One day.

That’s how long I was given to complete “The Course”. One day to become optimized. One day the lord and saviour of the Completionists was willing to sacrifice before he wanted to head to treetop town.

For Jade, it had taken three. For Patrick and Angie, four.

But I had one. Fuck me.

The objective of The Course was deceptively simple: grind out as much favour in the shortest amount of time possible, and distribute your favour strategically so as to maximize your abilities in relation to the rest of the party. Each point in either Constitution or Fortitude increased the cost of the next point by one. The earliest levels were cheap and easy to advance through, but the later levels required next-level grinding and some serious ingenuity to discover all the ways you could squeeze favour out of this godforsaken fucking island.

Kiril happened to be just that sort of guy.

The gamemakers were no different, at least when it came to watching. They hid points of favour in the most absurd achievements. You wouldn’t think that starting out. Craft an item—favour. Make a ranged kill—favour. Kill a tough monster. Find an alternate use for an ability. Find a funny and/or creative way of not fucking dying—favour.

But as the day stretched on I began to see the extent of their madness, the depth of their humour. I was a player in their game—literally—and a pawn in their enterprise. They were gods of the Greek variety, the really mean ones. And here I was at their whim.

So…

Lesson One: When life gives you lemons, absorb its powers to smite your enemies.

Patrick had led me to the Anchor in the second room of the cave, a high-ceilinged stalactite-infested cavern with a small stream next to which various clusters of fungi thrived (his garden, he called it), and got me to increase both constitution and fortitude to level three. That was the minimum Kiril expected from all his party members. I could see the logic in that. There were many useful tier zero abilities utilized by either stat, and it was essential to learn as many of them as possible.

Once a stat reached level three, Patrick explained, that stat was considered to be tier one. All abilities of one tier below your current would drain that stat by half the normal amount. That pattern of halving continued for abilities two tiers below, three, and so on.

I took the time with the Anchor to swap titles. Patrick suggested I keep Hunter—as that was Kiril’s preference—but Delver was better. The power it gave me to treat passive abilities of my current tier as if they were one lower was worth it by itself, let alone the increase to my endurance and willpower.

With that quick lesson out of the way, Patrick harvested a number of intriguing plants, humming cheerily, before signalling me to follow him outside.

“Doughertus Sephorus and Doughertus Nosferatus is a potent cocktail,” Patrick was saying. I had stuffed the Red Lip Flower and Vampire Root in my mouth at the same time. The taste of chicken was something I would never get used to. “I’m thinking of calling this combo the succubus.”

We stood on a flat outcropping in the slope near the cave, daylight having swept the forest floor. Birds were chirping and the air was crisp, and on my lips I could taste the early hint of autumn. Already I felt the clock ticking.

Gradually my dualities—body and mind—responded to the substances travelling down my gullet. My brain reeled from the now familiar brief high of my fortitude kicking in, and my stomach stirred at the awakening of my constitution. I received two prompts back to back, one alerting me that I had learned the Charming Glare ability, and another for Drain Vitality.

Achievement Unlocked

- Have two abilities active at once -

Feeling a little greedy there? One life changing power isn’t enough for you? I’m just messin’ with you. Use your newfound abilities to fuck. shit. up.

Reward

- Favour +1 (2) -

“That was quick,” I said, blinking against the neural barrage.

Patrick backed up several paces, leaves crunching beneath his feet. “Now use them on me,” he said. “Don’t kill me, just make me hurt a little.”

So I did. After the first two attempts were resisted by his willpower, Charming Glare forced Patrick forward at my command, and Drain Vitality, well, drained his vitality. The next popup startled me, informing me I had found synergy between two unrelated abilities and had been granted another favour. Neat.

Another ability, Play Dead, from Fingers of the Grave (I thought they were more phallic in appearance, but whatever) unlocked the achievement for discovering ten abilities. Cool. Next up? Twenty.

Lesson Two: Sometimes fucking around is its own reward

Patrick set his pouch beside us and spilling out came a pile of mushrooms, roots, sticks, flowers, and various unidentifiables of all sorts of dazzling colours and punchy aromas.

Imbue Sight gave us the power to see through nearby objects. Beastspeech let us talk to animals (I asked a passing furbo if he’d like to chat, but he apologized and said he was late for a very important date). Mimic Voice let me be Patrick and Patrick be me.

Nature’s Cloak let Patrick look like a tree and me like the ground I was laying on, while Telepathic Link let us talk with our mouths closed. Summon Vine was for hitting each other upside the head, while Summon Swarm was a little less pleasant.

We were like a couple of high schoolers getting stoned in the park after school. Piece by piece our stockpile depleted as we delved into our not-so-psychedelic tour. Barrier, Cause Distress, Nature’s Barb, Still Mind, Storm of Thorns. Power after power shifted our minds, our bodies, what we could do, see, feel.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

Twenty abilities? check. Have two abilities active from different tiers using the same stat? down. Win a difficult game of tag while looking through an object using Imbue Sight? yeah, seriously. Use Summon Swarm to conjure a cloud of bees and convince them through Beastspeech to leave your service, draw up a constitution and court of laws and sue the human race for exploitation? I warned you, didn’t I?

Patrick and I returned from the land of the absurd after I told him I’d skimped out on some of the basics of wilderness survival. I hadn’t yet built a shelter, hadn’t cleaned unsafe water, and I was yet to drink my own… you know.

After explaining that unlike his grizzled adventurer self, I had been a doughy concrete jungle cat up until a couple days ago, we set to work. He showed me the basics of constructing a simple lean-to and gave me tips on how to build slightly more complicated abodes. Then he returned from the cave with a pot and some murky looking pond gunk and let me brita-filter it through Cleansing Hands. We skipped the part about drinking your own urine, though. Patrick’s Superior Perception was wearing off, and it was time he handed me over to Angie for the second phase of The Course.

“If this is it, I don’t know what Jade was all worked up about,” I said absentmindedly as we trudged back to the cave. It was noon, I surmised by the sun’s arc in the sky. “That took what… less than three hours?”

Patrick was walking slightly ahead, but I could see he was smiling. “Just wait until I give you to Angie.”

The worry began to settle in my stomach like three day old leftovers. “Why? What could be so bad?”

Lesson Three: It was bad, or (never run uphill carrying a mimic)

“Faster! Faster!” Gnome urged. I bounded up the hill for the fifth time, leaves crunching beneath my tired footfalls. “You call that a stride? I don’t even have legs and I carry myself with more purpose! Go, fool! Run!”

Gnome was a little grumpy today after not being allowed to talk around Kiril. He had spent the better part of the morning and early afternoon in the cave, silent as he had been during his captivity. Philosophy, I learned, was not a hobby of his but a coping mechanism. Introspection was not his nature. He was a talker, and boy did he have a lot to say.

“Left foot, now right foot! Don’t slow down, we are almost at the summit!” He ordered.

Angie sat on a stump at the top of the hill, knees drawn up to her chest, fiery red hair tangled and decorated with twigs and leaves. She had been here two and a half weeks, almost as long as Kiril’s three, and her feral side was beginning to show. She clapped as I reached the top and sank to my knees, spilling the mimic on the ground.

“How you feelin’?” Her voice had a melodic swing.

“Like death,” I rasped. “Tell me, do I still have legs?”

Angie hopped off the log and squatted next to my face. Her ankle bracelet of woven flowers caught my eye. She poked my thigh with a stick. “Looks like it,” she said, and danced off.

Angie in Wonderland. That’s what she called herself. She was the youngest of us—twenty one to my twenty nine—and maybe it was because of her age but she had adapted surprisingly well to Killjoy Island. It occurred to me briefly in our first five minutes of conversation before our leg of The Course began that maybe she was going slightly insane. It seemed to explain the grating positivity in the face of overwhelming bleakness. But maybe that was my own cynicism at work. Maybe I didn’t think anyone could be that happy without something being broken.

Running up the hill was only one half of the achievement, she told me. Now that my endurance had been reduced to zero, I needed to break myself if I wanted to push its maximum up by one point. It was worth two favour, which to me felt like a rip-off.

Rock climbing was next on the list. I chose the lowest cliff to climb, as it was also the smallest, and I thought perhaps the droning of the waterfall would direct my focus to the task at hand and away from my protesting limbs.

I was wrong. And rock climbing was hard, even with the pitons from Kiril’s Hardcore kit that had been set up along the height of the stone.

“It’s all in the legs,” said Angie, from the safety up top. She was chewing something.

“Yeah, legs that have abandoned me,” I said, forcing them to stop shaking as I gradually and methodically hauled myself up the wall. The rope was tied around my waist and connected to a large rock somewhere above, denying me the sweet release of death should I fall. “This day sucks,” I managed between bouts of feverish grunting.

“My mom used to say every day is a gift.”

The misplaced cheeriness angered me, and fueled my climb. “My dad used to say yeah, but why is it always a pair of socks?”

She laughed. “I would sure love some comfy socks right about now.”

Yeah, me too.

Once I reached the top and Angie pulled me up the rest of the way, my body mimed that of a Chinchilla in a vat of coffee. Every muscle spasmed, every limb vibrated and my entire head shook as I struggled to roll onto my back and stare at the sky. I imagined the pantheon of gamemakers were out there somewhere, watching, as gods do.

Two achievements assaulted me, one for increasing my endurance through sheer force of will, and the other for climbing a cliff. Three favour, all told.

“What’s next?” I asked.

I didn’t really want to know.

Lesson Four: Sometimes all you need is a pair of socks

Rock climbing and speedrunning up an incline had been the worst of it, but it wasn’t the end. “Shoot a bird mid-flight” was impossible to pull off in my current state, as was “Climb a tree with the Bearhide ability active,” so we skipped over those, but “Build a raft and throw it over a waterfall” and “Catch a furbo by convincing it you are dead using Play Dead” were fair game, so we struck them off the list.

The bright stillness of noon gave way to the sleepy glow of evening when we decided to take a break.

To say I crawled to the campfire would be giving myself too much credit. I didn’t learn what Angie had been eating as I struggled through my climb until she used the accompanying ability on me: Telekinesis. Apparently there is a kind of rare sloth on Killjoy Island so lazy it doesn’t even get up to grab its food, and that was its method. Genius.

She psychically carried me through the ass of the cave—easy to do as my tapped endurance couldn’t resist the effect—and laid me gently by the fire.

I sat in silence, nursing my broken body while Angie stirred something above the fire and battered Gnome with questions about who he was. The others had gone back to the site of the caravan so Kiril could investigate it himself, which gave Gnome the chance to talk at length with someone other than me.

After a while Angie ladled a steaming sludge of broth into a clay mug and handed it to me. “Here, it’ll make you feel better.”

I blew away the steam and took a sip. The warmth slid quickly down my throat.

“How does it taste?” She asked, crossing her legs in front of me.

“Like chicken.”

She beamed. “Yeah. It’s no chicken noodle soup, but it sure does remind me of it.”

I took a deeper mouthful, burning my tongue. I hissed. “Thanks. Really, this is nice.”

Behind the mask of dirt and grime her eyes lit up. “You’re welcome. For what it’s worth I think Kiril will say yes.”

I nodded and thanked her again. “I doubt we’ll finish everything he wanted me to today. He doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d accept the excuse that my body is no longer functioning.” With much difficulty I turned my head to the opening of the cave. Orange light speared through, and a puffy pink cloud drifted across the sky. “They’ve been gone a while,” I observed. I hope that’s normal.

A scraping sound brought my attention back to her. She had grabbed a stick and was absentmindedly carving her name in the dusty cavern floor. “You ever wonder why there aren’t any bodies lying around?” She asked, ignoring what I’d said.

I remembered the dead sprawled around the caravan. Keith was there, and that meant the likelihood of the others being excavated players was high. Did they know Jade and Patrick were coming? Did they put Keith there for them? There were also the skulls in the catacomb, and I know not just anyone had hung them. “Sometimes, yeah.”

“I was curious so I watched a dead Seawing bird one time. It disappeared.”

I furrowed my brow. “Disappeared? Like decomposed?”

“No, like sunk into the ground,” she said, frowning. “I think that’s what happened to Keith. We buried him, but I think he’s gone.” The cheeriness had peeled away. She stopped short of finishing her name, and lifted her eyes to me. They were red at the corners, like she’d been crying.

“You shouldn’t join us,” she said.

For a moment I was at a loss for words. The sudden severity of her tone was startling, almost frightening. It was as though I’d blinked and Angie had been replaced by an exact copy, only one on the opposite end of the emotional spectrum. I swallowed. “Uh… what do you mean?”

She bit her lip, fighting the words she seemed uncertain to say. “Keith…” she began. “Jade and Patrick don’t know…” she perked up at the sound of footfalls outside the cave. “Wait, they’re here.”

The happiness bounced back as she rose to her feet. The footsteps outside the cave stopped suddenly. There was a long pause. Angie started forward, but my hand snapped around her ankle. “Wait,” I whispered.

“Hey guys,” Patrick’s voice rang through. “You in there?”

Immediately I knew something was wrong. Why ask that? Why not come inside? Where’s Jade? Where’s Kiril? My mind spun so fast I felt dizzy.

Just then I heard his voice in my head. Patrick had opened a Telepathic Link.

“Don’t come out of the cave,” he warned. “Don’t come out.”