“Tell me again why you’re wearing that?” Reeve looked over her shoulder at her father as he followed her along the forest path. With one hand, Walter was adjusting the way the gossamer mesh of the bee veil fell from the helmet to lay about his shoulders. With the other, he was absentmindedly pumping smoke from the bee smoker. The only positive Reeve could see was that the bee veil was the right size for her halfling father.

“It seems like I should learn my craft—“

“—craft?”

“—in case it comes in handy, if we run into bees...or mosquitos, or moths, black flies, small fairies…” Walter’s face had a sheen when viewed through the veil. “I’ve gotten an idea of how the smoker works. It seemed like it was about time for the veil.”

Reeve continued to follow the signs left by her mother while thinking there didn’t seem to be much ‘craft’ involved in a piece of apparel that you put on your head and then left alone. At a washed-out section of the path, she stopped and squatted where her mother’s barefoot prints were more obvious. Why had her mother kept walking for so long, she wondered. They were now miles from the clearing where the goblin had attacked. Walter’s miniature finger tapped Reeve on the shoulder. She turned to look into her father’s face, his veil almost brushing her nose and smoke floating up between them, a second veil. “I cannot believe—“

“Help me.” His words were so quiet Reeve was surprised they were able to penetrate his veil. Or the smoke.

“Dad, I don’t even know where to begin—“

“I don’t think this veil is going to offer much protection.” His voice was still a whisper, but now Reeve registered the tremble she’d missed in his first two words.

“I’m sure it doesn’t take much to keep bees away from—“

Walter’s gaze was not on Reeve’s face, and so when he reached his free hand to direct her own gaze, his palm pressed indiscriminately against her cheek and nose, gently but firmly turning her head toward the path ahead of them.

Reeve did not have to check her UI to know that the bowlegged beast baring its teeth at them was a Level 8 honey badger. Small eyes peered at them from a flat head. The broad body appeared alert but not overtly aggressive. The coarse hair of the upper body was entirely covered by a dirty white band from head to tail, while the hair of the rest of the creature was a deep black.

“Why is it here?” Reeve said, her tone the soothing one used in the presence of dogs that might not be friendly.

“I don’t know,” Walter said, his whisper the panicked one used in the presence of honey badgers that might want to eviscerate you, again.

Reeve turned on the balls of her feet and rose. She slowly twisted the naginata in her left hand so that she could take a two-handed defensive pose. “Take out your dagger and knife,” she said without moving her lips. Almost immediately she heard the sound of cloth landing in a heap.

“Oh, shoot.”

Reeve did not have to turn around to know that her father had just sliced his suspenders again. The honey badger, which was less than three yards away, displayed its teeth more generously.

“It doesn’t like that,” Reeve said.

“The knives? Or the pants thing?”

“The honey badger and I may be upset about different things, Dad, so I may not be the one to answer that question. But, if I had to guess, I’d say the blades.”

Reeve heard the sound of two objects landing in the brush twenty feet to their right. She took a breath. Then she decided another was in order. After the second, she found that she was just getting started. Almost a minute later, she said, “You could’ve just put them in your Inventory. You didn’t need to fling them.”

“Oh, right.”

“What’s going on in your UI? Anything useful?”

Reeve could not hear her father flinch when his UI swooped toward him, but she could hear his feet shuffle, each step only as long as the breeches around his ankles would allow, the shuffling becoming faster as her father’s lower body tried unsuccessfully to keep up with his upper body. She heard him land on his back with a grunt, and the corresponding clatter produced by the bee smoker was unmistakable and discouragingly familiar to her.

Reeve watched the honey badger.

The honey badger watched Walter.

Walter looked toward the sky as his eyes moved abruptly in one direction, then another, then back to the first, then, after only belatedly realizing they’d already been there, off in another direction. He began providing a quiet running commentary on his search of his UI. “Nothing in the Combat Log. Oh, those’re my Stats. We’ll look at those later. I can’t get out of my Stats. So many numbers here. Good thing I’m an Accountant, huh?” He chuckled. “How do I get— never mind, got it. Combat Log. Party Log. Why is it called a party? You’d think it’d be called—Oh, there’s Combat Log again. Companion Log. Log out.”

“Companion Log? You have a Companion Log now?”

“Yes, it’s right…shoot. Give me a second.”

Reeve watched the honey badger for almost three minutes. It remained planted on all fours. It ignored her and looked past her to her father.

“Right, Companion Log. Wow, there’s a lot here.”

“Just read the last few entries.”

Walter cleared his throat. “Having suffered no more unprovoked attacks at your hands, your intended non-anthophile Companion…you know, I wonder if that has to do with bees?”

“Maybe you’ll find out if you level your Beekeeper Skill.”

“My Apiculturists Skill?”

“Read.”

“Your non-anthophile Companion feels a growing impulse to keep you within her range of perception. Your path to gaining a Companion remains fraught with challenging pitfalls, but, together, you have taken the first step along that path.” Walter fell silent.

Reeve looked at the unmoving honey badger. “Are there any action options available in your Companion Log?”

“Options?”

“Can you communicate with it or give it instructions?”

“I don’t see anything like that here.”

“OK, the relationship must still be too weak. But, it sounds like it’s probably not here to kill you.”

“I certainly hope that’s the case.”

“What’s higher up in the log?”

“Ah…let’s see…hmmmm…goodness. Oh, dear. It looks like all the higher entries have to do with her killing things. Or eating things. Or killing then eating things…there are poisonous tree snakes?”

“Work out your pants situation. I’ll keep an eye on…does it, I mean she, have a name? It would be at the top of the Companion Log.”

“No, no I don’t see anything. Oh, it says ‘Unnamed Honey Badger.’”

“Can you change that by thinking about its name?”

Reeve counted to twenty-five before Walter said, “No, I don’t seem to be able to.”

“OK, we can try again later, but that may also be because of the weak bond.” She relaxed the position of her naginata, resting the butt of the pole on the ground.

The honey badger did not move.

Reeve became tired of counting and further relaxed her stance before her father announced that his pants were in ‘ship-shape.’

Walter tugged up on his pants and shrugged his shoulders to adjust the suspenders. “What do I do?”

“If she doesn’t want you walking on the path, I wouldn’t walk on the path. Try walking around her.”

Walter began tracing a semicircle around the honey badger. At his farthest point from the path, when he came even with her, the honey badger turned in place to face Reeve.

Reeve raised her eyebrows. “Time to go?”

The honey badger gave a sneezing snort and shook its head convulsively.

Reeve shook her head and turned to continue up the path, hearing the honey badger padding along a few yards behind her and hearing her father starting to make his way through the low underbrush off to her right, trying to match their pace.

“Oh!” Walter stopped and bent to examine the ground near his feet. “Found the knives!”

Keeping an eye on how close the honey badger was to her, Reeve resumed her tracking and, over several minutes, found more of her mother’s footprints, occasional disturbed rocks, and bent or flattened leaves or stalks. She paid loose attention to her dad, who had to hike as quickly as his spindly legs allowed to keep pace with Reeve and the honey badger.

Coming to a bowling ball-sized stone lying in the path, Reeve stepped around it and then stopped, the racket her father was causing as he fought through brush continuing for several seconds before it too stopped.

“Evie?”

Reeve squatted next to the stone, which she examined carefully, not noticing the approach of the honey badger until it began sniffing at the rock.

“Evie?” Reeve heard her father take a few steps toward her, then several steps back as the honey badger turned in his direction and emitted a low growl of a different quality. “What is it?” He said once behind an elm trunk.

“Mom’s not alone.”

“No?”

“She was joined here.”

“By whom?”

“A winged kobold.”

“The little thing with bows?”

“That was a pixie! You were killed by a pixie!”

“Are these cobalts friendlier?”

“Depends on the type. Most aren’t particularly friendly, and mine kobolds, which have a tendency to lug around rocks as weapons,” she rapped her knuckles on the stone in the middle of the path, “are nasty, particularly if their clan is under the sway of a malevolent creature.”

“Malevolent creature?”

“Like, a dragon.”

“There are dragons?!”

“That’s not the point.”

“But there are?”

“Yes, but—“

“And your mother found one of their little helpers? No wonder she wandered off and got lost.”

“She may not be lost, Dad, she may be captive.”

“Captive?” Walter shifted slightly, a fraction more of his body emerging from behind the elm. “But this is a game.”

“It’s a game, but that doesn’t mean that bad things can’t happen to you. That it can’t hurt. The goblin. The cliff.” She shook her head. “The pixie. It can be really scary in here. Really scary. The things we’ve run into so far are nothing compared to what’s out there. She’s not ready for that, so we need to get her out of here—both of you out of here—as soon as we can.”

Walter nervously adjusted the position of his hands where they held the trunk that shielded him. “If it can be that scary in here, Evie, why do you like it so much?”

“What?” Reeve stood. “Are you crazy? Like it’s not scarier out there?”

Walter looked at her, concerned.

“What am I supposed to be excited about out there? Never being able to do all the things I want to do physically? And when I’m older? Best case scenario is I can get a Computer Science degree and go to work at a VR company so that I can help create worlds that I and everyone else can use to escape reality. No one knows what the real world will be like in one year, or five years, or ten. That’s like, my whole life. The climate’s crazy, and most countries may be carbon negative now, but it’ll be, what, a thousand years before things are like they were when you were a kid? So, what do I have to look forward to? Fires? Power outages? Floods? Hurricanes? Droughts?”

“Well—“

“And that’s not even including all the things humans may do to each other. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but a lot of humans are horrible. Cyberattacks. Nuclear attacks. Civil wars. Ohmagod. Do you know what it’s like having all that as one of the more likely futures to look forward to?” Reeve stared at her father. “ I may get hurt in here sometimes. Hurt bad. And I’ve lost friends. And people have been mean to me. All that stuff. But it’s a world I chose. Not a world someone chose for me. Or, more accurately, a world someone screwed up and then dumped on me.” Tired, tired of the conversation, tired of her dad not getting it, just tired, Reeve puffed her cheeks and slowly blew air out tight lips. “Come on. Let’s go find mom and get you two back to your beloved real world.”