Candra squats across from Todd and doubt tilts her head to a skeptical angle. Randall is close at Todd’s left, and he keeps self-consciously readjusting on his knee as he finds a comfortable kneeling position difficult to execute. Sue Ann hugs her knees against her chest, squatting on Todd’s right as her eyes pensively dart between Joe and Candra.

Joe sits upright and monasterial, for a silent moment and then his pointer finger taps down hard against the blue stone floor. “No. Absolutely not,” he declares.

Zero might be a poor point to start a negotiation, but Todd holds up his hands and continues. He flips his hair out of his eyes and extends a hand, palm up to a figure standing above them just outside of their circle. Geeky Chris shuffles nervously. At the margin of attention he’s already near melting; it looks as if under the center of it he might faint outright.

“Just hear me out,” Todd pleads. “It’s about the numbers.”

It’s true that Todd started down this path on intents less than saintly, but he’s done his due diligence. If he’s going to do something selfish, he has to make sure to balance the scales. The only right thing to do is keep as many people safe as possible. That’s the goal, that’s what must be – and anything less is wrong, wrong, wrong.

It took Todd fifteen minutes of trial and error, plus a handful of confused, slightly frightened volunteers to test the parameters of the Mode Selection Plates, but he’s confident he’s got it right. It’s just a matter of making a convincing case to his friends and his conscience.

“We’ve got six hundred of us, five eighty six,” Todd begins a little nervously, “We’ve got twelve hundred tokens, but keep in mind a lot of people haven’t eaten dinner yet. Some of us skipped lunch. Then we’re gonna be gone for three days, five eight six times three is seventeen fifty eight…”

Candra shifts position impatiently. “And we only have a thousand something – two hundred, whatever. It’s fine, Jennifer will sort it out and people have nexus coins still.” She sweeps back her hair into a ponytail, frowns, and then drops it back down to hang loose.

“But think about that!” Todd excitedly retorts. “Five hundred tokens difference, but the most basic food’s the ration token and it costs fifty coins. That’s twenty five,” Todd pauses dramatically, “thousand coins.”

Randall sputters at the amount. “Nobody has that much magic money, that’s crazy.”

Sue Ann, having been silent, stops chewing on her thumbnail and her voice peaks high with a subdued creaky terminal to her sentences. “It’s like, not just one person. It’s like the same thing, five hundred or six hundred people, divided by… or divided into, twenty five… whatever. It’s like, fifty fairy dollars per person. Maybe forty something – two and a half.”

Joe bobs his head and raises his eyebrows in approval. “4-H, you’re doing basic arithmetic, what’s going on here?”

“I know,” Sue Ann groans. “I can math now and it’s terrible.” She ekes out a smile and Candra chuckles in response.

Uncomfortable interrupting but needing to, Todd clears his throat. “So my point is, in three days we all get back here, everything goes according to plan, and we’re all broke. No money, nixed to zilch on tokens, and still even then we got three weeks left.” Todd raises enough fingers on one hand to illustrate his point. He breathes deeply. “If we’re here thirty days total. By the time we get back we’ll have been gone six, seven if the first half day counts. Five eighty six, twenty seven, and times fifty coins.”

Candra grabs at her bag for something she can throw, but can’t find anything safe for a good tantrum chucking and gives up. “More than three quarters of a million. Do you have any idea how many [Werrel Amaranth Ale]s that’s worth? That’s worth ten Gamma Alpha Lambda Homecomings at least.”

Joe idly nods. “Or three Beta Iota Gamma spring break welcome-backs. But we’re going to get more tokens right? Twenty seven days leaves plenty of time for the pixies to, you know, have us fight a lion or build a giant lego castle.”

Randall nods enthusiastically. “They wouldn’t leave us without a way to win more tokens,” he asserts.

Todd shakes his head. “That’s exactly it,” he grins but then catches himself and politely coughs his face back into a severe expression. “These long missions ARE the structure for the rest of the month. Look at the way the mission bonuses are structured. The normal mode gives you nothing. Hard mode gives you four rations, and four nicer meals.”

“Okay,” Candra acquiesces. “And?”

“And what’s that enough for? To take the next mission on Normal mode. Extreme mode’s even more obvious. Sixteen tokens. Eight rations, four nice foods, and then four more but with the word luxury in the title.”

Joe narrows his eyes. “So you’re saying, take the extreme mode, you get a free pass on three missions instead of just one.”

“And the whole thing is designed to force you to pick just enough hard quests to breeze the rest on easy,” Candra concludes.

While Randall appears unphased, Sue Ann hugs her knees tighter and buries her chin into them. Joe’s expression darkens, while Candra rubs at her eyebrow and looks Todd in the eye searchingly.

Her lips are very pink. Todd flinches and looks away.

“But that’s not what Todd’s proposing,” Joe reasons. “Take our teams on hard mode and then alternate back to normal, that’s not the plan.”

“Uh, no.” Todd motions to Chris, who’d been fidgeting and rocking on his feet the whole time. “Can you step on the Hard mode plate and tell me what your percentage is? Thanks Chris.”

The man tiptoes like the plate is planning to bite him, and then he taps his toes against it. “Forty eight percent,” Chris whimpers.

“That is a shitty number,” Todd declares gravely, before remembering he’s talking about Chris’s odds on not dying. “Sorry, thanks Chris. Remember, eighty six,” he encourages, “eighty six percent, man.”

Randall catches onto the sense of alarm for the first time. “It can’t be that bad for everyone…” but both Candra and Joe are team captains, and have run some tests of their own. Randall’s face falls. “Can it?”

“Yes, but here’s the good news.” Todd scraps his hand across the little pile of treasures in front of him and scoops them up. Rising to his feet, he takes a healing pill and lightly tosses it to Chris, who catches it. “Odds?” He insists.

“Fifty two,” Chris gulps. As the number rises, his hands clutch around the pill and start to shake less.

Todd raises up the misshapen glass jar which holds his marrow cultivation pills, they rattle lightly and he tosses them over as well.

Chris has to reach to catch them, but once the bottle is safe in his hands he says, “fifty nine.” His voice is growing more certain, his hands steady.

“How about normal mode?” Todd asks simply.

The man pads over to the wide iron plate and steps up on top of it more confidently. “Seventy one,” he whispers.

Todd turns back to his friends, who stare at him thoughtfully and maybe even unhappily.

“His gear, his pills, his food… it all affects his chances. Our chances too.”

“Having the full team is what brings him up to eighty six?” Candra assumes.

Todd dips his head to confirm.

“I noticed that,” Candra glumly sighs. “My percentage… actually drops a little when I’m with my team. Theirs goes way up,” she explains as guilt sours her expression, “but I go down.”

Joe winces. “Same here.” He is quiet for a long moment, but his calm boils up into real anger. “So, your plan is that we go, we abandon our teams,” Joe growls, “we load up a couple of people with some gear that SLIGHTLY increases their chances, just so we can take the hard mode together, is that right?”

Candra wilts away from Joe. “I kinda wouldn’t mind,” she mumbles out of the corner of the mouth.

“Actually…” Todd presses his fingertips together and tilts his head. He glances from Randall to Candra, skipping over to Sue Ann and then back to Joe “I was kind of thinking Hard might not be enough.”

It takes a few minutes to convince his friends to step on the Silver plate. They stand elbow to elbow, at four of the five positions of a pentagon. Even Randall looks upset at him, while Joe looks run just about to the end of his patience.

“You’re crazy,” Sue Ann squeaks incredulously. “He’s crazy!”

Joe stands perfectly still and works his jaw. “These are not good odds, Drips.”

Todd doesn’t blame them. Extreme mode had put him at a heinous 45 percent, which is fine betting odds for a basketball game, but a wretched chance to take on buying a headstone. However, that had been his chances alone; experiment had shown him that very unusual things could happen in a group.

“I know, I know,” Todd placates. “Just –” he steps forward and onto the final position on the plate.

The ill humor melts off his friends faces and Todd breaks into a grin.

"Does that always happen?" Joe asks warily.

“I just went up ten points,” Randall laughs. “I mean, seventy percent still sucks pretty hard, but –”

Todd ignores the question and claps Randall on the shoulder excitedly. “And I mean, we still have time. We can buy more gear, more armor. We can’t afford anything magic, but some of the basic stuff is affordable. I still have my [Skill] treasure, a couple of you probably still have your weapon tokens –”

Candra winks at Todd and jabs him lightly in the shoulder. Joe shakes his head so slowly it doesn’t count as a no.

“We can still pack on some boosts,” Todd insists. “We dump all our healing pills and food token the others. We drop all our cash on gear wherever it helps raise someone else’s surviveability. The advance package is worth ten times anything we’re carrying around anyway, right?”

Candra nudges Joe with her elbow, Sue Ann looks nervous but thoughtful. Randall begins to bounce excitedly on his feet and then wraps an arm around Todd’s shoulder.

Joe unfolds his arms with resignation and drops them to his hips. He scoffs. “Every single one of you is responsible for bringing your team survival up equal or more to their chance before you left. Bare minimum, that’s rule one. Rule two is that our team isn’t enough. We put a team on Andrew, because it sounds like he’s taking Extreme solo right now. Because just like us, he is an insane person. And rule three: Drips, this had better be worth it, man.”

Confidently squaring his shoulders, Todd grits his teeth. “They brought us into space, guys. We know they’re not here to watch us take the safe option, we know that. If they were there’d be an easy mode.”

“Gotta play hard to win,” Candra murmurs, and the others repeat it after her like a mantra.

“Yea well. You realize the only catch here is we’ve got one chance in three to die,” Joe grumbles.

Todd swallows down a gulp and he shrugs. “Yea, I guess there is that. Let’s work on fixing that.”