“Who are you? Why are you here? How are you here?”

Her words were as sharp and cold as her blades, both of which were now drawn.

“I, ummm, we….” I stammered.

“You first,” Miguel tried, mustering the illusion of his usual confidence.

“Wrong,” she assured us. “You have thirty seconds before I kill you or boot you,” her voice having changed from friendly Kate Winslett to angry Judy Dench.

“Wait. Please,” I said in my most calming/conciliatory/I-hope-I-don’t-urinate-on-my-burlap tone. “We’re as surprised as you are. We assumed you were an NPC…if this is even a game. We don’t know what the hell this is. We just got thrown in here.”

“No one just gets thrown in here,” she insisted. “Aside from my rig, the only other entry point is buried in the depths of a top-secret, government-funded, intentionally forgotten lab halfway across the world – and it’s been shut down for years.”

“We’re in that one,” I answered, more calmly than I expected.

“Wait,” I said, cocking my head. “Didn’t you hear everything we said outside?”

“No,” she responded quickly. “I was listening to music.”

I looked around the room for a bard.

She tapped her ears, blades still gleaming. “In real life,” she clarified.

Nice. Invisible airpods, scotch, and an Elvish library. I’d be in love if I weren’t so afraid for my life.

Understanding I was starting from scratch, I quickly explained the How of our arrival, trying to sound slightly less terrified about the earthquake and significantly more heroic. I almost definitely didn’t pull it off. Still, in the process of describing the disaster, our near-death experience, and the narrow escape, I had also answered the Why of our presence in her cottage. I wouldn’t say that had relaxed her exactly, but she did seem slightly less stabby.

That left Who.

“My name is Nathan. I’m no one,” I continued. “This is Miguel. He’s the tech guy who had visited the PTSD treatment offices.”

“PTSD treatment,” she snarled, gripping her daggers until her knuckles turned white.

“What’s wrong with treating PTSD?” Miguel asked angrily.

“Nothing. It’s brilliant,” she said. “It’s beautiful. Magic. Perfect.”

The smallest of tears formed in the corner of one eye but did not fall.

She composed herself, adding, “But it’s a lie. A façade. It’s the promise of nuclear power when they’re building a nuclear bomb.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she insisted, finally sheathing her blades. “But it does mean you’re the first people to step into this world in over three years, and in that time, it has evolved into something utterly unable to accommodate you. I don’t know if you’re the shipwrecked explorers or the smallpox blankets they carry, but this ends badly for someone. Maybe everyone.”

“Look,” I began softly, “I won’t pretend I understand everything you’re saying, but I can assure you we don’t want to hurt anyone.”

“Very kind of you, but I’m guessing neither did the smallpox blankets,” she said.

She broke eye contact, took several deep breaths, and processed our new information with more past information than I could guess. This was a place she clearly cared about deeply, but not one that should be taken lightly.

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“Let’s assume for now I believe your story and your intent. But that leaves the flip of the coin. You’ll actually have to kill a lot of someones and somethings if you want to survive,” she stated matter-of-factly. “But the who, when, and why are more complex than you can possibly imagine. And the stakes are higher than any game you’ve ever played, because as I’m sure you’ve noticed…”

She spread her arms, adding finally, “This isn’t a game anymore.”

We let the news we expected sink in, its confirmation more jarring than the assumption.

“We definitely got that impression,” Miguel responded. “But if it used to be a game, where are the loot chests? The crafting stations? The NPCs?”

“That’s complicated too,” she said. “The short version is that there are no loot chests because they are inherently inorganic. If ten people line up to open the same chest and find the same sword, then the illusion of reality is torn away, never to return.”

We both nodded, having had that precise experience in dozens of games. Even in a single-player campaign, an unopened but un-hidden treasure chest in a world full of characters – NPCs or not – felt consistently false.

“So while this world spawns,” she continued, “it does so naturalistically. The reason you don’t have a better sword is because there was no fallen NPC to take it from. The reason you have no food is because there is no abandoned wagon to rummage through. The world used to be full of people – all living, dying, trading, taking, giving, buying, selling…being. And from that ecosystem, the world provided what you needed in a way that felt very real.”

We combined that admittedly brilliant system with the shortcomings we had faced, and now the world made sense – both the before and the after. Presumably some NPC would have failed to defeat the viper but had a potion we could loot. Some poorly trained trader would have been overcome by spiders but had a sword slightly better than mine. It was a darker form of looting, but admittedly much more realistic.

“But those people are gone,” she added. “Other than the occasional confused NPC wanderer – which I assumed you were – any grouping of more than a few people is at least a week’s walk from here.”

“Wait,” I interjected. “Even if that system were still active, that high-level Hell Panther was way too early in the game.”

“The what?” she asked. “Oh, matted fur, double rows of teeth?”

We nodded, and her eyes widened.

“That’s a Cerber, and it definitely should not be anywhere near here.”

She looked suspicious that we could have survived such a beast, which felt pretty awesome for someone still wearing a burlap outfit.

She continued, “But without the people of this world to keep the system in balance, predators and prey have wandered, multiplied, and dwindled, varying across time and locale.”

“That’s doesn’t matter. Not now,” she said, shifting back into problem solving mode.

I took the brief silence as an opportunity to again ask for introduction.

She paused, eventually taking a deep breath.

“I’m Nia,” she said cautiously. “I helped design the game. A little. Not much really.”

She was nervous for some reason, softer.

“But that was ages ago,” she said, pausing. “A lifetime,” she added with a sigh.

“So now you just hang out here?” I asked. “Alone?”

The last word ripped the softness from her.

“Look. I don’t know you, I don’t fully trust you, and I don’t understand how this will all play out,” she said without a hint of sparing our feelings.

She was on a roll again, her back straightening and voice rising.

“I haven’t considered the repercussions of other humans in the world’s current form – technologically, socially, politically. This world is on a knife’s edge, which is why I hide in this quiet little corner of it.”

“But you,” Nia continued. “You changed everything, which means I have to do something. Several somethings most likely…which means I have to get off my arse. And focus. And probably switch my tube from Jameson to coffee.”

She drank Jameson from a feeding tube and was still smarter than me. Nice.

“I have to leave,” she said hastily. “I need to check the news and look at some code.”

“You can’t do most of that from here?” I asked.

“No,” she said impatiently. “The outside world is closed to us. I can’t even listen to music that isn’t in the goddamn soundtrack.”

We absorbed the news, and not particularly happily. She was our first connection to the real world, and she had to abandon us to access it.

“I’ll be back – but not soon,” she added. “I’ll need 10 minutes. So it will feel like…almost two weeks to you.”

Our hearts stopped and HUDs flashed.

She noticed.

“Your brains are faster in here, so time moves differently,” she explained, as if it was normal.

“Our brains are faster?” we said in unison.

“No, not faster,” she clarified. “Unconstrained. The way dreams seem long even when they’re not. You’ll figure it out. Or you won’t. Doesn’t matter. Just know I won’t see you for a while. Oh, and mind yourself. As you may’ve assumed, your first camp is just up ahead, but it’s not what it used to be. Nothing is. And if your capsules are unmonitored and unopenable, then…”

The consequences rattled around in her head.

“Just don’t get killed. If the game can’t boot you…you’ll actually die.”

With that, and our HUDs flashing like crazy, the cottage was empty.