Andalon and I sat cross-legged beside one another on grass-textured blocks as we—but mostly me—answered Greg’s many, many questions.

“So…” Greg reared himself up once more, “let me get this straight. Andalon is an understudy for God who’s lost her memory, but who’s on a sacred quest to trying to hack the Green Death fungus by turning folks into magic wyrms whose minds house the gardens of Paradise——and these wyrms may or may not be related to the ones from your favorite manga——and she’s doing this to make sure that the souls of the dead get to Paradise and the reason why this needs to be done is because the fungus is somehow connected to or part of Hell, and that if Andalon can’t save the souls of the dead, the fungus will damn them to Hell to be tortured for all eternity, maybe even turned into demons?”

He paused.

“Did I get it right?”

I nodded. “Basically.”

“And, for whatever reason,” Greg continued, “I guess it’s because you can see and talk to her while the rest of us only catch glimpses of her——well… whatever the explanation is, Andalon roped you——specifically you, the psychiatrist,” he pointed at me, “into aiding her on this quest?”

“Actually, I’m a neuropsychiatrist, I deal with both the psychological and physiological aspects of the mind.”

“Sure,” Greg nodded.

“But, other than that,” I added, “yep,” I sighed, “that’s pretty much where things stand.” I let my head hang low. “It’s completely nuts,” I muttered.

“It’s just like Princess Gerbilina asking your player character for help on her quest in SGW,” Greg said, whispering in awe.

Yes, there was a tiny chance he was trolling me, but I preferred the world in which he wasn’t.

“Any other questions?” I asked.

“And the ampersand thing…?” Greg raised an eyebrow.

“I,” I looked to Andalon, “we”—she nodded—“think that &alon is the name of Andalon’s greater self——the part that she forgot. Up until now, I’ve just been calling this part of her”—I pointed at her—“Andalon.”

Greg pursed his lips; his square ears folded back on his head. “This seems unnecessarily complicated,” he said.

“No no no,” I said, shaking my head, “we can make this work.” I turned to the spirit-girl. “&alon?”

“Yeah?”

“From now on,” I said, “when we talk about you, let’s use ‘Andalon’ to refer to the piece of you that’s here with me, and let’s use ‘&alon’ to refer to the rest of you out there, the part that you’re still remembering. Can we do that?”

“Yeah.” She nodded excitedly. “Yeah!”

Greg made Xs in the air with his accordion limbs. “Wait wait wait. You’re pronouncing them both the same way. How will you know the difference?”

Andalon hopped in place. “&alon can hear Mr. Genneth’s thinks. But... Andalon will say 'Amplersandalon', too.”

“Okay. Okay. I think that makes sense.” He nodded. “Yes, that makes sense. I can jive with it.”

“Wait, really?” I asked.

The caterpanda snorted. A gale-force wind rustled through the voxelated tree leaves. “Dude, I mentally checked out of all this nonsense days ago. As soon as I woke up feeling dead, I decided I was going to turn the page on my life. Now, I’m just riding the walrus, and seeing where it goes.” Suddenly, he cooed with delight. “Oooh!” He turned to the side. “Open notes.”

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A window filled with text appeared midair beside him.

“——> Add rideable walruses, including ones that can fly. Possibly without wings. Close notes.” The words he spoke wrote themselves inside the window, and then the whole thing vanished back to whence it came.

Meanwhile, I fidgeted with my bow-tie.

“Also, I like her energy.” Greg nodded his beary head at Andalon. “That helps.” He nodded again. “That being said… Open System Menu.”

Another window appeared.

He quickly tapped through several submenus, and then said, “Testing, testing.”

No speech bubbles appeared.

“Where did the speech bubbles go?” I asked.

“To the graveyard of bad ideas, where they belong.” Greg closed the window with a tap of a forelimb.

Meanwhile, Andalon scampered over to Greg’s side and proceeded to poke, pet, and prod his flank, cooing and muttering all the while. For a moment, I nearly panicked—not knowing how Greg would react—but then the caterpanda curled his lower half into a short spiral and started gently raising and flicking his legs at random, much to Andalon’s delight. She jumped at them like it was a game of whack-a-mole.

Greg reared his forward half off the ground to look down and address me, and even though he towered over me, there wasn’t the slightest trace of shadow.

Rising to my feet, I spread my arms out to either side. “Now, if you don’t mind me asking questions for a change…”

“Ask away.”

“What is all this?”

“I always wanted to go into game design,” Greg said. “I came up with lots of different scenarios, but I never really had the time.”

“Oh?”

Greg pressed the feet of all three pairs of his forepart’s accordion-limbs together, end to end. “Reading and writing were invented thousands of years ago, and, for most of that time, we were too backwards and small-minded to realize, you know what, it might be a pretty good idea if everyone could read and write. The reason I have to come here and sit in my cramped, sorry-ass excuse of an office is because we’re letting this same fuckery play out all over again, except with computers instead of written language.”

Bending over, Greg lowered his mighty head and brought his muzzle close enough to my non-existent ears to whisper into them, as if to tell me a dirty secret.

“Have you ever stopped to think about how fucked up it is that we’ve got computers and information technology stitched into our bodies and stuffed into and in between every single god-damn waking moment of our lives, and yet nine out of ten people have no friggen clue as to how any of it works, or how to fix it, or how to set up even the most basic, kiddie version of a local access network?”

“I…” I stared him in the eyes for a bit before responding. “I could imagine how that could cause… problems.”

The caterpanda reared his forepart up and spread his arms. “No, you can’t,” he hissed, shaking his head. “No. You. Can’t!”

Greg let out a rumbling growl, only for his face to contort. He lowered himself to where Andalon was petting him. “Watch it,” he said, “that tickles.”

Andalon giggled. “Wyrmeh!” she shouted happily.

He turned back to me and sighed.

“It’s such a drag, man. You’ve got no idea. WeElMed is a vacuum tube that sucks me dry. My time. My soul. My ability to resist stress. All of it—whoosh!—gone! Like the wind!” The caterpanda growled, flashing his teeth. “Everyone expects me to solve every goddamn problem they stumble into. The junior manager doesn’t like the way the wiring looks in the cable closet, so he rearranges it, and it’s left to me to go reconnect everything where it’s supposed to be. Receptionists wear those ugly fake nails—they’re not nails; they’re talons, they’re talons!—and scrape and scratch at their console screens, not expecting it to fuck up the tactile capacitors that make the touch-screens work, and then demanding I fix it when, of course, it inevitably breaks. And the fax machine. That poor, lonely fax machine…”

I was polite enough not to interrupt the stressed and clearly overworked information technology specialist as he vented his frustrations at me. By the end, it was clear to me that the ill-fated fax machine was on its last legs, and would soon be roommates with my childhood ornamental cactus in the great big greenhouse in the sky.

“Greg,” I said, after he’d calmed down, “if you don’t mind, I’d like to know what’s going on—with the cubes, I mean.” I gestured to our surroundings.

“Ah. Ahem. Yes.” Greg returned to his earlier percipient pose. “Well… you see, once I started turning all scaly and snaky,” he said—

—“Wyrmeh!” Andalon said, correcting him—

“—Ever since I started turning all scaly and wyrmy,” Greg resumed, “I’ve been noticing that my memory has been getting more detailed—it’s honestly photographic at this point—and my thoughts have been getting faster, too.”

I nodded. “It’s not just me, then,” I said, thinking of how drastically my memory had improved within the past day or two. It was like a film crew had taken up residence inside my head.

The caterpanda nodded. “A while back, my shrink recommended I take up meditation. Yesterday, while running through the motions, one thing led to another, and I ended up making a lot of really swell discoveries.” He spread his arms once more. “The long and the short of it is, my imagination is now a lot more vivid than it used to be. It’s like being able to lucid dream on cue, only while being awake. All you need to know is that, right now, our minds are linked together, and you and Andalon over there”—he gestured over his ‘shoulders’—“are now quite literally inside my thoughts.”

“To what end?” I asked.

“Finding out that you’re turning into a wyrm has a way of making a guy reassess his life’s priorities,” Greg said.

That, I agreed with.

“And, what with the headless-chicken pants-on-fire apocalypticon bonanza going on right now, I had an epiphany: I’m done giving any fucks. Done. I have a hobby, goddammit—a real, flesh-and-blood passion—and I’m going to follow it.” Greg grinned. “I’m taking this opportunity to do what I’ve always wanted to do: I’m going to make an open-world sandbox RPG.”

I stretched out my prismatic arms to either side. “You’re telling me you made this?”

The caterpanda nodded. “Every damn pixel of it.”

“That’s why I’ve asked you to come here,” Greg said. “Even though it’s still incomplete, I want a second opinion. As you can see, we’ve got a little wyrm LAN going on here, and my plan is to use it to invite folks like you to join as players.”

Andalon cried out in alarm—and then delight—as Greg’s forepart wriggled with vim.

“It’s gonna be sweeeet,” Greg said.

“Couldn’t you have gotten someone else to do this?” I asked.

“Tira volunteered a while ago, but it turns out her knowledge of gaming begins and ends at match-three PortaCon puzzle games. So, yeah, totally unhelpful.”

“I… I see,” I said. “So, I suppose that means there’s a way out?”

“Yeah, of course,” Greg waved a foreleg dismissively. “Just… don’t use it yet. There’s still a lot of stuff I’d like some feedback on.”

I spent a moment processing all this in my cubic noggin, and then sighed. “I’m… sorry your job is so… frustrating.”

Greg’s panda-head winced. “Yeah… sorry ‘bout the rant.” A nervous chuckle thundered through the caterpanda’s massive body. “I… I just… I don’t get many opportunities to vent, is all,” Greg said. “Anyway… you had a question?”

“Uh…”

Where to start? As I pondered, my eyes wandered over to my arm and the stubs at their tips that I now had for hands.

I guess might as well start with the obvious…