I could only ignore the constant barrage of messages from my group mates for so long before they’d start threatening to hit the emergency release on me. Cale knew where I was and what was going on, but that only gave me so much time. While it was nice someone gave a shit about me, it was more than a little annoying that I couldn’t go about my business without so many noses poking around.

Instead of taking my leave, I had them meet me there, in Mr. Bouchard’s office. He told them what we’d been discussing and tried his best to assure them about his intentions. By the time he finished speaking, everyone seemed sold.

Well, everyone but Luke. He scowled down at his hands. “Sorry, I hear what you’re saying, but I just ain’t buying it. Even a good corporate is still corporate.”

Richard pressed his lips together into a firm line and sat on his desk, directly in front of Luke’s pretty female avatar. “I understand why you’d feel that way. You of all people.”

Luke opened his mouth to respond. But remained silent after a raised finger from the CEO. “Please, let me finish and you’ll have the floor. When I first watched Mr. De Angelis’ video-”

The rogue’s unnaturally pale face reddened. “Just Salvo.”

“Apologies. When I watched Salvo’s video, I did some research on you all and was pleased at what I’d found on all but two of you. The one I distrusted the most is now missing, both in the game and in the real world. I’m assuming Mr. Williams had something to do with that. The other displeasure I found had nothing to do with the person themselves, but the hardships they’d endured. I won’t go into it anymore than that, it’s not my business in the first place. But, please know that despite my position in the world, I’m not like most of my contemporaries.”

“So you say,” Luke said and crossed his arms.

“So I do. I could also say that all club bouncers are mindless meat, but I don’t. I could also say a great many things about your second profession, but I won’t do that either. We’re all just mice scurrying to the next scrap of cheese.”

Luke scoffed. “Gotta be tough finding that scrap of cheddar when you’re living in the damn factory, huh?”

Richard spread his hands and sighed. “We’re at an impasse so I’ll stop trying to prove my worth with words and continue doing what I can with actions. Hopefully, we’ll see eye-to-eye someday. With that in the open and, as promised, you have the floor.”

“I’m good. You know where I stand and I heard where you think you do,” Luke said and sat back in his chair.

Well, that could have gone better, I thought. It also could have gone a lot worse. Just have to take my winning battles as I get them.

“If there’s nothing else, I’m going to go check on our fairy situation. See if my guy has made any headway on that.” He waved a hand, and a portal appeared. “Go on ahead to the tavern and have a drink on me. I’ll let you know everything as I get it. Please remember to pass the information along to Mr. Williams so there are no further incidents. I’m working on getting you all somewhere safe, but it’ll take some time and finesse to get you out unnoticed. You’re being watched.”

That said, we waved goodbye and stepped through the portal; finding ourselves not just in the tavern, but Mr. Bouchard’s personal VIP area. The goblin server jumped at the sudden appearance and scowled at us, tossing an old copy of Penthouse behind his shoulder.

Salvo’s eyes widened and moved so fast to pick it up he was a blur. “You can leave this with us, thanks.”

I sat at the table, gazing out through a large window that overlooked the general area, but I couldn’t remember ever seeing a balcony in the tavern before. Had I overlooked it all the times I’d been there? No, judging from where we looked out, we sat over the bar where there was a solid wall adorned with a dragon head mount. Guess in the game world, you didn’t need things like two-way glass when you could just have a wall coded to be transparent on one side.

“Between us,” Luke said with a guilty look. “I’m willing to give this guy a chance. Maybe some other time I’ll get into why that’s a big deal, but not right now. We’ve got enough going on.”

“When you’re ready,” I said, nudging his arm. “We’ve all got a few skeletons in our closets. Some of us,”—I nodded my chin at Salvo—“Have a full army of undead in there.”

“Liz, you know me better than that,” the rogue said with a wicked grin. “The skeletons and I are out of the closet and knocking bones on the regular.”

“Ears,” Maddie said and pointed at Nate, who giggled heartily.

I tuned out the conversation after that, watching the area below us bustling with life. The dwarves happily greeted each and every patron, the servers ran from table to table, people laughed, all the while we sat isolated from their vitality. It felt disgusting and wrong looking down on the world around me, sheltered from their status in a glass bubble. If this is what it meant to be privileged, I’d happily stay poor for the rest of my life. This is how the rich become so out of touch with the rest of society. They cage themselves off.

“Look guys,” I said and motioned at our surroundings. “This isn’t me. I’m gonna head down to our normal table.”

“Right behind you,” Cale said. “I was beginning to understand how Spike felt all those times he watched us from the tank with that dopey grin of his.”

Following our lead, everyone stood to leave but Salvo, who pouted and groaned. “Guys, look, personal fireplace, just for us.”

“Fine, stay here then.” I said and turned to go. “But there’s no one up here who’s going to tell you how great you are. Trust me, absolutely no one in this room will say that.”

“There’s plenty I could say to the opposite,” Cale said.

“I think you’re okay,” Nate said. “You smell funny, but you’re okay.”

“Goddammit. Fine, I’ll go too.” Salvo huffed. “And I don’t smell funny. It’s not my fault Liz bought ditch weed.”

The narrow staircase down to the common area led to a fake wall behind the bar. A server dropped a mug of ale in surprise as we all shuffled through in single file, splashing herself and getting some on our feet.

The dwarves roared in disapproval, crying party foul, then turned to our group and cried out as one at the top of their lungs, “NORM!”

I waved and patted one on his shining red bald spot while I passed their table.

“That’s the first time a lass has touched ya. Innit, Varik?” one dwarf asked. He waggled his overgrown golden eyebrows at his friend. His blue eyes sparkled with too much drink and mischief. “And your mum don’t count.”

“You’re right, Lenny, she don’t. But yours does.” A cacophony of laughter erupted from their table. Varik chugged the rest of his mug and raised it for another.

All of them were still fairly low level, averaging at five, but still having the time of their lives. And honestly, I think the experience they’d gained directly resulted from their drunken adventures running without armor from one side of the continent to the other. They were part of the reason I stayed in this and would continue even if Viv woke up tomorrow. People enjoying the little things in Arcadia deserved to be safe.

Once we’d gotten our fill of the community at the tavern, it was time to get back into action. Nate was almost level 50 and the rest of us hovered at 47. We were close to cap, but then what? Did we even really need to grind out these last few levels? We’d already proven we could take the agents on. But why wouldn’t we cap ourselves out? Get the best gear and run around like rock stars more than we already did.

I’d never admit it to Salvo, but I enjoyed the attention, just a little.

The first order of business was to figure out where we’d go. Like hell was I going back to Dante’s Depths. Both times we tried running through ended in some form of catastrophe. There was another dungeon, though a little harder than the Depths, and that was out of the question with my lack of sleep. So, skipping the prospect of dungeons, we opted for some good old-fashioned questing.

We ran around a sylvan glen collecting kill and fetch quests. The area, while pretty with muted cool tones of green and purple, looked bare without the bright fairies darting between the trees. From time to time, I caught sight of golden eyes leering out from nests made in hollowed tree knots, the only sign of ambient life. And even those were probably just part of the design for the trees themselves.

A path of coiled ferns and lilies led us to an Ursine Warrior camp that contained our first group of quests. They’d become tainted by dark magic, and we’d need to dispose of their corrupted talismans. Since the hulking bearlike men weren’t about to hand them over peacefully, we’d have to kill and loot them. Somehow, by killing them en masse, we were saving them… sure.

While we were in the camp, we had to look out for one called the Mooncub. A baby Ursine born under the special star alignment that would save them all. But wasn’t that why we were slaughtering them in the first place? I get the designers have a lot of area to cover and sometimes they get bored, but seriously? Double save the race in one small area. C’mon guys.

The warriors hit like a werewolf on steroids, with each strike reverberating a loud gong on Cale’s shield. Spittle foamed from the corners of their mouths, showering us with each movement. It was like fighting rabid dogs after they’d taken a bath. Okay, not a good analogy, hydrophobia and all, but it got the point across. Nasty bears dripped nasty shit all over us.

The nursery, a den built into a rock face, contained at least twenty tiny little cubs. As infants, their saliva glands hadn’t kicked into overdrive, so they were kinda cute. But, as Cale discovered when he reached into a bassinet to pet one, they still had plenty of teeth. He yelped as the infant clamped down on his fingers and pulled his hand away with no damage other than a bruised ego.

I checked each tiny cub, trying to figure out which was the one we were supposed to nab, but they all looked the same. Seemed to me they were cloned copies of each other. While I could accuse the programmers of laziness again, I could hardly blame them. How many people were doing this quest? And how many would give a shit they all looked alike?

Unsure of how else to know we’d grabbed the correct one, I started picking them up in my more dexterous cat form, carefully biting down on the furry bunting so I wouldn’t hurt them; hoping the system would tell me I’d grabbed the correct one. Unfortunately, once I’d done this to all twenty, we’d lost a ton of time with no clear sign which was the rugrat we’d come looking for.

“Fuck it, I’m just dropping this quest,” I said and opened my log. Right as I was about to hit abandon, Salvo appeared from the shadows.

“There’s a hut with the chief out front, but he looks like a badass. Otherwise, I’d have just sapped him and looked for the baby in there. My guess, our special delivery is inside.”

“Well, look at you taking initiative,” I said. “Good timing, too. A few more seconds and you’d have to share the quest with me.”

To avoid adds while we took on the chief Ursine, we cleared the area around a hut made of mud, furs, and moss. Charms made of bones and twigs hung from the eaves, clattered in the soft breeze. There was something off about them, they gave off a sort of negative energy that made me want to steer clear.

“Anyone else feel whatever those charms are giving off?” I asked in a low whisper.

“Oh yeah,” Luke said with a hearty nod. “I’ve been feeling it since we walked into the camp. Just thought I was being paranoid, but it’s been getting worse the closer we got to this hut in particular.”

Maddie’s eyes shone with blue light, and she pointed. “There, that dreamcatcher. It’s giving off magic like you wouldn’t believe.”

“And a dreamcatcher would be what exactly?” Salvo asked.

With more than a little annoyance, Maddie grumbled and shot a thin beam of fire at a dangling charm. The magical artifact popped like a balloon full of confetti, exploding with glowing green embers.

“Fools,” the Ursine chief yelled. His mouth pulled up to reveal serrated, yellowed teeth. “Do you know how much planning you’ve undone with that act? Now it’s time to discover how large of a mistake you’ve made. Surely, it’ll prove to be your last.”

“Dramatic much?” Cale asked as he readied his shield and taunted the overgrown teddy bear.

Claws surrounded by a glistening black haze extended from the chieftain’s paws. Cale blocked an attack with a hard grunt but took damage from a puff of diseased smoke on impact. His health bar ticked down in rapid chunks as the toxin worked its way into his system. Dark veins formed at his temples and his lips took on a shadowy hue.

“That’s nasty,” Luke said, casting a cleansing spell of golden light and following it up with a full heal.

Cale glanced at Maddie over his shoulder. “Can you ice him in place so we can hit him from a distance? That sucked.”

“If it’s negative energy,” Nate said. “Let my pets take the damage. It might even heal them. Same goes for Salvo. Try to get a splatter of the attack on you. See what happens. If it hurts you, I’ll just heal you back up.”

I pulled back to avoid getting hit and shifted to my elven form, providing back up heals and tiny amounts of magical damage as needed.

Maddie iced the creature’s feet in place and tried to neutralize his claws with an added arctic blast. Instead of helping, it gave him a maul of ice on each fist to pummel us with, all the while splashing the deadly disease with each swing. “Well, crap. Sorry, guys. That didn’t work like I thought it would.”

The remaining spider’s decaying ichor had little to no effect on the shaggy protective hide of the Ursine, forcing it to rely on biting attacks that missed more often than not. The zombified lizard-man proved equally useless, dealing no damage and dying after a single crushing blow.

“I knew I should have raised one of the Ursine warriors from before,” Nate said in a teenage whine distorted by papery rasps of the dying. Whispers of the dead left his lips and his fingers twitched in casting, the dried sinew in his hands creaked in protest of the movements. A slick black two-headed serpent coiled around the chieftain, biting down; the muscles straining and constricting. “Channeling the spell, you’ve got thirty seconds to take him down before it falls.”

With the threat of disease out of the way, I fell into action, shifting into my cat form and pouncing. A good portion of his flesh was covered in snake or frozen in ice, but Salvo and I attacked where we could. Tearing, stabbing, and rending his body until the Ursine cried out with a plea for mercy.

“Stop. I yield. I only did these things for the sake of my kind. Don’t you understand my fear? How long before the hunters cut down our cubs for their pelts? Or the woodsman’s axe fells our sanctified groves?” Defeated, the spells binding him vanished, and he took a knee to await his judgment.

An Ursine woman stepped from the hut with a crimson crescent moon adorning her otherwise unblemished snow-white fur. Her robes of silver-spun silks billowed behind her in an eerie flurry.

So, maybe I assumed with a name like Moonchild we were looking for a cub. I was wrong, all right? At least I’m not the only one. The entire party was looking for a baby.

Moonchild’s eyes filled with tears at the sight of the chieftain on his knees. “My people owe you a debt, strangers. Take his weapons and leave us be. He has no need for them any longer.”

“But, my love, who will protect us?”

“Any love between us died the moment you made a pact with unnatural forces.” The ursine woman kissed his forehead and whispered her goodbyes. Her eyes shone with a brilliant white light so bright I had to shield my vision and close my own.

When I could see again, he was gone, and she reentered her hut without another word. A quest complete box came up, along with the reward, Chieftain’s Befouled Daggers. They granted the negative energy splash damage with attacks, even in my cat form. About time I had a way to deal magic damage in my fighting form. Not wanting to lose all the bonus bleeding damage my old daggers granted me, I only equipped one, and kept the other in my inventory so I could swap out as needed.

The quests in the camp finished, we turned back up the trail of coiled ferns to move on to the next; breathing a little easier without the weight of dark magic hanging in the air. We headed towards a boggy marsh that spawned sentient ooze to start farming slime. The druid NPC we’d gotten the quest from said they were used to create an antidote for poison. Wouldn’t need the slimes if someone had just given us a cure poison spell. Really wasn’t too much to ask for, was it?

Just as we entered sludgy water with somehow thicker mud that made walking a giant pain in the ass, we heard a scream. Followed by another. Without a word shared, we turned towards the commotion, hoping we were only happening upon a random quest and not the creeping suspicion it was more agents.

“Help me, oh fuck, somebody help me. I’m gonna die,” a man’s voice cried out. The pure panic in his voice kicked something inside me into high gear, pushing me forward faster. So far, the only people I’d encountered who used profanity had been players. The chances of this being a random encounter dropped to nothing.

My paws, still slick with muck from the marsh, slipped as I made my way down an embankment. I half-rolled, half-tumbled my way down, tangling myself in a bush of nettled thorns. When I finally came to rest, I’d lost about ten percent of my health, losing a little more each time I struggled my way free.

Fuck, I groaned to myself, and held my breath when I heard voices way too close for comfort.

“Find out what that commotion was,” a man ordered. His voice sounded tinny and popped with electric crackles, like a radio station just out of range playing on the world’s worst speakers.

Before what no doubt was an agent could discover me, I pulled the shadows around my body; hoping he couldn’t see through my stealth ability. Heart hammering in my chest, I watched as a static figure appeared in my peripheral view, blinked a few steps further away, vanished and reappeared inches from where I hid. My head swam with visions of lying in a hospital bed while machines beeped a never-ending chorus to keep my body alive. Of Cale finding my empty husk the same way I’d found Viv. I readied myself for whatever came next and waited.