“Emma!” Slade and I yelled at once. We shoved in, each hugging her from opposite sides.

“Jinx?” She groaned.

Slade slapped her on the back, whispering, “Glad you’re back.”

She gave him big wet anime eyes. I was still in the process of switching gears from worry to relief.

“What the hell were you doing?” I demanded. Relief washed away quickly, only to be replaced with anger that she’d made us worry.

Emma looked at me, blinking, “It was trying to talk to me.”

“It what?” I said.

“It was whispering to me. Saying something I couldn’t quite understand.”

“I didn’t hear anything,” I told her.

“It was. It was talking.”

“Slade? Max?” I asked, looking at the others, “Did you hear anything?”

“Who cares? If she says she heard something, maybe she did.” Slade said.

“You’re able to see tracks,” Max offered, “None of us can. Maybe she did hear something.”

I nodded. Max had a good point. It brought up a myriad of concerns. If we saw the game differently, how we be certain we were even speaking about the same thing when communicating? After a moment of thought, however, I realized that might very well be how things worked in the real world, but without computer graphics to make it obvious.

“Did you understand anything it said?” I asked.

Emma shook her head. “No, but it was trying to communicate.”

“What makes you think it wanted to talk?” I said.

She struggled with that question, her eyes darting to the floor before looking up to answer, “I don’t know. It was just a feeling. And the way it moved its hands.”

“Hands?” I said, “I didn’t see hands. They looked more like flickers of lightning, but black.”

“I saw wavy noodly things, like dark spaghetti,” Slade said.

We looked at Max, “Tentacles of shadow.”

And there it was. Confirmation that each of us was playing a different game. My thoughts were snarled and twisted. It seemed unfair that we weren’t being told what was going on here.

“Kane,” I demanded. “What the fuck?”

“We’re monitoring the situation.” His disembodied voice said.

“Who is we?” I said.

“A team of experts. It’s classified beyond that.”

“What do you mean - classified?” I asked.

“So, not programmers?” Max interrupted.

“I apologize, Mr. Pendergrast. It’s classified.”

Max looked at me and shook his head, whispering, “Confirmed, not programmers.”

My thoughts ran wild. What sort of team of experts would be monitoring a game? Maybe Max had been right that Kane and whoever else was there with him were not responsible for making the game. If not them then who?

“Kane,” I said evenly. “Who made this game?”

There was no pause, “That’s classified, Miss Price.”

“We may have had a near-fatal experience, and you won’t tell us who caused it?” I said.

“I cannot say,” Kane replied.

“He’s not in charge,” I whispered to Max.

“Or, he may not know,” Max whispered back.

My frustration melted into something darker, colder, an icy fist squeezing my spine. We’d been dropped into something with rules we didn’t understand and were expected to beat it somehow.

I told the group, “We need to figure out the rules of the game. Goblins and fighting are not the focus; all that’s ancillary. There’s something else at play here.”

Max nodded, “Agreed.”

“Maybe we’re not really here to report glitches,” Emma said. “But to talk to them.”

Me and Max shot each other dubious looks.

“Ha!” Slade said, “Yeah, like the writing on that wall.”

“Writing?” I said.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

“The rows of triangles,” Max said as he returned to the door.

I got up and followed. Sure enough, now that I was looking at it, I noticed that the triangles on the wall had all the hallmarks of writing. They had been laid out in even rows but not in a square like English fit on a page. The column of symbols was longest at the top and bottom but pinched in the middle. After a moment, it occurred to me that it looked like two triangles were placed on top of each other so that their points were aligned with the base of the other, like an hourglass.

“A lot of triangles.” Max was reporting, “Some dashes. Some slashes. Some back-slashes. And some chevrons.”

“Parts of a triangle,” I said.

“How so?” Max asked.

“A triangle is made up with a slash, a backslash, and a dash. Those three pieces combined make a triangle. The other symbols are combinations of those. It looks like nine, no - maybe a dozen different symbols. That looks like an alphabet.”

“Sweet!” Max said. “Emma was right.”

“Maybe,” I said. “What about the chessboard? Seems like a game within a game.”

“It's not chess,” Slade said.

“How would you know?” I asked.

“I play chess,” Slade said. He looked at me, then Max, “What? It’s a time-honored test of strategic skill.”

“I’m just having a hard time imagining you playing,” I said.

“My dad taught me. We’d play at the ranch.” Slade said. “We could take that one and play sometime, but it's not exactly right.”

Max and I stared at him. Finally, I gestured to the board, “Care to explain how so?”

“Sure. There’s way too many pieces. Each player in chess has sixteen pieces that fit in two rows. There are three rows of nine pieces for each player here. That makes…

“Twenty-seven pieces,” I said. “Divisible by three. Like a triangle. As a matter of fact, it’s a perfect cube.

“Perfect cube?” Slade said.

“Maybe work better if I show you,” I said, opening my inventory and drawing out a dagger.

I scratched on the surface of the wooden table:

27 pieces

27 = 33

27 = 3 x 3 x 3

“Twenty-seven is a perfect cube because the cubed root of it is a whole number, also called an integer.”

“Whatever,” Slade shrugged. “Also, this board has too many rows. See? There are nine in each direction. There are only eight in chess, which makes four home rows for each player, even distribution. This board has an extra row in the middle, kind of a no man’s land.”

“More factors of three. Nine, the number of rows, is a perfect square. It's three squared.” I said, scratching out:

9 rows

9 = 32

9 = 3 x 3

I continued, “Twenty-seven, the pieces, is three cubed. And the board has eighty-one spaces. Eighty-one is a perfect fourth power. A biquadrate three.”

81 squares

81 = 34

81 = 3 x 3 x 3 x 3

“Are you trying to kill me?” Slade asked. “Cuz I’m ready to slip into a coma like Emma did right now.”

I was a little stunned. “You don’t find it fascinating that the number three keeps popping up?”

“No, I think if you ever start a math lecture like this again, I’m going to have to kill you. Seriously, we are in the most kickass video game of all time, and you are literally sapping all energy out of it.”

“Why else do you think we’d be bombarded with the number three? You don’t think there’s any significance?”

“Sure, there’s significance,” Slade said, “But it's fucking boring. I’ll bet Kane has already cut his wrists.”

Kane replied, “I’m afraid not, Mr. Peterson. I am quite alive and doing well.”

“A lot of mythology uses the number three.” Emma said.

We all gawked. She continued, “In Greek mythology, there were the three fates, the three Charites, three gorgons. In Norse mythology, there were the Norns, spinning the fate of man, past, present, and future. Christianity has the Holy Trinity, the Three Wise Men, three theological virtues. Hindu, Celtic, and Toa each have deities, stories, and symbols in triples. Bad things come in threes. Genies grant three wishes.”

“Damn,” Slade said. “What was your degree?”

Emma replied, “Anthropology with a focus on mythology and religion.”

I was a little irritated. I’d used hard facts, numbers, and the wall paintings, to show that the number three was somehow significant to the game. Emma presented some hackneyed superstitions and mystical mumbo-jumbo, and Slade lapped it up. Max was nodding too, further irritating me.

To get us back to the facts, I said, “I have a feeling the alphabet is going to be twenty-seven letters long.”

“Or some other factor of three,” Max said.

“Right.” I nodded, trying to count unique symbols on the wall, “But my money is on twenty-seven. ”

Max seemed positively excited, “Now, this is a puzzle. Let’s figure out this alphabet and decipher that language.”

Party Gained: Experience

“Woot!” Slade yelled.

“Great googly moogly,” I said.

Max nodded, “Emma was totally right. The game is about communication.”

“But with who?” I said.

Max smiled slyly, “Or what.”

When he said that, I felt a chill shoot along my spine. What would a ‘what’ be? I had an uneasy feeling that we were slowly prying open a Pandora’s box. I looked at the glitch, triangular in shape, even though it was constantly undulating.

“The glitch,” I said. “It’s a triangle.”

Max peered at it, “Oh my gawd. You’re right.”

Whatever the glitch was, it sent Emma into convulsions. I didn’t want to talk to it. It was just static repeating itself. It wasn’t a person. It was a thing. A dangerous thing. Something to be avoided, like poison, or rom-coms.

I could feel my lip curl in revulsion every time I looked at the glitch now. Getting as far from it as possible was all I wanted. Slade, however, decided to edge close to it.

“What are you doing?” I hissed.

“Don’t worry,” Slade said. “Just gonna grab the game.”

The giant idiot reached out carefully and gripped the edge of the wooden board by the two corners farthest away from the glitch.

“When you pull it, do it slowly,” Max said, egging Slade on.

“Don’t encourage him.” I said, “Leave it alone. What if it gets mad that you are taking its game?”

Slade was hunched in concentration, looking directly into the thing. Dancing bolts of lightning still flickered from it, touching the far edge of the game.

“Steady,” Max whispered. “Now.”

Slade pulled. Agonizingly slow. And the thing did not seem to react. As Slade pulled the board farther away, he sped up, knocking pieces over.

“Careful!” Max moaned.

“I got it, I got it.” Slade breathed. “And done.”

Slade was now in possession of a strange chessboard. I watched him blink, opening up a menu, and then the board and all its pieces vanished.

“That’s weird,” I said as a thought occurred to me.

“What's that?” Max asked.

“The board is square. It seems like it should be a triangle. You know, to match all the factors of three.”

Max thought for a moment. We were both surprised when Emma offered, “Maybe it's trying to meet us halfway?”

I didn’t like the implication and didn’t say anything. I knew that if I asked for evidence of the assertion she had just made, she’d point out the glitch in trying to speak to her. A puzzle about alphabets and numbers I could wrestle with comfortably. But communicating with something so strange and downright creepy... Yeah, I was not there yet.

An odd, irritating noise broke out from up the stairs. It sounded like a cross between a bugle and a kazoo played by an angry musician.

“Goblins!” Slade yelled and went racing up the stairs with Max behind him.

Perfect timing, I thought. These little bastages attacked right when we were starting to make some headway to understanding what all this was about.