Entering Pomerium - Losthearth . . .

Eyes.

Hundreds of pairs of eyes.

Upon the opening of the doors to Losthearth, most of the survivors of our march burst in, burning through stamina as they rush confusedly into still foreign streets and collapse, or embrace players that await them with swiveling virtual heads, or stand quietly amid the traffic with gaping mouths and glazed-over eyes. The guards atop the battlements do not react to us; they keep their crossbows trained on the horizon or descend through their watchtowers and file patiently onto the street.

A slideshow of images still shuffling through my mind shows myself and Adelaide and the other holdouts approach—with the reluctance of prisoners walking to our own executions—the bodies of our fallen leaders. We recover their weapons for memorialization, and as it appears that bodies, like items, must slowly decay in durability before disappearing in Last Advent, I cover the two as completely as possible with my gnoll pelt—and we leave them for the safety of the city.

And now, as we file in onto a wide road cobbled together of light stones and gravel heaped on and smoothed over to a near uniform texture by ages of virtual traffic, we’re received into an orange haze of smoky torchlight by the largest group of players I’ve yet seen: a veritable tunnel of aghast onlookers, variously cheering for us “Survivors!” with the maudlin spirits that follow on the heels of a surreal disaster like the situation we’re all in, or those grimaces that bespeak an incapacity for empathy due to personal distress, or tears, listless and mournful tears, tears of emotional breakdown and tears of an opening of the heart to strangers who suffer in common. Through all of this bitter confusion, my eyes work through the sea of faces and notice their homely fidelity to reality—our UMs and their plain features are apt to communicate our helplessness in this world, and regardless of the virtuality of this experience, or the as yet unearthed foundations of this inescapable game, I recognize before me the traces of maybe a thousand unique minds zapping their Kaleidoscopes with their emotions, and the whole scene strikes me as a panorama of deep and irrepressible humanity—we may endure this simulated world’s trials, whatever they be—but a single day has brought us so low!—and then I remember Xenophone and Cynythya and DimensionZ and many others yet unaccounted for are gone, these strangers who mean more to me than I can grapple with. I’ll never know who they were, what kinds of lives they led . . .

I look out for our comrades of the past battle—Rainmaker, Prim, Craw, anyone—but it seems they’ve wandered into the mass, lost in their own reveries or hurrying straight to friends or loved ones or to polish their weapons, and I start to wonder whether they entered Losthearth with us at all or lay among the deceased without my realizing it. As we trudge on beside mule-pulled wagons toting shaking lanterns and past lines of hurrying harrowed players—trudge, not because this wide road is especially steep, but because we’re emptied out of energy, utterly spent, and the price of our intense alertness in battle is wearing on our wills—we’re met with occasional prying eyes and mouths, revealed from the shadowed masses by pockets of light.

“What happened out there?” Concerned, knitted brows.

“Did anybody die?” Wonderment and terror in wide eyes.

“Excuse me—did the GM appear out there?” Intense purpose and anxiety melding in one gaze.

“Why so glum, you two? Haha.” Abandon racketing against despair in a crooked smile.

And a comment directed at Adelaide, “Hey, smile! You'll feel better.” A sinister glare masking vulnerability.

As she turns to respond, I tell the lanky guy grinning at her to “get the fuck away from us,” and I must look how I feel, because he does. Ad shoots me an irked look, and sighs, and pushes through some of the crowd to our left—drawing heys and excuse mes from other leather-clad idlers and down-and-outs—toward a shady cobblestone alley, spiraling away from the main road between rows of precariously towered buildings. Their sometimes overhanging stories are supported by wooden beams joined to their frames that dig between stones in the cobble. What appears to be a gas lantern with a bulky base hangs from a short rusty chain on the spiraled end of an iron rail; it sputters so that the alley flickers with a weak and weakening warmth with deceptive bursts of revival. I see a dark, catlike creature rush from behind us into the pall-black crawl space between one such beam and the cobblestone with a reeeeeeer! When I look back to Ad, I see she’s motionless, leaned against a taller beam with her arms crossed, her eyes twitching through her intuitive menu.

I say nothing.

I look at my right hand,

And my left hand.

I turn their palms up to face my eyes, as if catching puddles of torchlight, and I stare into the wrinkles—detailed, detailed, striated so much like my palms in real life—but there’s a discernible point, hard to identify with words, where the detail breaks down. Maybe the lack of dynamic blood beneath the skin. Maybe the light’s just too dim.

I look back at Ad, whose eyes are pools of tears that flicker with the light, still twitching.

“ . . .

Adelaide.”

Her wide hazel eyes shoot into focus on mine, and her wary frown shows all of her unease, directed inadvertently at me.

“I have class,” she says, her voice incommensurably composed, dispassionate. “Fundamentals of General Surgery at 5. Virtual Psychodynamics and Pharmacology at 9! I don’t have time for this.”

“Adelaide . . . I don’t think you’re gonna make it to either class.” All of the day’s weight bears down on me—I can feel it on my brows, my shoulders; in my knees, my soles.

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She swallows. “This much gore . . . this isn’t even allowed in medical sims.”

“Yeah . . .”

“It’s been, like, three hours since I first tried to log out. Shouldn’t they have fixed the issue by now?”

“I don’t know. I mean, yeah, they should’ve patched it . . .”

“ . . . Do you think anyone’s been able to log out?”

“I’m not sure, Ad.”

“You haven’t tried since we got back here, right? Why don’t you try again. Please?”

“I don’t think it-”

“Just try, Phil. Please.” She’s lowered herself to sit against the wooden beam, which is split vertically to some depth but seemingly stable under the massive weight of a multistory building, and she blinks out some tears as she stares tensely up at me.

[Log Out] <=

My virtual eyes barely break contact with hers as my vision disintegrates and is instantly reintegrated.

“No.”

She twirls and knots her hair with an index finger, lets it spring uncurled, and repeats.

I shouldn’t jump to conclusions. This is all going to blow over within a few hours. Right? This is the biggest launch, on the biggest media platform, maybe ever.

“Ad—I think we should get some blankets, some food, and we should try to sleep. It’s just a matter of waiting until they patch the bugs. Could be any moment.” Here I go with my consolations.

She’s unmoved, but nods slightly, slowly. “Okay, yeah. Matter of time.”

“Right,” I say. “And it looks like we’ve found ourselves a quiet enough place right here—” I gesture around the alley, noticing mud spatter and dust on the road and chips and gaps in the planks of the surrounding buildings as I do. “Ahem. So, why don’t we mark our place here . . .”

I'm unable to place a pin on my map—Kidding me?—but note where our alley winds out of the King’s Road.

“And check out the Monkey’s Paw Inn? I read they’re supposed to have free loot chests there.”

She continues nodding—her lip quivers—and she says, “They were engaged.”

“Hm?”

“Cyn and Xeno. They were engaged.” Her chest shakes with repressed sobs, and my vision blurs with tears too. “I h-hope they still are. This is all just . . .”

They’re not really dead, I want to say.

But I can’t.

So I collapse next to Ad, on another side of the beam, and we both cry for a while, facing different directions. And the hissing of the nearby lantern is joined by a hiss and a green glint from the shadows, where that catlike creature bares its glossy fangs at me.

After we’ve sat for many minutes in this gloom, a horrified clamor rises out of the mob outside the alley. Neither of us is eager to see the source, but Ad looks at me and sniffles, I shrug, and I raise myself up before offering her a hand—which she ignores, deftly springing up. Her clothes are tattered, dirty, but on the neater side of those involved in the march; mine are bloody, torn, almost indecent now that I’m without that pelt. We walk back onto the King’s Road, where the street is nearly clogged with players crouched, squat, prone, recumbent, standing, and between which shouting threads of active players rush up the road or aimlessly around.

“That’s right!” a shrill male voice yells, drawing another outburst from the crowd. “Haven’t you all heard the legend? I know you have! We used to roleplay it on private servers on Knights! Come on—Questeps! Questeps!”

A rogue, enwrapped in a ragged brown cloak soaked crimson with big splotches of blood, moves serpentinely through the crowd, looking intensely into players’ eyes to bark “Questeps!” before darting away to other listeners.

HemHawLock - lvl 2

20/110 HP

Status - Poisoned

1 dmg. 1 dmg. 1 dmg. 1 dmg.

His health trickles away as he staggers, and people avoid him as if the poison is contagious—and maybe it is. His skin is pallid and tinged slightly green so that he looks like a phantom in the torchlight, and his spectral movements don’t help to dissuade one of this.

“Ahaha! Yes, you gamers—no-lifers, larpers, noobs!”—he barks these names at individual players, who jolt away from him—“Cosplayers, streamers, let’s-players,--game masters!” He seizes a tall, bulky axe-wielder by the leather coat before being thrown to the ground, skidding a few steps down the road and parting another section of the crowd, the remnants of which reform around him with morbid curiosity. “Ahahahaha, haha!”

Adelaide hurries toward this gaggle. “Ad!” I protest, vainly.

“You silly gamers, all of you—all of us! We’ve doomed ourselves! We’ve put ourselves in check!” HemHawLock crows at the sky, squirming delightedly. The axe-wielder approaches and stares down at him.

“Can somebody cure him?” Ad shouts, glancing about the idle crowd. “Quickly! He’s poisoned!”

The mood of the rogue immediately and sharply changes to one of abject dread. His dark eyes flash desperately at Adelaide, then at the axe-wielder, at all of us as his breathing accelerates and he looks at the blood on his hands, on the knives strapped to his belt, on his mantle and clothes, and begins screaming.

“Oh, I’m poisoned!” he shouts, causing many of us to draw back. “Oh, I’ll die too—! I’ll die too-hoo! Death game! I’ll lose the death game! Questeps, questeps!”

He rolls and rocks from side to side, his eyes twitching as he assumedly attempts to log out, log out, log out, log out to no avail, until the axe-wielder himself pushes through the surrounding gaggle and places a shaky hand on the rogue’s arm, which flashes and glows green—with the result of the rogue’s health stabilizing and status returning to normal. But it doesn’t allay his panic.

“Adelaide,” I say, placing a hand on her shoulder. “Let’s go.”

And while she stares back at the squirming rogue and the horrified players around him, probably dwelling on his rant and the specific repeated phrase “death game,” I pull her gently but firmly by the hand up the King’s Road, past a line of stoic NPC guards with clattering armor and past countless panicking, comparatively naked players, toward a marker on my map near the center of the city that’s been there since log-in: The Monkey’s Paw Inn.

Wait.

No. Fucking. Way.