The fog over the top of the city (or what little of it he was able to explore without the loop kicking in) had darkened considerably, and even though he had covered the window in a layer or anti-shatter coating, enchanted metal bars and Yggdrasil wood boards (in that exact order), he could still see a little bit outside. The darkening skies led to darkening streets, which were slowly illuminated against the growing night by streetlamps that went from emitting a dull glow to… a slightly less dull glow. But that wasn’t all that added to the creep factor.

As darkness descended, so too did the fog that was over everything, slinking down in what seemed to be purposefully moving tendrils that wrapped around the streetlamps, lowering the illumination they provided to a level that would see even the most stubborn of maintenance workers decide that it wasn’t worth the potential lawsuit and/ or OSHA fine to let the light be that low.

For those of you readers who don’t get that reference, then basically the fog was making the ambient lighting low enough that it would almost certainly lead to lawsuits and Government Safety Regulation fines. If your country’s government doesn’t have that power, then you probably live in a place with sweatshops.

As it had done when he had first arrived in this weird city, the fog tried to worm its way into the area around him. The vapor seemingly had a will of its own, and Vaile had prepared for it. The windows were protected in the way stated above, the door was blocked by no fewer than five different barriers as well as a few holy icons that he had picked up over the course of his play time (things like crosses, stars of David, etc.), because while he wasn’t sure if they had any power, he was going to use anything and everything in his arsenal.

And, if all of that wasn’t enough, the walls were plastered with wards, runes, enchanted and blessed pictures, and posters, and the base of all of that was ringed internally by a metric fuckton of various relics and statues. Hell, he had even busted out a few old tomes that he had just collecting dust in his item box and drawn some rather gnarly occult symbols all over the floor and the walls. Not in his own blood, of course. He wasn’t interested in accidentally empowering whatever spooky bullshit was going on in this place, so using blood, excrement, or anything else that one might use in such rituals was right out.

And, as he held his breath and waited for something to inevitably go horrifically wrong, he was pleasantly surprised when the ‘living’ tendrils of fog seemed to be actually quite peeved that they couldn’t get into the room. Inside of him, there was a hell of a battle going on as part of him wanted to get up and mock the fog and another screamed at that first part that doing so was one of the dumbest things someone can do in a situation like this. Eventually, the latter part of him won out, and Vaile continued to sit inside the middle of the room on top of a spell circle while covered head-to-toe in his full outfit (mask included). He said nothing, he barely even moved, and he tried desperately to pay absolutely no mind to the fact that it sounded like every Counter-Terrorism Unit from every nation on Earth was trying to smash down the door all at once.

In the beginning, the knocking on the door had been rather nice and soft. The appeals from the barmaid that he had gotten the key to his room from quickly began to turn rather dark and the knocking on the door turned to banging and then finally to a sound akin to someone trying to perform Riverdance but with jackhammers instead of shoes and on a door rather than a stage. And, as if the sound of what was trying to pass off as a sustained aerial carpet-bombing raid by tens of thousands of bombers wasn’t bad enough, the barmaid’s appeals had shifted as well.

Gone were the calm and collected and downright cheerful requests to come down for some ‘fun’ or the questions about his well-being. After those failed to get a response and after the fog began to get rather annoyed with its inability to enter his room, the barmaid’s tone took a turn for the worse. After the charm didn’t work, next came some rather crass language, which was followed shortly thereafter by a mix of incoherent, Banshee-like screeching and absurdly creative cursing that would make both a Karen and a Sailor look like rank amateurs by comparison.

Despite all of that happening, Vaile stayed seated in the dead center of a roughly two-meter-wide circle around him. He said nothing for the entirety of that time, silently and internally screaming about how he would probably have just gotten up and smashed his way to safety by now if he still could use his busted as fuck stats. He was nearly pissing himself scared, if for no other reason than because, for the first time in a very, very long time, he was stuck as a nobody with no real power in a situation where he was quite possibly going to die without it. And by ‘it’ I mean his broken as fuck End-Game MMO Player stats and such, of course.

And so, for what felt to him like a solid five days but was actually just a mere two hours, he sat in silence as a growing number of people screamed and cussed him out for not opening the door while actively trying to break it down. Under his mask, his face was locked in a smile even though his eyes were showing his true feelings, which boiled down to a message of “please, dear god, fucking end this fucking nightmare right the fuck now”.

Well, at least the crazy people outside hadn’t had the bright idea to set everything on fire to smoke him out. And, after two hours had passed and the fog and the people outside stopped trying to get in, the stress and general exhaustion finally caught up with our hero and he found himself passing out in a seated position. Thankfully, he would not need to worry about anything else for the rest of the night and could finally get some well-deserved rest.

No, seriously, he could, and he did.

What? Did you really think I wouldn’t throw the poor man a bone? Jeez, I may be cruel to the people in my novels, but I’m not that evil.

Well, maybe I am, but not right now.

Not yet, anyway….