Rich had too many options, too little time, and too little information.

No, that wasn't quite right. He had a fair amount of information, but he couldn't risk looking at it.

After considering Cutter's words, he decided that he couldn't afford to pass up the file. But his paranoia wouldn't let him just grab the thing; one of the first rules of Echo safety was that no matter how good your hardware was, bad things could still happen. So Rich had set up an online file structure in a free Cascadia anarchist site, and used a triple-layered emulator to move the damned thing.

And every second of the time he'd used to set that up was justified the second he transferred the file. Because it wrecked everything around it, and almost got him, too, before he cold-disengaged in a way you weren't supposed to do with Echoes.

One trip to the toilet to heave up most of his guts and a pounding headache later, he managed to reconstruct things and see what remained. To his surprise, the file had made it across, even if it had tainted most of the fileshare's directly tied links with malware that was well above his pay grade.

He figured he had some time before the anarchists dumped it off their site. They'd sent a nastygram about it not long after it happened, but Rich had the feeling this wasn't an uncommon occurrence, and they'd give him a day or so to clean up his mess, if he was lucky.

Still, this was the second time Cutter had tried to screw him over. Third time, if you counted the man sending him to Fimble. There was the distinct chance that the file was nothing but a big old honeypot full of viruses, a Pandora's box with only faint hope inside and no real payoff.

The second problem that Rich found himself up against was the game. He'd made significant progress back-hacking the cash store. Going in through the game itself had made all the difference... to a point.

He'd wormed his way through layers of security, sliding past intrusion countermeasures by the skin of his teeth. Twice he'd nearly been traced, and he still wasn't sure that watchdog daemons weren't hunting for him after his trip through the Gibson memorial network.

And now he stood on the precipice of a virtual abyss, staring at where the game's code ended and the banks took over. The place where cash actually moved between the users and the accounts that Generica Online used to store its digital earnings.

Rich could try to step over that threshold. He was talented, he had top of the line tools, and he had all the training that Waverly's network classes could teach him. All that would let him try.

But then he'd be up against the banks. And he was under no illusions as to how that would go. There would be consequences.

He'd need a team, a hell of a lot of better gear, and backing from another major entity to try that and get anything productive out of their databases. And even then, it would come with consequences. Perhaps not immediate ones, but enough that he couldn't follow this lead further without a significant amount of preparation and a better reason than Aristattler's advice.

Aristattler now, Aristattler was something he could follow up on. And he had just the way to do it.

With a sigh, Rich eased back from the mountain that was the financial sector. He'd climb that mountain another day.

Instead, he dove back into the darknet and went elbows deep into the cash shop.

Security was much, much easier there. As long as you weren't trying to disrupt transactions, or redirect money, the system didn't care so much. Oh, it still had security, and would still kick you the hell out of you got clumsy or stupid, but it wasn't black-suited-guys-at-your-door bad. It wasn't Ministry bad.

Rich slid past all the chances to try and mess with the system, and headed to one of the weaker links in the system.

And after about ten minutes of worming his way through a long-neglected firewall, he got his hands on the transaction logs.

Not the full logs, no. That would have been too big to remain unnoticed. No, he only got the ones that contained usernames ranging from Ari to Arj who had purchased something within the last three months.

Even so, it took a good two hours to download. He couldn't speed it along, either, because that would be noticed.

Finally he had what he wanted, and cracking it open, he started querying the segment, hoping for hits.

He was expecting perhaps one, maybe two.

He got about eighty.

Rich sorted them, dug deeper, and got the first surprise. He'd been expecting token purchases.

But every last transaction was an alternate character.

He wasn't digging into pricing. That would have brought security down on his head. But he knew roughly about how much the average alternate cost. The wealth that Aristattler must have was ludicrous.

There's no way he's doing this alone, Rich realized. He had to be dealing with a syndicate, or a middleman, or someone involved in the gray market online trade. Gold sellers or worse.

Then he blinked. Rich read over the lines that had caught his eye, and went back through the other entries. He half-expected to see PER+1 pop up, and snorted at the idea. “Been playing too long,” he muttered. But humor faded as the timestamps confirmed what he'd seen.

Every hour, on the hour, from three days ago, Aristattler had bought an alternate character.

And the whole thing started three days ago... at exactly the hour when Rich had died in game, avoiding Boombabe's attempt to capture him.

Which, if Rotgoriel's report had been accurate, meant that Aristattler started his random purchases at exactly the point in time where Rotgoriel had spoken to him.

Someone spent a great deal of money to get me here, Rich realized.

He flipped on his speech to text option. “It's too late to run, isn't it?”

Incoming Message From: Average Joe >> Pretty much.

>>How screwed am I?

>>Less than you think. You passed several tests.

>>I'm more of a homework guy.

>>I know. I took the opportunity to check your academic bonafides. Waverly's lucky to have you.

Rich ground his teeth. But before he could figure out a safe response, his unknown watcher continued.

>>Let's continue this talk somewhere else.

Abruptly, Rich was in Waverly's chapel. Small, neat, fussy, and cleaned daily by first-year students, it was comfortable but impersonal in that way that public churches should be. The stained glass windows were of the seven colors, and the engravings on them showed variations on their virtues.

A figure sat in the first pew, one arm thrown over the back of it, looking towards him with a friendly smile. He was middle-aged, with a buzz cut and spectacles, and Rich trusted him not one bit.

“You went to a lot of trouble to get me here,” Rich said. “Now what?”

The man shrugged. “Less trouble than you'd think. A bit more than I'd usually spend, but it's just money. I'm more interested in you.”

Rich moved over to the green window, stared up at it. Jesus on the cross, with a wound in his side and thorns on his brows. Arrayed around him were lesser scenes of biblical suffering. Job's trials made up three of them. This was Fortitude, and no matter what he did, his life was pulled to that division... if not that particular virtue. They definitely weren't one and the same, that was for sure.

“Nothing to say?” The man asked.

“I don't know who you are. That limits what I can safely say here.”

“Fair enough. I—” the man stood, and then he was a woman. “—am Legion,” she said, her voice much, much different.

Rich blinked. Now she was half the age of the original man, with black hair tousled out into wisps that surrounded her head in a dark halo. She had fine features, and purple eyeshadow and lipstick, and wore a rather revealing evening gown that glittered in the shifting light.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Rich hastily averted his eyes upward, and met her knowing smile with one of his own. “I know that story. It doesn't exactly make me less wary.”

“You're one of the few in your nation that does, then. Not too many people actually read the bible here.” she walked closer, heels clacking on the tiles, leg flashing ivory white in the slit in the dress. “I'm no threat to you, Richard. Quite the opposite.”

“So I'm free to leave at any time?” Rich took a step back.

She stopped, and nodded, and mid-nod she was a he again. This time a dark-skinned boy half his age, wearing a brimmed cap and cheap clothes that included baggy shorts and a sports shirt of some sort. “Sure. But if you leave now the cash store will probably pick up your presence. If you hear me out I'll help you leave gracefully, without traces.”

“All right. Can... you pick a form and stop changing? It's a bit disorienting.”

“You want to check out the lady again?”

“She's a bit distracting. Maybe the original guy?”

“Sure.” He was thickset, now that his body was visible, dressed in casual slacks and a simple t-shirt. For a second Rich was reminded of his father, but it passed. His father's face had never had such a friendly look on it, not one that he could remember, anyway.

“Yeah, this will do,” Rich nodded, and took a seat in the nearest pew. “So what do you want?”

Legion sat down on the opposite side of the pew. “To bargain.”

“Gonna show me all the kingdoms of the world?”

“Nah, that's some other guy. I'm no demon, just someone who's very rich, with a lot of time to kill. And very curious about how you've done what you did.”

“You'll have to narrow it down.” But Rich had a feeling he knew where this was going.

“Fair enough. So... I enjoy Generica. Very much so. It started as a hobby, and became something of an obsession. Do you know they have no upper limit on alternate characters?”

Rich shook his head. “Do they still have that policy that prevents you from deleting any character you make?”

“They do.”

“Then that's... I used to think they had a city's worth of servers stashed away somewhere. Now I'm wondering if whoever's behind this isn't puppetting one of the smaller remnants. That much server space is just plain infeasible on a smaller scale.”

“Not just infeasible, but impossible,” Legion agreed. “I've tried to break their system through sheer volume of my alts. And I've failed.”

“I don't have an answer on how they're doing that, if that's what you're looking for.”

“It is one of the questions I'm trying to answer,” Legion agreed. “But I'm aware that it's not a huge priority for you right now. You may, however, be able to provide a piece or two of the puzzle that I don't have.”

“Oh?”

“I think you're being coy. You've got something that nobody else has, Richard Royal.”

“Scales, I'm betting.”

“Good, I was wondering how long you were going to play coy about it. Do you know how many alts I've devoted to random selection, Richard? How many rolls I've taken, trying to get the result that you landed on the first try?”

“I couldn't begin to guess.”

“It's higher than you're expecting, I'm sure. And I've hacked deep, as deeply as I've dared, and I've spied and perused and queried and examined. Aristattler is just one of my alts. I've got watchers in every significant place you can imagine, in that game, and there are a lot of significant places. It's a big world. And in all those places, of all the players I've seen, of every player I can watch in one way or the other, I've only ever seen a single one who was both a player and a dragon. And you're him, Richard Royal.”

Rich absorbed that. “Nobody else? You're sure?”

“I'm never certain of everything, but I'm sure within less than a percentage point of error. So you can guess my question; how the hell did you pull that one off?”

“That's all you want from me?”

“That's the main thing I want from you. Anything else is going to have to proceed from that. If you're unwilling to share the answer, then there's the door. I'll even help you leave without alerting the cash shop. But I will be disappointed if you take that option, and I doubt we'll speak again.”

“All right. What do you have to offer for this information?”

“Straight to bargaining, I like that.”

“If you went to the trouble of bringing me here, you're prepared for the possibility. That's just common sense,” Rich shrugged. “And this is a secret I'm willing to trade, but I have to warn you I don't know if you can duplicate it.”

“Hm. Well, I tell you what, then. Any aid I offer is going to be quantitatively affected by the utility of what you share. That is to say, the more useful your information, the higher the reward.”

“Well, there's something I'd like first, as a show of good faith,” Rich said slowly, his mind racing. He could kill one problem with another, here. “I have this file, you see...”

One brief explanation and a few minutes of monitoring later, Rich watched Legion get to work. There was nothing to see on the graphical layer, of course. But his hacking toolkit caught every move... or at least most of them. The guy (or girl) didn't fuck around. And in about twenty seconds he was done.

“All yours. You know I kept a copy, right?” Legion smiled, a wry twist on a broad face.

“I don't have a way to stop you. That's fine. Just bear in mind the source isn't the most reliable of narrators.” Rich used his transfer programs, and this time the thing didn't barf out malware like a cat who'd swallowed its own hair.

“I always do. How's that saying go? Everyone's the hero of their own story?” Legion chuckled.

“There's days I feel like a supporting character at best. But all right,” Rich said, after he finished reviewing the file's metadata. “It looks like you came through, and you've got no reason to screw me here. What do you have to offer?”

“Three different kinds of support. Money, information, or game resources. Or some combination of all three.”

“What kind of money are we talking about, here?” Rich asked, though that was the least of his worries right now. He was trapped in a bad spot, and money wouldn't help in the short term. In the long term, sure, he could use it, but he had to survive the short term, first.

“Depends on how useful your information is. Anywhere from a few million Ministry dollars to enough international stocks to set you up for life, given time. All under a false identity, of course, just waiting for you to step into its shoes.”

That was a higher offer than Rich had expected, But the guy had basically thrown away a small fortune to get him here, so he wasn't entirely surprised.

“And the information option?”

“A number of questions that I guarantee will be answered honestly. And in the event I don't have the information about one of your questions, it won't be counted against you. Questions about myself, of course, are subject to my discretion. I'm not... hm... lawful stupid.”

“Strange way of saying things, but all right,” Rich nodded. That would be useful, but it would require him to stay in contact with Legion, and for Legion to have no ulterior motives or percentage in lying to him. He didn't like that option. Too much good faith, and there in that chapel, Rich found his own lacking. “Tell me about option number three.”

“Game resources. Well, it's no secret the Warmers are coming for you. At the low end of the scale, I can pull in at least one person who has a vested interest in helping you, and an ideal setup to get things rolling in the region.”

“I might have that already,” Rich said.

“If you're talking about Mayhew's crew or the wendigos, I don't mean them. I know someone who has definite reason and incentive to treat you with goodwill, and help out of the kindness of her heart. With my assistance, I can set her in motion, but for her to be effective she'll have to start moving now. But listen, that's the low end. On the high end, I can set you up as the ruler of a good sized nation state. Or help you influence politics on a larger one, or generally back you up with whatever you have planned beyond this point. Really, the question is how much involvement from me you're willing to put up with, but the scope of what I can offer is breathtaking. Generica has a lot of possibilities, really. And I am Legion. There's enough of me I can do just about anything.”

“Except be a dragon,” Rich said.

“Well yes, but that's what I'm trying to fix here today.”

“Give me a minute. I'm still finding it ironic that after all that, yeah, you are offering me at least one kingdom of a world. Not the world, but a world.”

Legion chuckled. “Take your time. Pull up a pew, set a spell, and think it over. I can move this avatar elsewhere if you'd like the illusion of privacy.”

“I wouldn't know what to do with that if I had it. Been watched my whole life, more or less.” Rich shrugged, then considered the altar as he thought. Pros and cons any way he turned, here. But at the end of the day, he wasn't in a position that could afford to be turning down help. And while he was leery of any miraculous charity that came his way, this one seemed mercenary enough that he could at least believe Legion's motives.

And then he cracked his knuckles, and started haggling.

A few minutes later, they shook on it, and he transferred the footage he'd saved three years ago, the footage he'd initially only kept because he'd been a horny little kid and there were naked monster girls in it. And now it might just save my ass.

He watched Legion sit back, and consider. “Konol.”

“Yep.”

“This is... I've tried to interact with that particular program. It's barely responsive. Certainly not to the degree shown here.”

“He didn't respond to me again in any meaningful way. Not until I prayed to him, anyway. Clerically, I mean.”

Legion inhaled. “I've tried that. I have a priest of Konol among my alts. He's non-responsive. Prayer sessions with him are more of a contemplative affair.”

“I can transfer footage of my last prayer session to you. I assure you, he's rather talkative.”

“I'll throw in additional aid if you do. The fourth clauses that we agreed to.”

“Including the fast evac?”

“Yes, yes, that too. Please?”

And that convinced Rich, as little else would have. In his experience, bad guys rarely used please when a threat would do. “Sure.” He took a minute to edit out the bits surrounding his last use of 'pray,' and sent the footage over.

“This is a hell of an easter egg, all right,” Legion rubbed his chin. “All right. You've earned your money's worth, and it'll be waiting for you in quiet, ready-to-access accounts. Might not want to touch them while the Ministry's got such a close eye on you, mind. But they'll wait until you're ready.”

“Thanks. And the in-game stuff?”

“I'll set your ally in motion, and start moving one of my more skilled alts your way. No details now, a lot's going to depend on how much I can sneak past the Warmers. But overall, I'm happy. You've shown me an angle to this mess that I haven't considered. Don't know if I can fulfill my dream of wearing a set of scales, but at the very least this opens up some alternate approaches.” Legion stood, and waved a hand at the door. “Thank you, Richard.”

“The pleasure's mine,” Rich said, as he shook Legion's hand one more time, then headed for the door.

No alarms tripped as he left. The cash shop didn't start trying to trace him. He made it back out of the financial webs he'd been traversing with a few minutes of easy work.

And once he was back in his own head, and had the world sealed off, he cracked open Cutter's file, and started picking through the contents. There was no guarantee Legion hadn't altered something or deleted crucial information, but he had no real choice, not really.

Besides,Rich thought, I can always download the original again when I have more time and resources and hack it myself.

When I have more time. Heh. So, basically, never...

An hour later, he was done with the file. He lay there, staring up at the ceiling in that darkened room, listening to the easy breaths of the Mnemoi guard watching him.

In the space of a single hour, he'd gone from cautiously hopeful to utter despair.

This was big.

This was bad.

And he knew what he'd have to do, if he wanted a chance of coming out of this alive.

But first things first. With a sigh, he loaded up the program that would pass on his letters to Rotgoriel when the dragon next inhabited his body.

There was no way around it. He was going to have to work in two worlds at the same time, or all was lost. And that meant that it was time for a very young dragon to start growing up very fast, or else none of it would matter...