“Yo!” Frank greeted me as I opened the door for him.

“Hey…” I said with a sigh. His expression fell as he saw mine.

“Still feeling guilty, huh…?”

“Yeah… I feel like crap… And I hate that Mom isn’t here. Part of me expected this to be Mom rather than you.” I shrugged. “A habit.”

“Huh… Right…”

With nothing more to say, Frank came inside, took off his shoes, and we moved to my room.

“Sooo… I said we would prepare, but do you have any specific ideas yet?”

I nodded and sat down at my computer where RLO had already been running.

“Yeah, a couple of things.” I clicked a few buttons and opened my in-game item bank. “First of all, there’s these newly added skill scrolls. I already have one for flash step and stone skin here.”

I’d visited the treasure hunt again and despite my worries of the devs being unable to change things, the new skill scroll had been there, as if I’d forgotten to take it last time. Another mini-quest I’d completed a while back had also gained the stone skin skill scroll as an extra reward.

“Oh yeah! I read about that! That would be so cool if we could just nom a scroll to learn new skills! No need to go through the tedious training montage!”

I smiled.

Ironically, the true form skill had been one of the easiest skills to learn despite its impact. All you needed were a bunch of quests to access the Golden Woods and then follow a guide on the wiki to get through the ‘secret’ path. From what I remembered, the devs hadn’t meant it to be so easy, but after the skill rework last year, they had confirmed that they wouldn’t be changing it.

Now they probably couldn’t.

“Do you think we have the same cap of three active and three passive skills equipped like our avatars?” my friend asked as I grabbed the scrolls from my bank, along with a bunch of gear, and made my way to the Golden Woods.

“Probably…? I have no idea how we would swap the skills out, though. Not like we have an interface for it. But then again, there’s no interface for the true form either, so maybe it will come naturally to us…?”

Luckily, as a special skill, true form didn’t take up any skill slots.

“Eh, probably! But if not, then we better pick the best six skills we can, right?”

“I guess so… But it’s not like the better skills have skill scrolls for them. Not yet, anyway. The best we can get are the basic ones. And if we’re gonna have to fight the boss, it’s better to have these than nothing.” I grimaced.

“Eh… That’s true, I guess…”

I arrived at the familiar spot and looked around with my game character to make sure there weren’t any other players around before dumping most of my inventory on the ground. I then stood up from my computer and eyed the portal in my room.

It was still stretched out from my little experiment with Mom a few days ago. Part of me felt concerned, but other than it being taller, it didn’t seem to be any different. It wouldn’t… break or anything, right…?

I placed my fingers on the portal and stopped. Rather than ripping it open right away, I closed my eyes and tried to get a feel for it.

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It felt… electric. I had always thought that this feeling and the shocks were related, but I had been mistaken. After all, when I thought back to how the Wiland portal had felt on my fingers, they were nothing alike.

Wiland felt… like a campfire in the middle of a forest filled with wildlife. Nature, trees, soft wind, and cinders. That was the best way I could describe it. This one, the RLO portal, felt like buzzing electricity running through the fibers of plants.

That… described the video game world pretty well, didn’t it?

“Hey, you alright…?”

I opened my eyes and looked at the confused Frank.

“I’m fine. Just trying to… feel the portals. They both feel different, you know? I was hoping I could learn more about them by doing this. Maybe even learn to somehow tell what was inside from just the feeling.” I pursed my lips and in a quieter tone said, “Maybe avoid an apocalypse altogether next time…”

“Right… Good idea.” He nodded slowly as he considered my words. Then his expression took on the familiar grin. “So what does this one feel like?”

“Like electricity. Which makes sense. Since it’s a video game world.” I shrugged.

“Huh… Interesting. Hey, maybe you could figure out what the blue portal in the dragon’s lab is about by feeling it up first.” He wiggled his eyebrows.

I looked at him deadpan for his wording, but nodded in agreement regardless.

Finally, I opened the portal and stepped inside before looking around curiously. Nothing had really changed even after the update. I hadn’t really thought it would have because of the whole ‘making things real’ thing, but part of me had still expected things to feel different.

“Well, let’s get the loot then.”

I nodded and we both headed to my character standing still on the road, dropped items scattered around her. It didn’t take long for us to smuggle everything back into my room and thankfully, no players suddenly appeared at the worst possible moment, despite my expectations.

“So, what’s this?” Frank asked as I closed the portal behind us again.

I turned to look at the tower shield he was holding.

“The undead conqueror’s aegis. I got it from the treasure hunt in Abyground.” I stopped for a moment before continuing. “It’s what you used in my dream.”

“Oh…” Frank blinked as he looked at the shield more closely now. After a moment, he shot me a wide grin. “Well, that’s good! It’s like we’re assembling the dream team from a prophecy or something! What else were we using?”

I thought back on the dream.

“I’m pretty sure I used the katana I already have… You used this shield as well as… an axe. I’m not sure what axe, though. It wasn’t very distinct.”

He nodded. “Hmm, right. Guess I’ll just get the best axe I have on my character. What about Casey?”

I sighed. “She used the staff with the orb… The Pandemia with the mana conductor.”

“Ah… Right… That makes sense. The thing is filled with mana from earlier, isn’t it? She can probably let out a drop of it to blast away a building or something.”

I stopped… and then remembered how the dream had ended. Casey had done something with her staff and then light enveloped me. I had no idea what exactly that meant, though. Did it go out of control and explode on her? Was that a sign that she shouldn’t bring that staff with her?

“Anyway!” Frank broke me out of my musing. “Skill scrolls! This is gonna be so fucking cool!”

I gave him a small smile and picked up the flash step skill scroll while he held the stone skin one. From what I’d read on the forums and wiki, the game character simply unrolled it, looked at it, and then it disappeared in motes of light while you unlocked the skill.

Following exactly that, I unrolled the skill scroll and…

…Nothing happened.

“So, uh, how does this work, exactly…?”

“It’s supposed to disappear while we learn the skills…” I muttered as I rolled it up and unrolled it several times at different speeds from different angles. It didn’t do anything.

“Well… it’s not doing anything…” Frank helpfully added, as he mimicked my actions.

I deflated with a sigh.

“Yeah… I guess it won’t be that easy if we’re not game avatars…”

“Hey, let’s not give up yet! Maybe we can still somehow learn the skills from it. Look, the text is different on both of these! Maybe we have to decipher it somehow?”

I frowned as I looked closer at it. The gibberish looked somewhat familiar, but…

“Oh… It’s RLO’s language. It’s what the announcement board used and whatnot.” I straightened up and marched over to my computer again before minimizing the game and going to the wiki once more.

“You think there’s gonna be translations?”

“I hope so… You know what some of the lorehounds are like. I bet some of them have already made a dictionary for this language… Oh, here it is! Look!”

Just as I’d thought, there was an entire wiki page dedicated to explaining the in-game language and translating most of the text to English. Unfortunately, the lorehounds hadn’t yet added translation for the text on the scrolls, but we could simply translate it ourselves. We just had to refer to the list of known words they had compiled.

I pursed my lips.

“This might take a while…”