“Lighten up, Jay. It's just a game.”

Roger had used his real name, not his character’s name. That mean he must be looking like he was about to blow his stack. Jay forced himself to draw an entire breath before responding.

“I'm not mad because I rolled a one. I'm mad because I knew it was possible and I didn't have a backup plan.” He put both hands on the table so he wouldn't pick up the offending die and throw it. “Also, it's not a game. It's a simulation.”

“But you've got me for backup.” Ash grinned wickedly. Turning to Roger, he declared, “I blast the wraith with arcane missiles.”

Roger frowned gently. “I thought you were out of spells.” As game masters went, he was one of the good ones. He never seemed to enjoy making the player's lives suffer and yet his adventures were notoriously difficult to survive, let alone defeat.

Ash was still grinning. He did that whenever he thought he had a clever idea, which Jay had noticed was all the time.

“While Tonto here was fooling around with his bow I was drawing a scroll from my backpack. The magic one, so it only takes half a round. I use the rest of the round to activate the scroll.” Ash dropped a handful of dice on the table. “Read 'em and weep.”

Roger started counting but Jay could see the roll was terrible. He knew the answer before Roger spoke.

“That's not actually enough,” Roger said apologetically. Ash was staring in shock at all the dice showing single pips. “The wraith is tattered and torn but it still lunges forward.”

Jay closed his eyes because while they were open he could see the future with perfect clarity. The monster would make its attack roll; his beloved character, having been so carefully raised through the last nine months of work ever since he had started taking the new game - er, simulation - seriously, would be destroyed. The damage was entirely psychological; he actually preferred lower-level play and wouldn't mind starting over. The pain was what it said about his ability to really deal with the unpredictable nature of the modern battlefield. Which called into question his long-term life plan. That was the part that hurt.

A girl’s voice, small and hesitant. “I leap on it and rend it with my claws.”

Jay opened his eyes again. The girl was new to the club; he hadn't seen her around before. When she had asked to join the session he hadn't objected because he had assumed that he and Ash would be able to finish it off on their own, so it wouldn't matter if she was dead weight or not. So far she hadn't done anything particularly interesting and he had mostly forgotten she was there.

Roger was still shaking his head. “The wraith is insubstantial. Even a tiger's claws can't hurt it.”

The girl - Mary, he remembered - had turned into a tiger last round. Jay hadn't counted that as interesting for precisely the reason Roger was citing. It wouldn't help their current situation.

“Remember when I cast spectral fangs on my wolf?” Mary had started the session with an animal companion, which she had enchanted so it could affect the wraith. That might have been interesting several rounds ago but the wraith had reduced the wolf to a rotting husk almost instantly. After that Mary had gone quiet, making it easy to forget that her druid character would be dying too as soon as the wraith finished off Jay's ranger. He wondered if she had thought that was a possibility when she had sat down at the table.

“Yes, but–” Roger tried, but the girl was already talking over him. Jay wouldn't have guessed her capable of interrupting someone, let alone the quietly authoritative game master.

“Any spell I cast that affects my animal companion also affects me. The spell hasn't timed out yet. Now that I'm in animal form it makes my claws capable of striking insubstantial targets.”

Roger raised his eyebrows. “I'm not sure the spell works that way.”

“Take it up with the elves,” Mary shot back. “That's what they say. Belarian's Lament, chapter one hundred and seventeen, paragraph twenty-nine.”

Roger sighed. Jay appreciated the sentiment; no one liked a rules lawyer. On the other hand, what was the point of the simulation if you didn't stick as closely to real life as possible? And the elves were definitely the authority on druid spells; they had invented the profession, after all. If Mary had interpreted the passage right then there was no arguing with her.

“I don't mean to be rude, but I need to check that,” Roger said. “I mean, because I don't know you yet. Okay?”

“Of course. That's fine,” Mary said. She was shrinking back into the quiet, mousey girl who had spent the last two hours at the table. Jay was astonished that the transformation had happened at all.

There was an awkward pause while Roger looked up the relevant passages on his phone.

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Jay cast about for something to say, feeling like it was up to him to be friendly. He knew Ash well enough by now to know that the other guy wouldn't bother. “Belarian's Lament? I haven't read that far.” There were several million pages of elven lore already translated. Pouring through all of it for clues to how magic worked was a full time job. Jay mostly relied on second-hand analysis, though of course he had read the core Ranger ballads.

“It's pretty obscure,” Mary acknowledged with a slight blush. “I think it's only known value is that particular clarification.”

Ash shook his head. “I studied quantum physics with less effort. Scouring elvish romance novels to learn magic is insane. At least Dr. Falconer writes clearly.”

That was not nearly as attractive as Ash made it sound. Jay had tried to read Falconer's treatises, out of professional courtesy if nothing else, but they took way too much math for granted. In any case, Falconer had only been studying magic for a decade - well, fifteen years if you counted the time slips - so there just wasn't as much known about wizardry.

“I like reading them,” Mary said. “They're so beautiful. Like poetry.”

Ash was not the kind of guy to appreciate poetry. Then again, neither was Jay. He put up with it, though, because he wanted to know how use the powers of the ranger profession. Just in case, someday, through some miracle, he could connive his way through the Gate. And start a career that meant something while there was still time; get out ahead of the rest of the pack and most of all, out from under the iron grip of the Church of Sinclair. Get out and grab some tael, the mystical purple virus that made people into superheroes, and in Christopher Sinclair's case, an actual god. “Grab” being the operative word, because the Church had every scrap locked down tight. Sure, it was for a good cause; Jay appreciated curing cancer as much as any guy who had never actually had cancer, which is to say in an abstract but still respectful way. And yet it seemed inherently unfair that Sinclair could fall through a random gate and become a god while everyone else on Earth had to petition for the right to cast the smallest spell. Someday, the Church said, they would have enough high-ranking priests to start sharing with other people, but given that the other thing Sinclair had brought back through the Gate was immortality, as in never getting old, Jay and pretty much everyone else assumed “someday” could easily stretch into centuries. By then there would be no more opportunities; the human race would have conquered the world of Prime with corporations and armies, leaving no room for mercenaries and adventurers.

Right now it was like the Wild West, with only one train leaving at high noon every day; and Jay, along with pretty much everyone else, dreaming of striking out to make his fortune instead of crawling up an interminable corporate, or worse, religious, hierarchy. Hence the simulation, the wildly popular pastime of pretending you could actually be a ranger or wizard and fight monsters for profit. And hence the addiction to rules, making the simulation as close to the real thing as possible.

A lot of people were into it these days. But Jay was really into it. As in, all the way in. He had a bow and three pairs of moccasins in his apartment. He didn't own a car because he'd spent every dime he had on hunting trips, getting backwoods hillbillies to teach a New York city boy everything they could about living in the wild. When you went to the other side you couldn't just pop in for a snack or to replace a broken shoe-string. Jay had skinned and gutted a deer he had killed with his own hands, cooked it over a fire, and lived off the refrigerated remains for weeks. He had camped in a snowstorm, slept in a tree, and made a knife out of stone. He'd also made a stab at learning Elvish though without quite so much intensity. The language wasn't going to help; if he met an elf on the other side they'd just turn him over to the Church. He had tried to join the military and sign up for Army Ranger training, on the theory it would at least make him tough, but the army wasn't hiring anymore. Pretty much everyone who had a job was hanging on to it, expecting that they might still be doing it in a thousand years. This made things hard for people like Jay who came of age after the Gate. Sure, Jay appreciated that he would never die of old age, and it was neat watching his grandparents slowly grow younger again, but what was the value of eternity if you couldn't get a decent job? Part-time work at a convenience store was not what he wanted to do for millennia. It barely paid the rent on a closet-sized apartment, and staying at home was no longer an option now that his parents were almost his age. They were both relieving their youth now that they were young again, and in his dad’s case that meant cruising for kegger parties while his mom was way too into weed.

If he had ranks he could write his own ticket. The Church might frown with the force of a thousand suns but it could not forbid, and there were people who already had ranks free and clear of the Church's controlling hand. True, most of them had started out on the other side, but not all of them. And more slipped away every day, disappearing into the endless wilderness of Prime. A few came back with riches.

The rest died, but that wasn't as bad as it sounded. If you'd made the right arrangements the Church could bring you back from anything, even being eaten by a dragon. Or a wraith, both of which were apparently real and every bit as fearsome as people had always imagined. It turned out that the Church needed money as much as the next massive interplanetary corporation, so you could still buy certain favors. Like being rezzed this decade instead of centuries from now when the Church got around to it.

So wandering off into a violent, unpredictable world full of unimaginable monsters wasn't the suicide trip it sounded like. It was a viable career choice, if you were willing to get dirty and had the money to front a return ticket. Jay had spent enough time with his hands inside a dead animal to know he was good with the dirty part. All that was stopping him was the ticket.

He wasn't so sure about Ash. The young man certainly played his character like he was a Truther. Jay hadn't known him very long but he had gleaned that Ash had been born on a Navajo reservation and clawed his way out of poverty into a prestigious physics programs just in time to watch physics get a total rewrite. It was hard to feel too bad for him; physics was one of the few industries that had open spots at the top, thanks to a histrionic response by a number of establishment professors who had taken the shakeup as badly as stockbrokers had taken the crash of '29. But physics just didn't have the same cachet now that it didn't have all the answers. Maybe Ash was attracted to magic for the same reason Falconer had been. A chance to get his hands on the real heart of the universe.

Roger looked up from his phone. “Biróg's spell holds.” He was back to using character’s names, so everything was cool again. “Go ahead and roll for the attack.”