“Why don’t you just keep your opinions to yourself?” I grumbled over Peach’s head. “It’s actually a pretty cosy place.”
“Well, I suppose it’s bigger than your apartment.”
“Just because you’re rich and live in a giant house!”
“I’m not rich, I’m comfortable.”
“That’s what rich people say.”
“You can argue later,” Jesse interrupted. “Let’s get these out of your shoulder first.” She sat me down on the nearest chair.
Originally, I had been swapping between my basic priest’s robes and the intermediate ones I had received recently. But after a while both were torn from fighting, and although I could wash the blood until it was faded brown, I couldn’t fix the tears. So when I shrugged off my shawls, I was met with general concern –
“You look like a homeless person,” Lee Wai Meng said.
– mostly.
Calvin grabbed the back of Lee Wai Meng’s collar with a meaty hand and began to drag him out.
“What did I do? Hey! Calvin! Don’t drag me outside, it’s cold! Stop!”
His calls faded as the door shut.
“Is he always like that?” Jesse asked.
“Yeah, I don’t know why I’m still friends with him. He says such garbage all the time.”
She smiled as she helped me shrug the tattered remains of my robes over my shoulder. “He must be a good friend then. Jesus Christ, Maria! What the hell happened here?”
“Oh, um… I tried to heal myself without taking the arrows out. I couldn’t reach them.”
“You realise I’m going to have to cut you open again to get these out?”
“Have you, um, done that before?”
“Not on a human… unless you count the NPCs I’ve killed since I got here. Lots of possums, though.”
“Possums?”
“I used the hunt them. They’re a big problem in New Zealand. But they’ve got decent fur and meat, so.”
“Wait, I thought you taught outdoor sports to kids? And then you were a bouncer or something?”
“Event security.”
“How many different things have you done?”
“Eh… a few.”
Peach was oddly quiet, her eyes flicking from me to Jesse as we chatted back and forth. When I glanced at her, she gave me a secretive little smile.
I recognised that smile. It was the kind of smile that Lee Wai Meng, Poppy and sometimes Tommy would give me when they thought I was flirting.
“I’m not!” I yelled at Peach desperately.
She laughed so hard she almost fell from the stool she was sitting on. “Not what?”
“Don’t look at me like that!”
“Sorry, sorry.”
Her laughter died the instant Jesse drew a knife from her belt.
“They’re in deep, and they’re in the bone,” she said. “I could just cut off the shafts, but it’ll hinder your movement. Can you heal yourself again?”
“Yes, I can.”
She gave me an apologetic look. “This will hurt.”
“I’ve got high Endurance,” I said, with a bravery I didn’t feel.
“You’ll need it. Do you want something to bite on?”
“… No.”
“I’ll hold your hand,” Peach offered. “Squeeze as hard as you like, I’m pretty strong.”
“Ready?” Jesse leaned over my shoulder, her knife out of view. I could feel my palms sweating in Peach’s.
“…Yes.”
“Three… Two… One…”
I let out a strangled grunt as the knife dug into my back. The blade was sharp, slicing through the tendons of my shoulder easily, but then metal met bone and I felt it grind.
I wanted to rip my skin off. Peach’s hand was tight around mine but I could barely feel it over the rushing vortex of adrenaline and pain.
“It’s okay, Mik Tsaam. I’m here, I’m here.”
I tried to move toward her voice. It was like wading through deep, black water towards a light on a far shore that didn’t seem to draw any nearer.
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How long had Jesse been rummaging around in my flesh and bone? I tried to count the seconds (one – two – three – four, two – two – three – four, three – two – three – four…) but quickly lost track, the numbers jumbling in my head with each new jolt of pain.
When Jesse finally stepped back, looking green, her hands coated in my blood, I barely had the presence of mind to Heal myself.
The pain vanished instantly, and I collapsed back in the chair, shivering, suddenly aware that I was drenched in sweat. Peach fussed about, rubbing my arms to try and return circulation to them. Jesse remained standing, eyes closed as she breathed deeply.
“There’s some water on the stove,” I said, my voice more hoarse than I had expected. I cleared my throat. “And there’s some cloths over there.”
“Oh my god, why is there so much blood?” Lee Wai Meng shrieked, walking through the door.
“SHUT UP!” Peach and I screeched back at him.
“But there’s so much! You look even worse now, Mik Tsaam!”
“Sorry.” Calvin’s hand appeared on top of Wai Meng’s head. “I’ll take him back outside.”
“It’s really, really cold…!”
“Do you have a change of clothes?” Peach asked.
“I have two sets of priest’s robes, and they both look like this.”
“Give me your other one. I’ll fix them.”
“You can do that?”
“I have tailoring skills,” she said, flashing me an OK sign with her fingers. “I can even add buffs into the fabric!”
I drew my tattered Intermediate Priest’s Robes out of my inventory and handed them over without a second thought. Peach produced, of all things, a shining silver sewing machine, and carried herself off to the kitchen table.
As the gentle hum of the sewing machine filled the house, Jesse returned, clean-handed. “Are you feeling okay?”
“Yes, yes, I’m fine. I’m all healed up. Are you okay?”
In response, she held out her hand, and I could see it visibly shaking. “That sucked. I don’t ever want to have to do that again.”
“I don’t really want to go through that again either.”
“So what was your previous scenario like?” Lee Wai Meng had reappeared at the door. He and Calvin kicked their boots off and found seats on stools. Jesse sat on the carpets and furs on the floor.
I opened my mouth. No sound came out.
“Mik Tsaam?”
I tried again.
“Ah, shit,” said Jesse. “You’re not okay.”
Peach hastily handed me a scrap of cloth and hugged me again, at which point I realised I was crying.
“What were your scenarios like?” I asked quietly, covering my eyes with the cloth.
“Pretty rubbish,” Lee Wai Meng said. “Calvin and I were in something that seemed to be Rapunzel.”
I squinted suspiciously over the cloth… “Were you Rapunzel?”
“How did you know?”
“Figures.”
“What does that mean?”
Peach laughed.
“Hey, why are you laughing?”
“She’s barely spent any time with you, and she already knows exactly what you’re like,” I teased gently. “Who were you playing, Calvin?”
A silence, then, “The guy.”
“The… guy?”
“The hero! He had to rescue me!” Lee Wai Meng fluttered his eyelashes dramatically. Calvin expressionlessly found a woven blanket and proceeded to calmly smother Wai Meng with it.
“Help! I can’t- Mff!”
“What about you, Peach?”
“Um…” She raised her peachy-pink head. I suddenly realised that she was no longer wearing her usual hoodie, but a grey fur. In fact, she was practically wearing the intact pelt of a wolf, head and all.
“Oh, yes, this pelt was a reward in my last scenario. So I made it into a jacket. I was in a Red Riding Hood scenario.”
“Were you Red Riding Hood?”
“Yeah…” She seemed shyly pleased by this.
“Did it go okay? I mean…” I looked from Calvin, to the struggling shape of Wai Meng, to the grim-faced Jesse. “You’re all here, but…”
Peach sighed. “The grandmother in my scenario was a player too. But it took too long for the hunter… another player… and I, to catch the wolf. It had already eaten her, and she couldn’t be revived.”
She snipped some threads. “I don’t think we could have found it any faster, but… what if we could have?”
The only sound for some moments was the crackling of the fire.
“We were okay. I’ve got my administrator privileges. Calvin was supposed to really get fucked up when he falls out of the tower, but I replaced the thorns with a mattress…”
“How much power do you have, Wai Meng?”
“I’m not really sure. I’ve been trying all kinds of things. Like in my first scenario, I was able to change breadcrumbs into pebbles. And the third scenario, I could teleport you places. The second… oh, the second one was the one with the annoying woman. And that other annoying woman… That was a really sexist story. Anyway, I was able to distract her dog, so…”
“You can’t end scenarios? Change tasks? Stop the bad guys?”
“Not directly. I’ve tried. It’s never worked.”
We contemplated this information, although I was distracted by the expression on Jesse’s face.
“What about you, Jesse?” I asked carefully. “What happened in your last scenario?”
“Mine was called something like ‘Moon Queen’…” She covered her face with her hand. “There were… eleven players.”
“Eleven?” Wai Meng interrupted. “That’s so many.”
“Nine of them were…” Jesse leaned on her knees, clasping her hands. “I was a hunter, another player was my wife.”
“Whoah, this game is so progressive,” said Lee Wai Meng.
“Calvin, suffocate him again.”
Calvin obliged.
“We didn’t know where the other players were.”
A horrible thought escaped my brain and lodged in my chest.
“There were ten suns in the sky. Everything was drying out… I was told I had to shoot down the suns.”
“They were players, weren’t they?”
“Well, only nine.” She laughed, sickly, and dropped her head. “Only nine. As if that matters. They must have been players. We didn’t see anyone else.”
“How… How many…?”
“I… I don’t know. I haven’t dared to look at the Kill Feed.”
“Should… I?”
“I can look,” Peach offered.
“That’s alright. You’re fixing Maria’s… Mik Tsaam’s clothes. Can I call you that?”
I nodded. “That’s fine… I’ll check the Kill Feed.”
Jesse didn’t answer. I brought up the window and began to scroll to the section of the Feed I had previously noticed before.
The section that read:
<…>
<…>
I looked up to find Jesse’s eyes peaking at me through her fingers. “… Eight.”
“Eight…” I couldn’t tell if the sound she made next was a laugh or a sob. Her face dropped back into her hands, and she lapsed into silence.
“I hadn’t realised that the players could be on opposing sides either,” I admitted. “In my last scenario, one of the other players was the ‘bad guy’. And the other player with me accidentally killed him.”
Jesse made an indistinct sound, possibly of sympathy.
“Actually, it caused us some problems since he was supposed to be publicly and legally punished… Luckily I got an Autopass in the daily wheel spin.”
“Oof, lucky,” Wai Meng said rapidly. “Something else I can do is look at some of the background statistics. I think it’s like a one in twenty chance each roll to get an Autopass. Not bad, but not the easiest. So you got out of the scenario with the Autopass?”
“I had to. We were trying something else as well, but it would have taken a long time and there was no guarantee it would succeed… Wai Meng, what did you know about the game beforehand?”
“Not much. I was only in the marketing team, you know? The game was supposed to allow you to pick a character archetype, build them up, and use them to pass fairy tales.”
“What would happen if your character died?”
“You’d lose that particular scenario, but you could just try again.”
“Have you… Have any of you seen any of the players that died again?”
Everyone, even Jesse with her head still in her hands, shook their heads.
“Poppy and Rohan… I hope they just… returned to real life.”
And at least I wouldn’t see Wen Yong again.