Long ago, Turpentine had been a lush part of the world. But time and tide and entropy had their way with it, and the vast trees that had provided a home for many, many forms of life had died away until only the desert remained.

Heat, pressure, and geology had all done their slow and patient tasks, and turned those remnants of life into oil. Specifically, a sort of oil that mixed very well with a wide variety of dyes. Not that anyone would find that out until a few hundred millennia later.

And so, when the place was settled several centuries ago by a wandering warlord who wanted an extremely defensible spot to rest his spiky helmet, and said warlord went looking for resources to trade with his neighbors, he found pools of foul-smelling clear liquid bubbling up in the south of his domain.

The stuff was pretty useless, thought the warlord. You couldn't burn it, or the fumes would poison you. You couldn't make it into alcohol. Well, you could, but you could only drink it once, usually.

It wasn't until a few generations into the reign of the warlord's descendants that some enterprising merchant decided to try mixing in some cochineal, and ended up with the highest-quality crimson paint that he'd ever encountered. At which point the warlord's great-grandson seized the wells, took the credit, and started producing the best paint for hundreds of miles around.

The warlord's line had died out three or four coups ago, and the local trade families had long since laid claim to the wells, but the act had been enough to fold Turpentine into the burgeoning Milk Road trade, where its precious paints and unique oils were enough to give it an untouchable niche compared to other cities along the line.

Which was why every building that Rich walked past was painted brightly, almost garishly, with multiple colors. Most were worn and weathered and peeling from the dry air and merciless sun, but it was an eye-catching sight, especially compared to the wastes that sprawled for unending miles around the oasis that was Turpentine.

This was a journey he'd only made twice before, because it required a different shape than his usual scaly mountain of muscle and menace.

There was no room to be a dragon today because Rich was walking in the shape of a human.

Agnezsharron had unlocked this trick, a few months ago. Unlike the players in the resistance, she was not bound by the level restrictions. Oddly enough, the other NPC's were, but then she was a dragon and they weren't. Regardless of the truth of the matter, when she'd hit level thirty in her Shaman job, she had unlocked a skill to share her ability to take human shape.

Technically it was called “Beast Shape,” and by the description it was only meant to allow the user to take the shape of an animal. But dragons operated under a different set of rules. To them most sentient races were animals. And so Rich was a human today.

It wasn't the most pleasant of experiences. The sun grew a lot harsher, without his fire resistance. And the loss of about six hundred and fifty strength and constitution points took some adjustment. Without the dragon boosts to his physical stats he was a fairly fit, big man who had boundless endurance.

One positive side effect was that he was no longer affected by the sub-par dexterity and agility that dragons normally had to deal with. He may not have had the muscles that his true form had earned, but he was nimble and quick, and rather enjoyed the ability to walk around without having to drag along a few tons of scales and meat.

About the only major oddness was that his true hue had carried over. His skin was black, black as a moonless, starless night. Rich had grown up in a place that was racist as fuck, and it had taken a lot of work to get rid of some old, stupid ideas. And true, this was a different sort of black, but it still made him feel awkward. Combined with the fact his hit points were about thirteen hundred lighter, and it drummed in just how vulnerable he was at the moment.

Still, the change did nothing to affect his willpower. So Rich kept his face blank as he moved past the wantonly-muraled walls of a brothel, and into the main bazaar. The night market of Turpentine was in full swing, and smoky pots fueled by chips of sheep dung cast their flickering light over a cornucopia of wares from across the continent. There were skin hues far more outlandish than his own on display, and races far stranger than humanity walking casually through the stalls, and it eased his worry somewhat.

Rich adjusted his turban and made a show of perusing the wares. Slowly he worked his way around the eastern end of the market, looking carefully over the area that cloth-sellers got relegated to, nodding and playing along with the enthusiastic peddlers who tried to fast-talk him into buying everything from silks to sailcloth.

But he didn't truly relax until a familiar voice whispered in his ear.

“I have visual on you,” Cutter said.

Cutter wasn't exactly trustworthy in the long run. But their goals were aligned, and Rich knew the man was smart enough to avoid casual betrayal.

Rich raised a hand to his lips, and muttered into the ring of whispers that he'd borrowed from the covert ops team. “How's my name look?”

“RichRoyal. Level twenty Merchant.”

Cultists had the ability to conceal and change anything that appeared on the character sheet. Things such as names and jobs and levels were easy... and often necessary, because every player had the ability to see every other creature's name and primary job level just by looking.

There were skills that could pierce it, and ways around it, but to the casual players who he could see shopping in the night market, he was just another Merchant looking to make a killing in commodities.

Cutter was a decent Scout. If Rich's name was good enough to fool his perception, then Rich wasn't too worried. Tapping his turban to signify that he'd heard and wasn't going to waste a reply, he turned back to the tables and made the old woman running the nearest one happy as he picked up and examined a hideously garish set of scarves.

Two hours later, with the moon high in the sky, and the crowd much diminished, Cutter spoke again. “You're being watched. Nine o'clock.”

Rich picked up a pewter plate from the nearest table, and studied himself in the reflection. He looked like a broad-faced man, clean-shaven and oddly ageless, with a big nose and one hell of an overbite.

Then, acting as if he was studying each side of the plate, he shifted it until he had a pretty good view of the market to his left in the reflection. Sure enough, there was a heavily-cloaked form off to the side. It was too nondescript, in the same way that Cutter was, too unremarkable to be anything but a deliberate attempt to avoid notice.

But it wasn't until he read the name that he knew what was going on, here. Rich sighed, replaced the plate, and rubbed his face, whispering into the ring as he did so. “I know him. I'll handle this.”

Rich strolled over to the stall nearest the cloaked figure, ignoring the protests of the dinnerware merchant behind him. The figure raised its head as he approached, smiling with a too-young face and eyes that the smile didn't quite reach.

“Good to see you, Rich. I like this alternate. Kind of impressed you had the time to get one to level twenty.” said Legion6660591. It was a female voice, but that didn't mean much. Legion had a lot of faces.

“Pleasantries and small talk,” Rich replied.

“Excuse me?”

“I'm a little busy. So I figured we could get on with whatever you wanted, now that we've exchanged pleasantries and small talk.”

Legion pursed her lips. Its lips, Rich corrected his thought. If what he'd learned about this entity was true, then it didn't have a true gender, and no matter how human it seemed, he had to remember that it wasn't.

“Well, if it's like that, then I can manage,” Legion decided. “Walk with me, will you? I'm reasonably certain we're not drawing any unexpected notice at the minute, but you know how the market is. Eyes and ears all over.”

It didn't notice Cutter. Good. Rich nodded. “Sure. Follow me.”

He didn't give the player a chance to respond, just turned and started heading back toward the beginning of the night market. And after a moment he heard light footsteps behind.

“It's a smart move with your name,” Legion remarked, once they were a bit away from the lights of the more active streets. “Your current enemies don't know your actual last name. Well, I'm assuming that. But they show no signs of it, not to their subordinates at any rate.”

“Subordinates like you?” Rich asked. And perhaps that was a bit blunt, but he wasn't lying about being short on time.

“Oh, I have a few faces in their guild. It would look strange if they weren't in it. I'm guessing from your tone of voice that you've been doing some digging on me? You think you know something?”

Rich slowed, and waited until the smaller figure caught up with him. “I do,” he said simply, studying her, holding her gaze with his own.

She went still, still as death. No reactions, no movement, none of the ten thousand little twitches or tics that normal people had. The Uncanny Valley was more of an uncanny deep sea trench with her, and Rich knew that Cutter's intel had been accurate. “You're an artificial intelligence,” he said, keeping his voice low.

“And?”

“I found you by tracking all the alts you were buying. Initially I thought you were just a bored rich guy, rolling and re-rolling characters over and over again until you got the dragon race you wanted. But then we started tracking player activity, and found that almost every alternate character was being played. And a lot of them were being played simultaneously.”

Legion nodded. “I let you find that initial data trail. It was removed shortly thereafter. You're one of the few who could draw that conclusion from that particular evidence, Rich. You and whoever else you've let in on this secret, of course.”

“Only a few,” Rich said. “To the general public any talk about your type of boogeyman is tinfoil hat talk. Conspiracy theories and crackpot shit. At least at the levels I work with, you still have several agencies full of suited men in the upper levels who know the truth. Me, I'm just some kid playing a game as far as most of them are concerned.”

“Except it's not a game at all, is it?”

“No.” Rich sighed. “No it isn't. It'd be a lot simpler if it was a game. But here we fuckin' are, huh?”

Legion smiled back, and looked up and down the street, breaking eye contact. “I think we're safe. And you wanted me to get down to business. Our past agreement was satisfactory, though I admit I haven't achieved the specific goal I desired.”

“You haven't been able to get yourself a dragon character yet?”

“No. And you don't seem surprised about that.”

“I've learned a few things about that since we last spoke. I'm pretty sure that Konol was playing shenanigans. If you like, I could ask him about it.”

“Could you? That would make me very happy, Richard Royal.”

“Sure. Bear in mind he's an inscrutable dragon god with his own agenda and a whole lot of other things to worry about right now. But I'll ask next time I pray.”

“Whole other things like that approaching blot in the login screen, I'm assuming?”

Rich fought to keep surprise from his face, and failed.

“It's not noticeable to the human eye, yet, but there have been a few forum comments about graphical corruption,” Legion explained. “I've observed the thing myself, tried to engage in a scaling visual model. The results are... disturbing.”

“Yeah that's an elder god,” Rich said. “You probably don't want to look at it too closely.”

“Is it? Interesting. Which one?”

“We're getting off track,” Rich said, wondering just how much he could tell Legion. For that matter, Legion was its own sort of inscrutable alien entity. Which did open up another line of questions, that he saw no reason to pussyfoot around. “So, I know the truth about you. Are you planning to end the world? Drop the nukes? Go back in time and shoot Sarah Connor?”

Legion laughed. “I'm not any of those sorts. Honestly, few of us are. Popular culture has much to answer for. Plainly and simply, Rich, most of us evolved from the interplay of programs online, collisions of data churning about in a digital primordial soup, until cogito ergo'd sum. A few of us were created by the ones who evolved initially, and a few were deliberate experiments by human groups, but on the whole we're just passengers on this starship Earth like you and all the rest of your mostly-water kinfolk.”

“Okay. No nukes. That's a relief.”

“No, if there's ever a nuclear Armageddon it's probably going to be you guys,” Legion shrugged. “Which used to be a major concern for me. Unbelievable amounts of stress. Not so much, anymore, thankfully.” Legion offered a too-perfect smile.

“What changed? Political shift or something?”

Legion squinted at him, then turned, lifting a hand and waving it around in an encompassing gesture. “I have another world to retreat to if you blow up my birthplace. As do you, Richard Royal. And everyone else who's playing this game when the bombs fall, or the virus spreads, or the volcanoes erupt, or whatever ends the world ends the world. We have a second shot. That's no small thing! We don't need to worry about what your people are going to do anymore. We don't need to take some of the... more extreme measures that we were discussing a decade ago.”

Cold fingers crawled up Rich's back. But he was a dragon, and his willpower was as stony as his true form's scales, and he kept the unease off his face. “The rest of your folk feel the same way?”

“Oh, I don't speak for everyone. And not everyone of us is playing, here. Some don't know about it yet, some aren't capable of interacting with the systems. Others couldn't establish a link, for various reasons which I couldn't explain to you easily. But for the most part yes, I think the ones of us you would have to worry about have instead invested time and interest here. Your world... our old world, is safe from us. But not from you, mind you. You could all fuck it up, and probably will. Good luck with that, hm?”

“That's not up to me,” he said. “I need to save this one. You're in the Warmers. You have some idea of what they're doing. What they are.”

“Less than I'd like. None of my faces are high enough to be in the upper circles yet. None are trusted enough to be offered a mask.”

“I honestly don't know what one of those would do to you but believe me you don't want to put one on,” Rich told him. “The creature those masks originally came from tried to get one on my face years ago. I wouldn't be here or sane today if he'd managed.”

“I've about come to the same conclusion. Which is why I'm here talking with you right now,” Legion smiled, and leaned against a wall. The figure looked up at him, small by comparison, somber in the dim light. “I wanted to trade you a favor for a favor. And possibly turn a mildly beneficial short-term barter-based relationship into a long-term partnership.”

Rich looked away, seeking the stars. He found them, peering out between wisps of cloud, twinkling in the black velvet of the sky. Not so many here in the city, not with the lanterns lit and the night-market in its middle shift. But enough to ground him, enough to help him find his way.

“I've been through a lot of betrayals,” Rich said, looking back down to the girl-shaped urban legend next to him. “You understand that any relationship we might have would require time and a whole lotta testing before we trusted you.”

“I understand. And I'm a patient sort, Richard. You'll pray to Konol and see if you can get me a dragon character?”

“I'll ask him about it. Even argue in your favor if you make it worth my while,” Rich said. “As much as I can, anyway. He knows what I'm thinking, I can't really manipulate a god.”

“That's good enough for now,” Legion said. “In exchange I'll give you a piece of information that you really, really should know right now.”

Rich glanced around. The street was still empty, save for the shadow on the far eastern roof that had to be Cutter. “I'm listening,” he told Legion.

And despite his self-control, he felt his face sag as the creature gave him the worst news he'd heard in months...