The Soiree in The Slums.

“...Mohawk Healer Bro screamed at the crocodile about to chomp off his leg. 'AHHHH!' Little did he know, by employing the situational awareness techniques passed down to me by Big Bro, I’d already thrown him Hatchet Sis to intercept the…”

In the crowd of costumed festivalgoers, Handsome Dan was recounting for Team Friendship Forever his latest independent adventure of tanking for a random dungeon pick-up group.

“Isn’t that croc visible at the start of the encounter?” Abigail snorted. “What a noob.”

“I know, Ninja Sis, but I didn’t want to hold that against him. We’re all noobs at one point.”

“Only a week has passed,” said Henry, dressed like a teen on a prom date in a tuxedo picked out by Cathy, his hair over-gelled, his arms loaded with a bouquet of roses. “You’re still a turbonoob.”

“…and don’t call her a turbonoob.” Cathy, in the middle of her ignored ramblings, was fussily wiping dust from Henry’s pant legs. “Girls don’t find it attractive when you insult their competency with esoteric game jargon. You might think it’s giving you psychological leverage, but it just reveals your lack of manners and empathy. And keep the monologues to a minimum. Communication is about sharing. Don’t be selfish. And don’t be complacent because you’re 'filthy rich' and have the supposed backup of gold-diggers. Fewer women than you’re estimating will put up with your personality for more than a couple hours. Even when you pay them, which you should never...”

Henry shrugged. “Worst case scenario, I’m content with my own company.”

This day for Henry in Suchi had passed without any nearby catastrophes.

At his stadium, he gathered more sycophants and moderated the attention being given to The Saga of The Cripple’s Return by intentionally losing a couple mini-tournaments to the local noobs.

At team practice, Justinian reached a compromise to their roleplayed conflict. He informed Henry that Byzantium’s 6v6-team would be his to command in exchange for renouncing any further loyalty to His shadowy, insidious legion. Henry, Him, refused. The golden Crusader retaliated by calling a Village meeting to kick him from Byzantium. A heroic, heartfelt speech Justinian gave in support of this motion convinced Henry to concede any defence and vote against himself. Alas, they were both defeated by the power of democracy, the other Byzantines being too terrified to offend The Company by supporting the ejection.

Loki did some weird stuff.

It'd been an uneventful day. One could only hope this night would prove the same.

“…is what unhappy loners say. Henry, I expect you to not to half-bottom this. You can’t fail here. I love you, but—to not offend the Lord with lying lips—you’re fundamentally unlovable. You have a toxic, rude, antisocial aura. If a girl’s blind to this and she’s nice, that’s enough - cling on to her and try to get married before she awakens to the truth. Are you nervous?”

“Petrified.”

Cathy stuffed a bottle of orange pills in his palm. “A friendly naturopath told me these will help with anxiety. He had plenty of repeat customers so you can trust…”

Henry inspected the pills, which were a concentrated form of Liquid Thunder – basically crack cocaine.

“Big Bro, I can come along as emotional support.”

“That was sarcasm, Dan. But here's a reward for offering!” Henry threw the meathead the pills. “Share them with your rugby mates for a fun time."

“Thanks, Big Bro!”

“You’re welcome, buddy. No more than one pill each."

“…not find these snide remarks endearing. In fact, nobody does. You should stop using sarcasm completely. But we can work on that and this giving away gifts issue later.” Cathy stepped away from him and nodded in approval - she didn’t agree with his choice, but any love was better than none. “Henry, we’re all proud of you for daring to journey into the healing realm of romance. If you need help or advice, you can always message us. I expect updates. Remember the team motto, ‘Defeating evil with the power of love and friendship!’”

Henry accepted a few extra words of encouragement from his school friends. He then split off from the group to venture alone into the packed streets of drunken, partying Australians, in the midst of which his date awaited.

With each step he took forward, he focused himself, shedding his awareness of the night’s darker rumblings and the approaching storm beyond his ability to halt, condensing his psyche into the limits of this small, silly moment that remained within his control.

Tonight, among other conflicts, he would confront the romantic incompatibility that’d killed his first love before it’d blossomed.

During yesterday’s chat with the Australian chick—who'd spurred today's mission after he'd seen his first love while making out with her and realised he couldn't give up yet—he’d attempted to explain this incompatibility through the analogy of being a teenage parent burdened with a bastard kid. As strange as that'd been, the metaphor had been necessary because the actual problem could not be comprehended by anyone remotely normal.

The real incompatibility? Saana.

When you cleared away the dross, fundamentally, Henry’s first romance had been killed by nothing but a videogame. Of all the tragic incompatibilities that history had ever placed between two young people, the cruel castes predestining them to rival suitors, the wars abducting them to trenches, the economic and educational necessities flying them across oceans, Henry's own incompatibility existed entirely inside of a poorly-designed videogame, within the way two people interact with a videogame, the roles they played in a videogame, the decisions they made in a videogame.

A stranger could neither grasp the depth of this problem nor that it could even possess depth. For the average kid Henry's age, in a conflict between events in a distant, virtual universe and the intimate, physical proximity of love, the first would crumble like ash through the fingers. Whatever happened in a videogame was inconsequential compared with romance. You'd have to be a moron to pick the first.

But there were such morons - like Henry, the paragon of morons.

Already, he'd made material sacrifices far beyond the magnitude of one teenage romance. He’d given up his sleep, his dreams. Most people would probably go bald if they had to endure a single day of his financial losses. Despite the disgusting, filthy real-life riches procured from his in-game and out-of-game businesses, he'd left ungodly amounts more on the table because he, genuinely, prioritised Saana's NPC population over his own profit. Worse, these losses didn't bother him in the slightest - he practically never thought about them outside of general instances of reviewing and assessing his sanity. He was, unironically, a charitable humanitarian for a virtual MMORPG. He was a total moron.

For morons like himself, a videogame could produce this level of conflict. It could ascend to the spiritual significance of a bastard child. It could lay down a path that, once chosen, eliminated thousands of alternative paths and the romantic company one might’ve had walking them. A game could become a solitary path that, deep down, despite the incessant complaining, one had no desire to abandon and that one, if given the option to restart everything, would choose to rewalk again and again until eternity's end.

Some people were morons.

Since last night's conversation with the beauty, Henry was no less confident about his moronic incompatibility being insurmountable.

Still, one could apply to this situation the lessons of his forest farming exercise - romance akin in some respects to a cherished forest farm. Usually, there were more ideal ways to meet the end of love or anything else than to flee from it or stand idly while it slips away. By having the strength to persist a couple steps further with one's attachments, one might discover two or three gestures to diminish the sadness of the transition. If all that was achieved was giving the other person a sense of closure by sharing the problem, as the beauty had advised him to, that was better than nothing.

And there was also that essential but unspoken possibility secreted away in the silent final years of his Overdream session devoted to Monster-Self Veneration. The chattering mind that constructed these impressions, attributions, predictions of ‘incompatibilities’, this was but one part of any person. The mind’s manifestations had, ultimately, to contend with the physical realities of the acting body, whose rapid, breathing, fluid nature often evaded and defied any rigid mental shackles that might be imposed upon it. With any prediction involving individual humans by individual humans, a gap existed. By not being a coward, by standing one’s ground in this gap, by daring to test the apparent fortitude of the prophesied future through stubborn, physical resistance, one might enact enough meaningful gestures to push slightly further beyond minimising defeat. By not conceding, one might just achieve the ultimate miracle of transformation, redirecting what's perceived as a certain loss into a narrow victory.

But Henry—who carried within him a mountain of bodies that’d failed their no less desperate rebellion against his mind—wouldn’t invest himself in the prospect of a reversal. He was here to lose with grace, and that was all.

Regardless of the outcome, he wouldn’t be shedding any tears for this minor tragedy. Throughout this costumed crowd, so dense he almost had to swim through them, he was spotting many youngsters lost in a similar predicament, sneaking glances at their crushes, steeling their nerves as they prepared to plunge ahead and utilise the cover of this masked night to test their chances. Whether Henry succeeded or failed, he wouldn’t be alone.

(Of course, his predicament wasn’t quite universal. He did have to balance this one private struggle against the more nefarious ones operating in the background - like the teams of spies tracking him.)

Henry dipped into a Village rave. Under the diversion of pulsating strobe lights and the sardine-packed dancers, he swapped Cathy’s lame outfit for another and ditched his pursuers.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Several streets away, passing along a row of food stalls outside a ramshackle amphitheatre hosting a poetry slam, he finally caught sight of her.

She was elevated a few metres up on the amphitheatre’s brim, seated in the opposite direction to the audience and dangling her legs down into the street. Her cocktail dress, a golden number with an integrated ribbon belt and necktie, would have been overly showy in its design on most occasions but, with the other costumed festivalgoers, seemed almost too normal. In contrast to the ornateness of the rest of her outfit, she wore a plain white eye mask covering a thin strip between the brow and nose, its sparsity allowing the exhibition of the face, whose canvas had been painted, cleaned, and repainted many times over.

The eyes through this slit of this mask, the same distinctive honey-orange of her brother’s, were filled with delight instead of the tears of rejection last seen in them before she suicided her character during the Doomreaver prank.

Catching a glimpse of Rose, Henry gave a dual-meaninged sigh. One part corresponding to his Fleshbag self, filled with regret, was calling himself a moron for caving into this. A second part of the sigh, from his Digital self, agreed he was a moron from a different angle.

Nevertheless, with their path chosen, they would walk it with sincerity.

He strolled past Rose's perch. At the sound of a light thud, she appeared beside him, growing two inches taller as she stepped into a pair of materialising heels.

“Why’d you pretend to not see me, big bro?”

“I’m still very angry with you.” Henry tossed the bouquet and an exasperated look at Rose, who showed no signs of contrition. “The therapy sham was despicable. Exploiting an issue as serious as mental health…schemes should have some limits.”

Rose, catching the bouquet and savouring its aroma with a deep inhalation, pumped her eyebrows cooly over the top of her mask. “Nothing you wouldn’t stoop to doing. Chapter 17 of The Strategy - 'The komodo is at ease with its mouth full of disease and venom'.”

“That’s where you’re incorrect, Rose.” Henry recalled yesterday’s elaborate harassment of that chick based around his duelling tactics. “After a lifetime of conquering one climb after another, I’ve developed a keen sense for which tools are suited for which slopes. Against the mountain of romance, even if I've never attempted it, it should be obvious that the most important tool is to have no tools, that one should approach the target as not a target. A healthy relationship must be built on a foundation of honesty and unmanipulative affection.”

Rose shrugged. “My starting foundation was poor, big bro. With the background and your paranoia, you would have dismissed any change not seen first-hand as a stalker ploy.”

“True,” Henry conceded. “On the topic of change, how much craziness do you have left to get rid of? 30%? 70%? Give me an estimate.”

Rose was appalled. "Big bro, you can’t ask porcupine-level Social IQ questions like that on a first date! That’s too personal!”

“Is that so?"

Henry noted a contradiction between this unwillingness to share and the previous days. During their fraudulent experimental therapy, she’d been quite open with discussing her derangement, even encouraging him to offer advice on constructing a new, less insane persona - an exercise that’d actually been her researching his romantic preferences.

But this contradiction, considered more seriously, made some sense to him. The fraudulent context could have added a protective layer that enabled her to speak about this otherwise delicate topic. Whenever things got sensitive, she could always retreat behind the idea that they were critiquing a false persona instead of herself.

Henry may or may not have been guilty of relying on a similar tactic this week. Two of the stories he’d written, the ultimate pleb-bait and then the love quadrilateral of the marathon, might both be examples of this. Both, from a certain angle, had been means of exploring his own romantic predicament from a distance. His problems, too painful to touch directly, became easier to manipulate and dissect once they’d been anaesthetised through the subordination of his personal struggle to the loftier mission of artistic creation, through the liberating conversion from the first-person of himself to the third-person of a fictional character. When speaking about someone else’s tragedy, much less friction arose. An absurd coping mechanism - pathetic, inefficient, weak, juvenile. But, well, despite the many areas of life in which he’d been forced by circumstance to grow up, he remained in others a dumb teenager.

Henry didn’t pursue the craziness topic further. “So what are we doing for this date? Show me your itinerary.”

He expected she’d have made plans to maximise the use of time. After their talk the previous night, they'd achieved a compromise of him giving her four in-game hours of his undivided attention.

Rose, whistling merrily, handed him a folded note, bound suggestively with the same golden ribbon material used in her gown, and awaited his approval.

Henry, opening the thing, glanced through a list of 14 activities, from dinner at a piano concerto to an avant-garde play. At each event, she’d enrolled them under various pseudonyms, allowing him, if he so deigned it necessary, to murder the local amateurs with his Ultrapatrician multi-talents. To up the artistic kill count, the time to be spent at each had been calculated to the exact minute and a hand-drawn map showed the most efficient route between events, along with possible tangents of novelty and intrigue.

The note’s penmanship and drawing seemed exquisite, as ornate and detailed as a page from a Renaissance codex. However, for Henry’s keener scrutiny, an unnatural quality stuck out. Plenty of affection had been poured into its creation and the plan, but none of it was for the art itself, which’d been performed with resistance.

When he thought back on the Floating Leaf sketches she’d drawn during the marathon, the same quality had been present...

She, he had an epiphany, didn’t care for these creative pursuits. In fact, he bet she despised them, probably having been forced to learn them against her will.

Rose sneered with disdain. “For the evening’s first victims, we should decapitate these fifth-rate slam ‘poe—"

Henry, storing the note away respectfully, resisting the defeat contained within it, interrupted her. “Rose, I love the skill, I love the effort, and we can have a fun time destroying the illusions of noobs if you insist, but I’d prefer a more romantic alternative meeting between our different interests.”

This date couldn't be about himself. Blissfully repeating the same old hobbies he could do alone while she continued to hide everything about herself wouldn't get him past their hurdle.

“Hah! Big bro, nothing gives me greater grati—”

“Don’t bother," Henry pushed on. "I’m not distracted now. Here’s my improved game plan: instead of speedrunning this level, we skip it with cheats. Instead of squandering this evening in the awkward initial phase of you trying to impress me, a scheme that at best ends in a peck on the cheek, we will trade in those four-going-on-five years we’ve known each other and jump ahead. We’ve arrived beyond the stage of having to demonstrate and prove that we have value as people. You're already valued. You're safe. You're comfortable - so much so that you're a tad complacent. On this dull date after many dates, the only question stirring through your mind should be what will make you happiest. Me, I’m miffed about the latest dumb mistake you made, but I'm still wanting to do something you'll also enjoy because, at this sappy point, although I’d never admit it, that’s the best cure for my sour mood, your happiness. On this spectacularly ordinary occasion, who knows what the limits are? I could be incorrect as I often am, but I believe there's more potential in this direction. Think about it. Choose. If you have any refinements, give them.”

He appended a second part through private message.

-Henry Flower: Also, you have to drop the optimised persona and just be yourself. In the spirit of honesty, because of The Tyrant stuff, I have a visceral repulsion to artifice. Reminds me of spies. Kills the mood.

A faint blush had blossomed on Rose's cheeks from the first part mentioning a kiss. At the second part, she stopped abruptly for a few untaken breaths, and the expression she’d been portraying, a cutesy condescension, solidified like a drying mud-mask. Her eyes, uncoupled from the relationship to her frozen face muscles, shifted about, blinking through her options.

Her eventual agreement came without an explicit response. Rather, assent was marked by a subtle metamorphosis, a shift in expression so muted that it barely formed a crack in the preceding mud-mask. The corner of her lips dropped from a smile stretched beyond their native position, and her eyebrows, which she hadn’t yet learned to utilise automatically, relaxed and straightened out.

From out of this flattened face, her eyes stared with caution.

Henry responded by reaching towards her head, gingerly as one might towards a feral cat.

For anyone unfamiliar with Rose, this might seem a negative change, her assuming a dead, statuesque expression indistinguishable from the one she’d worn years ago. For Henry, however, there was a difference…

“Big…bro?” Rose tracked his approaching palm casting a shadow over her face.

Henry inched, slowly, closer...

Although he wouldn't deny being bamboozled into sincerely helping with her therapy speed-run, it’d never felt real to him. As with any domain outside of his guild duties, he was merely accustomed to making decisions in the absence of feeling, cobbling together his responses from the fragmentary glances he could spare with his limited attention and time. Yesterday, after he’d called Rose and reprimanded her for pulling this insane stunt, he’d extracted the proper timeline out of her, her parents enrolling her with a shrink during his absence from Saana between the two instalments, now many years ago. This story was, logically, more plausible, aligning with the hard, gradual process that would be expected in exorcising one’s most ingrained demons. Nevertheless, for Henry, this clarification hadn’t felt any more or less believable than the condensed version used to trick him. Both were equally insubstantial inside of him.

Now, however, in this undistracted moment, sparing much more attention than he ever had to this sister of his ex-colleague, he might have seized a moment of genuine feeling.

His hand came to rest on hair, which she’d dyed a caramel shade to match her gown and tied up in careful curls, and he ruffled it vigorously.

“Big...bro…” Rose, staying motionless as her hairdo was ruined, blinked in confusion, “what are you…doing...”

Henry, rubbing like a caveman attempting to ignite a friction fire on her head, studied her reaction.

Blink. Blink. Blink, blink. Blink.

Seemed real.

They may not have much, but these blinks of bewilderment and fear signified a drastic improvement. In the past, he could run up to her with an axe and she would ogle at him unblinkingly like a corpse right until he split her head. It’d been very creepy.

This degree of progress, Rose having gone part of the way but not entirely, aligned more with what Henry would expect for the magnitude of her troubles.

Also, she had literal autism, so her baseline 'normal' should still be mildly robotic. A Little Liu-style verbal awakening wasn’t in her semi-mute cards.

What a relief, Henry thought, still rubbing, still scrutinising, still confirming this feeling. For Geno’s poor sister, there might be some hope...

He stepped back, withdrawing from the assault. “Was checking if it’s a wig. Colour’s different.”

“Ah...no, big bro, I dyed it…”

Henry winced at being called big bro again, this repugnant label. “With the sham over, you can drop the honorifics. Call me Henry. It's much less offensive.”

Rose stared back silently, and then her cheeks flushed with a new burst of pink at progressing so rapidly.

"What the?" Henry frowned. "Aren't you Canadian?"

Autistic or not, her response made no sense for a native English speaker. Bare names meant nothing in this language.

Rose blinked in embarrassment. “Big bro, we don’t speak…around…”

“What about school? Friends?”

“Tutors, and…” she mumbled, dodging the second question.

“Oh, you’re homeschooled?” Henry had a series of insights about her and her creepster brother. “Explains a bit.”

Amongst the festivalgoers, a woman ahead of Henry and Rose had been covertly scanning the crowd. When she noticed someone, her eyes lit up with Peopleworker energy as someone remotely co-opted her vision.

Henry, without the greater knowledge of his Overdream research, would have assumed this woman to be a scout for the spy teams scrambling to relocate him. In actuality, her gaze was locked on a figure behind him purchasing a snow cone and wearing a mask of Hercules’ Erymanthian Boar – not The Saviour, wrong monster, wrong food. She had to be one of Oliver Spears’ journalists, out on the hunt for their prowler in the dark.

At once, the map leading to Henry’s exposure tonight coalesced into a visible shape. The pawn pieces, including himself, Oliver, and Ramiro, were being unwittingly nudged into place.

Less time remained than he'd hoped for. He’d be cutting it dangerously close.

-Henry Flower: Spy ahead; lose the bouquet. As for the honorifics, forget them for now. It's not a huge deal. While you rethink what you want to do on this date, let’s explore this noisy dump.

Discarding the big bro issue for the larger hurdles needing to be overcome, Henry knocked the bouquet out of Rose’s grip and grabbed her hand. Her eyes doubling in size, he dragged her along with him deeper into the labyrinth of The Slums, to search for whatever defiant miracles might be hidden in its ever-shifting, unmapped streets.