Rich blinked. The cave looked strange.

“Master! Are you the human now?”

“Yes.” Rich blinked again. Then he tested a theory and winked twice, one eye after the other. “It came back! I wondered if it would.”

“Master, Geebo has something you must read.”

“Read? Someone sent us a letter?” Rich looked around until he found the wiry drakkit.

He was holding a sheep's fleece. As soon as Geebo saw that he had Rich's attention, he went to his knees and offered it up like a drama-loving pastor offering the collection plate before a Jesus statue.

Rich unrolled it, and it was an actual sheepskin, dried and scraped with what looked like paint splattered everywhere. Big, uneven letters spelled out words that made no sense when put together.

WHY DEAD

AWNAROX

PRAY

CITY MPORTANT

HACK ARISTATTLER

“He insisted on writing it himself, huh?” Rich remarked. “Low dexterity's a bitch. I need a ball or something, a few thousand rounds of catch might help with that.”

“He did, Great One.”

“I don't suppose you've got context for any of these?”

“Geebo does, yes! Firstly, master wishes to know how he died.” Geebo stretched out his long, wicked claws. “Er, may that be returned? Geebo must write answers upon it.”

“It's a long story,” Rich said, squinting at the little guy and blinking until his focus settled. “So after the training exercise, Cole respawned early. We had a problem up north...”

As he recounted the story, he looked back to the mirror. It would save a lot of time and breath if he just used it.

Then he remembered the half-mask on Boombabe's face.

That horror had made the mirror. Was it possible that the thing still had a link back to its creator? It was possible that was how they'd tracked him to this region.

The thought derailed Rich's monologue, and it wasn't until Geebo cleared his throat that Rich realized he'd stopped talking.

“Sorry,” Rich said. “Where was I? Right. Turns out the leader of the wendigos was Livindeadgrrl, remember her?”

He summed up the rest to find Geebo looking distraught. “The Boombabe killed you, Master?”

“Technically I killed myself to get away from her. But she said she wasn't going to kill me for about a week, and I have no idea why. Maybe it'll take that long to get their army here, and they want... they want to capture the mirror, too. That's got to be it!” Rich slammed his hand on the floor of the cave. “Powerful artifact like this, they wouldn't pass up a chance to snag it.” Rich turned that thought over in his mind. It was a good theory, but just a theory. Too many variables were in motion to settle on that one definitively. “Let's move on. Awna... Aunarox?”

“Leaving in three days, great one. She is bothered by the attention of the players. And Master thinks she might try to steal the mirror.”

“Shit. There's an army coming here. We need her. Please tell Rotgoriel to do whatever he must to get her to stay.”

Geebo frowned. “Geebo can, but Great One, he thought you would—”

“I can't. There's too much to do on the other side. I need him here, pretending to be me and running the show, while I make sure we survive Mayhew.”

Geebo thought for a second. “I am not sure he will like that.”

“We don't have a choice. Tell him not to mirror me, either, unless he can figure out whether or not it's compromised.”

“He will like that less, Great One.”

“He can hate it, it's how it has to be. Pray?”

“Rotgoriel spoke with Konol. He was much at peace afterwards. He said that you probably had questions the god could answer.”

“If we weren't rushed for time, sure. I'll get to that next time I'm back here. Maybe.” Rich doubted it. Prayer had never helped him in his own world. What could some made up god do for him here? “Let's move on. Why is the city important? Beyond what I already knew, anyway.”

“Geebo does not know precisely what you knew,” Geebo wrung his hands, fingers interlacing like a spider's orgy. “But Konol said the city was very important when Master prayed to him. And Aunarox said that the city follows the phases of the moon. It gets more 'real' as the moon fills out, and more misty when the moon shrinks.”

“The moon...” Rich considered. “It was full the night we came here, wasn't it?”

And a flash of insight came to him.

Cutter downplayed it, said I had time, but he knew I'd try to get it over with as fast as possible. He wanted me here, burning the village and fighting Agnez on the night the city was closest to this dimension or whatever.

“Geebo...” he said, slowly. “When is the next full moon here?”

“Perhaps ten nights, Great One.”

“So about a week and a half...” Boombabe's sneering half-face floated in front of his mind's eye. I'll take you back with me, and we'll kill you in a week and a half, she had said.

“The city isn't just important, it's everything. It's the place where the secret of guilds lie, it has to be. And killing me is a key to opening it. Though Agnez said she wouldn't kill me, just fight me... but Cutter might not have known that. Shit. Shit shit shit,” Rich said, and the icy stone whined under his claws as they tightened and gouged into the rock.

“What are we to do, Great One?”

Rich closed his eyes, and tried to focus. There was much to do, but he had to digest everything before he started giving orders. “The last thing. Aristattler. Who or what is that?”

“A wise man Rotgoriel spoke to in the death chat. Rotgoriel felt he could help provide answers. Aristattler told him that if he hacked the game, then Aristattler would help him.”

“Some dead guy... wait.” The name did sound familiar.

Rich checked his Echo archives. Long ago he'd been recording while he was offline, trying to figure out what the NPC controlling his character was up to when he wasn't around.

Aristattler had been one of the few helpful ones in the deatchat. “He's still there? That's a long time to stay dead,” Rich frowned.

“He said he had his reasons, according to Master.”

“Hack the game. As if it were that simple...” Rich stopped.

He had his tools back, now. And they were tools that had been honed and updated and improved by three years worth of patches and development.

The game, by contrast, saw patches only sporadically. The devs had cut off contact long ago, and from the research he'd done nobody had ever been banned for attempting to hack it.

Rich had nothing to lose by trying. And he was going to be asking a lot of Rotgoriel. Also, this wouldn't be a bad warm up for the stuff he had to do in the real world, that had far more consequences for failure. “All right. Tell Rotgoriel I'll do that. And here's what I need him to do for me...”

They talked, and Geebo scratched the words from the sheepskin as he listened, then pulled out a quill and ink jar and scribed notes on the hide.

It didn't take long. “Take the mirror,” Rich said. “You've still got that magic pack active, right?”

“Geebo does,” the drakkit said, lifting one of the pouches hanging from his belt.

“Good. Secure it. Until we figure out whether or not it's corrupted, we can't use it and can't risk Aunarox swiping it.”

“Well... nevermind,” Geebo said, hesitating before he loped over to the mirror.

“What?”

“It is not Geebo's place to tell you how to do your business.”

“Stow that. You're my friend. Friends can correct each other when they have to. What's on your mind?”

“You are a Cultist, Great One. Are there not skills to detect corruption by dark forces?”

Rich blinked. “I am. I forget that a lot. Okay...” He was aware of time ticking, trickling by, but he forced himself to be patient and called up his status screen.

He found what he was looking for. “Occult Eye.”

The world exploded into light and symbols.

Rich gasped, reeled backward, and almost stepped on Geebo. “The fuck?” he growled.

They whirled past him like a galaxy of stars, symbols and letters and things he couldn't place, and for a second he felt himself slipping into them, drowning as they pulled at his mind...

...but only for a second.

WIS+1

He forced himself to draw back, drew his neck around until his head was away from the mirror, and he could make some semblance of the thing.

“It's code,” he whispered. “This is raw code. Just not in English. Wait. The Icon used... Arabic, that's right. That's what his code was written in. And I couldn't work with it beyond the basics, because there was no time and the translator was taking too long.”

“But now there is more time,” Geebo whispered.

“More. Not a lot,” Rich considered.

Then he flipped on his recording software, and got busy capturing images of the code. There was a lot of it. Midway through, he paused. “Occult Eye is letting me see code. In-game. This is a Cultist thing, and it's letting me see how code plays out... so the hidden knowledge of the world is the software behind the gui?”

“Gooey?”

“Graphical user interface. Nevermind.” Rich finished capturing the images. He could take them back and work at them later, figure out what exactly was happening here. “Thanks for the tip, Geebo, I appreciate it. I still want you to hold onto the mirror for a bit. Ah... talk with Sweeney, see if he can make a fake copy of the mirror, and keep quiet about that. Then hang the duplicate on the wall. If Aunarox really wants it, then we might catch her trying to steal it.”

“That is sneaky!”

“That is basic entrapment. I learned that last year. Academy's good for something, I guess.” Rich watched the real mirror disappear into Geebo's pouch, bending several laws of the universe to do so. “Okay. Thanks man. Get going, and let Rotgoriel know what I told you, when he gets back. I'm gonna take a few minutes to try something, then get back to my world.”

“Yes, Great One!”

It wouldn't hurt to get started on Rotgoriel's request. This would probably be difficult, and something best approached in stages. It didn't help that he'd be looking for PII— Personally Identifiable Information. That stuff usually had tighter protections due to the legal troubles it could cause for corporations.

Of course, that wasn't as much of a problem for Generica Online. Rich had been briefed by Mayhew's people, and done his own research over the last few weeks. At the core of it, G.O. was a darknet game, and the corporate logos on it had been exposed as a fraud years ago.

But there was one part that remained constant:

The cash shop.

The cash shop had been shut down many times before, but it always popped up again within a few hours. Concerted global efforts by hackers, competing corporations, and even a few concerned nation-states had gone after the cash shop.

It didn't matter. And while nobody had ever been punished for trying to hack the game, hacking the cash shop brought retaliation. Disproportionate retaliation, in some cases. The people-ended-up-dead kind of retaliation.

What Rich was about to try was dangerous. But then, he was running out of options. And he had the advantage that he didn't really care about the place he was in, and the people around him... well, save for two of them. Pat and Greg needed to live through this. But everyone else at Waverly who was involved in this mess? They were playing him, lying to him, or using him in some way. And they were directly between him and any kill teams or mysterious accidents.

“Be my shield, oh ye faithful,” he whispered and spun up the appropriate apps, one by one. A recorder, first, to log everything he did. A system monitor to keep an eye on its response. And finally, a spoofing agent, to make it look like his traffic was coming from somewhere else, back in the real world.

And once that was done, he opened up the online store and started purchasing tokens.

If this had been a movie, or a cartoon, or some show that liked to glamorize hacking, there would have been some neat special effects. But the reality of it was that hacking wasn't that awesome to watch. Rich sat there and checked the stream of text flowing through his recorder, making sure he got good snapshots of the parts of the code that were visible to his passive programs, and the responses to his actions.

A few minutes and ten tokens richer, he closed the shop.

This was the control run, the basic approach with minimal malfeasance to capture standard responses... and also to see if the system picked up on his spoof. The money was real, the ID was real, he was just logging in from Madagascar. That was all.

The game didn't kick him out, and he got no signs of a trace, so he counted that a win. Closing the shop, he saved the logs. He'd analyze them later, and set up the next step of the hack.

Then he tried a message. She was still on his friends list, after all this time. It was worth a shot.

“LivingDeadGrrl, are you on?”

LIVINGDEADGRRL: I was wondering when you were gonna say something.

RUTGER: It's a two way street.

LIVINGDEADGRRL: You still owe me an apology for ghosting me all those years back.

RUTGER: Fair enough. Sorry. It was Ministry bullshit, out of my control.

LIVINGDEADGRRL: So you've got control now?

RUTGER: No. But I've got leverage, and that's more than I've had for a very long time.

LIVINGDEADGRRL: Damn. How old are you these days? You were what, thirteen when I met you? Now you're talking all badass.

RUTGER: Thanks, I guess.

LIVINGDEADGRRL: Sorry I had to cut and run. I saw what happened. That mage of theirs is a powerhouse.

RUTGER: Did you see her face?

LIVINGDEADGRRL: Yeah. Looks kind of like that mask that the Icon used to wear.

RUTGER: It IS the mask. Half of it, anyway. I think it's corrupting her, or trying to persuade her to go after me.

LIVINGDEADGRRL: Paranoid, much?

RUTGER: Ministry, remember? That's a way of life around here.

LIVINGDEADGRRL: Can't argue with that. You picked a right shithole to be born in. Also it's been making the news more often, lately.

RUTGER: Yeah. International prisoners, right?

LIVINGDEADGRRL: Fucking bingo. The Republique du Quebec is getting the worst flack for it, but nobody's coming away unscathed. So the stories are true?

RUTGER: Yyyyyep.

LIVINGDEADGRRL: Well shit. I really thought we were good guys.

RUTGER: I couldn't say. I've got bigger problems. I'm pretty sure that Boombabe and that army up north are coming to stomp my ass.

LIVINGDEADGRRL: What, again?

RUTGER: It isn't the usual griefing. When she was fighting me, she was trying for a capture, not a kill. And she let it slip that she needed me alive until about ten days from now. A thing's happening ten days from now that makes me think she wants me here for like a ritual sacrifice or something.

LIVINGDEADGRRL: So run like the wind.

Rich paused.

That wasn't a horrible idea. But run where?And the more he thought it over, the more he realized that was the wrong move.

RUTGER: No good. From what I can tell, it's a... repeatable quest. Forty days later she can try again. Seventy days later she gets another shot. And I've got some weirdness from my race choice, so my character is active when I'm logged off. I don't disappear like you do, I can't just log out and wait for it to blow over.

LIVINGDEADGRRL: Then what are you going to do about it?

RUTGER: Fight. I've got a bunch of noob players I've been training up, and an army coming from Upper Derope. I'd like your help, too.

LIVINGDEADGRRL: I dunno. Never been one for hopeless fights.

RUTGER: It's not. I've got a few tricks I'm not talking about on an unsecured channel.

LIVINGDEADGRRL: Well aren't you the little spy now. But seriously, what's in it for me?

RUTGER: You're fighting them anyway. And you can't tell me a close-up view of an epic battle won't get you streamers.

LIVINGDEADGRRL: Heh.

RUTGER: Is that a yes?

LIVINGDEADGRRL: It's a you've grown, kid. I thought you were adorable before. Now I'm starting to like the person you've become.

Rich started to put together a reply, stopped. Put another one together, stopped. Finally he settled on

RUTGER: Thanks.

For a second he thought he was going to cry. And he couldn't say why.

LIVINGDEADGRRL: No problem. Yeah, I'm onboard. What do you need me to do?

RUTGER: I'm in Fimble. It's a tiny town on the slopes of a huge, fuck-off mountain. Do you know it?

LIVINGDEADGRRL: That place? Yeah, I tried to hunt it once. There's a dragon there. Did you work out a deal with him?

RUTGER: Her. And yeah, kinda.

LIVINGDEADGRRL: Well you stud! Okay. Let her know we're coming in and I'll get my Labeouf moving that way.

RUTGER: Your what now?

LIVINGDEADGRRL: Labeouf. It's the name the game gives a pack of wendigos. Damned if I know why.

RUTGER: Okay. I'll arrange things with my people, too. Got a scout named Anselm, I'll have him shoot you a friend request and whisper some stuff once you're close enough.

LIVINGDEADGRRL: Works for me. Hey, kid?

RUTGER: Yeah?

LIVINGDEADGRRL: Win or lose, this is gonna be fun. It's a game. They can't kill you forever, you know? Relax, we'll shake the pillars of heaven however it goes.

RUTGER: Heh. Thanks again.

And that's when an ear-shattering roar shook the cave.

“Master!” Rich heard Geebo screech. “That is Agnezsharron! I think she challenges you!”

“Fuck.” Rich closed his eyes, and backed out of the challenge interface. “I don't have time for this. This is dragon bullshit. Remember what I told you to do, okay? And tell him fast.”

“Er... yes Great One?”

Another roar.

“He's the one who insisted on talking to her, so he gets the job this time, too. I'm going to let dragons handle dragon business. Good luck, man.” And with that, Rich logged out.