I reached the next ledge down, and stopped to cast Rock Tumble twice more, forming another arrow of churned earth.

  “Why are you doing that?” Dave said quietly.

  “It’s just in case.”

  “Just in case what?”

  I didn’t answer him. I just dropped down to the next pool, the one glowing with a darker royal blue color. Oneiric magic—Lore’s favorite. The things my brother could do with this stuff… maybe I should have chosen it, but then again, I highly doubted I’d ever be able to be as awesome with the Aspect as Lore had been.

  As he is. Not “had been.” Is.

  I strode past the blue pool. The water in this pool was different—they all were different, in their way—in that it was full of shimmering blue lines, which traced the currents and undulations of the water. It looked like the water was made from a net of light, and that’s what made it glow. The NPCs, who looked like they’d been snatched from an old folks’ home, didn’t acknowledge me. I had already chosen my Aspect, so there was no sense in getting me to choose theirs.

  I Rock Tumbled another arrow, then descended halfway down the next rock face. The Astral pool gleamed and swirled on the final ledge below me. This one was full of clear water, too, but the bottom of the pool was made of glowing amethyst, making it appear violet.

  The pool’s NPC woman looked like a basketball player. She was six feet tall, at the least, and the man beside her had the misfortune to be so short that I could barely see him in her shadow. I blinked and stopped climbing when I saw that they were holding hands beneath the water. The woman appeared to be quivering slightly.

  What the hells?

  Fuck You Dave: They don’t always get full control of the mind. Sometimes, the natives have resistance to qubins. She’s probably partially aware of what’s happening to her.

  I swallowed thickly.

  Remnant: But why are they holding hands?

  Fuck You Dave: Why do you think? They are probably coupled. The Conduit choose people to populate NPCs at random, but they often choose in groups if a particular game area calls for a group. That’s why you got all those Tendua from the same commune. Those old people at the last pool were probably the same.

  I shivered. Had all the people in these pools been together? And the Conduit was here making them flirt with Hunters? It was another level of degradation that I had trouble setting aside. I faced the rock wall and dropped down, landing hard enough to hurt myself. The pain was the only thing keeping me sane in that moment.

  Without turning around to look at the pool, I started walking, this time up the path, toward the switchback that would return us to the Oneiric pool.

  “Where are you going?” Dave asked. He held out a wing to indicate the bottom of the cliff face. “Aren’t we going that way?”

  “That leads to the next Curve,” I said, pausing. I pointed out over the cliff, which was more like a ravine. Another cliff rose opposite us, with a path leading up and out. “That path is guarded by a boss. You have to defeat her to get to the next area.”

  Apparently, reaching the next area was not the goal of Trash Planet. Killing Bridget was the goal. So even if we defeated the boss, I was pretty sure we couldn’t go past her.

  “We should kill her for the experience, at least,” Dave said.

  “We can try, but she’s pretty high-level, even for us. I also want to check the Slain Crags for those lost Celeste women. If I remember right, they drop a really good weapon. And the Slain Crags entrance is this way.”

  “Right. Bridget went this way. We can’t let her get the weapon.”

  I nodded. She might not know about the quest yet, but it seemed likely. The Celeste woman back at the gate was a chatty one.

  We were now coming upon the first and only side path leading off the mountainside. A boulder marked the fork in the path, and an ancient woman sat behind it. In the game, Wapum the Watchmaker had looked vaguely Native American, and she wore spectacles. Now she was a hot blonde in Oakleys, but her long dragonscale cloak was the same .

  “Go away,” she said in a monotone that gave me the creeps. It was in the delivery, not the words themselves.

  “Is she… is she a boss?” Dave said.

  Above the woman’s head was her name and title, as well as the level 99, and the whole thing was in red. Red was only used to indicate bosses.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “She’s an oddity,” I said. “She’s a boss, yeah, but no one has ever figured out how to aggro her. And she’s indestructible, so you can’t damage her.”

  “You mean, you can Rock Tumble her, and she won’t care?”

  I did it, stomping the ground and ripping up the earth underneath the blond woman. She didn’t even shift slightly to one side. The ground around her feet remained flat in a perfect circle, as if she had an invisible shield.

  “Huh,” Dave said, hopping off my shoulder. He waddled up to the boulder, looking up the face of it. Because the boulder looked somewhat like a desk, he looked as if he meant to ask for the manager.

  I leaned over the big rock, triggering proximity.

  “And if you see old Horatio,” Wapum said, “tell him I said hi.”

  “Will do,” I told her.

  “Who’s Horatio?” said Dave’s voice by my feet.

  “He’s a boss you find later in the game.”

  “You’re not going away,” Wapum said in her eerie, toneless voice. “What do you want?”

  “How about a giraffe made of jelly beans?” I said.

  “Well, I don’t know about that. But I do know a thing or two about Aspects. I could tell you a secret, if you promise to leave me alone afterwards.”

  These were all programmed lines. What a player actually said rarely mattered to NPCs. They would proceed along a pre-set route of voice lines so long as the player kept talking to them.

  “I really wanted that giraffe, though,” I told her.

  She leaned closer. “So you see that ring around your mana gauge?” she said. “The one that looks like the armor ring around your health gauge? That there is called a Depth gauge. You fill it up every time you use a spell or defeat an enemy.”

  The blonde paused for effect, and to wait for acknowledgment. I heard the soft twip twip of pecking near my feet.

  “What are you dong down there?” I asked him. “Making another weird mural?”

  The question triggered Wapum to proceed with her tutorial. She raised a finger, pointing toward the mana orb on my HUD, which did indeed have a ring around it, just like the health bar did.

  “Once that Depth gauge fills up, you can cast a spell from your Depth slot at double power,” she said. “You’ll unlock a Depth slot at level 20. Just put any old spell in there and if you cast it when the Depth ring is full, it’ll come out at double power. If the spell causes an effect instead of damage, the effect will double in effectiveness or range, or both. It differs with every spell.”

  “There’s something here,” Dave said as Wapum finished. “I found a hole, and something is glowing inside.”

  I knelt down beside him, my eyebrows knitting together. “What?”

  This triggered Wapum to reiterate that I needed to go away, but I ignored her. Dave had pecked a little hole in the rock, and it did seem to be glowing from the other side. The light was a faint red, and it pulsed.

  “I’ve never seen that before,” I said.

  “Can you Rock Tumble to get it out?” Dave asked.

  “No. Some environmental objects can’t be affected, usually when they’re related to an NPC. I’ll try though.” I grabbed Dave and stomped.

  It was no use. “Set me down again. I can widen the hole,” Dave said.

  I obliged, then blinked as I realized the incongruity. “Wait. The rock should be impervious to damage, even pecking. Yet you’re making a hole in it?”

  “I’m told I have a very skilled mouth,” Dave said, his voice muffled. He’d made the hole large enough to fit his head through.

  “Do you think you can make the hole big enough for me to grab whatever’s inside?” I asked.

  “I think it’s some kind of metal box. A machine. Has knobs on it,” Dave said. “There’s a blinking red light.”

  I stiffened. “Is there a timer?”

  “No.”

  Okay. Not some kind of random bomb then. I hoped.

  Dave pulled his head out. “I can’t make the hole bigger. The indestructibility only allows it to get this wide. I think it’s a secret.”

  I doubted Bridget had the power to affect a game object to make it only selectively indestructible, so I was inclined to agree.

  “It’s out of your reach, then?” I asked, deflating. “Maybe we can find something to stick inside the hole and pull it out—”

  “I can get it,” Dave interrupted me. He looked up, meeting my eyes. “But you have to turn around.”

  “What? Why?”

  “I will be in an embarrassing position.”

  I smiled with half my mouth. “You’re tenning.”

  “Very embarrassing. I don’t want your optical cameras picking it up. I’ll never be able to show my face at a stranger’s wedding again.”

  “A stranger’s…?”

  “Good source of desperate bridesmaids,” he explained.

  This was getting out of hand. I shrugged and turned around. “There. That better?”

  “Yes. Now don’t look. I’m—I’m fucking serious, Talon. Don’t look.”

  I had just turned half-around. I faced away again. He really was serious.

  “Is the bridesmaid circuit that good?” I asked. He didn’t answer. I heard a very quiet scraping sound, like a snake scuffing over sandy rock. Then, grunting.

  “Bloody… thing…” Dave said. His voice was muted again. He must have gotten inside the hole.

  “Need help?”

  “No. I’m just trying not to press any buttons.”

  “It has buttons?”

  “Shut up. I’m working on it.”

  I shrugged and stomped out another Rock Tumble for the use points. I wondered if I should jog in place to improve my Running skill, or do jumping jacks to improve Jump. Sitting still didn’t really jive with me. If I scanned the area, and just looked at it really, really hard, would my Insight skill improve? Or would it only get better if I actually found magic traces? How was all that supposed to wor—

  Something bumped my leg. “Got it,” Dave said. “You can turn around.”

  I did. Dave stood again at my feet, this time with a tiny metal box on the ground next to him. I crouched down to look at its name, which was in white. White was only used for really low-value items, and the text was small. It had effectively been hidden inside the boulder.

  It read:

  Teleportation Device (White Grade)

  Amulet.

  Broken.

  I relayed this to Dave. “But what’s it do?” he asked.

  “You can’t tell what broken items do until you repair them,” I said, eyeing the hole. How in the hells did Dave fit through there? It was barely the size of a golf ball.

  “Well, pack it up,” he said. “It’ll obviously be worth something if we can fix it.”

  He added, in a Whisper,

  Fuck You Dave: You sure you’ve never seen or heard of it before? From the real game?

  Remnant: I’m sure. And my brother would have told me about it if he knew. He knows about all kinds of weird game lore and Easter eggs.

  Fuck You Dave: What do eggs have to do with anything? Do you think it relates to Wapum being a boss?

  I stood, dropping the device into my inventory. I opened my mouth to speak to Wapum again.

  I stopped.

  The clockmaker was gone—and in her place was a woman ten times her size, one bare foot on the boulder like it was a footstool. Her leather clothes had turned to scintillating violet robes, and the air around her rippled, as if with heat. The words Level 99 still hovered in red above her head, but they were a lot more menacing now.

  “You dare,” she hissed, “to steal from me?”

  “I think we figured out how to aggro her,” Dave said.

  Then he took flight, and left me alone.