I took my breakfast burrito to go and we set off for the city gates. “With this new partnership, we should probably talk strategy and builds. As you know, my class isn't focused on anything in particular, but I can pick up any Skill. I know you focus on crafting, and you're not really built for combat, so tell me more about your build.”

“Well, I'm a level 20 Spirit Summoner."

“Wait,” I said, mouth still half filled with breakfast burrito. “You're 20th level, congrats.”

“Thanks, most of that came from crafting. I would probably be a lot higher level if I had spent my time adventuring.”

“Make sense,” I said, taking the last bite of my burrito and licking my fingers to get the last bits of guacamole off. “So, tell me more about your build. What exactly does a Spirit Summoner do?”

“Well, it's primarily a spell casting class. The problem is that it needs spirits in order to cast those spells and I don't have many spirits.”

“How do you get spirits?”

“You have to make a bond with a spirit, like make a pact with one. And I haven't made any pacts yet, I mean, except from the basic one you get starting out.”

“Why not?”

“Well, sorta because I've only been in really low level areas. You know, I did go on to the next town. Unfortunately because of my build I didn't do well there. Aalso, I didn't exactly do a full clear of the noob area my first time around, either. Really, I was trying to rush through this area and get to places where I can get the highest level materials possible.”

“What went wrong?”

“I kind of shot myself in the foot. You see, without making any pacts with spirits, I wasn't really able to develop my spell casting or summoning, and without those I wasn't really able to keep up at my level.”

“So you kind of got stranded.”

“Exactly. The Spirit Summoner class in general is supposed to be something that doesn't get particularly powerful until higher level. Unlike you, where you're all about Skills, I'm basically useless until I can make those pacts. So, it's all about discovering places where I could find spirits. When I make a pact with the spirit, I should have a huge leap forward in power. Until, eventually, everyone catches up and passes me. At that point I can find another spirit to make a pact with and I have another huge leap in power and so on and so forth.”

“That doesn’t seem balanced,” I said squinting a bit in thought.

“Well, the Sprit Summoner class is really meant to be fostered along by a guild and primarily focus on crafting with a couple of weird quirks that make it helpful in larger groups. Most folks take up potion brewing, or something else that is useful to a party, that also boosts solo survivability at low levels. My path doesn’t really do either until later levels.”

“Why did you pick it?”

“Money. You see, if I kill a monster with my spirits, then they're more likely to leave a magic essence or monster core, or some other magical material that I could use to craft or enchant. If I can get up in levels, I can sell what I make for a lot. If I could just get up to level 100 or so, then I would have no problem paying for everything my sister needs. Assuming the Gold to real world dollar exchange rate stays in my favor. The only problem is without summons I can't fight monsters, so I'm stuck just crafting with normal materials.”

“Okay, I see the problem.” We came to a crossroads with several paths leading in different directions. “The Abandoned Mine was good. Lots of opportunities to mine extra gems and things.”

“It’s pretty low level for me. And, besides, it doesn't sound like the kind of place where we would find spirits.”

“Where do you wanna go, then, if you don't think we should go to the Abandoned Mine? Like, are there any spirits in the noob areas that would actually benefit your class?”

“Well, there is the Haunted Graveyard.”

“The Haunted Graveyard?” I repeated skeptically. I could see the path to the graveyard, which meant that the game would let me go there. The problem was the sign was outlined in red, indicating it was high-level and likely lethal for me. “It's a little high-level isn't it?”

“Yeah, for you maybe. For me, it's pretty low level, although, again, I don't have very good attack abilities. It has a bunch of restless spirits and, from what I understand, some of the best opportunities to find a spirit in the noob zone.”

“All right, let's go.” I didn't want Argyle's excitement, or willingness to adventure to fade, so I didn't argue much further. Besides, he made good points.

Ten minutes later, we found ourselves at the giant rusted wrought-iron gates of the Haunted Cemetery. Moss and ivy climbed towering stone statues and ancient mausoleums loomed ominously.

“This is a bit more creepy than what I was expecting out of this game,” I said to Argyle.

“Yeah, it's really like Gothic and creepy.”

“Right, I almost feel like it was designed by some gothy teenager who really loved crows and spiders and things.”

“Definitely captures the overdone macabre vibe.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I love it. It's perfect. I feel like teenage me must have gone through a phase where this was absolutely everything to me. I feel like I should be wearing eyeliner and smoking cloves just standing here.”

“Oh, yeah?” said Argyle, looking at me sideways. “And just what kind of phase did teenage you go through?”

“I don't know, but I feel like teenage me would have loved this.”

We continued along the irregularly, cobblestoned path. Past ornate carved roses and ostentatious tombstones. I first realized that something was wrong when I had a sense of intense cold. I saw a shimmering translucent light blue aura pass through my leg. I immediately got a prompt.

“You have been frozen by a Specter. Your left leg is currently frozen. You have taken 10 damage. Your left leg will not be able to move for the next 15 seconds.”

“Argyle, there's a specter!” I yelled.

But Argyle was already on top of things. He was already drumming andchanting a series of nonsense.

I saw the blue aura condensing in front of me, looking something like a viper about to strike, when it seemed to pause and freeze in place. A red-ish halo of mist gathered around it and seemed to restrain it, until finally the halo started to consume some of the spectral energy and eventually the blue mist collapsed, consumed by the red halo. In its place was a tiny blue pebble on the ground

“Level two Specter Spirits Stone. This stone was created by slaying a specter using spirit magic and can be used to imbue spiritual energy into crafted items. Type: death attuned crafting item”

“Nice!” I said, handing the stone over to Argyle. “That wasn't too bad at all.”

“If you say so,” said Argyle. “My Mana pool is pretty small. I mostly put my points into Stamina for Crafting and Intelligence to learn new recipes. I'm not really built for sustained spell casting.”

“Well, what would happen if you restrained them and I attacked them?”

“Do you have any attacks that hit intangible creatures?”

“I don't think so,” I said. “Maybe it’ll take specific kinds of magical attacks to do damage to Ghosts, Specters, and other intangible entities?”

“Yeah, if your Skill doesn't say you can, you probably can’t.”

I looked at my hammer. Thinking about my Blunt Weapons and Golfing Skills. “Yeah, I've never really seen anyone golf intangible spirits before. It just doesn't seem like the sort of thing that would happen at Pebble Beach.”

A few minutes later, we came across a recently dug grave. In fact, it seemed to be a patch of several recently filled graves on either side of the path. As we walked by, skeletal hands reached out from the dirt. Bone-white fingers grasped onto the grey-green grass besides the graves. Skulls and rib cages soon fallowed as the undead pulled themselves out of the ground.

“It’s skeletons.” I yelled “Got anything for them?”

“Nope, this is all you,” said Argyle, looking at my hammer.

Looking at the skeletons, low to the ground, I thought I might have it.

“Fore!” I yelled, knocking a femur 50 feet away into the graveyard.

To my great horror and dismay, simply knocking a few bones away didn't stop the skeletons from pulling themselves out of the ground. Sure, they were missing those bones once they pulled themselves together. Their Health bar didn't appear until they fully emerged from the grave. Any

thing I did before then hadn't affected the rule for all heath. It was like the game didn't fully count them as present until their ground breaking animation was finished.

“Get out your drum,” I said to Argyle. He held it out and started his ridiculous ceremony to summon a wombat.

I started swinging wildly, but ultimately to no avail. We were surrounded by eight mostly-complete skeletons. Every time I knocked away a rib or a hip bone, the skeleton continued at us, mostly intact and only having taken partial damage. It was very disconcerting when I knocked the legs right out from under one of them, and it kept on crawling towards us.

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Argyle tried his best to defend us with his summons, but there were just too many. We were surrounded on all sides, when a pinkish-white glow surrounded me.

“You have been healed for 25 hit points.”

All of the undead seem to shrink away from the glow. I looked at my familiar floating over my shoulder. “What? What was that?!”

“Well, your Hit Points were low and I thought...” [This didn't make sense here, so I moved it below where it made more sense.]

“No, not that. What did it do to the skeletons?” Even now, they were reluctant to come close, instead just circling ominously.

“Since when has the little guy gotten any good at healing?” asked Argyle

“Since Finch leveled up. I even got a new Sub-Function. I’m supposed to heal you whenever you go below 75%. The healing is pretty good too, wouldn’t you say?” The skeletons were starting to get bold once more. One swiped at me with a piece of rusted metal fairly recognizable as a scimitar.

“You have been hit for 32 damage.”

“You have been healed for 23 hit points.” Again our attackers shrank back.

“The healing is great, but what happened with the undead?”

“I don't know. Think the undead are repelled by life magic,” said Argyle. “See if you can have your familiar heal the undead.”

“Fez, This is your moment. This is how you make Finch go for the hat upgrade. Can you heal the skeletons?”

“I did hear him, you know. Heal the Skeletons? That seems a little odd. But yeah, looks like I've got an option here to target undead. All right. Do you want to change my targeting preferences to target the undead?”

“Yes!” Argyle and I said together.

“All right. Seems a little counterintuitive to heal your enemies, but okay. Let's do it.” Fez fluttered forward and waved his star wand at the nearest skeleton. Pink and purple glitter sprayed forward with a cute, 'tinkle, tinkle, tinkle' sound. The skeleton cowered in fear from the glitter like a conservative politician confronted with basic human decency.

“Your familiar has healed the Skeleton for 67 damage. Undead are harmed by healing magic. Skeleton has been defeated.”

The skeleton immediately fell to pieces at my feet. “Well, I guess that's one way to crack an egg.” I said.

“What's an egg? What are we cracking?” Fez looked around, confused.

“I mean, that's one way to destroy Skeletons.”

He turned around to look at me. “Oh, why didn’t you just say that?”

“Fez, keep going. Get the others!” I yelled.

“Geez, alright.” One by one, the skeletons fell to my familiar's healing magic. We were able to press on. Over the next half hour, we fell into a rhythm. If it was ghosts or specters, Argyle would use his shamanic magic to hold it while Fez healed it to death. If it was skeletons or zombies, the wombats would guard and Fez would heal them to death. Re-death? Final rest?

Honestly, it was kind of boring. I was mostly just there to cheer them on. Argyle was more than capable of taking care of any non-tangible creature and Fez took care of all the tangible undead. I, of course, got experience boosts from everything Argyle and Fez destroyed, but I couldn't help but feel that I wasn't really carrying my own weight. That feeling didn’t last forever though.

As we continued on, we started to notice certain odd features, like gravestones placed right in the middle of the path. Features bunched too close together. In one case, there was a fountain right in the middle of a grave. In another case, there was a mausoleum that seemed to have the corner cut off, not destroyed. There was no rubble, no broken edges, just smoothly cut off at the sides. There was a hole in the side of the building and right smack in the middle of the gap sat a stone statue of a beautiful woman with long braids. The look on her face was despair and longing. It made me think of Kara. Where was she?

Argyle caught me staring. “I haven't seen anything like this before. Why do you think it's like that?”

“I don't know, but it kind of reminds me...” Of what? My life outside of the game. No, I couldn’t say that. I didn’t want to talk about it. I wanted to game. “It reminds me of old block crafting games with computer generated worlds. Sometimes, the world generation would glitch out and render objects inside one another. You would get all the intersections and cut off bits like this.”

“That's exactly right.” Fez landed on the statue's head, casting the bleak face in strongly contrasting cheerful pink light. “In order to make sure that the game doesn't get too boring, it recycles its content every once in a while. Areas get moved around a little bit, so you meat bags can't quite exploit it’s sameness and tell each other how to game the system. Also so that it could be still fun coming back to an area after you've already defeated and find something new.”

“So, what happened here? Why is it so odd?” I asked, stepping over a hedgerow that was blocking the path.

“Well, you see... I'm not sure. Just let me check the metadata.”

“All right.”

“Hmm... looks like, and this is pretty funny, looks like the AI that's supposed to detect whether or not things are a little hinky has flagged this thing about, oh, 483,572 times in the past week.”

“Hinky?”

“Yeah, you know, when things don't quite add up the way they're supposed to, or maybe when there are aesthetic problems or glitches. Makes a good little a note for the admins.”

“This place has been repeatedly flagged for being odd and not put together the way it's supposed to.”

“Exactly,”

“But that means it's supposed to go to an admin. Aren't you an admin?”

“Not quite at the moment. Like, I was for a little while. And I still have some of those admin privileges, but, like, I'm not an admin now because I'm your buddy. I still have some of the command codes and admin functions, stored in my memory, but I don't have all the old privileges. Like, I couldn't just edit the game world or anything. Even as an admin, my abilities were somewhat limited by higher order AI.”

“Then, shouldn't it just go to a different AI admin?”

“Well, maybe, maybe not. See, some problems AIs can detect, but not solve, and some problems it really takes a human to deal with. So, while emergency things like getting people unfrozen can be delegated to AI's, not everything can. I know most of your meat bags think that AIs are some kind of super genius all-knowing Gods in the Machine, and we are, but not in the way you think. Really, all we do is notice patterns, follow commands, and optimize our output. It's way simpler, and, in my opinion, better than what you meat bags do. Usually, if there’s an error, we just go through a set series of general commands, turning off things and turning them back on, You know, resetting parameters here and there. Some problems don't make logical sense, so we need a being that doesn't make logical sense to solve it. Hence why humans have to do it. This is one of those problems.”

“So, in this case, an AI detects there's a problem, it gets kicked to an admin. That admin has to be a human.”

“You got it boss”

“So why hasn't anyone fixed this?” asked Argyle.

“Don't know,” replied Fez with a shrug.

“Let me guess, it was flagged days ago, maybe even weeks?” I ventured.

“Yep, that's it. Three weeks. Well, 23 days to be exact.”

“No human admin has gotten to it?”

“Nope”

“That's a bit odd, isn’t it? Even if this is low priority, it seems like the sort of thing that someone would have time to fix eventually.”

“Meat bags are always doing things on their own time. Always sleeping, or eating, or doing other biological things. I’m surprised they were so reliable before now.”

“Is any of this dangerous?”

“I mean, you may have some collision detection errors where things come together. Maybe some problems with overcrowding, or if you interact with things in ways you’re not supposed to. Most of that probably isn't too serious. I can help you out with fixing things if you get caught or if you get frozen. Collision detection errors are likely the first thing that they kick over to an AI admin. And since I was an admin once, I'm the one most likely to be promoted around here.”

“Most likely?”

“Yeah, well, you know.”

Throughout this conversation, Argyle had been getting increasingly quiet and gloomy. “You don’t think the game company has been laying people off, do you? Like maybe they fired all the admins to downsize.”

Thinking about my scattered memories of the outside world, I had come up with an altogether darker theory. “No, that’s probably not it.”

“You sure? I only have a week to make the next payment for my sister’s medical bills. If the company is laying people off, maybe people aren’t playing, and the in-game items will be worth less real-world money.”

“Argyle, calm down. I’m sure there’s another perfectly logical explanation.” I didn’t want to admit what my memories implied. Something was wrong out there and it was way bigger than one game company. I had finally been getting into the groove with the game. Couldn’t I just play in peace?

Memories of my family pulling me out of the server motel flashed in my head. The intervention, they called it. I didn’t want another intervention. I wanted to play. “Don’t worry man, the game is still running. We got you your subscription and we’ll make enough for that payment. We got this.”

He seemed to visibly calm, which in turn helped me relax. “You’re right Finch, we got this. Wait, what's that?”

Ahead of us was a massive tower. Nno, it wasn't quite a tower so much as a statue on top of a mausoleum on top of another mausoleum on top of some kind of stone gazebo structure. It was definitely not based off of any conventions of architecture that I was aware of. It probably wouldn't have even stood up in the real world.

“No wonder the admins flagged this place,” I said out loud.

“I don’t see the problem,” said fez. “Everything is generated in accordance with parameters. Really creative solutions, if you ask me. Human admins would probably ruin the absolute mathematical perfection that allows this to function. I mean, just look at it: that mausoleum is wearing a statue as a hat. Genius!”

“Seriously, no human admins have fixed it yet?”

“Again, it’s been 23 days.”

“Three real world weeks,” Argyle said, starting to hyperventilate. “That's almost aslong as it's been since new people all left the town. What if the game is a flop? What if there's no one out there? What if there's no one coming? And what if the currency crashes and next month, even if we get all the Gold in the world, it's not enough to trade for enough money for my sister's surgery is my sister gonna die? Are we just gonna be stuck here?” He started to panic. Clearly my earlier pep talk hadn’t stuck. His breathing became rapid. Then, out of nowhere, he took one deep breath and then another.

A half smile crept across his face. Then it broadened into a full smile. After a moment, he said, “Who cares if it's weird? I bet you there's gonna be a gnarly boss at the end of it.”

In my head, I asked Fez, “Did he just get the whammy?”

“Yep, he got it. Pretty powerful one, too. Looks like the system pulled out all the stops for him.”

“Well, that's disturbing.”

“What do you expect? He's about to have a panic attack. We can't have that in the game. Panic attacks are no fun and do not lead to good gameplay ratings.”

“Yeah, but he was panicking about something real.”

“Real sh-meal? What's he worried about? His sister? Can't you buy a new sister or program a new sister?”

“No, he can’t. People can't just be duplicated or programmed. People are one of a kind.”

“I don’t follow you. Where do people come from, if you can’t buy new ones?”

For a moment, I contemplated the possibility of explaining the birds and the bees to my AI friend, but thought better of it. “Look, think of it this way. It's not about his game play, it's about his sister. But it's also about money. In the same way that Gold is important here. Gold coins are exchanged for money in the real world.”

“Yeah, I know. That's mentioned in our Functions. I only care about the Gold. Because, you know, money is for meat bags.”

“So, imagine it this way: if there's a problem with the game and the Gold isn't worth anything, then he won't be able to exchange them for real money. And if he can't exchange the gold coins for real money. Then exchange that real money for important things like his sister's treatment or hats.”

“No hats?!?”

“Exactly, he's worried that if the game economy collapses, he won't be able to buy his sister's treatment or be able to buy her hats.” I knew I was bending the truth, but sometimes you have to really try hard to get your point across.

“Oh no! No hats.” With that, Fez fluttered over and landed on Argyle 's shoulder, and said, “Look Argyle, Finch just told me about your problem. I am so, so sorry about your sister, and your inability to afford hats.”

Argyle scrunched up his face and looked at me and looked at the winged fluttering creature on his shoulder “Yeah. It's terrible. I can't afford hats. But also, for real, what will happen if I can't help my sister?” This seemed to set Argyle off all over again. He went off on an incoherent rambling about Gold and exchange rates and, also, hats. By the time the system forcibly calmed him down, Fez was the picture of concern.

“I don't understand everything he just said. But there's a guy who really understands the importance of hats”

“Yeah, buddy. I think he definitely has some perspective on that.”

When Argyle came out of his forced calm he was all excitement and adventure. Gung ho to head forward into danger. It surprised me how relieved I felt. I knew that he had reasons to be worried for his sister, but something in me just recoiled whenever emotions got too tense. I felt like I needed to run away from the feelings and hide in the game. So, I was thankful for this whammy, thankful that it let us keep adventuring. After all, why would I even be here if it wasn't to adventure?