Ad soon shakes my grip from her wrist, but gently, as if signaling a quiet surrender to my guidance. I turn back to see her eyes are focused mostly on the road, tracing its rocky patterns with subtle shifts of the pupils between blinks, while her hair, stringy with virtual sweat and dark in the dim light of the street, is tossed to screen her eyes and shaken aside again with every step.

“Adelaide,” I say, trying to wrest her attention from the depths of contemplation, “if you open your map, in your IM, you’ll see where we’re going. Right now we’re in a district called the Alleys, it says, and we’re moving radially toward the Heart.”

She’s silent behind me for a moment before saying, “I’d bet most of the players are gathered there. Most of the ones moving toward the gates and into the Alleys had carts or carriages, right?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Those were NPCs, probably turning in for the night.”

Within the spasmodic flow of traffic, a half-hunched middle-aged man with a red goatee, streaked with shiny coppery hairs by the light of a handheld lamp, carries a huge backpack as he walks in our direction. Pointed ears jut out to support a dark woolen cap. A nameplate, slightly different from that of a player, reads

sergio strummond - lvl 1 trader,

and bobbles past us as he continues on, breathing heavily and wrinkling his face with effort while clenching a strap of his pack with his free hand. Its weight tips it periodically off of his back, and he shrugs his shoulders every few steps to reverse this.

Adelaide hurries from my side to meet the man. She plants herself in his path, training her coolest gaze on his simulated eyes.

“Hey, you,” she says, and more dryly, “sir?”

“Ad, I’m not sure-”

“crshrrkrrhrktktthskdth,” the man says, his glazed, squinted eyes widening to an icy glare

“I said, excuse me!” Ad says, determinedly blocking the trader from maneuvering around her.

“crskhfskfhgahhwhhaaAT? Whatcha want, ‘venturing shrimp? Shop’s stopped.” The haunting garble emanating from his scowl quickly forms into intelligible words.

“I need you to tell me what’s going on with Last Advent—right now. Call an administrator. I need to get to class, and if this joke goes on another second, I’ll be late—and I’ll review-bomb this stupid game all over social media.” NPCs do typically act as eyes and ears for admins and devs, but . . .

The trader stares blankly before stomping in place and rejoining, “‘Stadtvent?’ ‘Minister?’ I’ll’ve’ad enough o’ your jokes, pernces.” He heaves his body forward, shaking the towering sack on his back so that a glossy round ornament falls onto the road, ticks instantly down to 0/2 durability and shatters—at which he seems to curse, and continues on past Adelaide.

“Hey, wait! I said, call an administrator!” Ad shouts, but I return to her side to stop her from pursuing.

“I don’t think he’ll be much of a help,” I say, pointing back up the road. “Most of these NPCs are germs.”

“Germs?”

“Mostly a thing in games, I guess, since they usually need droves of AIs that won’t hog server resources trying to sound human.” I glance at a family of nondescript NPCs in ragged clothing. “They don’t come alive until you initiate a conversation, and even then they may not understand your commands.”

“Or they may be hard-coded to resist . . . Will he even remember me?” She turns to see the trader’s shrinking lamplight fade as he follows the road around a block of buildings.

“Maybe—maybe not. Mimmisoft promised this game would have immersive NPCs, but the intricacies of the system have been kept under wraps—they said, ‘to keep them secure from the competition.’ But I attended a beta tester’s Q&A, and he was saying the germs here can start to sound like AGIs if you talk to them enough.”

“Huh,” she says, seemingly bemused at my gamer knowledge—as am I right now. “Well, I don’t think we’re talking to him again. So the AGIs?”

Most media employ artificially intelligent avatars that can’t technically be said to have reached the capabilities of Artificial General Intelligence—servers couldn’t handle hundreds of thousands of users simultaneously interacting with state-of-the-art AI—but are commonly called AGI since they’re functionally identical to humans in most contexts. Unlike germs, these have active, distinctive personalities that are fully developed from the jump, and they’re often used as direct liaisons to admins and devs.

Another stretch of road swamped with players lies ahead of us. It seems to empty into a broad street perpendicular to this King’s Road.

I reply, “. . . are probably loaded into NPC notables—trademasters, faction leaders—anyone who looks-”

When we approach the crossing and start to push through the crowd, our conversation is curtailed by peals of vicious laughter, aggressive shouts, cheers and protests, and a solitary halting voice like that of an illegitimate ruler attempting to quell the anger of an entire kingdom. And indeed, tossed wildly back and forth within a pit in a mob of players waving torches, a woman in silvery armor holds her longsword as an impotent warning against her aggressors

Lady D’Augustine - lvl 10 knight

and stands before the steps of a soaring gothic cathedral, the delicate windows of which twinkle with the flames of a hundred lamps and torches.

“Get the devs in here! Stupid trash!” “Admin, admin!!”

“Do we have to spell it out?”

“Tell us what’s going on!” “Drag her outside the city!”

“How do we log out!?”

“Get Mimmisoft support!”

“Can we kill her!?”

The knight dissembles a tone of mastered agony as these players shove her. “Desist, adventurers, desist! I do not understand your exhortations—but let our discourse be peaceable, and we shall-”

Before her vain address to the crowd is finished, a thrown gauntlet clatters against her helmet and her visor falls over her exposed face. Next, a burly player tackles her to the ground by her legs, and the crowd ignites into cheers.

Adelaide’s illuminated face has an expression of disturbed curiosity, and I see her eyes swerve toward a train of city guards filing into the crossing from the left on the perpendicular road. One guard near the front is winding a lever on some contraption to which a brazen horn is attached, which sounds a wavering, foreboding siren, and the rest start to rush toward the dogpile around the knight and pry players off. As other players attempt to block the guards or push them back, they are wrestled aside, thrown away with brutal force if without damage, and most of the mob streams away gasping, screaming, and jeering. We have no choice but to follow the flush of virtual bodies, and this time Ad grabs my wrist and pulls me rightward down this new road, Angels’ Angle, into a dead zone, where we can collect ourselves and reorient toward our destination. We do so wordlessly, having grown somewhat desensitized to all of this noise.

Stony gothic buildings, taller than any of those stacks in the Alleys, tower around us—fittingly for this district, Cathedral Circle—and I notice a gargoyle graven into the frontage of a corner building before us. Its figure, half-submerged in the stone edifice, is mangled as if writhing in pain under the stone sword fused into its breast. A Sepulchral Owl, lvl 3, stares down from its perch on the sword’s pommel, before flapping away with a flicker of the near lamplight that had illuminated it.

However compassed by shadows, we move on, with Ad having usurped the lead. The streets of Cathedral Circle, bounded by these fortified stone buildings, some ornately carved, some built of ancient bricks, are desolate compared to the claustrophobic traffic of the Alleys; and apart from the occasional scurrying player who jolts wide-eyed away from us, and the glimmer of leaves in a garden, and the twinkle of a mossy old fountain, there’s a feeling of our being the last surviving lifeforms in the city. Pinprick stars stipple the black sky visible between buildings. But we’re almost there . . .

Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

“Phil,” Ad says, slowing as we approach a corner. She flicks through her inventory and removes a roughspun chocolate-colored cloak, which she tosses to me while faced forward. “It’s getting cold, right? And you’re in rags.”

“Oh,” I say. “Thanks, Ad.”

Friar’s Cloak - Common (50/50)

A simple cloak. Warm, roomy—itchy.

(Equip)<= (Place) (Info)

Survivor’s Tunic (21/100) unequipped.

Friar’s Cloak (50/50) equipped.

Shwff.

We walk on. A portion of the cloak sweeps along the road behind my feet, but it is cozy—I hadn’t noticed how cold I was.

“I’m sorry—if I’ve been overbearing,” she says suddenly.

“Oh. I mean, not really.” I mean, she has, but no need for me to press that.

“I’ve been thinking . . . games like this have been hacked before, right?”

“Well, never like this . . . but, to your point, Rarify’s band sim Rockout was hacked on launch last year, and a lot of players’ UMs and neurosigs were exposed.”

“Yes, that’s the one I was thinking of. I read some people were stuck onstage with guitars glued to their hands—for over an hour while the server was quarantined,” she says, chuckling slightly before returning to gloominess. “At least we can run around like this.”

But we’ve been here for many hours. “Uh huh, plenty of room to run—and jump!” I spring forward into Ad’s path and start sprinting around the street and leaping into the air with exaggerated grunts like those of a tennis player, and after the fourth of these jumps my feet are caught in my cloak and I trip and plummet face-first into the ground for the third or fourth time today, taking 2 dmg and lying there motionless.

“Pfftaahahaha,” Ad’s composure breaks into laughter. She continues to chuckle at me for a moment before I raise an arm by which she pulls me onto my feet. When my eyes meet hers, she smiles sweetly at me, maybe for the first time since she moved out, and pulls me into a hug. “It is good to see you,” she says.

“Yeah. You too.” This sincerity is uncomfortably uncharacteristic of us, or seems inappropriate to the moment, so I continue, “Mom and Dad were hounding me to ask you all about how school’s going. I’m supposed to walk over to their place tonight and repeat everything you tell me. Major pain.”

She grins sardonically. “So you’re their spy. Don’t tell them about all of the drugs I’ve been doing, okay?” And her smile softens back to a warmer, childlike one. “Mom’s making carbonara?”

“‘Course. That was my condition,” I smile back. “And Dad’s promised to share some of their stash of ice cream.”

“That freezer is ridiculous,” she laughs. “I think there are ice pops still nestled in the back from the summer when I broke my arm.”

“Freezer-burnt to the core. I wouldn’t turn one down right now, though—even in this cold.”

If our virtual stomachs could growl, they’d be growling in unison. A dry wind whips through the street and whistles and moans into alleys, rattles latches on doors, rustles the shutters on the few old houses in the district.

I lead us onward, and continue, “I think you’re right, though; a huge release like this is a hacker’s dream, and Mimmisoft probably quarantined the server to keep our data from getting stolen and find the culprits. We just need to wait out the storm.” But during the Rockout hack, players were immediately informed of the quarantine by administrators. And server chat

~ Chat/server ~

Server: Welcome to the world of Last Advent!

Celebrate the Launch Week event in Losthearth Square

and collect a free starter loot chest!

Free drinks are available at the Monkey’s Paw Inn for

the duration of the event.

Happy adventuring! Hoo hoo hoo —

:grinning_mizaru:

hasn’t changed . . .

I try to type a message into the server chat, but when I click “Enter,” I’m met with a message in red: “ERROR: PERMISSION DENIED.”

[Inbox] No new messages.

And my Mimmisoft system menu yields nothing new. It’s as if a firewall’s been raised around us.

“Yeah, and we can wait it out in this inn, and hopefully over a nice warm meal,” Ad says.

I mask my unease and grin back at her, and we approach a corner around which bright torchlight spills and players’ voices echo, less hostile than we last encountered, but with tones of fatigued protest. The wide, flat area we turn into is regularly lit with streetlights and low, wide sconces of fire. Another restive crowd has agglomerated around a building directly to our left—its cobblestone foundation and rough wood walls, covered in chipped olive green paint, rise three stories up, with a successive roof and front-facing railed balcony on each before a final dutch roof at the top. The shingles are coal-black, and below the middle balcony, a metal sign hangs from two small black chains. The symbol on it is unmistakably a monkey’s paw.

“Awwsh,” a player in a pristine leather starter outfit slurs, “yer all bots. Bots, bots! Who’s not a bot?” He shoves through the crowd at the entrance, followed by a few friends in more sober states.

“Gavin,” one says, “let’s go up to the room.” They shrink from following the drunkard out of the crowd when they see the loose cordon of stoic guards watching him.

“Room! Lesh go outta the fields!” he barks. “Monster hunting!” He punches a guard in the side of the helmet. “Bot hunting!”

The guard immediately grabs his wrist, twists it around while the drunkard whines and ragdolls against the grip, and throws him to the ground. Players move away or form up against the guards, raising agitated and inebriated shouts, and the drunkard’s friends drag him quickly away by the arms and pull him up into the inn.

“crhhsklkue’re here to keep the peace,” the guard says. “Townsfolk are sleeping, adventurers. Quit your carousing and go home.”

“We can’t go home!” shouts back an adventurer, drawing a bunch of angry yeahs from the crowd. “Tell us how to log out!”

The guards are ominously staid. “Plenty of inns for you debaucherous lot,” the speaker among them says.

“The loot chests are for launch week,” I say, cupping my mouth to Ad’s ear amid the noise, “so let’s find another inn for tonight.”

“Sure,” she says absentmindedly.

We circumvent the crowd to continue down the narrow street that ends at The Monkey’s Paw, where it opens into the flat town square, until we find a quieter inn cramped between two deserted townhouses. Its dark, sloping roof overhangs a porch where players or NPCs sit candlelit. A placard next to the oaken door reads, The Dragoness.

When we start to ascend the rickety stairs to the porchside entrance, a player rocking slowly in a chair lifts his tired virtual eyelids and says, “Don’t bother. Place is fully booked.”

We halt midway up. “Know a place that might have rooms?” Ad asks.

The player brushes a lock of hair from his face and scratches his head. “‘Bout an hour ago we heard Caulder’s Inn down the street had some rooms. Not sure it still does.” His friends seem to be sleeping in chairs beside him.

“Thanks,” I say, waving, and we continue down the street.

—

“tzzorry, place’s packed. Care for a drink? Or try Howard’s.”

—

“ghfhull through tomorro’. ‘Pologies.”

—

“gghaah, yes, yes, dears, you’re in luck! We have just one room left.”

“Great!” Ad says, exasperated. “We’ll take it.”

“Of course, of course,” mara belfry replies, tapping her wrinkled fingers on the counter on which she leans with the same arm. “That’ll be thirty gold for the night, deary dear.”

“Thirty?” we say in unison.

The half-lidded gaze of the receptionist sours into a three-quarters-lidded stare. She pulls her parched lips into a kind of grin through which she slowly exhales. “‘s late, late, and other ‘venturers would love the room, we’re sure.” Her gaze flicks over to a bodyguard leaned in the shade of an adjoining hallway.

“I only have seven,” Ad whispers to me.

( Inventory ) <=

6g

“Six,” I whisper.

“Ten gold,” Ad offers the receptionist, “and we’ll take the room now. Who knows if you’ll get any other customers?”

The bell attached to the front door of Belfry’s Nest chimes, and another couple of harried players enters.

“No loit’rin’, paupers,” Mara says, beckoning the bodyguard toward us with a lazy pointer finger. I push past the newcomers with Ad following close behind, and when we emerge onto the street, I point to a tavern directly across that radiates the murmurs of a tired bunch of rowdies.

“I think it’s time for your first drink,” I say to Ad.