Kyle sat in the library, typing on a keyboard only he could see, racking his brain, trying to transcribe every little detail of the spellcrafting system he could think of.

There were a lot of valuable benefits to being a “kingdom” instead of a loose collection of players. But topping the list had to be the wiki.

It didn’t take long for them to discover it; it was added to the top of the list in their help files. It was surprisingly sophisticated, with version histories, comment pages, templates, and redirects. It even had a button that let you take a screenshot of your current field of view, then crop it into a graphic to add to a page.

No sooner was it discovered then It immediately exploded into an eclectic assortment of disparate articles. Kyle put Dr. Aubrey in charge of trying to organize the chaotic barrage knowledge. It was amazing how people rallied behind the structure Aubrey set up. Misplaced and misformatted articles were the result of mistakes; nobody trolled or vandalized. The wiki was too sacred.

Everybody had some knowledge of the mechanics of Infigeas that wasn’t covered by the help files. Dvorak started making a page for each herb he had found so hunters encountering an interesting plant knew whether to bother collecting it or not. Kyle and Insagrim, the other adept with spellcrafting, started putting up descriptions of the runes they had purchased. Aubrey said she and a few of her assistants were making progress on discovering the damage calculation formula; their section of the wiki was full of cryptic math notation more arcane than anything Kyle had seen in his section on magic.

The sketchy nature of the help files at last made sense to Kyle. Presumably, there were other kingdoms being formed elsewhere with their own wikis. Deep knowledge about game mechanics could represent a competitive advantage they could use against other kingdoms. Kyle was more interested in trading knowledge with them.

Kyle heard the door squeak open, and he looked up to see Aubrey enter the library. He saved the page he was working on as a draft and quit out of his wiki. “What’s up, Aubrey?”

Aubrey walked up to the table and wordlessly placed three sticks on the table in front of Kyle, smiling smugly.

“Um…” Kyle said, unsure of what to make of it. “Is there anything special about these sticks, Aubrey?”

“You tell me,” she said.

Kyle sighed. Aubrey had a flair for the dramatic whenever she found something interesting. “I mean, not really. This one’s got a little hook shape near the end of it, I guess. This one’s straighter than the others. But not that straight. And this one splits part-way up it.”

“Good enough,” Aubrey said. “Put them in your inventory.”

Kyle did so.

“See them there?”

“Yeah,” Kyle said. In his inventory tab, somewhere around his other junk, he saw an icon with a stylized stick and the numeral “3” under it.

“Now say you pull one out. Which stick will you get?”

“Does it matter?”

“Pretend it does,” Aubrey said. “You’re in a jail cell. The keys are just out of reach. You need that one stick with the hook in order to scoop up the keys and unlock your cell.”

Kyle thought about it. “I guess probably you’d get the stick you stowed most recently. Or maybe the one that’s been in your inventory the longest.” Kyle shrugged. “Or maybe it’s random, like it should be if you’re pulling a stick out of a bag blindly.

Aubrey smiled. “Stack, queue, random draw. Good thoughts. Now try it.”

Kyle tapped the stick icon and then confirmed he wanted one stick instead of more. A stick materialized in his hands.

It was thick, with a twig sticking out about a third of the way up.

“Hang on,” Kyle said.

Aubrey’s grin spread. “None of the above. You get a new stick, randomly generated fresh from whatever algorithm makes sticks.”

Kyle struggled and failed to see the implications. “I guess… I guess if you needed a stick in a certain shape, you could just put it in your inventory and take it out again over and over until you get the kind you want?”

“Sure, sure,” Aubrey said dismissively. “But more importantly, it gives us insight into how the programmers made the game. They don’t want to waste memory and drive space storing the exact structure of every stick. They took shortcuts.”

Kyle, intrigued, took out a piece of charcoal as Aubrey continued speaking.

“So why just your inventory?” Aubrey asked. “What about the ones out in the world? Is their state saved? It didn’t make sense. Why take shortcuts with your inventory when there’s a zillion sticks on the forest floor? They’d occupy way more memory, right? More testing was in order. So once, when we went to get stones at the mine, I arranged sticks in patterns on the ground, just to see what would happen.”

“And when you came back, they weren’t there?” asked Kyle, trying to stay one step ahead of Aubrey’s logic. He started marking one of his sticks with concentric rings.

“No! They they were still there, but they were different sticks.”

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“So…what?” Kyle wasn’t sure if there was a point to Aubrey’s line of thought. What good is the ability to change sticks an hour’s travel away? He took the other two sticks out of his inventory, and put back the stick he marked with charcoal.

“It means the whole world isn’t loaded into memory at once. When you aren’t looking, it changes. That’s when monsters respawn. When trees grow back. When chalk markings fade.”

“Yeah,” said Kyle, following so far. He pulled the stick back out of his inventory. It still had the charcoal marks. In fact, it actually seemed to be the same stick. Kyle raised his eyebrows and wagged the stick, smiling.

Aubrey smirked back, and handed Kyle another stick. Kyle took it and started marking that one as well. “We can’t be sure exactly when those things happen, because we aren’t there,” Aubrey continued. “But the sticks are. So get this; we took a cartload of sticks and made notches on them with a knife, marking them like you’re doing. Then, we lined them up, end to end, going as straight east-to-west as we could.”

Kyle finished his marks on the second stick, then put both into his inventory.

“We went until we ran out of sticks, then marked our position on our minimap with a waypoint, and started walking back, following the trail of marked sticks. And you know what?”

Kyle pulled out both sticks from his inventory. Both were unfamiliar and unmarked. Kyle conceded with a shrug.

Aubrey’s grin widened. “511 meters away from our waypoint, the sticks were marked. 512 meters away, they were unmarked, brand new. It’s our smoking gun; the system only loads a half kilometer around each player.”

Kyle got the three sticks out of the way by putting them all in his inventory. “So, like, if we clear all the Sansi out of one section of the forest, we can walk a few hundred meters away and then come back? And there’ll be more?”

“Kyle, Kyle. You’re thinking too small. How about if our hunters planted marked sticks in the ground every 200 meters or so. Every day when they check their traps, they check the sticks too. If they’re blank, they re-mark them. If they’ve kept their markings-”

“It means somebody’s in the area, keeping the sticks marked,” Kyle finished. “Aubrey, that’s genius. You’re planning on using the respawn mechanics to root out hidden players?”

“Hey, I don’t make up the rules. I just abuse them.”

“That’s fair. And helpful. We can try and recruit anybody living alone in the woods.” Kyle paused for a moment, then took out some paper. “But speaking of rules, here’s a question: why does paper keep its markings?” Kyle picked up the charcoal with his right hand, then with his left, he tapped his menu to open up his spell creation tab. He went to his list of previously “invented” spells, and selected his flame mist spell. He started moving the charcoal more or less at random over the page. The system ignored what he was doing and instead slowly started drawing the collection of runes. “So, I understand why a spell scroll like this would keep its markings when I’m done. It counts as a different item, right? So what about paper? Paper with charcoal markings on it is still just paper.”

“Seems like there are some things that keep their markings. Paper’s one of them. Armor and shields are another.” Aubrey shrugged. “I guess we’re supposed to be able to paint them or make crests or whatever. But most things don’t keep their markings. If it’ll stack into a group in your inventory, it loses all other information.”

“And that’s why the stick only keeps its markings if it’s the only one in my inventory. It hasn’t stacked with anything yet.” Kyle stopped drawing the spell diagram, leaving it half complete. He stuck it in his inventory to see if a half-complete spell scroll would stack with the rest of his paper. It didn’t. It appeared with its own icon. He pulled it out, and it came out, markings intact. Curiosity appeased, Kyle picked up the charcoal again and kept “drawing” the diagram. Might as well finish off the scroll.

“What’cha got there?” Aubrey asked, leaning over to see Kyle’s drawing.

“A spell scroll,” Kyle said, finishing it off. He glanced up to see his mana bar drain to near-empty. “Now that I’ve crafted it, I can give it to another adept and they can learn it too. I think Braden still hasn’t learned this spell yet; I’ll give it to him.

“Looks like a celtic knot exploded all over the page.”

“Yeah, I guess. This rune here, the mist rune? It fits decently well with the fire rune, but the connectors are in all the wrong places. I needed to sorta thread this line between these two other runes to avoid wasting mana on a crossover-rune.”

“Runes?” Aubrey asked. “All I see are squiggly lines.”

“No, see, the rune’s here, and the end of it swoops around here to connect to…” Kyle paused. It did look a lot like squiggly lines when it was on paper. “You know, it’s a lot easier to see when it’s in color.”

“Color? It looks different to you?”

“In my spell creation tab, yeah. All runes are white. But they’ve got colored dots on the ends, and you can draw a line between any two dots with the same color, and they’ll connect. The colors mean something. Like, a blue dot means a thing. And a yellow dot means ‘yes’ or ‘no’. So you can’t connect a ‘thing’ dot to a ‘yes or no’ dot, because that doesn’t make sense. And the colors keep it from being a jumbled-”

“Wait wait wait,” interrupted Aubrey. “A typing system? You’re telling me yours spells are typed?”

“I mean, I guess we’ve got fire spells and ice-”

“No, no. Shut up. Does this thing have conditionals? Like an ‘if’ rune or a ‘while’ rune?”

“Uh…” Kyle paused and thought. “Insagrim said he found a ‘decide’ rune last week…”

“Okay, sure. ‘Decide’. Cute. Can it store values? Like, numbers or… or ‘things’?”

“Store them? Like…”

“Like put them away and pull them out again later. From a different rune.”

“No. Not that I know of.”

“Oh.” Aubrey slumped back in her chair and looked disappointed. Then she sat bolt upright. “What about detecting objects? Like, in your inventory?”

“Yeah,” Kyle said. “The ‘detect’ rune has a green dot, which stands for a ‘place’. And that ‘place’ can be your inventory.”

Aubrey put her hands on the table and leaned across it. “And can you create things? Put them into your inventory?”

“Yes. Only little things, though. It takes too much mana to make anything larger than-”

“My God,” said Aubrey, sinking back with an overwhelmed expression on her face. “It’s turing complete. And here I am stuck as an acolyte.”

“I… what?”

But Aubrey wasn’t paying attention anymore. She stood and ambled out of the room, shaking her head.

* * *

The next day, when Kyle went to the library, he found Aubrey and three of her assistants tearing papers out of books and putting them on shelves. Kyle’s organizational system had been upended; all the piles of pages were in unfamiliar places. Kyle felt a flash of indignation.

When Aubrey saw Kyle, she handed him two stacks of papers. Kyle took them and looked at them. The top pages of each stack were duplicates of each other. Kyle put them on the table and pulled the top paper off each stack. The ones underneath were identical too.

They were all pre-matched for him.

“Uh, thanks Aubrey. This is going to make getting RP a lot easier than-”

“Kyle,” Aubrey said fiercely. “You are going to learn all the runes. And then you will put every scrap of information you have on into the wiki. Everything.”

Kyle nodded meekly.

“And I will give you spells to rule the heavens and shake the earth.”

Aubrey turned aside and continued ripping pages out of books and handing them to her assistants.

Kyle wondered how he was going to break it to Aubrey that a spellcrafter could only learn a certain number of runes at once.