Warren sat in the middle of the market on a bench seat, sipping the local analogue of coffee from a metal bound wooden tankard. He mentally thanked whoever had programmed the drinks that caffeine wasn’t considered and “adult” drink and allowed him the pick-me-up he so desperately needed. Here he was, surrounded by people, yet just as alone as he was in his hospital room. The rest of the guild were off training, as per his instructions. After a rousing speech about rights versus responsibilities, following your passions and there being more to life than death they had all cheered and sped off to do something other than die for the rest of the week. Warren knew his exhortations had been well received, but he couldn’t remember a word of them himself.

Putting his tankard on his knee to relieve the weight on his arm, he removed it a moment later as his leg began to bounce of its own will lest it spill the precious liquid. “I hope that’s not a sign,” he muttered under his breath.

The day before had been harrowing.

Warren’s father had insisted on yet another surgery in order to attempt to correct his paralysis. The old man had refused to listen to Warren’s protestations and simply informed him that a Doctor Duntsch would be arriving soon whether he liked it or not. He was, to quote the patriarch, “outstanding in his field and came highly recommended”. Warren knew that meant “rich people liked him”.

Warren’s anxiety had peaked when the doctor performing the operation had entered the room to his own theme music. It certainly did not abate when the bed rolled him over to face the floor while the doctor joked with the anaesthetist. The arms of an auto-doc connected Warren to a spider’s web of tubes, giving each site a quick mist of numbing and antiseptic spray before inserting the needle.

Warren was given a feed from the camera overhead, as he was required to retain consciousness to allow the doctor to judge nerve conduction. As Warren watched, the scalpel-wielding maniac parted the skin from the nape of his neck to the tip of his tailbone with a flourish. A small device was then screwed to every vertebra down his spine and connected to the nerves and bloodstream so that they could – according to the monologue that accompanied the doctor’s work – be charged by his body and never need external charging. Warren watched Dr Duntsch place the electric screwdriver on the stainless steel bench and step back to tap and swipe at a display that Warren couldn’t see due to the angle. The anaesthetist nodded and started tapping at their own screens so Warren assumed that they were cutting off the drugs.

While the anaesthetic had prevented him feeling anything other than a slight itching during the procedure, the very moment the drugs had worn off had been excruciating agony from the neck down. Every muscle in his body had locked solid including his diaphragm. He would have thrashed around in pain were his muscles not already doing their level best to tear themselves free of his bones.

The anaesthetist immediately sedated him, the doctor switched off the devices, and the machines flooded Warren’s body with oxygenated blood. Once he was stable they both left the room to confer with his father as Warren’s body slowly relaxed until he was able to breathe on its own once more.

Ultimately, it was decided to leave them in place and the auto-doc was instructed to suture the incision.

With some wonderful drugs now circulating his bloodstream, Warren swallowed hard as his father escorted Dr Duntsch into room once more. The monster in scrubs announced that the procedure was a promising indicator, even if not a total success.

Warren had said unkind things about his ancestry and their molesting of animal companions. However, he waited until his father and the medical professionals had left the room to do so. He was in pain, not stupid.

The moment Warren was sure nobody was coming back he had fled from reality, diving into The Age of Steam and Sorcery. He gathered every last member of his crew and announced that they were not returning to the Archology for at least a week. He also made it clear that the rota for manning the stall was entirely voluntary for that week. The dungeon clearly wasn’t going anywhere and he refused to lose another member. It felt like a win, on a day where he desperately needed one.

Sighing, Warren placed the tankard on the wood beside his leg where it probably wouldn’t fall and massaged the limb until the shaking stopped. This gave him time to really look around the market properly. He listened to how the stall owners spoke to each other and how they interacted with customers. He compared it to his own experiences as a customer and as a leader of a team.

After a moment his wrist started to flash golden. “Well, that’s new,” Warren inspected the area. He’d never really interacted with the character sheet, thinking of the system information as “nerd stuff” that got in the way of his kicking things that deserved it. His father’s rant about paying attention, however much he hated to admit it, was probably right so Warren swiped the edge of his right palm down his left wrist as though smoothing out a scroll.

You don’t get to be one of the richest men in the world by being wrong all the time, Warren thought as he tried to make sense of the numbers. There were the usual things like strength and dexterity and so on, every time he levelled up he assigned a point in this section to just to make the notifications stop, but his eyes were drawn to the Skills list as that was where the golden flashing was coming from. He’d never noticed a gold anything before, except maybe the halo around the unique quest that led to the Arcology. Maybe they’re related? he wondered.

Most of the skills in the list were pulsing silver-ish, or maybe steel, but stopped the moment he read them. Running, jumping, One handed melee, one handed melee – single edged weapon, Warren read through the list in his head. There’s a skill for everything here. Oooh, leadership is almost to ten already. Observation? Why’s that glowing gold though?

The bench rocked as somebody threw themselves down on it. Warren’s hand flew to his tankard, nearly knocking it to the ground in his haste to rescue it. He glared at the intruder who lounged in the sun, his chocolate brown skin glistening with sweat.

“Sup, gee?” Pham greeted, using the front of his overalls to fan himself cool.

Warren steadied his drink pointedly, before returning the greeting. “What’s the go with skills? I’ve been here forever and my highest score is ten point oh oh two?”

“Thaaat’s akshully kinda high,” Pham adjusted a phantom pair of glasses. Then he pulled what looked to be a granola bar out of a pocket and started munching. “Didn’t you read the promo material?”

Warren grunted. “Didn’t really get a chance to. Why?”

“Weeeeellll, the devs were really enamoured by the idea that it takes ten thousand hours to be an expert at anything,” Pham explained, spraying crumbs everywhere. “Sure you get crits and bumps when you do something brilliant, but if you’re straight grinding a skill it’s going to take you just over a year if you do nothing else. And I do mean nothing else, that’s not eating, sleeping or pooping.”

Warren blinked, then took a slow drink to cover the fact he was thinking. “That’s per skill? A year per skill to get it to one hundred percent?”

“A bit more than a year,” Pham dusted off his hands, then began patting at his pockets. “And don’t forget that you’re going to need skills for everything.”

“Everything?”

“Everything. There’s even a breathing skill, the better you get the easier it is to exert yourself and recover after exertion,” Pham demonstrated, taking a deep breath, inhaling a crumb and coughing up a lung. “Yeah, I’m no good at that yet.”

Warren slapped Pham on the back until the coughing passed. He took a quantum of pleasure adding a tiny bit more force than he probably needed. “Well, at least when you have learned a skill you’ve got it. This is an MMO, and we have all the time in the world.”

“Hawk tua,” Pham spat out the offending speck. He showed Warren a wan smile. “You’d think so, you’d reaaallly think so. Sadly, you lose a skill point a week on an unused skill. Use it or lose it, you know?”

“Are you kidding me?” Warren leaned back and sighed. “Fine. Well, I have some skills I need to learn and Dad says we can learn them here. He also says,” Warren gave Pham the side-eye, “that you’re the person I should ask. Don’t ask why, I can’t tell you.

Pham rubbed his fingers together in the international sign for “pay me”. “Cross my palm with silver and I’ll tell you anything you want.”

“Didn’t we already have an agreement to get you stuff you want from the dungeon?”

“Doesn’t apply,” Pham stood up, brushing off the rest of the crumbs. “That was you using my skills to get you through the traps. This is me teaching you the skills to use yourself. Besides, I possess secret knowledge. I suspect your father knows what it is too, which is why he pointed you at me.”

Warren stood too. “Fine. Deal.” He held out his hand to shake.

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Pham held out his right hand, palm up and poked it with his left index finger. “Fifteen bucks, little man. Put that coin in my hand. If that money doesn’t show, then you owe me, owe me, oh,” he rapped.

Warren opened his inventory and extracted fifteen silver coins. He laid them across Pham’s hand with a pained expression.

“You know,” Pham opined, “your accent comes and goes, but you’re a Scot to the core, aren’t you? Tighter than a platypus sphincter.”

“Hey!” Warren held up a warning finger. “You don’t use the S-word. Tha’s our word!” Warren’s sudden burr was as thick as any Glaswegians. “And that silver cost me a lot of blood and sweat, if you’re not careful it’ll cost you the same.”

“Chill, Winston, I was just kidding,” Pham backed off, hands up. He didn’t relinquish the coins though, they went straight into his inventory. “You want to know the secret of Monkey Island? I’ll share, but we have to pop over to my workshop. I’m not going to blather them out here in the open.”

Mollified, Warren stopped bristling. “Aye, ‘tis no yer fault. My morning wae fer the birds.”

Pham just stood there looking confused.

“I had a sucky morning,” Warren explained. “I’m sorry for taking it out on you.”

Pham shrugged and indicated the way to his workshop. In a few minutes, they were standing out the front of a dilapidated warehouse that looked like someone had tried to drive a locomotive through and gotten stuck half way.

“Much bigger than your last place,” Warren observed.

“You never know your luck in the big city,” Pham quipped, opening the front door. A blast of steam enveloped him, but dissipated quickly. “Especially when you can count cards.”

“How is that fair?” Warren grumbled. “You can gamble but you can’t drink?”

“It’s cos you’re not using real money,” Pham led the way inside. “Apparently. Anyways, up the hall, there’s a soundproofed chamber I built in case something exploded really loudly. Stops eavesdroppers too, and I’ve had a few. I’ll see you there after I lock up.”

Warren wandered down the hall, glancing into rooms as he passed. Most were only full of dust, but one had a cosy little bedroom and another had a combination machine shop and theoretical physicist’s lab.

“Next one on your left,” Pham called, still snapping locks shut.

Curiosity curbed, Warren opened the indicated door and stepped inside. There was a light overhead inside a brass bound glass globe the size of a basketball. It illuminated a checker plate floor that was suspended over a grid of pipes that curved around and led up into the roof. In the centre of the room was a blackened workbench that was partially melted in places and chipped all over. Sitting on the bench was, if you squinted real hard, a replica of a repair droid from Star Wars. It had pipes and wires hanging out of it at random intervals and it was smoking gently.

“Don’t worry about that little guy,” Pham entered while Warren was still examining the robot. “There’s nothing flammable left in it.”

“Are you sure?”

“Mostly,” Pham dragged a pair of bar stool height chairs in behind him and set them up next to an unoccupied section of bench. “Worst case the respawn point is just down the road. You have move your spawn point, haven’t you?”

“To the church near the front gate,” Warren said. “Is there a closer one?”

“This is the craftsman’s layer,” Pham pointed in what Warren felt was a random direction. “People have accidents with power saws or hot metal regularly enough that there’s a small chapel and graveyard near the middle, by the weird vertical railway.”

The pair eased themselves into the chairs and Pham pulled a few books from his inventory. Warren looked one over and saw that it was entirely handwritten. It wasn’t terribly unusual for books in this game to be like that, but normally they were neater and had fewer singes. “Did you make this?” he asked, impressed.

“Surely did,” Pham took the book from Warren and flipped it open to a bookmarked page. “So here’s what you paid for. Some parts of the game are censored, so we can’t say certain things. I can, however, write them down by hand, it seems. I’m sure they’ll patch it out once they realise it’s an issue but for now I don’t think too many people are sharing knowledge by writing books.”

Warren took the book back and began reading. After a minute he had to put the book on the countertop and massage his forearms which had begun gently spasming. “Day five: Time seems to move differently when I’m alone in my workshop. I know I can hyperfocus and lose track of hours but it never seems to occur when other Travellers are near. NPCs do not seem to interrupt the effect. During these periods, skills advance much more quickly, and are retained after logging out. I have taught myself knitting, cooking and calculus over the course of a real world week. The ten thousand hour effect appears to be subjective time, not objective, Warren read. He arched an eyebrow at Pham, who was sitting patiently and eating peanuts from a copper crew top can. “You talk like that, and write like a tenured professor.”

“I never expected to be sharing my notes,” Pham shrugged and offered the can. “Remember, the only difference between science and screwing around is writing it down and I’m alllll about the science.”

Warren accepted the can and shook some nuts into his palm. His arm, still twitching, caused him to shake a bit harder than he’d expected and a few fell through the grate into the pipe mouth with a soft clanging. “And you’re saying we can’t say this out loud?”

“Test it,” Pham took the can back and replaced the lid. “Not with those words though, we don’t want the system twigging. Try swearing though. Or tell an NPC they’re a character in a game. You’ll see soon enough.”

“So what you’re saying is that I can…” Warren trailed off as his train of thought derailed. He wasn’t sure why, just that the words he’d been going to say just weren’t there anymore.

“Hah, told you so,” Pham jeered. “Anyway, instead of looking for loopholes, I think the bit your dad was wanting you to learn was the take home part? If you learn it here, you keep it. So, go to the training hall and start throwing that silver at skill trainers then go practice.”

“Really?” Warren was rubbing his whole arms now, the spasming hadn’t gotten worse, just spread up to his shoulder. “Do you get double XP from trainers or something?”

“The opposite,” Pham said. “Being trained will never get you a critical breakthrough.”

“What’s that?”

“When your skill glows gold? You just got a full point instead of a decimal,” Pham explained as he stood and opened the door. “But, some skills you just can’t get a start on yourself. Anyone can grab a sword and get swinging, duh. But without a basic lab safety course anyone attempting alchemy is just going to poison themselves, get blown up, or both.”

Warren looked pointedly at the still smoking robot shell. “Both, you say?”

“Shut up,” Pham stalked down the hall away from him. “I’ll tell you what, though. I’ll refund five of those silver if you help me with some trash disposal.”

Not sure if household chores were worth five silver, Warren followed the elf out into the wide open main floor of the warehouse. Dangling from a chain by their foot was a dark robed figure. They were illuminated by a shaft of light coming in from a square opening in the roof, a trapdoor of some sort to Warren’s eyes. As the figure thrashed about trying to reach their foot to free it, bits of singed robe and blackened feathers drifted down to splat on the floor where they leaked a gooey, oily substance.

“Remember when I mentioned eavesdroppers?” Pham gestured at the gyrating guest.

“Aye, that I do,” Warren watched, mesmerised. It was kind of like a messed up lava lamp.

“Well, this one managed to pass three levels of dissuasion and still has enough hit points to put on a little show. If you want those silver back, would you mind?” Pham waved dismissively.

“Why can’t you do it yourself?” Warren asked, as the figure gave up on trying to reach their foot and tried swinging themselves like a pendulum.

“Unlike some, I’ve invested in the intellectual arts. It’d be like beating someone to death with a wiffle bat. Hey, cut that out!” The last was directed to the intruder who had swung themselves to a pole and was inching themselves up. Pham pulled a nearby lever and the chain dropped to the floor, dragging the robed figure after it. “Look, it’s a player. They’ll respawn. Hopefully somewhere far from here if they have any sense.”

“Five silver?”

“Six if you do it now,” Pham offered, watching the intruder working their foot free of the chain.

“Done,” Warren agreed. He took two quick steps and a swipe, cleanly parting head from shoulders in a draw cut that would make and Edo era samurai jealous. He wiped the blood on the intruder’s robe before the body began to fade and returned the blade to its sheath. “Some games have enforced bounties for player killers. I wonder why The Age doesn’t?”

“No idea,” Pham shrugged holding out the six coins. “Probably a good thing it doesn’t though.”