“Freddy’s dead? What do you mean dead?” Britta knew what dead meant, but she still felt like she needed clarification. “Dead how?”

“He fell out of a window,” said Stan. “Well, more like he was pushed very hard.”

“Pushed by who?”

There was a pause which gave Britta time to look over at the dwarves sat watching her. They seemed to be quite interested in the conversation, even if they could only hear her side of it. Interested enough not to demand she end the call, anyway.

“I can’t talk right now,” said Stan. “People. They’ve arrested me. I’m on my way to jail.”

“Why are you going to jail? Did you kill Freddy?”

“No! Of course not. I’m being framed, obviously.”

Britta didn’t think any of it was very obvious. She’d sent them off to gather some information, that was all. How did that end up with one dead and the other arrested for murder?

“Is he really dead? Didn’t he…” She glanced over at the dwarves. “Didn’t he wake up?” She didn’t want to bring up the subject of respawning in front of the dwarves. It felt like an unnecessary complication.

“No, he didn’t wake up.” Stan used the same inflection, but from his mouth it sounded mocking and sarcastic. “He stayed splattered all over the ground. If you go over to the Town Hall you can probably still see them trying to scrape him up.”

That wasn’t a very appealing image. She took a breath. “Okay. Fine. I’ll come over as soon as I’ve finished here. Where are they taking you?”

“The Guard House. It’s at the north end of the main street. And B, there’s something else. I can’t log out.”

“Are you in combat?”

“No. I can’t log out and I can’t exit the game.”

Britta knew the game wouldn’t let you leave a fight unless you won, or died. But you could do a forced exit, which would impose the same penalties as death. Not in this case, apparently.

“Alright. Maybe this is some kind of special quest. Give me ten minutes and I’ll come find you.”

There was no point discussing this long-distance. Stan couldn’t get anything other than standard answers from his accusers. She would have to go see for herself, and try to find out what had happened.

She ended the call and turned to face the dwarven inquisition. “Could we rearrange this for another time? Something’s come up.”

Roman frowned. It was a slow, thoughtful frown. It didn’t come across as very sympathetic.

“Whatever you’ve got yourself mixed up in, you’ll answer our questions first.” His voice was a firm growl. He was in charge.

The other dwarves nodded on either side of him.

“I’d love to. And there’s a bunch of stuff I’d like to ask you, too. Honestly, I’m not trying to run off. I want to talk to you guys. I just need to take care of this first. It won’t take long.” She didn’t know how long it would take, but she was sincere in what she said about wanting to talk to him. Now just wasn’t the best time.

“I haven’t decided we’ll be letting you go, at all.” There was menacing edge to his tone. “It all depends on what you have to say for yourself.”

Britta could tell he wasn’t going to be reasonable about this. She knew it wasn’t right to generalise, but dwarves seemed to have a stubborn streak and a tendency to treat everyone like the enemy. Admittedly, her experience was limited to a dwarf who had faked his own death, and one who had been possessed by an evil spirit, so probably not the most representative of their race.

She could just stay here and work things out, however long that took, and then go see what kind of mess Stan had got himself into, but there was this strange feeling in her chest telling her it couldn’t wait. Something about his situation felt off to her.

“I appreciate the position you’re in,” said Britta. “I’d want to know what I was up to, as well. But I can’t. I just can’t.”

Britta opened her status screen and logged out.

After what Stan had said, Britta was worried she wouldn’t be able to log out, either. The dwarves would be staring at her patting the air in front of her as nothing happened.

Whatever the issue was for Stan, there was no problem for Britta. She found herself in the white room with options to leave the game or go back in.

She did feel a twinge of guilt. It was a cheesy way to avoid what the game had planned for her. From the dwarves’ perspective, she would have disappeared in front of their eyes, effecting a world-class escape. They would explain it away as magic, probably.

It wasn’t really a mechanic that should have been allowed, but you couldn’t force people to stay logged in just because they were in the middle of a story. Usually, it wouldn’t be that big a deal. You’d get kicked out of the quest you were doing and have to start from the beginning. Only, Britta had changed the game and that way of doing things had become problematic. If the NPCs were supposed to act like real people, you couldn’t reset them so casually every time you wanted to take a bio break. Was that why Stan was being forced to stay in game? Did the game have the power to do that?