Mayon’s delicate wings flared instinctively, trying to catch the air, and his grip tightened on the cord connecting him to the nearby building. He fell, for a moment that felt like eternity, then the rope caught him and he swung in an arc, the house’s wall looming nearer and nearer.

He was too high up to jump. The rope brought him within ten feet of the ground, but that was still a long way to fall. He clung tighter, and bounced off the building’s side.

-5 health.

He swung there a moment, gripping the cord with terrified strength, vision blurring as he stared helplessly at the ground below.

Now what?

He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to steady his wild heartbeat and frantic breath, but fear still pulsed through him in desperate waves. Calm would be a long time returning.

Mayon hung, spinning slowly, halfway between the roof and the street below. Belatedly, he realized he was still muttering, “nope, nope, nope, nope, nope,” in frantic tempo between gasps for air.

He had to go up. He had to get down. Or something. He couldn’t just hang here forever.

He hoped things would calm down soon, that should happen, right? Maya had calmed down eventually while not-drowning, so he should calm down now when not-falling. It made sense. It was very logical.

And it kept not happening. Dizzy and terrified, he spun between earth and sky, wings fluttering uselessly.

“Come on,” he said aloud, trying for confident. It came out cracked and desperate. “Get it together. You can do this.”

“Hey up there. Do you need help?”

No, he could do this on his own. He would.

“Please, yes, help.”

… or not. Apparently plans and actions were a bit less entwined than could be hoped.

“Hang on, I’ll grab someone.”

Mayon closed his eyes and hung on, trying not to visualize the ground below or imagine the grapple slipping from its tenuous hold to send him plummeting.

“Falling doesn’t matter,” he whispered. “Just let go. It’ll be fine.”

He opened one eye, which was a mistake. The ground spun below him, looking far too distant to be safe.

“Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope.”

Then the other voice returned. “I found some boxes, here.”

Mayon risked a glance down. Volo Warrior and someone else he didn’t recognize were pushing a stack of storage crates over, forming a rough set of overlarge steps. Mayon exhaled in relief and dropped gratefully down onto the top one, then scrambled down to the ground. The grapple, being magical and special, promptly vanished from its place once he no longer held it, and reappeared in his inventory.

He sat on the lowest crate a minute until he felt more or less back to normal.

“Thank you, I don’t know what I was thinking, picking this class. Or … doing whatever that was. It was a stupid idea. Phobias aren’t that easy to do away with, it seems.”

“Is that what you were trying to do?” Volo asked. “Overcome a phobia?”

“Yeah, heights. It’s probably stupid.”

“Not at all,” said the other player, a green-eyed vampire in plate mail. “I know the regulations make it hard to adjust your mindset, even just to improve it or remove defects. But I hear there are places you can go to have it done for you, if you can pay.”

“I doubt I can.” Mayon was almost surprised by how little it bothered him to be chatting with a vampire. Maybe it was over-exposure from the combat trainer, or maybe he just hadn’t met enough friendly vampires. “I don’t have any idea if any of my assets from life still exist.”

“It wasn’t specified in your upload contract?”

“There was a problem with my upload, and my memories didn’t all transfer correctly. I don’t recall anything about a contract, and I don’t know how to find out anything more about it.”

“Log out to the universe map, then toggle the ‘About Me’ pane. It’s hidden by default for immersion. It should include your full contract and a detailed log of any alterations made to your status. I know mine has a ton of reversion points I’ll never use.”

“Reversion points?” It felt like every time things started making sense, there were more layers hiding to complicate matters again.

Volo jumped in. “Like saves, but for your mental state, except they’re not complete saves. They’re more like … a list of things that could be changed. You know, because of the stupid inactive consciousness laws. It makes reversion a real pain.”

“It makes perfect sense to only store a reference list rather than complete copies,” the vampire said. “Otherworlds might have a vast amount of storage available, but it isn’t infinite. They’d probably do it this way anyway even if there weren’t legal requirements.”

“Why would you need saves for your mental state?” Mayon asked.

“Mostly for reverting trauma or other unwanted psychological side-effects of particularly intensive gaming experiences. World 9352 is ridiculously tame compared to a lot of the worlds out there. It’s a quaint little vacation world with enough template modifications to be fairly unique, and some unsolved mysteries to keep people from getting too bored. If it weren’t for Domitius, I doubt half of us would even be here. It isn’t exactly the best Otherworlds has to offer. But I’m sure you know that.”

“This is the first world I played on,” Mayon admitted. “This isn’t my main, I’m just trying out other classes at the moment.”

“And climber isn’t the one you’re looking for?” Volo asked.

“Acrobat, actually.” Mayon stood. “Do you want help returning these?”

“Sure. I’ve never played as an advanced class. They have smaller bonuses than the basic ones, and I’ve never seen one whose ‘special abilities’ outweighed that deficiency.”

“I’ve actually never played as a basic class,” Mayon said. He joined the others in pushing the stack of crates back toward the marketplace. “I tend to go for higher rarity.”

“The rarer the class, the bigger the drawbacks,” the vampire said. “Sure, you get special items up front, but basic classes don’t go out of style. Being able to climb things easily doesn’t scale. Warrior class adds the equivalent of 14 levels of health, without any major drawbacks. It doesn’t prevent using spells or ranged attacks; any class can use any ability as long as you can perform it once. I see no reason why anyone would choose anything else.”

14 levels … 70 health?! It wasn’t quite Path of Life, but it was enough to make Mayon’s +20 stamina as an acrobat look downright measly. Maybe judging the quality of classes by their rarity tier was a mistake.

Well, nothing to be done about it now, but something to keep in mind when playing Myna Seasworn. Maybe the merla would be a warrior. It could be fun to try.

“Here,” Volo said, pointing to a larger stack of crates. Together the three of them shoved their pile back into place.

“Thanks for the rescue. I really overestimated my bravery, it seems.”

“This is the biggest problem with uploads, that I’ve found,” Volo said. “No offense intended, of course, I think it’s to do with the software or hardware the database uses. But I’ve noticed that you have a lot harder time changing. Not you specifically, uploads in general. I think there are safeguards in place to prevent too-drastic revision of your personality, but it also retards actual progress.”

“Like overcoming phobias?”

“Exactly. Keep trying, and you’ll get there.”

“And, sorry, I didn’t catch your name?”

“UP. All caps. Because I’m going to go UP to the top.” The vampire player made a hand motion, swooping, forming a fist, then flattening out his hand again.

Mayon didn’t know what it meant. It wasn’t spellcasting. Probably some 2300s meme, because Volo grinned and imitated it.

“Anyway, I should get going. Thanks again.”

“Any time you need help, if we’re online, give us a call. We’re happy to help.”

Mayon returned to Maya’s room, saved the game, and logged out.

“About me.”

The words weren’t actually spoken aloud, but worked as anticipated. A brief summary appeared, with her character number, a list of worlds she’d played on and characters on those worlds, her friends list with the worlds they played on and their active characters, and several other tabs. Options, Reversion, Technical, Contact Otherworlds.

She skimmed through them all, though most of Reversion was incomprehensible, just huge blocks of letters and numbers that meant nothing to her, vaguely reminiscent of what happened when opening a game executable with a text editor, but far more complex. Each reversion point had its own massive block of code going on for dozens of pages, all of which meant absolutely nothing to Maya. She didn't feel comfortable touching it. Apparently no one got around to making it user-friendly.

Technical contained an endless list of patch notes with such fascinating tidbits as ‘World 388302 has been spawned! Description: a plas for my’ or ‘World 482940 has been moved 3 miles closer to its sun. This should correct the climate imbalance for now. We are still investigating the cause of the planet’s spontaneous drift.’

Options had a list that went on and on and on, for everything from filtering worlds to various criteria (she discovered that her account had ‘child-safe worlds only’ checked by default, which made her laugh. Since when was 22 still ‘child’?) to active filtering of personal interactions (set to ‘restrictive’) to graphical style and resolution (currently ‘realistic’) and on and on.

She wished she’d found this panel during her boring imprisonment when she had nothing better to do with her time, she could have spent days just reading through everything.

She returned to the patch notes and filtered for 9352. The list was very, very short.

World 9352 has been spawned! Description: A land of magic and mystery to be explored and unlocked. Tagged with: Limited resources, competitive questing, PvP enabled, PvE enabled, magic, exploration, unlockable zones, secrets, mysteries.

World 9352 has added a new game system: Conquest. Description: Any player home can now be attacked and defended! Want access to your neighbor’s garden? Go ahead and take it over!

World 9352’s Conquest system has been patched: Player owned items can no longer be removed from conquered homes to ensure fairness to PvE players. Instead, homes will gain benefits for their owner if remaining unconquered which increase over time, and conquerors will gain bonuses for successfully taking over a contested property.

World 9352 has been updated: The main quest chain has been expanded to include a second and third continent after the initial storyline is concluded. Have fun!

That was it. Four updates, taking place within eight months of each other over a hundred years ago, then nothing.

Well, as interesting as this was, she had an appointment with Hara. She’d put it off … probably too long, actually. But time to face the music. She’d learned how to properly flail about with a flaming sword, rather than in an embarrassing way, so that would have to do.

Maya logged into World 9352, selected Maya Starborn, and …

Hara paced back and forth in the shadow of the ravine’s edges, running through some sort of practice kata as she did so. Very complicated, involving lunges and sweeping motions and stabs, all of which she somehow integrated smoothly into an obviously-impatient waiting motion.

She spotted Maya almost immediately, and came to an abrupt stop. “Oh, there you are. I thought for sure you’d decided to log out and never come back. What took you so long?”

“Nothing particular. I spent a while in the combat training, took a few breaks to practice archery, then came back.”

“It’s been eight hours. Which means you spent over a year in there. I know you were a rank beginner, but really?”

Maya laughed. “No way, it can’t have been that long.”

But … she didn’t really have any context for time in the tutorial. She did things until she was tired of them, without any of the natural stopping points like food or exhaustion. Pausing a few seconds to allow stamina regen was built into her practice regimens, insufficient to disrupt her rhythm.

Still! Surely if she’d been there that long, she would have noticed. A couple months, that she could believe. But … a year?

“Show me. What have you learned?”

Before Maya could reorient herself to being a larger non-sprite with arm-feathers and no wings, Hara sprang at her, sword leading. Maya moved by instinct, evading and dropping to the ground. She rolled away, flipped back onto her feet, and drew her sword.

But Hara was too fast. She somehow slipped inside Maya’s guard while she was equipping her weapon, punched her in the face, grabbed her sword arm, and twisted her off-balance. Maya fell, instinctively swapping her sword out for a shorter dagger, Hara atop her. Not for long.

Maya slammed her knee up into Hara’s stomach, twisting with the momentum into a backwards somersault much like she’d used on the teacher back toward the beginning. Hara rolled aside, disengaging before Maya could reverse their positions, and they got to their feet.

“Better,” Hara said, stabbing outward as she spoke.

Maya deflected the attack, then blinked as her opponent turned and ran.

“Am I supposed to follow—”

Arrows began flashing toward her from Hara’s distant form, and Maya dropped to the ground. She could have tried returning fire, but wanted to keep some of her actual abilities secret for use in other personas.

Hara adjusted her aim downward, so Maya had to jump up and dodge actively. She couldn’t just lie there and be pincushioned.

This was less successful. Hara managed to hit her over half the time, probably closer to three out of four, but Maya advanced on her as she dodged until they were again within melee range.

“Again, better. Not good, especially for a year’s practice, but passable for this zone. Ready to continue?”

Maya took a ready stance.

Hara snorted and shook her head. “Not against me. We have a job to do, and we’ve wasted half the day already.”

“Right.” It had been so long, Maya didn’t actually remember. “Something about stopping thieves?”

“No, just completing missions in general for reputation. I already turned in this quest hours ago. I’ve been hoping it might reset, but hasn’t yet. I have a list of several more we can check for.”

“Alright. Lead on, I suppose.”

Maya fell into step beside Hara, then stumbled over the ground and fell flat on her face.

-2 health.

Hara eyed her. “What’s your luck today?”

“I … don’t actually remember.” Maya checked, and was surprised to see it at -100. Had it always been that low? She hadn’t been gone a whole day, had she?

“Negative one hundred? I should probably roll again.”

“Wait.” Hara held out a hand to stop her. “Check your penalties before you do anything. You do not want to build up too many detriments. They’ll make things unbearable if you let too many accumulate.”

"Oh, I know. It can be very bad." Maya brought up the penalty window.

Trickster’s Price: -15 luck

Trickster’s Fool: -50 luck

“My base roll was -52, but I thought that would mean -62. What’s ‘Trickster’s Fool’?”

“You ignored your class mission yesterday as well as ignoring me, I see. Normally I’d say it serves you right, but you seem exceptionally ignorant so I’ll explain this in case you didn’t notice before. Every day you roll for luck, you get a mission. It’s usually something random, but sometimes it’s targeted and specific. Doesn’t matter. It’s always in your best interest to at least give it a decent effort. Do the mission the Trickster gives you, you get a bonus. Ignore it, you get a penalty. The Trickster doesn’t usually punish you as long as you gave it a good effort, but she’s unforgiving of defiance and hates being ignored.”

“That makes sense.” Maya sighed. “I’d failed quests before, but never outright ignored them. What was today’s again?” It felt so recent, but so long ago at the same time. She had no idea what it was. Had she even checked? She didn’t remember.

Trickster Day 12: Engage a higher-level player in PvP at least three times.

“Yikes.” Maya remembered the last time she’d died in PvP on a low luck day. She’d lost nearly everything. If Sevard were any less honourable, he could have taken it all and she’d have had no recourse. She didn’t know if she could be so lucky again.

“What is it?” Hara asked.

“PvP, my least favourite part of the game. I have to attack someone higher level than me three times.”

“Well, that’s easy. I’m right here.” Hara tapped the air, then nodded. “Go for it.”

“How much health do you have?”

“765. I’ll be fine.”

“I guess so.” Maya hesitantly toggled PvP on, waited out the 30-second delay, then attacked Hara in a sudden lunge to catch the faster player off guard.

Hara didn’t even try to dodge. The hit connected so solidly that Maya stumbled, already anticipating for a dodge or block. She hesitated.

Hara shrugged. “Not bad. Does it say you have to win?”

“No.”

“Does it say you have to die?”

“No, just engage.”

“Then step back.”

Maya did so. She waited.

Hara tapped one finger in rhythm, probably counting to herself.

“Alright, now you can try again.”

Maya charged, and once again Hara made no move to evade, simply nodding and motioning for Maya to disengage.

“Are you sure this counts?”

“No, but it’s worth a try. Besides, the Trickster appreciates creativity. She’s much more likely to accept a sneaky workaround than a half-hearted straightforward attempt.”

“What was your quest today?” Maya asked.

“Harvest an apathy field.”

"What's an apathy field?"

"A field of apathy flowers. I don't know their scientific name, but the pollen decreases will if you breathe it in. Since apathy fields are generally occupied by lots of glass cannon type monsters, it's easy enough to defend yourself if you manage not to inhale any of the pollen. But if you've lost the will to fight, you'll go down fast."

“Did you do it?”

“Of course, first thing after midnight.”

“Straightforward?”

Hara shook her head, a faint hint of humor on her face. “I hired some of these handy noobs to work with me. They were happy enough to go to a higher-level zone, complete with higher-level pay. And if half of them passed out before we finished, that’s not my problem. Those who finished got paid, and I survived unscathed. It’s been long enough, go ahead and attack me again.”

Maya did so, and received a new popup message.

Mission complete, Trickster Day 12.

>Negate penalty

>Claim bonus

“Well, that was easy. Now it’s offering me the choice of negating the penalty or claiming the bonus.”

Hara shrugged. “If you can’t do the math, you won’t be much of a trickster.”

Maya bristled, but then supposed it was rather obvious. Spend the rest of the day at -50, but with a bonus of 20, or just negate the thing altogether.

She selected Negate penalty.

“Should I try rolling again? I’ve only done it twice today, and I’m at -62.”

“No. It’s generally accepted that two tries a day gives the best probability of more good luck than bad. Three can be manageable if you roll really badly, but then you’ll have to spend the first several hours of the next day at minimum, and you still might end up rolling badly. It’s more probable that you’ll get a decent roll one out of two times more days than not, since if the first roll is good you don’t need to risk rerolling, so it’s already skewed toward success.

"Bad luck still happens, of course. A one in four chance of rolling badly twice means it still happens regularly. But overall, a trickster is going to have more good days than bad. So today is bad; doesn’t matter. Tomorrow will probably be better, and if not, the day after. Just keep going. Besides, you have me. I'm sure we can make things twist around to the positive."

Hara gestured toward the crack beside the stream, descending further down. "I've been here all day and no one else has tried to come down. This may be our chance to steal a march on our competition and finish a few more missions before they catch up."

"How much competition do we have?" Maya asked. "I haven't seen anyone."

"You wouldn't. They don't advertise themselves. It's usually solo players, smaller groups who think they're something special, that sort of thing. With any luck, which I have a decent amount of, we'll be fine and never encounter anyone else."

"You don't worry about jinxing it by saying that?" Maya asked. "I'd be afraid to even think something so confident."

"I'm confident that we can take them. Two tricksters working together, I don't care who it is, they won't stand a chance."