It was a fine evening when the party reached the last patch of forest standing between them and Tyrathon. Carey savored the smell of flowers and grass, the warmth of the waning sunlight, the cool breeze rolling past them, ruffling the trees. He knew without looking at his menu’s clock that it was time for dinner. He led his comrades toward a flat rock overlooking a vast depression in the earth circled by mountains.

You have reached Ciranor’s Valley

EXPERIENCE GAINED: 50 points (2,230/22,875 to next level)

Carey looked down into the valley. The midday sun had filled it with light. Bright green grass spread from mountain to mountain, with colorful specks of flowers, trees at the edges, and a glittering lake near the center.

“Anyone thinking what I’m thinking?” Carey asked the group.

Bea was in the process of setting a picnic blanket on the flat rock. Will stopped her with an extended hand.

“Is that a lake down there?” Will asked. “Saw it on my map.”

“You bet.”

“Then hell yeah.” Will shrugged. “I didn’t bring a bathing suit, but whatevs.”

Ara vanished back into Carey’s Araband before it could blink out of existence as he phased into his owl form. Min-joon phased into a turtle, probably choosing the heavier shell because he was afraid the owl would eat his mouse form. Carey used his talons to grip the turtle’s shell, lift it off the rock, and take it sailing through the air over the clearing.

Will had grabbed Bea’s wrists, and together they went gliding on Bea’s wings down into the valley toward the lake.

“Wooooo hoooooo,” Will howled.

They landed at the edge of the lake. Carey and Min-joon phased back to their human forms as Will and Beatrice dropped next to them. Ara sprang from Carey’s crystal and grinned.

“No bathing suits,” Carey said. “No clothes allowed.”

“Dude,” Will said. “There’s a kid here.”

“I won’t look,” Min-joon said and covered his eyes.

They all laughed as Min-joon’s clothes disappeared off his body, leaving him clad in bright-red underwear.

“Where did you get those?” Carey asked, chuckling.

Min-joon looked proudly down at himself. “Crafted ’em. Molly berries and Flummock Seed oil make the red ink.”

“Brilliant.”

Min-joon spun to face the water. Howling like a boy raised in the wild, he ran and splashed through the water and dove in, sunlight sparkling among the misty drops.

Then Carey turned and was stunned by what he saw.

Beatrice and Ara had stripped down to their underwear, semi-naked bodies gleaming in the sunlight. Ara’s fleshy curves were more cartoonish than Bea’s, the colors more solid and bright, yet still every bit as appealing, maybe more so. They approached Carey.

“Can’t get completely naked,” Beatrice said, a mischievous look in her eyes. “Believe me, I tried, but the game won’t let me.”

“What a… good Christian game,” Carey said, his mouth so dry he could barely speak.

Will was similarly shocked by the half-nude women among them, though he did a better job of hiding it.

“Once you two quit ogling us girls,” Ara said, “maybe you could join us in the water.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Carey said, mentally stripping off his armor and clothes until he was clad only in underwear. Ara and Bea broke into sprints toward the lake, laughing with the pure and unfettered glee of little kids at a family outing.

Down to the same pair of cotton-looking underwear all the male characters wore under their clothes, Will went next. His toned, brown skin was more at home in the sun’s light than Carey’s pale, almost bloodless, rolls of flab.

They were at the water’s edge now. Will dipped a toe and grunted approval. “Nice and warm. I hear if you go up to the northern reaches of Astros, where it’s always snowing, the water feels like ice.”

“Do you ever want to explore those places?” Carey asked as they waded in. “I mean, actually take the time to see the rest of this place. Maybe… I don’t know…” He shrugged, feeling embarrassed at what he was about to say next. “Maybe staying here like Wally, for months or years…”

“You mean ignoring the main quest and just sticking around?”

“Yeah. Would that be so bad?”

They were chest deep in the water. Carey was enjoying this moment and felt no urge whatsoever to laugh and splash around like Bea, Min-joon, and Ara were doing. Will was easy to talk to. He listened in a way Carey’s friends back home, Steve, Ray-Ray, and Tim, would never think to do.

You want me to listen to you? he imagined Ray-Ray saying. Dude, what are you, gay?

Yeah, bro, Steve would say next. Gonna dive on his knob like a homo?

After Irish Delish dives on mine, Tim would probably add, using the nickname Carey hated, though he’d never told them that.

Carey made a startling realization. “You know what this place makes me think?”

“What’s that?”

“That the best friendships are made in life-or-death situations. I have a few friends at home, just guys I went to school with, and… and I realize now what’s been bugging me about them for years. They’re drinking buddies, and if I ever quit drinking, I’d have literally nothing in common with those guys. All we do is get drunk and bully each other, calling each other names like homo, dumbass, and…”

“And what?”

“Irish Delish. That’s what they call me sometimes. All the time, actually. When we were in the seventh grade, I used to be kinda chubby. Well, I’m kinda chubby now, but I was fatter then. Kids used to make fun of me. Tim, Ray-Ray, and Steve were my friends, but they made fun of me, too. One day at lunch, they were joking about me licking my plate. So I did. We were having Sloppy Joes that day, and the meat and sauce dripped down my chin and stained my shirt. A teacher saw me and made me get up and show everyone. Some asshole kid named Barry Olsen shouted out ‘Irish Delish gets his wish,’ I guess implying that my wish was to devour everything in sight. Then Tim and my other friends started chanting ‘I-rish De-lish. I-rish De-lish.

“I laughed it off at first. Then I grabbed a Sloppy Joe off some kid’s plate next to me. I smiled up at the teacher, took the thing, and buried my face in it, getting sauce everywhere.”

By that point in the story, Will was laughing and making victorious punching motions above the water, as though he were living the moment through Carey’s memory. Carey was smiling and chuckling, but deep down, the memory made him cringe.

“They still call me that. All the time,” Carey said, gazing absently down at the water, his smile lost. “My friends. Sometimes, when they’re drunk enough, they call me fat-ass and roly-poly, tell me I should lose weight, say I look like an Irish Chris Farley. I always laugh. Funny thing is, Chris Farley was Irish, but you think those dumbasses would know that?” He was shaking his head now. “I always laugh it off, never show how it makes me feel. I just make fun of them right back. You can’t show pain or weakness to guys like them, or they’ll skin you alive. Our whole friendship—my side of the friendship… It was just trying to prove myself to those guys, so they’d stop making fun of me. So they’d respect me. It never worked.”

“I’m sure they do respect you,” Will said. “They’re just cowards. Too afraid and insecure to show they care about you. Too shallow to show their feelings toward anyone. You’re not like that. Not really.”

“Thanks, man. Honestly, if we make it out of here somehow, I… I’d rather have you and Bea as my friends, not those guys.”

Now, it was Will who gazed vacantly down at the water, as if watching his own painful memories play out in those murky depths.

“Will,” Carey said. “You never told me how you ended up here. I mean, if you don’t want to talk about it, I underst—”

“It’s not that,” Will said and shrugged. “Just been waiting for the right moment.”

Carey nodded to show he understood. The look of pain in Will’s eyes was so great, he thought his friend might start crying.

“What happened to you, man?” Carey said. “It’s okay. I’ll listen if you want to talk.”

“It was my brother,” Will said, and when he blinked, tears dripped down his face. He sniffled and wiped his eyes quickly. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay, man. Let it out.”

“It’s my family… We were pretty messed up.”

“All families are screwed up in their own way,” Carey said.

Will was nodding slowly, watching minnows dart back and forth in the water. He absently swished his hand across the surface, scattering them.

“I had a mom, a younger sister, and… and an older brother.”

“Had?”

“My mom and little sister are still alive. But my brother… he was a heroin addict. Name was Deion and he was five years older than me. Used to rob liquor stores with his buddies. I can’t tell you how many times I wanted to call the police and rat him out, have them show up and just take him away forever. But you couldn’t do that where I grew up. If anyone found out… Nah, I couldn’t risk it. His friends, Antoine, Lamar, and Mykelti—they were a bad bunch. Scared the crap out of me all the time. They’d do it on purpose, pressing pistols to my head and saying shit, how I couldn’t show fear if I wanted to join their gang someday. And for a while, I did want to join them. I wanted to be gangsta, just like Deion.”

“Holy crap,” Carey said, aghast. “They’d actually put guns to your head?”

Will nodded, then dunked himself in the water, which caught Carey off-guard. He came up sputtering, drenched, agleam in the sunlight. But he wasn’t smiling. Not even close.

“That wasn’t the worst of it,” Will continued. “Once they made me stand lookout on the corner while they robbed a liquor store. I heard gunshots inside, and I just… I ran back home, scared. I found out later my brother had shot the storekeeper in the shoulder. Dude survived, but Deion and his friends beat the hell out of me that night for abandoning them. Broke my collarbone with one of their gun grips.”

Carey was stunned into silence. He thought he’d had it bad with his emotionally distant mother and critical father. But this… this was just terrifying.

“In the hospital, I told the nurse it was local boys who roughed me up, because that’s what we did in my neighborhood. She didn’t believe me, but she knew better than to ask. We didn’t rat each other out. That was the ultimate rule. Couldn’t ever break it. No snitching. Ever.

“About a year ago, Deion and his buddies discovered heroin. They started out by selling it. Used to flash wads of cash all over the house. Made my mother nervous. But then Deion would give her cash sometimes, and that was cool. She always needed the money to make rent. My sister, Samara, is a Type 1 diabetic and had to live with these machines always reading her blood sugar or whatever. So money was tight.

“But Deion didn’t give her anything close to what he was actually making. I found some of his cash one time. Dropped my sock when I was doing laundry, and when I looked behind the machine, I saw the corner of an envelope. It was stuffed with hundos. There must have been fifteen, twenty grand in that little fold of paper. I put it back and never said anything about it. He’d kill me if I took any of it.

“Deion acted real tough, but he wasn’t. There were times when he didn’t want to come out of his room. Just stayed in there for days at a time, polishing his guns and chatting on the internet, posting pics on Instagram of his muscles and tattoos, stuff like that. But he’d make me bring him his food, like he was too afraid to go downstairs.”

Carey cut in. “He was depressed.”

“Makes sense.” Will nodded. “But then he’d snap out of it and go off with his buddies and rob a liquor store or get into a brawl. He started doing the drugs he was selling. You know what they say: never get high on your own supply. But try telling that to someone as impulsive as my brother. And Deion really took to heroin, too. Started getting high every day. I didn’t mind so much. It calmed him down, kept him from getting into too much trouble. He started leaving me alone, focusing on the drugs instead.

“But then the dealers above him took the supply away after hearing a rumor he was using. Dude was lucky they didn’t kill him. But Deion was useless out on the corners in that state. You know, withdrawal and all. He could barely stand up straight. His friends tried to have his back, help him out, but the head dealers didn’t want any of it. So now Deion’s making no money, he’s too tired and strung out to rob liquor stores, and his friends are starting to avoid him because he’s getting a bad rep on the streets… Only thing he had left was heroin. He lived for it.

“It made my mom’s life a living hell. He’d demand money from her so he could go out on the corner and score H. His addiction took over our entire family. She tried kicking him out, but he’d always threaten her with guns and stuff, saying if she kicked him out, he’d come for Samara, take her away from us, sell her out on the streets to men who liked little girls. It was terrible. My mom would cry every day. We tried to keep Samara from knowing what was going on, but she was six years old and knew something was wrong.

“Deion didn’t give a damn about anyone except himself. He didn’t even try to hide that he was a heroin addict. Eventually, he started making me go out and buy it for him, when he was too paranoid or strung out to leave the house by himself.

“One night, I came home from a computer class I was taking at night over at the local community college. My dream was to go to school for Computer Science, get a job in the city, get far away from Deion, and make enough money to get my mom and sister an apartment in a nicer part of town, maybe health insurance for my sister.

“But Deion came into my room one night and put a gun to my head. Said if I ever tried to leave him, he’d hunt me and my ma and sister down. He’d kill us, then kill himself. He didn’t care anymore. I couldn’t leave him alone. Not ever.

“There were tears in his eyes. I’d never seen him like that before. He looked like he had demons chasing him, and he was desperate to keep his sanity, and he needed us not to abandon him. I told him that. Said I’d never abandon him, that he was my brother. Deion fell into my arms and cried, and I held my older brother for a minute or two while he sobbed like a little kid. It didn’t last. He wiped his eyes and got up and went back to his room. The next morning, I see him standing in the doorway, that hungry look in his eyes.

“‘Go down to the corner,’ he tells me. I tell him the truth: I ain’t got any money. ‘Find some,’ he tells me. ‘Or I’ll beat Samara.’ He’d beaten her before, nothing too serious, just slapping her around. But this time, the look in his eyes told me he was ready to take things to the next level.

“That’s when I started planning out what I was gonna do to fix this. I started talking to people on the streets, asking what the strongest heroin was. Got my hands on some brown stuff from south of the border. It took me about three weeks, and I had to sell my handheld Nintendo, which I kept hidden from Deion because I knew he’d pawn it. Took me a whole summer of delivering sandwiches at the local deli to save up for that thing. Seems so stupid and childish now. Compared to all this.”

He lifted his arms, looked around them at the simulated world of Astros. Carey knew exactly how he felt. No other game or system compared to this one.

“I gave the drug to Deion on his birthday, as a present. The needle was completely full. It was a big needle, too. I’d made sure of that. I also made sure my mom and sister were out of the house. It was Bingo night. They went every week. It was just me and Deion, and luckily, his door didn’t have a lock. We all knew never to go in there, so he never bothered to get one.

“I remember walking in afterwards, feeling like I was in a daze, or like I was possessed. I found Deion passed out on his bed still wearing his clothes, his jacket, his sneakers. His sleeve was rolled up and the needle was stuck there—stuck in his arm, pulling on the skin just the slightest bit, with a little stream of blood running down the side.

“The needle was half-full. He’d taken too much. I knew he would. It’d been days since his last fix, so his tolerance was down. I looked at his face, and he was awake, taking quick little breaths, his eyes half shut. His lips were purple. I told him I was sorry. I remember he looked at me, but he couldn’t even move his lips to say anything. I imagined he was telling me, ‘Do it. End it. Please do it. I’m in so much pain.’

“So that’s what I did. I ended his pain. I used a sheet from his bed so I wouldn’t leave any fingerprints. Then I pushed the plunger on the needle and injected the rest of that poison into his vein. Only took a few seconds for him to pass out completely. I wasn’t sure if he’d ever wake up again, but I hoped he wouldn’t. I believed then, and I still believe it now, that it’s okay to release people like Deion from the pain they create for themselves, as long as that pain is hurting others. He couldn’t be reasoned with. No one coulda helped my brother be a good person, a stable person, someone who loved his family and would take care of them. Like I would take care of them.

“He was a monster. I did what I had to do.”

“Did he… ?”

Will nodded. “Never woke up. Least he didn’t feel any pain. Just… slipped away.”

Carey didn’t know how to react, so he simply met Will’s gaze and said what he hoped were the right words. “You did the right thing for your family, Will. He would have overdosed eventually. You just took away his pain, made him comfortable in his last moments.”

“Maybe.” Will shrugged. “When Roger and Sam kidnapped me, they said it was that or go to prison for what I did. I was a murderer. I might’ve convinced myself it was okay, that I did the right thing. But they said I was a killer and I might do it again, and their machine would help me see that and confront it the right way. So I’d never become a soulless monster like my brother.

“In a way, they were right. In the months after Deion died, I started bullying other kids in my neighborhood. Sometimes, even Samara. I kept one of Deion’s pistols hidden in my room. I fantasized about using it to punish his friends, especially Antoine, who started coming over a lot after Deion died, saying he wanted to help out with Samara because Deion was his boy. I walked in on him once, bouncing Samara on his knee. His hand was on her thigh, real high up, and he was sniffing her hair.”

“Oh, man,” Carey said. “I’d waste that guy.”

“I almost did. I went and got the nine, told Samara to play in the other room. It pissed Antoine off something fierce. He got up and was about to thrash me, but I pulled out the nine and pointed it at him. I told him if he ever came back, I’d put a bullet in his balls and his brain. He left, but I knew it wasn’t the end. I started carrying that gun around with me, into stores, even to school. One day, I almost took it out at school when I saw a kid bullying another kid. Only thing that held me back was the thought of ending up in prison, and Deion’s dead purple face smiling at me, saying ‘You were the bad one. You were always the bad one.’”

There was a long moment of silence between them—a comfortable silence between two friends who understood there were times when talking wasn’t necessary. Yet Carey still had questions about Will’s story. There were things that didn’t make sense.

“Roger and Sam…” he said. “How did they know about Deion? Did you post about it online?”

Will nodded. “It was one of the stupidest things I’ve ever done. I kept a journal online—some app called Journally, if I remember. I know how it sounds, like something a little girl like Samara should do, not a grown-ass teenager who carried a gun around. But I used to love writing in that thing. I thought maybe someday, I’d use the material to write a memoir. You know, one of those ‘how I got off the streets and made a name for myself’ sort of thing. I thought it was private, but Sam found it using the web-crawling and security-breaching software his dad invented. He must have read the whole thing. Knew everything about me, about Deion, what had happened. He even knew about Samara’s diabetes.

“They said they’d take care of my family. I thought it was just a fake promise to make me more receptive to the game, less likely to kill myself, I don’t know. But they said as long as I kept playing, even if I got game over—as long as I tried—they’d make sure my mom and sister had everything they’d ever need for the rest of their lives.

“A couple of weeks into the game, they sent me a video. Only happened once. It filled the entire sky. Bea couldn’t see it. No one could. It was for my eyes only. The video showed my mom and Samara living in a nice house. There was a small table by the front door with all these pictures of me in frames. A memorial of some sort. I guess they think I died. Video also showed a nurse coming by the house to check up on Samara. It showed my mom getting into a brand-new car. It showed a donation webpage some anonymous donor had set up for my family, and a grand total that just kept getting higher and higher, hundreds of thousands of dollars being ‘donated’ to help my mom, who had lost her two sons, and to help Samara, who was diabetic. A family that had experienced the horrors of street violence and drugs. I guess the world thought it was a good story. Most of that money I knew was from Sam and Roger, but I bet a lot of it was also from good people who felt bad for us.”

“I can’t believe that all happened to you,” Carey said. “Thanks, man. For telling me. I know it’s not easy.”

Will shrugged. “Now you just have to tell me yours.”

“I will,” Carey said with a nod. “When it’s the right time. Right now, I think the rest of our party is ready to go.”

Ara and Beatrice were wading toward them, Bea carrying Min-joon up on her shoulders. The kid loved being up high like that.

“Ready?” Bea said, setting Min-joon down.

“To Tyrathon we go,” Carey replied, and lightly splashed Min-joon. His laughter came out a series of chirps and he splashed Carey right back.