"Wait a minute!" I said, recovering my voice. Bushra stopped in the hallway and looked back at me, challengingly. Then she seemed to examine me more closely, and her expression changed to confusion.

"You're looking well." Almost accusatory.

"Uhm, thanks?" I replied, not really sure how to respond. Her tone didn't sound like she was concerned about my well-being.

"Maybe it wasn't as bad as it looked." She murmured, her expression pensive.

"What?" I wasn't sure I caught that.

"Well, if you are up and moving around, that works for the better." She continued into the house, but halted at the first interior doorway to the front room.

Box in hand, I quickly caught up. Bushra was staring at Iter, sitting gracefully on the sofa, his face serene, and his hands folded on his lap. The TV in contrast was playing loud combat background music in stark contrast to his demeanor, the screen paused on his game. The game controller sat conspicuously on the coffee table in front of him.

"Who's this?" Bushra demanded, eyes not moving from Iter. I slipped awkwardly past her into the room, setting down the box on the coffee table, mind racing on what to do next.

"Iter, this is my coworker, er, former coworker, Bushra… " I blanked on her last name in the moment, and looked in her direction.

"Bushra Patel," she said, standoffish.

"Right, sorry. Bushra, this is Iter," I turned to the god, hoping he had a plan for this. His unclouded smile of welcome gave me no hints. "Iter is staying with me for a while." I finished lamely.

Bushra gave a fleeting smile back to Iter, almost involuntarily, then moved her more business-like gaze to me. "I want to talk to you about work." She paused and stared at me. When I didn't respond, she gave a tilt of her head in Iter's direction. "Does he know?"

I looked at Iter, who was now considering Bushra appraisingly. "Yeah, Iter is pretty well informed on that." Then I looked back to Bushra. This whole situation was strange, even leaving out the god playing video games on my couch. Bushra and I knew each other, but only as work colleagues. Her presence here didn’t make any sense – it was weird that she even knew where I lived. "What do you want to talk about?" I asked, folding my arms and narrowing my eyes.

She gave another quick glance to Iter, then moved over to the box where I'd set it down. She tipped the lid off, and pointed at the inside. "I read that," she said, accusation and defensiveness in equal parts warred on her face. Her eyes shifted around the room, then back to me.

I looked in the box, not sure what she was getting at. On top was a loose packet of papers. It looked like my personal things from the office. I also saw my phone inside, and reached to pick it up. The screen was cracked and the case scuffed more than I recalled, but the lock screen appeared when I picked it up. Almost out of power, but still working.

"I didn't mean to," she blurted, looking for all the world like a child caught doing something wrong, "But I collected them, after you… after the accident." She trailed off, looking to the side.

I wondered what she was talking about. I put my phone on a side table and plugged it into a waiting cable. Then I picked up the top paper in the box. After skimming it, I realized it was my exit paperwork. This page in particular was spelling out my various "crimes". In fact, as I read further, this was tantamount to a confession – if I signed this document, I'd effectively be admitting to guilt. I inhaled sharply, as white hot anger rose up the back of my neck and filled my mind, like a slow-motion explosion rising in a cloud of hot air and flame.

"So. You read this," I dropped the paper back in the box like a lit match. "What do you want?" I turned back to Bushra, unable to keep the tension out of my voice. She swallowed, her face was as taut as my nerves felt, but she stood her ground. In the periphery of my vision, I noticed Iter had stood up at some point, but I had no attention to spare for him at the moment.

"I don't believe it. What's written there," She started, an anger of her own fueling her words. "They lied to me, stole from me, too." She lifted her chin. "I want you to help me take it back." Her eyes burned into me, and I could feel my guard melt away in the blaze of that glare.

✦ ✦ ✦

Bushra was sitting on the sofa next to Iter, and I was back in the lounge chair. She'd taken off her coat and draped over the arm of the couch. She was wearing a simple black long sleeve shirt, blue jeans and black mid-calf winter boots underneath. She had declined my offer of coffee, and requested tea instead. I had a stash of black tea with lemon that I used occasionally, and a hot cup of it was now sitting, untouched, on the coffee table.

"I also picked up these," she said, and quietly pulled something out of her bag. It was my missing wallet and keys. She handed it over to me. I picked them up and cursorily looked inside the wallet, before setting them down on the coffee table next to the box. "The ambulance left before I could hand them over. So I picked it all up together." She glanced over at the box. "That's how I knew where you lived." She picked up the tea in front of her and held it with both hands, taking a sip. She seemed smaller than earlier, minus her puffy coat and her body pulled in as if crouching behind the cup of tea.

"You were there?" I asked, wondering where to start. Iter quietly watched us both, his thoughts unreadable.

She nodded. "I called 911. You were… hurt pretty bad." She was staring at her cup, unfocused. Then she looked over at me sidelong. "You look okay now."

"Looks can be deceiving," I deflected. Shit. I wonder what I looked like then. I have no idea how injured I was before Swift Regeneration, they didn't go over it in the hospital. Probably weird to tell a patient they'd broken 11 bones, but everything seems fine now. "So what did you mean, they stole from you, too?" I pulled the conversation back to the point at hand.

"You know the product I was working on, right?"

"Virtual office stuff, right?" I was tangentially familiar with what that team was working on. Like many software companies, there was huge investment going into software solutions to bring teams in different locations together to collaborate virtually.

"ARC. Augmented Reality Collaboration. I built it. The code in that product? It's all mine." Bushra lifted her chin.

"What do you mean?" There was more to that look than pride in her work.

"I was hired last year, specifically because I created the proof of concept for this product as a project at university. I built an AR interface and the framework to share a representation of a physical space, and interact with it in real-time to anyone with a smartphone and a pair of AR glasses. I patented it. It's mine." Her voice was quieted, but lost none of her previous intensity. I had known Bushra was considered a talented engineer, but had no idea her work was that integral to the product they were building. I'd first met Bushra when I led a project to evaluate and bring on a new technical partner, and she was the technical point of contact on our end. I'd wondered at the time why an engineer right out of school was so deeply involved. I'd thought at first it was a minor product feature, and they'd let the new recruit take it on to get their feet wet. But Bushra knew every technical detail, and had immediate answers for the vendor's engineers who joined the calls. I'd assumed she busted her ass diving into the code and systems in advance, but it appears she was even more impressive than that.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

"I signed up with Complyze because I wanted to take ARC to the next level, and they said all the right things," She paused a moment, her jaw bunching before relaxing. "They accepted the terms I asked for. I still owned the code, they only licensed it. Stock, bonus, a senior position, promise of more when it went to General Availability."

"If it was that big a deal, why not launch it yourself? Why join Complyze?"

"No capital, no connections to get it. Lots of student debt." She looked at me, exasperated. "I'm a brown-skinned woman in my twenties in Silicon Valley. No one is going to take me seriously, at least, not enough to fund me. And then here was this opportunity," she glared at a point on the floor. "All the backing and support I needed." She squeezed her eyes closed, and tilted her head back as if trying to avoid something.

"So what went wrong?" I knew what I thought – screwing founders out of their work is as old as Silicon Valley.

"If I'm fired for cause, everything goes up in smoke. The position, obviously, the unvested stock – which is most of it, pre-GA – even the bonus has a clawback. I owe them money now." She fell back into the sofa cushions, arms crossed, fuming.

So now I know why she came here after seeing my exit paperwork. Commiseration, maybe, and also looking for a potential confederate. But something else was bugging me.

"But why fire you, if you've already patented the code? They'd lose access to the one thing that made the whole thing valuable. Right? Or did it not actually work?"

"It worked!" Bushra replied heatedly. "We were focusing mostly on integrating the code bases and UX controls, we'd passed the initial security and compliance audits months ago." A pause. "The license was the one thing that wasn't terminated. They have a non-exclusive, unlimited right to use the code. They don't need to own it. They can do whatever they want with it and I get nothing." She ducked her chin, spitting out the words like vinegar. "I thought I was clever. I even had an IP lawyer help with the negotiations. They said they wouldn't launch a major product without full control of the code, but I wanted to keep ownership. The unlimited license was the compromise." She closed her eyes, her jaw tight.

I leaned back in my chair, and let the silence ruminate. "What was their cause for firing you?"

She barked a laugh, and swiveled her head to me, her tongue in her cheek, grinning. Her eyes were smoldering, though. "Sexual harassment. I apparently forced myself on Jon." Jon Hu was her boss, the VP of Engineering. "They said I tried to blackmail him into an affair, threatening to tell his wife that he seduced me unless he went along." Her fierce look turned bitter. "Thorsten said he witnessed it." That would be Thorsten van den Berg, the Chief Marketing Officer. "Coward," she added, quietly, though it was unclear which of the men she meant.

I regarded her, my right hand pressed against pursed lips, considering. If I hadn't had my own recent experience, sad to say I might have had suspicions about her story. The more salacious the details, the less people would want to get involved, but the more people would talk about it. But now it was hard not to see the parallels with my own situation. The accusation, the manufactured witness, the calculated crime to threaten maximum embarrassment, legal, and professional repercussions. The 'easy' way out to make it all go away. Hearing about it happening to someone else brought into clarity how awful it was, how premeditated and cruel. "I assume you got a 'special' packet of your own." I said, dryly.

"Practically copies." She grinned, ruefully.

"You want me to help you. Take it back, you said. How?" This was the part I didn't understand.

"Simple. Let's build our own app, and beat them to it!" Her eyes burned bright, the corners of her mouth curling upwards.

My eyes widened in shock. "How do you plan to do that? They've got the license."

"They have a non-exclusive license. There's some terms to prevent me from licensing it to another party again for 5 years, but there's nothing preventing me from using the code I wrote. We can make it ourselves! Let's start a company!"

Iter had been sitting on the couch listening patiently this whole time. But now he leaned forward, eyes flashing. At the same time, I saw a little notification message pop up, weirdly superimposed over the lower right field of my vision. It said:

New Quest.

Reclaim Stolen Honor!

Accept? Y/N

What the hell? Bushra was still staring at me intently. A quest? I tore my focus back to Bushra. "It's worth looking into," I said automatically, a common phrase I'd used whenever anyone pitched a new feature or idea during a product meeting. Not dismissive, but noncommittal. Bushra seemed to take it at face value, her expression showing happiness for the first time since she arrived.

"Great!" She nodded. "Where do we start?"

Iter seemed about to say something, but I jumped in first. "Well, I haven't eaten yet, what do you say we all get some food first and brainstorm a few ideas?" I needed some space to figure things out.

"Sure, that sounds great - I'm totally starving! I drove over first thing." Bushra leaned back into the sofa, some of her prior intensity ebbing.

"Let me change real quick, and then we'll get going." I stood up, barely waited for an affirmative reply, and made for the privacy of my bedroom. Bushra looked satisfied, before turning toward Iter. I heard her ask, "So, are you Mai's boyfriend, or… ?"

I hurriedly closed the bedroom door before I was sucked into that conversation.

✦ ✦ ✦

I quickly changed into jeans, left my fleece coat on, and pulled on a pair of socks and ankle boots. Taiga was sitting in the center of my bed, tail wrapped protectively around her. She looked at me with slitted eyes, her ears following as I moved around the room getting dressed. Once I was done, I quickly opened up my Journal to take a look at the new message. The notification disappeared when I did, but I could see the message clearly in the latest Journal entry:

New Quest.

Reclaim Stolen Honor!

Accept? Y/N

Nothing else. I sat on the bed, trying to think of what to do, if anything. I had two options, obviously, accept the quest or decline it. I was afraid of what accepting the quest would mean, but I also suspected that saying no would mean the quest would disappear forever. I should probably leave it until I have a chance to ask Iter about it. This was new territory.

I heard muffled talking from through the door. I wondered how their conversation was going. Out of curiosity, I opened my map to check if Bushra and Iter were still in the front room. But this time, in addition to the arrow marker that was me, and the blue dot representing Iter, I saw three more things: An exclamation point was next to Iter, where I assume Bushra was sitting; a question mark was on the coffee table, a little to the side; and finally, a little box-shaped icon was just outside the house. Curious, I focused on the exclamation point, and the message "New Quest from Bushra Patel: Reclaim Stolen Honor" appeared. Okay. Then I focused on the question mark. Nothing. No message popped up, but by zooming in closer I was able to determine that the question mark was in the cardboard box Bushra had brought me. I repeated the process with the box icon, but I couldn't figure it out. It was definitely outside the house, but in the bushes on the side of the exterior wall.

Figuring I'd been gone long enough, I left my bedroom and grabbed a suitable one of my coats for Iter from the coat rack. I could see Iter and Bushra on the sofa, an awkward silence between them. Iter was smiling his usual serene smile, but Bushra's return smile was fixed and at a loss. I walked into the room, picked up my wallet and keys, and put them in my pockets. I looked at my phone, but it was still charging. Bushra stood up abruptly when she saw me enter, grabbing her own parka.

"So, is your boyfriend from Europe or something?" She asked, gratefully latching on to someone she could understand.

"Swiss," I leaned into the cover that I'd given Kris. "And he's not my boyfriend. He's… " I struggled with how to describe our relationship, as I picked up the controller and suspended the gaming console and turned off the TV. Iter glanced worriedly in the direction of the TV, before resuming the calm serenity that was his natural state. "...We're still figuring out our relationship, " I finished lamely. I probably gave Bushra the wrong impression, but the presence of Iter's indefatigable smile made me want to avoid lying if I could help it. If it stopped Bushra from prying, it was just as well. Iter lifted an elegant eyebrow, and accepted the slate colored padded jacket I handed him. I noticed at some point he'd added a pair of suede ankle boots to his outfit. What the hell, or heaven, I suppose. Roll with it.

"Shall we go?" I asked, and at their affirmative nods, I turned to the door… and nearly stumbled when the following appeared in my field of view:

A new Party Member request was received.

Accept? Y/N