Rick and the team went down the stairs. At the bottom was a short, undecorated hall that led to a heavy door with a slot at eye level.

"Wow, it really is a speakeasy," Daniel said.

"Yeah, they've got some restaurants like that in Vegas with a peephole and everything. It's pretty fun," Rick replied.

Gambit got to the door first and pounded on it with a broad fist. The slot slid open with a scrape.

"Who is it?"

Rick leaned forward to peer through, and Gambit tilted his head to join him. Daniel, curious, crowded in from behind.

"Holy shit, it's combat players!" the voice inside said.

The slot slammed closed, and a muffled voice could be heard yelling, "It's combat players!" There was a murmur of other voices, lower and indistinct.

"Should we bash it open?" Gambit asked, but then the door rattled and clanked and opened.

"Welcome, welcome." A heavy-set Rork held the door wide and gestured for them to enter.

The team glanced at each other, shrugged, and went in.

They stopped just inside the door.

"Er, Hello." Rick said.

Craggy faces looked at them wide-eyed from several booths around the room. The place was dimly-lit with a scattering of flickering lights. The patrons had a surprised and embarrassed air, like a teen party when the lights were flipped on. Some of the more drunk patrons were still slumped over. One short-statured Rork was slumped on the bar, and the bartender was shaking him.

"Whash dat?" the drunken voice slurred.

"There's players! You gotta get up!"

"Whasat? Players? We's all players," the drunk insisted

“Combat players!"

Rick asked the bouncer. "Do you know if there are any game guides around?"

The slumped figure at the bar jerked erect like he’d been stabbed with a pin. His head came around with wide eyes filled with surprise and something else. Hope? Eagerness? It was impossible to read the Rorks’s leathery faces.

Or maybe not, Rick thought, as an unmistakable air of horror filled the drunk’s face.

"Oh shit, oh shit! Stay back, stay back!" He held up all four hands as if to ward them off. His sudden motion upset the bar stool, and he backed into it and tripped, staggering. Seconds later, he recovered his balance and bolted for the back door to the side of the bar that went who knows where. The drunk Rork missed it slightly, bounced off the door frame, fumbled it open, and vanished, still screaming "Oh shit, stay away!"

The whole team stared after him in surprise as the announcement popped up.

[Quest update: Your game guide has fled the premises. To complete the quest, you must catch him.]

Rick looked at Gambit. They both took off for the back of the room.

"What? What's going on?" Daniel called after them.

"Stay here!" Rick shouted over his shoulder. "Ask the barkeep if he knows where this guy lives!"

Gambit made it through the door in front of him, and an instant later they rushed into the dark beyond. They pelted down a winding tunnel, passing alcoves on either side that held barrels labeled with three X's. Far ahead down the echoing corridor, they could hear the wailing voice, "Stay back!"

Gambit pounded down the hall, and Rick was right on his heels.

They came to a sharp bend and for a second, they paused, panting, though Rick realized he wasn't actually out of breath. It was more a force of habit. Announcements popped up.

[Plus one to running!]

[Plus one to endurance!]

"How's endurance different than stamina?" Rick asked.

"I still hear him!" Gambit shouted and took off down the tunnel to the right.

Rick followed as the tunnel grew more rough and cave-like. Then it widened slightly, and they were running through an actual cavern. Stalactites hung down from the ceiling, and stalagmites rose up from the floor to meet them, some merging into columns. Gambit dodged between them with expert speed and pulled further ahead of Rick. Suddenly, he stumbled to a halt, arms pinwheeling.

"Whoa, holy crap!" He grabbed for a low stalagmite nearby and caught himself. "That was close! Slow up!" Gambit called back. Rick slowed down as he reached his companion.

A chasm ran across the cave from one end to the other. Below was only blackness. It was then that Rick realized they were able to see due to glowing patches of lichen on the walls. It was getting easier as his eyes adjusted.

“We need a torch,” he said. “That was too close.”

"I don't think there'll be any of those in this game," Gambit commented.

Rick looked at him. "What? Of course, there will be."

"Oh, you mean the stick and fire kind," Gambit said. "Yeah, probably. A little lamp would be better. Or a lantern."

Rick opened his mouth to say a lantern would be hard to store in a pack, but he remembered his inventory didn't have a pack. Everything just vanished into the air and came out again just as easily.

"Yeah, a lantern would be great."

A thin voice echoed up the chasm. “Hello up there?”

"Are you okay?" he called down.

"I'm fine. Kinda," the voice said, almost too quiet to hear. "Just don't come down.”

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“Why are you running?" Gambit called down.

“I'll tell you everything," the voice drifted up. "Promise you'll stop chasing me, and I'll answer all your questions."

"We have a quest for you to be our game guide," Rick yelled down.

"I know!” The voice yelled back. “Well, I guessed as much," he added a moment later in a lower voice. Rick could still just make it out.

"Why are you running?”

“I can't let you get too close, or the quest will complete."

"That generally is the idea of quests," Gambit said dryly.

Rick dug into his interface. Beyond Character was a Journal, and in there was a list of quests. One was the Find a Hammer quest that Daniel had accepted on the party's behalf, and the other was the quest for the game guide, which was currently on Step 2.

[Catch your guide.]

"Look, I want to be your game guide,” the Rork below called. “I really do. Just, not yet. You have to get to level five."

"Why five?" Rick asked. “The quest doesn’t say anything about that.”

"Just shut up and listen. At five, you unlock your encampment. If you pick up a game guide before then, they stay in the city and don't get added to your retinue."

"Our what?" Gambit asked.

"Retinue. Look, it's all part of the encampment system. If I'm not at your encampment, I get stuck in town, and I want to get out of this hellhole. I need to be in your encampment, or it's all wasted." A moment later he added, quietly, "Unless you get yourselves killed." The Rork continued, sounding surprised. "Hey, wait, did you only have three in your party? How’d that happen?”

“It's a long story. Look, I don't understand any of this, but you're saying, 'Come back and find me when you get to level five?’”

“Level five, and you unlock your encampment. That’s a separate step. Don’t screw it up."

"Do you think we can trust him?” Rick asked Gambit. “It might be better to climb down the hole after him."

Gambit shook his head. "I'm not going down there. Not without a lantern."

Rick felt the same way. He called down the hole. "After we do that, where can we find you?"

"I'll be back at the bar, but you've got to promise not to come back until you unlock it. If you get within fifteen feet of me, the quest will complete, and I'll be stuck here forever. Or until you're dead.” The Rork’s voice was starting to sound pained.

“Are you sure you're okay?”

"I'll be fine."

“He's definitely not fine,” Gambit said. "I think he went right off this edge."

"Damn, I wonder how far down it is." Rick peered over the edge, but couldn't see the bottom or any sign of their quarry. "Do you think we should trust him?"

Gambit shrugged. "I guess. This encampment thing sounds interesting, and we don't know how it works. And if we can't trust him to tell the truth, he wouldn't be much use as a game guide, would he?"

"True." Rick laughed before raising his voice again. "Okay, we're going now. We'll come back when we've done the encampment thing."

"Great. You do that. I’ll be waiting.”

They turned to make their way back across the cavern when the voice came again. He definitely sounded in pain now. "Can you tell the bartender I need help?"

When they got back to the speakeasy, Daniel was at the bar. He had a cup in front of him half-full of a strange shade of orange liquid. An umbrella was sticking out.

"They serve non-alcoholic drinks too," he said. “He said the first one is free.”

Gambit leaned over and sniffed the drink. “And that's non-alcoholic?”

Daniel looked down at his cup. He seemed to be having trouble focusing. "I think so." His words slurred a little. "It sure is tasty. But it doesn't look much like a Shirley Temple.”

The bartender stalked over. "I'll have you know, we make the best Shireton Templar around. Just like the monks of Shireton used to make."

Rick and Gambit exchanged a glance.

"Ah, crap."

"Do you think he's actually drunk or is his user interface just screwed up?" Gambit asked as they dragged Daniel from the bar. He staggered and nearly fell, but they each held an arm and kept him upright.

"What do you mean?" Rick asked.

"Like in Everwar, drinking alcohol makes your screen all blurry and you can't walk in a straight line regardless of your control inputs. And it even slurs your speech. But the player is still sober. Well,” Gambit paused. “Maybe."

Rick laughed. "Yeah, I knew several guys that drank while they raided. Their performance got worse and worse as the night went on. Actually, come to think of it, it got better for an hour or two then took a nosedive. So, you think maybe he's trapped in there, stone cold sober, but everything he does comes out skewed like in the game?"

Gambit shrugged. "Maybe."

Rick craned his head to look at Daniel. The soldier's head fell on his shoulder. "I love you guys," he slurred. “Let’s go defuse some bombs and pick up chicks. They love hearing stories about the time I had to decide whether it was the red wire or the blue wire… it’s never the red wire…”

"Nah, that’s not someone's interface getting blurry. That's just somebody who's drunk."

It was dark outside, but scattered torches around the perimeter of the spire lit the pathways and doorways of the outer shops and residences. They set Daniel down on a bench.

"Now what do we do?" Gambit studied the drunken man, every now and then reaching out to keep him from pitching over.

Rick considered, "We've got a quest to go after the hammer, and we need to grind."

"But we need to level him up too," Gambit pointed out. Daniel was only level two.

"Yeah," Rick said slowly. "We could head back up the path, but I don't think we should just stumble around blindly. We need to ask around and find a place to fight level ones, just to be on the safe side."

"The guide said we need to hit level five to get the quest for an encampment, whatever that is. He didn't say whether we all needed to be five or just one of us."

Gambit made sense, and any plan was better than none. "Right. It's probably just one of us, but we'd have to get to five and find out.”

“Maybe we can go back and check the quest board, look for something like, 'Bring five apples to the stable’."

Rick nodded. "Oh, like a FedEx quest."

"What?" Gambit looked puzzled.

"All those ones where you fetch and deliver things. Federal Express. It's a package delivery service in the United States."

"I’ve heard of them," Gambit said. "That's a good name for those quests. You're not playing as an adventurer, but as a delivery man. I always hated those.”

Before long they had Daniel up and staggering towards the quest board. They both still had almost a third of their endurance bar left. So, despite the late hour, there was no reason to find a bed. Rick didn't feel the least sleepy, just faintly heavy, if that made sense. A vague feeling of being run down, not enough to make him want to rest. He wondered how resting worked in this game. Would there be an actual bed? Would they have to really sleep? Or maybe they just walked into an inn, and then popped out almost immediately, fully restored, to find eight hours had passed in the game world? That was a question for later.

They looked over the quest board carefully and considered their options. Rick didn't want to accept anything until they understood what the failure penalties were. In some games, abandoning a quest carried hefty drawbacks. Right now, while they were broke and low level, he didn't want to risk it.

There was a quest on the board to deliver a package, but the town it named was nowhere on their map. They asked a guard, and he said it was several days' journey to get there.

"That’s more realistic than most delivery quests. Why pay an adventurer to move a package across town? It makes more sense to hire them to go through hostile territory."

Gambit agreed, and they both looked for something a little more feasible. In the end, they decided to attempt the hammer quest first.

The blacksmith was not very happy at being woken up in the middle of the night. It took some encouragement bordering on intimidation from Gambit to get him to tell his story.

Apparently, he had left the hammer in his shop on the anvil one afternoon. When he came back an hour later, it was gone. Then he’d slammed the door in their face and refused to answer their repeated knocks.

"That makes more sense than leaving your hammer in a dungeon outside of town surrounded by bandits, anyway.” Rick said.

Gambit laughed. "Yeah, or dropping it down a well. Someone swiping it from his shop is considerably more believable. Or maybe he just left it somewhere and forgot."

"Could be, or some kids borrowed it, played around with it, and then chucked it somewhere.”

As they talked with the blacksmith, Daniel had staggered off and was being sick in the dull purple hedge in the blacksmith's garden. The plants in the garden looked nothing like ones from Earth, but their general shape and the places they were located in were familiar enough.

When he had finished being sick, he straightened up. "Oh, I feel much better. But my head." Daniel rubbed at his temples.

"We should get him some water," Rick suggested.

“Before we go, we should look around for that hammer. He probably left it in his shop."

"I think he dropped it in the hedge," Daniel suggested. He was looking considerably more alert.

Rick nodded. "Yeah, exactly. It could be right around here."

"No, really," Daniel said. He pointed to the bush he'd been head-first in. "He dropped it in the hedge. I just puked on it."