But the players had already missed their opportunity.

With a great grunt, Bui stood up.

Bui’s previous irritation with Bono was nothing compared to the wrath that now controlled her.

She uprooted a tree from the ground and began to hit the players with it like she was playing hockey, sending them flying in all directions. Some of the players tried to flee. But Bui was too fast for them. No one escaped.

“There!” Bono cried, drawing Bui’s attention to Sam who was trying to steal away without being noticed.

Bui pounced on Sam. My heart somersaulted in my chest seeing my brother in danger. I had to interfere.

“Now where are you going?” Bui asked Sam, squeezing him between her thumb and her index finger.

“Please let me go…” Sam gasped, squinting his eyes out of agony, “ Don’t you remember? I am the brother of your king!”

“Brother of my king?” Bui said, making a silly expression. “What kind of rubbish is that? We live free!”

“I say tear out his arms and legs one by one,” Bono suggested.

“Stop it!” I shouted. “Stop it!”

Hearing my voice everyone turned towards me.

“Vicky!” Sam cried in joy. He looked like a kid being bullied by his peers when daddy–me– had shown up. “Ask them to put me down! … Look there is your king, or have you forgotten even him?” he added to the stone couple.

“Put him down! Now!” I ordered with all the authority I could. “Bono and Bui, I am talking to you,” I added, for the two of them had frozen on seeing me. The mention of their names injected some life into them. Bono placed Sam on the ground, almost like a schoolgirl surrendering a prohibited object to the headmaster. Sam scampered to me.

“What is wrong with you?” I said to Bono and Bui, as Sam straightened his clothes.

“How do you know our names?” Bui asked. “And who are you? Why do I feel like I have met you… long ago?”

Like the zombies, Bono and Bui too had lost the ability to recall pre-timebomb memories.

“Come on, you cannot forget me,” I said to them.

“Psst…” Bono whispered to his wife, “I have a feeling in my guts that we should get away from here.”

Even though her husband didn’t have any guts to begin with, Bui heeded Bono. She began to back away.

“Wait,” I said, as they were leaving, “Have you really forgotten who I am?”

My words were completely ignored. Bui hurriedly moved away. I could hear her tenderly muttering to her ‘darling’ husband if he had injured his teeth while pulling out the hook. Well, on the bright side, the intrusion of the players had put a balm on the stone couple’s quarrel, though how long the soothing effect would last was debatable.

“They do not remember,” Sam commented. “They remember nothing. I have lost a couple of lives because I didn’t shield myself against monsters, thinking that they wouldn’t harm me ”

I nodded, as the vegetation finally blocked Bui from view.

“It’s not really their fault,” I said.

“Where have you been all these days?” Sam asked me. “Kiara calls me often. She says that the last time she met you were going to get the tears of a dragon, and she is worried like mad something happened to you.”

“Well, I did get the dragon tears,” I said to him. “But some other things went wrong and I was unconscious for five days.”

“Five days?” Sam raised his brows.

“Yup,” I replied. I related my escape from the island of the sirens and told him about my continuously changing affinities.

Sam frowned at me.

“You are right,” he said, pouting his lips like a concerned diva, “but how’s this happening?”

I shrugged.

“I guess the same way other things happen to me,” I said, flashing my front large incisors in a silly way. “And an important thing. I lost my pouch of gold dust. That is the reason why I haven’t contacted Kiara after I regained consciousness. Can you tell this to her? Can you ask her not to worry?”

“Gah! You lost the gold dust? Where?”

“If I knew I would get it back.”

“Okay, I will tell Kiara about that. But how did you find the settlement?”

“What settlement?” I asked curiously. I had definitely not found any settlement as far as I knew.

“The settlement of the players,” Sam said. He stuck out his finger in one direction. Through the gaps in between trees, I made out a reddish brown structure, made of bricks, that seemed to stretch quite a long way. A wall?

Sam confirmed this.

“That’s the wall of the settlement,” he said. “The players and the helpers built it after they were chased out of the town.”

“I followed some elves who had captured a siren,” I said.

“The elf king had asked for sirens to be captured. Though nobody has had any luck doing that so far”

“Well, there were four in the group and the siren ate three of them,” I said. “I followed the one elf who survived.”

“That’s not surprising,” Sam said. “It is idiotic to think anyone can catch those sirens posing as nubile females.” Sam suddenly grinned in a guilty-but-not-guilty way. “I lost one life to a siren too. That was pretty bad. I went in search of the old town of the players so that I could find you, but instead I found the sea… and there was this pretty wench on the shore…” Sam sighed in a wistful manner. “If only she had been more interested in me than in chewing my meat!”

“Why were you all trying to catch Bono and Bui?” I asked Sam.

“Well, the elf king is planning a big ritual,” Sam replied. “Three days from now. Says he is going to get back the players what is rightfully theirs. He has had enough living in this shitty place, hardly anymore than a slum. He is getting eviluns captured for this ritual. Everyone is participating in this ritual, lending a helping hand. Now, I don’t want any part in it. I don’t want the players to snatch the town from you—”

“The town is no longer mine anyway,” I said.

“Oh, well, right,” Sam said. “Kiara said that to me… I guess the elf king is doing the ritual in oblivion. But the point is that he is doing it, and we were asked to capture a stone giant. Now I didn’t know that the stone giant would turn out to be Bono and Bui… But I guess it doesn’t really matter, because they remember absolutely nothing. They didn’t even recognize you! Though I guess in some hidden corner of their rock brains they still know you, otherwise they wouldn’t have let me go when you ordered them.”

“Earlier I saw flying mantures,” I said, “one of them was an evilun and the others were neutral. Do you have any idea from where the neutral ones are getting their evilese? It would be good if I could have some evilese, it might stabilize my affinity. Have you come across any farms of evil crops recently?”

Sam shook his head.

“I haven’t,” he replied. “All this is creating a problem for the players though. The players do not kill, or expect to be killed by the neutral monsters. The eviluns are exploiting this to the fullest.”

“Bono and Bui were eviluns?” I asked. I had not checked myself.

“They are. That’s why the players wanted to capture them,” Sam said.

“I think you should return to the real world now,” I said to Sam. “Get Kiara on the phone and tell her I am okay. I don’t want her having a nervous breakdown thinking the dragons turned me into toast.”

“And what about you?” Sam asked.

I thought quickly about it.

“Obviously I can’t go to the settlement of the players with you,” I said to him.

“But I can’t just leave you in this forest alone,” Sam said.

“So you are worrying about me now?” I laughed, kicking at a clump of grass. “I have fought with dragons, escaped sirens, and even journeyed all the way through this forest to reach you. I will be alright.”

“Are you sure?” Sam placed his hand on my shoulder and stared at my face thoughtfully, reluctant to abandon me in the middle of nowhere. A fly settled on his forehead and began rubbing its legs together.

I nodded.

“Besides,” I said, and chased away the fly with a puff of air from my mouth. “I made a wish… Let’s see how fate grants me that wish, if it is going to anyway— or else I am going to wander this game world for the rest of my life, which is not really bad to be honest. It’s free living, no nine to five worries!”

“What kind of wish?” Sam asked me. He titled his head back, guessing what it could be. “To go back to the real world?”

“With a new pair of legs, of course,” I told him.

Sam hugged me. I urged him to go, for Kiara’s sake. I watched as Sam made his way towards the wall, away from me.