Kyle sat in the library, surrounded by torn papers. He wasn’t paying them any attention, though. His eyes were fixed on the interface in front of him.

Spellcrafting was hard. There were a bunch of “runes” of various shapes and sizes that represented different spell components. He needed to arrange them in a window, and then draw lines connecting them. Spells were created by linking these nodes together in a way that described your desired behavior. A “creation” node linked to a “fire” node linked to a “thrown” node, with a node representing the caster’s hand placed near all three, formed the fire spell Kyle had made. Thing was, that fire spell was literally just the sample spell that came in the help menu under the spellcrafting description. Spellcrafting was quite complicated, and because crafting a spell required him to spend his research points, he was loathe to experiment. Matching pages was just so boring.

But deep inside, Kyle knew it wasn’t just that. Kyle had done boring stuff in his life before. No, the big problem was any time he let his mind wander, he’d just start thinking about this world, and his place in it.

Back home, he felt like he had control of his life. Sure, professors expected things of him, and he had bills to pay, and his girlfriend demanded more attention than he sometimes thought she really needed. But he knew those challenges, and had equipped himself to deal with them. He knew which professors would demand his work be on time and which he could put off a little and still get most of the credit. He knew when his girlfriend could be safely ignored so he could finish his homework and when his girlfriend needed attention right away. He knew how to apply for grants, how to stretch out his food budget, and even a local lawyer who would pay him under-the-table to help sort through legal briefs. He owned the law-school thing.

But here? Here, he wasn’t so sure.

Kyle dragged some of the runes around with his finger, hoping to find a better way to organize them. If he could get them to fit in a smaller space, the spell would cost less mana. And if the spell’s nodes took up too much room, then he might not be able to craft the resulting spell at all until he gained another rank in spellcraft. Fitting them together to leave as little empty space between them as possible was kind of a puzzle.

Kyle could probably learn how to own this world too. But that would require things of him he wasn’t sure he wanted to do. Say people attacked the town again. Could he kill them?

The man in the library had made it easy by being so obviously unrepentant. He seemed completely okay getting killed. And come to think of it, Kyle wasn’t even the person who had done the killing.

But what if the man had apologized? Begged for forgiveness? Given Kyle a sob story? Pleaded with Kyle to let him go?

…and then stabbed Kyle in the back once his guard was down?

Kyle sighed, pulled out the “Sleep” rune, and replaced it with a “Poison” rune. It fit better against the “Mist” delivery rune. Would a poison mist be as useful as a cloud of sleep gas? Would poison be as humane as putting foes to sleep? What did it feel like to be poisoned in this world? Would your HP bar just drop without you realizing it? Or would you feel constant, wracking pain until the status effect wore off?

Maybe he shouldn’t care. He bet he could manage that. He’d learned about Nazi Germany in School. The Stanford prison experiments. He had a pretty good idea how it worked. He could just start dehumanizing anybody that wasn’t in the city. Intentionally view them all as animalistic. Like the goblins. Killable. Unworthy of remorse. But then what would happen when he got home? Could he flip back to the way things were? Could he walk down the streets of Cincinnati again and pass by the people there and still view them as though they were as much of a person as he was? What would it cost him, long term, to own this new world he was in?

He swapped back to the sleep rune and rotated it, then sighed and swapped the mist rune back out for the flash rune. He still wasn’t sure what the different between Blast, Spread, Flash, and Area were. At least with Mist he had some clue; it implied a persistent area of affect. But he was mostly using the others interchangeably; he’d just stick in whichever delivery rune fit best out around the other pieces. Sleep and flash did fit together nicely. Maybe he could even enlarge the power rune by a few ticks. The bigger he scaled the power rune, the more damage a spell would deal. But sleep wouldn’t deal damage. So what would a bigger power rune do? Make it harder to resist? Kyle didn’t know. He swapped back to mist and tried rotating the sleep rune again.

He didn’t want to hit the “Invent Spell” button and spend the research points because he didn’t want to match more pages. When his mind wasn’t actively involved in something, he’d start thinking, and thinking just stressed him and made him depressed. But then, he’d been twiddling with the runes so much during the past few days that he’d gotten bored and been thinking anyway. And as usual, he wasn’t coming up with answers. Maybe he ought to just spend 72 matched pages on this sleep mist spell and head out to the forest to force naps upon some unsuspecting Sansi.

As Kyle looked at the “Invent Spell” button and the possible distraction it offered, there was a knock on the library door, which was odd. It’s wasn’t like it was his library. All the Adepts in the city knew that.

“Come in?” Kyle asked as much as stated.

Mia came in, followed by Lumen. She looked around. Kyle hasn’t seen her in the library before.

“Wow. Nice place you’ve got here. Very… very you.”

“Thanks,” Kyle said, not sure how to take that remark. He closed his spell creation window without saving. “What’s up?”

“So, Adrianne and I have been talking about it,” Lumen said, looking distinctly uncomfortable, “And we’re kind of thinking that… I mean, it’s not that there’s anything wrong here, it’s just that we feel like maybe, I dunno…” he rolled his eyes and put a hand to his head. “God, this is awkward. How do I even-”

“We’re leaving,” Mia said. “This has been great and all, but the whole point of this town is to equip people to go off into the world and hunt for those crystals. And now that we’re finally making metal, it seems like it’s a good time to split.”

Kyle felt a sinking feeling in his stomach. He should have expected this. He really should have expected this. Of course they’d leave. Players don’t spend forever in a town full of NPCs. Mia and Lumen had done all they needed to. Crystopia had a wall. It had bloomeries and tanneries. It even had a guard force made of other NPCs like Kyle. The players had completed their quest here. Time to pick up their rewards and move on.

“Yeah,” Kyle said numbly. “Yeah, okay.”

“Which brings me to our other point,” Lumen said. “I’ve notice that we’ve got a lot of ore here, right? I mean, Aubrey’s been doing a good job pulling it up from that mine we found. And given that you’ve got so much of it, I was thinking that maybe-”

“We need metal armor,” Mia said, “as light as you can make it. What’s that like in this game? Chain shirts? Breastplates? Mageplate? I dunno.”

“I mean, I get that you could probably use a lot of metal here,” Lumen said quickly. “And I don’t mean to be pushy-”

“I do,” said Mia. “We’ve put as much work into this city as anybody else. When we leave, I think it’s only fair that we can claim some of its resources as ours, even if we didn’t pull it out of the ground ourselves.”

“Yeah, I get it,” said Kyle. “And I mean, even if you just walked in today, we’re trying to equip people to win the game, right? So why hoard equipment?” Kyle forced a smile. “Go win the game, ‘kay Mia? We’re counting on you.”

Mia smiled. Not a sarcastic smile, or a cocky smile, or even a patronizing smile. Not quite warm, either, but pretty close to it. “Thanks Kyle. You’re… well…” She sighed. “I know I can be kind of… how do you put it…?”

“Bitchy?” Lumen said, smirking.

“Shut up, kitty,” Mia said, rolling her eyes and smiling. “Bitching is complaining for no reason. I might complain, but there’s always a good reason. No, I’m talking about… well…” Mia looked off to the side, not making eye contact with Kyle. “I can be a jerk sometimes. I don’t get along with people. I get that. So… you’re a better guy than I’ve been treating you. You don’t deserve half the crap I’ve been putting you through. You’re… you’re okay.”

“Pretty fantastic, even,” Lumen said, with his enthusiastic toothy tiger grin.

“Yeah, Mia said. “Thanks for… thanks for everything. We’ll be back. To sell things and get equipped and stuff.”

“And tell stories,” Lumen said. “And there’d better be a brewery here so we can get drunk too!”

“I’ll tell Jacob,” Kyle said, smiling sadly. “He’d love to hear we’ve got to build a brewery when he’s already saving up resources for a respawn point and a mana tower.” Kyle paused as Lumen chuckled. “I don’t know that I have the authority to say it, but if it helps, tell Braden I’m happy with you using our ores so he can make you some metal armor.”

“Oh, quit the whole false modesty act,” Mia said, her sarcasm returning. “You know you’ve got this town wrapped around your pinky finger,” Mia said.

“Not you I didn’t,” Kyle said, still smiling.

Mia thought for a moment before responding. “Yeah, well, maybe I wasn’t really part of the town. I never did fit in. I knew people didn’t like me.” She shrugged. “I dunno. Maybe when I’m out of your hair, you can go back to being the awesome bookworm leader-man you’ve been trying to be. You might snap out of your funk.”

Kyle figured other people had noticed his recent moodiness, but it still stung a little to be called out on it. “Maybe,” he said.

“Anyway, see you around,” Lumen said. “We’ll head out as soon as that armor is done.”

“Yeah. Thanks for… thanks for stopping in to say goodbye.” Kyle nodded at Lumen and Mia, who backed up awkwardly and shut the door behind them.

Kyle put his head in his hands.

He wished his body would feel as despondent as his mind knew he was.