Duckling and I fast-traveled back to Quackitude, where I entered Shad's mansion and raided its stores. He'd done a lot better for himself than I had. I collected everything, sorting it into "keep" and "sell." Then we visited every vendor in town. This game had that annoying setup where vendor gold was capped and you could only sell so much to each vendor. Meanwhile, every time we visited, I looked at their inventories. If I liked what I saw, I had Duckling sneak up behind them and rob them blind. By the time I was done offloading Shad's inheritance, I had a war chest and a bunch of supplies.

Now it was time for a grind. This is the part where you should cue the montage music. I found the nearest enchanting station and started leveling up my enhanced smithing enchantment. Once I'd gotten that as high as I could, I headed for a blacksmith where I crafted every kind of dagger imaginable. I ground that skill from 10 all the way up to 100. That let me put points into “Feel the Tip," a perk which would make my daggers 50% stabbier.

Seriously, that was the stat. Stabbiness. Daggers had raw damage, but stabbiness was a multiplier on that. Which was going to make this all work out.

Then it was back to the enchanting table to learn the new enchantments I'd picked up back in White Plume with the Drake’s reward money.

I could already load my gear with increased sneak and backstab damage enchantments. But that wasn't going to be good enough. I would craft the stabbiest, most powerful dagger ever, thanks to Shad's stacks of Dragonsteel bars, and enchant it with a life drinker spell.

I was looking at 276 points of damage from a backstab attack launched from sneak, and the new enchant should let me double that. The Turduckens I had been fighting all had hundreds of hit points. I had to guess the final boss would be the same. But I needed to find out who, or what, he was, so before I finished off my scheme, it was time to read the lore.

I headed back to the Duck Brotherhood. They were all in a kerfuffle, waddling around, quacking their heads off, talking about the outsider who had invaded their lair. When Duckling and I entered, they barely noticed.

I headed for Greeter Duck. I caught hold of him, putting one of my hands on each of his feathery shoulders and forced him to look at me. "Hey, hey, listen."

He stiffened, squawked, then looked me in the eye, his beady little duck eyes full of fear.

"I need to talk to whoever's really in charge."

"You led the monster to us," Greeter Duck said. "You betrayed the Brotherhood."

I shook my head. "Nope. I think I've done you a greater service than you all appreciate. Now, I need to talk to your leader, whoever he or she is."

Greeter Duck quacked, and the others surrounded me. "Let me talk to whoever's in charge here," I said. I sensed a ripple of quacking around the room. Then finally Girl Duck said, "Fine. If he wants to speak with the Queen, so be it."

Girl Duck led me to a platform in the middle of the room. She stood in its center, and I joined her. The whole thing rotated with the sound of grinding stone before lowering. We disappeared deep beneath the Duck Brotherhood's sanctuary.

The stone slid smoothly downward into darkness. It settled into place with a splash. A moment later, pale light sprang up around us. The stone was now an island surrounded by water. A little ways off floated an enormous nest. The nest was made of a few logs and lined with thousands of tiny feathers. Well, they looked tiny from here, but I was guessing they were from the human-sized ducks I'd been seeing everywhere else. It looked big enough for a turducken, if nothing else.

A head poked out over the top of the nest, a huge female duck with a crown. She looked at me. "This is the outsider who so troubled you?”

Girl Duck bowed, sweeping her wings back. "No, your majesty. This is the first outsider, the one who found a way to join our Brotherhood. The second intruder is gone.”

“He failed out of the zone in order to get some things done topside," I said, and noted how the Queen Duck's eyes narrowed. "You know exactly what I'm talking about, don't you? You people all know exactly what this is."

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"We are the last vestiges of the true rulers of Duckrim," the Queen said. I could hear a note of panic in her quack. "We will remove the Imperial trespassers from our land and..."

I held up a hand. "It's a simulation. Your land is far from here, isn't it? You were taken."

Her eyes flashed. "What do you know of it? You're one of the murderers, the hairless ones who came and ripped our nestworld from us, took us from our kin."

"I'm actually not," I said. "I don't know how much Shad told you, but the same thing happened to us, more recently than you, I think. Bunch of alien jerks showed up and tried to kidnap a lot of humans and force them into slavery. We managed to fight them off. Our own reality engine is free, and our homeworld is safe."

"And so now you come to ours to help them take what little we have left?"

I held up a hand. "Shad says he's working on a plan to help you out, and I believe him. But I need something from you."

"Why would we trust you?"

"Because I'm the first one who's paid enough attention to realize you're here, but I won't be the last," I said. "You can bet people will be scrutinizing the records of my attempt. Even if I was trying to hide you, I couldn't. Our sponsor owns the playbacks, and they'll see it. This is your one chance. Trust me, throw in with us, and let's try something else."

I couldn't help adding, "How long have you been playing this game, getting the exploiters to trap themselves here until they run out of time?"

"I've lost count," the Queen said, sounding suddenly tired. "It's hard to know in this place."

I felt sorry for her. "Then it's time to take a risk. Let’s try to get your people out of here."

"What do you want from me?" She sounded sad and tired. I felt sorry for her. I’m no bleeding heart, but if there was a way to help these duckfolk, I wanted to find it.

"You're the ones behind the turducken attacks. If I'm right, you've been faking the entire so-called main quest line, as well as keeping the Civil War going."

"Yes," the Queen admitted. "If the players don't get involved in the Civil War, then eventually, the main line, they'll go up against the Ostriswan.”

I blinked. "The what?" I held up my hand. "No, wait. Let me guess. Like one of your turduckens, except it's an ostrich and a swan."

"And a duck," the Queen said softly. "That is the real reason I am willing to speak with you. The turducken contain the souls of my people. Every time they die and their souls are taken, it is agony to our brave volunteers. They return to us at the end of a cycle, but only after weeks or months trapped inside the essence of an alien. We have already lost many to madness. I can't keep asking them to do it."

"Wait, so the turducken are powered by...your people’s souls? And when the turducken die their souls get trapped?”

"When you leave this engine, they can respawn. But it is a hellish, nightmarish existence until then."

I felt nauseous. I had a soul of one of the Duck Brotherhood inside me right now, and I was supposed to use it to power some stupid game-changing ability I hadn’t even bothered to look at. "That's a pretty gruesome fate."

"Indeed," the Duck Queen said. The queen duck slumped in her nest, all the spirit gone out of her. “What do you want from us?"

"You're protecting something. I think you're protecting the last fragment of your reality engine. I need to find him and persuade him to give up the fight."

"No.” She shook her head, her wide bill quivering with dismay. "No. He protects us and we protect him."

“I know, but it's turned into a trap," I said. "Galactic records say this exploit started about 600 of your world's years ago."

“Six hundred,” the queen whispered. “So long. What of the others in our world?"

"I don't know," I said. "It's time you came out."

The duck queen raised her wings. She flapped twice, powerful wind beating down against me and Girl Duck. I raised a hand to protect myself as the queen flapped up to the edge of her nest and peered down at me. She was an enormous creature, larger than any of the turduckens in the high mountains.

“Our fragment is not entirely stable anymore. It is protected by the great Ostriswan, the one we bring in to take out particularly dangerous players. The Ostriswan has never been defeated. He is powered by my mate's soul," she quacked softly. "I have not spoken to him in hundreds of years. From how the ducks condemned to the turducken respawn, I fear he may be beyond madness at this point."

“Then you must listen to me and end this. It’s time to stop hiding and face the world. You may have been safe here, but your time is running out. This place is destroying your people.”

“What more can we do? Where can we go?”

“Trust my people. Let us help you.”

For a long moment she considered my words with her head bowed as if under the weight of the centuries. Finally she looked up. “I will let you talk to the king. If you can convince him then…” She trailed off and did not complete the sentence.

“So… Ostriswan. In the mountains. Can you give me a location?"

She raised her wings and flapped again. A single enormous feather detached itself and drifted toward me. It landed, and I seized it like a sword. The feather dissolved in my hands. I checked my mini-map. A new marker had appeared.

"Thank you,” I said. “I'll go and have a word with your fragment. You tell your people it's time to come out of hiding."

The queen duck quacked sadly.

“Oh, and I need one more thing from you lot. An enchanting recipe. Something special.”

The queen tilted her head to one side. “Go ahead….”

I told her what I wanted. “Done,” she said. “Our guild vendor will sell it to you when you return upstairs.”

"I'm ready to leave," I told Girl Duck, and the stone platform slowly ascended upward.