“What was that?”

Alex looked at me out of the corner of her eye, sitting in the passenger seat of my car as we headed to school. I’d thought that her inviting Hasanat with us had been some sort of ploy that I hadn’t had the wherewithal to understand, but Alex hadn’t exactly done much with the opportunity, just asked us a few questions and accidentally got us talking about our high school marching band days, which had led into topic after topic. Hasanat and I had been friends for ages, and it had been all too easy to leave Alex out when she hadn’t made an effort to be included in the conversation.

“What was what? I don’t really know what you’re talking about.”

I scoffed. “That conversation. I thought there was a reason you brought her with us?”

I could hear her take a breath, leaving a long pause in the air. “There was, but it’s complicated.”

“I’m… kinda emulating you in dealing with Vegas.” I said.

She rolled her fingers against the door, just under the window, a few times, and for a minute I thought that she hadn’t understood what I was getting at, but she spoke before I could figure out how to continue. “Three parts. One, she was genuinely bothered by the idea that I’d slept with you. A little strange, because she didn’t mind nearly as much with some of her less-close friends, but that’s maybe to be expected. A little bit not, because with them I was trying to have an actual relationship, which seems to me like a whole lot more worth being bothered about, but whatever. Poking at that when I knew the behavior would bother her was insensitive, and that part was genuine apology.

“Two was a little complicated. Backing out of the conversation like I did is usually seen as ‘ceding ground’, in a way, if she’s interested in you as something other than a friend. She knows that I’m poly and that I usually encourage my partners to have other partners, so I think it’s kinda dumb to begin with. But a lot of… monogamous people tend to find that display of submission to be reassuring, and it costs me nothing but the opportunity to have a conversation with you– something we have plenty of other times to have.”

I interjected there. “We’re not dating, though?”

“I know that. It’s not about the truth, it’s about the image she had in her head– among other things, I don’t actually do one-night-stands anymore.”

I felt my eyes narrowing slightly. “All of this assuming she’s interested in me.”

I could hear her shrug, next to me. “It’s a reasonable assumption, but it could just as easily be friend-jealousy. Which, fundamentally, doesn’t change the ideas at play– making a show at lesser ‘status’ is a decent way to deal with what she was feeling at the time. If and or when we hang out more, I would engage with your conversation a little bit more, steer it in the directions we all share instead of the ones that just you two do.”

I felt a twinge of something strange and had to chase down and corner the thought in my head before I put it together. “Wait, hold on, you did that on purpose?”

“Yes?” Alex asked, seeming confused.

I didn’t really have a response to that except to file it under ‘Learn to be more subtle, Ell’ and move on. “And the third thing?”

“I’m not really comfortable being the center of attention, so I was trying to shed that.”

I had to control my reaction to that, but I was certain that she’d at least caught some of it before I managed it. Her? Not wanting to be the center of attention? It sounded insane– at first. But it lined up with the things I’d been learning and recontextualizing around her.

Still… “Being the center of attention is kinda the whole point of what I’m doing, though.”

Alex turned to me, a stiff half-smile on her face. “Emulating me is pretty good at that.”

I thought about it for a second, but I was completely lost. “I… Can you explain that a little?”

“If you’re going to be paid attention to either way, it’s better if it’s for good– or at least impressive– things, than it is if it’s for bad ones.”

“And if nobody does pay attention to you?”

There was another long period of silence. “If no one pays attention… I don’t know. I’ll let you know if it ever happens.”

After class, I was fairly quick to get back into the game, loading in to the city Deyana had been in first and immediately heading towards the teleportation station, picking up another disguise on the way. It wasn’t my best field, but I had had some practice pretending to be other people.

It would have been much more convenient to teleport invisibly, but I knew perfectly well that the NPC security measures around it would likely make that even more conspicuous than just walking in as myself. While I had thought about it, Alex and I had decided against using any of her three remaining uses of |Merge|­– all of which we had placed together– on items designed around sneaking. Instead, we’d put them on the barrel of a rifle and on the inside of an armor plate in addition to the orb, trying to give me the ability to make something of a variety of items without explicitly making it clear that we’d prepared them in advance.

Once I’d cleared the teleportation room, I made quick time towards a shop, quickly changing out of my disguise and leaving it as though I’d just appeared there from a login, spending another quarter-hour looking around as though sightseeing. The city was impressive enough to be worth that in reality, let alone an alternative where the laws of physics could be overcome by a single bored worker on the equivalent of minimum wage, but I was able to catch what I was looking for within the first five– they’d assigned the tails.

It was still a couple of hours before I was supposed to meet with anyone, but that was part of the point. Alex had pointed out that I needed to make my presence seem more realistic, particularly in wandering around, to help the cover story. Someone genuinely interested in moving to the area would be interested in the sights first, then the area generally, instead of being bound up in guild dealings exclusively. While that didn’t match up with my personal experience much, hindsight made that seem more than a little strange. I’d seen plenty of people move to the area, and almost every single one of them had gone through a similar process.

Finally, I was able to push past the guild recruiters outside the Runewriters’ Guild, rent a room, and cut myself off from the public.

"Honestly, you almost had me.”

The voice was sweet, as casual a statement as I’d ever heard, and also coming from inside the room I’d rented. I spun to face it, aware even as I did that I wouldn’t be able to actually fight its owner if she decided to solve the problem with violence.

“Joy. I didn’t expect you to be here.” Facing her didn’t exactly help much. She was wearing a dress cut so low she was almost spilling out of it, so short that sitting with one leg over the other threatened a flash of whatever was under it, and tight enough that I could see the thin line around her stomach where she clearly had a band under the dress in what must have been the outfit’s single concession to practicality. Not that I had any illusions about the scenario– I would have put money on it being the most heavily enchanted single piece of normal-looking clothing I’d ever seen actually worn.

She smiled, and I found myself instantly running through exactly why she was such a huge threat to me again in a vain attempt to keep my guard up. “You didn’t have any reason to.”

I leaned back onto the main table, putting one hand behind my back and summoning my bound PvP knife to it. It wasn’t likely to do much if it came to a fight, given the level difference between the two of us, but I didn’t want to go out without fighting back at all. “I wouldn’t say no reason. I’m honestly a little surprised there were only four tails.” I’d only seen three, but it was probably safe to assume I hadn’t seen whichever one Luck’s Shadow sent.

Joy laughed; a musical tinkling must have been rehearsed until it sounded spontaneous. “I’d hardly call it a tail. It was just a couple of good guesses off a tip and one bit of history.”

“I worked with Novsha; I’d hardly call that a guess.”

“Reasonable, I suppose. Ultimately what gave your game away, but reasonable.”

I hesitated, staring at her to very little avail in determining what exactly she thought they’d figured out. “What game would that be, exactly?”

“One of the classics.” Joy flipped her hand over where it was on the table next to her, lifting it slightly and summoning a cup, upside down on the table. “It usually is, with people who are new to this.”

Two more cups quickly joined the first on the table next to her, and she summoned a small ball in her hand– a show of intentional vulnerability so obvious that it couldn’t be anything but faked– I assumed that that all four items took, at most, two binds, with runes on the part of the cups that I couldn’t see. “Not that the woman behind Novsha is new to this. A little too experienced, or I wouldn’t have bothered to look so hard. The shell game is one of the classics, and everybody with a lick of sense knows that the ball gets tucked into the hand.”

She lifted the ball she held, looking me in the eyes as it disappeared between us, her grin shifting from an uncomplicated amusement to something verging on schadenfreude. “Assuming, of course, that we take it the way it’s clearly meant to be understood. Novsha is perfectly happy to, underneath the first cup, place three more.” She lifted the cup next to her, three copies of it appearing underneath, and placed it back down on top, forming a pyramid. “Underneath the second, the ball.” Joy lifted the second cup, showing the ball that had disappeared, “And under the third, nothing at all.” She lifted it, showing the empty table beneath.

Silence fell for a moment, her grin not faltering for a moment to my silence. Five seconds later, she shook her head. “But we live in a world of science and play in a world of magic. So instead…” she lifted the middle cup, showing the ball that had been there before, and ran her other hand underneath it… passing through the visible ball. Then, she picked up the third– the one that apparently hadn’t had anything under it– and tapped the bottom. A ball fell out, clacking against the table and rolling onto the ground. Joy leaned back, placing her hands at her sides again. “Of course, I’m simplifying somewhat. You might be the second cup in this analogy, but in the first you look like the hand.”

“If you’re going to do your grand reveal with all the guilds, thanks for the warning, I guess.”

She laughed, this time much less of that tinkling façade and much more obviously sinister “Oh, if I were going to do that, I would have just done so at the big meeting today. No, you and I are going to have a different agreement. Three favors for three favors– my favorite deal to make.”

I sighed. “And I supposed your first to me is not telling anyone that you think I don’t have the rune?”

She scoffed. “Hardly. That’s not a favor at all, given that– as things stand– you’d be perfectly able to string them along, balancing the guilds against each other for weeks with no problems whatsoever. No, our first trade of favors is that I buy some of the work you brought with you, give you the capital to actually develop during your time here, and you help me by– with a little encouragement from us, of course– doing the thing you came here to do in the first place.”

Joy suddenly swept her arm through the six cups on the table, throwing them all to the ground.

“You help me by making a mess.”