I am not a particularly good judge of space. Human architecture has a tendency to boggle my mind somewhat. I vaguely recollect my sense of Lisa’s house when I first came to live with her as a pup—how my immediate surroundings were my whole world. The great folds of the towel or blanket that surrounded me seemed mountain ranges, the stairs to the upper floor of the house a natural wonder of sheer cliffs. This changed as I grew, and perceived the house not as an unexplorable vastness, but a rather small collection of rooms which belonged to me. Or, at least, the guardianship thereof fell to me. Six of one, half a dozen of the other, at least in dog terms.

That is all to say that it struck me that the “JRPG tent” was much larger on the inside than it appeared on the outside.

There was a coat-rack in the foyer, but nobody seemed to have anything to divest. Kriegsgeswinnler remained cloaked, Addrion did not remove any armor to make herself comfortable, and Helmgarth never let his backpack out of site.

A small feast of turkey slices and beef stews had been arranged by unknown hands on the island counter in the kitchen, steam billowing from them and the fragrance drifting to every room in the house… rather, the tent. Commander Zideo paused by a mirror with an ornate, baroque wooden frame to rearrange his hair, replacing a couple of pink and aqua patches into the most organic disorder to achieve the most spontaneous appearance possible. I felt a prickling sensation beneath my paw pads, and found I was standing on a welcome mat with human English printed on it. In case the reader is overawed by the luxury, please observe that all the there was one shared bedroom with two rows of adjacent beds.

Addrion was already asleep, or appeared to be so, with her boots crossed at the ankle and her gauntlets behind her head. Her visor was sealed. The merchant walked around from room to room with his hands in his pockets in the manner of a person who strongly desires for you to see him not stealing anything. He bent to inspect details of the tent-house interior, the intricate designs on the demilune, the dull candlesticks, the knobs and fixtures, muttering things to himself such as “Well!” and “Wouldja lookit that” and “So-and-so could move these drawer pulls for a good profit,” cataloguing items he saw in a small notepad.

Beneath a modest chandelier in the dining room, Helmgarth tended to a the menagerie of small animals that he had rescued from the Ohmpressor assembly line in Fort Weepus. He didn’t hear me walk into the room, and I did not disabuse him of the notion that he was unobserved. He brought a plate of hot baked bread and fresh-chopped vegetables, and the creatures gathered around, sullying the table cloth with animal fur and crumbs. He made sure that everyone had enough. Although I still needed more information about his intentions regarding Commander Zideo, the sight of his calm kindness and servitude towards these creatures—especially after witnessing the heartless cruelty of the assembly room—clutched at my heart. It seemed a routine and practiced service for him, as though letting the creatures go hungry had not occurred to him, just as releasing them had not occurred to the captors in the Fort. For a human that wasn’t Commander Zideo, he was rising rather quickly in my esteem.

Zideo helped himself to a slice of turkey with his bare hands, with no Lisa here to gently swat at and admonish him. (I had always failed to see the problem. If anything, skip the hands and just put your face right in it. Am I right, dog readers?) He took a bite, then winced as though he had walked into an invisible wall. He stopped in the hall and said in astonishment to nobody in particular, “This is good.” He explored the rooms, chewing and observing, but not with Kriegsgeswinnler’s keen interest. He sat on the couch in the living room (I strongly prefer the term “den,” of course.), chewed, then tried each of the chairs. “These are comfortable,” he noted.

He went back for another slice of turkey, and threw one to me. “Here, bud.” He reached to pet me, and my body tensed in exultant anticipation, but he turned instead, noticing Helmgarth in the dining room. He went in and sat down at the table.

“Is this like an Air BNB?” he asked. “Do you have to wash the tablecloth after this?”

Helmgarth was cutting tiny slices off of a cheese wheel he had produced not from the kitchen but from his own backpack. Tiny, that is, for a human mouth, but a feast for the small rodents about to enjoy it.

“Wuffa hell’s a Airbee-enby?” asked the mouse, standing upright with his mouth full of cheese.

Zideo’s brow furrowed. He had never been sworn at by a mouse before. I have, and let me tell you, he got off with a light sentence, so to speak. “You talk?”

The mouse stopped chewing. He pushed his head forward in imitation of that sense that humans take on when they want to say the opposite of what they mean in order to make the other person feel bad. “No,” he said, but with a full mouth, it sounded a little like “Mo.”

Zideo made a kind of stirring gesture towards the critters gathered around the plates. “What’s… what going on here, with this? All of this?”

Helmgarth sighed, and folded his hands on the table.

“M’lord must have many questions.”

“Well, yeah,” said Zideo. He was getting the kind of angry he got whenever something didn’t make sense, but should. When he was Doing A Stream, my understanding was that this consternation was an attractive quality for those watching from other places in the world. It was one of the more deeply confounding human concepts I have ever been confronted with. “Maybe I just need to rest for a minute.”

Helmgarth bowed his head ever so slightly in acknowledgment. “If m’lord does, he will forsake all time for questions. M’lord is advised to ask them now.”

“Okay, well, for starters, why do you keep calling me that?”

“Calling m’lord what?”

“That!” said Zideo, pointing at Helmgarth as though he had spotted the offending word departing Helmgarth’s mouth. “I’ve played your game. You’re not, like, a peasant. Why do you talk like a medieval serf?”

A barely noticeable tremor went through the animals and people alike at his mention of the word ‘game.’ Helmgarth shivered, the porcupine took a step back, and from the other room, the merchant dropped a vase he was inspecting, which shattered on the floorboards.

“It is only natural to treat m’lord with some manner of respect. M’lord saved my life, and I am sworn to carry your burdens.”

“Yeah, I know, you said that,” said Zideo, directing the air in a circular motion as though he might skip forward in time. “But… why did you do it? Why are you here? You’re supposed to be in Gleam’Blade (20ǂ1). Why do they talk? Why is the merchant guy here at all? He’s really familiar. And of course everybody knows who Addrion is. We’ve all played metroidvanias.”

Helmgarth pawed thoughtfully at his own lower lip. “M’lord has many strange words for things, but everyone in Exe hails from somewhere else, I suppose.”

“Ee ex ee?” repeated Zideo. “Like an executable file? Like a game?”

Helmgarth closed his eyes tightly at the word. The porcupine actually said “Oof,” out loud, and Addrion grunted and shifted in her repose. The merchant stuck his head around the corner to see what was going on in the dining room.

“This humble servant knows not,” said Helmgarth. “I myself am not a serf, I am a seneschal. It is my duty in life to take care of the household of a hero… or it was.”

“Do we really have to get into this at the dinner table?” asked the mouse.

“There, again,” said Zideo. “What’s with the talking? That’s not normal.” He stood up, agitated. “And why aren’t you a weird boarsquirrel beast? How come you’re a normal mouse?” He looked as though he had scored a rhetorical point, then added, “Except for, y’know… the talking?”

“I ain’t from here,” said the mouse, and turned away with his cheese slice, showing Zideo his fragile, furry back.

“None of us are,” said Helmgarth in a way that he thought was helpful. “You among the foremost.”

“Why do you say that?”

Now it was Helmgarth who stood. I struggle to find the word to describe the look on his face in that moment. He looked hard at Commander Zideo, not threateningly, but with resolve. Conviction.

“You fell to the Screenwilds in our hour of greatest and most desperate need. In the shadow of Shard Platformia, you crushed those who would do us harm, take what was most important to us. The omen shone in the sky for you—a portent that has not happened for, well… for some time. You took control of the Compendium. You joined us all, bonded us as a party. The cutscene played… for you.”

Zideo wanted to say something, but didn’t say anything. He had the same look on his face that he had that one time, years ago in dog reckoning, when another human waiting outside the R-Mart spoke to him very forcefully about something I had never heard of called “the globalist agenda” and how the “deep state” was a puppet of “U.N.,” or perhaps it was the other way around. Although his monologue rose quickly to a crescendo and his tone was urgent, what he expected of Zideo was not clear, and Zideo eventually excused himself to go inside, saying, “Okay well I have to pick up some funions.”

“It is as you say,” said Helmgarth. “This is world of games, although few know it. Most who are aware are in this house.”

“Tent,” corrected Kriegsgeswinnler, appearing out of nowhere with a fingerless-gloved finger pointed casually upward.

“Hey!” shouted Addrion, with real annoyance. “Can we please stop saying the word? Some of us are trying to sleep.”

“And you…”

“I believe to be a Player.”

The merchant’s mouth dropped open. Or at least, that’s the impression I got based on the shape of his scarf covering most of his face. His single visible eye was wide, I’m pretty sure. The critters all turned toward Commander Zideo, stunned, cheese crumbs raised halfway to their open mouths.

“Well… yeah,” said Zideo. “Duh.”

Helmgarth did not know the term, and bowed. “Duh to m’lord as well.”

His eyes began to dart around the room, as though evaluating every surface and every corner differently. “Are you telling me this is all, what… polygons?” He picked up a hunk of bread from the plate.

He sniffed it, tore a hunk off with his teeth and chewed with a philosophical intensity. “Diff made of piffels?”

“Piffels, m’lord?”

“Pixels? Everything here is made of code? Ones and zeroes?” He picked up a spoon, furious at the logical flaw. “There is no spoon?”

“The spoon’s right there, jackass,” said the mouse. “You’re holding it.”

He placed his hands on the table and leaned over the creatures, moving his head in close to inspect them. “What are you from? Which g-”

Helmgarth cleared his throat. “If m’lord will refrain from the word…”

“Why? Not everybody knows? But you know.”

“Indeed,” said Helmgarth. “But the knowledge of the true nature of one’s universe can be a matter of significant… discomfort. Can you imagine if the answer to all of existence were contained in one word in the world whence you hail? And if someone went around saying that word with abandon?”

He looked at the mouse. “Which g-word are you from?”

“Hop Skip Legends! (19∞2),” said the mouse without hesitation. When Zideo did not react, he said, “Frogger ripoff.”

The equation was playing out in Zideo’s eyes. They darted from place to place, fact to fact, premise to premise, focusing on nothing in the room for a minute. “But… that makes you Atari-era.”

“DiVersio,” corrected the mouse.

“Same difference. Shouldn’t you be made of big fat pixels? Like our friend… the cowboy?”

The mouse shrugged. “I’m from a remake.”

“Fine.” He pointed to the porcupine. “What about you?”

“Leave him alone,” said the mouse. “He’s an unused asset.”

Zideo stormed over to the other side of the table, and grabbed Helmgarth by the elbow, to the seneschal’s chagrin. He raised the arm, worked his shoulder around, bent the elbow, checked the range of motion. He twisted the hand to either side, and folded Helmgarth’s fingers.

“I played a shitload of Gleam’Blade (20ǂ1) back in the day,” he said. “This is too many points of articulation. Y’all all had big chunky, dumpy fingers, and your pathing was terrible. You walked over tables and chairs and spouted your greeting dialogue every time I was in earshot. Why are you… so real?”

Helmgarth firmly removed his arm from Zideo’s grasp. “Mods,” he said, almost testily, but then bowed his head. I thought he might be ashamed, but he quickly moved on.

“There will be many answers tomorrow, when we reach Ludopolis.”

“What’s Ludopolis?” asked Zideo.

Helmgarth raised his hand to protest, but was too late. The last thing he had time to do before we heard the fluttering of dry pages was slap his palm over his face in resignation.

“What the-!” shouted Addrion from the bedroom.

The mouse dropped his cheese, and it froze in midair. My tail halted mid-wag, and I found the familiar invisible restraints had returned. The book appeared in front of Zideo.

* Entry: Ludopolis

* Faction: The free peoples of Exe

* Description: A sanctuary amid chaos, Ludopolis is the home of many refugees fleeing the Total Conversion.

He dismissed the book, to the great relief of everyone in the tent-house. The cheese crumb fell to the floor.

“What the heck does any of this mean? What is the Total Conversion?” Time froze and again and pages fluttered.

* Entry: The Total Conversion

* Description: An apocalyptic event during which all gameworlds were destroyed and remade into Genre Shards. The Genre Shards were hurled into the chaotic but neutral land known as the Screenwilds, destroying the vast majority of its resources and surface. Only one broken chunk of land remains, a region surrounding the city of Ludopolis.

The book disappeared once more, and once more time resumed. Addrion shouted unintelligible invective from the other room, the signature wrath of disturbed slumber.

“Oh, okay,” came her amplified voice through her helmet from the other room, obscured slightly by static. “If you do that again… actually, do that again. Find out.”

“C’mon, man,” protested the mouse with his front legs up in the air like hands. “Knock it off!”

“So then wh-” but this time, Helmgarth strode over to him and put a palm over his mouth. Instinctively, I rose to intercept him. But then I recalled that I, too, hated the sensation of the book appearing.

“M’lord must practice discipline,” said Helmgarth. “The Compendium responds to direct queries.”

“Mmf mfmff fmmf mfff?” asked Zideo from behind Helmgarth’s hand. Helmgarth nodded. “Indeed. Get them out of m’lord’s system.” Once Zideo stopped making noises, the seneschal removed his hand, tentatively at first. There were so many questions, and they were dangerous… or at least, terribly annoying.

“We do not know who wrote or compiled the Compendium. We knew it contained a vast amount of knowledge, history, science and lore. We believe it originated from no g-word. But no one from any g-word or from the Screenwilds has ever been able to open it. And on the way back from my… mission… it sprang to life, obedient to your voice.” He took a seat at the table, satisfied that Zideo had learned his lesson and was not going to summon the book again.

Zideo sat down too, across from him. “It’s a pause menu thing, isn’t it?” he asked, weakly. He might have said “paws menu,” but neither meant anything to me.

Helmgarth was equally out of the loop, and shrugged.

“I urge m’lord to rest,” said Helmgarth. “There are many more questions, and whatever my meager knowledge can answer for you, I will.” He let out a deep breath. “Tomorrow.”

“Why do we have to go where we’re going?”

Helmgarth went to the bedroom and began turning down his bed. “I have sworn to carry your burdens,” he said again, “but I have taken another, greater oath to serve another.” He waved across the bedroom with the two rows of beds. Addrion shushed him and turned her huge armored back on us. “We all have.” Kriegsgeswinnler looked up from the notebook he was reviewing in bed. “Not him,” said Helmgarth. He glanced at the porcupine and mouse and their associates, all climbing into one bed to share it, a great luxury for non-human mammals. “Not them either, I don’t know them.”

Helmgarth was overwhelmed with fatigue then, and he dragged his enormous backpack over to his bedside like it was a side table. He relaxed and closed his eyes, but occasionally his arms would reach into a pocket of the backpack and feel for some item or another, a habit he must have developed over long periods of lonely travel. Or else he was born into a litter with many siblings.

Commander Zideo climbed into a bed as well, and the room was filled with the quiet breathing of safe, comfortable humans. Knowing all was well turned off my alertness like a lightswitch, but out of curiosity I made another round of the house. Looking out the windows, it did not seem to me that the dark landscape matched the place we set up our tent house. Stars glared down at us, and a crescent moon I had not seen before patrolled its night sky behind dark clouds like spilled ink. A comforting river ran noisily nearby, which I had not heard outdoors. Perhaps I was merely unobservant during our flight from Fort Weepus, though. I put it out of my mind and slept, for the first time, in another world.

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