Throwing his line out into the water was a load off his shoulders. Kaldalis had been using fishing as a stress relief tool since he got into the game, and at this point, his whole body was conditioned to relax as soon as he cast out.

“Seems pretty clear,” Ess said, looking around. She still had her spear out, even though it was obviously not her strongest weapon. “You picked a good spot.”

“Behold,” Kaldalis said, gesturing up at his minimap. “The power of default.” There was just a narrow sliver of the area where the quest indicated that Ruddy Praeor could be caught that wasn’t overlapped with the red off-limits area.

The area wasn’t completely devoid of life. As expected, every few minutes a few guards popped out of the jungle and patrolled to the edge of the beach. Kaldalis could see the group peering at them suspiciously from there, but they were on the right side of the line, so every time they just turned around and went back on their patrol.

In addition there was some seemingly benign marine life in the area, wandering about with no obvious intent to menace them. A hermit crab the size of a kitchen table was trundling about, picking at the sand. There were a handful of strange mammals loafing around on the beach. Their oily fur was a mottled red and black, bringing to mind an image of a lava flow. But at only about eighteen inches long - not counting their muscular water-adapted tails, which were as long again as their bodies - none of them seemed at all inclined to pick a fight with Kaldalis and Ess. Despite their stubby legs and streamlined body, they reminded Kaldalis of cats more than otters, since their primary focus at the moment was basking in the sun.

It meant that Ess was able to relax as well while Kaldalis fished. Which kind of undermined his usual relaxation.

They didn’t have much to say. Ess seemed to want to start a conversation, but seemed unable or unwilling to do so while he was fishing. Since he needed to periodically play the minigame to reel the fish in, it would have been a halting conversation. Kaldalis was comfortable with that sort of exchange - he had done so while fishing time and again. But maybe she wanted to have a deeper conversation than could be had in that context.

After catching five Pale Perch in a row, Kaldalis made a mental note of this place before catching his hook to replace it. He had other options for bait, but he wanted to try using a lure instead. Switching to a spoon lure was easiest. He had extras in case something happened to this one, too.

The next cast after switching lures, he got a Ruddy Praeor. It was a funny-looking fish, with a flat face and large spiny fins. Its belly was lily-white, but the upper part of its body and its fins were the same red-pink color as a sunburn. It was larger than expected, too. Thanks to Kaldalis’s high fishing skill, it didn’t put up much of a fight, but when he pulled it out of the water, it was just about two feet long from nose to tail. He had wondered why the chef had only wanted seven, but he could see now that seven of these would be nearly fifty pounds of fish.

“So,” Kaldalis said, making an effort to break the ice with Ess. “You got your stream rewards last night, right? Any interesting news from the outside world?”

“Ugh,” Ess grimaced. “I don’t know how you stand it. People think they can just say whatever they want if they’re sending money with it.”

Kaldalis shuddered. He had been uncomfortable with how many of his messages had expressed inappropriate sentiments towards Heluna, Ara, and Onirioago. He wondered how much worse it would be if those comments were directed at him instead of at the woman around him.

“How about your family?” Kaldalis said, trying to shift the topic a little. “Did your mom send you anything?”

“Not that I saw,” Ess said with a shrug. “But I might have missed it. I got a lot of messages. If she did, she didn’t attach a message, which sounds like her.”

“A lot, huh?” Kaldalis said, suddenly feeling a little puff of confidence at his payout. “How much did you get? Crescents, I mean. If you don’t mind saying.”

“Oh, only about fifteen hundred,” Ess said casually. “But I guess Monsoon has been pushing me to the top of the main page a lot to use my name in marketing. So I am getting a lot of exposure. I’ll probably get more next month.”

Kaldalis immediately felt the wind come out of his sails. His plans to impress Ess died before they began. She was making more than him, and he had been launching himself heedlessly into the middle of every in-game event that had happened within Jump range. It didn’t feel fair, but that was how this kind of thing worked. Monsoon was trying to wring money out of their userbase, and putting the famous esports community darling on the front page was probably the best way to do that.

“That’s really good, actually,” Kaldalis said, swallowing his pride. “You might want to keep that under your hat, though. I’ve been beating around the bush with my payout because I don’t want to piss anyone off. Or have any unscrupulous folks try and scam the money off of me.”

“Oh. Good. Good,” Ess said with a laugh. “Sorry. I just got a lot of my rewards in potions and stuff, so I thought I was getting less money.”

“You couldn’t have known. It’s not like there’s a leaderboard,” Kaldalis said. “Though I am a little worried about where the money… You know. Comes from.”

“What do you mean?” Ess asked.

“One second,” Kaldalis said as another fish bit down on his line. The Ruddy Praeor was a low enough level fish that he could have spoken while reeling it in, but he needed to be careful about how to present his concern without getting his stream shut off.

“I’m just worried about Monsoon failing to consider the larger consequences,” Kaldalis said carefully once he had the fish in hand. “I know that when Reno was working on the game, she said she was working on the economy. So much of this world seems so real, I wouldn’t be surprised if tens of thousands of crescents entering circulation might destabilize the economy.”

He hoped he was conveying his concern. If this world was real, the money that was popping into existence from their streams might count as counterfeit. Considering how much the Zarans already hated PCs, if they induced hyperinflation by producing thousands - or tens of thousands - of crescents every month, it might evolve from hatred to outright hostility.

“I’m sure they’re giving it some thought,” Ess said. Her voice had the same careful tone as Kaldalis’s. She had picked up on what he was getting at, and was dancing around the same language as he was. “The system must absorb money somewhere along the line, right? Maybe there’s a tax between quest issuance and quest rewards. That might explain why building the towns was so expensive. More money went into the jobs than came out in quest rewards at the other end?”

Kaldalis nodded, but said nothing. He hoped she was right. If Monsoon busted into another universe and started mucking with the world - especially in a way that apparently caused time to speed up for hundreds of years so that they were here long enough after the Calamity that Onirioago had needed some extra evidence to reach the conclusion that they were responsible - Kaldalis needed to believe that they had taken steps to ensure that the systems they were building had accounted for themselves.

“If not,” Kaldalis said, “I hope they can change the systems. It would be a real boneheaded move if they… You know. Built a system that was so complex that they didn’t have some control over things.”

Ess winced at that, and Kaldalis realized he was toeing too close to the line on that. Game devs famously hated when players were armchair game designers, demanding instant fixes and proposing flawed solutions with incomplete information. He didn’t imagine that those feelings would be any different if the game dev in question had branched out into interdimensional invasion.

“There is… One thing,” Ess said after Kaldalis reeled in the next fish. “One thing that bothers me.”

“What’s that?” Kaldalis asked, casting his line out again.

Ess screwed up her face, clearly thinking very hard.

“I’m trying to think of how to put it, give me a few minutes,” she said. She started tapping her chin with her finger. “Don’t let me leave this lie. If we have to turn our streams off, I’d rather do that than not talk about it.”

“Take your time,” Kaldalis said. Another fish bit on his line already. “Maybe it’s a conversation that will come easier over a big plate of fried fish.”