Canberra, Australia, a one-bedroom student apartment smelling of a sumptuous dinner including roast duck and steamed seaweed-stuffed tofu.

“Sofa.”

“That’s right! It is a sofa!”

“Keyboard. Brand-spanking-new.”

“It IS a brand-spanking-new keyboard! Do you want to learn to play the keyboard, Little Liu? Auntie can send you cousin Yuqi’s tutor.”

Through the terrain of the apartment lounge, a toddler was roaming with his camera like a little emperor surveying his kingdom, pointing at various objects and pronouncing their names while a relative on the phone sang his praise.

The toddler aimed his camera at the kitchen, where a teen was floating between bubbling pots and chopping boards.

Little Liu gave a cocky grin. “Father.”

“Uh…no, Little Liu, that’s not your father. That’s…” The caller had no clue as to the identity of the teenager hanging out with their nephew.

Henry was attending a wok of sizzling deep-fried seaweed rolls.

After logging out following the little Trading Post incident, he’d retrieved his napping nephew from the patrician beauty – she hadn’t recognised the toddler despite his sunglasses falling off. They then caught a taxi to a hot-air balloon operator. When Henry woke the kid up to surprise him, Little Liu surprised him back by talking. Turns out, Alex's silly excuse for sticking his spawn on Henry about a one-on-one excursion with a male role model curing the kid's muteness ended up being correct. How unexpected - hilarious.

The miracle had been followed by much fervour in the extended Wong Dynasty. Little Liu received congratulatory calls from parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, grand-aunts, grand-uncles, etc. All of them, between their confusion as to why the toddler was riding a hot balloon in Australia with a stranger, had been greedy to spectate the child's newfound mastery of his tongue. The family was so proud of the now-talking tyke, and Henry, in his own way, was among them.

Little Liu soon became irritable from overstimulation, and Henry’s will to resume the quest for ordinary romance had been killed by his digital self’s prophecies of its pointlessness and the recent bloodshed. Thus, they'd concluded the late afternoon itinerary there. The devilish pair retired to a 5-star luxury wildlife lodge, and they dined in opulence with the fuzzy company of lions and giraffes. At least, that had been the plan, but Little Liu bragged about the animals to Henry’s grandmother, who, already peeved about him going rogue to hit on that chick, reprimanded him for wasting money that could be used for better purposes. In the end, uncle and nephew were sent to a dingy, miserable student accommodation provided free in the university’s tour package. Henry's zany efforts at extravagant comforts had been thwarted again - ah, how unfortunate!

While the tuckered-out nephew had then slept, Henry’d ordered a VR unit and logged back on.

One might assume he was rushing back for The Trading Post's clean-up - but he didn't. No, no, no. Henry The Retired marched off to his stadium to practice his many martial arts in the hopes of placing top ten in his own recruitment tournament. The massacring of one site could not impede his ambitions, no matter how childish - The Company’s domains were massive, and if a couple thousand casualties were sufficient to force Henry to crawl back, he wouldn’t have endured a single day of freedom, he would be enslaved to the job until his mind caved in crazier than Karnon’s. No. No longer would he give power to these virtual distractions. Saana was a game, and he hated it. He’d sacrificed more of his psyche than anyone rationally should for a fictional game universe. His duty was done a thousand-fold over. The time had arrived for him to reclaim the right to live as an ordinary, boring teenager with no greater consideration than for the trivial troubles in the narrow purview before them. Wu-wei!

So, at the arena, in the unworried spirit of a retiree, he had a cracking great time debuting his seven latest 'invented' martial arts (obviously, substituting out The Laughing Son’s Combat System and others with later styles in order to hide the fact he’d changed the order to prepare against The Trickster God). The spectacle of last night’s match with Loki had drastically overhauled the atmosphere amongst the top trainees. New devotees popped up when Henry appeared, treating him—The Oracle a.k.a. actually The Invincible Cripple making his secret return—with extra respect for his dazzling feats. Had the toppling of the pillar been planned, had it been an accident? Impossible to tell. Most promising among his new followers was a Japanese talent from the 6v6 Commander tournament, who’d switched classes to an Earthfriend and started imitating his methods. Their stat-balance being similar, with a decent mental but mediocre physical GQ, the Commander seemed to have deduced what Henry was striving to achieve with A Thousand Tools and begun applying its principles to themselves. This kid was very perceptive, a genius new addition to The Saga of The Cripple's Return. Meanwhile, SaNguiNe, the Miracleworker duped by Artemis a.k.a. Loki, expelled his manly frustrations on Henry in a couple of rough bouts, before they settled their animosity beneath the greater fraternal spirit of the arena. What an amazing, mystery-laden, testosterone-filled time it was out there on the sweat-and-blood-soaked sand.

Beyond duelling, there were other in-game intrigues. Henry declined an invitation from Brian to join an avant-garde drum ensemble for tomorrow night’s performance event - that's kind of weird. Several groups of Virtual Realists and Villagers butthurt at him mocking their queen failed to break into his stadium to assassinate him - dangerous, that could be a problem later. Silver wanted to discuss something in person, but she couldn’t complete the journey to Suchi from Lake Hotfever where she’d logged off because assassins kept jumping her. Henry’s messages to Rose to calm down and call off her guildmates were ignored. It seemed that Geno's sister was taking her sweet murderous revenge after being abandoned last night for the alpha-pleb - a little disturbing, but funny overall!

And all throughout these hijinks, Henry didn't once sacrifice any more of himself to the background troubles. He did not spare a single thought for the deceased, nor for his guild’s retaliation for Karnon’s terrorism and the theft of Worldpiercer. Nor did he spare any thoughts for the God inferring his bygone past from the previous game instalment, nor for the recurring genital symbolism littered throughout their encounter, nor for whatever mysterious party Karnon’d had alluded to eavesdropping on them and who might be related to the ‘Enemy-Bear’. Henry, disciplined of mind and ever stalwart in his convictions, contemplated none of these issues.

He was not thinking about them then, and he was not thinking about them now, as he prepared a dinner for a low-key, private celebration of his nephew’s developmental milestone.

Henry turned to Little Liu, aiming the camera up at his face. “Say goodbye, buddy. We’re not eating under the surveillance of whatever seventh-three-removed-whoever this is.”

“As you command, father.”

The toddler shutting off the device, Henry had him clean up then help with setting out the dishes. Oddly, when he lifted Little Liu to select cutlery from a draw, the kid kept trying to pull out triples of the knives and forks.

“Dude, stop. Did your neural counting systems get repurposed for language? What are you…ah.” Henry, having an epiphany, rotated the toddler, who attempted to rotate back around but couldn’t because he was a two-year-old with no core strength. “You treacherous dog. You sold out the wildlife luxury resort plan to get us sent back here.”

They’d been shown this place during the tour – not merely Henry and Little Liu, but the other student they’d been with, holed up in an apartment down the hallway. The deceptive toddler had schemed to arrange yet another cringy rendezvous.

“Accident.” Little Liu professed his innocence.

“This dinner request, too...I should have realised that you, given free choice, would have picked nothing but sugar…”

The toddler gestured to his fat belly. “Diet.”

Henry shook his head. “One day, you’re exploiting your nephews for your schemes; the next, they're exploiting you. Fine. Now you’ll get to learn what awaits you at the conclusion of a poorly-plotted plan. You intend to sneak in a guest? Go on, then. Waltz over there and persuade her yourself using that tongue you’ve been so loose with.”

Henry’d truly given up on pursuing the patrician beauty. Whatever the kid wanted to do, he was on his own.

“Impossible!” protested Little Liu. “Only 2! Insufficient speech!”

Henry scoffed. “Do not cower in the excuses of youth. To paraphrase a former teacher of mine, ‘This sham universe won’t wait for you to come of age. It is already upon you!” He omitted Heavy-Finger’s next words of ‘the blood and the chaos’ due to age-inappropriateness.

Despite the nephew’s infantile whingeing, the uncle disguised him in sunglasses, flung open the apartment door, and wished him luck on his mission.

Henry returned to the kitchen, expecting nothing more to result than a few manageable toddler tears.

Soon after, Little Liu marched back triumphantly, a pretty girl in tow, surveying the apartment as if entering a haunted catacomb.

The young woman was back for more.

As their eyes met, Henry was thunder-struck by the shock realisation at how severely socially inept he must be - his crippled brain couldn’t produce a plausible explanation for this chick accepting a dinner invitation after such heavy harassment.

“Hey, you lied before.” He thrust his chin towards her helmet hair. “You do play Saana.”

The young woman coughed gruffly. “I...had re—"

Henry waved away the deception. ”No judgement from me - I lie constantly about that trash game. Tea? Juice? There was coffee in the cupboard, but the quality might be dodgy.”

The young woman took a while to falsify her preferences. “I prefer tea.”

While Henry put on a new pot and resumed his cooking, the beauty was dragged around the place by his successful nephew. The kid tried to impress her with his naming skills, his advancement against their common enemy of speech difficulty.

As Henry was ladling sauce onto a dish of braised abalone and mushrooms, the pair returned.

The young woman coughed gruffly again. “I wouldn’t take you as a cook.”

“No, it’s not a skill I would have prioritised in ordinary circumstances.” Henry agreed, the culinary arts being a low priority climb due to the ephemerality of creations.

“But you did?”

He shrugged. “Had to find a method to compensate for my lack of charm, and they say the best way to a woman’s heart is through her stomach.”

The young woman analysed his answer. “Is that a joke?”

“Obviously. Charm is optional when you’re filthy rich.”

“Filthy rich!” Little Liu parroted.

The young woman, unable to determine whether that was also a joke, frowned in disapproval. Observing Henry’s proficiency in the kitchen, she couldn’t help returning to the subject. “Why’d you actually learn?”

“Actually?” Henry weighed how much of his backstory to divulge to a stranger, eventually concluding that it was inconsequential – he often spoke quite freely with Handsome Dan for the same reason, the meathead unlikely to utilise the information against him. “Hmm...two years ago, prior to becoming filthy rich, due to family circumstances, I dropped out of school to work at a restaurant. Those shifts at the stove acquainted me well with the fine art of the spatula.”

Inconsequential or not, he still oversimplified out of habit. Truthfully, there’s been no material necessity for quitting school. He could have devised more lucrative pursuits than saving his parents’ restaurant, but, following his mother’s terminal diagnosis, he’d been too angry and depressed to go to class. His parents' business failing as his father had to split the hours between it and the hospital, his mother's distress about her life's work crumbling, these provided a convenient excuse to drop out, a goal by which to reorient and direct himself.

He didn’t regret the decision. His mother sitting in the kitchen behind him, taste-testing his attempts were among his more cherished memories. She’d understood his reasons.

The young woman, not anticipating Henry to admit he was a parent that fast, staring at the 'family circumstance' describing kitchen objects, changed to a lighter topic by commenting on a song playing in the background. "I guess you composed this one, too? Haha."

"Yes." Henry gestured to a keyboard in the lounge. "While preparing dinner."

"Oh..."

Henry went on to explain that he wasn't repeating the impromptu concert play. The current music wasn’t romantic but a lamentation based on an Ibanmothe sea shanty about a crew of sailors starving to death because their avarice prevented them dumping the cargo from their overloaded ship – it would be a rather bleak choice if he were trying to seduce her. The beauty seemed to interpret his convoluted explanation as an excuse to save face. Nevertheless, she inquired further about how he’d learned music. Henry, not understanding what was happening but also not particularly caring, shared his brief history with that climb.

Dinner was served on a small balcony overlooking the campus and the city-centre beyond. They were situated on the opposite side of the descending November sun, and the shadow of the building provided relief from the heat. Little Liu exploited the narrowness of the balcony only allowing two chairs to claim a seat on the beauty’s lap.

Henry did his best to focus on the dinner. His first spoonful of soup hit him with a pang of longing for the missing part of the taste. The other two seemed to enjoy the meal, though. Little Liu began declaring the value of each dish. The guest, between awkward, overly-conscientious manoeuvres of her cutlery and even more awkward glances, gave her compliments. Henry supposed that was enough.

“Exquisite duck, father,” Little Liu announced of a half-bitten piece jabbed on his fork. “Succulent. Divine. Mouth-watering. Tender. Juicy…”

The young woman—masking habitual eating habits—stared down with confusion at the kid, wondering, how he’d learned so many words and whether he was presently compensating for the day of being tasked with silence. “He’s…eloquent.”

“Eloquent,” the toddler grinned smugly. “Articulate. Expressive…”

“A bit of precocity is to be expected since his father is, technically, a genius.” Henry crunched through a shrimp and chicken ball - bland. “At that age, I was already delivering pedantic monologues about plot-holes in children's programming.”

“Right...” The young woman misinterpreted those two non-sequiturs as him complimenting his own genetics again. Her expression suddenly shifted with an onset of nerves, and she reached for her tea and took a nonchalant sip. “What about...uh...Little Larry’s...mother?”

“Let’s not talk about her." Henry cut this topic short before he accidentally gave away the kid’s celebrity status.

“Overdose. Dragon dust."

Henry lifted a confused gaze from his plate to the toddler, who, fork dropped, was pouting in sorrow at his fake deceased mother – who was in the fake father-son mode.

What on earth? thought Henry. How did the boy switch modes without the trigger word ‘heaven’? He supposed a relative might've used it. Well, that would explain the kid calling him father this whole time...

”What on earth did you say, Little Larry?”

Little Liu, exhaling in exhaustion with the deactivation of his charade, reached his palms across the table for the expected greasing. “Remuneration.”

The uncle retrieved four candy bars and dropped two each into the toddler’s hands. “You’ve worked hard, nephew. Take it easy now.”

The nephew stuffed his loot down his shirt. “Good game; easy.”

Henry noticed the beauty giving him a complicated stare, a mixture of sympathy as if he were a teenage parent with a troubled past and disgust at him bribing his son to pretend he wasn’t.

“You’ve got it in reverse,” he clarified. “Little Larry’s a genetically-unrelated child who was sent to Australia to snitch on my misdoings. Pretending to be my son is a secret aborted trick we were going to pull on the tour guides before I switched priorities to aggressively hitting on you – obviously, a fake son would damage my romantic prospects. Regarding him calling me ‘father’, his use of the title didn’t immediately alert me to his continued performance of the fake father-son mode because, in part, I was distracted and, in part, I’d passed it off as a kind of retarded toddler thing, a failure of his disorganised infant brain to demarcate the precise verbal boundaries between the ‘father’ and ‘uncle’ sub-categories of male guardian figures. You see, having acquired speech a mere few hours ago, my former mute nephew is still an amateur at verbal communication.”

Little Liu corroborated his uncle’s account. “Amateur at verbal communication.”

“Oh,” replied the young woman, “my mistake.”

Henry, paying too little attention to catch the sarcasm, gave a thumbs up and grabbed himself a seaweed roll.

They resumed their meal, Little Liu continuing to flex. In a row of trees beneath their balcony, Henry watched a pair of thumb-sized weebills foraging for insects. Their pleasant back-and-forth chirping was interrupted by the shouts of an Australian on a nearby balcony asking if Henry was on a date. Henry answered in the negative, but the guy insisted they were. The two of them exchanged trash-talk before a second Australian emerged from their apartment and swore at the first to go back inside and stop interrupting the date.

The beauty then asked why he’d picked this university. He summarised the plan to have Brian, already enrolled, vouchsafe his attendance to his grandmother while he globetrotted and the doppelganger studied in his place.

“This doppelganger scheme is unnecessarily convoluted," observed the young woman.

“It’s my middle-ground between my wishes and my grandmother’s. She’s been distressed these past years, believing that I’d skipped the vital last stages of young adulthood when I dropped out. Her nagging has grown unbearable now that I have no financial restraints and I’ve retired. Thus, I decided on the easy middle-ground of deceit. It costs me nothing except the doppelganger’s salary.”

The young woman, blinking, picked one of her confusions. “What can you retire from at 17?”

“No one gets filthy rich making snacks,” Henry swept a hand over the meal. “Eventually, I switched over to investing in the digital space. Projects like building the writing circle, Stratford-on-Saana – that kind of stuff. Nowadays, my portfolio manages itself, leaving me free do whatsoever pleases me: write novels, sew fanny-packs.”

“Care for kids?”

“Child development? Guess that’s a type of climb. But I’ve already made contributions in that field as part of my…uh…duties.” Henry’s guild had extensive investment in public education.

“Right...” The young woman misinterpreted again. “But for you to have bothered flying here, you can’t have completely disagreed with her?”

Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

Henry was taken aback by the astuteness of this inference. “Yeah, an entire day wouldn’t be worth the sacrifice if her opinion held no substance. I do waver. Most of the time, her emphasis on formal education seems antiquated. At others, I wonder if she might be inadvertently expressing a gem of geriatric wisdom, if the cure for this…strange mindset might be the very embracing of normalcy that I’ve been resisting.”

“Mindset?”

Henry glanced cautiously at the beauty, who'd been listening to him far too intensely compared with her previous stonewalling. The change was too drastic. Her over-attentiveness reminded him of the company shrink he’d visited for his insomnia. But if a professional hadn’t been able to grasp his perspective, he doubted a random stranger could. That would be the logical conclusion, yet it felt incorrect to him – his gut was telling him this one might understand him.

Weird.

“What strange mindset?” the young woman repeated.

“It’s one that’s developed from…my duties these past years,” Henry, wanting to see where this might go, answered vaguely. “The experience has widened my perspective to the point that student life becomes tiny and insignificant. Imagine going back to kindergarten and being expected to pretend that snapping a crayon is a valid excuse for a mental breakdown. There is a fundamental misalignment in the priorities, in the sense of what is and isn’t meaningful. At moments, the discrepancy gets downright offensive. Today, those other kids were comparing the past ordeal of having been assigned morning classes with the exact mixture of grief and pride that you hear…” He didn’t finish the thought comparing their tone to soldiers being assigned the worst patrols. "It’s hard for me to relate - that's all."

The young woman listening had an epiphany into Henry’s remoteness, his habit of hiding in the background of their writing circle.

His strange love-triangle novel provided additional insight, his aloofness mirroring that of the horse-riding barbarian self-insert. The character's alienation had the same flavour, although Henry must have taken creative liberty with the specific ‘duty’ causing it. His barbarian clone—as she analysed it now in a serious sense, as an actual barbarian—was accustomed to a much darker existence than the schoolgirl protagonist Mary Sue, creating a chasm of perspective between them. This sub-plot must have been a dramatic transformation of the author's own struggles as a teenage parent in relation to...herself.

“I understand,” she said.

“Really?” Henry frowned. “Even I recognise it’s a crazy position to be in at my age.”

“Growing up isn’t the automatic passage of years. It’s broken apart by steps of gradual insight. Some face theirs ahead of schedule.”

“But that’s the contention," Henry fought back. "Is this a natural, expected response analogous to maturation? Or does it have a different source? Could it be a by-product of…the specific nature of the duty?”

When the beauty couldn’t follow that point, Henry told her to leave it alone and taste the soup, the nuances being impossible to articulate with his unwillingness to share everything. She kept insisting, however, kept prodding and prodding.

“Just try without sharing everything," she said. "Maybe I can offer advice. Maybe not. Does it really matter? It's only a stranger's opinion.”

Henry spied a pair of students strolling below to the apartment complex's entrance, chatting about something pleasant enough to make them erupt in a fit of laughter. Their voices were inaudible over the distance.

“Suppose it doesn’t matter,” he concluded. “How should I explain? Let's say...certain duties upon their acceptance have a tendency to consume a person. They're demanding in many respects - physically, mentally, emotionally, socially, spiritually. They demand everything of you, and everything doesn't satisfy them. After devoting these past years to my own duties, it strikes me in moments that the entirety of me might have been devoured. Or, more accurately, converted. If you opened my skull and took a microscope to the neurons, you might find its trace on each of them, each one having been altered to make them more efficient at the single art of…performing the duty. Same with the rest, the muscle fibres, the skeletal structure – every cell in my body and soul has adapted. For any endeavours outside of the duty, nothing spare remains anymore. Perhaps, when I try to concentrate, I can requisition parts for a while, I can force them to mimic the functions of these purposes that others find effortless, but, left alone, they quickly revert. Everything is reconsumed. Whenever I close my eyes for too long, it all returns back to the mountain. So, maybe this strange mindset of mine that is dismissing the prospect of college as trivial or ‘immature’, maybe that’s a by-product of this consumption. What I’m confusing for insubstantiality might rather be my own personal failure to make contact beyond a superficial level anymore, to reach far enough into the depths where the substance does exist. The absurdities of today might be another consequence.”

“You’re referring to the...embarrassing episode...s.”

Henry’s thoughts had drifted to Suchi, but, noticing the parallel in his romantic failures and guessing he could work with that, he nodded. “See, one of the by-products of being unable to interface deeply is losing most of the emotional feedback that would provide guidance through complex situations. Outside of the duties, my intuition fails constantly. To decide how to act, I often have to reimagine myself like a character in a novel, operating according to the identifiable threads of motivation contained within the background and foreground of the story, without the confusing detritus of the life outside the pages - or, in this case, the life that has the duty. This simplified caricature, I ask myself how it would respond, and then I perform those actions."

The young woman—thinking this was an unnecessarily melodramatic response for having a child, yet not wanting Henry to stop sharing—continued to express sympathy. “Sounds exhausting.”

“There are much more tiring tasks,” he disagreed. “Acting’s a breeze. But it has limits, defects. Today, for example, I met a pretty lass and I wondered what—supposing these duties had never existed—would a hormonal teenager like me do in this scenario? What lengths might a less serious, more carefree, alternate version of myself go to? The result was—”

“An embarrassing abomination.”

“An embarrassing abomination. But if I’m being frank, throughout that abomination, perhaps due to the lack of personal presence, I wasn’t struck by any embarrassment in line with the absurdity. In fact, whenever I listened to my gut, it was shouting, ‘Plough on ahead. These ludicrous plays are appropriate to the circumstances.’ Even the proposal.” He gave a tiny laugh in proportion with his genuine embarrassment on the matter. “But that’s another problem in the whole complex of problems. When all you can rely upon are pieces borrowed from elsewhere, the feelings of that elsewhere are liable to transfer over and intrude. I have no clue about the original source of that romantic confidence. Plain old desperation?”

He’d felt this way with his romantic plans from his gold-digger tournament, to his speed-dating, to hitting on this chick. Beneath the excess and absurdity of each was a frenetic resistance being summoned from an unknown, repressed corner of himself.

But this emotional contagion wasn’t strictly limited to this extraneous romantic component of his life. Part of his necessity to retire had been him witnessing himself devolve. With all the enemies he’d confronted still lingering piled up inside of him, whenever he encountered a new one who might join them, the whole rotten conglomeration was reincarnated. To his heart, each foe recalled their predecessors. The result was increasing difficulty in evaluating the true danger of the specific threat in front of him, in developing a response appropriate to them and no more. In the past, when danger really was omnipresent, this paranoid mindset wasn’t debilitating. But now, in the post-reformation era of peace…well, one might interpret his choice in Suchi regarding the assassination and all the mindslave army as an error of that impulse, him overreacting to the urgency of the horror and rushing a risky, disproportionate solution - maybe.

After Karnon’s interference, the dangers of this trait had been exacerbated. Henry’s instinct—or more accurately his Digital twin’s instinct—upon reviewing the decades of evidence and analysis was, in fact, that The Trickster God would pull through at the very end, that the purpose in Suchi of this mad hero from the past was to reclaim his lost self and slay his ‘Enemy-Bear’ for good – not metaphorically, an actual, flesh-and-blood motherfucker deserving their assassination. Today’s encounter had only supported that intuition. Yet, as one might notice from Henry’s catastrophic failure to woo this chick earlier, his and his twin’s instincts were not to be trusted. This manipulative trickster figure might be exploiting that very deficiency of intuition, the paranoid tendency of a worn-down tyrant to project enemies from out of the ruins of his unconscious.

The discussion died, Henry and the young woman ruminating on wildly different ideas.

Eventually, the beauty, based off Henry’s vague statements, managed to loop back and solve why he didn’t entirely disagree with his grandmother’s insistence on attending university. She inferred, based on the metaphor of ‘being consumed’ by the one duty, the potential of participating in this mundane rite to convert some of his internal self back to being an ordinary teen, to achieve a healthy balance. Henry, impressed, dove deeper, sharing the more nuanced challenges in finding that balance. Because his ‘duties’ had a totalising effect that pushed out competing interests, the single path forward might be to relinquish all his responsibilities and give them to others. That handover, though, was itself a battle, requiring him to resist the constant urge to glance back, requiring him to reconceptualise the completion of his personal duty as not the completion of the entire mission but the completion of a mere moment contributing to it all. One might analogise this view to that of a soldier who’s gone on tour, fought themselves haggard, and retired home before the war’s conclusion.

The beauty replied emphatically that his issue wasn’t as dire as war and that he absolutely couldn’t give up completely. Henry realised, from her over-reaction, they’d reached an impasse due to his vagueness, both discussing different things. Lying, he diffused her alarm by explaining that these were merely the exaggerated fantasies of desperation. Novel-writing had made him prone to hyperbole.

Later, when the beauty went to the bathroom, Henry turned on the TV in the lounge and, after flicking through a few random channels, arrived at a national Australian e-sports network. Being shown was a press conference from the Company’s NZ headquarters.

In the brief hours since the massacre at the Trading Post, the guild had annexed several East Togavian cities bordering the capital of Karnonia, their soldiers marching into each without much resistance. The player-base and media had been in a frenzy over this action, which represented The Company’s largest scale military operation in recent months. The wildest speculations were that the annexation was the beginning of this instalment’s first attempt to conquer a Starting Zone, The Tyrant having used the months of hibernation to devise an ingenious plan to outmanoeuvre and slay a God.

Alex, The Tyrant, appearing before the reporters, was clarifying that the occupations were a temporary measure to retrieve a stolen item from Togavi’s troublemaking Zone Guardian. He assured everyone that the cities would soon be released when Karnon made the wise choice of nation over pranks. Between clips of the beaver-head, the channel showed a collage of The Trickster God’s recent antics against The Company, including the profane sky mural, and analysts were attempting to figure out which incident linked to the theft.

The drama in Suchi had receded into the background of these Togavian events, but Henry had a general sense of how it would run. Clean-up of the aftermath—both physical and administrative—would've delayed the local Company branch meeting with The Empire’s leadership until tomorrow morning.

Henry’s impulse watching now was to fly back to the headquarters, to eavesdrop on his guild’s handling of the crisis and offer his paranoid advice emphasizing the potential trap they might be venturing towards within Karnon’s multi-level schemes. But he wouldn’t. Resisting this, too, was part of his trial. Retirement meant entrusting these crises to the successors and systems he’d carefully built. Whatever happened in the next weeks, months, and years, he would have to be content with the third-party vantage point of an outsider. That wasn't a tragedy, either; few had the privilege of giving significant input into the inner workings of the world - why should he be an exception?

Hearing her footsteps, he went to turn the TV off, only to be beaten to the draw.

“TV off.”

The device shut down, and the young woman reappeared with a disgusted expression.

“Sorry. I just can’t stand his obnoxious face and voice.”

Little Liu, being picked up and placed back on her lap, shrugged at his uncle to acknowledge that, indeed, his father was obnoxious.

What the uncle was considering, however, was the discrepancy of her disliking Alex this much yet not recognising his spawn. It couldn’t be the superficial celebrity that offended her.

“Me either,” Henry replied playfully. “That guy’s insufferable. I hate Him.”

The dinner conversation became much lighter, Henry feeling a bit less dark for sharing despite having solved nothing. By the time they were reaching the finale of a feijoa sorbet, the patrician beauty had sweetened up enough to talk books. Staying cryptic about her own, she prompted him to waft about his own, along with those of the other circle members like the alpha-pleb, whom she seemed especially interested in. Henry—at last deducing the motives for her intensive inquiry and her acceptance of the dinner invitation—told her to apply for the circle through official channels if she’d changed her mind about his previous offer regarding writing support. He’d lost interest. Reflecting upon the offer in his current mood of sobriety, he found the idea of repeating the past vulgar and pathetic. When a stuffed Little Liu was beginning to doze off to their dull murmurs, Henry had the kid say goodnight—the little rascal trying to sneak in a smooch—and took him to brush his teeth, before setting him down to sleep.

Returning from the bedroom, Henry was surprised at the beauty still seated on the little table on the balcony.

“My bad, that was the conclusion of dinner,” Henry clarified.

“A few minutes,” the young woman answered. “I’m contemplating the view.”

Henry was perplexed, the chick’s apartment having its own balcony with access to this mediocre view. “Suit yourself. I’m going to—”

“Do you have any more tea?”

“I’m going to fetch more tea.”

Henry, baffled as to why this already lengthy rendezvous was dragging on further, cleared the dishes outside while the pot was boiling, using the opportunity to side-eye the beauty, who was staring off meditatively at a cloud chugging across the red evening sky. Not wanting to be rude to a guest, especially one who'd listened to his vague grievances, he then joined her in drinking the tea. Together, they sipped away without conversing, listening to a flock of roosting birds singing lyrics over an instrumental track bumping in an upstairs apartment.

A minute after finishing her second cup, the young woman finally shared her own troubles.

“Earlier, you mentioned giving up on love due to an ‘incompatibility’. Is it that…is that related to this ‘duty’?”

“Huh?”

Henry was astounded at her connecting those two elements. However, perhaps, after alluding to the pathological degree to which his activities in that trash game had dominated his life, it wasn’t unusual to assume its totalising presence had also encroached into his romance, swallowing it as it did the rest.

That she recalled this detail slipped out in passing was also notable. Given the over importance she’d placed on the statement, given the build-up to this question, given the sober tone of her voice, it was clear that this’d tapped into deeper sentiments for her. Her own past may have contained a similar decision, by herself or another.

At a small pulse of sorrow and jealousy, Henry laughed at himself. “Yeah. Duty, incompatibility, they're all ways of talking around the same problem.”

"Mm."

When she made no further reply, Henry glanced directly at the beauty to study her weighing his answer in relation to herself, her body almost motionless except for a thumb drumming on the brim of her teacup. The pose had the same complex delicacy he'd first seen in her reading his book that'd struck him as beautiful. He observed the pulse of resurging sentiment and let it flow on.

“How do you know it can’t be overcome?” she eventually asked.

“That’s the nature of incompatibilities. Some can be overcome. Not all.”

“What can’t be?”

“What can’t be…” Henry searched for an example, his own being too insane for a normal person to relate to. Recalling the earlier misunderstanding, he gestured at the bedroom where Little Liu was sleeping. “What if the toddler had actually been my son?”

The beauty flicked him an attentive look, his analogy evidently striking a poignant note.

“Isn’t having a kid an incompatibility at our age?” Henry continued. “Some teenagers might be able to accept the additional burden by focusing on mitigating factors. Others, though, it will always be a categorical no. Understandably. At 17, most of us are seeking an idealistic romance, one that’s naive and new for both, one that’s not divided between a child and the rest of it. I doubt I could do it. It’s an incompatibility, right?”

The young woman nodded slowly.

“And it’s not the worst tragedy when it doesn’t work out with one person because of an incompatibility.” Henry drained the rest of his own cup, wishing a bit that it’d contained something stronger than tea. “It might feel that way in the present, but it’s not. I believe we describe the people we love in terms of ‘soulmates’ and destiny because it’s painful to entertain the possibility that feelings of this strength might, by chance, have been given to another. In the reality, though, love could never have functioned this way. If the conditions of its manifestation were so strict, it would be exceedingly rare. As it is, love is one of the most common occurrences in the world, as easy to discover in a sculpted palace of clay as a run-down shack of driftwood. ‘There are plenty of fish in the sea’. I’d go even further to assert that which fish we pick is much less important than the fact we do pick. Love, more than any individual, is the accumulated memories from a journey you choose to share with them, the weight of those memories being attached to the individual and their qualities, made specific to them but not, ultimately, limited to them. So when you fail to set off on that journey of romance with one, for whatever reason, it’s OK to give up and take a rest until you’re ready to set off for another...with another. You’re only 17. Life still awaits you.”

Henry, giving the chick’s slumped shoulder a pat, motioned to grab her cup.

She snapped it back. “But how can you know for sure that it would have failed?”

“Huh? Didn’t you hear me make up all that nonsense about love on the spot? My social IQ is astronomical.”

The young woman wouldn’t let him escape with a joke. “You could be wrong. Look at today. One idiotic, wrong stunt after another. It could be the same.”

“Maybe I was wrong with that, but not this."

The young woman grew frustrated at his confidence. “Even if you aren’t wrong, even if it’s truly hopeless…I…the other party is owed an explanation rather than being left in the dark. They should have an opportunity to judge for themselves, to judge everything, and to decide, themselves, that it’s going to be a no rather than having you project that onto them. That’s so unfair. They’re owed at least that, aren’t they? The choice.”

“Yeah, you’re right. They are owed the choice.”

“Then why wouldn’t you give it? Why wouldn’t you give it?”

“Me?” Henry had to deliberate, having never had the time or inclination to ponder the matter deeply.

The first answer that sprang to mind was that he didn’t want to incur the unnecessary risk. This seeming callous and unhelpful, he searched further inside for a piece of him that was still human.

Upon finding one, he broke into a sad smile. “Selfishness? When everything is lost, the sole comfort might be in leaving open the possibility that you could've been wrong, in preserving at least the airy dream of a maybe.”

Alas, in this regard, one of the by-products of the events Suchi was that, soon, this unresolved possibility would also be stripped from him, yet another victim of Karnon’s meddling.

Oh well. It was hard to summon much pity for himself when weighing this minor drama against the mountain.

He’d planned to log on to resume his duelling climb after the beauty left, but she didn’t. Having difficulty booting the grieving girl out, he decided to cheer herself and himself up by inviting her to join him in cooking a six-millennia old Egyptian date-cake recipe dredged up recently by Computational Archaeologists. The final product ended up tasting bland, as one would expect from the limited ingredients available back then.

Once Cathy started spamming him about Team Friendship Forever, he explained to the beauty that he had other obligations and she needed to leave.

“Go already,” Henry implored, scrubbing a bowl in the kitchen sink. “I’ll finish quicker on my own.”

“Feels a bit rude…” The young woman beside him was drying dishes.

“Nothing rude about it. Consider it repayment for earlier, a cancellation of the embarrassing debt.”

“If that’s the case, then you owe me way more than this.”

“True.” He laughed. “But what else could I give?”

He shared a look with the beauty, and she returned his smile at the absurdity of it all.

And it was absurd, this digital era, this interim period in the middle of the 21st century, the kids having to puzzle together their bizarre solutions for the many never-before-encountered problems…the bewildering complications of these strange new realities…in virtual videogames…and things…

The look was dragging on...

Weird...

Henry, as the beauty didn’t break eye contact, suddenly saw the flash of a familiar expression. It was one that he’d glimpsed from countless souls, from the soldiers lined along the parapets before he sieged their castles, to the assassins before they’d offed his companions, to the Senior Director today before he’d slit the man’s throat. These were the eyes of one about to participate in the desperate moments of death, the pupils dilating in response to the adrenaline coursing through their body to make the muscles move strong and quick.

In the corner of his vision, he detected the knife the beauty had been drying, its handle squeezed in her clenching fist.

So, he thought, this is how he died, caught off guard and shanked while washing the dishes…whelp, hopefully, she spared Alex’s kid…

Despite his internal resignation, his arm had already shot out to grab her wrist. As it was moving, though, penetrating through the space slowed by his paranoid perception, he recognised that the beauty hadn’t beaten his slow self to the jump.

She hadn’t attacked at all.

In fact, in a rather peculiar choice, she was dropping the weapon, letting it slip from her fingers flying towards him.

Oh.

He may have misread the situation…

The girl mirroring his abrupt advance with her own, he found his lips smothered in a soft warm wetness, whose enticements to sink deeper his body immediately accepted. His tongue, like a rope wound once by each of the day's repeated failures, released its tension upon hers, which responded in kind. His hands, meanwhile, struggling still against death, clawed around for life in the velvet of her hair, the frail flesh-softness of her cheek, her throat, her waist, and stomach. Her hands replying with a similar caress sent little shocks around him wherever they touched, and the realisation of this happening in return drove him to claw harder. He tried to separate to catch his breath, but when he did, he was overcome with a sense that the world contained in the form of this young woman might slip away from him forever. Lunging back in before he could breathe again, he seized her lips and pressed her smaller form against the sink, trapping her in the space between it and himself. When her fingers tapped his cheek to ask for oxygen, Henry, being able to live without it himself, kissed her throat on a spot where he’d felt the racing thumping of her heart. The hot breath of her panting stroked his ear and filled his mind with the flashing image of a different face.

He stopped.

Wincing, he released his hold and backed away slowly from the chick, whose eyes met his in bewilderment and questioning.

“Sorry,” he apologised. “It seems...it seems that I can’t give up quite yet.”

The young woman stared for a long breath, then, an abrupt calm setting over her, she moved away and tidied her shirt. “So you’ll tell them?”

“I’m sorry.” Henry apologised again, both to her and himself, clinging still to a hopeless chance.

The beauty ended up handling the rejection beautifully, wishing Henry luck as she departed on an amicable note.

He logged back onto Saana to waste the evening with his school friends and the Byzantines. Secluded in their drunken island of Slumpoints and tournaments and community events, none of them were aware of the events with his guild. Team practice was marked by Justinian roleplaying out the conflict of Henry being a member of ‘His’ shadowy legion; this culminated in a challenge to fight to the death, and Henry, wielding a Spelltome, one-tapped the idealistic imbecile. After practice, Byzantium assembled with other Villages from The Duchy of Australasia; in preparation for tomorrow’s Kingdom-wide performance event, they watched dress rehearsals from competing troupes and bands, created stage-pieces, fixed up costumes, and so on. A few more idiots started calling him ‘Big Bro’ after he corrected their offensively trash music and scripts. He dealt with 11 attempts to kill him, 3 of which were by spies merely pretending to be disgruntled roleplayers and Queen Atusa fanboys.

Throughout the evening, Loki hovered around them acting lost while occasionally testing various past personas and freaking the Byzantines out. The spy, oblivious to his plans being soon rendered pointless by the other trickster figure, had initiated the next stage of his scheme. He was performing the gradual realisation of his falsified transgender inclinations from his extensive catalogue of feminine personas. Henry, ignoring this doomed charade, did not think about whether Loki had been manipulated into discovering him and employing this search for gender as another component of Karnon’s recurring genital symbolism.

Finally, prompted by the random dinner conversation, he got Rose to reply by saying he’d seen through her therapy sham, resolved the issue with her killing Silver repeatedly, and arranged a date for tomorrow night. Whether he'd ever had a chance, whether it'd merely been a dream, he'd soon find out.