“Cheaters!” I said, throwing my hands up in frustration. “Did you guys see what happened? They said there were no rules, but then they intervened with those robots!”

“Technically,” Tamie said, “if there are no rules, it’s fair to send robots that choke us to death.”

“Calm down,” Lee said. “We’re not dead yet.”

A pregnant pause followed. The five of us drifted through an empty dreamscape side by side. Through the void. Were we really not dead? There was nothing around us, just blackness. The lack of light.

My shades appeared to be just as alive as always. No sign of any mental stress and glowing orange veins either. Only the newest member of our ragtag team was somewhat under the weather; Suit’s unfocused eyes stared ahead without blinking and her body was limp. Yeah, to be honest, she looked kinda dead. I resisted the urge to poke her, knowing that she was processing the memory snippets from the Inspector’s head. Obtaining a Pheilett’s memories was largely unprecedented for shades and so it took time and effort to go through them.

Suit’s appearance had changed since the last time I saw her; she was wearing a suit still, except this one was white like the Inspector’s. Her face was a feminine, older version of my face. Kinda like Tamie, if she aged twenty years, and her graying hair was tied up in a bun so perhaps my subconscious had put some of Erika into her image too. I liked it. One could say that this look suited her.

“Stop smiling, this isn’t funny,” Tamie said. “We’re not dead yet, but it might just be a matter of time. The Pheilett won’t let this one go easily. Your days among us are numbered, Roland.”

“Yeah, whatever,” I said. “My days have always been numbered.”

“Oh, absolutely—except now you’ve made that number inconveniently low. Your plan was stupid and short-sighted.”

I furrowed my brow. What was her problem? It sounded like she was trying to pick a fight, and this time I was inclined to give it to her.

“So what?” I told Tamie. “What kind of plan wouldn’t have been stupid in your opinion? Leveling up in this Player system for decades just to maybe ascend, and then getting closer to the Inspectors somehow—because surely an ascended Player is allowed to do that, right? And then, when we are somehow closer to them, they would just let us take our sweet revenge? Does any of this sound realistic to you? Wake up, Tamie! The Inspectors are playing chess with us, except most of the pieces stand on their side while we have only a single pawn! We could delay the inevitable, but no amount of clever play will change the outcome. What I did was the only reasonable thing to do: I flipped over the entire board. Now they are scrambling for the fallen pieces, which is a much better state of the game to work with.”

“Roland,” Lee cut in as I paused to take a mental breath, “calm down, please. There’s no need to get so offended. Tamie wasn’t implying that your plan was useless—”

“Actually, I do,” Tamie said. “From an objective standpoint, if they kill us now all of this has been for nothing.”

“They won’t kill us,” I said. “Not directly. The Inspector told us to do our worst—he encouraged us to murder him. At this point, it’s a simple matter of pride for the rest of them. They pride themselves in being fair, twisted as that fairness is. They have their own integrity. They wouldn’t punish us after we directly asked for permission to kill the Inspector.”

“Sure, because you know them so well after just a couple of conversations,” Tamie said. “You’re already an expert on Pheilett behavior, huh?”

“No, but—”

“Roland is right,” Suit spoke for the first time, stirring.

“He is?”

“I am?”

“You are, but for the wrong reasons,” Suit said. She rubbed her temples, wincing. “The Pheilett won’t kill us, but it’s not because of a personal sense of integrity. They are going to keep us around for the Spectators. At least for a little while.”

“Spectators?” Lee asked.

“For a little while?” Wolf asked.

“So Stanley was onto something,” I said. “There really are people out there who watch us for fun?”

“That explains a lot,” Tamie said. “The Inspectors are rather theatrical.”

“How will that keep us alive?” Lee asked.

“Answers, Suit, answers!” Wolf said. “What did you mean by a little while?”

“I meant—sorry, it’s a lot to process. Nice to meet you, everyone. Call me Suit.”

“I think we’re past that,” Tamie said. It seemed like greeting other shades wasn’t her strong suit. Did shades bump into each other in the Astral Plane a lot? I would have imagined these ageless solitary entities to be more excited to see each other. Sit down for an afternoon tea, gossip about all the people they possessed in the last millennium, things like that.

“Can we focus?” Lee mildly asked, giving me a flat look. “If you haven’t noticed, we’re sort of in a pinch.”

“Sure we are,” Suit said, “but Roland is right in that the Inspectors won’t act directly. They don’t need to. If they wanted to kill us, they could just give us an impossible Quest or a vastly stronger opponent. Anything, as long as the murder doesn’t seem too deliberate and unfair to the viewers.”

“Poking our body full of demonic weapons seems pretty deliberate to me,” Wolf said.

“Yes, but that’s an already established thing—exactly what Roland used to pull off his plan. The Inspectors have set a precedence, and so by now the Spectators are expecting them to show up and give the winner shadebound Player the other’s weapon. Inspector Hartigulmathin, the Pheilett we killed, was obliged to interact with us. He didn’t want to. He had to.”

“Makes sense,” Tamie said. “I’ve no doubt that they’ll punish us for the murder, but I agree that we are not in immediate danger. We have time to plan ahead. Any ideas?”

The five of us drifted through the void in silence.

“I have one,” Wolf said. “Let’s assign this task to the person who got us into this trouble.”

“And who might that be?” I asked. “The person who decided to go to Skyward? The person who couldn’t even enter the High King’s ball without getting arrested? The person who—”

“It’s you,” Wolf said. “No need to ask so many questions, I’ll tell you plainly: it’s you, Roland.”

“Oh. Well, that’s very generous. You know, considering how I betrayed your trust.”

Wolf lifted his bushy eyebrows. “What are you talking about?”

“I asked you all to refrain from reading my mind. You didn’t have to, but you granted my wish. You trusted me with this plan of deceiving the Inspectors. I imagine it’s quite a letdown that my plan ended up being so short-sighted. It’s hardly a master plan. I might have just doomed us all. Makes me wonder why you’d trust me again. Or is it just Tamie who regrets giving me a chance?”

“What are you talking about?” Tamie asked, frowning. “I’ve never said that I regretted it. I criticized the wisdom behind it, sure, but I very much enjoyed what we did. Not many shades have ever had the pleasure of ending a Pheilett’s life. It was a sweet little appetizer for what hopefully is to come. If we had another chance, I would do this gladly again.”

Now it was my turn to feel surprised.

“I don’t understand,” I said, then thought better of it. “Alright, I do understand, sort of, maybe … but you’re weird. You’re all weird. Don’t you care that if we die, you might get trapped in Soul Eater and Soul Seeker forever?”

“You’re talking to four ever-existing imprints of conscious life,” Lee said. “I think your confusion is perfectly understandable.”

“If it makes you feel better,” Wolf said, “we think that you’re weird too.”

They didn’t answer my question, though.

“How very nice of you,” I said. “I don’t have any plans for getting out of this, by the way. I can only offer my talents for improvisation.”

“Only?” Wolf asked. “That’s the greatest thing you could offer, Roland! We all need to play to our strengths: you improvise, we adapt. I already feel much better about our chances of keeping this body. Our chances of keeping you.”

The others muttered their agreement—even Suit was nodding along. If I didn’t know better, I would have sworn that they were concerned for my life in their own unique ways. I rubbed my eyes. Was this a dream? It had to be. It probably was. That didn’t make it any less real, though. I cleared my throat, opened and closed my mouth a few times, but couldn’t find anything to say. The five of us drifted through the void in yet another awkward silence. Eventually, I couldn’t bear it any longer and struck up another topic.

“So,” I said, “I don’t know whether you realized this, but we are unconscious. Or as close as we could get to it, with Soul Eater and Soul Seeker bound to our body. I think we’re actually in the weapons now, not in my head.”

“Really?” Wolf asked. “It feels the same. Dark and empty.”

“Ha-ha,” I said. “I’m serious, though. Can you explain what am I doing here? How can I think? Am I dreaming? Am I becoming a shade too?”

“You cannot become a shade like this,” Lee said. “You cannot become a shade, period. Shades have always existed. There is no beginning.”

“You aren’t dreaming either,” Tamie said. “We are the real deal, not just your imagination.”

“That’s what my dream-shades would say too.”

“So what makes you think that we haven’t been dreams all along? Perhaps you really are mad, painter.”

I almost wished that was true. What would I do, if I woke up at my desk one day? Back in my apartment, having dozed off on my drawing tablet because of working late before the approaching deadline. How would I feel, if everything turned out to be one big elaborate dream ever since I had first woken up in Nerilia? All the pain and suffering I had been through would turn out to be an illusion—and so would the wonders I had experienced. Friendship. Love. Trust. So much trust placed in me. Plus all those jaw-droppingly amazing fantastical creatures and mystical places and wild magic, but those really were just secondary stuff.

Would I be better off if all of this turned out to be a dream? Would I go back to my tiny apartment, go back to being all alone, barely scraping by because I was too bitter and resentful to take up my father’s legacy? I didn’t think so. I had immortal beings in my head and godlike beings breathing down my neck, stripping me of basically any privacy I ever had. And still, I didn’t think I’d be better off without this. My past seemed to be an even darker place than the void I was drifting through.

“Well,” I said, “it’s a good thing that we’re not in my head because I know it would hurt right now. There’s a lot to think about.”

“That’s just the thing!” Tamie said, snapping her fingers. “That’s what I wanted to talk with you about. Guys, I know we’ve already discussed this, but we really can’t go on without changing something. Our body is deteriorating. The brain can’t keep up. We won’t be able to function for long.”

“We can do it,” Wolf said. “If we push past the pain, we become stronger. We’ll get used to it.”

“I think not,” Tamie said. “That’s not how brains work.”

“I concur,” Suit said. “Have you thought about taking turns?”

“We did,” Wolf said. “It’s stupid.”

“We need to set long-term goals to function,” Lee said. “We cannot do that if we keep changing who’s in control, not unless we all agree to the same goals.”

“Which is already what we were doing,” Wolf said. “We should do this together, as Randel.”

“Just to clarify,” I spoke, “does your together include me or not?”

“Hmm. It includes you too, of course.”

“Then it’s definitely not what Randel was doing recently. You were operating without me.”

“That’s true. We’ll need to practice operating with all five of us merged.”

Tamie snorted. “Or – and this might sound crazy to you, Wolf – we could try taking turns.”

“Well, I’m new to this body-sharing thing,” Suit said, “but I hold the memories of someone who was in charge of this planet. I think I’m the best fit for taking the first turn.”

“You hold fragments of a single Pheilett’s memories,” Lee said. “You also seem to have trouble processing them.”

“I just need time.”

“Sure,” Tamie said. “Take your time processing those memories—and once you’re done with it, you’ll be the perfect assistant for the one in charge. You can supply them with all those undoubtedly useful insights that you have.”

“It was just a suggestion,” Suit said. “There’s no need to be snarky with me.”

“She learned that sarcasm from me,” I said, puffing out my chest.

“Actually, Tamara had plenty of that too,” Lee remarked.

“At least I have some personality,” Tamie shot back. “Unlike you, Lee. Did you know that being a combat expert is not a personality trait?”

“Now you’re just trying to get into an argument with everyone, Tamie.”

“See, this is why you’re all unfit to be in charge,” Wolf said. “You bicker and banter. You are too easily distracted. There’s no way I would let any of you rule over me.”

“No one is ruling anything,” Lee said. “Least of all you, Wolf.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re a dolt,” Tamie said. “If we leave you in charge, Randel would become more insane, not less!”

“Hey! And why is that a bad thing?”

As Lee and Tamie and Wolf launched another debate about each other’s sanity, Suit gave me a troubled look behind their backs.

“Having second thoughts?” I asked.

“It’s … a lot to get used to. I don’t regret joining you, but you’re one hell of a sorry lot. Ask me again in a few hundred years how I feel about having spent my time with disgusting experiments, with blind maggots and clueless lice, with—ahem. Something like that.”

I raised an eyebrow at her.

“I apologize,” Suit said, looking rather vexed. “It’s the Inspector within me. His personality.”

“Apology accepted,” I said. “I can already tell what a pleasant fellow he must have been. May he rest in peace.”

“Peace?” Suit asked. She was watching me closely, like a scientist would observe a particularly interesting specimen. “You don’t really mean that, do you?”

I scratched my head, thinking. Rest in peace was just a careless phrase that I had used without much thought behind it, but … did I actually mean it?

“I don’t know what to tell you, Suit. I sort of meant what I said, but not honestly. Like, I’ve just facilitated the murder of another person and I don’t feel bad about it in the slightest. But then if I think about it, I do feel bad about not feeling bad about it. Perhaps the Inspector deserved his fate, perhaps he didn’t. Frankly, I struggle to care. I needed a tool to shake things up and I used him—just like they are all using us. I found no satisfaction in taking his life, but I have no regrets either. Does that mean I’ve become cold-hearted?”

“It means you’ve matured,” Lee said, his wrinkled face appearing next to me. “I remember how the two of us started, how sick you felt at the mere sight of some spilled blood! You’ve come a long way since.”

“I’m not sure that’s a good thing,” I said. “In fact, according to most of those stories that us pesky humans tell each other, getting used to murdering people is a rather bad thing.”

“What’s this?” Wolf asked, floating after us. “Is that another moral debate I smell?”

“I don’t think I’ll ever be able to get my point across,” I said. “Like, can you even comprehend such things? Imagine killing a shade. Not just its host, but the shade too. Deleting it from existence. Would you do it, if such a thing was possible?”

“It is possible,” Lee said. “Believe it or not, shades are not the apex predators of the Astral Plane; there’s always a bigger fish, as the saying goes. But robbing a shade of its existence is nowhere near the same as murdering a human. You are the one who is unable to comprehend, Roland.”

“We can agree to disagree,” I said. “Like, I don’t agree with your assumption that I’ve matured. Do you know what I’ve become instead? Traumatized. That is, more traumatized than I’ve already been.”

“You’re rather chipper for a traumatized man,” Suit said.

“Because I have nothing left to lose.”

There was a dim light far off in the blackness of the void, and I studied it just so I wouldn’t have to look at the shades. I could feel their attention on me anyway. I had nothing left to lose. Sure. That wasn’t an honest answer, though. The honest answer cut a little deeper.

“I have to cope with it somehow,” I admitted, watching the dim light get brighter. “I may act chipper, but it doesn’t mean I’m fine. I wonder about that sometimes. What’s holding the broken pieces together? Why can’t I just let myself fall apart? I don’t know what keeps me going, in spite of it all.”

The light broke over the horizon. Yes, there was a horizon now—and light. So much of it.

“Well,” Wolf said, “if the last few days were any indication, it’s us who kept you going.”

“My guardian angels,” I sourly said. “You know I don’t begrudge you for taking my body, because it wasn’t your choice to get trapped in here—”

“Except for me,” Suit said.

“—but I don’t think you guys have contributed much to my mental health, really. I would have kept myself together without you just fine.”

The source of the light grew, becoming so bright that I had to squint.

“Sure,” Tamie said, “but then whose shoulder would you cry on when you feel like falling apart?”

I rolled my eyes. “I don’t remember crying on anyone’s shoulder.”

“No, but we know that you want to. Even in here, you keep wearing those masks.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes, you do,” Lee said. “We know your mind, remember? There’s no need for masks. There’s no point. We’ve already accepted who you are.”

“Masks and all,” Wolf added.

The brightness was taking over the void now. It was just a coincidence. Not a metaphor. No way.

“Alright, time’s up,” I said. “Shoo, everyone. Enough sloppy talk for tonight, we’re waking up. Go back to being evil ghosts doing vaguely malicious things.”

“You consider killing an Inspector vaguely malicious?” Suit asked. “You’re a funny guy, Roland.”

“Hey, would you look at that?” I said, pointing at her. “Barely joined us and already giving me the lip!”

“Good job, Suit,” Tamie said.

“Welcome to the team,” Wolf said.

“Please carry on with your good habits,” Lee said.

Oh, the treachery!

“This is hell,” I griped, turning my back to the shades. “Randel died and I landed in hell—and here comes the next level.”

When the white light finally enveloped me, it found a goofy smile on my face.