Not only did Geraldine have a fridge, but she also had a working stove and a dishwasher. I was famished enough to ask if we could bug her to have breakfast. We had been raiding late at night until early in the morning and I think at least a few hours had passed since we entered this dungeon. I hadn't eaten since a bag of microwave popcorn at 9pm the night before.

While she cooked, Geraldine told me about how she woke up in her lounger chair to the sound of someone rummaging through her kitchen. When she came around the corner, it was the little man. She grabbed a knife and he ran past. So she shut the door on her kitchen and threw things at him.

Geraldine's apartment was so full of stuff I had to imagine that was the reason we didn't have anything spawn in ours. Calling her apartment a hoard was unkind after I realised that it was more like a treasure trove. The fridge was a golden prize — actually harvest gold. It was older than either me or Suze and it hummed, but it was inexplicably cold inside and Suze could actually pick it up to loot it.

Apparently Suze had levelled some abilities with all the fighting of spiders. She was able to temporarily increase her strength. It lasted long enough for her to pick up not just the fridge, but also the stove and the dishwasher one at a time. All of them were old, metal, and decorated with harvest gold paint, but they worked. How they worked, I had no idea. I just loved that we could turn the oven on and cook something and when you put something in the fridge, it was like it automatically got chilled to the set temperature.

As Geraldine cooked and Suze ensured that the entire apartment was looted, I went to the front door. Geraldine's front door, was an actual door. This was likely our exit. I didn't want to open it for fear that it'd unlock some kind of monster and I still was unable to heal myself again. The cooldown timer was bizarre. I explained as much to the two of them while we ate Mac'n'Cheese with bowls and spoons and drank some OJ.

Geraldine fussed over me to help ease the pain and bruising. She had so many pills of all kinds in her kitchen cabinets. I took a couple of acetaminophen.

As I did, no game alerts happened. I inspected the bottle and it just said Bottle. I did feel less pain in the right amount of time. I let Suze know.

WeeWee had given up giving us the silent treatment so began singing a loud and out-of-tune song in a language none of us understood. He annoyed Suze enough that she put his cage in time out in the bathroom. It was the only room where nothing had spawned. Not even the toilet paper. I felt a bit better once Geraldine let me know that it was the expensive fluffy stuff from the drug store. There was no gaping hole in her floor for spiders to climb up. I checked.

We took time to block the windows entirely and barricade the doors and set up jingly bells to hopefully alert us if anything broke through. I added another larger cage around the cage that held WeeWee and ignored him while he hissed at me and threatened to cast curses on me and the like. I ignored him. If he could have done it, he would have already.

Then I closed the door to the bathroom and we barricaded that.

Geraldine was amused by us looting everything. She told us so when we sat around the glow of candles eating the last of the slightly congealed Mac'n'Cheese directly from her pot with a two large wooden spoons. It was nice not to have to cast my light spell, but I wondered if maybe I was losing out on levelling it up so every once in awhile I cast it just to do it. The cats got some canned catfood and were enjoying our attentions. I noticed the other two cats also had a Tier 0 class or whatever of Cat as well.

Geraldine was talking so I focused on listening to her. "If I'd known you girls liked cleaning up all my things so much, I would have had you over earlier."

"I hate cleaning, but I like looting." Suze leaned back. She was still inspecting the cudgel. It glowed that greenish lime light whenever she wanted it to. Another light source unattached to a spell that required recasting would be useful. "You had so much to loot too."

"Suze." I admonished her.

"No she's right. I have too much stuff. Most of it was my late husband's and I just hadn't found a way to get rid of it."

"Oh, Geraldine." I said and reached out to touch her on the arm.

"I'm not sad Kaylee dear. He's been gone over a decade now. I didn't need the space in that room so I just shut the door and left it."

"What's in all the boxes?"

"Who knows? Most of those things were from his shop. When the lease ended I didn't want to offload it all and just had it shipped here."

"Shop? What did he do?"

"He was a traditional Chinese medicine practitioner."

"Oh, wow." I looked at Suze who seemed just as impressed. Some of the stuff in those boxes could be really useful medicine-wise, but I didn't know how long supplies would be okay since 10 years was a long time. Besides, everything would likely be labeled just Bottle so it would be trial and error to figure out what anything was. "Do you know how to make things with his stuff?"

She shook her head. "No. That was his expertise. Mine was a little different."

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

"What is your expertise Geraldine?" Suze asked.

"I'll be right back." She wandered back into the kitchen, taking our dirty dishes with her.

"Suze. Don't you think it's terrible that this game thing summoned Geraldine? She clearly didn't play the game. I don't even think she owned a computer."

"I thought she could be a trick. Some kind of NPC trap. But it's definitely Geraldine. She handed me a letter that had ended up in her mail that she said she was going to drop off in the morning." Suze yawned. "I'm so tired, I'm dead."

My heart dropped. "Please don't say that."

Suze half-grinned and then had the audacity to wink at me.

Geraldine came back to us right then, carrying several bottles of beer in each hand. "Here's my expertise girls. I worked in a brewery. Still brew my own wine and beer."

Suze whooped in joy and Geraldine tossed one to her. She opened the bottle with her teeth. I frowned at her.

"You can lose teeth that way."

"Yes mãezinha." She took a swig and after an appreciative grunt, she said, "We should have spent more time with you before this."

"Well. Well. I keep to myself." Geraldine's voice was gruff, but she looked actually happy. She passed a beer to me and I thought about using my shirt to twist off the lid, but it was caked in guts and bits of my weirdly magicked strands of hair stuck to that. I just settled for twisting off the bottle top with my hand.

I sipped at the bottle while the other two talked. Geraldine knew quite a bit of apartment building gossip. Suze knew the people around us enough that she could show interest in it. It felt good, but strange to hear them chattering as if the last bunch of hours hadn't happened.

I just couldn't let go of it. In the course of the past few hours I could have died multiple times. I can cast spells. I summoned or conjured or created a magical mirror from nothing. I pulled it from inventory and it appeared in my hand.

Mirror of the Moon. Conjured by Kaylee. Level 1 item.

Looking back at me in the silver depths was just a reflection of me.

"Mirror mirror!" Suze tossed a pillow at me. "Drink your beer."

"It's just. It's kinda unbelievable."

The other two laughed wryly and drank their beer.

I just played with the bottle, not drinking any more. I thought about the door and how I had no idea what lay beyond it. I also thought about the abyss outside the windows we barricaded. Then the little man locked in the bathroom who I could barely just hear shouting obscenities at us.

While we drank, Geraldine hauled a bunch of knitted and crocheted blankets out from a closet. They only smelled a little dusty, but I didn't care. Then she pointed at us, "You two look disgusting. Take off your clothes and we'll clean them tomorrow."

"We don't have anything to wear."

"Hmph. I have just the things." She took off again with one of the candles but then stopped at the edge of her hallway. "Did you loot everything in here Susana?"

Suze answered in the affirmative.

"Can you cough up the things from my closet?"

"Uhh." Suze seemed a bit stumped and then as she focused on something, she chuckled happily. "I just got a skill about an improved inventory. I can search now by category. What am I looking for?"

"My clothes."

A few moments later, a pile of brightly coloured fabric lay on the floor. Geraldine attacked the pile like nobody's business and clothes flew back to Suze who absorbed them back into her inventory one by one.

Geraldine was a small lady, but she had lots of clothes from the 1970s that were way too large for her. The final items that remained were three giant muumuus covered in psychedelic patterns. "Put these on and here are some baby wipes. Use them liberally."

We did as we were told and put our nasty clothes in a pile far enough away that I realised they had been stinking. I even used the baby wipes on my hair. It was gross, but not as gross as the gunk that came off when I cleaned them. We used up an entire package. Suze then looted the empty package.

"Are you going to loot everything? Even garbage?"

"Sure." Suze grinned. "I loot everything."

Yeah, well we'd looted everything in Geraldine's apartment and we could put it back. If Geraldine stayed here, she'd maybe be safe. But then, what if this area closed off and she ran out of food. I had no idea how long the game would last or what happened if you stayed in one place for too long. Did things respawn?

She wasn't safe. She had to go with us.

"Geraldine, I don't know how we're going to get you out of here, but I really want you and the cats to stay with us so we can protect you."

"Kaylee..." she trailed off and it became clear to me that she'd decided to stay here.

"No way. You're not staying. We're going to need to sleep for the night here, but I think the WeeWee guy is easy mode in this dungeon and he nearly strangled me to death with my own hair. I have no idea what else will come into this apartment or even if you'll be able to survive. At least with us we can protect you."

Suze raised her eyebrows.

"Well, at least Suze can protect you."

Suze frowned at me. "That's not why I gave you that look."

"You've got combat skills. I don't -- yet. I will. I'll work at it. But I can heal once in a blue moon and that's useful. I have some lights and they're slowly levelling up. If I work at it, I bet I could be just a good a healer as I am in Realms. I can protect you." I said to Geraldine with as much seriousness and assuredness as I could fake. I almost believed myself.

"Yesterday is a foreign country." Geraldine said sadly and I had no idea what she meant by that. "Maybe this is my time. You girls should just leave me."

At the exact same time, Suze and I said, "No/Nāo."

"Not an option." Besides the guilt I felt at having her with us here which was likely our fault if my theories were correct. I couldn't just leave her. We still had no idea how respawning worked or if this area would remain standing. Without groceries to replace her food, she'd starve to death. "You'll come with us."

"I don't want to kill things or fight, dear Kaylee." She pet Bootsie and the cat arched up to her hand.

"You won't have to." I said.

Suze gave me a look like, Are you crazy? Maybe I was. So far at every step of this place we had interacted with things intent to kill us. Geraldine maybe was not going to be helpful in combat, but technically neither was I in comparison to Suze. Geraldine may prove useful in so many ways like she knew how to crochet and she spent years making beer and wine. If anything, she could help us get drunk when things got really terrible.

We all three laid out together in her living room. Geraldine fell asleep first. I felt like maybe I should stay awake and watch over them, but Suze sat up and she said, "Kaylee. Let me stay up. I'm tired, but I had a second wind."

I wanted to bicker and try to be the hero, but I was really tired. A kind of tired I hadn't felt in a long time. "Okay. Thanks Suze." I lay down and closed my eyes. I was almost asleep when I heard Susana say one last thing.

"Besides you'll need the respite to interrogate that unpleasant little fucker in the bathroom in the morning."

Sleep dragged me under.