Aubrey sighed. “Show’s over,” she said to the wounded players. “Go lie down. You’ve earned it. Sorry I got you into this mess.”

Muttering and complaining, most of the players started slowly leaving the cavern through the cave entrance. Only a Jakarna and another dwarf remained near Aubrey, eying Kyle and Mason suspiciously.

“So now what?” asked Kyle.

“I guess we wait,” said Mason. He looked towards the two other exits from the room. “Any goblins in those other passages?”

“I think,” Aubrey said. “We don’t go those directions much. No need.”

“I’ll keep watch at those two tunnels,” Mason said, and headed into the dark.

Kyle’s pain had spread through his whole body by this point, dulling to a generalized ache that made him uncomfortable and irritable. At least it wasn’t as bad as last time he got stabbed by a goblin. He opened his status menu and saw his HP bar. He watched it to see if it moved, finally opening his options menu and changing the digits of precision. As his health inched from 81.1% to 81.3% he realized it could take hours for the pain to go away. Wanting to distract himself, he looked around for something to do.

“What do we do with the… with the corpses?” Kyle said, walking over to Dvorak’s eerily still form. Dvorak, as annoying as he was, was full of life and energy. Seeing him still on the ground was unnerving and sobering.

“It’s sounds awful, but we’ve just been leaving them out,” Aubrey said, glancing at the mess of bodies. Fallen players and goblins alike were strewn indiscriminately on the cavern floor. “We tried burying them for a while, but it was so much effort, and at the beginning, we’d have people dying pretty often.”

“What happens to their stuff?” Kyle said.

Aubrey looked back at Kyle. “Wow. Must have been nice hanging out with two… two gamejackers.” Kyle hadn’t heard the term, and wasn’t sure if Aubrey had just made it up, but it was a useful shorthand for people like Mia and Lumen. “You’ve never died, have you?” Aubrey asked accusatorially. “Has anybody in your group died?”

“Not this group.” Kyle stopped to think. “Back in the town? I know Braden has. Lumen killed him. Lumen’s reformed now, by the way, don’t worry. Oh, and that one girl… Avina? She’s died once. In fact…” Kyle trailed off. Suddenly, Avina’s mousey demeanor made more sense to Kyle.

Aubrey rolled her eyes. “If people take stuff from your corpse, you don’t respawn with it. Otherwise, you keep your inventory aside from some randomly determined items that stay on the ground where your corpse despawns. I don’t know what the algorithm is for that. Soulbound items disappear when you die and reappear when you respawn; they can’t be looted from your body.”

“Speaking of respawning, where do you respawn? Obviously not where your body is, if you’ve been burying them…”

“You get your choice. You’ve got your starting pod, any other starting pod you’ve found, and a few natural landmarks. At least, according to the help files. I’ve not found one of those myself.”

Kyle nodded. He supposed he should be thankful he didn’t have any info on dying in his help files. He could guess what the prerequisite was.

“Also, higher level architects can build their own respawn points. I hear it’s pretty expensive, though,” Aubrey added.

Kyle sighed. “I guess we won’t know exactly where Dvorak will come back, then. Think I should take his stuff or leave it on his body?”

“We could just hide the corpse,” Aubrey said. “Stick him in a corner and build a wall around him. He might want to respawn with as much of his stuff as possible if he needs to make a trek back to your city. Anything that drops, we can come back for later.”

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Kyle nodded. He went over to Dvorak’s body, but he couldn’t lift it one-handed. “Hold this?” Kyle said, holding his flame out to Aubrey. She looked at him skeptically. “Actually, nevermind. Do you have a torch or something?” Aubrey nodded and pulled a torch from her inventory, already lit. Kyle didn’t know how to dismiss his flame, so he tossed it on the ground, where it sputtered and died.

Kyle hefted Dvorak’s body over his shoulder. It was limp, cool, and unnerving.

“Why are you with that Elf and Jakarna, anyway?” Aubrey asked as Kyle heaved the corpse towards the nearest corner. “Are you using them as bodyguards? Are you hoping travelling with them will net you some useful equipment?”

Kyle thought about that. “I guess… well, Mia started off in our pod, so when we escaped together, we just sorta fell into a party together. Then Lumen came to the town, and we just… pulled him in. We just sort of… we’re trying to work together, you know?”

“If that works out for you, I guess I wouldn’t complain,” Aubrey said, shrugging. “But I wouldn’t trust them. They’re too different.”

Kyle dropped the body in the corner. Aubrey nodded solemnly. “I’ll ask Skyfire to build a wall around him before we leave.”

“Skyfire?” asked Kyle.

“One of our Architects. A good kid. An Elf now. I don’t know his real name off the top of my head. He was accepted to Penn State’s microbiology program before getting sucked in here. He’s nervous the game will go on for so long that he’ll end up being a no-show and lose his acceptance.” She looked suddenly fatigued and rubbed her forehead. “Even ignoring the death and pain, this game is disrupting a lot of lives.”

Kyle realized he hadn’t thought about his upcoming oral exams in several days. He tried not to worry about it. There was nothing he could do. He just hoped his professors could understand. He stood again and surveyed the room. “There are a lot of dead goblins here. Think we should loot the bodies or something?”

Aubrey didn’t react for a moment. “Sure. I guess.” She walked towards the nearest goblin and planted a hand on its chest, then tapped her crystal. After tapping a few buttons invisible to Kyle, the body dissolved into motes of light that winked out after a moment.

Kyle didn’t realize you could loot corpses like that. But then, he hadn’t been the one to go on the hunting trips. That was always… Well, it was Lumen and Mia. He suddenly realized just how disconnected he had been from the death and combat in this world.

But he had felt it, once or twice. The feeling as the axe cleft the goblins skull in the first dungeon. The way the arsonist’s head bounced off his fist as he punched his face. Those feelings disturbed him now, just thinking about them. He knew what this place was. Was he trying to fool himself? Pretending that if he built a town around himself, it would somehow shelter him from the violence in the world?

Kyle leaned down, touched the bodies, and saw a menu pop up with all the stuff the goblin was carrying. Small hide armor, a goblin sword slightly worse than the one he already had, some silver. Nothing remarkable. Kyle hit a button marked “loot all”. Might as well. His possessions were far below what the game would let him carry. Maybe they’d be able to cut the armor into leather strips and use them for farm equipment, or melt down the weapons and reforge them into something useful. He moved on to another goblin corpse and found similar junk.

“Hey, do you guys know what silver’s for?” asked Aubrey suddenly.

“No idea,” Kyle said. “We thought there would be NPC shopkeepers or something, but we’ve not seen any. Maybe it’s supposed to be part of a player driven economy of some kind?” Kyle headed back to Dvorak’s body. Just to check to see if he had anything that looks like he couldn’t afford to lose.

“Can’t be a player driven economy,” Aubrey said, shaking her head. “If you can ‘print your own money’ by farming respawning goblins, you’d end up with really bad inflation. You can’t base an economy off that. There’s got to be some way to take money out of the system for it to balance itself. Are you guys using it for currency?”

“We’re all on the same team, basically. We’ve been sharing all our possessions. Giving them to whoever can make use of them most. Lumen and Mia get the good weapons and armor, I get the books, Dvorak gets the herbs…”

“Wow. You really do have a little Utopia going, don’t you?”

Kyle didn’t know how to respond. Didn’t it just make sense to do it like that?

Kyle checked Dvorak’s inventory by planting a hand on his chest and navigating his menus. Kyle quickly realized he had no way to tell what was valuable and what wasn’t. The list was mostly just a mess of herbs and “unidentified” potions in varying shades of brown. Kyle considered taking those for the party to use, but decided against it; there was no way of telling if any of them were “mistakes” that would poison him or whatever. Kyle closed out of Dvorak’s inventory, leaving everything there.

With the battle site cleaned up, Kyle and Aubrey walked towards the center of the room, where Lumen and Mia had run off to fight. They didn’t find any bodies. Lumen and Mia had probably already looted them.

Kyle heard voices from up the hall and turned to see Lumen and Mia coming down the hallway from the crystal. Half of Lumen’s face was speckled with the pale pink color Kyle had learned to associate with wounds. Lumen had a strange expression; Kyle couldn’t tell if he was smiling or wincing.