When Rick emerged the next morning, Slate and Gambit were seated by the fire discussing questing. There was a pot of something hot brewing, but when Rick tried it, it tasted nothing like coffee. He spat the remains out and dumped the cup into the fire. "What is this crap?"

Slate shrugged. "I have no idea. I've never met anyone that likes it. But every time a campfire spawns, there's a pot of it hanging over the coals from one of these doohickeys." He pointed at the tripod arrangement. "Nobody drinks the stuff, so no one I've met really knows what it's for. Not that I meet that many people that live in encampments," he added, rubbing the back of his head.

Daniel came down a minute later and tried the coffee. He grimaced but didn’t spit it out. “I’ve had worse.”

Gambit asked “Were you up all night?”

Daniel nodded as he took another swig of the ‘coffee’. He didn’t wince this time.

“Daniel had some ideas for traps he wanted to try,” Gambit told Rick.

“Really? Traps are…” Rick said. He hesitate, not wanting to dampen Daniel’s enthusiasm. “Hard to use in most battles,” he finished.

"Yeah, but what about those – what did you call them, patrols? We don't even have to get close if we can take these things out with traps," Daniel said. “You should see what I came up with. I took the trap that shot tar—the one that..." He hesitated and had the good grace to look embarrassed. "...that your girlfriend triggered and..."

"My ex-girlfriend," Rick muttered, but no-one seemed to pay attention.

"...I added some extra effects to it. Just wait till you see. It's freaking awesome."

Gambit and Rick exchanged a look. They both knew getting mobs to path straight into a trap was tedious and often took longer than outright killing them. If the mobs were so weak that the trap would defeat them immediately, killing them the old-fashioned way was quicker.

Rick tried to get the conversation with Sam out of his head, but something about it was bothering him, and he couldn't let it go. "Slate, you said there were ways to get more than five in a party?"

Slate looked up from his conversation with Gambit. "Well, no, not in a party. Parties are only five."

"I mean here." Rick circled his fingers around. "In the caravan."

"No. You must be thinking of guilds. If we get an invite to one of those, you can join your caravan to another and be part of a larger group. Those can only be created with a token from an end-of-expansion-tier dungeon."

"End of expansion?" Rick asked.

"Yeah, you know, the best dungeon on the planet," Gambit threw in.

Rick shook his head. "No, I mean sooner than that. Something we could get now."

"Oh, you mean an enclave. Yeah, if you get a token that upgrades your caravan to an enclave, then it unlocks all kinds of features." Slate shrugged. "But even those are rare drops from very specific bosses."

Rick mulled it over. "Dungeon bosses, right?” Was Technique planning to go into a dungeon soon? Was that why Pratt thought he could invite Sam soon?

Slate shrugged his lower arms. "Dungeon bosses or summoned bosses or world bosses. I don't have a full list, but—"

"Can you ask around?" Rick interrupted. "See if you can find out? I think there might be one around here that drops a token like that."

“Sure, I guess." Slate seemed confused by Rick's request.

"But to use a token like that," Rick pressed on, making sure he understood the fine print, "you would need to have a caravan."

"Of course," Slate said. "It's a caravan upgrade token."

As far as Rick knew, Technique didn't have a caravan. Had that changed? If they had gone back to Stone Spire, would Technique find a duplicate of the Mars crew that his own party had picked up? Or would there be some other group of NPCs providing that function? Maybe there were other points to pick up caravans?

He asked about it, and Slate nodded. "That's right. Couple different places will have a quest that will get you a caravan. Who it'll be?" He shrugged. "I don't know. I was surprised to see your humans."

Daniel's head jerked up. "They're not our humans. I mean—"

Slate held up several hands to ward off his sudden anger. "No, I just mean humans like you, from wherever you're from."

"So, what are we doing today?" Rick asked, changing the subject.

Gambit leaned forward. "We've been discussing, and we need gear." Rick nodded but let Gambit continue. "Random drops could be a thing, but Slate says this faction system will earn us several pieces of loot."

"Do we know what kind?" Rick asked.

Slate nodded. "Yes, it's in your reputation interface." He walked Rick through where to find the menu. Sure enough, under the [Angels’ Landing Farmers] faction was a list of rewards. At the bottom of the list was a pair of items, an amulet and a pair of gloves.

"There's some boots that up my dodge, and gloves that'll make my attacks hit harder," Gambit said.

Rick didn't see either of those two. The two pieces he did see looked appropriate for a caster. Apparently, the system was only showing rewards he could use. That was nice. Nothing was more frustrating than a long reputation grind where the rewards were garbage—or were overpowered but forced you to play a style that wasn't of your choosing.

"So, back to the village for more daily quests?" Rick asked.

Slate didn't seem convinced. "Actually, no." Slate frowned, leaning back and folding both sets of arms. He didn't seem to like that idea. "The daily quest is fine, but then you would have to go up against that war machine again. But if you look at your quest log, the ones that are still listed are part of the chain and not repeatable.”

Gambit was nodding. “If you look, the ‘Tracing the Source of the Corruption’ quest is still there. We completed the ‘Defend the Village’ quest, but the bunny one is gone, too."

Rick pulled up his quest list. Sure enough, the rest of the quests were gone, but the 'Investigating the Source of the Corruption' quest was still there, listed as on Phase 3.

"So you're saying if we focus on that one, we might be able to avoid the robot?" Rick asked.

Slate uncrossed one pair of arms. "You can get that rabbit quest again, and you can get the one to defend the village, but..." He hesitated.

Gambit jumped in. "But that war machine was a freaking killer, and we got lucky."

Rick gritted his teeth but didn't respond. Gambit made it sound like a slight on his healing, but he told himself that wasn't what Gambit had meant. The Mongolian didn't seem to notice his turmoil.

"We don't have enough gear," Gambit continued. "Our health pools just aren't big enough. Even if you had been able to shield all of us, it was too much of a roll of the dice. Any of those hits might have killed one of us. That's not the kind of quest we should be playing around with. We should focus on things that are a little bit safer until we're geared up."

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

What he was suggesting made sense, but it still rankled Rick. "We can't play it safe forever," he said. "Not if we're going to go into dungeons and take down serious bosses."

Gambit shrugged. "Sure. But we're not going to do that when we're effectively naked and just asking to be one-shot."

Rick didn't answer. He knew Gambit was right. He was just being grumpy. Sam's words the day before had hurt, and his failure in the healing trial had done nothing to make him feel better. He needed to get his head in the game.

"All right," Rick said. "But we should pick up those dailies just in case."

Slate looked confused. "What do you mean, 'just in case'? I thought we agreed you shouldn't go back after those."

"Sure," Rick replied. "But we never know what might get triggered."

Gambit nodded in agreement. "Like when we happened across that war machine yesterday. We defended the village because it seemed like the thing to do, but it gave us a big wallop of reputation."

When they arrived back at the village, Rick was impressed to see that there was no sign of the fight from the day before. All the buildings were rebuilt just as they had been when the party first arrived. After a minute of looking around he spotted two workmen nailing up a shutter and someone else fiddling with a crane—one of the convertible trebuchets. There had been similar activity around town the day before, but Rick had not connected it with an attack.

The farmer and his wife greeted them with almost the same dialogue as the day before. The farmer thanked them for protecting the village and begged them to do it again. His wife asked how well they were getting on with tracing the source of the corruption. Their son, as before, couldn't care less about the rabbit quest. But when Rick asked him about the stuffed animal, the boy was relieved to relay the quest and then scampered off to go play with his boat.

No new quests presented themselves at the edge of the village. Rick stopped and looked toward the fields they had fought in the day before. On his mini-map, only the rabbit quest and the 'Defend the Village' quest indicated that direction. The one to investigate the corruption was highlighting an area they had not explored farther out.

“Guess that’s where we’re going,” Gambit said, and shouldered past Rick onto the road.

They skirted the edge of the watery fields as they worked their way toward the point marked on their map. A canal ran along the north side of the fields, carrying water from the main canal out to the outer fields. They followed along it until it ended where the farm fields reached the desert, Rick keeping alert for any sign of enemies, human or otherwise. They were about a quarter of a mile north of where they had encountered Team Technique. Rick wasn’t certain about going cross country, but the quest was farther along, so there was nothing for it. They weaved around and over a series of water diversion berms, then down into a dry wash.

As they rounded a bend in the wash, someone shouted.

Two humans stood in a tiny makeshift camp. One of them waved and called, "Hey, humans!"

“More astronauts!” Daniel exclaimed, hurrying out ahead of Rick and Gambit just as Rick opened his mouth to urge caution. But Daniel was right; they were clearly survivors of the Mars expedition. The pair approached cautiously, the guy out in front of his female ally. They were both a little on the short side, with the excellent physique required by NASA. The man looked at least partly Asian, with close-cropped dark hair and epicanthal folds around his eyes; the woman’s skin was a rich brown, her shining dark hair back in a braid, and Rick wasn’t sure if she looked Hispanic or Indian.

The pair hurried forward and everyone exchanged names and contact information. The guy was Theo Lee; the woman, Nia Patel.

“You’re not from the expedition,” Theo said, after they’d sorted out the names. “Where’d you come from?”

Rick gave them a quick rundown. “I guess we had more warning than you did, at least.”

“You can say that again,” Theo said, shaking his head. “Man.The first night here was chaos. We went straight from our beds into a lizard attack. Seems silly looking back now—those things were only level ones, but they ripped through us like we were made of paper."

“After the initial attack, the group was split up," Nia added. "We only lost a few in the initial attack, but then some of those velociraptors showed up."

"Those weren't that close to the initial starting hill," Gambit commented.

"Assuming they started in the same place as us," Rick threw in.

Theo shrugged. "Someone probably ran and aggroed them. There were a lot of us and a lot of running around that night."

"We got away," Nia said, "out into the desert. I knew not to run around a lot, or we would just pulled something else. So we found a place where nothing new was spawning and waited until morning. By then, there was no sign of our group—no tracks or any trace they had even been there."

"Did you find any after that?" Rick asked. "We've run into several."

"Really?" Nia was eager. "Who?"

"Dr. Schneider, Dr. Martel" Gambit said, ticking off the other names. "And Dr. Wilkins."

"Oh yeah, Sam," Theo said, nodding. "We've seen her around several times since. She's been doing pretty well for herself. But the rest? No, we didn't see them."

"How about Team Technique?" Rick asked.

The two looked at each other.

"Team Technique?" Theo asked. " Aren’t they an esports team? Why would they be here?"

Nia smacked Theo on the shoulder. "Rick used to be on Team Technique, don't you remember?"

"Oh yeah," Theo said. "Sam talked about you all the time. She was livid when that tournament thing happened."

Rick gritted his teeth. He didn't want to hear about how disappointed his ex-girlfriend was in his exploits.

"She was ready to rip those judges a new one," Theo continued. "I couldn't believe some of the stuff she said."

"Really? The judges?" Rick asked.

Theo nodded. "Yeah, she said they were blind idiots that didn't know the rules. She used to talk about you all the time before that, but after..." He shrugged.

Rick wanted to mull over this new information, but was distracted by Nia’s next words. "There's another group of humans down the river.”

"Survivors, we mean," Theo clarified. "They're all NPCs at a little quest hub off the canal."

"Really? NPCs?" Rick asked.

The Theo nodded. "Yeah, have you noticed? Anyone that gets killed turns into an NPC."

"You mean an NCP," Daniel corrected.

Theo shook his head vigorously. "No way. They can suck me into this crazy place, but they can't make me use their dumb terminology. NPCs are in everything. It's universal."

Daniel looked skeptical but dropped the topic.

"So there's just the two of you?" Rick asked. They nodded.

"Is your encampment?" Gambit asked. “Don’t you need more for an encampment?”

The two looked strangely embarrassed, like they’d been caught half-dressed by a parent. Finally Nia said, “It’s Theo’s.”

Rick looked back and forth between them when suddenly it hit him. Theo was an NPC.

“Whoa! Oh sorry.”

Theo scratched the back of his head. “It’s no big deal really. We were running quests for the first couple weeks. But then we tried to get into a dungeon. We had been exploring the menus and saw the system there.”

“How did you get one so fast without a healer or tank?”

Again, the embarrassed looks were exchanged.

“It was Sam,” Nia said. There was something like anger in her voice. “We found her in town and queued up together with her as tank. But the healer we got, this Rork, simply couldn't keep up. We made it through the first few trash packs, then the first boss just ripped us to pieces. I got away, but Theo here didn’t make it… I came back out here next day and Theo was an NPC.”

Theo sheepishly rubbed the back of his head. “Yeah, there wasn't much for it after that. I just came to with the urge to give out quest clues.”

His voice changed abruptly. "Are you investigating the source of the corruption? I found something very strange here in this embankment."

Nia sighed but didn't interrupt him.

Theo looked at Rick intently, waiting for a response in the characteristic way the NCPs did.

"Uh, yeah, we are looking for the source of the corruption. What can you tell us about what you found?"

Theo picked up his shovel and prodded at the dirt of the embankment.

Sand cascaded down to leaving a hole that revealed a shining patch of green metal, a little bigger than his hand, with more clearly buried. He tapped it with the end of his shovel and it gave a metallic ring. “This - I think this is part of an old war machine. I think this is part of an old war machine. A flash flood must have unearthed it.” He turned and pointed down the water course, the dry water course. “You can see there's not as many plants and shrubs that way, and what are there are all dried up.”

Rick squinted in the direction he was pointing. Most of the desert shrubs looked dried up, to him. After looking back and forth, upstream and down, he realized Theo was right. The ones downstream of this relic didn't look as healthy.

“I think something coming from the robots is poisoning the ground. That would explain what's happening with the farm fields. The miners are digging up war machines out in the desert. When it rains, the corruption flows into the fields.”

Theo stopped. Nia stayed silent. Theo’s expression relaxed just as a pop-up appeared in Rick's interface.

[Trace the source of the corruption phase 3 complete]

Theo signed, “Oh man, it feels good to get that out. I told Sam everything when she arrived, but nobody else has come along to do the quest. It's really bizarre. Like a hiccup that you know is coming. It's there, lurking, and you just know it'll spring.”

Nia sighed. “You see what this system does?” She shook her head.

Theo sighed. “It's not that bad, and it beats being dead. Look, you don't have to stay with me forever. I'm stuck. You don't have to be.”

Nia had her arms wide and looked to Rick and the others. “You see? Whatever it's done to him makes him satisfied with this – this life.” She spat the last word, her voice filled with despair. I can't just leave him.”

“You have to,” Theo said, “you have to go on.” He was looking intently at Nia, and she wasn’t looking at him. “Look, this is the best chance you’re going to get. They have an empty slot in their party, they know what they’re doing – go on, get out of here.”

Nia shook her head furiously, her eyes starting to tear up. “No way.”

“You still have a future, you have to try –"

Rick held up a hand. “Hang on. What if there was a third option?” he asked as he pulled up his retinue interface.