Kaldalis was bored out of his mind.

It was only mid afternoon, but there wasn’t much else to do around camp. Kaldalis had turned in his remaining quests, but no new ones had shown up yet. It might have been that the daily rollover hadn’t happened (he couldn’t exactly remember when quests had rolled over before) but it was also that the camp was filled with bustling activity. Everyone was trying to repair or rebuild after the Infernal Horde attack.

With a sigh, Kaldalis checked his character sheet. He hadn’t gained a level, so he didn’t have new stats to look at, but he did have an ability he’d forgotten to examine after all the activity of the morning.

The ability was called Endure, and it would apparently reduce his damage taken for a short time.

Kaldalis wondered if it was going to be that useful. He hadn’t encountered anything with burst damage or tank busters that would warrant the use of the ability. But with the exception of the Four-Fingered Syncoresi, he hadn’t been fighting any real boss monsters.

Perhaps tank buster moves would be introduced later on.

But there was no way he was running out into the jungle to test his new power right after sending the Infernal Horde packing.

After the attack, most of the normal camp functions were on hold until a headcount could be done to figure out who was living and who was dead. And such a count couldn’t take place until after anyone who fell during the fight could respawn. The bodies of player characters they’d lined up at the town square would become skeletons, with their former owners reappearing where they’d died in their underpants. The bodies of the NPCs would stay corpses, though, as they wouldn’t respawn.

The duties of those who didn’t respawn would need to be covered, and the structure of the camp would need to be adjusted accordingly.

Until then, there wasn’t much to do. The survivors of the attack were either drunk (literally or figuratively, although Kaldalis wasn’t sure where they got the booze) on their victory, or were still in shock at the violence of the attack itself.

Kaldalis thought the best course of action was to try and catch some sleep. For whatever reason, he felt exhausted.

As he settled himself in to try and catch a power nap, he realized that his exhaustion wasn’t that crazy. He’d had a relatively busy morning of quests even before he encountered the syncoresi. As soon as the monster had spotted him, he had led it on a chase that seemed to last for hours. Keeping up a near-running pace for that long would have been exhausting on its own, but the fight that followed - including his death - were tiring in their own right.

Death had turned him into a ghostly form, and so Kaldalis didn’t count all of the running around he’d done in that form towards explaining his fatigue, but once he’d respawned, he’d sprinted all the way back to camp. And then after that, he’d run around the camp like a madman in its defense. He and his friends found and activated the powerful censer to debuff the invaders, and then rushed to the front gate to assault the leader and drive out the attackers.

Put all together like that, he realized he had no right to question why he was so tired.

Unfortunately though, sleep eluded Kaldalis.

Every time he closed his eyes, his vision was filled with that last moment of the fight with the boss monster.

The Four-Fingered Syncoresi’s eyes looked into his own. The debuff had worn off, and the monster had him reduced nearly to death. Again. Chaos was erupting around them, and in its sunken eyes he could see its victory approaching.

In actuality, that moment was interrupted as the mob of DPS behind it managed to push the beast past whatever HP threshold triggered for it to flee. In his mind, though, he couldn’t stop wondering what fate they may have faced if that hadn’t happened. It would have torn through the others like a bread knife through tissue paper, surely, with the tank gone.

So much could have been fucked up.

Eventually, he had to give up on his nap. The horror of so much death so narrowly avoided wouldn’t leave his mind, and he just couldn’t relax.

Kaldalis sighed. Whenever insomnia hit him in the real world, a little physical activity helped.

He stood up in his tent and stretched a little, meaning to go into his real-world workout routine. It was mostly squats, situps, and pushups - just until he was tired of them - and his in-game body was more than up to the task.

In all honesty, he’d been slacking off since coming to this world, but that was because this was a videogame. He didn’t have to work out to maintain his stat scores, or his physique. Or, at least, if he did, the systems were forgiving enough that going three weeks without was fine.

But it felt good to get moving. He went through his routines, marveling at how much better this body moved than his real one.

It wasn’t long before he felt his head clearing, and his heart rate became more regular. It was elevated, but when he closed his eyes, the thumping in his chest was what caught his attention, not the brush with total disaster.

What concerned him was the little chime he heard in his head. It wasn’t the chime he got when he turned in a quest and got experience points.

This was different.

Instead of triumphant, it was plaintive. Attention-seeking.

It faded after a moment, but Kaldalis got the impression he should figure out what it was. Was it some kind of mail system? Private messaging? Was there finally some way he could communicate with his party mates?

Message? he thought to himself.

A panel opened in his vision - much like his inventory or character page. Unlike those other pages, this one was a blank screen for a full second after he opened it, as if lagging. Once completed, it looked like an email inbox, with a single message in it.

NTucker, (no subject)

Kaldalis recognized the name. It was Nakala, the person who got him into this game. His best friend, previous raid team member, and occasional duo.

The Dylan inside of Kaldalis’ head frowned. He didn’t know there was a way for her to send messages to him in game. Would have been nice to have that information before.

He focused his attention on the message, opening it.

I bet you didn’t know there was a way for me to send messages to you in game.

Kaldalis gave a heavy sigh at that. It was just like her.

The systems for the in-game mail needed testing, so I got permission to say hi.

You can respond to this message. (Please do, because if the messages don’t come through from your end, we need to start working on a fix.)

She left the message unsigned.

Kaldalis knew his first instinct was to reply with just some garbled text. Mostly because he wanted to annoy her. But when he tried to issue a mental order to respond to the message, a text entry box didn’t pop up.

However, a sheet of paper appeared in his hand, along with a pencil.

He stared at them for a moment.

Analog. Gross.

With a lopsided grin, Kaldalis found a flat surface to lean on and put the pencil to paper. He began to make roughly word-sized scribbles. Kaldalis wasn’t sure how they would come through the message, but they might make someone freak out and think that the system was bugged.

After a couple of lines, he actually started writing.

I’m kidding. Though I’m sure if you’re watching over my shoulder - and you might be - you know that already. How did the launch go? Are we famous?

-Dylan

As soon as he signed it, the paper disintegrated. On the panel in his vision, he saw Nakala’s message turn grey and a little arrow icon appeared over it, the universal sign that it had been replied to.

He focused his attention to open the message and saw that his reply was just the written message itself presented in his scratchy handwriting. It made sense, after all. He wouldn’t trust an OCR to capture his words. Or his wit.

He wondered what it would look like on Nakala’s end.

“Alright,” Kaldalis said. “Now just a quick rest.” He settled back into his cot and took a deep breath. He was feeling a bit better. The brief workout helped, but the connection to the outside world probably helped more.

When he closed his eyes, he was actually relieved to find nothing waiting for him. He took a deep breath and-

“Kaldalis?” a voice said from the front of his tent. “Are you decent?”

He took a deep breath and tried not to groan. “Yeah. What’s up?”

Balrim poked his head into the tent. Kaldalis could see the slit pupils in his reptilian eyes widen to adjust from the mid-afternoon sun outside to the unlit interior of the tent.

“Haldir found out what he needed us to find for the replacement incense.” The talsar grinned crookedly. “He wanted to talk through what we need to do and make plans for gathering it all.”

“Alright,” Kaldalis said, pushing up off of his cot and getting to his feet. So much for his nap. “Do we want to talk it out over dinner?”

“Nope. Unfortunately...” Balrim trailed off with a grimace that not even his reptilian features could disguise. “So, the expedition leader caught wind of it. Apparently her assigning us the quest to remake the censer wasn’t enough. She wants to make it a whole council meeting or something.”

Kaldalis sighed heavily. “I should have known she was going to do something like that. The initial assignment happened in the middle of the chaos after the fight. Without the proper chance to use us to grab glory, this was inevitable.”

“Yeah,” Balrim said, “I know. I just though she’d wait until we’d finished before trying to take credit for our work.”

“Let’s get moving then,” Kaldalis said, stepping up next to Balrim. “Soonest begun, soonest done. And the sooner this is finished, the sooner we can get dinner.”

And sleep.

Before leaving his tent, Kaldalis looked over his shoulder at his cot. It wasn’t the most comfortable thing in the world, but it still looked lovely.

Wait for me, beautiful, he thought, before following Balrim.