The Godhead’s tears fall.

And fall.

His laughter—laughter at my expense—continues, reverberating down through His Stoneheadedness into the ground, and outwardly in all directions.

The ground shakes even as the flourishing plants become hypergrowth.

Grasses rise above huts. Shrubs choke livestock. Tomatoes and other fruits enclose whatever has the misfortune of trying to occupy the same space they occupy: tools, animals, people. No one can hear you scream from within the confines of a giant overripe tomato!

It is both an earthquake and a superflorification.

And the tears keep falling, their moisture accumulating. Supersaturating the soil, failing to drain, the water level rising. Beginning to flood.

The Godhead’s mirthful shaking dismantles the fences, weakens the wooden skeletons of the village’s structures, around which plantlife wraps itself tentacularly as if possessed of a mind (or minds) of its (their) own, and the waters enter from the bottom up.

Thask’s farmers scream. And Tabatha—Tabatha—

I awake sweating in an unfamiliar bed in a small musty room surrounded by foreign sounds and ceaseless noise. It is night but there is no darkness, for beyond the room’s sole window people and flickering lights pass even at this hour, pass and knock, and pass and speak, and pass and…

It takes me several seconds to realize where I am. In the city, in an inn, in a room for which I most likely overpaid with some of the coins my mom gave me to get me started on my adventure. The realization brings with it comfort but also shivers. That image—that horribly vivid image—of Thask was only a nightmare.

I wipe the sweat off my face with the back of my hand and try to calm my pulse to a pace less-than drumroll. I am OK, I tell myself. Everything is OK. Now I remember what happened. I entered the city, with its extreme commotion, which so discombobulated me that I retreated into the first inn I passed and rented a room for the night. And I am in that room now, and it is still dark, but not dark enough for me, not country dark but city dim, and as I sit on the old creaky bed, waiting for the stained sheets to dry, I wonder whether it is in fact people making all that din I hear or if it is perhaps the city itself, whispering.

When I wake up again it’s morning.

I don’t remember falling asleep a second time, but I must have, and now I rush out of the room, into the inn’s downstairs common area, where a few people have already made their way. Most, I imagine, are still slumbering. I imagine their faces and their bodies, their quests and their experiences. I have never been inside a place (the city or the inn) in which there are so many others. I am not used to being with people who are too many for me to ever know.

“Kid, you wanna eat something?” the innkeeper asks me.

“Sure,” I say.

I go over to him and pick out a piece of bread with a thick slice of some kind of meat. I ask also for milk, which he pours with a slightly raised eyebrow. “You wouldn’t prefer beer?”

“I’m too young to buy alcohol,” I say.

“Suit yourself. But if you heard me ask your age, that makes exactly one of us.”

I eat the bread and drink the milk. It’s cold and tastes watered down. The bread tastes like it has chalk in it. The meat—better not think about the meat.

“I am in search of a lawyer specializing in game mechanics,” I say. “Do you happen to know one?”

“Lawyers. Ha! Do I know one? Kid, there are more lawyers in this city than there are decent, law-abiding cits. They smell injury too. And need. You go out on the street and curse your luck, and you’ll have a dozen of them on you like rats on a corpse.”

That’s certainly a colourful phrasing. “But do you know a good one?”

“A good one? No such thing. Some are just more effective at what they do than others. I’d say that—and forgive me, I’m generalizing here based on manners and appearance—a weasel willing to work for your level of coin might be Sam Swan. He’s down the street. Go out the door, turn right and keep walking until you get to a locale with that name on the sign. You’ll probably see some, let’s say, undesirable elements gathered at his door, but Sam himself isn’t a bad sort for a weasel.”

“I’m sorry, is a lawyer a ‘weasel’?”

The innkeeper laughs (reminding me briefly of my nightmare). “Well, they sure as sorts ain’t any more respectable animal, now are they?”

I thank him, pay for the meal and follow his directions.

They turn out to be accurate, because a quarter of an hour later I come to a building above which hangs a sign announcing: “Samuel Swan, Barrister & Solicitor.” (It hangs just below another sign, which says: “Madame Lily’s House of Pleasings,” with a hand-painted addition: “open dusk to dawn.”)

Contrary to what the innkeeper said, there is absolutely no one outside.

I wait a bit and knock.

When there’s no answer, I slowly open the door and walk in.

“Greetings,” a man says almost immediately. He’s seated behind a desk, reclined, removing his leather-booted feet from it. “May I help you?”

“I'm looking for a Mr Swan,” I say.

“You a runner?” he asks. He has a large, round head, a small nose and gold-rimmed glasses. His cheeks are pink. He resembles in many ways a soft pig.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t know what that means,” I say.

“Then you’re not one. Come in, sit down.” He motions to a chair on the opposite side of the desk from him. The desk is covered in parchments, papers. A few quills, bottles of ink. His short, fat fingers are stained with it. After I sit—uneasily, looking around: at the framed diploma on the walls, the bookshelves covered in dust, the spiderwebs in the corners, and the spiders in them, staring back at me—he says: “How old are you and what’s your grievance?”

“Do I pay you… per answer?”

I curse myself for spending so much on that shabby room at the inn.

Samuel Swan laughs. “Spoken like a cit with past experience in the legal field. The initial consult is free. You pay if I decide to take you on as client.”

In that case, “I’m seventeen and my grievance is related to game mechanics. But I’m not a ‘cit.’ At least I don’t think so. I’m not from the city but from a nearby village.”

“Ah, a yoke—but that’s what we call a pejorative term—so I’m going to go ahead and call you a cit anyway. Anyone who’s in the city’s a cit unless they act like a yoke, at which point it doesn’t matter where they’re from. Make sense?”

I nod.

“Good. Now tell me about this ‘game mechanics’ grievance.”

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

I explain the whole situation to him. He listens attentively, then picks up one of the quills on his desk, dips it into an inkwell, chooses one of the many sheets of paper before him and says, “Mind showing me your quest log?”

I oblige him.

“Tell the Godhead a sad story and cause Him to cry,” he says, speaking each word slowly while he writes it down. Then he sits looking over what he wrote, the gears in his mind obviously grinding, his eyes darting back and forth, his tongue from time to time escaping from between his lips. Finally: “Here’s what I’m thinking. This is an issue of mechanical interpretation. The quest goal wasn’t well drafted—although that’s now well and past being beside the point. What we do have is a compound goal. Two conditions needed to be met: you needed to tell the Godhead a sad story and you needed to cause the Godhead to cry. Clearly the game does not feel you met both those conditions. Based on what you told me the Godhead did cry, so the issue has to be with the first condition: the telling of the sad story. Now, notice the quest doesn’t say the story itself has to make the Godhead cry. It’s not: ‘Tell the Godhead a sad story which makes Him cry,’ although that might result in some interesting interpretation issues in itself—but I digress. You told me that you went up to the Godhead’s ear with the intention of telling a sad story, the Tragedy of Randy and Gertrude, and that you in fact began telling that story, but that the Godhead interrupted you because the Godhead felt the story wasn’t any good.

“Let’s deal with the idea of sadness first. What is a sad story? Is it a story the teller believes is sad, a story the audience believes is sad, or is there some objective measure of sad? I think there’s an argument for each of those in theory, but in practice you get into evidentiary problems. Do we just take your word that you believed a story to be a sad one? If so, then a liar can make the world’s greatest comedy into a sad story, legally speaking. That would be perverse. What about the audience? Do we take their word or do we go by their physical reaction? What if there’s an audience of more than one and its members don’t agree? I know in your case the audience was one, but I hope you appreciate the difficulty. An objective measure would surely be best, but can we arrive at one? The definition of sad seems to me to necessarily include both objective and subjective elements. Having said that, I don’t think sadness is where you’ve run into complications.

“Let’s assume, for the moment, that the Tragedy of Randy and Gertrude was a sad story. That brings us to the verb tell and, probably most importantly, to the noun story. You began telling the Tragedy of Randy of Gertrude—yet you didn’t finish telling it. Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“You moved on from telling the Tragedy of Randy and Gertrude to the telling of your life, essentially. Correct?”

“Yes.”

“Two things here. One, because you didn’t finish telling the Tragedy of Randy and Getrude, the story was told incompletely. So, I wonder: is an incomplete story nevertheless a story, or are there some basic elements that need to exist for it to be a story. I would suggest the latter because imagine a story that’s told, and with each telling it’s shortened by one line—the final line. If that story remains a story forever, you eventually reach the absurdity of a ‘story’ that is nothing but an opening line. ‘Once upon a time there was a man.’ That cannot, by itself, be a story even if it’s derived from something that was a story. Hence, I say that there must be something akin to a story minimum. Beginning, middle and end. Character, plot, setting, theme. Five acts. Three acts. Something. If you had told a third of the story and summarised the rest, you may have a case. As it stands, I don’t believe you can successfully argue that what you told the Godhead was a sad story.

“The second thing to consider is: was your life story a sad story? Here we get into the line between fiction and non-fiction. Can the telling of something that actually happened be considered a story, or does a story necessarily have to be fictional; and if the actual truth is not a story, how fictionalized must a telling be to make it a story? Let me ask you this, did you make anything up, embellish, conceal, add, subtract?”

“I don’t believe I did,” I say.

“Let’s assume then that what you told the Godhead that made him cry tears of laughter—the telling about that period of your life, a few days really—was a story. I hope you see the complexities here, by the way, because now we must circle back to our initial consideration of sadness. Was it a sad story? If we remember our three possibilities for building an evidentiary basis of sadness, we must, unfortunately, conclude that any objective measure of sadness remains unknown to us, that you did not intend the story to be a sad one, and that the Godhead found the story funny.” Here, Samuel Swan takes a brief pause. “But does the finding that something is funny, which I think we must concede on the basis of the Godhead’s intense reaction, preclude that it is also sad. Are sadness and humour mutually exclusive? Can a story be both? I could see an argument made for the proposition that a sad story (by some measure) could induce laughter and even tears of laughter in an audience. If we could make that argument, I think you might have a case.”

My head is spinning worse than after my level-up hangover.

“So I could challenge the decision not to award me the completion of my quest?” I ask.

“In theory, yes. Realistically, we would need to find someone—an expert in narratives, or in tragedies, for example—to attest to the inherent sadness of that part of your life which you told the Godhead. We might even try to draw a parallel between the events on which you based your story and some classically famous sad story. If x, which everyone agrees is sad, is similar to y, then y is also sad. Make sense? Or we would need you to tell the same story to someone else, ideally to a group of people, who would then agree in some way that the story is sad. Thereby we would be attempting our objective measure of sadness.”

“But how could I prove that the story I told those people is the same one I told the Godhead?”

Samuel Swan scratches his chin. “Boy, now you’re thinking like a lawyer. That is a fascinating question. I assume you could say the stories are the same, but that has minimal value. You could also tell the story to your new audience while in the presence of the Godhead, who, although involved in the initial telling of the story, presumably has no dog, so to speak, in the race, so could be relied on to tell the truth. That said, the Godhead is a giant head carved out of stone, so the Godhead could not come here, say, to my office, and we would need to bring this new audience to the Godhead, which is a logistical headache—no pun intended. And how would you convince these people to go way out to the yokes in Thask and listen to a story while suspended in the air on some rickety old platform? You would have to pay them, and if you do pay them, that there's a strike against their objectivity because they’re in your proverbial pocket. We’d have to engage another party, an objective one, to arrange the entire enterprise. I mean, it’s doable. It’s certainly doable. We’d have a right crack at it. It might even be interesting. Interpretation issues usually are. But how much coin do you have to spend on this, my dear boy?”

I tell him.

He stares at me rather dumbly. “Is that how much you have for legal matters—or how much you have in total for everything, food, board, clothing, survival?”

“For everything,” I say.

“Then why didn’t you lead with that? There’s nothing I can do for you for that amount of coin. There’s nothing anyone can do for that amount.”

“You didn’t ask.”

And, at this, Samuel Swan bursts out laughing, only a little less loudly than the Godhead had after I’d told him the story of my life. “That is absolutely correct! You asked a question about payment. I said my consult is free, and here we are still consulting. You didn’t flash coin at me. You didn’t even tell me your name, and I got carried away yapping. I must say, you got me going on the subject. It’s not often I get a case involving game mechanics or interpretation. Usually it’s criminal matters, family matters. Business disputes. Wills. And so on.”

“My name is Grom, by the way.”

“Ah, Grom. A fine name. Well, I like you, Grom. Where are you staying, and are you staying long? I saw you have another quest in your log.”

I tell him the name of the inn and about my pursuit of Eduard.

“I have a proposition for you,” says Samuel Swan. “There are people in the city who make it their business to know who comes and goes. I may know some of them. I may bring your Eduard to their attention. They also have contacts in other cities. Eventually someone sees, another tells and these things get back to me. In exchange—and because you are plainly in need of coin—I offer you my office as lodgings and I make to you an offer of employment, short-term if that suits you better. But I like your sparsity with words and the sharpness of your mind. I also like that you don’t interrupt. I’ve won many a legal case by simply letting a man speak his mind to his own detriment.”

I admit that I don’t like the city and express my fear that if I stay here for too long Eduard may travel beyond where I can ever reach him.

“No true cit likes the city, Grom. We all hate it, yet we can’t get away because we’ve become a part of it. The city is where people are. Where quests are. Where coin is. You helped the villagers of Thask, and what did you get for it, some vegetables? If you want to quest—the city is where you have to be. As for the man you’re after getting too far away. The more you travel, the more you understand there are very few places a man can go to escape. Remember too that your quest is about retrieving a sword. You don’t need to get it from Eduard yourself. If you stay here and you learn where Eduard is, you can pay someone to acquire the sword for you. From the city you have reach.

“Besides, what’s your alternative, head back into the backcountry with your pack and what’s left of the coins your parents gave you and hope to catch, on foot, someone who may have, at some point, gone in a particular direction? I don’t need to tell you the choice is yours–but I know you’re smart enough to know a bad plan when you see one. And if you do stay in the city, how many more nights can you afford to stay in that inn of yours? What happens after that, sleeping in the streets? I know my clientele and I wouldn’t advise that for someone of your age and inexperience. Not that you asked for my advice in life—just, legally, about a quest—but one surely is tied up with the other, the quest being about a story, and the story being about your life, and this office is warmer and safer than the streets, and you’ll need a job sooner rather than later so why not kill the proverbial two birds with this one stone I’m offering. Stay awhile, work awhile. Find quests. Gain game experience. Gain life experience. So what do you say, Grom? Make sense?”