[Travel Log; Day 59]
Mishlin was a desert town, somehow stubbornly staying alive amidst a constant drought.
Of course, many people would tell you the droughts were better than the rains. There were few things worse than a rainstorm.
That was three months ago, though. The water that fell from the skies now ran sweet. No one trusted it at first, after a decade of avoiding rainfall like the plague, but the people of Mishlin were the only folks desperate enough to put out tubs to collect the water, and risk them being melted through.
It hadn’t happened yet. Not since that last catastrophic rain, where it had fallen so hard and so fast that when the sun had risen that morning… the red had been washed right out of the skies.
There were whispers from all over – especially in Wayside, which had become the center of gossip and community trading in the last two years – that the weather’s temper had greatly improved. No freak fire tornadoes in the East, no earthquakes down South. Everything settled down, slowly and cautiously.
It had been months since a weather accident had happened, but no one had fully relaxed yet. They knew it wouldn’t be so easy.
But that didn’t mean they weren’t a little bit relaxed.
“Here’s to a hundred days of no godforsaken acid!” One of the revelers in the pub cheered, spraying the clientele with seltzer water, a commodity, not too long ago. Most of them shrieked excitedly, whooping and hollering and patting each other on the back.
Most of them were marked with burn scars. A not uncommon sight around these parts. No wonder they didn’t miss the rains.
One of the customers on the bar however, grumbled and pulled his cloak securely over his bag, trying to protect it from the water.
The girl sitting next to him tracked the motion carefully.
“Can you do card tricks?” She asked finally.
“Uh… what?” He blinked, looking over at the hooded figure.
“There are cards poking out of the pocket of your bag.” She pointed out, “Can you do tricks?”
He paused. Squinted. And then it clicked; “Verity?”
She grinned, pulling the hood back to reveal herself, “Hey, yourself, Jar. Sorry it took so long to find you. I thought you would be raking in the glory of bringing peace to the Wayside. Surprised to find you all the way out here.”
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“Mishlin has good people.” Jared defended reflexively, “And besides, I didn’t do much of anything. Simply compelled them to follow my plans in the first place. Didn’t even expect the town to be inhabited by the time I got back, let alone… what it is now.”
“Humble, aren’t we?” Verity teased.
He laughed softly for a second, and then immediately dove into another question, “How are you here, Verity? I- I thought you were gone. The Game was over and done with. I turned off the Console. We all went back to where we were originally.”
“Funny. I did the same thing to the System.” She nodded, “Except my power button was a little more permanent. Say, you didn’t destroy the Console, did you?”
“Uh… no.” He replied tentatively, hand tightening over the bag he had been carrying for the better part of four months now. Verity grinned at him, so he tried a different tack, “Why do you want it? The System is destroyed, right? Like, gone for good?”
“Oh yeah, completely out of the Developers’ hands.” She assured him, holding up a singed and mangled book, with the cover barely hanging on, “But I’ve been doing my reading. And I’ve got reason to believe that the reason they couldn’t find and stop our movements despite being able to control the entire world is because it wasn’t going through the same Magic engine that the rest of the Consoles were.”
“What.”
She sighed impatiently, “No time to explain. Just give it to me.”
Someone behind them did a backflip onto a table, only to flip the entire thing over to raucous applause, and she amended, “Perhaps in private, though.”
Once they were in a safer place, Jared furtively passed her the laptop.
She opened it, and stared at the blank screen with a wistful expression he had certainly worn before, doing the exact same thing. Wondering if it had all been worth it. If it had all happened, at all.
But this time, Verity did what he always been too afraid to do. She held down the power button.
The screen came on. But it was the panels appearing above it which displayed the text:
[New User Registered!]
[Previous Programmed Objective… is Unachievable]
[Start New Game?]
[{x} Yes { } No]
Verity fist pumped, “Fuck, yeah!”
Jared’s heart was still in his mouth. He nodded.
[Choose a Mode:]
[{ } Combat {x} Mission { } Explorer]
“…Yeah, no.” Verity switched it immediately to Explorer, “First order of business: we get the Party back together. Next order of business: we have adventures!”
“They might not want to go on an adventure.” Jared warned her, “Most of them just wanted to go back to their regular lives. Half of them are dead.”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.” She settled, grinning at him sharply, already navigating to a brand-new feature of the Explorer Mode: the map showing unlockable regions. The shape of the map seemed to be a spiral, though some thin paths seemed to connect non-adjacent Realms together. Most of it was greyed out, and only Wayside was lit up green. The two Realms on either side of it were highlighted in yellow.
“Tracklands on one side, Developers on the other.” Verity hummed, “This is a hard choice, isn’t it?”
“Fine.” He pretended like it was difficult to decide, “Let’s give our mechanic friend a visit.”
With a press of a button, they were flickering away. Once again filled with that electric feeling of power and possibility. The worlds were out there for them to discover. They simply had to reach out and grab it.
[Log End!]
[No More Recent Logs.]