[ joined the chat room]

Please welcome our guest, Pak Yeung-Sung. Yes, it is him. Before we start our discussions can we get a quick round of intros so he is acquainted with who each of you are and your areas of expertise. Amber, you go first otherwise I’ll have to force you to do it after everyone else has gone.

Hallo

I am tester of PM.

Nice to meet you, Amber.

C’mon Amber, you can do more that! Tell him what you test, what you know about how Airgead works.

OK

Yeung-Sung’s screen was suddenly flooded with links.

[Fire Nova@50% Grade 6 Worked Iron Grade 2 Chest-plate (Crafter; Tog3D)]

[Continuous Fire Mirror@75% Grade 3 Worked Copper Grade 4 Shoulders (Crafter; Sean8B)]

[5 turn Slow Restore@25% Grade 2 Worked Gold Grade 1 Tiara (Crafter; Sean8A)]

[???@50% Grade 7 Worked Deer-hide Grade 5 Boots (Crafter; Sofia4B)]

[…show more? +15 more messages]

Yeung-Sung looked up. “What is she doing?”

Hand firmly grasping his forehead, Luke answered,

“She’s hyperlinking the labels of blessed gear that she has been testing. That’s what she does.”

“She details what they do? I think I see…Fire Nova is the effect, it goes off at half durability, then the quality of the base gear and who made it?”

Luke shook his head.

“No- well, yeah, that’s her job, but I meant linking items or quoting others, rather than typing it out herself; That’s what she does. She’s awfully shy.”

Luke stretched his eyelids with his fingers like sliding blinds down in the morning when you’re hungover. “Her lack of English doesn’t help, either.”

Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

Amber Moon, huh. “She’s a Chinese woman?”

Luke frowned. The longer he spent with him, the more Yeung-Sung noticed how rubbery the speaker’s body was. “Yes, not that I should tell you. What’s your obsession with knowing where everyone came from? We’re all stuck here anyway.”

‘And we’ll all die here’ he is probably thinking. I can’t let that happen.

Avoiding Luke’s suspect glare, he went back to the chat where the next person was busy introducing themselves.

Thank you very much, Amber!

I’m Vanessa. Ness is my handle and communism is my mantra. A key part of making sure our economy is working effectively is the planning and distribution of labour. As such, I oversee that the materials that we need for our plans are being adequately farmed, and that the shit we don’t need is not. Easy! Also, I love goats as they are the cutest and no one can challenge me on that front.

Great, Ness. Kelly, you’re up next.

Kelly? Surely, he’s not talking about the guide I was with before; Kelly Ann? Of all people to still be a part of PM, I wouldn’t have picked her to be one.

You need no introduction to me. I recognize you. Suffice it to say that I’m still the spine of this entire operation. No, maybe the cortex. Yeah, I like that better, actually. They would be disbanded without me.

As a refresher just in case, she holds all the records of our inventories, as well as whom they belong to. Thanks, Kelly.

And as for me, as well as being the speaker; the intermediary compiling the opinions of the general populous, I will also act as the representative for the Fighters. Given my experience with beating several Airgead levels, as well as sergeant general during the RTS period, I can offer detailed information on our tactical approaches and our history.

At the same time as he typed the next line, Luke said them out loud to Yeung-Sung,

“Any questions?”

This explains why he’s so desperate. He was a Fighter; He has been in the Gauntlets; he knows how useless the situation is without outside help. That’s why he’s giving me this chance.

Nodding, Yeung-Sung began to type out his first thought when Luke stuttered.

“Uh, just a minute…”

“Yes?”

“What are you going to ask? Nothing negative, remember? You’re sure what you’re about to say isn’t going to squander my position?”

Yeung-Sung looked down, thinking. “I don’t think so.”

“Well,” Luke said, shrugging, “Just humour me. What are you going to ask?”

“I was going to ask,” Yeung-Sung explained,” If you keep a record of your gauntlet runs. Do you?”

Luke sat up birch straight. “Of course. We check who is running them, what their past records are -wh-why are you asking this? How does this help?”

Yeung-Sung saw Shirley smirk at him.

“I’m not talking about that,” Yeung-Sung explained, shaking his head, “I mean do you have a like a video of the events, a recorded log, something like that?”

Luke see-sawed half his body over the table in confusion. “What? How would we do that?”

Yeung-Sung shrugged. “How do you do anything in Airgead? Make the skill, practice it.”

Luke covered his mouth.

“But that’s not- You mean that all this time- Even if I –”

Slowly, he lowered his hands and typed in a message into his phone. The three of them in the room waited with locked stares until another PM player skipped in. Dark ponytail bouncing along behind her head, she stopped dead when she noticed the air in the room and Luke had to call her over. He whispered something in her ear. She nodded curtly to his words. Yeung-Sung pinched the underneath of his knees as he watched her jolly face swirl into panic, then confusion and finally after she took out her phone and tried it for herself; amazement.

Luke dismissed her afterward, a tightness -frustration with himself- showing plain in his jaw. Turning back to the conversation at hand, Luke took in a staggering breath to control himself, holding the edge of the table so hard it looked like it might crack.

“I have a feeling,” he then said, his voice airy and suppressed, “That our conversation today will be most enlightening.”

Yeung-Sung simply smiled. As he did it, he touched his cheek in surprise; this time it came naturally.

“They told us next to nothing about Airgead. It was supposed to be just a game, like any other,” Luke pondered aloud, “It frustrated us all to have the mechanics of the game hidden, but now I understand why. It would’ve been too much…I never thought Airgead would be capable of this.”

“Well, I never got into games. To me it looked like real-life.”

Luke nodded. “Which makes your perspective invaluable.”

“Still,” he continued,” That is a good example of something you should not be typing in the chat.”

Yeung-Sung nodded. “Right.”