The pre-dawn sky still perforated by stars, the chill morning air, the dew speckling the stone face next to him—Walter shivered and marveled that it all felt so real. The air had a fresh, cold scent. He hadn’t realized that air could smell cold, but now he realized that it could, and the game had captured it perfectly. He stretched stiffly. The stone on which he lay was warm with the heat of his body. The song of morning birds was just beginning to rise up from the green canopy below. He reached over his shoulder and, where he should have found only stone, plucked from his Inventory the skin of water Reeve had given him the previous day. He rose to one elbow, and the icy water prickled his throat and chest from within as he drank.

Walter returned the stopper to the skin and the skin to his Inventory. I’m really getting the hang of that, Walter thought with no small satisfaction as the item disappeared not onto the ground behind him but into his Inventory. He decided that the game really wasn’t all that hard to figure out, once you had a chance to try things a few times. He knew how upset Reeve was that they might be stuck for a while before it logged them out, but he thought she was probably overlooking something simple that would allow them to leave soon, and, if they really did need to stay in this world for a while, he was coming to be of a mind that it wouldn’t be so bad. For one thing, he was getting some real quality time with his daughter. Remembering an escape room they had done together a few years back, he smiled. “That was nice,” he said quietly. And this is kind of like that, he thought as he looked beyond their rocky shelf, just a much bigger room from which to escape. Plus, he’d already gotten a hang of the Inventory—not to mention that tricky U.I.—so he was probably through the steepest part of the learning curve. And he’d only had a few unlucky deaths—that was nothing compared to how he used to lose lives when he’d sometimes play video games at friends’ houses as a kid. Boy, he thought, games had really come a long way since those days.

Walter sat up and dusted the knees of his pants. He saw that Reeve was walking slowly in a circle around the broad rock where they’d watched the sunset the previous evening. She was hunched forward, focused on something in her hands. Her long pole-weapon that reminded him of a limb trimmer leaned against the rock. Walter rose and walked buoyantly to join her. He sat lightly on the rock and ran his hands back and forth across the cold, moist stone, enjoying the verisimilitude of the weathered irregularities.

On her next pass, Reeve stopped next to him, raised the quill from the page of the book in which she’d been writing, and looked down. She gave him a slow nod. Walter returned the nod, noticing that Reeve’s eyes looked a bit red. Had she let him sleep the whole night? He couldn’t remember being awoken for a turn at the watch. Walter furrowed his brow as he tried to remember the details of the previous night—it had all been such a blur…partly because he could barely see past his swollen cheeks, eyelids, and brow. He felt his face with still-cold hands. He wasn’t used to the halfling’s face, but it currently felt much more his own than had the balloon-like features the previous evening.

Walter smiled, sat up straighter, and looked around their makeshift campsite as the morning light began to lift the darkness and reveal greater detail. Though he didn’t remember it raining overnight, all about the rocky shelf on which they’d camped were puddles, inky in the early light. Walter also noticed that there were many more signs of wildlife and past inhabitants than he’d noticed the night prior. A number of bones lay scattered haphazardly about, and there were dozens of the little parcels—what were they? Lute bags?—like the one Reeve had stolen from the goblin, arrayed in a rough semicircle around the recess in which he’d slept.

Reeve lay a strip of leather down the page on which she’d been writing and closed the book. She set it next to Walter and on it placed her quill and inkpot, which held a brilliant emerald liquid that Walter could swear was emitting a soft glow.

“Hey, Dad. Your face is looking better.”

Walter smiled and probed both cheeks with his fingertips. “Much better. You get some sleep? I can’t remember much of last night.”

Reeve looked out over the trees. “I’m fine. How about you?”

“Slept like a baby.”

Reeve scratched one eyebrow. After a heavy sigh, she stooped to pick up the nearest loot bag. She sat next to her father and dumped the bag’s contents on the rock without paying the items any attention, and then picked up her naginata and lowered it so that the pole was to her side and the blade lay across her lap. She ran the bag down the flat of the blade, wiping thick but not yet dried blood from the metal.

“You going to need more of those?” Walter asked.

Reeve nodded.

Walter slid off the rock and walked about their campsite, collecting two or three loot bags at a time and dropping them next to Reeve. Once he could find no more, he resumed his seat and watched her clean the blade, emptying two more loot bags in the process.

Reeve tilted the blade so that it caught the light of the newly-risen sun, and she smiled. She whipped the bag through the air and it was gone. “OK, Dad.” She sucked air through her teeth and squinted toward the distant mountains, which shone bright in the nearly horizontal light. “We need to get your Class sorted out.”

“OK. I don’t know what that means.”

“And then we’ll spend a few minutes on easy XP to start leveling you.”

“Also don’t know what that means.”

“Then, we need to get back on the trail to catch up with Mom, who somehow hasn’t died yet.”

“She’s a very resourceful lady, your mother.”

“I’m sure, Dad. It’s just, we’re not…” Reeve made a few low noises as she struggled to think of a tactful way to point out that both her parents were out of their element, whatever their element was.

“Not in Kansas anymore?” Walter said.

“That’s actually not a terrible analogy.”

“Thank you for the high praise, Daughter.”

Reeve rolled her eyes. “You’ve seen Mom play video games before. It’s like she’s trying to break the game.”

“As I recall, she’s quite the star at Tetris.”

“That’s awesome, Dad, but unless there’s a component of this story mode that involves us needing to fit together oddly shaped objects in a very efficient way under time pressure, it’s probably not going to help us progress toward getting out of here. Let’s take a look at your Class and then farm a little XP.”

Walter’s slow nod perfectly conveyed both incomprehension and determination.

The slow nod Reeve returned perfectly conveyed both apprehension and resignation. “OK, let’s try this. First: open your UI.” Reeve paused until her father flinched, then she continued. “Find your Stats panel.” For a few seconds, Reeve thought her father was having some sort of stroke caused by a resurgence of the Firethorn poison but decided that, no, her parents only looked like they were suffering brain damage when confronted with unfamiliar technology. “Let me know when you find it.”

Reeve turned to the pile of loot and the unopened loot bags. She emptied the rest of the bags into the pile and then checked her Item Log rather than sort through the physical jumble. She ran her gaze down the list, which the log had helpfully organized by similar items.

2 Prismatic Shards

4 Obsidian Shards

1 Pound of Humanoid Meat

2 Pounds of Wild Meat

1 Bristled Hide (1’ x 1’)

1 Scaled Hide (2’ x 6’’)

3 Metal Teeth

2 Ivory Tusks (4” each)

2 Venom Sacs

4 Chitin Scraps

1 Spider Silk Strand (24’)

2 Silver Coins

2 Copper Coins

1 Pouch of Dust (Unknown)

1 Crude Iron Dagger

1 Crude Reed Blowgun

3 Coated Darts (Unknown)

1 Crude Maplewood Short Bow (Broken Upper Limb)

2 Horrible Bone-tipped Arrows

1 Water Skin (Empty)

1/2 Piece Dried Venison

30 Fireberries

1 Sturdy Vine (12’)

She was particularly pleased with the Prismatic Shards, which would be useful for higher-level crafting, or as high priced sales to magic-users, and the Obsidian Shards, which could be crafted into higher-quality arrowheads than basic stone allowed.

She mentally swept the entire pile into her Inventory. She’d have to try to show her Dad that loot collection shortcut. Someday.

“There it is!” Her father’s jubilant cry drew Reeve out of her UI. “I am gettin’ the hang of this, Evie!”

“Good thing too, Dad, because we’ll give you some new challenges after you tell me your Class. It’s near the top of your Stats block.”

Walter nodded and focused his attention. For a moment he moved his lips silently, tentatively. Then he moved them again more confidently. Then he said, “Apiculturist.”

“App-a-culture-what?”

“Apiculturist. That’s my class.”

“What is an apiculturist?”

“An apiculturist is a farmer who keeps bees for their honey—ooh!” Walter clapped his hand over his mouth, then removed it as though he were afraid something might emerge unbidden. “How did I know that?”

“You are a beekeeper? You chose ‘beekeeper’ as your class? You don’t like bees! You are afraid of bees!”

“You said it didn’t matter—“

“—because we’d only be in the game for a few minutes, I know, I know. Oh no, no, no, no…I may be stuck in here for months with a beekeeper halfling?” Reeve picked up her naginata and pressed the pole hard against her forehead. “What is your Secondary Class?” Her father wrinkled his nose. “It’s right under your Class. You get to choose a Primary Class and a Secondary Class. I’m a Ranger with an Archer secondary. Please, please, please tell me it’s something useful.”

Walter nodded and his eyes did a random walk over the unseen Stat block.

“Oh, yes, here it is. You’ll be relieved. It’s very useful. Could help someone in just about any profession. Even I know that.”

“Good.”

“I’m also an Accountant.”

“W-w-why? Why? Why are you an accountant beekeeper?”

“Both were right at the top of the list. ‘Apiculturist’ and ‘Accountant.’ I just chose a couple of the first things I saw. Didn’t really pay attention.”

Reeve lowered the naginata’s pole so that she could bite down on it. She stopped when the wood began making splintering sounds. She removed the tooth-marked pole from her mouth. “Know what? Doesn’t matter. It’s not like you having an appropriate Class was going to make this a lot easier. And…if we can get you leveled up some, you’ll be better prepared to handle the basic dangers of the game anyway, OK?”

“You also wanted to go over the rest of my Stats?”

“I can’t…I can’t right now. We’ll look later. Here.” Reeve withdrew the Crude Iron Dagger and the 1/2 Piece Dried Venison from her Inventory and handed them to him. “There’s the venison you always wanted. Stick it and one of the wooden knives in your Inventory and add the dagger to your waist.”

Her father rose and faced her, his reverent gaze on the venison. Taking both items, he swung the venison back and deposited it in his Inventory. Taking one of the wooden knives from his waist, he swung it back behind him and slid the iron dagger into his waistband.

Reeve watched the wooden knife land on the ground a few yards behind her beaming father.

“Great, Dad. You’re killing it. Pick up your wooden dagger, it didn’t make it to Inventory, and then we’ll see if you can kill some monsters.”