Two to three weeks before another militia stint and maybe the chance for some excitement felt like far too long to Galen.

Hopefully the game will let me know when it’s time, somehow.

When he’d realized the game had no internal time tracking, Galen had started trying to keep count of the days himself. It worked, technically. Nothing sinister happened. The tally marks he etched into his bed post didn’t erase themselves overnight or anything like that.

But sometimes Galen woke in the morning feeling like more days had passed than his scratches on the bed post indicated. Minutes and hours blurred and stretched, but then at other times felt like no time at all. Combined with the weird detachment of his initial transition after character creation, Galen suffered some moments where he legitimately considered a full-on conspiracy might be at work to make him feel as off-balance as possible.

Which was dumb, because ultimately it didn’t matter. Who cared how much time was passing, when time wasn’t real anymore?

“Excuse me, could I get some assistance here?” The lady looking at ribbons peered around the store, even though anyone could easily see that Galen was the only person working and that he was already with a customer. He suppressed a sigh and summoned a smile.

“I will be with you in just one moment, ma’am.”

And I thought I was done working retail.

And so Galen’s day went, customer after customer, interspersed with restocking and making sure his records book matched the coins in the collection box. Eventually, the afternoon wound into early evening. Galen locked up the store and trudged toward home along narrow cobblestone streets lined with equally narrow two-story homes.

While Galen was relieved to be done with the workday, he didn’t exactly look forward to returning to the house where he lived with his in-game parents and siblings. If the store sim was boring, being around his character’s family was outright torturous.

Galen had taken to deliberately and forcefully referring to Kelden and Chanta Arien as his “pretend parents” when he thought about them, because sometimes the memories of his character’s backstory scenes overlapped with his own real-life memories. As of right now, he had no problems telling the difference between fiction and reality. But the tendency felt like a very slippery slope toward being really fucked up if you weren’t careful.

God help anyone who barely had a grasp on reality to begin with when they uploaded.

The walk from store to home wasn’t a long one. The house looked much like all the others, plain in the front with gated yards behind. Galen let himself into the back and latched the gate behind him. On his way into the house, he gathered an armload of firewood from the stack behind the house. The action triggered one of those sets of overlapping memories which belonged alternately to IC him and real him.

The IC memory belonged to the Origin section just after character creation. Galen wasn’t sure how young he was supposed to be in the fake memory crafted for him by the game. Pre-teen or early teens, maybe. He hadn’t been working at the store, in the memory, but only gone out for firewood.

It had been winter. Outside his parents’ house, where he dragged chunks of firewood off the stack against the stone wall and dropped them onto the little sledge he used to haul the wood, darkness fell early across the city’s streets, thick with the scent of woodsmoke and frost. Across the narrow strip of gray sky that framed the looming keep and tower at the center of Chanford Falls, dark, snow-heavy clouds scudded.

However carefully they’d designed and coded the fantasy city of Chanford Falls, the winter sky Galen had glimpsed was also, in his mind, New York’s. He’d never had to cut firewood, but he’d hauled home groceries in icy weather against which no secondhand boots and cheap coat could keep him warm.

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IC Galen had pushed through the wooden door at the back of the house, dragging the sledge of firewood into the kitchen. Warmth encircled him, tingling against his cold cheeks.

The house’s main floor was one large room with a hearth at each end. At the back of the room, the kitchen hearth had burned low. At the front hearth, flames burned more brightly. The next-eldest of Kelden and Chanta Arien’s children, twelve-year-old Jodri, perched at the edge of a chair and sewed by firelight, her strawberry blonde hair turned bright in the glow. At Jodri’s feet, three-year-old twins wrestled. A wooden cradle at Jodri’s elbow held a sleeping infant.

The real Galen’s family had lived in a cramped, cheap apartment. Physical details and names of the individual family members didn’t match exactly, but the head count was right.

Too damn many kids for two people who couldn’t even take care of themselves.

In the memory, IC Galen’s parents stood together by the house’s front door, his father bundled in layers of heavy wool clothing topped with a hooded cloak and long scarf. His mother tied the scarf and patted the knot before stepping back.

The stack of firewood alongside the kitchen hearth held only two chunks of firewood, the rest depleted from the day’s cooking. The boy Galen closed the door behind him, dragged the sledge to the hearth, and began transferring the wood he’d brought inside from sledge to stack.

A group of travelers had been quarantined just outside the Southgate district of Chanford Falls, too ill to be allowed into the city but also too ill to care for themselves—barely able to build shelters or fires to warm and feed themselves and by now running low on foodstuffs, as well. A small group of citizens from Chanford Falls, organized by the tender at Voshell’s Favor, had decided they would go and help those poor souls.

Galen’s father had been among the first to volunteer. Kelden Arien had no healing knack or medicinal learning, but that had never stopped him from caring about people. And knack or not, Galen’s mother often boasted, without a hint of envy, that people simply felt better in her husband’s presence.

“I’ll send the cart back once we’ve unloaded. You’ll need it here.” Galen’s father loosened the scarf, caught the warning look his wife cast at him, and tightened it once more. “It could be weeks before the fever runs its course. They won’t let any of us back into the city until they’re certain we won’t spread it inside.”

IC Galen had asked to go with his father so that he could be the one to drive the cart back. In truth, he’d itched to make the trek outside the gates—beyond the walls that were beautiful, alabaster white and finely carved, but walls just the same. His father had refused Galen’s offer—what was not too dangerous for father was apparently too dangerous for son.

“We’ll be fine.” IC Galen’s mother patted the scarf once more. “It’s a good thing that you’re doing.”

A good man, off on a charitable mission. An adventure. The youthful IC Galen was informed by the narrator that this was not child’s play, that the people his father went to help were in dire circumstances, that lives were at stake.

His father left, off into the cold night and the first flakes of gently-falling snow. IC Galen had stayed, hauling and stacking firewood as he’d been asked while wishing he could also be out in the wild night beyond the walls.

In the days that followed, his mother took care of the things his father would typically have done. That involved running the storefront and overseeing the goods that came and went from Arien Mercantile’s storage, most often bolts of cloth, skeins of yarn, windings of lace and other fripperies. They’d hired an extra hand to do the heavy lifting in his father’s place, but young Galen had pitched in as best he could, too. In the evenings, his mother kept the books while Jodri watched the younger children.

Every day, Galen’s mother had walked down to Southgate to see what word there was from the plague camp. When she returned, she always smiled reassurance at her children. Even though that smile never reached her eyes, life proceeded.

When real Galen’s father was deployed by the US Army, his mother hadn’t been anywhere near that pulled together. Galen’s recollection was vague, but his youngest years played in his memory as a montage of boxed mac and cheese, canned spaghetti, and dirty dishes cluttering counters and tabletops. And crying—the younger kids had always been screeching about something.

IC Galen’s father had been gone six weeks. When he returned, he wore wood and leather braces on his legs and leaned heavily on crutches. He told them all he’d be fine, that the fever he’d caught from the people he’d gone to help had temporarily sapped his strength. But the legs in those braces withered, and the crutches never went away.

Real Galen’s father had come back with a wheelchair.