“Reeve,” a gentle voice said.

Reeve jerked her head in the direction of the voice as a thin woman with gracefully pointed ears, pale skin, and silver hair falling below her chest stepped silently from an alcove to her right. She wore a light cloak cut in the style of a wood scout. But the cloak was not the usual dappled brown and green, instead being made of a deep black material that reflected so little light Reeve found it hard to see the wrinkles, seams, or pockets she was sure lay somewhere amidst the apparent black hole that was the garment. The elf’s silver hair was stunning against the black backdrop the material provided. The smile she gave Reeve was so caring as to appear almost sad. She seemed familiar, but Reeve couldn’t place her.

“That’s my real name, not my gamer tag,” Reeve said, tense. “How do you know it?”

The woman stopped her approach and looked at Reeve with a curious expression. After a moment, she said, “There are few in this world who do not know of you by one of your many names. I’d go so far as to say, Reavyr, that you are becoming the stuff of legend. But I’m pleased to count myself among those who know you simply as Reeve.” She tilted her head slightly and the curiosity in her eyes deepened. “Come, let us not keep her any longer.” With one delicate hand, on the back of which Reeve saw numerous scars, the woman indicated Reeve’s naginata and gestured to the alcove.

Reeve narrowed her eyes.

“You have nothing to fear,” the woman said, “save perhaps a tongue lashing, so, please.”

Reeve did not move, and strained seconds began to accumulate. The woman watched her, seemingly unconcerned by the pause. Unsure what else to do, Reeve reluctantly stepped into the alcove and leaned her weapon between two pegs.

The woman nodded and gestured to another pair of large doors down the hall. She began toward the doors, and Reeve followed, glancing occasionally at the familiar yet unfamiliar woman as they walked.

“We thought your father was traveling with you?” The woman said.

Reeve didn’t like someone knowing more about her than she knew about them, but she forced herself to keep a level tone. “He’ll be in just as soon as he figures out how to dismount and hitch his horse.”

The woman laughed quietly as they arrived at the doors. “That does sound like him.” She grasped a brass ring and pulled one of the doors wide, stepping back as she did.

Unsure how she wasn’t the one in control in her own story mode—please let it be my own story mode, she thought—Reeve again stood, unmoving. The room beyond seemed busy with activity. It sounded to Reeve like…an office.

“Have you not already waited long enough?” The woman said, still asking questions of her that Reeve didn’t understand. “Come, I will deliver you to her myself then.”

Reeve did not feel any more comfortable with the situation, but the woman stepped lightly around the door and into the room. After a few seconds, Reeve followed.

The great hall might once have spent its days as an empty, cavernous space used for the occasional formal spectacle, but Reeve found it a sea of jumbled tables, around which thrummed people of every conceivable creature race and description. Some were as small as Yonnin and walked the tabletops, others towered over their companions and bent deeply at the waist when they needed to work with something on a table’s surface. Quickening her pace to stay near the woman, Reeve looked at the contents of the tables they passed and saw maps, blueprints, ledgers, tall columns of coins, piles of scrolls, and an assortment of other items too numerous to categorize as she quickly walked by.

“Reeve is here,” the woman said.

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Again jolted by the use of her name, Reeve tore her attention from the tumultuous activity to find that the woman had been speaking to another woman, leather-clad and leaning forward over the largest table in the room. Her back was to Reeve, but Reeve could see that the leather armor she wore had, like that of the gate guards, seen many battles. The woman had dark skin and tightly curled hair dyed emerald that ran from front to back in a short mohawk, the sides of her head cleanly shaven above pointed ears.

The woman adjusted the marker she’d been placing on the map that ran the length of the table and then stood. She was nearly as tall as Reeve. “And Walter?” She said in a darkly noted voice.

The feeling that had been growing in Reeve—that she was of use to these NPCs and not the other way around—tipped from unease to frustration. “Look, how do you know our names? There’s that, and then I want to know what world this is and what’s going on, then my dad and I will get out of here so you can carry on with whatever it is you’re doing.” Reeve looked over the map. “I spent time in a hostile war camp before, and I’ll be happy to get out of here, stat.”

The leather-clad woman stiffened, and Reeve reflexively took a half-step back.

“You wish to leave us again already?” The woman said. She turned.

“Dusk!?” So startled was Reeve by the woman before her that she took a full step backward and found herself tripping over someone substantially smaller than she was, which quickly led to her landing on her back on a table that, as best she could tell by the feelings she experienced from her head to her waist, had been covered in a scale model of a town that contained what seemed an unnecessarily large number of spires, steeples, and towers. “Dusk!?” She said again, unable to manage anything else.

When Reeve and her father had logged out the night before, Dusk had looked to Reeve like she might be a few years older than Reeve’s age IRL. Now, Dusk appeared a grown woman, somewhere in that age range between college students and her parents where everyone looked to Reeve about the same age. Despite her half-elf longevity, faint lines had started forming at the corners of her eyes and lips, and she stood with an air of authority Reeve hadn’t seen from her before.

Dusk looked at the silver-haired woman. “Did she always act this much like Wurmslayer’s kin?”

Reeve looked at the silver-haired woman, focusing on the woman’s face. Her eyes widened. “Leaf!?”

“Her skills of perception certainly do not seem what they once were,” Leaf said.

“You have hair!”

“You are proving my point to a painful extent, Reeve,” Leaf said.

Reeve realized that the packed room had fallen silent. She struggled off of the table, looking back briefly at the model of some town she didn’t recognize, particularly now that a third of it had been flattened in the shape of her body. She pulled a church from her neck, the tip of its steeple having embedded itself in her skin, and placed it on the table. “Sorry,” she muttered to the dozen people of varying races who stood around the miniature disaster, expressions hard, staring at her. She turned back to Dusk and Leaf. “What is going on?”

Dusk crossed her arms and leaned back against her table. “I had planned to ask the same of you. I even thought I might allow myself to make a small scene, considering my feelings on the matter. You seem to have beaten me to it.”

“What do you mean? Why is everything different?”

Dusk and Leaf exchanged a glance. Dusk was the one to speak. “I would understand if you didn’t fully comprehend the extent to which this world has changed, but I don’t understand why you are surprised that there has been change. What did you expect? Time to wait patiently for your return like a dog at the door?”

Reeve felt like the room tilted. “That’s exactly what I expected. When I came back in, everything should have been exactly where it was the moment I left. Instead, we’re in this world where everything’s way different. Even you two. Whose world is this? It doesn’t look like Devon’s.”

Dusk and Leaf exchanged another look, and Reeve thought she saw not the curiosity with which she had initially been met by Leaf but concern. This time, it was Leaf who spoke. “This is the same world in which we last saw you, Reeve, when you departed us, down on the bank of the Deiluyne.”

The room lurched again around Reeve. “This is my game world? The one where we beat Helia?”

Dusk and Leaf nodded, and Reeve was vaguely aware that Helia’s name had caused an uncomfortable murmur to sweep the room.

“Then…the story mode didn’t pause while I was logged out? But,” Reeve considered the town they’d ridden through, “this town was a ruin. How could you make so much progress rebuilding it in the time I was gone? It would have been, what, months in here?” Reeve started to feel sick as the room began to tilt again. “Wait, seventeen or eighteen hours logged out, that could be a full year-and-a-half for you.”

Dusk was so still as she stared at Reeve that Reeve started to wonder if the game had glitched again.

“Reeve,” Dusk finally said, “you’ve been gone—and we’ve been here, fighting to survive, trying to rebuild our world—for eight years.”