As far as I know, I’ve never lucted anything in my life, but somehow I re-lucted quite strongly as I pulled open the oversized door that led to the sitting room of my business. I was so not luctant, because doing this was a case study in how not to be a trepid investigator. But there was something in that woman’s expression… no, best not to think about that. Just get it over with.

As I entered, the woman - the client, I decided, because thinking of her as a client and not a person who needed help seemed safer - the client looked up from her thousand-yard stare at the floor. Seeing me reappear apparently flustered her, because she hastily wiped away her tears and placed the drawing back into her scrip, making as if to exit in haste.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m leaving.” She looked around, as if she had forgotten something. Inwardly I winced. Not like she had forgotten something. More like she was looking for someone. Someone she was used to having with her most of the time.

“There’s no need,” I said, trying, not successfully, to keep all of the frantic relucting out of my voice. “I’ll take your case.”

“I don’t mean to be an inconvenience to you,” she continued as if she hadn’t heard me. “I know you must be very busy, doing whatever the things are that you do.” Some heat was coming back into her voice. The rapidity with which she was bouncing between despair and anger was starting to give me whiplash. It was like an emotional ping-pong match.

“I’ll take your case,” I repeated.

“…Since apparently actually investigating things isn’t one of them-“ she cut off suddenly. “What did you say?” she asked, turning back to me. Her eyes were wide. The sudden re-blooming of hope in those eyes almost made me run back out of the door.

“I said I’ll take your case,” I re-repeated. I sighed loudly, this time trying to convey every bit of the non-luctance I was feeling. “You might as well come into my office. You need to tell me the whole story, and I need to take notes.”

I walked back into my office without waiting for her to respond. She followed in what I took for stunned silence. Once inside, I located the second office chair underneath a small pile of scrolls, brushed those scrolls onto the floor in one corner, and set the chair across the desk from my own. She settled herself into it, still silent, while I walked around the desk and collapsed into my place of safety and comfort. Unfortunately, it was feeling much less safe at the moment.

“Start from the beginning. No, scratch that. Start before the beginning. Who are you, exactly, and why do you need an investigator?”

Willow’s - the client’s face still registered shock, and she had a dazed look in her eyes that told me she hadn’t actually expected to get this far, and now wasn’t sure how to proceed. I rubbed at a headache that was slowly beginning to form behind my eyes. What the hockey sticks was I doing? What the hells, I meant. Damned profanity filter. It was even starting to affect how I thought curses.

“Start with who you are,” I repeated.

“I’m Willow.”

The headache increased a little.

“Yes, we established that already.” I did pull out out a blank scroll and write that down anyway. “Surname?”

“Stockton,” she said immediately. “I mean -“

“In-game name.” I said. “Wait, Willow Stockton isn’t your real name, is it? You know we’re not supposed to use our real names in here.” I had a sudden urge to look all around me for a DM. It wasn’t logical, of course. You couldn’t see DMs unless they wanted you to. And it was very unlikely that some random administrator was listening in on this particular conversation. As far as I knew, neither of us was even on the leaderboard.

“No, of course not,” she said. “I mean… Willow isn’t. I’m Willow Lakewood. In game.”

“Really? Lakewood?”

“I was only twenty when it happened. I was… idealistic.”

‘It,’ of course, was the beginning of the game. The Game. THE GAME. Yes, I was pretty sure it warranted all capital letters, even in my own head. The day when ninety percent of humanity had woken up and found themselves in Character Creation. For most people, after the initial panic had worn off, the assurances that they were given that everything was definitely OK and that their injection into the game was a “Temporary Emergency Measure” had been enough to allow them to relax and enjoy the experience. If, on the other hand, you had been on a 12 hour binge and were much closer to fatal alcohol poisoning than sobriety on that day, you might have done something really stupid, like botching your name, stats, and class decisions in what turned out to be a much less “Temporary” situation than you were assured.

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

So Willow - the client - was still only 29. I was… older than that. You couldn’t know that unless you were told, of course. Other players might be 19 or 90, no matter what their characters looked like. We did all look like ourselves, more or less, but much less age-specific versions of ourselves. Voices were usually another story. There were in-game ways to disguise your voice, but most people sounded exactly the way they would in real life.

“Fine. Okay, Willow Lakewood,” Client, I substituted internally. “What do you do?”

“I work in the Garden,” she said. “But I don’t understand what that has-“

“Just answer the questions, please.” I cut her off. “If you only tell me what you think is important, I’ll almost certainly miss out on something that actually is important. I need context.” And time to process what the hotel I’m doing. HELL. What the HELL I’m doing. Damned profanity filter. “What do you do at the Garden?”

“I cast fecundity spells, mostly. Sometimes I tend plants and do some harvesting if players transfer up or down and leave us short-handed. But mostly it’s growing spells and more growing spells. And then more growing spells.” Her mouth narrowed in distaste. “It’s never quite what you thought it would be when you rolled up your skills, is it?”

“I don’t know, I mostly do exactly what I expected,” I said, not feeling much sympathy for other players who chose grinding paths over adventure paths and then regretted it later. But I guess I had been old enough to already know what a daily grind was when ‘it’ happened. I also had been a lot more idealistic at 20. Far too idealistic.

Her job made sense. Most players who chose non-human characters worked jobs related to their species’ built-in advantages. Half-orcs worked as caravan guards or bouncers. Catkin were usually hunters or thieves. And Treekin usually grew things. Which honestly, I had always thought was a little forked up. After all, if a Treekin grew a vegetable, wasn’t that kind of like… raising a child? And if they raised those children so people could eat them, wasn’t that…? I don’t know, cannibalism by proxy? Fluxed up, for sure. Wait… fluxed? Damned profanity filter.

I jotted some notes about her job, then moved on. “Where do you live?” I asked next.

“Um…” she actually blushed a little. “By the lake. Next to the, um. The wood.”

“You mean…”

She blushed even harder.

“You actually live in Lakewood?”

“Do you know how hard it is to move your home once you’ve claimed it?” she said, indignant. “It’s really flicking expensive, and even if you pay the fee it can take months for the Mayor’s office to process it. So yes, my name is Willow Lakewood, and I live in the middle of a willow grove, in Lakewood. I. Was. Twenty.”

“I didn’t say anything,” I said.

“You were thinking it,” she said, hotly.

I shrugged. “Maybe.”

She crossed her arms and actually pouted. It made her look even younger than twenty, and definitely far younger than twenty-nine. I knew, back in the real world, that our bodies hadn’t actually aged at all. Heck, if the rumors were true, some of us may have actually de-aged. Bodies just looked younger when you took away all the illness, all the effects of past illnesses, all of the disabilities, all of the wrinkles and age spots and mole hairs. And all of the personality, some people argued. Though I would bet absolutely no one missed the mole hairs.

“Alright, Willow Lakewood, who grows willows in the Lakewood.” She glared at me, but I continued, non-plussed. I wonder how one goes about being ‘plussed?’ No, not the time. “Now you can tell me what happened.”

“It’s my daughter,” she said, instantly losing both her pout and her indignation. “She’s missing. She’s been missing for over three weeks.”

I gave a low whistle. Three weeks. Three weeks wasn’t good.

Back in the real world, if a minor had gone missing for three weeks - heck, even for three days, most people would have assumed the worst. And by worst, I mean death, if that isn’t clear. Finding missing minors alive after more than a handful of days was, unfortunately, not the rule.

Of course, in THE GAME, it was different.

It wasn’t that you couldn’t die in THE GAME. Everyone claimed they had known someone who had died in THE GAME. Their uncle’s cousin’s friend’s boyfriend, or someone like that. But death, if it really did exist in THE GAME, was exceedingly rare. If, for example, you found yourself, newly stumbling out of Character Creation, still about three times above the legal blood-alcohol limit for driving in your country of origin, falling into a nest of giant harpy chicks just as giant-harpy momma is coming home to roost, the most likely scenario is that just before giant harpy momma rips out your throat with her razor sharp claws, you’ll find your vision going black seconds before you regain consciousness in the nearest safe zone. Just for example, of course.

The problem is that dying isn’t the worst thing that can happen to you in THE GAME. Say, for example, that instead of falling into a giant harpy nest, you fell into a giant sand-wasp den, then got stung into a full-conscious paralysis and implanted with wasp eggs that slowly digested you from the feet up over the course of several weeks, and didn’t black out and regenerate until the larva worked their way up to some seriously important internal organs.

Just for example. Definitely just for example, in this case. Though, according to my receptionist’s girlfriend’s sister’s cousin, that exact thing had happened to one particularly unfortunate player.

Missing child, I wrote on my scroll. Beside that, I wrote Age? Species? and Class?.

“Tell me about your daughter,” I said. “Age?”

“She’s thirteen.”

I raised my eyebrows at that statement. I raised them very high. I had never heard of a child being released into THE GAME that young. Most of the children of players who had enter the game when ‘it’ happened had been released between the ages of 16 and 18. I had heard of one as young as 15. But never thirteen. It was just too young to be able to handle the realities of THE GAME. Or… the virtual realities, I guessed. Way too young.

“Thirteen?” I asked, incredulous. “Your daughter is thirteen?”

Wilow - the client - seemed to shrink in on herself. She wrapped her long branch-like arms around herself and shuffled her feet. Her roots. Whatever.

“Well…” she began, hesitating.

I rolled my eyes. “Spit it out.”

“She… might be an NPC.”

My headache instantly doubled. An NPC? What the actual fort?

Damn that profanity filter.