The captured man hadn’t woken up by the time Braden came into the library.

“Kyle?” Braden called, stepping into the dark building.

“Yeah, I’m here.”

“You can go get some sleep now.”

“Hold on, Braden, I think I got something.”

“What? You’re decoding it?”

“No,” Kyle said. “I’m not even sure it actually says anything. It’s more like a research minigame.”

“Really?” Braden said, coming over to peer at the book Kyle was holding. His short dwarven frame was eye level with Kyle even though Kyle was in a chair. “Can I help?” he asked.

“I guess. You have to find pages that match. Like, they have identical contents. It’s easiest to find matching pictures or diagrams, but I assume matching pages of text work too.”

“Then what?”

“Then somebody with the spellcraft skill, like me, can use the examine ability twice in quick succession on both pages, and it gives you a research point you can use to create spells. I think it’s supposed to represent making connections between disparate sources of knowledge, but it’s tedious as hell.”

“At least you figured out how it works. That’s something, lt least.” said Braden. “I picked Adept as my class too. I was wondering how I was supposed to cast spells and stuff. Guess I shoulda picked spellcraft. You’d think they’d have told me.”

“Nah, I can write spells on scrolls so others can learn them,” Kyle said. “Spellcraft’s just for inventing spells; any adept can cast them.”

“Well then we’ve got a deal. I’ll work on trying to find matches here, and then when you come back, you can make some spells.” Braden went over to a nearby shelf and removed a book.

“Thanks. It’s gonna be rough, though. I’ve only found four matches so far. It’s these stupid books. They’re too long.” Kyle pointed at a diagram in an open book on the table beside him. “Like, I feel like I’ve seen that circle diagram before. I thought it was in this book, but maybe it was in one of those other five books on that shelf over there. I honestly can’t remember which one, because they all blur together and -”

Kyle was interrupted by a loud ripping sound. He looked up from his tome to see Braden tearing a large picture of a flower from one of the books.

“Braden, what’re you doing?”

“Simple. Let’s tear out the pages and sort them,” Braden said, motioning to the mostly empty shelves. “Put all the plant pictures in a stack here, all the animal pictures on the shelf next to them, like that. Maybe the text pages we can sort by what symbol appears in the first word of the first line.”

Kyle trudged over and took a page from Braden’s hand. He tapped through his menus until he got to the Examine ability and used it on the page. Sure enough, it registered, and his interface asked him to Examine a second one.

“Wow. The page still works, even separated from the book.”

Braden smiled. “Great. Let’s rip these books apart.”

“This cannot be intended player behavior,” Kyle said as Braden leafed to another page with a diagram and carefully tore it out.

“That’s their fault. They should have thought of that before making such a dumb research system.”

“Or,” said a voice in the corner, “You could go out and play the the real game, noob.”

“Or,” Kyle said, without missing a beat, “If you’re so interested in winning the game, you could come in and get some free armor and spells instead of setting our city on fire.” He turned and looked at the man, grateful he finally woke up. Kyle had been on his toes for hours now.

“Free stuff? Like you’d really do that.” the man said, his expression contemptuous.

“Have you touched the crystal? If not, Braden and I will carry you straight to the crystal and you can level up.”

“Wait, we will?” Braden asked.

“Sure. We don’t care about this game. If he’s interested in beating this game so we can all get back to our families in the real world, we should be helping him out.”

“But what if he tries to torch our village again?”

“He’s smarter than that,” Kyle said. “Somebody – not gonna name names here – but somebody set fire to our village recently and undid a couple days worth of work. Not only that, but now our village has voted to set up a wall to protect themselves. That’s probably four or five days of work there, too. So now instead of getting our bloomery up and running today, this poor guy has to wait a whole week before he can come ask us for metal armor and weapons.”

Kyle looked over at the bound man in the corner. His face, smouldering with anger, betrayed some amount of thought. Kyle continued, “This guy seems like the kind of person who wants to get every competitive advantage possible. Why would he mess that up by setting fire to our infrastructure?”

“What do you get out of it?”

“Long term, you win the game and we all escape. Shorter term? We’d like more info. You’ve got two crystals more than we do, but we headed to the closest crystal we could find. What’d we miss? What else is out there? What’s your build like, and how’s it working out for you?”

The man thought for a while. “You really don’t care if I win?”

“Mia might,” Kyle admitted. “She’s the one that bagged you. She’s kinda competitive.”

“No joke,” the guy said. He grew quiet, still thinking.

“Or we could just kill you and take your stuff.” Kyle shrugged. “We could put it to good use. You’d just respawn elsewhere. Just don’t come back and make us kill you again.”

“So you’re looking for more guildies?” the man asked, straightening and smiling.

“Maybe,” said Kyle.

“You’re the leader of this place? If you said I was in, I’d be in for good?”

“Our village’s power structure is… weird.” Kyle said. “People might not be too happy their village was set on fire. You might have to do a little boring grunt work to help repair the damage you caused. You know, like chopping trees and stuff. Just enough for other people to trust you’re legit. You’d also have to get Mia’s okay. She thinks I’m a softie.”

“You are,” the guy says. “You’re gonna end up being murdered once you stop being useful. But somebody’s gotta chop trees. If you want to be an NPC shopkeeper, who am I to stop you?”

Kyle leaned over to untie the man, but Braden put a hand on his shoulder.

“Kyle,” he said, “I really don’t like this.”

“Why not?”

“He’s just not trustworthy. He practically admits as much. He’ll probably just steal our stuff and leave.”

“He can’t. We’ve set all our houses to have access rights that keep others from entering. He can’t get our stuff.”

“We’ve got public property, though. The leather in the tannery. The herbs in the apothecary. Hell, he might just wait, insist on getting the first set of metal armor, then disappear in the night.”

Kyle thought about it, and glanced at the bound man. The man shrugged, and his eager smile tightened to a smirk. “No offence taken. I wouldn’t trust me either. It’s just that sort of game.”

“It shouldn’t be,” Kyle said. “This stupid bickering is costing us time. If everybody in the game took all their resources and used it to help one person tag all the crystals, then we’d be out of here and back to our normal lives in a month.”

“And that one person would get five million. And everybody else would miss out on the coolest competition in their lifetime,” the man said. He leaned forward, arms still tightly bound behind him. “Have you considered that? That maybe it’s not about getting home for some of these people?”

“Are you one of those people?” Kyle asked.

The man paused, his expression lost in thought. He looked over at Braden, and Kyle’s eyes followed. Braden’s arms were crossed, and his face was stone.

“Yeah,” the man finally said, leaning back calmly. “I’m in this to win. I’m two levels up already, and this’ll only be my first death. Minor setback. No big deal.”

“No. If you’re going to be like that, we’ll just leave you tied up. We’ll build a prison next. Can’t respawn if we don’t kill you. You lose. Game’s over for you.”

The man laughed. “Like that’ll work. If you don’t tap your crystal for 24 hours, it gives you a message asking if you are okay. If you don’t tap “yes” within a few minutes, it respawns you somewhere. You’re a naive optimist even when it comes to handling prisoners.”

“How do you even know this?”

“It happened to the other people in my starting dungeon. I just kept them out by beating them in the head every few hours as I set up camp near the entrance. I found the info in the help menu after I saw someone disappear for the first time.”

Kyle scowled. “Fine. We’ll kill you at midnight so your respawn timer starts then. The least we could do is cost you 48 hours instead of 24. Pleasant dreams.” And he punched the man hard in the face.

The man’s eyes snapped shut as he fell immediately into unconsciousness.

The sudden violence unnerved Kyle. He was thinking of the game mechanics; return the man to unconsciousness to keep him from escaping. But in a flash, he realized punching a bound man’s face was far more violent than anything he had ever done in real life. He suddenly felt irrationally frustrated at the man, as if the man had somehow forced Kyle to do that.

Still under the ever-increasing effects of fatigue, Kyle laboriously stormed off.

Braden didn’t call after him.