“A d-d-deal?” Sage squeaks. Then his eyes flash from side to side, and when they land on me, he gasps, his body stiffens, and he exhales slowly, his expression of panic melting into one of misery. “Oh, g-great. It’s you.”

“Quiet, mouse!” a nearby goon says, chucking a club at Sage.

“These rats,” says the nearing voice of one of my captors,

“my King, gave us an extra bit of trouble.”

The basilisk flicks its tongue and a series of twitches travels down its scaly length.

“Trouble, mmm?” Doroveiro says, pacing slowly before our prostrate heads. “Trouble how?”

“This bigguy,” says another approaching captor, whose heavy boot stomps on my back, “put up quite a fight. Got Hurdra in the nose!”

“Just a touch!” says my other captor, hurdra canal - lvl 3 thief, breathing through wet nostrils. “But he’s a squirmin’ vermin!”

“Perssisstence,” Doroveiro says, planting a glossy boot before my eyes and squatting down and grabbing my chin with a calloused hand to pull my face up for inspection. He squints his bilious eyes, winces, and then chuckles slowly: “Mmaha ha ha. He is a child of Gorio, alright,” he continues, forcing my face back down into the pavement for 1 dmg. “Persisstence is a virtue, even among thievess. He will do.”

“Ours,” says one of Conrad’s captors, “is an ear-bleeder. Wouldn’t shut his mouth since we plucked him from the surf-.”

“Uh, when I get pulled dick-first into a scripted event, with no way of fighting back, and I’m stuck with two faceless dumbass germs while I’m dragged through literal shit, do you expect me to just keep quiet like you good little minions are taught to? If this were Tabletop I’d have called out the GM for railroading like five times by now, but here we are in Last Advent, where the admins apparently all shit the bed and died and none of the germs even know what ‘logging out’ could be other than a lumberjack’s phrase for dropping a deuce.” Conrad says this all in one virtual breath, and when he’s finished, a dwarfish captor lashes him on the back with a rapier, and Doroveiro paces over in front of him.

“Ha! He has ssomething like the ssilver tongue of Faelina’s offsspring.” He inspects Conrad’s physiognomy the same way he inspected mine. “Hm. Maybe it iss more of a brazen tongue. Still,” he says, striding to pat one of the captors on the back, “a brazen tongue may sserve us better than one of a brighter ssubstance. What is a heisst without a disstraction?”

“The only one I’m ‘sssssserving’ is your mom at din-”

“No-no, little rat,” Doroveiro says, suddenly flicking and dangling a serpentine, whip-like sword of vertebral blades over Conrad’s head and dragging the slack tip across his back. “Do not get the wrong idea. You may play with my ‘germs,’ but when I am sspeaking, you lisssten well.”

The canny quality in the King’s speech takes on a new level of intrigue at his use of “germs.” He’s definitely an AGI. How much does he know about the engine?

He takes a long drag from a smoldering pipe held in his other hand and exhales another plume of smoke, and his boots fall slowly between Conrad and I to rest before Sage, whose stiff body twitches anxiously with cautious breaths.

“Hmm. Mm, thiss one . . . sseems skittish. A moussse, you said?”

“A complete coward,” says a captor.

“Pleasedon’thurtmepleasedon’t, Ididn’tmeantoinsultanyoneIdidn’t-” Sage mutters.

“Nyxelas!” Doroveiro’s voice booms. “Hungry, my ssweet girl?”

The basilisk, whose head has been swerving slowly through the air to follow Doroveiro’s pacing, lunges forward and unhinges her many-fanged, drooling dark maw to breathe a rancid mist over Sage that spills across the floor to meet Conrad’s and my nostrils, too. We all cough and wheeze as the sulfuric moisture fills our virtual lungs. My heart rate seems to slow.

The creature stretches and slides its body over the King’s shoulder until its maw almost meets Sage’s limp living avatar, an adventurer born this morning with the Patch and already approaching its doom. I feel a guilty twinge of satisfaction in my anticipation of this execution. But all of my senses: the stench of putrefaction that dominates this dungeon; the sight of myriad glittering blades and fangs; the sounds of scraping and squelching and violent, gleeful gratification; the faint metallic taste spreading from my throat; the gritty, graveyard-cold feeling of the ground on which I lie; all of my senses attest to the reality of this world, and accordingly, the reality of death in Last Advent, so that my anticipation becomes a kind of empathetic panic at the imminence of my own doom.

“No!” I yell, my deep voice reverberating throughout the humid chamber. The basilisk halts—its eyes, mucusy white orbs, turn to me—and Doroveiro raises a forbidding hand with overgrown, sharpened nails.

“You dare sspeak, giantblood? After I have so graciousssly sspared you and offered you a deal?” The vertebral sword’s blades clatter and scrape against the ground.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“SageofStorms,” I say, cautiously but resolutely, “is a talented archer. My life was saved by an arrow loosed from his bowstring. I’m sure he’d be an asset to you.”

Sage whimpers.

The basilisk withdraws an inch.

And Doroveiro pulls me off of the ground by my shoulders with preternatural strength, raises me up onto my knees, and glowers at me from inches away, letting his weapon drape over my shoulder. “Iss thiss true?”

“. . . Yes. We survived a goblin swarm together.”

“Cool!” Conrad says earnestly.

Doroveiro stares back down at the miserable archer before shrugging, which Nyxelas seems to take as a signal to withdraw all the way back toward the throne.

“Fine. We will give him a chance. Perhapss we will make an asssassssin of a dainty moussse. Mmaha!”

He throws me staggering backward until I fall onto my back for 5 dmg.

“Let uss talk bussinesss, then,” he continues, turning to face his throne of stolen treasure with his hands behind his back, holding his hanging weapon like a demonic tail. “If you want your items back—and mmmore—you need only perform a ssssimple task for me.”

“You want toothbrushes for yourself and your pet snake?” Conrad says.

Doroveiro cracks the blades of his scourge against the ground and begins to turn to Conrad.

“Sorry! Couldn't help it,” he apologizes. “Please continue, your highness.”

“It is ssimple. You will go to the outposst at the Inner Gate before Sskybreach. Sssneak in past the Royal Guards. And ssteal any paperss you find with that coward king’s sstamp. Whatever else you ssteal is a bonus—but do not think for a ssecond about keeping what you find for yourself. I have eyesssss everywhere. No, you will bring everything back to me, and then we can talk about nexssst sstepss.”

“You can count on us, Doroveiro,” I say, intending to placate him until we're set free. “How should we deliver the papers once we have them?” Sage nods rapidly to echo my question, and Conrad squints skeptically at me, as if noticing a hint of familiarity in my cadence.

“Good quessstion, ssince my thievess will be carrying you out the same way they brought you into the Dragon's Den. Mhaha! But you will bring the loot to the quesst-giver who pointed you to my Den in the firsst place, and once you have done sso, they will show you the way back.” He begins to walk back up his throne, step, by step, by step. “Any more quesstions?”

“Yeah, I've got about a th-”

“Conor—shhhh,” I say.

“How’d you . . .” My friend glares at me, and then his frown slowly curls into a smile and his eyes sparkle with recognition. “No fucking way. Phil?” he whispers.

“We'll talk later.” I look at Sage, who breathes heavily, his nerves clearly fried by his near-death experience. He doesn't look grateful so much as humiliated.

“No quesstionss? Good.” Doroveiro waves our captors out. “Take them away, you libertines. Oh—” he swivels round and looks up diagonally, and his mouth puckers crookedly in the opposite direction while he searches his coat pocket for something, taking his pipe back out in the process and sticking it into the corner of his mouth. “Mm-aha!”

He removes and lobs three small sacks in front of our faces, the filled halves of which glow subtly amber.

“Dragontearss. To motivate you! All the pity I have for you rats, I'm afraid. Ha!” And he continues up the stairs of plunder, emitting that rumbling laugh all the way up, while we each (Take) our Dragontears just before our jealous captors blind us with those rough bags again and begin to drag us all the wait across the chamber into the sewers that lead back to the surface.

“Sometimes I miss traditional media. Like, if this were a cutscene, I'd have started mashing the A-button as soon as ol’ Captain Hook started strutting up the stairs. I mean, we get it: gross sewers lead to secret lair, gross sewers lead out. Do we really have to slog first-person through the shitstream again?”

The whole group of thieves sigh together, and I can't help chuckling even though it exacerbates the pain in my chest. “Mimmisoft definitely put immersion way above game feel in their list of priorities”

“I am so, so tired of this . . .” Sage grumbles. “I'm supposed to be in Aquaria with my girlfriend right now. Or at least in town with Rain.”

“Aquaria!? Dude—hahaha,” Conor says, “you'd rather be playing that cartoonish shit? With your gf who's totally not a mermaid AGI? I'd rather be breathing in air from my apartment window. It'd be smoggier, but it'd be real. Wait, damn! I want a cigarette.”

“. . . My girlfriend is real.” Sage says weakly. “And so what if I like to swim? Not like I have a pool IRL.”

“Really? I thought most buildings had them. Where're you from?” Conor says.

“Maryland-Delaware.”

“Oooo! That blows. But honestly, Jersey buildings all have the rankest, most diseased swimming cesspools you'll find. I swear, the only time I went downstairs to the pool room, I caught strep throat with one wet breath. I think they ran outta chlorine.”

“Jersey!” Sage says, reanimating a bit. “Why's someone from Jersey talking shit? You're in Metro's armpit.”

“Better than being in Metro's heart, though,” I add. “Even if I opened my window, I'd still be breathing indoor air.”

“Hey, you stupid rats!” A thief interjects. “If you lot don't cut the chatter, we'll just leave you right here for the dragators to snack on. How's that sound?”

“Gators? Nah, no thanks,” Conor says.

“That's right. So shut your traps till we get rid of you upstairs.”

We spend the remainder of our passage in silence, still gripped by fear, but slowly pervaded by a comforting sense of fellowship. Or at least I feel less lonely than I so far have. And when we reach the surface and the thieves that deposited us there flee with the same stealthy swiftness that allowed them to capture us, it take us a moment to realize they're gone, we're unbound, and we can remove our masks.

I pull mine off to see Sage, in his purple tunic and accompanying starter clothes, devoid of his armor and quiver and bow; and my friend Conor, here “Conrad,” a sparkly-eyed, smiley young man in a gray-blue silken robe. The latter scratches his spiky dirty-blonde hair.

A cold breeze blows from the nearby river as we all visually inspect the shadowy alley in which we've been left. The thieves are gone—but a feeling that we're prisoners, and doubly so—captives in Last Advent and captives of this band of thieves—remains.

“Well, fuck. How d'you guys feel about pulling off a heist tonight?” Conor says.