The hotel Cove had booked for us sat on the outside edge of the city, near the north gate, which led to the bareboned forest–and to the castle. The land beyond was filled to the brim with mamluks, thieves, and Djinn that traveled together in large hoards, dialing the difficulty far past eleven. It was rumored to be the final dungeon for this expansion, and this was reflected in the difficulty.
To make it worse, each night, beasts and creatures roamed the woods beyond, new legends brought to life by Sharazad’s tales. The expansion had claimed to have hundreds of these daily side missions, which they used to trick players into coming each night. Player killers, lured by the promise of once-in-a-lifetime treasure, banded together on the other side of the gates, ready to kill and loot anyone who’d beaten the side quest to resell or use the loot for themselves.
For people like us, who could potentially actually die inside the video game, it should have been our worst nightmare to face such a difficult dungeon so early.
I was trying to be braver, more confident…not stupid.
Cove and Sinbad, however, vehemently and foolishly disagreed with me, but hadn’t discredited my opinion totally quite yet.
“It’s the purr-fect idea,” Cove argued from his seat on his twin-sized bed. It was a horrific abuse of his pun privileges to repeat the same one so soon, and his idea was far from as perfect as he’d made it out to be. “And you’re good at this type of planning,” he added, throwing another bone my way. He was right. Cove had proved to be pretty atrocious at some aspects of preplanning, preferring to brute force and wing his way through events, as I’d noticed in What Lies Ahead.
From the floor, as I’d taken the only chair in the room, Sinbad nodded. “They said my crew’s there. I can’t abandon them.” ‘They’ being other NPCs Sinbad had overheard on the street. He wasn’t wrong, but I wished it had taken him a bit longer to discover it because we wouldn’t be having this ridiculous conversation.
I emphasized, truly. I hadn’t been able to abandon Aurora and Octavia in the dungeons or Sera and the others when they were dragged into a trap. However, if was my thoughts they’d wanted, it was my thoughts they’d get.
“We struggled to defeat one Djinn,” I ruthlessly appealed to Sinbad, “and you think we can magically defeat a group of them just because we upgraded our equipment?”
Just as I’d nearly swayed Sinbad to my side, Cove dove in with the perfect counter. “It won’t be a problem if we don’t get caught. I’ve been leveling up my thief skills.”
“What about not interfering?” I wondered, slightly bitter.
Cove shrugged. “It’s just a video game. We interfere just as much playing through as our characters.”
Stolen novel; please report.
I reclined back in my chair, stroking Ani’s fur thoughtfully. “Are you so sure?”
“Yes?”
“Then perhaps you’re right.”
“Look, I know you think this is a bad–what?” Cove was amusingly baffled.
“I have a theory.” Well, it was hardly so much as a theory as it was a fact. The full implications of it, however, remained frustratingly on the tip of my tongue. Unreachable, unspeakable, but there all the same.
“What does that have to do with–”
“Our expectations are affecting the reality around us.” It was the only sensible explanation I could garner from everything we’d experienced her so far. I gestured to Sinbad, the perfect example. “You haven’t seen it, but when he interacts with an NPC, they gain a new spark and start speaking and acting outside of their preprogrammed lines. I told you that the Storyteller mentioned he wasn’t different from the rest of the NPCs–but he’d acted so.”
I’d provided him with most of the details of our journey, leaving out the emotional turmoil during the training and our encounter with Black Cat and White Owl. A whisp of power had me certain it wasn’t yet time to tell him about the oddness of that encounter.
Jacob and Ava’s story I’d told as briefly as I could, with the occasional correction from Sinbad as I progressed through the story. He’d sat silently, his fingers twisting through the covers on his bed. Once I was finished, he’d switched topics smoothly, as if he hoped to ignore the conversation altogether.
I’d expected him to become more withdrawn once my story was finished, to encourage us to be more conservative and careful of our movements. Instead, it was as though hearing the story had convinced him of this world’s fakeness rather than of the NPC’s personhood.
It was disconcerting, to say the least.
“All the more reason to break in, then. If we can manage to steal whatever makes the stories Shahrazad tells into reality, maybe we’ll discover why this world acts so differently around us.”
Given his strong conviction in the video game aspect of this world, I was inclined to agree. Cove’d mentioned that he’d had access to the menu and the abilities from the beginning, no tutorial required. I, meanwhile, had to complete a tutorial before the full expanse of the system was available to me, highlighting just one of the different ways this world worked for us. His conviction in how this world worked and confidence in our abilities might be our saving grace.
I probed further, sensing this wasn’t the full story. “You think it’s connected.”
“And you don’t disagree.”
I sighed.
“Besides,” Cove continued, turning his gaze to his hands as he fisted them together. “If it’s as powerful as it sounds, maybe we can use it to fix everything.”
There it was. The true reason he wanted to break into the castle. It wasn’t to help this world or even help Sinbad, as he made it sound in his proposition, but to find a quick fix to all our problems. The tingling down my spine told me it could never be as easy as it sounded. Still, he was right to try. There were billions of fragments, and collecting them all one by one was a fool’s errand.
“As I was saying earlier–if our expectations affect reality, then perhaps it isn’t such a bad idea after all. I even have an idea on how to enter unnoticed.” Before they could congratulate themselves, I added, “But something tells me you won’t like it. I don’t even like it.” This was only a partial truth. Some aspects I’d enjoy immensely.
The first hint of uneasiness about our plan crossed their expressions, and they exchanged glances. Ani lifted his head, his mischievous eyes reflecting my silhouette.