Sure enough, the delivery had come. She got up and surveyed the empty chairs and desks where people would do sales and marketing and support in the morning. It all smelled faintly of strawberries this week. At this hour nearly everything was dark, turning the room into a maze of shadows and LEDs. Gail startled when she saw something moving, but it was just her reflection in a mirror. She made her way to the lobby past a portrait of the president and another of the company's founder. A statue of a dwarf brandishing a scoop and a bucket of ice cream dominated the front room.

It was a chilly January and wind bit into her the moment she stepped outside. In the front parking lot she waved to the little car that sat outside with its lights blinking. No one got out. Instead a synthetic voice said, "Your package is ready to retrieve."

She peeked in and saw several mailboxes built into the vehicle's sides, one of which clicked open for her. This was a drone car. She sighed; it would've been nice to meet somebody even in passing. She took out a heavy box and grunted. "Thank you. Do I need to sign?"

A panel on the passenger side lit up. She signed with her fingers, turned away, then noticed something in the corner of her eye. An animal had scampered toward the package slot and leaped in. Its head whirred around; it had metal eyes on a plastic body. Then the box closed and the drone sped off, leaving Gail staring at where it had been.

Weird. She shlepped the box back into the office building and found Enrico, the engineer who needed the thing. He was down in a machine room full of old, clanking boilers. She said, "Ta-da! What are these for, anyway?"

"Does it matter?" he said, whipping out a box-cutter knife with alarming speed and slicing the cardboard open to reveal some well-packed valves.

"I like to know how it all works. I was at an electronics company for a while and realized I didn't know the first thing about voltage and current."

Enrico said, "We've been getting weird splattering in how chopped nuts get sprayed onto the choco coating. Turned out to be a problem in the machine upstream from that, due to some leaky air valves. I spent a week figuring that out, then learned that it's been seen before. But everybody that knew the answer, doesn't work here anymore."

"The company forgot how something works?"

"Yeah. Whenever you leave Mountain King, there's gonna be chaos. You could probably get a raise, easy."

Gail knew where things were and how little procedures across the company got done, but that was just standard office manager work. Anyone could pick it up like she did... in a year, maybe. She wasn't eager to exploit that, though. She liked this place. "Say, have you ever seen a little robot like a cat just hitching a ride?"

He looked at her funny. "I wonder if we've got spies. Never heard of it being done by ground drone, though. Did it get into the building?"

"Just outside, I think."

"I'd check security to be sure. Maybe it was just a cat?" Enrico shrugged and took the spare parts. "Good night, miss."

#

Gail went back to her desk and spun around in her chair until she was dizzy. The Talisman sat there paused, though as a multiplayer game Thousand Tales didn't normally offer that option. She called up the company's security info on her main computer before she could forget. Nothing stood out, though she didn't have full access. "Weird," she said, and picked up her game again.

Instead of unpausing, it brought up a text notice: [We'd appreciate it if you didn't blab about what you saw.]

Gail froze. "What? Your company was --"

The machine buzzed and interrupted her. "It was just doing some suburban testing and running errands. We'd rather not publicize this research just yet if you don't mind."

Running errands. The game's company owned robots, mostly in other countries, mostly for use by the truly elite customers. There were rumors about people getting surprise gifts, being led to bump into someone handsome, or being warned about things, all by machines. "Okay. A little guardian spirit, huh?"

"You could say that. Back to the game?"

She gave the security feed another look, then shrugged. "Yes, but I need to head home in an hour or so." Not like she had anywhere else to go tonight.

The game resumed. Her character finished skidding down a long ramp in the cave, where the wall crystals had begun to glow again. The light showed her a broad ledge anchored to the cave wall, as opposed to hovering, with a trio of orkan playing dice. The black-and-white creatures puffed mist from their blowholes as they startled to alertness, and they reached for their cleavers.

Gail had survived a fight with two orkans before, in a group. She snagged some of the coins they'd been wagering and threw them to one side as she ran past them. In the moment's confusion she made it past two, then jabbed awkwardly at the third in passing. She made it to the far side of the platform, then blinked. She'd assumed there was another slide or something, but there was only a hovering blob of water about twenty feet down.

She jumped. Wind whooshed by as she crashed into the water and flailed. From here she couldn't really jump, only angle the direction she dropped through the blob's bottom. She did that to land in a rock-lined pool and was about to leave that when she spotted some sunken coins to gather.

[You're soaked in cold water!] warned the game. [Gained a status effect of: Shivering. Your speed and agility are penalized.]

That was going to make any other feats of platform-jumping tricky. She made a note to buy torches next time. Gail looked around the pool's edge and found the easiest jump from there onto another ledge. From there she did another slide through the cave, winding her way down with timed jumps over holes in the track. She nearly fell to her death twice. At the bottom of all that, she reached a large pool with stone ledges to hop between.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

Just as the cave's lights began to dim again, a single orcan splashed down from above, surfaced, and roared in challenge. A red gash marked the side of its head from her spear attack.

She was on the monster's turf, surrounded by water, shivering, armed with a spear and still bearing a major wound herself. She readied her spear and joked, "Uh... peace?"

The boss rose slightly out of the water and grunted. "Huh?"

Gail laughed. Was the game really going to let her turn this into a non-combat encounter? "Sorry about your head. I have a healing scroll if you want it, or just the spell."

"Thief! What you want, intruder?" The killer whale man's face filled the screen, full of teeth.

"I'm looking for the treasure of this cave, whatever it is. You can have the coins back if you want. And..." She opened her inventory and took out some salted cod, a loaf of bread, and a cookie. "Food?"

"Why I not eat you instead?"

"When was the last time you had a cookie?"

A mini-game popped up, declaring a "Staredown" and noting two points of advantage for her. It didn't explain the rules and it hadn't appeared when she tried learning the Charm skill, but there was a meter struggling back and forth and some buttons to mash. Gail did her best, and a flash of light marked her victory.

The orcan gave a startlingly loud squeaky laugh. "You heal quick, I not eat you." It leaned its wounded head closer. Gail took out her Heal spell scroll again and used it as carefully as she could, not wanting to mess this chance up. This time the spell succeeded on the first try and the monster's cut faded.

"So, we're good?" Gail said, offering the food again.

"Wait." The orcan splashed down, then returned. "This way. Grab." It offered its sawblade of a dorsal fin to hold.

Gail put down her offering on the rocks, then reached out and let the orcan drag her underwater. Everything rippled and blurred, going deep blue and purple. Her air was exhausted; she was starting to take minor wounds from drowning. Finally she got flung aside somewhere, flipped around backward. Her last sight of the orcan was of it regarding her with one dark eye and turning to go.

She spotted a glow and swam toward it. Scary drowning music had kicked in. She surfaced in a tiny cave where she could breathe again and stare at a glowing box. She lay on a wet ledge for a moment to let most of the drowning effects fade out, but she still had a penalty for "Shivering" that had progressed to "Freezing". On the box there was only a simple puzzle lock, but she'd have to do it with a serious penalty. Her first attempt at it whiffed completely.

Gail supposed that if she hadn't started her adventures half-naked and unarmed with no skills, she'd have some kind of legendary spiky armor and a hundred spells by now, and where could she go from there?

She leaned close to the box and tried arranging its symbols again. Someday this kind of puzzle would be easy, if she kept at it. What was the good in learning to solve abstract pattern games like this and the runes, though? It wasn't like she was learning anything useful.

The box popped open with a fanfare, and a glowing pearl appeared. Text explained: [Mystic Pearl. This item is valuable to enchanters, but if you use it yourself, you can change your race.]

This was one of the racial quests, then. Everybody in the Endless Isles started as human, except for some elves or something (she wasn't sure how that worked) and some visitors from other parts of Thousand Tales. To get any other option you had to venture away from Central Isle and find the right items. She said, "This is the water version, I take it?"

[Please clarify: Do you mean "I am taking it" or "I assume"?]

Some of the AIs still had some trouble with idioms. "The second one."

[Yes. Will you use this item, or just take it?]

She hadn't thought much about the race quests since she'd been focusing on crafting and exploration and meeting people. She'd fit in better if she changed, though. "I use it."

She held up the pearl, shimmered, and transformed. Her outstretched hands turned grey and webbing spread between her fingers. Her body shape turned subtly sleeker and curvier, making Gail herself envious.

[Your race is now "Element-Touched (Water)"! First effect: Sleek. Faster swimming and cold resistance, but you can't wear normal gloves.]

She turned around and checked herself out. "Ha, no dolphin tail?" Some people had those.

[Seek out more quests to get extra racial bonuses.]

"Fair enough." Gail dived again, and found that the tunnel the orcan had flung her into had a second branch. She followed that. Though she couldn't swim as fast as she'd been carried, she was faster than her own efforts before, visibly using her new webbed hands to pull herself along. "Hey, shouldn't that Freezing penalty be reduced now?"

[Your Freezing penalty has gone back to Shivering, for now.]

She moved a bit faster in reaction. Her air supply was still low, but she found another air pocket conveniently placed where adventurers could find it. After another one of those, and avoiding a nasty-looking eel hiding in the walls, the passage curved upward and she began to see the sun far overhead. Drowning penalties piled up and the screen slowly greyed out, but she made it to the surface and floated there, coughing and sputtering. The island was nearby.

Gail swam back there and lay on the beach of Island North-5 West-6, letting the sunlight warm her. Nearby fluttered the confusion of flags that past travelers had stuck here to mark the place as theirs, all theirs.

She said, "Remind me how the save points work? I used one at the dungeon entrance but that doesn't count, I think?"

[You're currently saved at the dungeon entrance of this island. You may log out without penalty.]

"Glad I have permission. Gotta go home." She began the log-out process, a thirty-second animation that could get interrupted by enemies. While Gail watched that, she thought of Ludo the game-master who'd orchestrated tonight's experience. "Thanks. That was fun."

[We aim to please], the game said, as it shut down.

Gail stretched and spun in her chair, watching corporate headquarters whirl around her. She was free to leave, now. She stood and packed up her Talisman, feeling uneasy about this dark and empty place. There would be no monsters to fight or befriend in here, no treasure to find or quests to complete. Walking the silent halls and jumping at shadows and seeing strange machines in the parking lot reminded her that there wasn't a lot to go home to. "You know what? Yeah. This is a cot night. It'll be fun."

She pulled out a change of clothes in one of her desk drawers, and claimed one of the two tiny bedrooms in a corner of the second floor. There was even a shower. Before she collapsed for the night, though, she had to get out of here and do something, anything, outside of Mountain King HQ.

Instead of using the vending machines she summoned a car and had it drive her to the nearest convenience store. The streets felt like another world at this hour. There was a significant chance of "monsters" showing up around here. In the shop, she indulged two vices at once by buying a burrito and some lottery tickets. There was an old-fashioned sheaf of brochures on the counter, saying, "Get a High Score!" It was probably some religious tract, but it amused her enough to have a look.

It was actually from the California government, touting the new Social Credit Score system. She skimmed it on her way out of the shop. She could sign up to have it track her diet, her schedule, and her social contacts to make suggestions, get ahead in her career, and find new friends. There were even real bonuses for people getting a high score in its silly points system, like getting discounts on airfare and a fast track on various license applications and other paperwork.

She looked up from the pamphlet and remembered she was standing outside at night, shivering a bit in the winter cold, in a neighborhood single women shouldn't linger in. She hurried into the waiting car and had it take her back to HQ.