To the clatter of the sea shells arranged on her homemade necklace, Justine McAllister clapped her hands and rolled away from her computer in her swiveling desk chair. “Yes. I got it.” She rolled close to her computer and poised a finger over the Enter key. “Executing solar eclipse routine… now.” She stabbed the Enter key.

And then the sun went out in Darkentide, the MMORPG game world she’d co-developed and had been maintaining and updating for years alongside her friend, Alfie Butcher, who occupied the desk next to hers. The game had a few dozen dedicated players on a single server, and they stayed because Justine and Alfie kept the virtual world fresh. It was a testament to the dedication of the pair that they’d managed to keep their game company of two afloat all this time. But they’d done well enough to invest in office space and real office furniture. With air conditioning, unlike Alfie’s garage, where the two had started out.

Alfie gave Justine a thumbs up. “Nice, J.” They’d been promising something grand to their players for a few months, and now, after three weeks of intensive testing, it was time to unleash the other half of their surprise on their thrill-seeking players. “I can execute my fabulous shadow-monsters routine now.” He typed a command in a shell window and pressed Enter. He chuckled. “The players won’t even know what hit them.” He stared hard at the command he’d typed. “Oopsies, I better change that. Put an extra zero on that difficulty level. Yikes!” He laughed. “Supposed to be fifty, not five hundred.” He tapped the up arrow to bring back the previous command. That extra zero was in the middle of the line, so he held down the left arrow key to move the cursor back. “Fifty is insane enough already. Cannot imagine the carnage even a single level five hundred monster would do to Darkentide, much less a dozen of them. The limiters I programmed for critters only go up to level one hundred.”

The door to the room burst open and in waltzed a line of slender blond women wearing green nurses’ uniforms and green berets. They danced in a circle in the middle of the room. Both developers turned away from their screens and keyboards to watch the impromptu show, their curiosity about why these people were here taking second place to the wow factor of their uninvited guests’ hypnotic movements.

As the dancing nurses spun by, Justine let out a whoop and jumped up to join them, shaking her rear and waving her hands over her head. Adrenaline flooded her veins due to her recent coding victory. “Come on, Alfie. Dance with us.”

“One moment, J.” He looked back to his screen to finish correcting the mistyped command and placed the cursor behind the zero he needed to delete.

A masculine figure donned in a gray hooded cloak rose from behind Alfie’s desk as though lifted by an elevator. The stranger pointed a finger with a three-inch nail at Alfie. Shadows hid the stranger’s face, as befitted a proper hood. “Do you want to die now or later?” High-pitched and honeyed, his was the euphonious voice of a seasoned actor or singer. He raised and lowered a hand to tap the bottom end of a wizard’s staff on the floor, sending tremors through the tile.

Alfie’s lips trembled. “Later?” He didn’t seem convinced that was a good answer, but the hooded fellow had only given him two options, and one of them had slipped out, perhaps before Alfie had given himself sufficient time to think about it. But the stranger didn’t seem the patient type.

The hooded fellow groaned. “I’d hoped you’d choose now. But very well. You can die later.” He shifted the staff in his hand, catching it lower, and bopped Alfie on the forehead with the upper end. The male developer’s skin blackened as though charred, and fell in a pile of ash in his chair. The hooded man put a hand to his mouth. “Oops.”

Justine stopped dancing. She stared at Alfie’s chair. “What…?” She didn’t have the voice to finish her question.

The man in the hood reached over the computer screen and typed another zero on the command line. He pressed Enter. “That should do it.” He pressed the power button on the computer and held it down until the screen went blank. A tap of his staff turned the computer to ash. Then he looked to Justine. “What to do with you now?” He rounded the desk, striding towards the woman developer, his staff held out before him.

Nurses tightened their circle, dancing around her at the center. One of them peeled off to face the hooded man. “Leave her be, Seth. She’s no threat.”

“Don’t question me, Greta. I gave you autonomy and I can take it away. She knows too much. She could reverse his command.”

Justine found her voice. “No.” She shook her head. “I only write the environmental code. Alfie was in charge of monsters. I don’t know his commands.”

“Please, Seth.” Greta bowed. “You wished me to have a conscience and morals. I’m exercising them now.”

He lowered his staff. “I am too magnanimous, but all right. She may live. But not here.” With a long-nailed finger, he beckoned for Justine to approach him.

The dancers stopped dancing, separating on one side of their circle to give Justine space to walk out between two of them.

“You killed Alfie.” Justine tried to back away, but the dancers blocked her in that direction. “What kind of monster are you?”

“Only level five hundred,” he said with a smirk. “Nothing like what your world is about to face.”

The shadow of a hulking figure rose on the wall behind him, its head reaching the ceiling ten feet up. The two-dimensional shape separated from the wall, gaining three-dimensional depth as it lurched into the room. It opened a gigantic maw, the inside a richer black than the rest of its body. It belched.

A stream of pink and yellow petals spewed forth from between the monster’s charcoal lips. With a unified cry, the dancers leapt towards the edges of the room. The flowery bits swirled around Justine, trapping her in the eye of a raging, colorful storm.

“You can’t be in Kansas anymore,” said Seth. “Greta, you go with her and make sure she doesn’t cause any trouble.”

“No, Seth, please,” wailed the dancer.

“It will be a good experience for you.”

The flowery gale lifted Justine from the floor, spinning her around and around. Greta, continually pleading for Seth to reconsider, joined her, flying around the room like a fairy with no control over her wings.

“And take these living ashes with you,” Seth said, his syrupy voice distant. “Just don’t let them reform into the man they once were.”

The pink cyclone darkened as Alfie’s ashes lifted from his chair. Then the whirlwind of petals aimed its tapered tail at Justine’s computer screen. The storm shrank, shrinking Justine and Greta with it, and pulled them into the display.

Darkness swallowed them. The swirling winds died, dropping Justine onto her butt on rocky ground. A heavy flowery scent made her heady. Dizzy, she couldn’t stand, but slumped backwards to recline on the ground, the back of her head cushioned by budding plant growth. Her breath should be heavy and fast, but it wasn’t. Perhaps she wasn’t even breathing. Was she dead? “Hello? Anyone? Alfie, are you there? Please tell me I’m dreaming or fell on my head or something. Can you turn on the lights, maybe? What happened?”

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“Umber whoosh, whoosh,” said Alfie from nearby in the darkness. “Needle posh booze.”

“Just great,” said an unfamiliar female voice from some unseen woman lying next to Justine. “I’ve always wanted to vacation in a world of darkness, babysitting a confused woman and a pile of living ash, with nothing at all on the schedule entertainment-wise.”

On second thought, the voice was familiar, belonging to the woman named Greta from Justine’s recent dream. Was Justine still dreaming? There was no way what she’d dreamed about had actually happened. No way she’d been caught up in a cyclone of petals and drawn into her computer screen. If it were true, that would mean she’d been dumped into a virtual world of her own making, Darkentide. It would mean Alfie wasn’t Alfie, but a pile of ashes, and a living pile of ashes at that. How was that possible? And it would mean they were in the company of a dancer wearing the attire of a nurse, sent to make sure… of what? That they didn’t escape Darkentide and return to the real world, where Justine could at least put an end to the solar eclipse in the virtual world, and Alfie, if somehow returned to human form, could enter the command to remove the level five thousand shadow-monsters that had been unleashed upon this land.

She must be concussed. She’d had an accident and was now in the hospital, which would explain why she was dreaming about nurses. Good Lord, she silently begged, please make me better, and let Alfie be all right.

“Buster move om jug jugs,” said Alfie from the darkness. “Wee, wee, wee, all midway chrome.”

“Please tell me one of you knows a spell for light,” said Greta. From the sound of it, she sat up. “My name’s Greta, by the way, in case you missed it. I assume the ash pile is Alfie. And who are you, girl?”

“Humpty Dumpty bus, bus throw sick,” said Alfie. “Zoom zig zag paddy truck.”

Justine clamped her palms over her eyes. “This isn’t real. I’m going to count to ten, open my eyes, and wake up.”

“Oh, please,” said Greta. “Come on. You’re the developer. You have to know something about this place that can help us. I mean, we could just sit here for eternity, hoping nothing chances upon us. But I have to wonder, did you program hunger and the need to eat for PCs into the game? I assume we’re PCs. I suppose we could be NPCs. Will we need to sleep? Will this accursed solar eclipse end of its own accord eventually? And what about lives? How many do we have? What will happen if we lose them all? What kinds of stats, skills, magic, et cetera, do we have? There must be some way to access character sheets. Computer, can you hear me? If you can, please show me my character sheet for this world.”

“Ten.” Justine finished counting. She removed her hands from her face and blinked against the darkness still enveloping her. “Crap.”

“Wiggly jumping radish beans,” said Alfie. “Soup, soup tundra.”

“Alfie,” Justine said, “could you please say something rational?”

“Zing ding rash,” he replied. “Tonal zoo all yay.”

Justine held her hand under her nostrils and tried to exhale. Hard. She couldn’t feel her breath. The scent of flowers didn’t let up. People must have sent her so many they lined both sides of her hospital bed. With some effort, she sat upright. The mattress was as hard and lumpy as though she lay on a bed of rocks. “Can someone please turn on some lights?”

“Okay,” said Greta. “The computer showed me my character sheet. Why don’t you two ask it for yours? I’m definitely a PC, though it has my character name the same as my player name, both of them simply Greta. I have unassigned stat and skill points, and I assume you do, too. The class field is empty, so I’m guessing that’s something we get to choose. I’m not seeing any inventory, but hopefully that’s on another sheet. I have 50 Gold. I’m hoping we can buy some beginning equipment, like maybe a flashlight, for starters, if such things are available in this world. I don’t have any idea about genre. Is this game sci fi, fantasy, or what? Please don’t tell me it’s a horror game. Crap. I bet an armload of daises it’s horror. I mean, shadow monsters, come on. What else could it be other than horror? Have you looked at your character sheets yet? And can you please tell me your name, girl? I heard you call the ash pile Alfie, so okay, I got his name. But tell me what to call you, or I’ll just keep calling you girl.”

Justine sucked in a deep breath. Except… she didn’t. There was no intake of air. “My name is Justine.” No air flowed from her mouth as she spoke. But the act of saying her name to Greta felt like an admission that this wasn’t a dream, like an acceptance of the truth that the three of them had been magically transported into a virtual game world, like happened in so many of the LitRPG novels she enjoyed reading. Sadness swelled inside her chest. She expected tears to moisten her cheeks, but none came. She couldn’t breathe or cry. Neither she nor Alfie had programmed breathing or crying into Darkentide PCs. She closed her eyes to the darkness and calmed her mind before speaking again. “To answer your questions, Greta, we didn’t program the need for food or sleep into the game. We did program a limited number of lives. Six, to be exact. It’s a maximum, really. You regain lost lives at the rate of one per week, or you can spend Gold to restore them early. If you’re down to zero lives and you die, then you lose all your Gold except for 50, all your equipment, half of your stat points, half of your skill points, and you start again, without a waiting period, reassigning the points you retain and buying what equipment you can for 50 Gold. You’re never out of the game for good, though it is possible to be trapped somewhere for an indefinite period of time, which has happened to a few early players who irked everyone else really bad. The genre is contemporary horror. If we’re starting as beginning characters in Darkentide, we should each have a flashlight already in our inventory.”

“Blubber dash hit,” said Alfie. “Can you even understand me?”

“Alfie!” Justine laughed aloud. At least laughing was possible, even if crying wasn’t. “I do understand you! Can you understand me?”

“Oh, geez,” he said. “I’m actually formal dingus goobers.”

Greta chuckled. “You don’t quite have the talking bit down pat yet, Alfie. Keep practicing. It would help if we can communicate.”

“Why are we even here?” Anger bubbled inside Justine. “Who is this Seth fellow and what does he want? For that matter, what do you want?”

“Oh, that’s easy,” said Greta. “I want to stay on Seth’s good side, however tiny it may be. And he wants to destroy everything. He’s basically the incarnation of destruction, drawn from the violence of your MMORPG game world. He has many incarnations, and this is the one Alfie unleashed with his unfortunate choice of command line, coupled with the fact neither of you put any limiters on the actions of monsters over level one hundred. So irresponsible of you.”

“And are you a level five hundred monster, too?” Justine swallowed hard.

“Nah. I’m just one of Seth’s tools, one of his divining rods, so to speak. I’m basically a visualization of a very long-term spell effect. Seth says what he wants to find, and me and my girls dance our way to it, letting magical forces guide us. Well, that was what I did, until he assigned me the role of custodian over the two of you. Now I don’t want anything except for him to call me back. As if he’ll ever do that. This is what I get for standing up to him, trying to spare your life, Justine.”

“Well, I thank you for that.” Justine was beginning to like Greta a bit more. “So, you’re basically a servant.”

“I’m as much a servant to Seth as a tractor is a servant to a farmer.”

“But if you don’t do what he asks, he’ll destroy you, right?”

“I suppose. I’ve never tested the theory. A tractor doesn’t question the farmer’s decisions. It’s when I tried to become something more than a tractor that I got into trouble, and here I am.”

Justine shook her head. “I heard him say he gave you autonomy. What was that about?”

“I’m his version of Pinocchio. He thinks he can make me into a real girl. He manipulated my metaphysical stats to higher values than one might expect of a tractor.”

“Ghostly jack blimp,” said Alfie. A ray of light shone upon Justine and Greta.

Justine shaded her eyes from the light. It was so damned bright in the darkness.

The nurse dancer laughed, pointing at the top of Justine’s head. “You have a flower garden growing on your scalp.”

Justine raised her free hand to touch her hair. What she touched wasn’t soft and silky like she expected her blond tresses to be, but rough, leggy, and leafy. Standing up. Like flowers. With open buds at the top. “Oh my god.”

“Hyper luck cult,” said Alfie, laughing. Whatever he’d said was supposed to be a joke, but it didn’t come out as one to Justine.

The female developer turned her gaze on her reluctant custodian. Greta still wore her nurse’s outfit. Golden tresses peeked from beneath a green beret. The woman smiled, and one of her teeth sparkled in the ray of light. The source of the light, Justine saw once her eyes adjusted, was a flashlight resting in a pile of ashes.