“I can, with great relief, claim no insight into the mind of your father,” Dawn said, as she helped the female Neecriot make the final drop from the tree’s lowest limb to the buckled brickwork below, “but if he is not here, then he more likely than not is still in Thhia.”

“Not here? Where is here?” Reeve said.

“Vyrdenh.”

“Is that a different country?” Gyl said.

“Realm, technically, I think,” Reeve said, “though they may be aspiring to more than that, post-empire.”

Dawn nodded.

Gyl pointed at Dawn’s back as Dawn helped the male Neecriot with the final drop. “You translocated us an entire realm away? You translocated a whole town an entire realm away?”

The man landed and stood uncertainly. Dawn patted him reassuringly on the shoulder before pointing to a group of Neecriots starting to assemble in a small clearing a dozen yards away. “Best to join your comrades,” Dawn said.

“Th-thank you, milady,” the man said, making a few rushed and awkward half-bows before hurrying to join the woman and make their way through the trees toward the group.

Dawn turned to Gyl. “Every meliá I have discovered requires no mana.”

Gyl squinted at Dawn. “Meliá are the spells of melióδin?”

Dawn nodded as she surveyed the trees within view, from which Neecriots on the ground were helping those above descend.

“Meliá don’t require any mana?”

Dawn nodded again as she began shedding her fur-lined cloak.

“But when you were talking about shielding the town, you talked about the mana cost?”

Reeve rocked her head to the side. “Wait, yeah. And I remember last visit when we were in the gnome cave, Dusk cast a shield against physical objects for me, and later she withdrew it to reabsorb mana.”

“You are both more astute than one might initially surmise,” Dawn said with a good-natured smile. “Although we didn’t know it at the time, the mage to whom my sister and I were apprenticed taught us meliá, not the mana-based casting of Ase Thhia. As my understanding has grown, I’ve discovered that many of the meliá are completely different than standard mana casts, but some of the casts he taught us are simply a device by which a meliá can be used to call forth a standard spell. The physical shield he taught us was one such.”

“It’s like having a wrapper function to call another function,” Reeve said quietly.

Gyl shot Reeve a dark look. “Stay in character,” she said.

“Straight meliá don’t use mana?” Reeve said.

Dawn nodded.

“But a meliá that calls a standard spell incurs the normal mana cost of the standard spell?”

Dawn nodded again.

Gyl crossed her arms and gave a nearly imperceptible shrug of her shoulders, a quirk Reeve knew meant that Millie—Gyl, whatever—totally didn’t believe what she was hearing.

“You can move a whoooole town…and you don’t burn aaaany mana?” Gyl said slowly.

Dawn looked at Reeve as though asking if her caster friend was OK.

Reeve shrugged and looked at Gyl. “Well, if the meliá are basically cheats—“

“—don’t break character—“

“—or some other manipulation of the underlying game code—“

“—don’t break character!—

“—or underlying VR system OS—“

Gyl’s yellow eyes somehow widened and narrowed simultaneously, and she jabbed a pointed finger at Reeve, her voice pinched, high, and interpretable by context alone. “—dhh brhh ku!”

Reeve paused as the intensity of Gyl’s look threw off Reeve’s train of thought. Reeve raised two palms and took a breath. “OK. OK,” she said gently. “How about this…it sooouunds like these meliá are an entirely different, non-mana-based system of magic…in this world.” Reeve felt like she was playing a guessing game in which she couldn’t use certain words as she tried to get her teammate to understand what she was describing. It was just that, currently, her teammate was a teenage gamer obsessed with in-game role-playing and not breaking character or engaging in meta-conversation. “If there’s no mana cost,” Reeve frowned slightly as she watched Dawn stand over the shed cloak and begin emptying the pockets of the worn and blood-covered creamy-white leather armor she’d had on beneath, “moving a single block—I mean a small piece of the world—would be no harder than moving a big area, like a town.” Reeve stared at Dawn. “What exactly…”

Dawn dropped a final item—a vial containing a murky red liquid—beside the others where they lay scattered on her cloak. She cast a short spell of only a half-dozen gestures and then raised one hand above her head before sweeping it diagonally down across her body.

Gyl leaned backward with such surprise that she had to take a step to catch herself. “You can change your skin!?”

Stolen novel; please report.

Dawn, who now stood wearing a set of clean, cream-colored leather armor, first considered Gyl and then gave Reeve another questioning look.

“She means your clothes, your appearance,” Reeve looked pointedly at Gyl, “because she’d definitely never ever break character and talk about avatar skins.”

“But…” Gyl sputtered as she waved a hand at Dawn, “it’s even more than that. She just conjured clothes—“

“—and probably didn’t expend any mana doing it,” Reeve said.

“Yeah, OK, that’s crazy,” Gyl said, “and I didn’t think I’d ever be saying this about white leather, but you look totally bad-bass in that action.”

Dawn dropped into a deep squat, butt on heels, and rocked her head to the side in acknowledgment of the compliment. She began quickly plucking her belongings from the cloak that lay on the ground, slipping them into pockets and folds of her new armor. “For almost a year I traveled, seldom setting foot on a road or sleeping under any roof but the sky. My skills as a caster were my only shield, sword, and companion, save for Nyx.”

Reeve felt a pang of regret and jealousy at the mention of her erstwhile companion.

Dawn held the last object, a dagger, close for inspection and then slipped it too out of sight. “If sufficiently motivated, one can learn much of themself under such circumstances.” She grasped the discareded cloak by the back of its thick fur collar and lifted it as she stood. “I had such motivation. And I learned much of myself, this world, and the craft of the melióδin.” She whipped the cloak once in the air, but instead of emitting a soft pop, it disappeared.

Gyl pointed again. “That’s the loot bag mechanic!”

Reeve crossed her arms. “You cannot give me any more grief about breaking character.”

“I know! I know! No more. I’m finished.” Gyl did a my lips are sealed key turn at the corner of her mouth.

“You also have noticed that objects can be disappeared?” Dawn said.

“Only loot bags,” Reeve and Gyl said in unison.

“That may be the case for you, but once I discovered in the word’s fabric a slit through which one type of unwanted item could be slipped, I was able to create a similar slit through which I could disappear any item.”

Reeve watched Gyl open and close her mouth a few times, seemingly unable to find a way—without breaking character—to discuss Dawn’s apparent ability to copy and modify game code to create new object mechanics or maybe to modify actions or the object classes to which they could be applied. Eventually, Gyl closed her mouth, crossed her arms, and frowned darkly at Reeve. Reeve looked at Dawn. “Those’re some powerful tools. The meliá you’ve figured out.”

Dawn smiled thinly. “Disappearing a cloak is but nothing.” She made a few more quick gestures and then ran her right hand across her left shoulder. A fur-lined, ice-blue cloak free of blood spatters fell down her back and sides as though unspooling out of the night air. “Appearing a cloak is no more impressive. The most meaningful meliá took me months to tease from the land and its inhabitants. And they were not without cost.” She pulled the cloak close about her and closed her eyes.

Neither Reeve nor Gyl, despite the latter being herself a caster, could tell whether Dawn was making any motions with her hands, which were hidden just inside her cloak. After a few seconds of watching Dawn, the two turned when the sound of a snapping branch brought their attention to someone approaching through the trees. It was the thin Neecriot farmer Dawn had helped down only minutes before. Whereas earlier he had seemed flustered, he now stood tall and strode confidently toward Dawn, who did not open her eyes until he stopped directly in front of her.

There they stood, looking into each other’s eyes, unblinking. Both Reeve and Gyl shifted their weight uncomfortably, disconcerted by how much they didn’t understand what was happening.

Finally, and without any warning, the man gave a quick nod of his head. Dawn responded with a slower nod before reaching from within her cloak and gripping him firmly by each shoulder. “Thank you,” she said. She released him, and the farmer turned and strode quickly back toward the Neecriot gathering. Reeve and Gyl waited until he was out of earshot to speak.

“So…,” Gyl said, “that was a moment.”

“What just happened?” Reeve said.

Dawn looked at Gyl and then Reeve. “These people need a leader who will prepare them for the danger that will no doubt seek this town, no matter how far it has been translocated. They need someone who will put the town’s safety before their own. He is now that person.”

Gyl and Reeve started speaking over each other in a rush, “You—why—change—we—directives—or Leaf—just—like Maeve—where—,“ but the jumble of occasionally discernible words quickly became incoherent noise. Dawn raised a palm toward each, and they trailed off.

“Reeve, you first, but with haste, we have little time.”

Reeve frowned and shifted her naginata from one hand to the other. “Why would we leave this whole town in that guy’s care? Why aren’t we, or at least you, going to be leading the defensive preparations? Or Leaf, isn’t she your right-hand butt-kicker?”

“The three of us must leave, lest our presence draws further attention from those who abducted Dusk and then attacked in Thhia. I shed my previous garments in case our pursuers had placed a mark upon them during my travels or the skirmish in Thhia.”

“Like a bug they’d use to track you?” Gyl said.

“Hey! Stay in character.” Reeve pointed at Gyl.

“And is it my turn for questions now?” Gyl said, ignoring Reeve’s glare.

Dawn shrugged.

Gyl pointed in the direction of the Neecriots. “Did you change that NPC’s core directive?”

“Hey!” Reeve shook her pointed finger at the red-haired caster. “What the heck!? I might as well be calling you Millie and asking you questions about our homework! If you were breaking character any more you’d be—“

“Reavyr,” Gyl said, “this isn’t just a normal slip-up, this is crazy-town. I think Dawn can change the core directives of the lower-level AIs.” Gyl pointed at both sides of her head. “I can’t even begin to think through what all that could mean. I mean…I mean…”

“And what about Leaf,” Reeve said, turning back to Dawn.

“If she was in the town when we translocated, she would have found us by now. I fear she was left in Thhia.”

“With my dad,” Reeve said.

“If Fortune shines on him,” Dawn said, “and not on her.”

“Yeah, been there,” Reeve said.

“Enough for now,” Dawn said. “The people here will strengthen the town’s defenses should they again come under attack. We must leave so as to draw the danger away from them and to hunt its source.”

“Go where?” Reeve said.

Dawn began the cast that Reeve could now recognize as that of the in-world portal. “Wyste. Where I was before I felt Dusk’s peril. I believe there is another melióδin.”

“That’s not good,” Reeve said.

“I believe it may be Helia.”

“Your mother?” Gyl said. Both Dawn and Reeve looked at her with surprise. “What? That’s one of the things Reeve told me at school today.”

Reeve took a single long step to close the gap with Gyl and grasped the caster roughly by both shoulders, Reeve’s naginata’s shaft sliding out of her hand and up her forearm to rest in the crook of her elbow as she did. “Millie, I swear to gosh, I would not say this to you if I didn’t love you, and if you weren’t one of my best friends, and if I wasn’t in melee range where I could definitely win a PvP, but if you ever shush me again for breaking character, I will send you back to your spawn point, which, I’m pretty sure, is in Thhia right now, and that’s a long way from here and probably a longer way from Wyste and also a place where you could see what its like to be stuck with my dad, OK?”

“Gyl,” Gyl said in a corrective tone. “Not Millie.”

“Open the portal!” Reeve nearly shouted before turning to find that Dawn was already standing on the other side of the open portal, her short hair jumping about her head as it was buffeted by violent, snow-dense gusts. Her cloak was pulled tight around her. She raised her deep hood and then tightened the cloak. Face hidden, she turned and walked away from the portal, her ice-blue cloak quickly lost in the whiteout.