There had been a lot of changes to Threshold in the last two months. The ramshackle buildings and makeshift tents had been replaced by real buildings directed by the various crafters of our coalition or one of our allies.

We kept to one sector of the great portal room. While the whole place was circular and the portals were hard to tell apart, there was one enormous unopened portal three times bigger than all of the others that everyone designated as "North". From there, we went clockwise around the circle.

Our sector was located between 7 and 9 o'clock. We sometimes ventured into the 5 or 6 o'clock or the 10 and 11 o'clock regions for portals, but mostly we stayed fairly close to home.

Our coalition had grown to over a thousand people. I no longer even knew half of their names. But the center of the Misfits Guild was still Mama Grace’s restaurant. Now it was housed in a long building that looked like a barn, that stretched nearly 100 feet along one of Threshold's streets. The outside was painted bright red and each end had a quilt-like design painted over the door.

It was two stories high. The bottom floor held the enormous dining hall, a large spacious kitchen, and multiple different crafting rooms. Upstairs were bedrooms and dorms for the crafters and for anyone who was not currently in a mission or working a farming zone.

Out back was a bathhouse. We'd put that in two weeks ago. I was proud of our contribution. My team had fought a pair of dragons and brought back their steaming hearts to serve as power source for our crafters. The waste heat was used for the baths. I’d spent several glorious hours soaking in a hot tub of suds

We stepped into the restaurant and found an empty booth at the back. Rosa appeared, spotted us, and hurried off to tell her mother. They both emerged a minute later bringing drinks and platters of good homemade food.

"How did it go?" Mama Grace asked.

"Great!" Sage exclaimed. "I got a flying carpet and the cutest little cloud pet. But I couldn't take it out of the mission with me. I had to give it to the Princess of the Sun. That was alright. She married the son of the Emperor. And they're going to fix everything so the cultivation schools have to be opened to everyone, not just the elite."

Rosa laughed gently. "Sounds like you really got into this one."

"It was great! Shad didn't kill a tiger and I fought a whole army of ninjas at once."

I helped myself to some of the delicious cornbread muffins. "Is Juana here?" I asked around a mouthful.

Rosa smirked at me. "She'll be sorry to have missed you. No, she's not. She went to one of the farming levels to check on our quotas. They've been down and she wanted to make sure our people are alright. Don't worry," she said as I struggled to chew the muffins so I could get another word in. "I had a message from her that everything's fine. They just were pushing themselves too hard and needed to take better work rotations. She should be back in a few hours."

"More importantly," Grandpa interjected. "We," he gestured at me, him, and Sage, "just hit level 5 and the brothers made level 4. We’re staying ahead of the curve."

"Did you get anything good?" Rosa asked, diverted.

I held up a hand. "Hold on just a second." I had just received a priority message from Veda, our sponsor, and the guild backer. I opened it. Very important I see you at once. Come up immediately.

I sent back a message. We're talking with Grace and having a meal. How urgent?

Drop everything and come. I have to handle some things on my end. We'll talk when you get here.

I looked at Grandpa. He nodded, having seen the same message. "Sorry, we've got to run," I told Mama Grace. "Veda sent for us."

"Surely it can wait until you've eaten."

"She says it can't."

Grace looked at Sage. "You want to stay here, honey? You can eat and take a bath while your Grandpa and Shad go up to the hub."

Sage shook her head. "Nuh-uh," she said. "What if Veda has a present for me? Maybe she remembered it was my birthday." She rolled her eyes at me.

"Okay, look, I didn't forget it was your birthday," I said. "It's just the system clock rolled over while we were in that mission, and the times didn't match up at all. I already said I'm sorry, and I said happy birthday to you."

"Not good enough, Shad."

"All right, we don't have time. Veda wants us right now. Bill, Bob, you can come or stay or..."

The brothers looked at each other. "Uh, yeah, so about that," Bill said.

I got to my feet and slid out of the booth, letting Sage come out so that Grandpa could slide over and get up. "Look, we really appreciate how you've been helping us get leveled and geared up. We've learned more running missions with you than we would have any other way."

"But what he means to say," Bob interjected, "is that you're insane, Shad. We like you, we really do, man, but you're going to get us killed. We can't keep up with you three."

"And honestly," Bill said, "we don't really want to." He held up a hand. "We're okay still running missions. Just, we need partners who match us a little more."

I looked at Grandpa and Sage. "Are we really that bad?"

Sage shrugged. "They're like the fifth people to have said so, so I guess we are," she said.

I hadn't thought I was taking that many risks, not with my sister and Grandpa along, but in order to beat the missions, in order to do what needed to be done, you couldn't go halfway on things.

Grandpa slid out of the booth and nudged me. "Come on, we don't want to keep Veda waiting."

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

All the way up the elevator, I stewed over what Bob and Bill had said. "We're not crazy. We just get things done."

"It's all right," Sage said. "If they'd been more on it, we could have killed that giant tiger when we were on the flying carpet. There was at least 30 seconds when it was still in range of their guns, but they were too busy being fraidy cats. We'll find someone who has a little more drive."

I looked over her head at Grandpa. Bob and Bill weren't the first miners to leave our team because they couldn't keep up. Our first partner, Frank, had said much the same thing when he left.

We still spoke with Frank regularly. He had taken over one of our coalition's mining levels and was supervising all of the teams that worked there. He was doing brilliantly. They hadn't taken a single casualty in the month and a half he had been leading, and their production rates were through the roof.

"I'm not crazy. We're not crazy," I said again.

"Just take it easy, Shad," Grandpa advised me. He turned to Sage. "Well, then, young lady."

She stood up a little straighter. "Yes?"

"What is it you'd like for your birthday?"

That brought me back to reality in a way Bill and Bob hadn't. It was Sage's birthday. We had been involved in this crazy scheme for almost four months now. We had been kidnapped from our home on the Arizona Strip, brought to an alien construct beneath the surface of Ganymede, and thrown into one insane simulation after another. Our lives at risk almost every day as we competed to earn soul coins and other resources that would enable us to, what, keep playing this stupid game?

Back when this had all started, the alien artificial intelligence that we all called the system had said there would be a chance for some of us humans to claim ownership of the reality engine behind all of this. Veda, our sponsor, had told us there was a three-phase process of exploiting the reality engine, and that we were only in phase one. She also said that the locals, meaning us, never made it to phase three.

This was no place for a twelve year old, girl risking her life in one ridiculous scenario after another. On the other hand, I had to admit the past four months had been some of the best of my whole life. Maybe that meant I was screwed up.

The thing was, at least I felt like I could protect Sage, could protect myself. I didn't wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat anymore hearing a baby cry and knowing there was nothing I could do about it. I got to spend all day with my sister and my Grandpa.

I'd always had a wild streak. I used to indulge it riding a dirt bike I'd managed to buy when I was 14 and then keep running with bailing wire and a lot of elbow grease. I'd ride that thing up the side of bluffs on paths a goat wouldn't take. I'd race along the edge knowing that one wrong turn would mean plummeting dozens if not hundreds of feet straight down. Helmet? Nobody on the strip wore a helmet. Those were for town people who came out on weekends to drive their fancy side by sides. Not us local kids.

My abuela used to scold me, but even she had given up eventually. She had died shortly before I went into the army. I wished she could have been here with us and been rehabilitated like Grandpa, but on the other hand I didn't think she'd have made the transition as easily as Grandpa and Sage had.

Abuela had been not-quite a pacifist. Her Catholic beliefs in just war doctrine meant she didn't approve of most of the military actions of the last 50 years or so. She had tried to dissuade me from enlisting, but Grandpa had put his foot down, one of the few times I'd ever seen him outright contradict my Abuela. They had been married for probably 40 years at that point, and I still remember how shocked she looked when he told her that it was none of her business and I was going to do what I was going to do.

I shook myself out of my reverie as we made the now familiar journey up from Threshold to The Hub. Sage kept her nose pressed against the invisible force field almost the whole time. I had to admit, the view didn't get old. Jupiter hung below us, round and ruddy, a hundred times bigger than any full moon I'd ever seen. It was almost worth everything just to see that up close.

"What do you think Veda wants?" I asked Grandpa, trying to get my mind off other things.

"No way to know. Hopefully she hasn't sold us to some other conglomerate."

"Surely not."

"They could have made her an offer too good to refuse," Grandpa said. "We'll wait and see. Might as well sit back and relax." From his inventory, he pulled out a box of cold fried chicken that Mama Grace had pressed into his hands as we left. He chewed appreciatively, offering me a piece. I took one of the drumsticks. "We're going to have to interview again," he said. "Not looking forward to that."

"Who in the Coalition isn't already teamed up?"

"There's a couple pairs, but I'm not sure any of them match our strengths and weaknesses."

"Neither did Bill and Bob," I pointed out. "We could really use someone who's got better heals than just Sage's Raise Your Spirits. And more area damage would be nice, unless Sage can whip me up a bunch more grenades."

"I told you, just get me the mats," Sage said, her attention still focused on Jupiter. "Besides, what's wrong with my heals? I've kept you alive so far, haven't I?"

"Sure," Grandpa said. "But more would always be better. Right now we have to plan our fights out pretty well. And one mistake could be deadly."

"Shad hasn't even come close to dying in six weeks now," Sage said. "We're good, Grandpa. We're really good."

"Well, we'll see what Veda has to say."

We docked at the hub and followed a glowing ball of light to the quarters Veda had rented us. They always looked about the same. I'd heard from other mission runner teams that their sponsors went all out on fancy suites with all sorts of luxuries, like chairs that massaged your back while you sat on them. Veda bought us the budget model.

I wasn't complaining. There was plenty of room for us to kick back for a day or so, relax, see the medical professionals of the Hub to make sure whatever we were doing in the reality engine hadn't caused some sort of soul damage. I really wasn't clear what they were talking about there, and I wasn't sure I wanted to ask too many questions.

The last couple of times there had even been packages of Earth entertainment we could watch, brought in fresh from home. I was pretty sure the movies and shows had been censored. There were no news shows available, and the dramas offered were conspicuously lacking in any reference to current events, like, say, 10 million humans being abducted by aliens.

I knew Earth governments understood some of what was going on. We had received one communication from the Joint Chiefs of Staff months ago, but I didn't know what they were telling the rest of the world. Had the Reality Engine Exploitation Committee announced what they were doing, or were they only talking with the heads of state?

Someone would have had to come up with an explanation for why people had just vanished, especially since we had all taken a chunk of Earth with us. In our case, it had been about a hundred-foot radius circle chopped out of Grandpa's ranch and the nearest couple of vehicles and outbuildings. Mama Grace had brought along a big chunk of her old restaurant. If someone had been taken from the middle of a busy city, that could have made a noticeable dent.

Veda wasn't here yet, which wasn't a surprise. She almost never met us in person. Usually her projected presence was already waiting. We filled up at the buffet and took a seat.

Sage started playing a Spider-Man cartoon movie that had been included in the latest media package. "Why don't you watch something educational?" Grandpa suggested. "You've missed four months of school. You might try to catch up a little on your learning."

Sage rolled her eyes. "There's nothing they've got to teach in school that I'm going to find useful," she said. "What, I'm going to study Earth history? Really? Or algebra? I think we're a little past algebra, Grandpa. Besides, it's my birthday. I get to do what I want."

Veda appeared in the middle of the room. She was wearing a yellow sarong-like outfit today, with her hair piled up in two conical spikes on her head. She was an objectively pretty woman, maybe even beautiful, and looked fairly human. But somehow I could tell she was an alien. I would have said it was pheromones, except she wasn't really here, so I couldn't be smelling any. Could I? Maybe their projections included smells. I had never noticed one way or the other.

"Thank you for coming," she said. "I'm sorry to have called you up so abruptly. I know you just finished your last mission, but I wanted us to be able to strategize in person. Phase two opens in three days."