[https://www.tanyarochester.com/uploads/5/4/5/5/54553809/grace3_orig.png]

A map! It hung over the desk, drawn in beautiful detail and displaying several levels of the massive prison.

Lore brought out his notebook and a pen. He began sketching a copy into it. I briefly peered over his shoulder. It wasn’t a great piece of artwork but it was certainly functional.

The tips of his ears turned red and I suddenly realized that I stood too close.

“Could you look through the papers and see if you can find anything?”

“Sure.” I quickly nodded and walked over to the desk. For some reason, each step closer to it made me feel like I’d just run a quarter-mile. I decided to ignore that for now and focus on the documents.

Mostly, these papers listed who visited when and what their cargo was. The most mentioned person was a guy named Brownsnake who oddly brought in piles of driftwood for some reason. But other than that, there wasn’t much information.

Then I picked up a letter.

“If anyone reads this, the tainted have breached the gatehouse. I apologize for not stopping them... they’re going towards the village on the west side of the island. The warden has already sent men to help them evacuate. I fear that they will only be caught in the madness as well.

I’ve sent a message to a friend of mine in a higher plane to come, seal this area, and eradicate this taint if they can. I only hope they make it before it escapes this island.

I leave this because I too find myself infected. I don't know how long I can last. As an NPC, I will choose to die here rather than live on in that horrendous state.”

The letters started to get more and more frantic looking as time passed.

“May this note find you well and untainted. Polaris Heartfire, if you are reading this, then don’t blame yourself for not making it in time. I chose this path.”

A chill ran down my spine.

We should have done more research into what this taint actually was.

I caught movement out of the corner of my eye that hadn’t been there before. A potted plant sat beside the desk. It looked like a pretty sea anemone in water, with currents causing its tentacles to drift.

I would have noticed it earlier if it had looked this ethereal. I especially liked the way it looked blue, violet, and green. The colors changed with the swing of each limb.

Actually... I hadn’t noticed this plant before I came in so it must have been completely still earlier, or something.

And those tentacles looked reeeeeaaaaallly soft and smooth. I bet touching them would be like petting a dolphin, both in feel and joy. I reached out.

A hand grabbed mine, stopping me from getting closer. A warm arm wrapped around my waist and pulled me back until I stood outside the office and no longer had line of sight.

Blinking to clear my vision, I turned to find Lore looking at me, his beautiful face a bit gaunt.

“It’s a health stealing plant. I don’t know how it got in here but it was a very subtle trap.”

He then cast several healing stomps. My health, which had shockingly depleted to ten percent, rose back up to full.

Fuck. If he hadn’t caught me I would have died.

He grimaced. “Check your death penalty. This isn’t an instance where the harshness is lessened, so we have to be very careful here.”

I nodded and opened my menu to the right page. “Eh? Dude. This. If I die I’ll have awkward dreams for two months?”

Then turned to Lore. His face had turned white. “If I die here Jethia will discover my location.”

I rubbed his shoulder. “It’s fine. We knew she would figure it out eventually once we escaped from her tails.”

He breathed out and nodded. “You’re right. Let’s go.”

“Where? Is there a way to pull up the gate?”

“That’s too much work.” He led me off to the side where a heavy metal door with massive locks was bolted shut from the inside.

Once he undid the locks we entered the completely still courtyard of this massive castle-like prison.

Instead of a yard empty of everything like most of what we saw on the trip here, there were crates of supplies piled in one area, and various barricades erected. But they were set up to face the buildings as if the gatehouse had been the last stand.

The gamer in me really wanted to solve this island’s infection as if it were a quest, but logically this area was not for newish players like us to complete. I’d rather focus on removing Lore’s collar than fixing an issue that not even a high-leveled player —one that could set up a permanent barrier around the island— managed to fix.

“After checking the map, I noticed that the warden’s office was fairly close. I still copied the whole map, just in case.”

Soon, we were moving while keeping up stealth. Lore cautiously traveled near stone walls until we reached stairs that climbed up to the next floor. We crouched low and tiptoed up them. Since there weren’t any actual people nearby, it all seemed a bit excessive.

Still, I used this as an opportunity to practice sneaking. I even cast Invisibility but only kept it up until I had half my mana left. The only way to level it was to use it, after all.

Oddly, despite all our efforts to sneak, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. It was as if someone watched us from the shadows cast by the depressing architecture.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Eventually, we reached a landing. Lore crouched down, took out his lock picks, and started working on the door to the second floor. Since we’d had plenty of practice watching each other's backs during the last quest, I stood sentry for him until I heard a telltale click.

At this point, I realized that my bard partner was a better rogue than my arcane assassin. Eventually, I would need to learn some of this lockpicking stuff.

I sighed. Maybe there was a spell for that.

He opened the door a crack. There was nothing there that either of us could see so we cautiously entered, keeping ourselves against the wall and to the right. We headed toward the small gate separating us from a hallway. Several more doors were spaced throughout it.

“So,” I whispered. “How do we deal with this gate?”

He raised a questioning brow.

I shrugged. He knew that I was still new to this shit, right?

He rolled his eyes. “Can you teleport us?”

Oh! Right. Duh. Since this wasn’t an actual video game, I couldn’t assume that it had invisible walls for things like this.

I wrapped my arm around Lore’s waist, took a moment to adjust to how nice it was to hold him for a second, then teleported several feet over.

“Excellent. The bars here don’t stop teleportation.”

“So, is the only way to check, to try teleporting through them?”

“If either of our Observe was high enough we could find out, but neither of ours are.”

“So where is this Warden’s Office?”

Instead of answering me, he knelt in front of the fancy-looking double doors in front of us.

Wow. That was fast. It also seemed too easy.

He opened the door the same way as the last one. And after ensuring that there was no one inside we entered.

The place looked chaotic. Papers littered the room. Large stains of dried blood told the story of a small massacre. A few small boxes had been piled up as if someone had been in the middle of packing. Judging by one of the broken boxes, they were filled with the prison’s files.

“You start in on these papers while I look for the key or any other treasure.”

I frowned. “I mean, even if we find something in here, can we risk bringing it out of the barrier? What if it’s infected by the taint?”

He shrugged. “We’ll deal with it on a case by case basis.”

I sighed and started first collecting the papers strewn throughout the place, then reading through them.

After a while, When Lore found nothing in the room, he started helping me go through each page with a disheartened look. I guess that meant he didn’t find anything?

***

“Argh! Why, as an assassin, do I have to go through so much damn paperwork?!” I threw the pile I just finished reading into one of the few empty crates, then I stretched.

Lore didn’t say anything for a second, then he looked at me with a raised brow. “You’re an arcane assassin. That means magic and magic, inevitably means that you get all the paperwork.”

I narrowed my eyes at Lore who was also doing paperwork and also had magic. Well, he would know, wouldn't he? Actually, since bards were supposed to be good with words, he probably had it worse.

I grabbed the next stack, which was one of the ones I picked up from the floor. The first few were just regular reports about various people’s antics in the prison. But the next ones put everything into perspective.

To condense it down, there was the guard, clan name of Brownsnake, who would always hang out near the beach and collect random debris. Mostly driftwood and seashells. He’d then bring it in and give it to the prisoners who liked to create art with it.

One prisoner everyone called Vashee used the driftwood more often than the other woodworkers. He created beautiful artistic circles. Sometimes he turned them into furniture or accessories. His manager, who would visit often, sold his pieces at art auctions for vast amounts of PMk. This cash helped his clan and gave himself a little spending money.

At this point, I asked Lore why they even had prisons in the game at all. He mentioned that before artificers created free-roaming prisoner collars, their culture would send lawbreakers into the game to serve their time in a prison. If they kept them locked up in real life then they’d just escape into the PPVS anyway, and most people at the time didn’t feel like that was enough punishment.

Basically, prisons were all currently old and outdated in the PPVS, though some were still being phased out. They also existed for NPCs or players who received quests to do something in them.

But to continue, during one of these instances, Brownsnake brought in a bunch of stuff, including a really weirdly shaped driftwood. Vashee became obsessed with it. He started talking to it as if it whispered back. I mean, red flag right there.

Then he started his wall project. This was apparently massive and so annoying that the warden received a lot of complaints about it, but since it was in Vashee’s own room they just let him be. That was their first mistake because that wall artwork was apparently a magic circle that the entity in the driftwood had Vashee create.

At this point, the warden started to get various complaints about other prisoners hearing voices. But those came to an end when the first sign of taint occurred... One of the usually peaceful prisoners grabbed a carving knife and murdered a guy. Which, in a violence simulator, shouldn’t be that big of a deal. Except that the prisoner he murdered was an NPC. And this NPC didn’t respawn.

Confused, and needing to properly report this, they researched the reason why. And they discovered that he’d slowly lost his sanity along with around half of the other prisoners in that ward.

The other half, who seemed mostly sane, all had small driftwood-looking bones growing out of their head like crowns. And their personalities had changed.

Of course, by this time the portal had been up and running for a few weeks, and there had been various reports of weird unexplainable instances. But other than trying to isolate the tainted prisoners in the southwest wing, they didn’t do much. That was their second mistake.

What they should have done was destroy the whole wing, and found some way to trap the prisoners. But, hindsight and all that.

So, the guards who worked with those tainted prisoners ended up helping the infection spread throughout the multiple wards. And finally, enough prisoners were infected or insane enough that they started a coup.

They used it to spread the taint faster.

The guards managed to fight them off and lock most of them back up, but the damage was done. Too many of them were infected.

They decided to evacuate those they could. Of course, the prisoners escaped a second time during the evacuation. This time they either immediately spread the infection more or straight-up murdered people. And once those people respawned... well, it was all over for them.

That was all I could figure out. I didn’t know how it ended. But still. It was fucking crazy.

Lore’s hands clutched a document so tightly that it nearly creased.

“I found something.”

I blinked. “What?”

“An accident report.”

He passed it to me. Frankly, I was constantly surprised with how thorough elves were when recording things.

On this document, the guard who’d reported the accident talked about an incident.

A free-roaming prisoner asked to be released early since the one in charge of his custody hadn’t come into the PPVS in several years and he was tired of being stuck at level 7. He also couldn’t return to reality until he was released based on an agreement with that individual.

After investigating the claim, the warden agreed to release him since they discovered that his custodian —the person who had been affected by the prisoner’s crime— had actually passed away and the prisoner’s wrongdoing wasn’t horrible enough to force them to stay in the PPVS for the next dozen years.

They took this guy to a special chamber to have his collar removed. And at some point, during the removal, the person using whatever it was that removed the collar, accidentally injured the now free prisoner causing his avatar in the PPVS to have permanent scars. Because of this, they had to give the prisoner some compensation.

And at the top of the page, they had listed the building, the floor, and the room number where the incident happened.

My hand shook. This was it!

A definite location where we could find the key to Lore’s collar. We’d just need to be very careful with how we use whatever item it was because the last thing I wanted was to scar his gorgeous body, even if it was just inside the game.

When I gazed back up at Lore, he looked determined, as if he’d already planned the best pathway to that room.

“Are you ready?”

I nodded.

We exited the office. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw something low to the floor and moving, but when I turned my head, there was nothing there. I swallowed.

Maybe I was just imagining things?