“Marge?” I strode in through the doors of the Chosen Ones Alliance, that giant hallway with the large stone gateways once more coming into view. “Is Marge here?”

After clearing the Ruler’s Grave, I’d returned to the Capital. Since Rue hadn’t been able to give me the answers I wanted, I’d decided to turn to another source. The Chosen Ones Alliance. I’d joined the Alliance, but so far hadn’t had any interactions with them other than popping in now and then. Since I had a point of contact with the other Chosen Ones, I thought that I might as well use it.

Rue had accompanied me about halfway there but in the end chose to wait for me at Richard’s smithy instead. When I told him that he could come and wait in the Guild Hall, he declined, saying that he'd probably be unwelcome. I didn’t know why he’d think that, but there didn’t seem to be any way to convince him otherwise, so I just let him be.

“Hello?” I peered through one of the stone doorways. “Marge?”

“Luck,” came Marge’s voice from behind me. I turned to find her coming in with a few other members that I didn’t recognise. “Looking for me?”

“I just have a few questions I want to ask.”

“Questions. Got it. Come with me then,” Marge motioned for me to follow her and began leading the way down the hall. The other members following her waved goodbye and dispersed, going their separate ways. She led me through one of the large, stone archways into a cozy meeting room, simply furnished with a long, wooden table and plenty of chairs. Marge sat down in the seat closest to the doorway, gesturing for me to do the same.

“So…” she clasped her hands in front of her, leaning forwards. “What questions do you have?”

Quite a lot. But I decided to start off with the most glaring one.

“I know this sounds silly, but is this a dream?”

Marge blinked.

“I’d have thought we were already past that stage,” she remarked. “You were running around this whole time thinking you were dreaming?”

“Maybe?”

Marge sighed.

“I knew I should have paid more attention to you… Look. You’re not dreaming. This is real. I know it feels like you’ll wake up at any second, but trust me. If this is a dream, then I’ve been sleeping for five whole years.”

“Oh.”

“I hope you didn’t do anything reckless.”

“I may have died once,” I admitted.

“That’s not what I mean. It doesn’t matter if you died. You’ll respawn,” Marge pulled out a green window and began tapping away at it, her eyes glancing over the glowing words on its surface. “What I really want to know is whether you’ve been reported.”

“Someone threatened to report me for going into their Guild Hall.”

“But did they?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Good,” Marge briskly closed the screen with a wave of her hand, seemingly satisfied. “Death isn’t permanent, but it’s over once you get reported.”

“Why? What happens?”

“You fall into comatose,” Marge said, with the same tone as if she were describing the weather. “The theory is that our accounts are directly tied to our physical bodies in this world. If you get reported too many times, your account gets locked.”

“And I get forced into a coma when my account gets locked?”

“Yes,” Marge said sternly. “The Chosen Ones Alliance is notorious for being a hacker guild due to our free reign in the game. We can do things that other players can’t since we’re actually, physically inside the game. This causes us to be at a higher risk of being reported than the average player. Some of our members have been paralysed after their accounts were locked. They’re in a special room in the Guild Hall right now, waiting for the day the devs decide to unlock them again.”

“You sure they’re not…well, dead?”

“Three of them have come back after getting unlocked, so no, they’re not dead,” Marge shook her head. “But a year is still a long time to be paralysed for. There haven’t been a lot of players around the normal zones due to the End of Ruin event, so you can likely romp around for a while, but you’ll have to start being careful with what you do once the event ends. I don’t want what happened to those guild members to happen to anyone else, let alone you.”

“I’ll be careful,” I promised. “Alright… next question. So you know how at the beginning, you told me all the stuff about the Chosen Ones and the Alliance?”

“Yes?”

“And how you were trying to find a way out?”

“Yes.”

“Mind briefing me on that?”

Marge nodded, and waved her hand over the table. In the span of a heartbeat, a large map appeared, a map I recognised as the map of Briarwood. There were the Light Marshes over here, and the Mounds over there, and the little patches of water that were the Lakes of Luna… Pins and what looked like sticky notes had been tacked to all parts of the map, categorised neatly by their different colours.

“This is a map of Briarwood. This,” Marge traced her finger along the edge of the map. “Is the border. It’s an invisible wall to the players, but to us, it’s traversable. There is nothing beyond the border but void and emptiness. You can walk for days, and still find absolutely nothing.”

She looked up at me. I nodded to show that I got that.

“These pink pins,” she pointed at them. “Are markers of places we’ve briefly scanned for gaps in the world.”

“Gaps in the world?”

Marge nodded. “We theorise that we got here by activating a gateway leading into Briarwood. That gateway is opened by clearing the final boss to story mode.”

“And so the gaps…”

“The gaps are what we theorise to be the gateways out of Briarwood, back into the real world. We don’t know if they’re activated by a specific action, like clearing the final boss, or a specific location, so we’re currently trying everything with everyone who’s down to help.”

“These blue, red and yellow pins are where we haven’t checked location, actions or both respectively. The green pins are where we’ve checked both location and possible actions. Purple pins would be where we hadn’t checked at all, but as you can see, we’ve already checked everything at least once or twice.”

“Yeah, I see.”

“We do systematic sweeps of the area every so often, making sure that we didn’t miss anything that could possibly be our ticket out of here. You can join them if you want once you’re max level, but it isn’t mandatory.”

“Why isn’t it mandatory?” I tapped the map with my finger. “Wouldn’t you be able to find the gateway faster if you enlisted more people?”

“That’s because the gateway theory is just a theory,” Marge grimaced. “Some Chosen Ones think that we were brought here deliberately, by either Oberon or the Decay, and that looking for nonexistent gateways is a waste of time.”

“Oh… I see.”

“We’ve questioned the Faerie Courts, all the permanent NPCs, as well as the first generation of random ones. They deny knowing anything about a gateway, or anyone who might have brought us here.”

“Someone has to be lying, right?”

“That’s what Trix thinks,” Marge said. “I’m a bit on the fence about it, since we’ve already used Overpower to compel them to tell the truth. If any of it’s a lie, then they’re not aware of it either.”

“What’s Overpower?” that was something I’d never heard of before.

“Overpower is a hidden skill unique to Chosen Ones,” Marge answered. “You have a limit of one per day. You can use it on any NPC to force them to obey one command.”

“That sounds… overpowered. And nasty.”

“It is,” Marge nodded. “Which is why we only get one per day. But anyway, you should come to our meetings if you want anything more detailed. This is basically the gist of it.”

“So regarding a way out, you’ve found nothing.”

“Well, not entirely nothing,” Marge dismissed the big map, which vanished in a poof of green sparks. “But you could say that.”

“Okay. A little disappointing, but I got it. Next question. What are the devs doing throughout all this? Do they know?”

“We have no idea,” Marge sighed. “But we’ve tried contacting them.”

She tapped to conjure another translucent screen and spun it around to show me. On it displayed Marge’s ingame outbox. Taking up nearly the whole column were emails sent to the Briarwood dev team, titled a variety of things, ranging from “SOS” to “Bug Report—Decay boss fight”.

“Did they ever respond?”

“Nope. Not even once,” Marge sighed and dismissed the screen. “It either means that our messages aren’t getting through, or they don’t care.”

“What about the other players? You know, the not Chosen Ones. Can’t we ask for help from them?”

“We tried asking through chat and dms, but the chat box keeps censoring what we have to say,” Marge shook her head. “Anything related to ‘trapped’, ‘isekai’, ‘world’… all censored.”

“That’s a bit of a problem…” I made a mental note to try that out myself a bit later. “How do I know I can trust you?”

That question seemed to catch Marge off guard, and she fell silent for a second.

“Well…you don’t,” Marge said simply. “Whether you trust us is entirely up to you. It’s just that we’re all in the same boat together, so joining forces would be the best course of action. There have been Chosen Ones who struck it out on their own even after hearing our introduction, so you wouldn’t be the only one to have doubts.”

“Huh. I guess I can accept that. Okay then… Next…Who’s the white lady? You know, the lady who—“

“Who looks like a sheet,” Marge finished for me. “That’s Titania. The Queen of Briarwood. You likely saw her with her Wild Hunt. She doesn’t usually bother us, so you don’t have to worry too much about her.”

“Titania?” What? The Titania I knew from BR didn’t look like that. I conjured up an image of Titania in my head. Icy blue eyes and golden hair, with a dress made out of morning glories. Not like a… blank character template. “She looks so different.”

“I don’t know why she looks like that either,” Marge shrugged. “But we’ve confirmed it long ago. Asked a bunch of NPCs, even asked some players. Might just be an issue on our side, since it’s undoubtedly Titania. Anything else?”

“Yes…umm… Who’s Rue supposed to be?”

Marge’s brows furrowed.

“I don’t know a Rue. Are they an NPC? Player?”

“NPC. Or at least he claims to be one.”

“Tsk. Don’t rely too much on the NPCs, Luck,” Marge frowned. “It’s not worth the trouble.”

“Wait, why?”

“No matter how real the NPCs feel, they’re simple minded, their personalities bound by their coding. If they’re programmed to be evil, then they’ll likely be untrustworthy, no matter how nice they seem.

“Take Rosa for example. She’s designed to adore and worship her Champion, and so now she sucks up to and flirts with every single one of us. They’re not real people. They’re just AI following their program.”

“They aren’t real people?”

“No,” Marge shook her head resolutely. “This isn’t a real world either, as in, it’s not a parallel universe to ours. It’s an artificial world.”

An artificial world? That was a wild claim. If I weren’t stuck in said world right now I’d have laughed it off.

“And how do you know that?”

“Surely you’ve noticed the lack of taste, touch, and smell,” Marge folded her arms. “All sensations that exist are sight and sound. Some of the visuals aren’t even finished, they’re just pngs.”

“Yeah?” I did notice that. Quite a bit, in fact. Those were a part of the main reason why I thought that it was all a dream.

“At the very beginning, it was even less. We Chosen Ones didn’t even have a body to inhabit. We were just plumes of coloured gas with a pair of severed hands. It was like we were just the strings controlling our avatars. Then a server maintenance happened, and now we have all this,” Marge gestured to her arms and legs.

“The random NPCs were the same. They didn’t have such diverse dialogue options way back then. Pngs, every single one of them, rooted to their shops and with fixed dialogue. But now? They have programmed personalities, backstories… Only ones that have stayed the same since the beginning are Oberon, the Decay, Titania, and Rosa.”

“Even then, you can see the signs of crude craftsmanship on them. Oberon is just a statue that doesn’t move. Titania has no colours. Something’s wrong with the Decay’s limbs, and Rosa… Rosa’s the only perfect one, the only complete NPC that was around at the beginning.”

“This world is an unfinished and artificial creation, constantly being fleshed out and improved by some unknown entity. Everything in this world that was not brought into it is also artificial. That includes the NPCs. I know, because I was there to bear witness to the very beginning.”

“Okay, so this world and the locals are artificial. What makes you so sure their personalities are set? What if they’re sentient?” I challenged. “Don’t they get the benefit of the doubt?

“They did, once. More specifically, the Decay did. But then something happened, and we realised that you really can’t trust the NPCs. Especially not the ones who seem benevolent, but were malicious in BR.”

“Oh…” I wasn’t sure I liked that response. The NPCs couldn’t be trusted? Surely not all of them right? I knew I wouldn’t trust Rosa, that’s for sure, but Rue seemed nice to me. So did Richard, and Lydia, and Poppie. And Emmie. Who could call Emmie untrustworthy? She was just a little kid.

“Well, last question. Has anyone actually died? Or suffered permanent damage?”

“Yes…” Marge’s eyebrows furrowed. “There is one. Poor kid. He’d just turned 14.”

“How did he die?”

“He was tricked. He dug too deep into the world’s secrets, and was punished as a result. I was there when he was executed, Trix too.”

Marge’s dark eyes glazed over, as if gazing off into the distant past.

“One moment we were in Briarwood, the next, we were on a beach. A silver beach on a silver sea. There, our naked souls were presented before them, without the shell of a body to protect us.”

“There was a god there, a child with hair the colour of wheat. The aura they exuded made us keel over from the sheer pressure of it.”

“They tore Michael to shreds, completely decimated his soul. I remember watching the light inside him fade, and get dashed to pieces over and over again. Trix has never been the same since.”

“That incident is one of the reasons why we generally don’t trust the NPCs.”

“I’m sorry for your loss.”

“It’s okay…” Marge whispered. “That was a long time ago.”

“…”

“You mentioned a god?”

“Yes… A god. The amount of power they showed was incredible, they couldn’t have been anything less. We don’t know who they are, we don’t know how much they control. We don’t even know if the devs are in on it. We just know that they’re watching, and that the NPCs are their servants.”

Despite the lack of temperature in the room, all of a sudden, I felt a lot colder, a chill running down my spine.

“Are you sure it’s okay to talk about this then?”

“I’ve repeated it many times to the Chosen Ones who asked. Nothing’s ever happened to me,” Marge shook her head. “It’s only when we do something to challenge the god’s rule that things go down.”

“Anything else?”

“No, that’s all I can think of at the moment,” I got up from my seat and shook Marge’s hand. “Thanks for clearing things up for me.”

“My pleasure. Now if you’ll excuse me.”

She moved past me and into the hallway. I watched her go, her figure growing smaller and smaller in the distance. I guessed that she was in a hurry, and that I’d just held up a good portion of her time with my questions.

Ah well… At least I got my answers, eh? They weren’t exactly satisfactory, but they were answers.

I strode out of the meeting room, making the trip back to Rue. I pondered my next course of action as I walked, now stewing in the new information I’d been given.

I was not dreaming. Fancy that. Contradictory to all the evidence in favour of it being a dream, it was not. I was a part of some grand kidnapping scheme by an unknown deity, and was now stuck in an unfinished world with no way out.

Evidently, I had to get out of here. I’d had my fun while it lasted, but if this really wasn’t a dream, that meant I’d just gone missing for days in the other world. My retired parents were still over there, sick and running out of cash to spend, and I couldn’t do anything to help them now that I was here.

Of course, there was no guarantee that Marge was telling the truth either. I’d like to believe that she was though. Since, as she said, we were all in the same boat together.

For now, I decided that I would go along with the original plan. Level up, go through story mode, enjoy what I had for the time being while keeping on the lookout for new clues. All the other Chosen Ones were worrying about the getting out of here problem, one newbie joining in likely wouldn’t help all that much. Especially since I was only Level 30 at the moment. Maybe when I was a higher level, I’d be of more use to everyone, but for now, leveling up was the main goal.

I returned to Richard’s smithy on the second floor, arriving to find Rue kneeling on the floor, playing some sort of clapping game with Emmie. He had found a hood somewhere and pulled it up over his head, obscuring his hair and parts of his face. Emmie was gleefully slapping her hands against Rue’s in a particular pattern that I didn’t recognise, their clapping pace getting faster and faster each second.

At one point, Rue’s hand slipped and the pace dropped. Emmie squealed in delight.

“I win! I win!”

“Well done, Emmie!” Rue praised. I headed over to them, tapping Rue on the shoulder.

“Uncle Luck!” Emmie came running towards me, her arms outstretched.

“Hi Emmie!” I patted her head and turned to Rue. “I’m back. Ready to go?”

Rue stood up, nodding.

“Where to next?”

“I’m not sure, really,” I replied. “I’m not high level enough for the next story quest to trigger.”

“Which is?”

“The Kelpie hunting quest at the Lakes of Luna.”

“Oh… I see…” Rue frowned, his hand on his chin in a thinking gesture. “Do you have anything in mind for leveling up?”

“Not particularly,” I replied. “Though I’d rather go someplace new than grind the old areas.”

“Hmm… what about the Deep Woods, then? I don’t think you’ve been there yet, have you?”

“Hmmm…” The Deep Woods was a darker, scarier section of the Forest, with much higher level enemies. Like the Forest, it was more of an in-between area than an area of its own, but with bosses riddled all over the place. This made it a good place for leveling up and getting drops. “Sounds good! If we’re lucky, maybe we’ll run into the Wild Hunt.”

“Uncle Luck and the Mister are going already?”

I looked down at Emmie, who had been listening in on our conversation. She was pouting, her bottom lip shoved out in a displeased manner, her eyes all scrunched up. It was hard to see her as anything other than a real little kid, but from what Marge had told me, she was just an NPC. A program trying to pose as a kid. Rue too, who felt like a nice guy, was ultimately also just some pieces of coding with a face. Coding that served the god of this world.

I hoped Marge was wrong about that. NPCs were the guys I’d been hanging out with since I’d gotten here. I really didn’t want to have to give up these friendships.

“I want to go on an adventure too!” Emmie grabbed my arm and swung it back and forth. “Take me with you!”

“Maybe next time, Emmie,” I rubbed her head with my free hand, swinging the entrapped one in a wide arc to make her let go.

“Promise?”

“If your dad and mom agree, then yes, I promise.”

That bit seemed to convince her, and she scampered off. I gestured to Rue to follow along, and soon, we were off.