"This place is well huge," Noah remarked, gawping at the vaulted stone ceiling above them, and the numerous passageways that led out from it. “I’m lost already.”

  Alfie opened one of the heavy wooden doors, paled a bit at the racks of weaponry beyond it, and slammed the door closed. “Chezz, can you get your magic management powers to put signs up? And lock this fuckin’ door ‘til we figure out who we can trust with pointy objects.” He turned just in time to block Noah. “Not you. I’ve still got the scar from the last time we let you play darts.”

  Chezzo ignored the others’ antics and scratched an eyebrow as he thought.

  “Fortifications are, like, castles, right?” Chezzo wasn't expecting an answer.

  Chezzo stared distractedly at Alfie, walked up to the door he was standing in front of, and glanced inside. He tried the next door as well before returning to his menus.

  Alfie and Noah watched with increasing confusion as Chezzo tried the first door again, then nodded. By the time he had finished poking at the Fortifications menu, they were bouncing with impatience.

  Chezzo finally turned to his band-mates. “So, like. The ones who got into a proper troffie with those Theo-doo-ron-rons. We give them the pointy things and call them a garrison. Two garrisons. There’s barracks, so they’ll have somewhere to sleep.”

  “Didn’t think it’d be that easy,” Chezzo remarked. Alfie and Noah continued to look confused. “What should we call them? The Fists and the Boots?”

  “Call what?” asked Noah.

  “Have you found the kitchen yet? I’m starving," Alfie complained, ignoring the question entirely.

  “Better get on writing a song for it then,” Chezzo replied, while trying a different sort of menu.

  “There’s a kitchen,” Chezzo said, ignoring the problem of how to fit roughly three thousand people into one thousand beds.

  “But where?” whined Alfie. “Me stomach thinks me throat’s been cut!”

  Chezzo stopped reading, and switched the Minimap to On.

  “What the…?” Alfie and Noah both waved their hands in the air as if swatting at something.

  “I turned everybody’s minimap on,” Chezzo said, “which probably means there’s a big map we can open. Let me try some of these other settings.”

  “Something worked, the passages and doors have got labels now,” Alfie said.

  “Yeah, and you’ve got a label too,” Noah chuckled.

  Chezzo looked up at his full name, hovering over his head, above a horizontal bar that was mostly red with a thin sliver of green at one end.

  Alfie made a noise of dismay. “You turned the labels off!”

  “Fucking right,” said Chezzo, marching off with a grumpy expression. “Use your map instead. Canteen’s this way.”

  They found the canteen, full of rows and rows of identical plain tables lined with plain, uncomfortable-looking chairs. A large serving hatch at the far end overlooked a kitchen, with a service door to one side. There were people in the kitchen, clustered near the windows where it was lighter and warmer. Several of them looked up as the three band members arrived.

  "A’ight then? Want a brew?" asked a skinny guy in torn denims.

  "It's mingin', 'cause we couldn't get the water boiling," said an equally skinny girl who could have been a clone of the first guy. "We kept singing Polly put the kettle on," until it got pretty hot, but it's still mingin'.”

  “A brew sounds ace,” Chezzo said.

  “Is there any food?” Alfie started hunting through the cupboards.

  “Just these,” said the skinny girl, passing him a silver cube. “The box called it a Basic Food Unit.”

  Abandoning the cupboards, Alfie peeled the silver coating off the cube and gave the grey solid inside it a cautious nibble. He pulled a face and threw himself down into a chair, dragging a pen from one pocket and a crumpled piece of paper from another. “Fuck that, I’m writing something instead.”

  “I told them to sing Blade In The Forge,” said a guy in a t-shirt for another band. “Or just to get a real bird to actually do their job. But no, they wouldn’t. Just like their sort.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” demanded the skinny guy, passing Chezzo a mug of hot brown liquid. Chezzo gave the wrong-band-shirt guy a hard look.

  “Just what I said. Guys in skirts and makeup and long hair.” He waved a hand at the skinny girl. “No surprise he can’t make tea.”

  “My name is Sophie,” said the girl, sounding strained but keeping her voice steady.

  “Oh come on, nobody believes that,” Shirt Guy said mockingly. “You’ve got a real name. Oh boo hoo you don’t like that, well suck it, it’s your name. It’s who you are. You don’t get to choose.”

  Noah carefully took the mug out of Chezzo’s hand, and backed away...

  ??????