My fingers curled around the rim and with the now familiar motion, I ripped open a hole in space-time into the RLO’s golden woods.

“Do you believe in maaagic?~” Frank sang behind me as Casey adjusted the hood of her white mage’s robes around her bunny ears. “In a young girl’s heeeeart!~ Naaana-na-naaana–”

I couldn’t help but crack a wry smile at Frank’s overwhelming enthusiasm.

Because of the dream, I wasn’t holding out a lot of hope that he would do much better than me when it came to using item runes, but I wasn’t going to kill his hopes prematurely.

We shuffled through the portal and I closed it behind me as always. Last-minute checks confirmed that everyone was ready. Both of them had already buried a ruby seed of their own inside the dirt of my potted plant and had an extra one on them for emergencies.

I idly wondered whether the seeds in the soil would have any strange magical side effects on my poor plant. I’d looked them up on the wiki and nothing on the internet indicated that they would, but that didn’t mean anything. After all, Elyssa’s name wasn’t on the wiki either.

“Which way is it?” Casey asked as she glanced around the peaceful forest with a smile.

“This way. Follow me.”

The three of us proceeded to make our way through the forest all the way to Trevor’s hillside, following the same path I’d taken myself a couple of days ago. We traveled at a somewhat leisurely pace, but still tried to go quickly to have more time for testing before Mom arrived.

We stayed inside the part of the forest that was untraversable for players, but we still came across a few player parties passing by on the road. We always made sure to hide behind a tree each and wait till they left just to make sure nobody saw us.

But then we came across the one party that was becoming way too familiar to me.

“-- think there’s gonna be another event with the glitch girl soon? It’s been a few days.”

I stiffened, recognizing the voice. It was the orange-robed guy from the trio.

And, of course, he was talking about ‘the glitch girl’... meaning me, most likely.

“Are you still going on about that? Didn’t the devs confirm that it was some kind of unintended bug?”

Wait, the devs knew about me now? And they had said something about me?

I suddenly felt a lot more nervous about being inside the RLO world now.

“Yeah, that’s what they want us to think! Reverse psychology, you know?”

A sigh.

“They wouldn’t outright lie in an official blog post. Or they would say it teasingly or something. Not in that serious manner.”

If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

Official blog post? What was that about?

“Yeah, I agree. I think it was all just a strange bug. They are probably working on fixing it soon anyway.”

A chill went down my spine and suddenly I felt very unsafe about being in this world. My hand hovered over my pocket where I kept the ruby seed as I glanced at Casey’s and Frank’s hiding spots.

“Aww, don’t say that! I hope they just give up and call it a feature instead! I wanna do more mysterious glitch girl mini-events! Don’t you guys?”

“I mean… It was pretty cool to be honest. But what if it’s some kind of virus? Didn’t the devs also say that the NPCs around the woods and Redaghoul have been behaving weirdly?”

Oh… Oh no…

“Yeah, they wanted to fix them too, didn’t they–”

Fix them?

As in, enslave them and force them to be NPCs again? Were the devs going to use whatever they’d used before to turn everyone into mindless NPCs again?

Elyssa.

They would erase her sense of self then. Make her forget everything. Turn her back to an emotionless robot.

I couldn’t let that happen.

But what was I supposed to do…?

The trio’s voices disappeared in the distance and we all came out of hiding again.

“Uhm… did you hear–”

“We have to save Elyssa,” I interrupted Frank, my teeth clenching. “We can’t let her be deleted.”

“Whoa, whoa, hold up.” He held up his hands. “Not that I disagree, but what would we even do? The devs have this entire world under their thumb!”

“Yeah.” Casey nodded in agreement. “It’s not like she can hide from their influence as long as she’s in… this… world…”

Both of them looked at me.

I swallowed.

Of course. I had even talked about it with Elyssa the first time we’d met. But I still didn’t know what kind of effects taking her out of this world to Earth might have. The devs would undoubtedly notice. What would they do when they did?

Well, at the very least, they probably wouldn’t have power over her if she were to escape this world.

“But then what…?” I murmured. “Where would she go once she’s on Earth…?”

There was no way she could live with me. I would have to not only tell Mom the truth about everything, but I would also have to convince her to let Elyssa live with us.

Even if I could convince her somehow, I didn’t want to put even more stress on her. But what other options were there? Dragging Elyssa out of this world just to leave her stranded on the streets of Earth was out of the question.

“She can live with me for the time being,” Casey blurted out, probably seeing my indecision. “My parents are away on a business trip for another week, at least, so we would be safe on that front.”

That… could work… but…

“And… What then? After your parents return?”

Casey frowned.

“Well… hopefully, by then, the devs will be done with their… whatever it is they do to turn people into NPCs.”

“Right…”

It wasn’t perfect, but hopefully, it would work for the time being. Worst case scenario, we could book a hotel for Elyssa or something.

“Right,” I repeated. “Okay. We can work with this. Maybe…” I sighed. “Hopefully it works out in the end…”

I briefly thought about all the other NPCs who weren’t really NPCs that I had met. Mainly the two guards and the man with the food stall.

Part of me wanted to go get them to evacuate as well, but there was no way I could do that. For one, they didn’t know about my true identity or about the portal to another world. And even if they did, they probably had people who would notice them going missing if they were to leave the world, unlike Elyssa, who was a hermit.

It felt like I was condemning them, but… there really wasn’t much I could do for them. I didn’t know how much time we still had before the devs made their move, after all.

I shook my head.

At the very least, we could save Elyssa. And so, we would.

“Alright. Change of plans then. We’ll try magic another time.”

“Aww…” Frank whined.

“We don’t know how much time we have.”

“Right…” He nodded with a look of defeat… before instantly brightening up again. “Alright then, let’s go save the damsel in distress from the evil gods!”

I couldn’t help but smile wryly.

“Yeah, let’s.”