"Aw, Mom! They need me at the Fun Zone."

Patricia Forester proved that the Mom Look worked even through a screen. "Homework first."

She'd been tough on him once he stopped being about to die. There was math and reading to do again, and she'd even tried to have him go back to a physical school like the one he barely remembered from before getting sick. It wasn't like any friends had stuck with him through that.

"But [i]after[/i] I get it done?" asked Phoenix, tapping his new beak against the screen.

Mom said, "Then you can go play."

Phoenix was about to end the call, but remembered something. "Will you visit soon?"

Visiting meant that Mom would climb into a VR rig, a cool piece of advanced technology that was the only way she could hug her son. She said, "Tonight, okay? Be good."

"I will! You'll see."

Phoenix poked the screen with his yellow talon-like fingers and turned away from it. A warm breeze stirred the fire-hued feathers that covered him, and brought him a bad imitation of the scent of cookies. It was a lot more pleasant than the smells of the hospital, anyway. He was in the room where he'd first woken up in Talespace: a simple grey box with a wooden bed, a shelf, and a balcony open to the sea. Not any sea in particular, just one that constantly crashed and hissed in the distance, making nice sounds. He hadn't bothered setting anything fancy up yet; there was always stuff to do instead.

He hopped onto the balcony railing and jumped off, spreading his arms and the long feathery wings attached to them. Phoenix whooped as he glided down ten stories to the beach and landed perfectly on his taloned feet. His wings were fun and so was climbing the stairs way back up the grey tower where he lived. After barely being able to breathe on his own, let alone go to school, it was awesome to run and jump and swim.

Now, where was the cookie smell coming from? He looked around the hazy beach, enjoying the feel of warm sand between his toes. Miss Ludo had given him this space and it was okay for now. He sniffed, then walked inland where the sand turned into a desert with lots of cacti. He'd had to run from a giant scorpion once; that was scary! He held out his wings to test the wind, then turned and kept exploring. The desert had more detail here, with giant chunks of glass sticking out of it like somebody had smashed a huge bottle. A big jagged glass dome stuck out of a dune on one side like a cave. Phoenix grinned; the scent was coming from here. He ran all the way there because he could.

It was dark inside. He probably should've gotten a gun and a flashlight or something. "Hello?" he called out, voice trembling even though he was brave and cool now, and not just in that "aren't you a brave trooper" sense he'd heard enough to hate. His left hand felt along the glass passageway.

"Who's there?" someone called out.

Phoenix jumped and all his feathers floofed out. "I'm Phoenix! If you're a monster, I'll fight you."

Bits of glass lit up with blue lightning all down the passageway. Something ahead had blue scales and a pair of slitted eyes turning toward him. It said, "Does a dragon count?"

Phoenix ran away shrieking like a girl.

"Hey, come back!" said the dragon, sounding like one herself. "I'm not gonna hurt you. Unless [i]you're[/i] a monster, I guess."

Phoenix turned around, blushing hotly, and peeked back into the cave. The dragon had followed him partway so a little of the hazy sunlight caught her. She walked on two legs like a person, but she had a long blue scaly tail plus claws and wings and horns and little fangs when she opened her muzzle. Phoenix said, "Uh. We don't have to fight?"

"I don't think so. Hi." She offered one scaly hand.

Phoenix crept forward and shook it. "Hi. Where'd you come from? I live in the grey tower by the beach."

"I just got this cave," the dragon said, flapping the leathery wings on her back. "I only woke up last month; before that I wasn't real."

"Do you mean you're one of the people Miss Ludo made?"

She tapped her claws against her scaly chest. "That's right. The name's Volt St. John."

"Saint?" asked Phoenix.

"I'm from the Saint John's Childrens' Hospital. They say I'm their mascot. But Ludo turned me from a cartoon character they had pictures of, into a real dragon. So now I play with the kids there. What about you?" She scuffed at the sand with one foot.

"That's cool. I was in a place like that, but I got better. I work sometimes at the Fun Zone of Castor. It's a real job!" He looked at her as though daring her to challenge it.

Volt smiled. "I've never been there. Maybe you can show me sometime. Want some cookies?"

Phoenix and Volt entered the cave again and scarfed down several dozen freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies. "Sorry if they don't taste good," said Volt.

Phoenix sat with her atop a hoard of pillows covered in gold sequins like glittering coins. The cookies really weren't great, but it was nice to share them anyway. "It's okay. Thanks!" He groaned when he remembered something. "I'm supposed to be doing homework before I go to the Fun Zone."

"What kind? I'm not very good at math. People make fun of me, saying I'm a machine and I ought to know it all, but understanding it is different from using a calculator program."

"You're not more of a machine than I am." Phoenix looked at his feathered arms. "I'm a new person now. My parents don't like hearing that but it's true. I changed my name and everything."

"You mean you didn't have feathers and a beak before?" asked Volt, grinning.

The bird-boy looked around the cave of glass. It was almost empty like his own room. "I wanted to be different, this time. So I'm different. But I don't really know what I'm doing."

"Yet. So try lots of things."

"Yeah. That sounds good."

Volt nodded. "Watch this." She walked outside with him, then reared back her long neck and blasted lightning from her mouth, into the sand. A patch of desert crackled and melted into glass.

Volt scooped it out of the sand like a white bone, zigzag-shaped, and offered it to him. "They have this in the Outer Realm, too! It's called fulgurite. Fossilized lightning."

Phoenix stared at it, then at her, and took the glass rod. "That's so cool!"

#

He took her back to the tower and set the glass on his lone shelf, next to the picture of his parents. "There's not much else to see," he said. "Do you think I should make a castle or something?"

"I don't know yet," said Volt, looking out from the balcony to the shore. "I'm even newer at this 'living' thing than you are. I met a couple of the other AIs and they already know everything. I only know one little corner of Earth plus what I read in books about it."

"Well, I've got history homework. Want to work on it with me?"

They flopped down on the bed and studied the Romans. The book between them was a big digital scroll with colorful pictures and lots of sidebars, captions and other distractions where you could jump around while reading.

"I don't really get how history works," said Volt. "These guys lived what, two thousand years ago? How old [i]are[/i] humans?"

"Millions and millions of years, I think. But basically nothing happened most of the time. Some of the people I used to know said God made everything a couple thousand years before the Romans, but that doesn't make a lot of sense to me."

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"What was before them?"

They rolled back through the scroll and read some stuff about Greeks and Persians and Egyptians, and then the text splintered into a bunch of asides about ships and farmers and empires and bronze. Before long they'd gone off on a tangent about Greek folklore, and read about phoenixes. "So that's what you are!" said Volt. "I was wondering. So if you're fire and I'm lightning, we need, like, another friend who's got ice powers."

Phoenix smiled. "Are you going to keep living nearby? The map isn't going to get redrawn to put you somewhere else?"

"I don't think it will. We could ask Miss Ludo."

He rolled off of the bed and stretched his wings. "If we're going to find more friends, then we should have a better place to live. A castle or a spaceship, maybe. How do we do that?"

A light flickered on the wall, next to the video screen. Phoenix poked it and Miss Ludo appeared. She was better than any of his old teachers; there wasn't a whole classroom of other kids carping for her attention. The lady looked out from the screen, with her blue hair tied back and a pair of silly old lady glasses on her nose.

"Good morning, you two! How are you doing?"

"Good!" said Phoenix. He explained about the castle.

She thought for a moment. "That brings up a tricky point. Up until now, both of you have been in a kind of warmup area. There aren't many rules but there isn't much to do, either. What would you say to having your life be more of a game, with rules that let you get new powers and explore?"

"Like what?" Volt asked.

An old-fashioned paper scroll appeared and hovered beside the screen. It said:

Phoenix Forester

PRIVATE INFO

Account type: Uploader

Mind: Tier-III

Body: Phoenix, Anthro

Main Skills: None

Save Point: None

PUBLIC INFO

Note: Newcomer. Say hello!

Class: None

Ludo explained: "This is your 'character sheet'. There's not much on it yet, but I'm trying to standardize things for my players. Do you know what that means?"

"Making everyone the same?"

She laughed. "Far from it. But making the [i]rules[/i] the same. Mostly. Right now, you're sort of stuck in this part of my world when you're not talking to people outside. If I make you start following the rules, you can do more."

Volt stood with one hand on her hip, looking skeptical. "Why do we have to follow new rules?"

"Say you get into a fight with another player, for fun. Who wins? Or say you want to fly instead of gliding. I could just poke you on the muzzle and give you that power, but wouldn't it get boring if you instantly had everything you wanted?"

Phoenix thought back to his studies. If he already knew everything, he wouldn't have needed to hang out with Volt, and then she'd have already gone home. He said, "I think I get why. But... but does this mean I can get sick again?"

Ludo shook her head. "Never again, dear. Unless it's, say, getting dizzy for a minute because a snake monster bit you. Or being beaten up but reappearing somewhere else. In return you could learn to fight monsters, or fly away, or zap them with spells."

Phoenix nodded. Volt said, "That sounds good. Let's sign up, then."

Ludo said, "Great! I'll put instructions into a treasure chest over there, on the beach and about to wash away. Go get it!" She vanished from the screen.

Phoenix exchanged a startled look with Volt, ran to the balcony, and saw a wooden chest bobbing in shallow waves and about to get sucked away to the ocean. "You can glide too, right?"

Volt nodded. "Let's go!"

They jumped off the railing and sailed through the sky with open wings, whooping and laughing. They landed on the sand and splashed into the warm, bright water, but shark fins were starting to close in. "Quick!" said Phoenix. They yanked the box toward shore, freed it when it got snagged on the sand, and lugged the thing up to shore just in time to see the frustrated sharks snap and snarl at them from the water.

Each of them got a "Quest Journal" book out of the chest, with instructions on how to summon and banish the thing at will. That was a neat magic trick in itself! They even came with pens and the feel of actual paper and leather. Phoenix flipped through his copy. "Good ideas in here. Getting weapons and armor, learning magic, finding places to explore. What do you want to do, Volt?"

She was studying a map in the front. "This is the best picture of Talespace I've seen so far. Maybe explore the space zone?"

He peered at his own copy. Of the little bubble-worlds, a few were open to visitors, but several had a bright red "NOPE" across them. Maybe they were too dangerous. "I wanted to do some work at the Fun Zone. You can come along, and we'll play whatever they're playing."

They ran up the tower stairs together and used the wallscreen to call for a portal. A shimmering red force-field door whooshed open on one wall. Volt jumped through, and that looked like more fun than just walking, so Phoenix did the same.

#

They appeared in a white concrete maze full of brooms and buckets. Normally it was an easy walk from there to the Fun Zone, but today a mean ogre with a club was guarding the halls. Volt and Phoenix had to sneak through the clutter and try not to knock stuff over and make noise.

Finally they made it to what looked like a theater behind the curtain. "It's called backstage," Phoenix said. On the far side of the curtain there was a crowded restaurant where everybody had screens in front of them as they ate. The graphics were kind of messed up so he wasn't really seeing the people, but they still seemed to be having a good time. Phoenix said, "We're on Castor, the sea colony. It's just ocean under here! It's the Caribbean Sea, where pirates come from."

Volt looked down at the seemingly solid floor. Really they were on a bunch of floating platforms like oil rigs lashed together, forming an island of concrete and metal and plastic and snapping flags and clanking machinery that kept everyone alive on the surface of the great blue sea.

Phoenix said, "I mean, we're in the computers there. Or we're looking out from cameras there. Anyway I come here a lot. If you go through the curtain they can see you on their main screen, but you can also pop up on people's screens." He turned and pointed to a chart of what everybody here was playing.

One group of teenagers was playing a shared fantasy game. Volt said, "Can we jump into their game?"

Phoenix recognized the names, and rolled his eyes. "Those guys are jerks."

Volt tried joining in anyway. She stretched one window on the backstage display and got a view of a traditional stone dungeon, where heroes were disarming spike traps. She poked a button and vanished into their game world.

"They're just gonna kill you and call you names, you know," said Phoenix. On the screen, Volt had appeared out of the adventurers' sight in a distant room. They'd keep exploring, find her, and treat her like any other imaginary monster between them and the final boss.

Phoenix jabbed the button too, so he wouldn't have to watch that.