Air. He needed air.

Tavish popped out of the water like a buoy. Just meters away he saw the back of the dragon skim the water. He felt a faint moment of hope when his eyes locked on the coral not too far away and realized the dragon wasn’t in his way.

He pumped his arms and legs against the water, his outsized power level helping him shoot like a rocket to the bare pillars. He pulled himself on top and looked around for Kaela, Fynn, and the rest of the crew.

Fynn had been launched most of the way to the coral pillars when the monster snapped the ship in half. Tavish saw him pulling himself up.

Tav focused his attention across the water until Kaela’s ID popped up in his vision. She was swimming hard. She’d make it, no problem. Just another few seconds…

No good. The dragon was carving a leisurely u-turn. Tavish jumped in the water, swimming out to Kaela. “Get to the pillar—I’ll distract it.”

She didn’t say anything, just kicked off harder, making her way to safety as fast as she could.

Tavish sank under the waves and fought to hold his eyes open against the sting of salt. He saw the gargantuan snout coming towards him and wrapped himself around it. The dragon tried to shake him off, but Tavish dug his fists tighter into the soft part of its nostrils. It couldn’t die, but it could feel pain. It thrashed around, bucking him like a bronco.

At last, as the head snapped through the surface, he with it, he noticed Kaela pulling herself onto a pillar of coral. Tavish pushed off, soaring through the air. The dragon tried to follow after, but Tavish was too fast, snapping out his rope-blade to sink into the coral and pulling, hurtling through the air back to his perch.

As expected, the dragon suddenly seemed completely uninterested in them once they were all on the coral pillars. A safe zone.

He turned to Fynn. “You see any of our other guys?”

Fynn shook his head.

Tavish nodded somberly. “Let’s not worry about it now. We might just be able to get them back.” He turned to face the small, sandy island just a couple hundred meters away. In the center was a black box like an arcade. “Let’s go.”

They leapt off the pillars. The water was noticeably warmer this side of things. Almost Caribbean. Tavish luxuriated in the warmth, letting it soak down to his iced-over bones. As they stepped out of the water onto land their clothes dried instantly. The temperature on the island was also much nicer. A clear, dry seventy-five degrees or so.

“Well, that’s nice,” said Kaela, inspecting her equipment and finding it also dry and free of water-logging. She nodded towards the big black box. “That the thing we came for?”

“It is,” said Tavish, organizing the files and notes he’d brought.

“Let’s hope it was worth it,” she said, not looking at him. She walked towards the box and knelt down, going through her inventory, piece by piece.

“You need me to do anything?” offered Fynn.

“Nah, take a load off,” said Tavish. “You’ve had enough to do.” He hesitated. “I’m sorry about your crew. Can’t exactly say they knew what they signed up for. Not really.”

Fynn shook his head. “No, I guess not. But we’re all in this. They knew it was dangerous anyway. Wouldn’t have been much better for ‘em back shoreside.”

“I’ll do my best to get them back.”

Tavish stepped up to the console and put his finger to the on switch, then though better of it. He wanted to go over his plans one more time. Getting this right was critical. Digging into the guts of the systems that ran Sevceneur was dangerous. Do things wrong, or in the wrong order, and he could collapse the whole damn thing. Delete them all out of existence, or glitch them into insanity.

Hell, he wasn’t entirely certain that he wasn’t putting all of HereAfter at risk.

So, he triple and quadruple checked all his paperwork.

They had a few goals at the console—a handful of things they wanted to get done. One thing was to make sure Sevceneur was completely decoupled from BlueDawn’s systems. They needed to be wholly migrated over to the HereAfter org-servers. Once that was done, no one would be able to undo his work.

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Then he’d give everyone on the planet Player status. No more NPCs. That way, if shit hit the fan, at least they wouldn’t be at the mercy of the world’s monsters. Of course, that could lead to all sorts of other problems, but, well… one step at a time.

Then he’d do whatever he could to pull all the people who’d been killed back to life. If he could.

Then decrypt all the documents he’d stolen from BlueDawn. He had a good feeling he’d hit the jackpot, if only he could read what was in there. He wanted to know who BlueDawn was working for. He wanted to know why they were doing what they were doing. He wanted to know how the hell they were doing it too.

He had a good feeling that the authorities would want to know too.

Then—and only then—after he’d done all that, he’d try to figure out how to separate his father’s consciousness form his own. Somewhere deep inside him Nash was still there. He sent out little messages once in a while, but it was a rare event. He’d also have to figure out how to balance his character sheet, but that would have to wait.

“Alright, I’m ready,” said Tavish. “Get on your guard, just in case this provokes some hostile response.”

Fynn drew a sword and faced the water. Kaela nocked an arrow.

Tavish flicked the switch on the console box. The screen flickered to life and showed him the same, familiar interface he’d grown accustomed to from working in BlueDawn’s bunker.

“Hey, Tav,” called Fynn. “Is that supposed to happen?”

“What?”

“Look yourself.”

Tav peeked around the console and saw one of the palm trees, fronds floating high in the air, trunk fading in and out. “No. No it’s not.” What the hell was that?

“Got it over here, too,” said Kaela.

He turned and looked—a big, perfect square of earthy stone had manifested in the water, waves passing through it as if it wasn’t there, though a bird managed to land safely on the top.

Tavish moved quicker. He’d need to run a proper reboot on the system, but not until he got all the required programs run through it. His fingers flew over the keyboard, searching for the right directory. There!

He opened up the file. There were the fingerprints of monkeying around all over it. Pieces of code sliced and spliced form elsewhere. HereAfter proprietary code—where the heck had BlueDawn gotten his hands on that? Selections of raw Dragons Rising code slipped in. Some home brew lines of esoteric stuff he didn’t quite understand. Whatever. He copied over the migratory software, deleted the unwanted lines from the main file, and pointed the two at each other. Enter.

The ground shook—hard. Tavish lost his footing and slammed into the sand. In the distance a city appeared in the sky.

And the city fell. He watched it tilt in the sky, the thin line of earth beneath it fracturing as some buildings fell at different angles. They all dropped at about the same rate though, stony sea meeting them with violent force, breaking and swallowing. It took a few moments for the sound to reach Tavish and his crew. But it was only sound of torn brick and ripped lumber crashing into the waters, a city whole. Not one scream reached them. Not even the imagination of one—how could they possibly imagine something like that?

“What the hell are you doing over there, Tav?” shouted Kaela.

“That is definitely not supposed to happen!” Tavish pulled himself back to his feet and leaned over the console screen. He needed to get the instructions through now. He couldn’t know for certain what intractable changes would occur after he did the reboot. He couldn’t risk a corruption in the system preventing him from finishing his work.

In fact… Tav flashed a copy of the Console’s integrated architecture to his own memory. It wasn’t much, but he might be able to reverse engineer better solutions with enough time to pore over it later if things went sideways right now.

He navigated to the next directory that needed his attention. This one was mercifully easier to deal with. He just had to flip a few False statements to True and bingo, everyone on Sevceneur was now a Player. At least they would be after a reboot. Even a soft reload should be enough.

“Ah, Tav, this can’t be good!” Fynn had let his sword drop to his side as he helplessly watched the horizon bend in the distance. Closer, gobs of ocean water rose into the air and twisted into strange shapes then fizzled into nothing.

Tavish knew the next step would take a while. Longer than they seemed to have. Things were getting out of hand—he needed to re-prioritize. He had a hunch that running a full reboot would make getting the “dead” Souls back to life impossible. Perhaps a soft reboot would be okay. Either way, he needed to get it done now. Just in case, he decided to run the stolen documents through the decryption program ahead of schedule as he simultaneously started work on the dead Souls problem.

Too many problems popping up at once. Tavish’s head was swimming. He was pounding down issues as fast as he could—slower than they were arising. Trying to feed through documents for encryption as he did so and trying to figure out where the lost Souls were being cached. Too many problems, too fast. Tavish dug his teeth into his lower lip and tasted blood.

The sky was rent with anomalies punching through, the howls of a system tearing itself apart. Giant mountains exploded out of the water like nails through paper. Their whole island tilted thirty degrees on its side. They couldn’t feel the change, but they could see it against the horizon.

Unstable physical location.

Attempting to find stable console placement.

Please wait…

Please wait…

Please wait…

Found.

Install 5068 km west of local orientation.

Clearing current state.

Everything went white.

And then walls—warm wood walls—resolved around them. Tavish, Fynn, and Kaela all looked around and at each other.

“How did we…” Kaela said, trailing off in disbelief.

“What is this, Tav,” asked Fynn. “Where are we?”

Tavish lowered himself into a chair. “We’re home. The White Tavern.”