Lindsey appeared in a shower of golden motes of not-light, and I immediately suspected that something was amiss. It was just something about the way she was standing, she seemed like she was swaying gently on some unseen wind. Her eyes were unfocused, yet I knew she had no game interface to look at.

“I am on drugs!” she confidently declared. What the hell?

She wobbled over to the nearest wall and slumped back against it. Her magic briefcase, strapped across her back, thudded noisily as she made contact. She flopped her head left and right, apparently surveying the wall she was learning against. After a moment of consideration, her power rushed forth. Three times it lashed out at the wall as she watched. An uneven tetrahedron of concrete with a small section of rebar slid out from the wall. She reached out to catch it, but missed entirely as the object clattered to the ground. She doubled over, rubbing her temples, muttering something about the walls.

Joe recovered his wits faster than I did.

“Are you alright?” he asked.

She shook her head no and then said, “This wall is loud. And does not want to be cut. It wants us to stay in here and let it be.”

Joe and I shared a worried glance. We went to her side, and over the course of a moderately frustrating half an hour, we managed to tease out the story. She had just gotten out of surgery, was full of pain meds and on bed rest. She had woken briefly when we logged on, informed by the weird friend list function, and decided to follow us.

“So, do you think the resting mechanic will be able to fix her up, or are we going to have to find somewhere safe to stash her?”

“No telling,” I said, “I still am not even vaguely certain what the underlying hardware here is capable of. Let’s give it maybe ten more minutes, you can mess with your passive power, and I’ll see if my pigeon is done fixing the butterflies.”

Lindsey, on hearing the end of my statement, started laughing. I suppose it was rather absurd. Look out! I’ll send my horde of giant butterflies after you!

“What do you think they might be using for hardware anyway? Those key crystals?” Joe asked, tuning out our zoned out companion.

“Honestly? People.”

“What, like using humans as living computers, stealing some of our brains’ clock cycles?”

“Yeah. If I had tech enough to make magical floating crystals in real life, and I had to design an online game that needed to scale up to an entire galaxy worth of players? I would definitely make those players subsidize my server costs. If they can send keys to random people that never went anywhere near the key stone, then they can probably tap into anyone and everyone nearby. Could be that the whole world is already hooked up and contributing. And as an added bonus, you can steal ideas and memories. Could be a bunch of the stuff we’ve seen was pulled right out of somebody’s dreams. It’s right there in the name of the game.”

Lindsey had quieted down, and seemed to be resting by the time I finished talking. Joe and I sat in silence for a few moments.

“I think my new passive lets me tell where fire will be,” Joe finally said, “part of why I picked this one was that I wanted to see how far out there the game would get with the time manipulation.”

I shrugged, “I hope you aren’t disappointed. Forward time travel and peeking at past events are trivial to simulate, and it wouldn’t be difficult to use AI to project a probabilistic map of where fire will be. The narrow subject matter, limited range, and probably short time frame to project would put that sort of calculation within the reach of normal gaming hardware.”

“It doesn’t really feel like probabilities though. It feels like knowing.”

I shook my head, “Joe, you know as well as I do that it only takes a few tweaks to the UX, and you can totally change the perceived experience for a user.”

“I guess,” he sighed, “I’m going to mess with it for a bit anyway. Go check on your minions, Mr. Butterfly Princess.”

“Do you remember the really big ones? I managed to catch one. Careful what you say, or I’ll get him all leveled up and resistant to fire, and then we’ll see who is the princess.”

Joe laughed, though when Lindsey stirred in her curled up position near the wall we both lowered our voices.

I stepped away and focused inwards. I found that Nico had already finished repairing them, it seemed. He was perched on that huge crystal table as it drifted through the void. Arrayed around him at the table were about half of the larger butterflies. The remainder of the big ones, and all of the smaller ones were flying around in formations doing… something.

[Team-building exercises.]

Right. I guess that made sense. I wasn’t entirely sure why he was still out in the general inventory, though.

[I cannot access my office from here.]

Ah. I would need to figure out something for that. It would be a pain to constantly have to move him between his little domain and the rest of the inventory. In the meantime, I moved some ink and paper out of his office, so that he could continue taking notes on what happened around me. Or maybe delegate that task to one of the butterflies, if they were capable enough.

[They are not.]

Oh. Well, I would get him an assistant soon enough. I took a quick look at the single massive butterfly that I had managed to secure, and found it in a different area of my inventory, drifting still and inactive. If I didn’t have a nigh omniscient view of everything in my inventory, I would have thought it dead. Thankfully, it was not. I took a look inside, and found that its mind was indeed repaired, and a number of impressions and ideas about lawyers had been wired into it. Yet it was not enough. I could see gaps and disconnects in the various components and fragments that made up its mind. Nico had drawn on my memories and impressions, but it clearly wasn’t enough to breathe life into this simulacrum. I would need either more and more clear impressions of lawyers from my real life (which sounded like a recipe for disaster, or at least misery), or I would need to find a more complete image or impression of the idea of a lawyer inside the game. Probably doable so long as the office theme held out.

I checked on my star, and found it just fine in its little pen, happily warping the space around it into new and interesting shapes. I checked on the weird truffle that had come out of the last glass box, and to my dismay, I found that a number of fine, ghostly blue filaments were growing out from it, and somehow into the void around it. Just what I had been worried about. Sure, the description said it was symbiotic, which suggested that I could get something out of it, but I didn’t want to mess with that right now. I gathered up the space around the truffle, careful to get any area of space where it was growing, and enclosed it in its own little bubble. As I was pretty familiar with the operation by now, it was the work of only a few minutes and a minor strain.

Fungal infection contained, everything else in order, I returned my senses to the world outside.

Joe was producing flames from nothing. Small, wispy white things, but it was still cool to see him get a natural power, like mine and Lindsey’s. He noticed me looking, and moved towards me. He kept his voice low, as Lindsey was still curled up next to the wall.

“Hey, you can light fires right?” he asked.

“Yeah, though it might be difficult to do so without overdoing it.”

“Give it a try.”

So I did. I positioned myself to block my companions sight using my body, summoned and crumpled a piece of paper, and then tried to grasp the absolute smallest possible bit of energy from the corona of my sun. I released it over the small wad of paper, a shining flare of pale green manifesting and arced down toward the paper. The spark didn’t land on the paper, but when it passed nearby the paper instantly burst into flames.

I turned back to Joe, who nodded.

“I saw it coming from a little bit after you turned away. I was a bit worried that I could only see my own fire, or specifically this white fire from my passive.”

“So you can see your own power activations ahead of time?”

“Yep. And if that holds in a fight, that means I’ve got an indirect sort of precognition.”

“Damn, I think this vindicates your choice of passive.”

He smiled that smug dinosaur smile at me.

“So anyway,” he said, “I’ve been trying to trigger false positives or false negatives on the predictive aspect. I can sort of get false negatives, where the prediction happens only a moment before the power activates, if I clear my mind of any thoughts about using my power, and then use it suddenly. I don’t know if I can get false positives on my own, though.”

“You want me to help you set up a paradox?” I asked.

He nodded, “Just the obvious one. You turn away, wait some random amount of time, and set a fire. I’ll shout once my power picks it up, and then you stop and don’t set the fire.”

It wasn’t a bad plan. Unfortunately, after three trials, a pattern was emerging. We could not get a false positive. His power never registered the future presence of a fire if there ended up not being one. The setup itself was somehow delaying his power’s ability to predict the fire, meaning all his warnings came too late to stop the fire being set. It ended up being the same result as the false negatives he had been able to get on his own. If I decided to not set the fire at all, but didn’t say anything, the game knew and just didn’t trigger his power at all. It only went off when I actually fully intended to set the fire if I didn’t get Joe’s warning, and every time that happened the warning came too late.

“Their modeling is probably too good for us to trick it with an experiment this simple, and they probably don’t project too far into the future or at too great a range purely to avoid a more complicated one. You’ll need some levels or practice or however you improve your passive before we can get a better answer on this, I think.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right. I want to try one more thing. Go ahead and light another fire.”

As he said this, he opened his hand and a flame bloomed into being above it. It was the orange of a normal fire, not the faint white of his new power. Little tendrils of white were creeping in around the edges though. I turned away, set the fire, and was surprised to see the flame vanish, vacuumed away by some unknown force, leaving the paper only half burnt. I stared down at the remains of the paper, then back to the orange flame Joe was manipulating. The gears in my brain slipped.

“Did you just… did you just steal fire from the future?”

I was treated to another glimpse of his many teeth. Then my thought process caught up, the gears turning correctly once more.

“Actually, this is probably the easier result. If they trust their future projections that much, they can just put a ‘fire debt’ wherever you grab the fire from. It would be more impressive if you could steal fire from the past. That would require them to model you and your actions with the same certainty, instead of just the fire.”

His smugness dimmed a bit.

“I don’t think I can do anything like that. Yeah, I guess this is all still reasonable stuff. Whatever, let’s check on her and figure out if we need to find a place for her to rest more comfortably.”

She was still sleeping, if fitfully. We’d need to find someplace secure to let her rest. Our original plan to find someplace more comfortable was unnecessary. As she had slept, her silver hoodie had apparently been expanding. It was now nearly double its normal size, more than enough for her to curl up into and practically vanish into its folds.

“Shame you can’t make a space for people to stay,” Joe whispered.

“It’s on the list. If nothing else, trivializing escort quests would make it worth the effort.”

That got a smile from Joe. That was how we had met, after all. We had both been on the QA team for an absolute travesty of a game. Escort quests as far as the eye could see. The designers had some high-minded idea that this would make the player feel more connected to the NPCs, so they could later kill them off to get an authentic emotional reaction. Joe and I had, independently at first, then coordinating with one another once we had noticed our shared purpose, systematically dug up every exploit, bug, or flaw that we could related to the escort quests. We even found a serious defect in the engine the game was written for. Management had mandated that escort quests be removed from the game entirely as a cost cutting measure. The game ended up mediocre anyway, but it wasn’t as bad as it could have been and I had made a friend out of the ordeal. That’s a win in my book.

“You stay with her. I’ll check the floors to see if there is anywhere suitable. It can double as a test for if things respawn while we’re nearby, if we find a good spot to hole up. We haven’t seen that happen yet, but we also haven’t tested for it specifically.”

“Sure,” he said, “hopefully she recovers quickly. I’m not sure we can afford to lose an entire session, with my seven-ish hour login cooldown.”

“Try not to worry about it. Once we get her sorted out, I’ll scout the twentieth. I suspect that the tenth was meant more as a non-combat puzzle than a boss fight. If the next one follows suit, I might be able to figure something out. Even if I fuck up and die, my shorter login cooldown will mitigate our loss.”

“Alright,” he conceded. With that, I set out.

I gave each floor a cursory examination, just poking my head into the door before moving on, just to make sure there wasn’t anything obvious. The first three floors were more of the same. Offices, that is. Slightly less ancient-looking than the ten floors above, but still deeply strange to someone with more modern sensibilities. The occupants of the floors varied a bit more. In addition to the monsterized animals, the third floor I examined featured clearly carnivorous plants growing over the wrecked and decrepit space.

The fourth held the real shock. It wasn’t an office floor. It wasn’t an interior at all. I stood at the threshold to what appeared to be a yard, a small suburban-style house at the end of a short length of road. Hadn’t people owned their own cars in the past? I guess it made sense that they’d need a place to keep it. The whole thing looked a hell of a lot cleaner and nicer than my own experience with the cheaply built hovels that reached out beyond the core of the city. Maybe time had been unkind to them. Maybe this was an idealized picture that had never actually been.

Ultimately, it didn’t matter. A house meant bedrooms, unless the inside was wildly divergent for some reason. I scanned the lawn for any obvious threats. Nothing stuck out to a quick look, though I did note that everything beyond the edge of the white picket fence was somewhat washed out and colorless. I wondered for a moment at what might happen if that border were probed, but my task now was to find shelter for Lindsey, so I stepped forward. I was certain that Nico would pick up on my thoughts, and if he hadn’t already started a task list, I knew he would do so now. Halfway to the front door, I felt something sharp on my leg. My power flashed out and stripped away whatever it had been, and I looked down to find a little garden gnome missing an arm. What?

I crouched down to get a better look and the damn thing lunged at me, its jaw unhinging to reveal a mouth full of ceramic blades. My power flickered out, ripping the entire thing in half. I sat, dumbfounded as to what had just happened. I hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary in the yard, and a weird little gnome statue would have definitely stood out. The half that remained on the lawn was leaking a glowing yellow gel from a little hollow cavity. There was a fine skin of essence which had begun to unravel as I watched. I took a bit of a closer look, and found that I really didn’t feel like looking at this. I stood and scanned the yard, wondering if there were any monsters to be found here, or if they were all inside the house.

I nearly took a step forward before I caught sight of the half-gnome near my feet. My power snapped out over me, brushing off the effect. Fucking mind magic. I scrutinized the half I had in my inventory. I found that the yellow gel I had seen seemed to be the physical representation of the ‘mind’ that drove the monsters we had encountered. The half that I had taken was incomprehensibly jumbled, but it wasn’t the feature I was interested in. This half, too, had a thin layer, woven from strands from some sort of essence that really, really didn’t want me looking at it. I found a small ‘organ’ connected to its core which seemed to be producing that layer.

Nico, can you put this thing into a different monster?

[No.]

Well that was mildly disappointing. I’d have to figure that out myself, or just capture a live one to convert.

I looked back out over the yard, this time with my power actively thrumming through me, and found that there were a number of things I hadn’t seen the first time. There were at least a dozen lanky pink birds made from plastic, five more gnomes, two small stone statues of frogs, a wooden statue of a dog, and two objects made from sheets of green wire mesh molded to look like little trees. Thankfully, none of them were moving.

Though it had taken almost no effort to block out the effect, all it would take would be a lapse in concentration and I’d lose track of more than twenty foes. I already had a shallow cut on my leg from the first assassination attempt, it could only get worse from there. Then there was the floor boss to consider. Could be that its attention deflection power wouldn’t be so easy to push back against… yeah, this was probably not a safe place to rest.

I surged forward, laying my hand on the wooden dog next to the front door. I could see multiple lawn ornaments moving out of my peripheral vision, but I ignored them for now. I wrapped my power around the dog, finding that I first had to tear through the coat of protective essence around it, and tried to pull it into my inventory. Its core was an order of magnitude more complex than most monsters, though marginally less than the floor bosses. I sensed that there was a tangle that dealt with activating its powers, and a whole bunch of precepts relating to stalking, hunting, and a number of other things. I zeroed in on the area that seemed to relate to target selection and struck, trying to contain the damage to just that spot. Its resistance disappeared once the target selection was destroyed, and I dropped the whole thing into my inventory. Nico seemed to be fully capable of handling the behavior parts, so hopefully he’d be able to sort it out if I damaged more than I intended.

Nico, buddy, any chance you could put a second stealth organ thing into this one, seeing as he’s already got all the parts necessary to run it?

[Yes.]

Now that’s what I like to hear. I imagined all the applications a doubly stealthy dog minion might have as I sprinted towards the door leading back out to the stairwell, almost certainly dragging a train of lawn assassins behind me.