“Do we craft a torch to light our way or something?” Mason asked.

“No need,” said Kyle. In his skills menu, he selected the new “flame” entry, a skill he added that morning by spending the research points Braden helped him accumulate. With a flash, a gout of flame appeared around Kyle’s right hand, with something hard and solid inside it. Kyle recoiled in surprise and dropped it, and the flame fell to the ground.

“Wait, crap…” Kyle bent down to try to pick it up, but withdrew his hands quickly. Now that it was out of his hands, the fire felt hot as one would expect.

“Hey,” said Lumen excitedly. “Our mage is finally maging!”

Mia snickered. “Kinda,” she said, watching as the flames on the ground sputtered out.

Kyle tried it again. This time, after selecting “Flame” from his menu, he shut his eyes. He grabbed onto whatever it was that appeared in his hand; It felt like a small, smooth orb, about the size and weight of a golf ball. It was warm to the touch, but not uncomfortable. With his eyes still closed, Kyle passed it from one hand to the other, then tossed it in the air a few inches and caught it. It seemed to follow all the expected laws of physics.

Clutching the sphere, Kyle opened his eyes. For all the world, it looked like his hand was on fire, an orb of flames dancing around his fist. Kyle hurled the ball down the entrance to the mine. The projectile trailed smoke as it flew through the air, then bounced along the floor, leaving a trail of small embers in its wake, before burning out after a few seconds. Dvorak cheered.

“Awesome,” said Lumen in excitement. “This is gonna be great. Mia and Mason, front! Kyle and I are ranged; we’ll take the back. Dvorak…. Dvorak, what the actual hell do you even do?”

“All sorts of things,” Dvorak said. “For instance, I’m quite good at making sarcastic comments!”

“No, I mean, Kyle can throw fire, but what do you do in a fight?”

“I don’t need magic to power my sick burns!”

“Forget it, Lumen,” Mia said. “He’s basically worthless, he just wanted to make sure he’s around whenever anything exciting happens so his audience doesn’t miss it.”

“Fine. Whatever. Stay in the back then. Maybe there’ll be a Bard subclass or whatever that’ll let you insult things to death later.”

“Hah! An excellent idea! I ought to practice my bardic skills then. Here, allow me to compose a ballad of our travels thus far…”

Kyle shot Lumen a dirty look as Dvorak started trying to extemporaneously sing a song about throwing logs. Kyle conjured another ball of flame and held it over his head to light the way as they descended the passage. As they descended, the darkness retreated from them; Kyle’s flame lit the passageway fairly well. Even then his party display and his ally’s HP bars, dim as they were, distracted him in the darkness. He considered asking the group to pause for a minute so he could mess around with his overlay to make it less distracting, but he just grumbled and turned it off instead.

Kyle had to be careful to hold the flame as high as possible; it was clear from the way his companions shied away from it that they could feel its heat. So Kyle found himself looking upwards a lot. The ceiling was mostly smooth stone, carved out of the rock face by some ancient race. Or the maybe the developers. In fact, definitely the developers. But game developers told stories about their worlds through the artistic assets they used to build a game, and Kyle could see the love that went into this corridor. Kyle could see chisel marks in the ceiling, suggesting some ancient, perfectionistic tunnelers had laboriously worked to make their mineshaft square. He passed underneath a more primitive, wooden, bulgy section of the ceiling and wondered what story the designer had meant to tell there. Perhaps the makers of this tunnel had to shore up a cave-in? Past that, there was a thick rope, stuck to the ceiling with some sort of sticky goo. It threaded back up the passageway, and was tied to one of the beams of the wooden bulge, as though…

“…Hey guys?” Kyle said, pointing up. “Does anybody know what that rope’s doing? Why’s it stuck to the ceiling here?”

The others looked up. “I dunno,” said Mason. “It looks like it’s connected to that wood section of the ceiling there.” He pointed behind them to the wooden bulge they had just passed. “You think that maybe…”

With a snapping sound, the rope came separated from the ceiling and pulled taut, yanked by some unseen force in the darkness down the hallway. With a grinding sound, the beam that the rope was tied to slid slightly, causing the whole wooden structure to fall apart. As it did, a boulder the side of a dishwasher fell from a hole in the ceiling, and started slowly rolling down the hall towards them.

Very slowly.

“This is a really crappy trap.” Mia said, standing to one side as the boulder rolled by at the speed of a slow walk. The others likewise stayed out of the rock’s way as it lumbered down the hall.

“I dunno, it’s picking up speed,” Kyle said, watching the boulder disappear down the hall. A few moments later, he heard a crash as the boulder impacted something down the hallway. “That could have been really dangerous if it caught us by surprise. I think we just triggered it early.”

“How would we have done that?” Lumen asked.

“We talked about it, obviously,” said Dvorak.

“What does that mean?” asked Lumen. “Like, it’s voice activated somehow?”

“No! I mean there must have been somebody pulling the rope. The devious trickster knew his jig was up when we started talking about his rope, so he panicked and pulled the trigger early. Better to have a crappy trap than to have no trap at all, as I always say.”

“Think somebody built this trap, then?” Kyle asked. He Examined the rope, where it lay on the ground, and saw that it, too, was crafted by “Unmet Player”. He shrugged. “I guess so.”

“If Dvorak’s right, then the guy’s still here,” Mia said. “They didn’t, like, booby-trap the mine and leave. They’re probably down the hall in the darkness waiting for us.”

“And pulling ropes,” Dvorak said. “Don’t forget about the ‘pulling ropes’ part.”

Kyle didn’t like that thought. With as little warning as possible, he flung his ball of fire as far down the hall as he could. The ball of flame landed in middle of the mostly straight hall, about fifty feet down. The additional light didn’t reveal anything besides an empty stretch of hall.

“Damn,” Kyle said. “I was hoping I’d catch a glimpse of somebody.”

“I guess we just keep going?” he heard Mason say from the darkness to his left. Without Kyle’s fire, the group was mostly in darkness.

“Uh….Kyle?” asked Lumen. “Down the hall there? Did you mean to do that? Or is that… something else?”

Kyle looked back down where he had thrown his ball of flame. Instead of burning out like it had previously, it had grown in size. As he watched, the fire filled the corridor with thigh-high tongues of flame.

“Not me,” said Kyle.

The flame spanned the width of the hall and started spreading down its length. Kyle stepped back reflexively, but it stopped growing towards them after a few feet. By the time it had finished spreading, a good ten to fifteen feet of the hallway was in flame.

Mason’s bulky silhouette shadowed Kyle’s view of the flames as Mason walked down the hallway to inspect the conflagration. Kyle saw Mason crouch, then look near the base of the left wall and point.

“There,” he said. “Some sort of device hooked to a tripwire.” Kyle could barely make it out from this distance. It looked like a little wooden box stuck to the wall.

Dvorak bounced past Kyle up to the flames to look where Mason was pointing. “What d’you think it is? It won’t tell me when I inspect it.”

“We’re probably missing a skill,” Mia said, opting to stay back in the shadows. That might be a good call, Kyle thought. It would be harder to aim weapons at them if they stayed in the darkness.

“Can I pull the tripwire?” asked Dvorak. “I want to pull the tripwire!”

“You want to trigger the trap?” asked Mason.

“Oh, admit it,” said Dvorak. “You want to know what it does too!”

Mason shrugged and stepped back. Dvorak grabbed the tripwire with both hands and yanked hard.

With a grating screech like nails on chalkboard, a shower of sparks flew from the wooden box, spraying onto the flames. Dvorak lost his balance and fell to the ground rear first.

“Huh,” Mia said. “That must’ve been meant to light the ground on fire, but Kyle’s fire thing did it first. I guess there was oil on the ground or something.”

“You guess?” said Mason, looking back towards Kyle and the others. “Aren’t you a rogue? Isn’t this supposed to be your thing? Disarming traps and stuff? What am I doing up here?”

“I mean, what games even have traps these days?” Mia said. “They aren’t fun. It’s like a big middle finger to the player. What designer’s gonna add them?”

“You could just say ‘I didn’t take any trap detection skills.’” Mason said in a deadpan.

“Look, there are too many skills for any of us to take all of them,” Kyle said. “Let’s just note it for later and move on. We seem to be doing just fine.” Kyle pointed down the hall at the now-dying flames, before realizing people probably couldn’t see him. He lit another flame in his hand and pointed again. “Come on, let’s go.”

The group reformed and Kyle trudged down the hallway with the others. As the tunnel curved to the left, Kyle saw the boulder that had rolled down the hall, smashed and broken against the wall.

As they continued walking, Kyle started to wonder if perhaps they were missing the point of the mine. He had been treating it as a set-piece dungeon. But what was he expecting to find? A big chest full of rocks at the end of the tunnel? Perhaps he should be thinking of it as more of an open world sandbox game? He idly considered taking his axe out of his pack and whacking the walls a few times, just to see if it gave him any stone.

“FORWARD!” A female voice shouted, startling Kyle from his thoughts.

From the darkness, a group of spear-wielding players rushed forward, filling the breadth of the corridor.