As we walked in silence, the mountain rising up before us, I tried to make sense of all my feelings.

I’d been here for almost a day and a half, now—and I’d had no time at all in which to really stop and think. Even this hardly counted—how much time did we have before it was back to the grind?

I wanted time, a rest that wasn’t interrupted by an attack at who-knew what hour in the morning. I wanted Haroshi dead so that Cuby and I could safely take the dungeon without worrying about falling behind, so that we could make camp and spend a few extra hours just talking, processing.

And what about Cuby?

I liked playing video games with her, and also she was a mass murderer. Maybe this was some kind of stockholm syndrome—that I couldn’t help but form an attachment with the nearest nicest person in conditions as isolating and desperate as these. After all, it bothered me that Cuby had killed those people.

But maybe it didn’t bother me nearly enough.

And I could rationalize: Cuby was not a human being, and had been even less of one before she’d come here. Her biology, from the sounds of it, didn’t cry out in anguish at the cold-blooded murder of other beings—and so she’d been shapen and used for just that purpose by a ruling elite that had taken advantage of the fact. Did it make sense to hold her to any standard of morality that I knew?

I sighed to myself, running a hand across my face and wishing, not for the first time, that I were smarter, knew more, knew better. Someone else could have done a much better job of all of this—talking to aliens and playing the game.

But there was only me.

I couldn’t make sense of my feelings. I wanted to go home, right? It wasn’t that I hated video games, it was that I didn’t want to lose everything in my life to play one. Maybe I was just a copy, and my original self was still moping about my—his—apartment: in that case, at least my parents wouldn’t be bereaved.

But I would be. Bereaved of everything. I was never going to listen to my mother remark with amazement at how well the tomatoes were doing, even though they grow like that every year, mom. I was never going to cringe inwardly as my dad told a joke whose punchline was essentially that it wasn’t funny. And there would never be another night with my friends from my old job or the boys from my old college—just shooting the shit, talking about movies, people, politics, or telling jokes.

These completely trivial things that, taken together, made up everything important in life.

Gone.

And that was my life, altogether: gone.

But that wasn’t the problem.

Oh, it was a problem—a problem as big as I had ever had, a problem the size of my entire life because it was my entire life.

And yet the more I thought about it, the more I knew what I wanted to learn in the dungeon, now; I could face how I really felt.

I wanted to meet my helpful hinter and have them tell me that I was never, ever going home. That Earth and humanity had risen and fallen, that I was a curious artifact of a bygone age. That the life which to me had felt like it was only two days ago had been gone for millenia or more, and that I was only a copy.

And I knew exactly why I wanted—no, needed that to happen, and it wasn’t because they were what I desired—far from it.

It was because of the alternative.

They are going to find Earth.

“But let it be an Earth that I don’t care about,” I whispered. “Let my Earth be far out of reach of these people. They’re not all evil, but they are all people… and that’s why I’m so afraid of them.”

That was what I wanted more than my entire life—I wanted to know that Earth, my Earth, was out of reach of the Hierarchy no matter what I did. I didn’t want anything so large to depend on me.

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Then I said, quietly, to myself: “So do all who live to see such times. But it is not for them to decide.”

“Hm?” Cuby asked. We were walking a little apart, and I wasn’t sure if she’d heard what I said, or if she’d just noticed me talking.

There was something fitting and even a little funny about thinking back to Gandalf’s words, here, in a place that was so inexplicably influenced by Tolkien and the genre that had succeeded him. In my mind, this situation called for a real wizard.

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“Alatar,” Cuby said quietly. “Are you all right?”

I looked over at her. She was staring at me with wide eyes, her face seeming tired and a little hurt.

“Yeah,” I said. “Are you?”

“Are you sure you’re all right?” she asked, ignoring me.

I shrugged, unsure of what to say. Of course I wasn’t really all right—who would be? But I was holding up fine, even enjoying myself when I wasn’t thinking about everything at once. “It’s strange,” I said at last. “I almost feel guilty because I don’t feel as bad I should. I mean, I never was very emotional, but… I can think of my parents, now and it makes me sad… but it doesn’t break me. And I guess I feel that it should, somehow.”

I opened my character sheet and looked at my stats. “I’m almost starting to wonder if Spirit and Focus aren’t making me more resilient to the horrors of combat in the same way that my Strength and Agility make me stronger and faster.”

Even this explanation, comfortable as it was, seemed to have holes in it. If my mental stats really did affect my mental state, wouldn’t I have noticed immediately when I’d started out? It seemed unlikely to me that I’d had what the Colosseum considered 5 Focus and Spirit back on Earth.

“I don’t think so,” said Cuby. “I haven’t leveled either, and my mental state has been all over the place since I got here.”

I almost laughed. Cuby had the steadiest emotions of anyone I knew. It had taken almost dying to put her in a bad mood, and apart from that, she was always happy. But then from what I gathered, this was all very unusual for her.

“Say, Alatar?” she said, sounding hesitant.

“Yeah?”

“Do you think I’m a monster?”

Oh.

“Uh… no, Cuby. But….” I gesticulated, painfully aware of how much my opinion, as a human, must mean to her. How was I supposed to explain this to her? I owed her more than just a lie. “In my world, a human who did what you did—killed people for political gain—would definitely be seen as a monster. It’s not that nobody does it—we definitely have our share of evil people. But we react very badly to things like murder.”

“I could give you math,” said Cuby. “All the numbers you could need to see that the prosperity we were building was worth it.” She looked down. “I hate to be so simplistic… I don’t want to make it seem like a phrenodine is just their biology… but I was cultivating, making room to grow something better. We couldn’t take any chances with the saboteurs, they had to….” But she trailed off. It had almost sounded like she was trying to convince herself, and I felt for her—I’d had my share of trouble realizing that I’d made a mistake before in my life. The big ones are never easy.

And this? This seemed like a big one.

“This is a very old argument where I’m from,” I said. “What ends justify what means. I don’t have an answer for you, Cuby, but I barely know anything about the Hierarchy—I’m not a good person to ask.”

“But you’re human, and you’re my friend,” she said, sounding agitated. “Who else could matter more?”

I sighed. “I’m not the kind of human who made the Hierarchy,” I said. “I’m the kind of human who is very confused. I don’t think you’re a monster, all right? But I don’t want you to put any stock in my opinion just because I’m human.”

“I suppose….” she said.

“Believe me Cuby, I’m not in a position to tell you how to act or be,” I said. “Well, except that you shouldn’t kill innocents for experience. But this… all of this is insane to me. The fact that the Colosseum was apparently built by humans is insane to me.”

I hesitated, unsure if I should tell her what I wanted to, then said: “A lot of this game feels very similar to the games of my world, but that makes no sense in just about every way I can think of.”

“What do you mean?”

“First of all,” I began. “The idea that you would use perfect virtual reality to emulate a 21st century MMO or TTRPG is kind of strange to me.”

“Are those… acronyms? That came through very strange in translation.”

“Sorry. massively multiplayer or table-top role playing games—games that my people play sometimes. It’s just… I would expect future humans to develop their own form of games as the new technology develops, games that fit the Colosseum itself.”

Cuby blinked. “But this does fit the Colosseum. I don’t understand.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s hard to explain what I’m trying to say. But the fact that this gets used for the game and nothing else is also very strange.”

“Nope!” Cuby said. “Just the Colosseum!”

Once again, I was stumped at how this place had come to be. It wasn’t just that it was filled the dwarves and elves that one wouldn’t expect coming from a culture that had developed independent of Earth, it was that it wasn’t being used for anything but this.

I mean, they had a holodeck. The technology could be used to do anything—any setting, any scenario they could dream of, they could create. One catgirl, two catgirls, ten catgirls—the possibilities were quite literally endless, literally any reality that could be conceived of.

“You have games like this in your world—but not exactly like this?” Cuby asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Is that why you’re good at this?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Maybe. If I am good at this.”

“But also because you’re human.”

“Probably,” I admitted. “I can’t imagine things are easier for the mind of a species that the game was never designed for.”

“I hadn’t thought about that,” said Cuby. “Also,” she jerked her head toward the mountain before us. “We should probably pick our skills. You get access to new ones at level 10.”

“Right,” I said, bringing up my menus. I sighed. “Can’t talk too long. Gotta keep playing.”