"So you could add Theo to your retinue and we could both get out of here?” Nia sounded gleeful. “Heck yeah, sign us up.”

“I don’t know…” Theo said, frowning. "Will I still be able to tell people about this quest when I'm done?" There was an odd note in his voice. Rick suspected he was being influenced by the system.

"You won't need to. The system will assign someone else to do it."

"But what if they don't do a good job?" Theo folded his arms across his chest. “Can’t take that chance. I've been waiting for someone to help me dig this out, so we can figure out the problem. I bet the old hermit that lives in the city could help us. She knows more about ancient artifacts than anyone."

"Who's that?" Rick asked.

"Who's who?" Theo responded, sounding peeved.

"The hermit in the ruined city?"

Theo shrugged. "I have no idea. I just know she's an expert in these things." As he spoke, his voice shifted back and forth between the robotic intonations of the system controlling him and his normal voice.

Rick opened his mouth and then closed it again. He was arguing with the system, not with Theo, and that was pointless.

Instead he just pulled up the retinue interface and selected "Recruit." If it worked like it had for the others, Theo would get a system prompt to make a choice.

Theo jerked in surprise, and when he spoke, the hesitancy was gone. "Whoa! You mean for real I can join your team? This is incredible!" As he finished speaking, he vanished.

Nia jumped as though stuck with a pin. She looked around. "Where did he go?"

"He’s fine, it's normal," Gambit assured her.

"He's with our caravan now," Rick explained. "It's back in Angels’ Landing."

"Where exactly?" she asked.

"Just outside of town. Literally, we're just beside the smithy."

She frowned. "We were just there this morning. I didn't see anything like that."

The party exchanged a look.

"I think it only shows up for those that are in our party," Daniel commented.

"Does that mean I'll have to join your party?" Nia asked sharply.

"Uh," Rick stammered. "Yeah, that's the idea, isn't it? I thought you guys wanted to join us."

"I wanted to join your caravan, but I'm not sure about questing with you guys. I've kind of been enjoying doing them on my own." Her stubborn expression was growing more intent by the moment.

Rick was taken aback. "Questing on your own?" He guessed he understood the appeal, but he had been so focused on getting the party prepared for dungeons and more difficult content that he hadn't seriously considered going solo. It seemed risky; one wrong move and you’d be an NCP.

"What we really need is another person to do damage in dungeons, or perhaps even tank for us," Gambit put in.

Rick shot him a frown. He wanted Sam to do the tanking. If they got some other tank, she wouldn’t want to join them. But he didn't want to bring that up just now and further confuse matters. They needed to get Nia on board.

Gambit gave him an eyeroll, which only annoyed Rick more. "We need a full team to get off the planet. That’s what you want, right? And we’ll help make sure Theo gets out of here. You can come keep an eye on him, make sure he doesn’t get brainwashed by the system."

Nia sighed, her expression lightening a bit. "All right, but I can change my mind any time, right? And go my own way?"

Rick nodded. "Sure." He sent her an invite, and a moment later, Nia joined as their fourth party member.

"And we're supposed to be able to get other players in the retinue," Daniel put in. “You wouldn’t have to stay with the party then. You could stay at camp.”

Gambit and Rick both looked at him in surprise.

Daniel shrugged. "I've been talking to Slate, and he said that one of the upgrades lets you do that. It's like you can turn the party into a larger organization. What do you call it?"

"A guild," Gambit and Rick said together.

Daniel nodded. "Yeah, that's what he called it."

"I really need to talk to our guide more," Rick muttered.

Nia cleared her throat. "Can I go back and make sure Theo got there okay."

"Sure, but we're already on this quest," Rick pointed at the robot part sticking out of the bank beside her. "The one he gave us. Can we just do that first?"

Nia hesitated. She really seemed worried about Theo. Was there something between them?

"Okay," she said finally. “I guess. Sure.”

The next step of the quest was to dig the broken robot part out of the bank. Theo's shovel was still lying on the bottom of the wash. Gambit picked it up and set to work. Rick only had his hands to dig with, so he stayed out of Gambit's way as he dug into the hard packed sand and gravel. Large chunks of it collapsed under his shovel, and soon he had excavated the length of gleaming metal. It was an arm about four feet long, tipped with metal fingers.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

As the arm tumbled free, a pop-up appeared.

[Investigate the source of the corruption: Stage three. You have found the remains of an ancient war machine. Take it to the hermit. Perhaps she would know more about it.]

Rick consulted his mini-map, and there was a dot in an unexplored area farther to the west. He found a higher point in the wash and peered over the edge. Sure enough, the mesa-shaped crashed city loomed in the west, its empty windows and balconies as dead as ever.

"Do we have to actually go in there?" Daniel asked.

Nia shook her head. "I don't think so. I didn't complete this quest, but I got close enough to see his cave. It's at the edge of the city."

The dot on the map didn't look very far off.

"You didn't complete it? Why not?"

Nia gave a little shudder. "I tried, but... there's a lot of robots around the city. And they're pretty nasty. I am ranged DPS but my attacks mostly bounced right off them."

Gambit cracked his knuckles. "I bet we can take them. That’s the power of a group, we can take on greater challenges.”

Now it was Rick’s turn to eyeroll. Gambit was laying it on pretty thick.

Daniel didn't look as confident so Rick took the diplomatic approach. "Well, let's get a bit closer and take a look at these robots. We can decide from there."

Nia nodded hesitantly. They all started up the wash until they came to a place where the bank was less steep and climbed out.

They crossed two rolling hills. The gravelly terrain was dotted by scrub brush. Unlike the sage and mesquite of the American West, there was more of the tiny barrel-shaped bushes, along with some new varieties they hadn't seen before, low-slung cactusoids with broad patches of round black spheres that covered an area on the ground.

Rick looked at one more closely and realized they were connected by tendrils. When Gambit stepped on one, the spheres popped and released a foul-smelling, sticky liquid that clung to his shoe. After that, the party went well out of their way to avoid the patches, some of which spread across a dozen square yards.

The mesa loomed higher and higher. Finally, they topped a ridge and saw its base a hundred yards off. On Earth, the bottom of a mesa was usually a wide skirt of talus sloping down at a steep but climbable angle. The steep cliffs of the mesa walls only started above the talus slope, which was formed from the stones that eroded off of those cliffs.

Here, the mesa came straight down in a sheer wall to the floor of the desert. Up close, its resemblance to a natural geographic feature vanished, and its true nature as a city that had fallen from the sky was undeniable.

The windows set into the wall were haphazardly distributed. Here and there, the openings on one floor seemed to be in a line, while elsewhere, they were scattered up and down in ways that couldn't correspond to the floors of a building back on Earth.

Bushes and Martian trees grew in patches along the base of the city, and the robots were everywhere. The brush close to the mesa had been trampled flat in a thousand crisscrossing pathways.

The nearest robot was fifty yards away, stomping through the desert, made of the same shining green metal as the debris they’d removed. It was 10 feet tall with arms that dangled down to its knees. The wide, low head looked like it had been bashed from above and flattened to the sides. The gap between the two halves of its head housed a glowing red eye that roved back and forth around the edge of the skull, peering backward and forward as it ceaselessly patrolled the area.

The robot kept going, without slowing or turning. As its path led around the bulk of the mesa, two more robots stomped into view, one ahead of the other, from the direction the first robot was disappearing. They stomped past Rick’s party and continued on their way. No sooner were they past than a fourth appeared.

"I see what you mean. There do seem to be a lot of them," Rick told Nia. He’d been hoping they could lure the robots away one at a time and kill them, but with their paths so tightly interwoven, that seemed unlikely to work.

"And they're really hard to kill," Nia added. "I tried pulling one away and fighting it on my own, but even one-on-one, it was a hell of a battle. I thought I had it and then two more appeared and nearly had me."

"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" Daniel asked, sounding eager. The soldier was smiling and rubbing his hands together.

Gambit frowned. "I think so, but where are we going to find a herd of goats and fifty meters of rope?"

The other three turned to look at the Mongolian. After a moment, he shrugged. "What? I thought the idea had merit."

Daniel looked confused. "No, I was just thinking about traps."

Rick looked back at the robots and then at the paths on the ground left by their tramping feet.

"I think he might be on to something. What have you got for us, Daniel?"

Daniel took the lead, and Rick was glad to let him, though he tossed in a few suggestions of his own here. This job needed an EOD’s instincts more than it needed gamer logic.

First, they worked their way close enough to find out how close they could get before a patrolling robot would aggro on them. Rather than fighting it, they just turned and ran, Rick watching carefully to see where the robot gave up the chase.

With their aggro radius and leash range established, Daniel set to work back in the wash a few hundred yards away. He practiced running forward roughly the right distance, setting his trap, and then racing back.

"Time?” he demanded after the fourth test.

Rick wearily read off the system time.

“Not good enough. I can shave off four seconds –”

“You’ve got the timing,” Gambit said. “We’ll start small. Let’s see if we can do this at all. If you mess up Rick will heal you up before they can murder you,” he added, with a confidence Rick wasn’t feeling.

Nia had her eye on the sky. “This is taking too long. I want to get back and check on Theo.”

“He’s fine,” Rick assured her. “I asked Slate in chat. He’s at the camp settling in. Let’s just see if this works or not.”

“All right," Daniel said. "Once it hits the trap, we'll move forward and engage. We need to hit it hard and fast before another one shows up."

They settled in to wait for a robot on its own. Two more passed before they were satisfied with the gap between patrols.

“Go!” Gambit urged.

Daniel ran forward and set his trap. The contraption looked like someone had run a stack of spears through a buzz saw and lashed them to several clay jars. It made no sense to Rick, but he wasn't an expert in this system's trap-making, so he held his tongue and waited for the results. As soon as the trap was set it faded from his view and all he could see was an orange triangle icon glowing on the ground. The robot patrolled forward as Daniel raced back to the party. They all stood ready. Gambit had his sword drawn, and Rick's knife was in his hand.

Nia had a Gatling blowgun. Rick only got a glance at it as she pulled it out before he had to pay attention to what the robot was doing. But it appeared to be a cluster of straws with a tiny crank on the side. She stuck it in her mouth and stood ready.

They needn't have bothered. When the robot stepped on the trap, it exploded in a cloud of black spray. Spikes shot up out of the ground and impaled the machine. For a moment, it stood there, caught on the spikes, unmoving, as the black substance dripped down it.

"That's funny," Daniel said. "There was supposed to be a kaboom."

An instant later the robot vanished in a ball of fire. The concussion knocked Rick back two steps and pelted the whole party with burning chunks of tar. Where they hit exposed skin, they smoldered painfully, and everyone jumped around, smacking them out and brushing them off. Except Daniel, who stood there, grinning at the crater his contraption had left behind.