Alan waited a moment, trying to convey confidence through the silence between himself and James.

“We can talk more later, Your Majesty?” Chief DaSilva said from behind James.

I wonder if there’s been a lot of crime since James started the Fisher Kingdom, Alan thought. I hope I’m not interrupting something urgent.

But James just turned his head to look at DaSilva for a moment and then nodded.

“Absolutely,” James said. “We’ll be working closely together, since you’re going to be the military here while virtually everyone else is gone.

So that was what they were talking about.

The new Chief of Police stepped away and began to move toward the exit, leaving Alan and James alone.

“What did you want to say?” James asked, smiling.

“You were saying you want to put together an Expeditionary Force,” Alan said.

James nodded.

“Mitzi and I were discussing it, and we both want to join it.”

“Oh!” James sounded surprised.

“What do you think?” Alan asked.

“Well, I think—uh, you guys are getting bored hanging around here, aren’t you?” James said jokingly.

“Oh, is that what you think of us? The old folks just need some excitement?” Alan tried to match James’s tone with mock outrage.

“I was actually thinking I needed some competent people to conduct this operation,” James said. “I already have people I want to send exploring, but the people I have in mind right now—” He frowned—“well, they’re basically baggage. I hate to put it so rudely, but you’ll see what I mean when you meet them. Intelligent, well meaning people, but they need someone who can lead them and help them survive in the wilderness. You said you were basically Rambo in the army, right?”

Alan chuckled. “Sure, something like that. I can at least pick my way through the environment well enough compared with people who never served.”

“Yeah, that’s plenty,” James said, shaking his head. “Believe me, you have a big advantage compared to most members of my generation.” He lowered his voice. “Especially now that you’ve begun to age differently than most of your peers.”

Alan nodded. “That was a consideration for us.” He looked at James a little uncertainly, still unsure of how much the Blessing of the Fisher King had actually been intended to do. “You know I’ve flirted with the idea of retirement in the past, but after what’s happened, that seems absurd. Now that we’ve been given this gift, it would be a shame to waste it.”

“I agree with you,” James said. “Give me just a minute, and then I’ll take you to meet the geek squad.”

“The who?” Alan asked, slightly confused.

“Oh, I’m just calling them that in my head.” James had the decency to look a little embarrassed. “Just some of the people you volunteered to escort.” The Fisher King’s smile took on a slightly mischievous quality before he darted away.

I’m starting to think we volunteered for something beyond what we imagined…

But he had no way of knowing the scope of the actual challenge that would be involved in working with the Fisher Expeditionary Force, so Alan refused to drive himself crazy speculating.

He watched James from a distance as the Fisher King spoke to the giant squirrel, the giant bat, the giant wolf, and the Goblin Overlord. And out of the corner of his eye, Mitzi approached.

“What did he say?” she asked quietly. “Are we going?”

Alan turned to look at her. “He said we’re going to be babysitting, essentially. I hope you won’t regret it.”

Joining the Fisher Expeditionary Force had been her idea. Alan had embraced it, because he knew his army experience would probably come in handy for the smaller, more ragtag group that James was sending off—and because there was no place or reason for a sedentary lifestyle in this new world, especially not for a couple who were slowly moving back to the prime of their youth.

“An adventure with you? Regret?” Mitzi laughed gently. “Never.” She stroked his hair with her fingers.

“Hm. Well, I suppose at worst, it’s a story we have to tell later.”

“At worst, we won’t have any more stories to tell,” Mitzi said, speaking the words lightly despite their meaning. “But in this new world, in this new country, I think what’s needed are people who aren’t so afraid of death.”

“We’re on our second wind of life anyway,” Alan agreed. This, in a nutshell, was the whispered conversation they had been having ever since James mentioned that he wanted to send out a group of scouts to explore the new world.

Now that they had survived Orientation and the Battle of the Haunted Forest, maybe they were on their third life in some sense.

People who kept surviving situations that killed other people ought to do something special with their lives. Perhaps it was that simple.

The Fisher Expeditionary Force, with a mission to scout the new world, was something special.

Maybe this was their place in the post-System world.

Pioneers. Explorers.

Advisors also, because it would be wasteful to let their decades of life experience go to waste.

But if they also served the new country as scouts, they could give a new meaning to the idea of a vigorous old age.

The idea that the world was much larger than it had been—and populated with a variety of monsters—had been frightening. Yet it was also tantalizing.

James turned away from the squirrel and bat, stopped to whisper a few words in his wife’s ear, and finally made his way back toward Alan and Mitzi. They shifted their attention to him.

“So, I got you guys a few additional scouts from the squirrels, bats, wolves and Goblin,” James said. “You guys haven’t reconsidered going on this mission, right?”

“Of course not,” Mitzi said slightly indignantly.

“Just checking,” James replied, chuckling. “Now I’ll take you to meet the members of the Electricity Commission.”

“There’s an Electricity Commission?” Alan asked.

“Well, they haven’t done much yet,” James replied. “With your help, this is their moment.”

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They followed him out of the community center.

Two dozen people, all humans and mostly men, stood in a circle, gathered at the center of the courtyard.

“You had already arranged to meet with them?” Alan asked.

“No, I just used my newfound communication abilities,” James said, touching his temple with his index finger.

“Right, your territorial telepathy,” Mitzi said.

“I keep losing track of your superpowers,” Alan said.

James closed the distance with the people gathered to meet him and spoke in a raised voice.

“Hello members of the Electricity Commission!”

“Good to see you, sir!” replied a Hispanic man from near the front of the group.

“This is everybody you’ve gathered for the expedition, Mateo?” James asked.

“Yes, sir,” Mateo replied. Alan noticed the man stood a little straighter as he spoke. There was an obvious undertone of pride in his voice.

“Congratulations on your willingness to venture into unexplored territories, ladies and gentlemen,” James said. “You’re going to lay the groundwork for our future expansion—and perhaps most importantly, the restoration of our lost technology! If your mission succeeds, your names will go down in history.”

A little cheer went up from the group. Even Alan felt a little bit carried along by the charisma James emanated.

He had heard James speak publicly before, more than once, but it was these brief, impromptu remarks that really brought home to Alan the power in the Fisher King’s voice. If James asked this group to go and follow him toward Orlando right now, with no additional preparation, Alan was fairly certain they would simply go with him.

Does he even know he’s doing it?

Alan knew how Skills worked, at least on a basic level. He knew that some functioned passively. A Ruler would undoubtedly have so many leadership-related Skills that some would manipulate people into following him without any conscious effort on his part.

It was a thought to follow up on another time, though.

For now, Alan carefully followed the conversation.

“Do you guys have a good accounting of the materials you’ll be hoping to get from Orlando once you make it there?” James asked.

Another man from the group stepped forward, pimply and pale with glasses and a slightly hunched posture. Identify said his name was Christian Zito.

He started to explain what the group had determined the Kingdom needed.

Alan watched as James listened politely for a few minutes, then with a slightly impatient expression, as Zito explained, in dizzying depth, the materials they hoped to secure and reasons why.

“Okay, I trust your expertise on this, guys,” James said finally, cutting the explanation off gently but firmly. “I can tell there’s a lot in this explanation that I’m not going to understand, and that’s all right. I know I’m not the one rebuilding our power grid.” He clapped Zito on the shoulder and gave him a warm look as he spoke.

The bespectacled man smiled at the apparent compliment.

“Unless someone has a strong objection, I’m going to place you all under the command of Alan and Mitzi Roget for the duration of this trip,” James continued. “You’ll be in charge of figuring out what you need to forage for in Orlando, of course, but the Rogets have a lot of survival experience from my Orientation, and Alan here is a military veteran. I believe they’ll be able to keep you guys safe and organized, so we hopefully see everyone come home.”

Zito nodded, though Alan saw a trace of reluctance on his face as he did so.

I hope we’re not getting started on the wrong foot here, Alan thought. James, you know everyone in the Kingdom will follow you anywhere, but that doesn’t mean you can put a stranger in charge of them and the group will just accept it, right?

Then the Hispanic man—who Alan now Identified as Mateo Rivera—stepped forward and had a quick word with James and Zito.

Alan couldn’t hear any of the rapid-fire, whispered dialogue between the men, but as it came to a close, James smiled and nodded and placed a hand on Rivera’s shoulder as he had done with Zito.

Then he turned back to Alan and Mitzi.

“Guys, why don’t you come meet the group?” he said.

Well, at least we’ll get to know them before we expect them to follow us. Was this Rivera’s idea? Or was that whispered dialogue about something else?

Either way, Alan and Mitzi spent the next quarter of an hour socializing with the members of the Electricity Commission—the men and women James had briefly dubbed the geek squad earlier. They were good people, Alan was relieved to observe. Decent, ordinary people.

None of them had been especially successful in Orientation, but they had all been scientifically inclined before the System descended. Some of them were former engineers or electricians. There were a few programmers and a couple of artificial intelligence technicians and a variety of other information technology professionals. Alan frankly didn’t understand the details of the work that many of them had done before the System, and he didn’t try to pretend to. He imagined that they would have been similarly lost if he had been forced to explain the work of an attorney to them.

The important thing was that Alan, Mitzi, and the band of so-called geeks seemed to get along.

Talking to Alan and Mitzi seemed to convince them that the old couple had the survival skills—and leadership skills—to get them to where they wanted to go.

And Alan felt convinced that volunteering to join—or, ultimately lead—this journey had been the right thing for him and Mitzi too.

These people wanted to restore the standard of living that humanity had enjoyed before the System—a similar, compatible goal to James’s, from what Alan had seen thus far—but they placed their emphasis on technology specifically, while James had been most focused on putting roofs over people’s heads and food in their stomachs.

Unlike James, none of these people had been great winners in the Orientations they had endured. If Alan had to describe them, they were the people who had the most in the old world that they missed, out of those citizens he had met so far. Nostalgic for the past, they met in their unofficial commission regularly to discuss how they might rectify what had gone wrong when the System appeared.

A few of them had met James before, to discuss how they might begin restoring technology, and he had given them a reality check.

His order of priorities could not place electricity and the Internet before basic necessities.

Now, though—now, they were elated that they would be able to start putting some of their wild ideas into action. They would at least try.

“The old Internet is gone,” Zito said soberly as he finished part of his explanation for their future plans. “Gone for the foreseeable future, maybe gone forever—depending on the overall success of His Majesty’s civilizing mission.”

One thing Alan had noticed was that every member of this group was unusually enthusiastic about the Fisher Kingdom. It was the closest thing to normal any of them had experienced since the System showed up.

James had acquired a semi-divine status with these people for restoring some semblance of order, even if his reality check had been a bit heart-breaking for a while.

Alan found it a little odd, though, how obsessed they were with getting the Internet back specifically—not electricity in general, even though with the Florida heat, that would be an obvious concern when Summer came.

“There’s no way you can get it back up?” Alan asked despite himself, finding that he had become reluctantly invested in their plight.

He had never been a big Internet buff himself, though it had become popular when he was a relatively young man. He was naturally skeptical of fads, and as time went on, and society recognized the variety of neuroses and mental illnesses the Internet seemed to nurture in the young, he had felt gradually vindicated—though the political will to regulate the Internet had never materialized, despite increasing evidence that social media was increasing rates of depression and suicidality.

“It’s the infrastructure,” Rivera said.

“Uh, I thought it was wireless,” Alan said.

Mitzi looked like she wanted to say something, but Zito started talking.

“The old Internet required a lot of wires and cables that were in fixed locations,” Zito explained. “There were undersea cables connecting nations across the sea, allowing them all to access the World Wide Web. The world increased in size, though, and those materials didn’t.” His voice turned bitter. “So, they were undoubtedly destroyed when the System fucked the Earth.”

“What about satellites?” Mitzi asked. “Space Co. has thousands of them floating around the Earth, right? Can you get Internet from those?”

“When the world doubled in size, they probably crashed,” Rivera said. “Like the way you’re thinking, though, ma’am. Christian here and Darryl already tried to build a mini terminal to see if we could access the Internet through the satellites, and it didn’t work. The actual solution will end up being something more rudimentary—and also, unfortunately, more complicated to implement.”

“So, what’s the plan, then?” Alan asked.

Mitzi’s eyes widened, and she gave Alan a slightly frustrated look before quickly shifting her face to careful neutrality.

Alan didn’t realize his mistake until Christian began to explain the plan in minute detail.