I couldn’t understand. This file was made yesterday and was filled with plain gibberish. It was letters only, however, not unicode characters or even something easy to translate like Wingdings VII where I could just change the font to a readable thing. No, this was encoded. I opened up a translation website for encoded files and uploaded the file to the website to decode straight from the USB stick, but the website ended up telling me it couldn’t decode it. It must have been some weird cipher that someone used. “There’s some file in here with my name on it, but I can’t read it.”

“Whaddaya mean you can’t read it?! It’s just a file right?”

“Yeah, it’s a text file, but the text file is full of gibberish.”

“Ah, okay. I’m assuming you tried a -”

“Yep.”

“I might be able to help you with that then, there’s a few people I know who work on stuff like this. E-mail me the file and I’ll get it translated for you.”

“Alright.” Kit told me his e-mail and I attached it to an e-mail and sent it off to him. “Okay, it’s done.” I opened up the pod and got out and shut it down and went back and sat on the couch. Kit sat on the other couch where he was before, grabbing the orange soda in a cup before sitting and taking a loud slurp out of it.

“Thanks for the drink.”

“Now I remember why I never had you over!.” We both chuckled. “So, do you play SwordGate as well?”

“Yeah, I make a bit of money on it. Enough for myself and my apartment at least, with some change to spare. You know, SwordGate even has player-run investment firms that invest your gold and stuff into businesses that are doing well and pay you dividends and stuff like that.”

“So, basically a fantasy stock market.” I took a gulp of my soda.

“Eh, yeah, basically, but less losing money and more making money.”

“Well, stocks don’t come without their risks.”

“It’s true,” he replied, “but you’re losing virtual money in a virtual world versus losing real money. And even though you can convert your gold to real money, you’re still just using virtual money, so there’s no losses.”

“Yeah, true enough.” We both sipped our soda in silence for a minute or two, relaxing on the couches.

“So, where are your parents?” he asked me.

“Ah… uh…” I stuttered. I had expected the question, just not right then. “On a business trip. They’re always running around and stuff all over the world, so. They’re basically lawyers for an international firm. They know a lot of languages and stuff.” I fibbed my way out of answering with “They’re dead and my mother is stuck in the game mentally and runs one of the biggest conglomerates in SwordGate!” because every time I’ve told someone that, which has been quite a few times due to me being an idiot, they try to cozy up to me for money, and it’s not happening again. I’ve had to burn way too many bridges because of that slip-up.

“Ah, so they’re gonna be gone for a while then.” Kit took a larger gulp of his soda. He set down his soda on the side table next to him.

“Well, I play as well. I’ve been reaching out to people I used to know in high school to network in-game. You never know who’s going to become the next billionaire in SwordGate.”

“Yeah, and whoever becomes a billionaire in Swordgate is pretty much a billionaire in real life, generally.”

“Yeeeep.” He sighed. “One day someone will make something huge, and I’ll get in on it and make a ton of money.”

“I do have a question though. I was given a quest to, er, for lack of a better phrase, get some armor in general and I was hoping to recruit a few people. But we have to kill a dragon.”

“Eh, where at though? The world is full of dragons.” He looked at me skeptically.

“Red Mountain. The dragon Neftngiz.”

“Oh, dude, that guy is cake. There are raids being launched against him all the time. The dragon is just level seventy. He’s not hard, really. A good source of loot as well for newbies such as yourself. What did you even roll as?”

“I spawned in front of an abbey so I just decided to be a Cleric, which also ties into the quest I got, generally.” I shrugged, mildly in defeat at my own laziness of exploring the world without a class.

“Ah, yeah healers are pretty high in demand, or rather classes that can heal in general, really. So you should have no problem finding a group. Everyone wants to be the hero and be on the front lines of the war, so to speak, so you’ll be good.” He grabbed his glass and took another swig of soda out of the glass.

“Ah, good to know. I do have another question though. Say I hypothetically came across some information on the internet on how to get a set of legendary, soulbound armor.” Kit’s eyes widened. “Are those typically long, drawn out quests or-” I immediately got bombarded with questions.

“Where is the armor? How did you see it? What region is it in, can you at le-”

“Stop.” I made a slicing horizontal motion with my right hand. “I don’t know where it is and I just read it on the internet… and no I don’t have my history because it was in a private session.” Kit made a kind of “harrumph” noise and leaned back on the couch.

“Well, typically, yes, those questlines are super long and also rare as all hell. Like super-ultra-mega rare. Like there are only three people who have gotten sets of armor from those kinds of Legendary quests, in the history of the game.”

“Hm, okay, thanks.” I drank some more of my soda and we ended up just chatting about our lives and such at the moment for a while. It eventually came time for him to leave to go run some errands or some-such and we said our goodbyes, and he promised he’d find out what the file said, and he also used an app on his phone to send me a friend request in-game. By the time he left, it was nearing 9PM, so I decided to just maybe slip back into the pod for another couple hours.