I followed Yuri to a mountain wall and watched her walk right through it.

“Whoa,” I said, coming to a halt.

I looked around scratching my head then carefully reached out and touched the rock. The wall consumed my hand whole.

“Neat-o.”

I held my breath and walked through.

I stepped into a shallow alcove and was immediately whaffed over by a pungent smell. It was a mix of old meat and wet wood, not necessarily the best combination. There was a hint of fish in there too.

Embers and ash lay in a small pile in the center of the room. The dying fire didn’t give off much light but I had no trouble making out the cave interior thanks to my thumb candle.

The walls were lined with small coin boxes, reward chests, and wooden crates. A layered stack of furs of all shapes and sizes formed a makeshift bed against a wall. Water dripped from the ceiling near the back into a rusty bucket next to a small desk and chair. A dozen jars sat on the desk, filled with a clear liquid that held organs suspended in place. Also on the desk were a couple dead candles and a strange metallic mechanism I had no name for. It was cylindrical and the center was slightly transparent.

“Wow!” I said. “A secret hideout. Pretty cool.”

I turned around to examine the entrance wall, which from this side was completely transparent. Well, nearly transparent. A closer look revealed a slight distortion, like subtle static running through the air.

Yuri dug around in one of the crates.

“How did you find this place?” I said. Firewood lay stacked near the entrance. I thought I’d be helpful and plopped two logs on then went to work flaring them up.

“The wall is an ability,” she said. “Helps me disguise pods, but it’s limited. I can only have three active shrouds at once. I’ve got another one on the slope that looks like a tree and another—ah, here it is.”

She pulled out what at one point could have been a pillow.

“It’s not the Ritz,” she said, “But it’s what I got.”

“It’ll work,” I said. “Thanks for letting me crash on your couch, uh, dirt floor.” I used both thumbs to bring the fire to life. “So, where’s your third shroud? You said you had three of them?”

Yuri waved her hand and a tall man in a loincloth appeared standing against the back wall next to the bucket of water.

“Jeez,” I said, stumbling back, falling on my ass.

Yuri raised an eyebrow at me. “My home security system.”

Her eyes lit up bright white and the man lifted his head, eyes just as bright as hers.

The man—this one definitely human—was built like an ox and was shaved bald. His shoulders were almost double the width of mine and he was about a foot taller than me as well. Yuri tilted her head and the man did the same.

“That’s really creepy,” I said. “Not going to lie.”

“The system calls them Mind-Linked Pod Servants, but I just call them MODS,” she said. Her eyes faded back to normal, and the man’s head fell forward, eyes blinking out. “I keep this one—my only one at the moment—next to me while I sleep just in case, you know ...” She let the implication drift and I got the message.

That also gave me pause.

“You’ve been through some serious shit inside this world, haven’t you?” I said.

She let out an uneasy laugh. “That’s what happens when you give a bunch of hardened criminals super powers and set them loose on a world.”

“Well, you let Arnold Schwarzenegger here know I mean you no harm.”

She made a soft, "hmm" noise again.

I wondered then what this seemingly sweet young woman had done to earn herself a place here, but didn’t feel like asking about it.

“You know,” I said, “I know someone who can make this guy clothes.”

She shook her head. “They’re not Ken dolls, Jack. I do have a few traveling cloaks, but that’s about all they need.”

I nodded then looked around the room. It appeared she’d been here a while.

“How long?” I said. “How long have you been in here, I mean?”

It took her a moment to respond. “Six long months,” she finally said. “Four of them here on this mountain side.”

“Day two,” I said, holding up two fingers, smiling.

Yuri huffed, shook her head. “Just you wait.”

I probed Yuri more about her abilities. The more she talked, the more she seemed to open up.

Everything about being a Flesh Gardener, she told me, had to do with pods and controlling the beings that grew inside of them. She also had some helpful protective abilities like the illusionary disguises and some personal body shields. Nothing offensive though, besides her knife.

The ‘MODS’, as she called them, had two settings. She could either give them a directive like, ‘kill that asshole over there,’ or she could completely take over a body and move them around with her mind, but that only worked one at a time.

The system only allowed her to have six pods growing at any given time. That would change as she leveled her abilities, though. As it stood, each pod once the organ was planted took four days to fully form if they were well watered and had plenty of sunshine. Once they bloomed, she could call upon them any time, but could only have a max of twelve fully awakened MODS.

“Six pods, twelve MODS,” she said. “I only kill jerks, by the way. NPC bad guys that have it coming. No kids, and no females either.

“What if she’s like a truck-sized bitch or something?”

“Well, then maybe,” she said.

I rubbed my neck. “What about other prisoners?”

She smiled. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

“Were you always this cryptic and morbid?”

She let out a flat, one-syllable laugh and shrugged.

I finally worked up the courage to ask her the big question. “So, what are you in for, by the way, if you don’t mind me asking?” Then I added: “Want an apple?”

She tensed up, and I tossed her a fresh red one from my inventory.

She caught it. “What are you in for?” she countered.

I stoked the fire, revving the flames, and shrugged. I pulled out a fresh cup of water, took a sip, then handed it to her.

“Tried to blow the whistle on some bad people," I said. "No one listened so I stole a bunch of their money. I work in cyber security.”

“Hmm,” she said, then gulped down the water. “Computers, huh? Me too.”

“Really?”

She nodded, took another sip. I waited for her to elaborate, but instead she turned the conversation towards our objectives. We’d made a deal to help each other out and she wanted to start forming a plan.

I told her about Gruda and Gilda, and she provided some insight into the Hog-Goblin’s slave trade network. She said she had some ideas on how to infiltrate because she'd done it before.

“I also have a secondary objective to kill what I think is their leader,” I said. “The system called her the Hog-Goblin Bitch Boss or something like that.”

I could see the mention aroused her interest.

“Angelica Farkish-Garber,” she said softly.

“Sorry, did you just choke on that apple or is that the hog's name?”

Yuri lifted her poncho and turned, revealing a thick keloid scar on her left side just below her rib cage.

“She gave me this.”

“Ouch,” I said. “Wait, I thought the game doesn't let you keep scars.”

“The system doesn’t usually let you but it let me keep this one,” she said. “Probably because the weapon she used was a magic proxy blade. I asked LES about it and he just made condescending jokes about how it made me look tougher.”

“Sounds like you have a history with this hog-lady.”

“You could say that.”

Yuri told me how she used a hog-goblin MOD to slip into the Hog Helm Hold, one of their nightclubs, at Rockwallow Hollow once. Her objective was to steal a particular vital organ from a particular hog called McCorin Buckshivers but things didn’t work out so well. She made the kill, but her MOD was captured before she could get the guts out and escape. It turned out McCorin was Angelica’s right hand hog and she was pissed. She used a magical blade to cut Yuri, who was a quarter-mile away, by gutting the MOD. Yuri never normally felt any pain when her MODs were injured, but she felt this one. And it left a mark.

“Needless to say I failed the objective,” said Yuri. “I would have died too, had I not had a health potion. Barely made it."

The bag with silver sequins made a buzzing noise and the sequins turned red.

“It’s ready,” she said, grabbing it and taking a seat at the desk.

“What’s ready?”

I stood up and walked over to her, carefully eyeing the big brute against the wall.

Yuri opened the metal device on the desk. I could see now it was a canister of some sorts. She took the liver out of the bag and the bag faded back to silver. She then took her knife, cut the tip of her finger, and dropped some blood on the liver. After she put the organ inside and sealed it, she twisted the sides and the canister made a clipped hissing noise as if it was being pressurized.

“What is it doing?” I said.

She didn’t respond.

It only took a moment for a crusty, rust colored layer to form over the liver, almost like a scab.

Yuri twisted the sides back the other way and opened the canister. It made an even louder hissing noise this time.

“Done,” said Yuri, opening the canister and putting the now crusty organ back into the silver bag.

“You have to do this every time?” I asked.

“No, I could just drop some blood on it before I plant it but pressurizing it first enhances my connection range.”

“Where’d you get that canister thing?”

“Reward chest,” she said. “They’ll sometimes slip modern or high-tech stuff in those things and call them ‘ancient artifacts’ or something. Feels completely out of place. Which reminds me, we need to figure out if you’re actually time loop proof or not. Based on what I’ve read I think you are, but I want to be sure.”

Yuri told me about the objective that’d been pestering her for a while now. It had to do with a small, walled off portion of Rockwallow Hollow called Rolo Village. Almost like a gated community for rich folk, it was built right up along the cliff side, literally on the precipice of the mountain.

The story went like this: One beautiful morning a long time ago, everyone in Rolo Village was minding their own business when out of freaking nowhere a giant, naked cyclops monster climbed up over the edge of the city and started eating everyone, bashing everything, and pissing all over the place.

While the monster thrashed about, someone, either a Time Wizard or maybe even a Spacialist—who knows?—locked the entire Village in a time loop bubble. This bubble caused everything inside, including the cyclops, to repeat the last twenty-one minutes over and over and over again prior to when the bubble was generated.

"And it's still going on to this day," said Yuri.

People on the outside can enter the bubble, she explained, but as soon as it reset they'd find themselves standing on the outside exactly where they entered having lost everyone and everything they’d obtained inside.

"And, everyone from within who left the bubble would find themselves back inside where they began when it resets, their memories of the previoius twenty-one minutes gone," said Yuri. "It's an endless cycle."

Her objective, Yuri said, was to retrieve a pendant from around the Cyclops's neck “But it’s impossible,” said Yuri. “Unless …” she pointed at me. “Unless you’re not affected by time loops.”

I blinked. “You want me to snatch a necklace off a giant rampaging cyclops?”

“Don’t worry, I’ll be the one doing the snatching. I’ve actually done it a few times before. Can't tell you how many times I've died trying but I've got done a system."

"Wait, you've died? I thought—"

"If you die inside a time loop bubble, you just appear outside where you entered, no harm done. Everytime I've been able to grab the pendant it would just vanish once the bubble resets. But as long as I hand it off to someone like you …" She wiggled her eyebrows at me and took a bite of apple.

“You think when the loop resets it wont kick me out or reset the pendant back around the monster's neck?”

“Exactly, which means all you have to do is walk out of the bubble, pendant in hand.”

“Wait, this is your objective. If I’m the one completing it will you still get credit?”

“Yeah, because I still have to return the pendant to its rightful owner, an old rich lady on the other side of town who is supposed to give me a high-tech lighting rod to make my pods grow faster. I’ll be doing that part alone.”

“Gotcha. Sounds like you’ve thought about this a lot.”

“There’s a lot of time for thinking in Lynn Ella World,” said Yuri, laying back down on her furs. She yawned, then tossed me a wadded up blanket, one of many she had on her stack.

I laid down and stretched it out over myself and watched the dying flames flicker out one by one.

When I woke, Yuri and her MOD were gone, and I could hear screaming in the distance.