FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Tyrian heard a murmur of voices fall to silence around him before the light had even faded. He blinked, finding himself standing in the back of a simple rural church, between its pulpit and another statue of Mother; this one depicted Her as a mare, although the wings and clothing looked much the same as the one in his Dimensional Interstice. Feeling disoriented, he turned… and found a dozen pairs of eyes staring back at him.

The closest belonged to the evident leader of the congregation, a small brown and white mustelid - a least weasel, at a guess - wearing a faded white robe belted at her waist, along with a holy symbol that looked much the same as the one the squirrel himself had been given, although the focal stone in hers was smaller and looked to be an emerald. The brown in her fur was shot through with grey, and she stood with a slight stoop.

“It would seem we are graced with yet another of Her servants, my kin. Praise to the Mother!” The assembled mammals murmured a reflexive echo, as Shawn - Tyrian, damn it, stay in character! - self-consciously tugged on the lapels of his coat. The weasel inclined her head, a paw on her chest, in the suggestion of a bow, and then gave him a weary but genuine smile. “I am Elder Sister Kathryn, and these before you are my flock - those of them who could be spared from their duties to gather on this momentous morn, at any rate. I trust I did not misapprehend your arrival…?”

Tyrian cleared his throat. Somewhere in the back of his head, part of him went rummaging for memories of his public speaking class back in high school, came up empty, and settled for not falling over in a frothing mess. “No, I don’t think so.” He glanced over the assembled villagers, who looked bedraggled and lean; they all appeared to be in poor shape, and he saw confusion and a glimmer of hope in their haunted eyes. “I’m Emissary Tyrian Avalore, sent by Mother to help you. I’m… very new to this, though, so… you’ll have to forgive me if I don’t really know what I’m doing just yet.” He looked back to the weasel priestess. “A few of my friends are apparently gathering at a place called Duskreach Fort to the west of here, and I was about to join them. Before I go, though, could you… fill me in on the situation around here?”

Sister Kathryn gave another suggestion of a bow. “I understand from your colleague, Emissary Winona, that you have been summoned from another world, and know of our plight only in the most general of terms. I will try to be brief. These past several years, troubles have sprung up all across the realm. At first, all we heard were rumors from traveling peddlers and the like… stories of bandits becoming more numerous and wielding fearsome magics their ilk had never been known to possess, and of strange happenings in far-off parts of the kingdom. We put little stock in the tales… until they came to our doorstep. Now, we’re lucky to go a fortnight without a band of itinerant ruffians riding into the Hollow as if they owned it, and demanding tribute from whoever is unfortunate enough to cross their paths. We’re simple farmfolk, and have little to offer. When there isn’t enough coin to suit their tastes, they become violent. Houses have been smashed or burned, womenfolk… taken in the streets by these beasts in the pelts of men, and any who raise a paw in defiance are cut down where they stand. We barely made it through this past winter, and if we can’t manage a decent harvest this year, we will not survive the next.”

“As if these were not enough trials for our meagre shoulders to bear, two years agone these… creatures began emerging from the Westerwilds. Some on two legs, some on four or many more, but unlike the bandits they ask for nothing but our lives. Young men and women, whose strong arms are needed in the fields, have had to form a militia to fend off their seemingly random raids, but far too many are wounded or slain trying to keep Caddaham Hollow from being wiped off the map. Once, the Guard would have kept us safe from all of this, but they have all been called back to the heartland, whence come stories of dark doings too varied and conflicting to be believed.”

“Duskreach Fort is an outpost on the edge of the Wilds - a haven for those brave souls and fortune-seekers who have been trying to fight back against the fiends within. The stories they tell in their occasional visits are grim, though, and it doesn’t seem that they have made much headway. If that is where you are bound, then go, with our blessings. May you find the source of the ills that flow from that accursed place… but I pray you remember, they are not the only doom closing around my flock.”

Tyrian’s tail drooped flat onto the floor as the priestess spoke. This wasn’t at all like getting a block of exposition from an NPC questgiver; to him, these seemed like real people, a village on the brink of becoming a graveyard and a cautionary tale. He felt torn. Caleb and the others were waiting for him, and he doubted he’d be able to do much to protect these people from bandits on his own. At the same time, just riding off to fun and adventure while they were suffering felt… wrong. His eyes returned to the mammals sitting on the benches - pews, he supposed - that filled the small church, and he spotted an older beaver with his crudely splinted right arm in a sling.

Hmm. Did Paths of the Emissary have a concept of ‘cutscene damage?’ Only one way to find out. He stepped down from the pulpit and approached the beaver, who looked up at him with a hollow expression. Closing his eyes for a moment, the squirrel rehearsed the spell in his mind a couple of times, and then reopened them, making a relatively simple gesture with one paw in the air before him.

“La sani rai!”

As he spoke, the magical script from his grimoire formed itself in the air in front of him, the unintelligible squiggles streaking in from around his body to settle as a luminous white command hovering at about chest height, which flared up and vanished as the spell completed successfully. He reached out and touched the beaver’s shoulder, and a surge of light flared around the injured villager, brightest by far on his fractured arm. Some of the broken indifference left the man’s eyes as he flexed his arm experimentally… then slid it out of the sling, testing its range of motion.

An awed murmur rose up from the assembled villagers, and a couple of them fell to their knees, clasped paws raised high toward the statue of Mother at the back of the room. All at once, Tyrian appreciated why She had referred to magic as a ‘miracle power.’ As far as these simple people were concerned, they’d just seen one performed right before their eyes!

Turning his gaze back to the beaver, the squirrel was gratified to see an uncertain smile spreading across the man’s bucktoothed face as the rest of the defeated apathy faded from his eyes. “Thank ye kindly, Yer Lordship. Reckon my pitchfork ‘n me’ve got a score t’settle with the cowpie what done that to me if he shows his face back ‘round these parts agin.”

“Praise to the Mother! Praise to Her Emissary!” The weasel’s arms were lifted high in supplication, the sleeves of her robe fallen back against her shoulders.

“Praise to the Mother! Praise to Her Emissary!” The congregation echoed her words, with none of the uncertainty Tyrian had heard in the earlier benediction.

The squirrel felt his ears burning. “It… it was nothing. Really. It was Mother’s gifts that let me do that, not anything I earned myself.”

Sister Kathryn lowered her arms, and opened her smiling mouth to reply, but was cut short as a field mouse shuffled quickly over to Tyrian and closed her paws around his arm with surprising strength for how underfed she looked.

“Please, Emissary! It’s… it’s my son. He’s very sick, and our healer’s herbs aren’t working. I beg you, heal him as well!”

Tyrian swallowed hard, his ears going flat against his head, and ran back through the list of spells he’d seen in his grimoire. There had been an entry for removing poisons, but curing disease? He reached for the tome, and it leapt back into his hand, at which point the mouse woman released him. Nope, nothing for that. He grimaced, and opened his mouth to reply, but the raw anguish in the woman’s eyes stilled his tongue. It wouldn’t hurt to try, would it?

“I’m… not sure what I can do, but…”

“Please!” She dropped to her knees and pressed her head to the wooden floor. “I’m begging you! I lost his father six months ago, I can’t lose him as well!” The squirrel could hear her throat closing up, and felt tears filling his own eyes.

“I’ll try. I can’t promise anything, but I’ll try.”

Caddaham Hollow was just as… rustic as he’d imagined it would be. Most of the buildings were a single story, and were spread out in a way that would have been shamefully wasteful of space in a more urban environment. He didn’t get much time to take in the sights, though, as the mouse led him across the village like a woman possessed, and in no time he found himself in a one-room cottage. One of the two rudimentary beds was empty, but the other…

Tyrian recoiled slightly at the sight of the maybe five year old field mouse staring blearily back at him with half-lidded eyes. He was thin and wan, clearly not well at all even to the squirrel’s untrained eyes… but why was there a grayish mist hanging about him?! He suddenly heard Yasim’s voice inside his head.

“It’s your glasses, b-* Emissary. They show you… well, I guess you’d call them ‘status effects’ in a normal game. It’s showing you that he’s infected with something bad.”

“Mama, who’s this?” The little mouse coughed weakly, unable to even clear his chest properly.

“Hush, baby. This is an Emissary sent by Mother to help you.” She looked at him with naked desperation in her eyes, and Tyrian felt his heart twisting in his chest.

Blinking back tears, he walked over to the bed and lightly stroked over the mouseboy’s feverish head. “Hey there. I’m Tyrian. What’s your name?”

Cough cough, wheeze. “I’m Haran. Like Saint Haran, only I’m not big and-” Cough, cough. “-and strong like he was.” Speaking even those few words seemed to be more than he could handle, and Tyrian could hear him struggling to get enough air into his lungs to recover.

“Okay, Haran. You just rest for me, okay? I’m going to ask Mother to help you now.”

“O-okay…”

The squirrel took a deep breath through his nose and cleared his mind. The somatic component for the poison-curing spell was more involved, and he went through it slowly. “Sani vex!” The arcane script flared, and he laid a paw on the boy’s head. White light shimmered faintly around him, suggesting the spell had taken hold… but the effect was much more subdued than before, and there was no change in the gray mist.

Cringing inwardly, he tried another approach. “La sani rai!” The light from the general injury-healing spell was substantially brighter, focused primarily on Haran’s chest… but still, the mist remained.

After a moment though, the mouseboy’s eyes opened a bit wider. “H-hey, I think I feel a li-*” CoughcoughCOUGH! Haran abruptly sat up in bed, curling inward as his petite frame was wracked by far more powerful spasms… and then leaned over the side of his cot, retching greenish-white phlegm onto the floor. The spell may not have cured the boy’s sickness, but apparently it had undone some of the ravages the disease had inflicted on his little body. That was progress!

Tyrian looked up to see hope and wonder on Haran’s mother’s face - he realized distantly he had yet to ask her name - and shook his head briskly in rapid negation. “I think it helped, but he’s still sick.” Watching her expression fall broke his heart all over again. “Just… give me a minute to think, alright?”

He walked away from the cot, pacing back and forth. He was no doctor, but it seemed to be a safe bet that Haran was suffering from some kind of bacterial lung infection. It also seemed pretty unlikely that Tethryll had anything like modern antibiotics, though.

“Pity we can’t just go back to Earth and ask Doc Sheridan for some amoxicillin, huh bro?” Jason’s voice sounded in his head again - apparently the ‘angel’ was done trying to stay in character when they were talking privately like this. “I’m sure that’d go over real well. ‘Yeah, uh, I need it as a prop, for a video game I’m playing.’ I can almost imagine his expression.” The voice paused. “Oh wait a damn minute here… bro, I got an idea. You need to see this. Can you do the lotus position?”

I beg your pardon? Tyrian blinked as he subvocalized back to his daemon.

“Just trust me. Sit down, ankles up over your legs, fold your paws in your lap, and close your eyes.”

Feeling more than a little silly, the squirrel found a spot in the corner to do exactly that. As his eyes shut, he felt his awareness of the cottage dimming… and then he reopened them to find himself back in his Dimensional Interstice with ‘Yasim’ standing over him.

“What the…?”

“You’re meditating, bro. It lets you send your spirit back here so you can spend praxis and stuff without having to start back over at the nearest Mother statue. Check it out.” He gestured toward the alchemy table.

As he got to his feet, Tyrian looked at his own paw. He was, indeed, slightly translucent, and his outline was looking a bit wispy, but he seemed to be able to touch things just fine. He padded over to the table, and his eyes were drawn to one of the racks of vials he’d seen earlier. Two of them were no longer empty; one held a very small amount of a glowing blue fluid that seemed to have ripples of green light dancing through it, but another beside it stood nearly full, and whatever was inside was glowing brilliantly white.

“I’m guessing this one is… what was it, Defensive Magic praxis? From the healing spells? But what kind is white?” He reached for the manual on the table, but Yasim was already talking.

“That’s not praxis, bro! That’s Mother’s Favor!” The angelic wolf was practically vibrating. “It’s mostly a quest reward sort of thing, for doing stuff that makes Mother happy with you. I think you got it from stopping to help the villagers instead of running off like everyone else did. You can use it like praxis, and it turns into whatever type you want without any loss, but you can turn it into other things too. And here,” the wolf slapped one of the spellbooks from the library down onto the table, “is the other half of the equation.”

Tyrian picked up the book, which was titled ‘On Remedies for Common Ills’, and noted that the lockable clasp on its cover already hung open. Opening the small tome, he saw his poison-curing spell listed on the first page, identical to what he’d already seen in his personal grimoire. So this was where that had come from! Suddenly realizing where Yasim was going with this, the squirrel started flipping through until he found a page headed with ‘Cure Non-Magical Disease.’ The rest of the page was… swimming before his eyes, as if the ink wasn’t fixed to the paper and couldn’t manage to sit still long enough for him to read it. He looked up from the page and met Yasim’s eyes, and both of them said it in tandem.

“Spell ink!”

In a manic frenzy now, Tyrian grabbed the alchemy manual off the table and flipped through until he found the recipe for converting Favor into spell ink. Deposit Inkstone Catalyst into the alembic - ah, here it was, in the left drawer - check. Pour in the Favor, heat until boiling, check; the squirrel was relieved to find the process was accelerated to an unrealistic degree, but this was magic, after all! Open the valve to the condensing coil, check check check! In less than a minute, Shawn found himself holding a vial of pitch-black ink with little white sparkles floating lazily around in it. Glancing at Yasim for just a moment to make sure he was doing it properly, he upended the vial over the page with his desired spell.

The ink flowed purposefully over the paper, latching onto the blurred and wandering characters and pinning them in place on the page as it was absorbed. Without even taking the time to stand the vial back up in its rack, Tyrian started reading through the spell, practicing its motions several times until he was sure he had it memorized.

“Um, how do I get back?”

“Same way you got here! Good luck!”

Shawn folded his legs back in over each other, dropped his paws into his lap, and closed his eyes again. When he reopened them, he was back in the cottage, where his patient’s murine mother was stroking her son’s head and speaking to him in hushed tones. As he stood back up, smiling, both of them looked at him. He didn’t bother to explain, though; he walked over to Haran’s other side, took a deep breath, and started waving his paws through the substantially more complex motions of his new spell.

“Ryne maerna, ex taeni sant: sani khrol!” The far more involved invocation spun into being before him, and flared itself out of existence as he laid a paw on Haran’s chest. Light bloomed from within the boy’s torso and spread outward to his limbs, before exploding out of him in a burst of luminous feathers that quickly faded out of existence. In the same moment, the edges of Tyrian’s vision darkened, and the colors faded from his vision, the scene before him washing out almost to the point of becoming monochrome. But he had only a moment to register all of this, as he realized that the gray mist surrounding the young mouse had instantly and completely dissipated.

For a moment, Haran laid there looking stunned at the light show to which he’d just been subjected, and then sucked in a sudden, deep breath. And then another, as his face lit up with wonder and delight. “I… I can breathe! And I dun feel heavy anymore! You… you did it, Misser Em’sary! You fixed me!” As his mother collapsed beside him, sobbing tears of relief onto her son’s shoddy mattress, the little mouse leaned up and gave Tyrian a big hug, before pulling back to grin open-mouthed at him with innocent joy.

Mother’s voice sounded in the squirrel’s head. “For those among you who show kindness to the least of My children, they are My true disciples, and shall know My love for all their days upon the world.” As the goddess finished reciting what had to be a passage from Her own scriptures, three words appeared in the air above Haran’s beaming face, a clear augmented reality element and the first break from total immersive realism.

Great Deed Wrought!

“Holy shit dude,” Yasim cut in, as tears ran down into the fur of Tyrian’s face. “I wish you could see how much your Defensive Magic skill just shot up! Plus, you’ve got a fuckin’ bottle of Favor waiting for you back here now! Way to go!”

Tyrian - Shawn - knew it was a game. He knew he had basically just completed a side quest, the existence of which had not been so explicitly spelled out as it would’ve been in a traditional MMO. He didn’t care. All his senses told him he had just saved an adorable young boy’s life from what would’ve been a fatal disease. He tilted his head back and wept openly, letting the tears come for as long as they wanted to.

So this was what it was like to feel good about who he was.

The mouse woman heaved herself halfway up, reaching out to gather her son against her chest and kiss all over his face, provoking a round of embarrassed protests from the boy. Tyrian wiped his face dry as best he could and took a shaky breath as he lifted his bushy tail up off the floor. Man, Caleb was going to kill him…

“Emissary, I… I don’t know what to say. Thank you. Thank you! I wish I could reward you, but with the raids, we have no coin and barely enough food…”

Tyrian raised his paws to try to stop her. “I don’t need anything! Really, it’s fine. It was… it was a privilege to get to help. Besides, my… my guardian angel tells me Mother’s already rewarded me for what I did. But I really need to get going. My friends are waiting for me at Duskreach.”

“Then I won’t keep you any longer. But if you ever need a place to sleep, my door will be open to you, forever and always. May the Mother bless you and watch over you!” She returned her attention to her son, whose youthful energy was already rapidly returning to him. As the squirrel headed out the door, he heard the boy’s voice behind him.

“Forget about Saint Haran. I wanna be like the Em’sary when I grow up…”

Tyrian’s smile turned into a grimace as his holy symbol lit up again. “Dude, what the fuck! It’s been almost half an hour and my daemon says you haven’t even left Caddaham! Did the town get attacked again or something?” Yup, Caleb was definitely losing his shit.

The squirrel glanced around; it looked like most of the locals were either out working or still gathered up in the church. He put a paw on the shining, winged amulet. “A little boy was dying of pneumonia or something. I couldn’t just leave him. And could you at least try to stay in character? We’re supposed to be heroes, here.” He sighed. “I just finished taking care of it and I’m leaving now.”

Matt’s voice cut in. “Heed him not, Sir Tyrian! Mother will surely rewardest thou’s good deeds.”

Tyrian physically cringed. So this, then, was the ‘Kool-Aid’ Caleb had mentioned. “Um, thanks. Also, A+ for effort, but even the people here don’t talk like that. Besides, you’re kinda doing it wrong. Anyway, I’ll be there as soon as I figure out how this skimmer thing works.” He removed his paw from the symbol and reached into his pocket, pulling out the glass prism and staring at it. It looked almost gray now, like the rest of the world around him, although the darkness at the edges of his vision was starting to recede.

Yasim, why can’t I see color? Did I mess up the spell or something?

“Nah bro, that’s just how the game tells you your mana’s low. It’ll clear up soon.” The squirrel shrugged, and gently tossed the prism onto the dirt path next to him.

As it tumbled through the air, it suddenly enlarged, and seemed to purposefully flip itself so its curved side was downward. It then gracefully slowed to a stop, hovering half a foot off the ground with a faint humming sound as the squirrel eyed it skeptically, and subvocalized back to Yasim.

Magic fantasy hoverboard?

“Magic. Fantasy. Hoverboard, bro!”

This isn’t going to end well. I set foot on a friend’s skateboard exactly once, and it took weeks for the fur on my left knee to grow back.

“Adventure. Noun.”

Alright, alright! Worst case, I guess I’ll find out how respawning works when I break my virtual neck. Tyrian tried to step up onto it, and it tipped, slipping out from under his paw. Cursing under his breath, he bit his lip, then hopped up into place, wobbling and flailing his arms as it skidded sideways briefly. It took him several moments to regain his balance, and then several more to figure out how to shift his weight to get it to turn, and he was very glad the streets were largely deserted. He’d only just started to get used to Zoomies, and now he had to ride one standing sideways and without a handle? He tucked his tail in around himself and bent his knees a little further, causing his sore legs to protest sharply, and finally got it to start gently accelerating away from the still-rising sun.

Like a Zoomy, it responded to changes in his balance; unlike a Zoomy, it wasn’t preprogrammed with a destination, and wasn’t giving him any tips on how to move. He ended up weaving drunkenly out of the village square, using his arms and tail to stop himself from taking an ignominious tumble.

“C’mon bro, you’re skimming like an old granny! I wanna see you fly!”

Tyrian didn’t have enough concentration to spare to subvocalize back, and besides, he was out in the open now anyway, even if he was moving at a gentle jog. “Hey, I didn’t get wings as part of the deal here. Also, my legs are still killing me. Have a little mercy!”

“So would you rather be uncomfortable for like forty minutes, or a little more uncomfortable for ten?”

The squirrel groaned. “I don’t suppose there’s a teleport spell or something I could learn?”

“Uh, I don’t think so. Lemme check.” The wolf went silent for several moments, which was just as well because Tyrian had just crested a hill and was picking up an alarming amount of speed down the other side. “Nope, none of the books you have unlocked sound like they’d have anything like that in them. I see a few on the shelves that might, but they look like they take some pretty high-level codex keys to unlock. I doubt you’d have the skill or the mana to use them right now anyway.”

Growling, Tyrian set his jaw and shifted his weight forward, and the skimmer obliged him, picking up speed to shove itself back under his center of mass. He managed to look cool for all of about ten seconds of rapid acceleration before he started freaking out.

“Ohhh god I’m gonna diiiiieeee!”

A languid capybara in overalls and a straw hat looked up from his fields and leaned on his hoe in mild bemusement as a blessed servant of his goddess shrieked past at high speed, the white squirrel’s panicked voice doppler-shifting sharply in his tiny ears.

As a dark, towering, old-growth forest gradually loomed closer in the distance, it slowly dawned on Tyrian that the skimmer was actually getting easier to control the faster he went. It was somewhat like riding a bicycle in that respect, where pedaling slowly was far less steady than zipping down the street. He focused on watching out for any rocks or holes in the dirt road as it curved slowly to the right, then faded into a carpet of green grass that tickled at his toes as it whipped around the edges of the skimmer. Wait… green? The squirrel spared a bit of attention to glance out at the fields surrounding him. Apparently his mana supply was in fact recovering apace. As he neared the treeline, he shifted some of his weight onto his back foot, and the skimmer gradually slowed to a less terrifying velocity.

It took Tyrian’s eyes several moments to adjust as he passed into the darkness of the soaring forest canopy, and in that time he had to veer sharply more than once to avoid colliding with the trees that crowded in close about the path. Giving up on his arcane conveyance, he half-hopped, half-tumbled off of it, and ended up falling on his butt. A moment later, he flinched, splaying his whiskers as something small bounced off of his nose, and found his skimmer lying between his legs, returned to its palm-sized inert state. Grabbing it, he allowed himself to flop onto his back and give his aching legs a few moments of respite.

“Aw bro, don’t give up now! You’re almost there!”

“Like Caleb’s gonna let me rest once he sees me?”

“Hey, you gotta remember, you wouldn’t even have gotten a spot in the game if he hadn’t mentioned it when he did.”

Tyrian groaned. “I guess I can’t argue with that.” He slipped the skimmer back into his coat pocket and sat up, at which point he saw a hazy thread of white light streaming from the gem in his holy symbol. Oh, right, the jerboa had said something about that, hadn’t he? He forced himself to his feet and hobbled as gracefully as he could manage in the direction it was indicating. In less than a minute, he spotted a clearing ahead, and within it, a palisade wall. He’d made it.

As he approached, a figure in polished bronze armor waved at him from atop the wall. He barely had time to register Becca’s long white ears before the rabbit performed a heroic but seemingly effortless leap down in front of him, landing on one knee and one fist, with a forked spear slung across her back. As she stood up and grinned at him, a purple on purple infobox popped up over her shoulder.

Valkyrie Winona Stormrider

Mother’s Emissary

Tyrian just stood there speechless for a moment, admiring her armor. In true fantasy form, it left a fair bit of her snowy fur bare, but at least the wing-engraved breastplate did fully protect her torso, and the matching gauntlets, greaves and open-faced helmet gave her a semblance of coverage. He wasn’t sure ‘chainmail miniskirt’ was a legitimate armor style, though, and her upper arms, face, ears, and large lapine feet were left unprotected.

“Wow, look at you,” the rabbit laughed. “Mother really nailed the ‘half professor, half wizard’ look, didn’t she? You’re just oozing style now, ‘Tyrian.’ And at the risk of sounding vain, white fur is always a bonus.” She winked, and the doors of the fort opened behind her, disgorging an impatient jerboa that bounded over to join them.

“Finally! Whoa, dude, you look sick!” Caleb was clad in green and purple finery, with an asymmetric cloak that draped over his left shoulder and arm; a quiver hung at his back, and a silvery bow engraved with runes was slung around his body. After a moment, his infobox popped up as well, green on green.

Spellbow Rave Swiftpaw

Mother’s Emissary

“So do you!” A bucktoothed grin spread across the squirrel’s face as the jerboa’s long tail twitched excitedly on the ground behind him. “Man, I’m not used to RPGs letting you start out looking like a badass. Where’s, um, Aster?”

“He’s inside, praying to Mother at Her statue. You gotta go in and touch it so you can teleport here from now on, and then we can talk about where we’re gonna go first!”

Tyrian’s head swiveled back and forth as he entered Duskreach Fort with Rave bouncing eagerly along beside him. Two buildings made of rough-hewn logs stood within the palisade, to his left and at the back. There were lean-tos full of supplies, a cookfire, and what looked to be a simple forge. And the fort was manned; the squirrel spotted at least a dozen mammals of every description going about their business, but none of them were clad in anything like what Mother had given the three of them, and none of them offered infoboxes when Tyrian stared at them. NPCs, then. There, at the center of the fort, was a statue of a winged deer woman, with three crude benches fanned out before it. And kneeling before the doe statue…

The heavily armored husky rose to his feet at their approach, turning to face them with a toss of his cape. Polished steel gleamed in the light of the clearing, sheathing him from neck to toe, and he held a plumed helmet tucked under his left arm. “At last, my final comrade arrives! Welcome, Sir Tyrian!” Matt’s infobox popped up, green on green.

Paladin Aster Brightcreed

Mother’s Emissary

Rave leaned in close to the squirrel, murmuring quietly. “See what I mean? Dude wouldn’t even tabletop with me before, and now…”

Tyrian’s smile didn’t even waver. “Forgive my tardiness, Sir Aster! Matters in Caddaham Hollow required my urgent attention.” He walked over and clasped the husky’s plated forearm, but then leaned in close and lowered his voice. “But I’m not knighted like you apparently are, so drop the ‘sir.’” He let his posture and voice return to normal. “What news?”

If Matt wanted to dive this hard into character, Shawn sure wasn’t going to stop him! But he could at least show him how to do it properly. Behind him, he heard Caleb groaning in defeat.

“I have little to share. The good folk of the fort make forays into the wilds in search of the source of the evil that plagues this land, but the sensible ones do not make it far into the woods before being driven back, and the others, well… they often do not return at all.”

As Aster was speaking - or perhaps ‘pontificating’ would be a better word - Tyrian stepped up to the statue and laid a tentative paw on one of its outstretched arms. He felt a tremor, as if the ground was shaking slightly beneath his feet, and a pulse of light traveled over the statue’s surface. He spent a few moments looking up at it as the effect faded.

Huh. Had its eyes just opened as he did that?

When Tyrian turned around, Rave looked back at him with an expression like he’d just bitten into a lemon. “If you gentlemen are quite finished, I’d like to get underway before we waste any more daylight.” He turned toward the building on the left, where Winona was already leaning against the wall, and beckoned over his shoulder. Tyrian and Aster shared a surprised look. Could it be? A convert? At the very least, the jerboa had apparently decided that swimming against the tide was more trouble than it was worth. Together, the four of them stepped inside.

The building in question appeared to serve as a headquarters of sorts. The main floor was a single room, dominated by a large log table in its center. Over the table hung a pair of lanterns, which cast faintly-wavering light down onto the giant map covering its surface. The four of them gathered around it, and Rave jabbed a finger at a spot near the middle of one edge. “We’re here. Obviously.” Indeed, there was a little building drawn onto the periphery of the map, labeled Duskreach Fort. “Everything out to about here or so should be accurate; the Westerwilds Exploration League - that’s the crew that lives here - has been able to search this far pretty thoroughly, so we’re not likely to find much interesting.” The jerboa’s finger traced a fairly small arc around the immediate environs of the fort, encompassing several square miles in total.

“Beyond that, we don’t really know. We only have one scout who can go further out without getting himself killed, and even he gets skittish moving through areas that haven’t already been cleared. The rest of the map was drawn from his memories from before everything went to hell around here. So, our ultimate job is to figure out why there are monsters everywhere, but before we can do that, we have to work our way out and deal with any threats we find, so the scout can go further safely and get us some leads on suspicious places to check out. Questions?”

Tyrian raised a paw. “Yeah. Who’s this scout?”

Winona smiled. “His name is Grolph. He’s a kenning… they’re small lizard people that live in the Wilds. According to him, his tribe was peaceful enough until a few years ago, but when things started getting bad around here, their shaman-chief was killed, and his replacement decided that they needed to start fighting back. Apparently they’ve gotten a taste for power and territory now… when they started riding out to raid Caddaham, Grolph decided that enough was enough and left. The kennings know the Wilds pretty well, and a lot of the lesser nasties have learned to leave them alone, so he can take some risks that mammals can’t. You just missed him; Rave sent him out to explore as far south as he could go a few minutes before you got here.”

Tyrian’s eyes roamed over the map. The details got sketchy pretty quickly as one moved away from ‘home base’, but the general regions were filled in. The Mouldering Hills. The Keening Abyss. The Wyrmfen. The Grey Wastes. Thunder Mountain. The Crimson Veldt. The list went on; he hadn’t really appreciated just how large of a region the ‘Westerwilds’ encompassed. His eyes returned to The Gloaming Boughs, which was apparently the forest they were in now.

“It’s hard to believe anything could cause trouble for this entire region, especially without making itself obvious. It looks huge.”

Rave nodded rapidly, his long ears bouncing a bit. “Yeah! I-* I mean, I agree. But Mother described what’s happening to Tethryll as a sickness, so whatever it is, it probably started somewhere and spread out. If we can figure out how that happened, it might give us an idea of what to do about it. My money’s on it having something to do with those crystals She mentioned.”

“Oh, that’s right. Do we know where they are?”

“Not exactly, but Leon - I mean Leonis, my d… uh…” Rave folded one ear down, looking a bit discombobulated.

Tyrian lowered his voice to a whisper. “Guardian angel?”

“...my guardian angel said that there should be one of them in each of the regions on this map. So I say we keep looking until we find one of them and hope we get some answers.”

“Sounds like a plan to me. The forest looked pretty huge as I was coming up on it though.” The squirrel’s legs ached all over again just thinking about it.

Rave, on the other paw, was obviously having trouble holding still. “If we’re lucky, Grolph will find it for us. For now, all we can do is start exploring, and maybe make him some breathing room so he can work.”

Tyrian resigned himself to staying on his feet a while longer. Rave had been awfully patient, in his way. “Alright then. So are we going after him?”

Rave shook his head. “No sense in riling up the locals around where he is, or in covering the same ground twice.” He pointed at the map again. “There’s a lake northwest of here, on the edge of the relatively safe area. I say we head there, then follow the river west and keep an eye out for anything interesting. I have a Pathfinding skill that’s supposed to keep me from getting lost, but I don’t really get how it works yet, so I’d like to stick near landmarks for now.”

No one offered any objections, and so off they went. Aster put his helmet on as they left the fort and took the vanguard, while Rave hung back and kept his head on a swivel, although Tyrian doubted anything was going to sneak up on a group that had both jerboa and rabbit ears going for it. On the other paw, with the heavily armored husky just stomping his way through the underbrush whenever there wasn’t a clear path, they weren’t going to be sneaking up on anyone themselves, either.

“I don’t even know how you can stand in that armor, Sir Aster. It looks like it weighs a ton.” The squirrel couldn’t deny he looked impressive as all hell in it, though.

“The goddess’s blessings enhance my already considerable strength, wise Tyrian! But I will not deny that it weighs on me.” He lowered his voice to an out of character stage whisper. “No lie, I might need a paw up if something manages to knock me over.” That got a giggle from the otherwise taciturn Winona.

It was quiet - almost boring, really - on the trek to the lake, which gave Tyrian time to appreciate just how convincing the forest was. The sunlight filtered through the branches of the towering trees in unsteady flakes, and he couldn’t pick up on any obvious repeating elements in the landscape design. It even smelled vaguely like a forest; he found himself wondering what the simulation was pumping into the air of his VR booth to give him that impression, but shook his head, willfully settling back into the illusion it was so painstakingly maintaining.

Tyrian’s legs were complaining mightily when the lake finally came into view, and he called for a quick break, dropping his rear onto a large rock at the water’s edge. Aster seemed equally as grateful for the rest, but Winona just leaned on her spetum, and Rave continued fidgeting, fingers running over his shiny bow; he obviously couldn’t wait to try it out.

The squirrel reached down to rub at his calves. “Next time I… travel to this world, I’m going to bring some snacks. Logging out for lunch is going to be a pain, especially if we’re nowhere near a statue.”

“Oh, are you getting hungry? Here, I started with some ‘rations.’” Rave reached behind himself, then held out his paw toward Tyrian, holding something that looked like a granola bar.

The squirrel took a tentative bite. Tasted like one too. And with raisins in it! He smiled his thanks at the jerboa, and pulled out his grimoire to refresh his memory on some of the spells he’d only glanced at in his Dimensional Interstice, wiggling one paw through the motions to engage his muscle memory while the other stuffed the decidedly real food into his face. No sooner had he finished the bar, though, than motion in the water to his right caused him to start… and then jump to his feet as a creature slid half onto the bank!

At first glance, it looked much like an otter, only slightly smaller than Tyrian, but in place of fur, iridescent blue-green scales covered its body, and it had a dorsal fin running all the way from its head to the base of its tail, which was capped by a second fin. The others all brought their weapons up, but the… naiad?... just raised a webbed paw and waved at them, smiling sweetly, before looking back to Tyrian.

“Kyura mailyn?”

The squirrel perked his ears. His grimoire had followed him up and was hovering in front of him; he grabbed it and tossed it back into his bag. “Sorry, what was that?”

The creature coughed a bit, apparently having some difficulty with its chest being full of air instead of water.

“Kyura mailyn? Gan setti sol?”

It didn’t sound like it was speaking Koryan, or whatever the locals called the language they conveniently shared with the players, but Tyrian couldn’t really tell. He leaned closer. “One more time? I didn’t quite-*”

That was as far as he got. Like lightning, the naiad lashed out with both webbed paws, grabbed the collar of his coat and, with surprising strength, hauled him bodily into the water with it! Tyrian barely heard the others yell in surprise before his face hit the water, and cut off his own gasp as some of it entered his mouth. He felt something close suddenly around his ankle like a vice, and started flailing against both assailants, before something else shoved past him into the water, and the creature suddenly released him. A heartbeat later, the grip on his leg yanked him unceremoniously back onto solid ground, and he sputtered in a wild panic as Aster released him and interposed himself between the squirrel and his attacker.

“Devious fiends! Unhand my friend!”

Spitting out water, Tyrian scrambled to his feet, then backpedaled as more of the creatures emerged from the water all along the bank. Winona lunged again to finish off the wounded naiad, and then backed up beside Aster, as spear, shield and sword dissuaded the nearest mer-beasts from making an immediate charge.

They weren’t nearly as cute with their double rows of needle-teeth bared in snarls!

“About fucking time!” The severely moistened squirrel barely had time to glance over at Rave before the jerboa loosed an arrow, taking one of the nearest naiads in the chest and sending it sprawling back into the lake, a dark cloud of blood rapidly obscuring its body. As if that was the starting shot of a race, the rest of them sprang into action, rushing the group with a speed that belied their aquatic nature.

Video games didn’t really do justice to the chaos of a real fight. Aster landed a solid blow, downing one of them, but then found himself wrestling three at once, and it was all he could do to keep his feet. Another grabbed the shaft of Winona’s spetum, resulting in a protracted tug of war until she leaned back and just punted the thing in the face, dislodging it. Meanwhile, Rave’s second shot only grazed his charging attacker, and it leapt at him, grappling the jerboa as it bit into his arm.

“OW FUCK!”

His heart racing, Tyrian’s mind was too stunned to recall most of the spells he’d just been looking over, but his basic attack spell was simple enough that he found himself casting it before he’d even consciously decided what to do. He extended an upturned paw, then inverted it, pointing at Rave’s attacker with two fingers.

“Zojak rai!”

The brief script of the spell flared before him, and a sizzling bolt of light streaked from his paw, blasting the creature in the side. The impact dislodged it from the staggering jerboa to flail on the lakeshore, coruscating with the aftereffects of the spell. Rave stumbled backward, reaching for another arrow, but appeared to be having trouble with his injured right arm; his paw closed on air over his shoulder, a couple inches away from the nearest shaft in his quiver.

Adrenaline coursing through his body, Tyrian ran over to the archer, paws already flitting through the air again. “La sani rai!” He clapped a paw on Rave’s upper arm where his shirt was already staining red, and another flare of light instantly erased the injury; even the blood vanished, although there was still a row of holes in the jerboa’s shirt where he’d been bitten.

Grinning a fierce - if bucktoothed - rodent grin, Rave loosed two more arrows at the naiads trying to get inside the reach of Winona’s cautiously jabbing spear, freeing her up to dispatch the trio that had succeeded in dragging Aster to the ground and were trying to find an opening in his armor to bite him. And just as quickly as it had started, the scuffle was over. As Tyrian wiped at his face and shirt, trying to rid himself of the worst of his impromptu drenching, Winona grabbed Aster’s mailed paw in both of her own and helped to haul him back to his feet; a few moments later, the naiad’s bodies went dark, as if falling into suspiciously localized shadows, and then dissipated into mist. A few of them had been wearing necklaces made from their own sharp (and presumably shed) teeth, and those fell to the ground, gleaming in the light more than they really should’ve.

Winona cast a wary eye over the lake, but the ripples were already fading, leaving the surface as still and innocent as it had appeared when they’d first arrived. “Is everyone okay?”

“I think so.” Rave was inspecting his right arm; the holes in his shirt had already mysteriously mended themselves.

“I’m still half soaked. Ugh. I almost had a heart attack!”

“Lesson learned: just because something tries to talk to us, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t also want to kill us.” Aster brushed grass and dirt off of his cape before picking up his lost shield. “I hope Mother will forgive me for not covering myself in glory, there.”

Tyrian’s heartbeat was gradually slowing back to a reasonable rhythm. “You kept that thing from drowning me. That was really scary… I can handle losing some hit points or whatever, but I don’t know what would’ve happened if I’d tried to inhale while my head was underwater. Besides, that was three on one; they knew who the biggest threat was, there.” He looked over at Rave. “I’m curious… did that actually hurt?”

The jerboa frowned thoughtfully. “Not really. I mean, I thought it did in the moment, but it was really more like this intense, throbbing buzz where it bit me, and then my arm got really heavy and unsteady.” His grin returned. “Oh my god you guys that was so cool! And look, they dropped loot!”

Tyrian scooped up one of the necklaces, and the others did the same; the suspiciously intense gleaming effect instantly vanished when their paws touched the primitive accessories. Winona held hers close to her face and sniffed it. “You think they do anything?”

Rave held his up to the light, examining it closely. “I doubt it. They’re probably just sell loot.”

Aster laughed. “I think you mean ‘souvenirs’, good archer! This was our first victory, after all!”

Remembering something, Tyrian pulled his spellbook back out and subvocalized to Yasim.

Identify.

The grimoire flipped to the appropriate page, and he left it hovering in the air before himself as he worked through the complex phonetics of the deceptively short spell. The squirrel drew a circle in the air in front of the necklace with two fingers.

“Uihanywyl!” He snapped his fingers, and a simple black and white infobox popped up.

Riverkin Necklace

Bounty Item

Local Adventurer’s Guilds will pay a small premium for this proof of the eradication of one of these aquatic predators.

Physically unremarkable.

Non-magical.

“Yup. Sell loot. I mean, ahem. The Exploration League would pay a bounty if we turned these in. But I agree with Sir Aster; we should keep them as souvenirs of our first battle together!”

“Dude, you started with an appraisal spell? That’s gonna be so useful!” Rave stuffed his necklace into his magic pockets, and the others followed suit, as the jerboa eyed the lake. “I don’t suppose you have a lightning spell? There might be some more of them in there.”

Tyrian shook his head. “No dice. I only have that one attack spell for now. Besides, that’d be a little dark, wouldn’t it?”

Rave shrugged. “They started it, and if the League is paying a bounty for them…” The others all stared at him in mild horror. “Okay, okay, bad idea. Ready to keep going?” He reached behind himself again, coming away with several more arrows, and stuffed them into his quiver, topping it off.

Tyrian groaned. “My legs are still killing me…”

“Oh come on, we’ve only just gotten started! And you’re not even wearing armor! If Aster’s still good to go, you should be fine!” Aster did not, in fact, look entirely ‘good to go’, but he thrust his chest out and put his fists on his hips in response to Rave’s comment, determined to keep up his heroic facade.

“I just started physical conditioning yesterday. But, okay, I’ll try to tough it out a bit longer. We should probably stay away from the river, though. If I take another unscheduled bath I am going to lose my shit.”

“Deal! We’ll veer to the left a bit, still mostly west, and then when we’re about this far from home base the other way, we’ll head back. Make kind of a triangle. Good?”

“Good enough. If my legs give out on me before then I can just teleport back and let you guys finish without me.”

And so they set off again, this time with Rave leading the way. He avoided the worst of the foliage, so their path was a bit more meandering than the last time, but after the encounter with the Riverkin, they were all on much higher alert than they had been for the first leg of their expedition. Still, compared to the excitement from before, the journey proved largely uneventful, and more than once Tyrian had to fight the urge to tap out and teleport home. Cory had been right; this game was physical enough that he might not even need to go back for conditioning if he kept playing regularly.

Just as he was opening his mouth to beg off of the remainder of the trek, a sudden rustle in the foliage caused Rave to draw back an arrow. As if summoned by the squirrel’s thoughts of the handsome vulpine trainer, a red fox darted out of the undergrowth. The jerboa loosed his arrow, but the animal was too quick, and the shot passed under its bushy tail, lodging in the dirt as the fox juked between several of the giant trees and was lost from sight. Cursing, Rave quickly retrieved his arrow. “After it, quick!” He was already on the move, and the others hurried to follow.

“It’s just a fox,” Winona protested. “And it’s cute. Do we really have to kill it?”

“You guys wanted to roleplay! And I’m a hunter, sort of. Besides, its pelt is probably worth something. Come on!”

“Friend Rave, I am far too burdened to hope to catch a fox!” Aster was panting heavily at this point. “This is a fool’s errand!”

It seemed to be a lost cause, anyway; at first, the jerboa appeared to be seeing something the rest of them weren’t - probably some sort of tracking skill - but after a few minutes even he sighed in defeat. “If it’s still around, I can’t even tell. Let’s… wait a minute, I think I see something.” He set off again, and a moment later the rest of them saw it too: a small, rocky hill, with a hole in the side large enough for them to enter. “I bet it hid in there! C’mon! Tyrian, be ready to zap it if it gets past me!” Rave bounced toward the opening before anyone else even had a chance to say anything, and they fought their way through the undergrowth that the bouncy rodent was able to clear effortlessly.

It was the long-eared valkyrie that first noticed something was amiss. “Um, guys? Do you hear that?”

Aster perked his triangular ears. “No, milady. Nothing.”

“That’s what I mean. All the birds and everything just went silent.”

Tyrian’s fluffy white tail danced behind him in agitation. “Rave, wait up!” It was too late; the archer was already slinking into the cave, ears back, arrow drawn. A moment later, a loud roar sent a wave of birds, chipmunks and other small creatures scattering off, and the jerboa fell on his butt as he scrambled backwards into the open again.

“Not a fox! Not a fox!” He flinched away as a massive black paw nearly took his head off, then launched into a panicked zigzag of leaps back toward the party, as an absolutely massive black bear lumbered on all fours out into the open.

“Oh crumbs.” Winona readied her spear, as the huffing paladin hurried to rejoin his boyfriend.

“Zojak rai! Zojak rai! Zojak rai!” Tyrian threw bolt after bolt at the bear as it reared up on its hind legs to swat at Aster. The husky interposed his shield and braced himself, absorbing the first blow. The second forced him to take a wobbling step backward, and the third drove him down on one knee. Winona lunged in, landing a telling blow - more telling than Tyrian’s spells seemed to be, to his untrained eye at least - but it still barely fazed the beast, and she was forced to jump back as it rounded on her. That gave Aster a moment to pull himself back to his feet, though, and the bear promptly found itself sporting a few feathered arrowshafts, although Rave’s attacks didn’t appear to be striking deeply enough to do more than piss it off even further.

Winona gave it another gash in the belly, and the towering bear decided it had had enough of the pokey bunny. It swatted her spetum aside hard enough that she nearly dropped it, then collapsed onto her, grabbing her in a crushing hug, and she let out a frightened shriek. Tyrian continued flinging his single offensive spell at it - and was finally starting to see some meaningful wounds forming when he focused his attacks on a single spot - but at the same time, the color started fading from his vision again, and he realized he was going to run out of mana before the bear ran out of angry. What to do? Game or not, that was the mother of his children it was killing, and the squirrel saw red. Brushing his coat open, he yanked out his shortsword and ran at the bear from behind, hacking at its thick pelt as hard as he could with a two-handed grip while screaming like a madman!

On the plus side, Aster and Tyrian slashing at its back proved to be enough to make the bear release Winona.

On the other paw, it was still very strong, very angry, and now very close to an extremely squishy spellcaster.

With surprising agility, it twisted around and clobbered Tyrian in the chest, sending him flying right into the rocky face of the hill. The safeties of the system diffused the force of both impacts - it neither caved in his actual ribs, nor broke his actual skull - but for the purposes of the game, it apparently did both. Tyrian crumpled face down onto the ground, an invisible force firmly resisting all his attempts to make his limbs do anything other than flop limply. His vision went blurry, then rapidly darkened, as he heard Winona scream his name in shock.

“SHAWN!”

The squirrel felt oddly detached as everything faded to black. Being one-shotted by a bear was kind of a crappy way to get his first taste of respawning in the game, but most of his thoughts were of that last yell. Part of him was annoyed that she’d used his real name, but more than that, he found himself profoundly touched by how sincerely she seemed to care about him. Oh well, he’d wanted to tap out and get some rest anyway. The others could tell him later how it-*

He suddenly felt the pressure of two paws on his back through what was otherwise a seemingly weightless numbness that the game had imposed on him, and heard Aster’s voice. “O Holy Goddess, show mercy on Your servant in his hour of need!” Light exploded in Tyrian’s vision as the imprisoning force rapidly receded, and an intense buzzing in his chest and the back of his head formed, only to quickly fade.

Oh right! The infobox had said paladin!

As his vision cleared, Tyrian forced himself up into a crouch, just as the bear reared back to crash down on Aster and himself both. The husky snatched up his shield and twisted in place without rising. “Sacred Bulwark!” As the bear’s forelegs smashed down, Aster’s shield glowed brilliantly white, emitting a faintly curved barrier, and the bear was left scrabbling ineffectually at the protective field as a very wobbly rabbit did her best to make new holes in its side.

“La… La sani rai!” Abandoning all pretense at grace, Tyrian lunged out low and managed to slap a paw on Winona’s ankle. Light flared up over her body, and her stance steadied, even as the edges of the squirrel’s vision darkened again. For a moment, he was too dazed to pull himself back up, and looked sideways to see Rave on one knee, holding a shot drawn, as a ring of light collapsed in on the head of the arrow.

“Piercing Shot!” The jerboa released his bowstring, and the arrow converted into a perfect line of white light that passed cleanly through the bear’s body. It recoiled back and fell onto its side, stunned, but then started rolling to get its legs under itself again. It still wasn’t done!

Aster’s magic barrier faded, and Tyrian started scrambling up and back out of swatting range before the bear undid his hard work. Gritting her teeth, Winona took a deep breath, and dropped into a crouch. “Bifrost Dive!” As she leapt straight upward, Aster staggered rapidly backward to get out of the way… and then she came down hard, her spear wreathed in a spiral of rainbow light, right onto the bear’s back. There was a brilliant vertical flash of light as her spetum went cleanly through it, and it let out one last attempt at a roar that faded to a defeated growl as it slumped flat onto the ground, before promptly exploding into a dissipating cloud of darkness.

Mighty Foe Slain!

It might be a bit immersion-breaking, but Tyrian was rapidly becoming fond of the game’s habit of putting a bit of visible punctuation on significant accomplishments.

Winona slung her spear across her back and hurried over to put her paws on Tyrian’s shoulders. “Are you alright? That looked… that looked bad. Like, hurt-the-real-you bad.”

“I’m okay! I feel… shaken. Like, both kinds of shaken. But it wasn’t actually any worse than a hard shove.”

Tyrian saw the rabbit’s shoulders slump in relief and, without warning, she moved her paws to his head and kissed him, hard. He was left blinking and smiling stupidly. The kiss had felt off - apparently the system couldn’t simulate it quite believably - but even as gay as he was, it still kinda went to his head.

Winona’s relieved smile very suddenly turned into a scowl. “Never do that again! I think my heart stopped for a second!”

“Y-yes ma’am.” Still a bit wobbly, the squirrel retrieved his sword and slid it back into its sheath. “So um, all in favor of declaring victory and going home?” He raised a paw, and so did Winona and Aster. He looked around in sudden confusion. “Wait a minute, where’s Rave?”

“In here!” Apparently the jerboa archer had ducked back into the cave while they were recovering. “There’s a bunch of bones, and some goodies. It looks like that bear had been snacking on explorers!”

Tyrian shuffled woodenly in toward the sound of the voice. The cave wasn’t very deep, but even so, it was hard to see in the faint light that made its way into the hollow. Rave had already made a pile of three coin pouches, and was in the process of extracting a rather fancy-looking quiver from the pile of skeletons. “Hey, can you tell if this is special? I'll use it either way, it’s pretty, but…”

“You’re all heart. Remind me to completely ignore you when you get bashed to the brink of death, bouncemouse. I’m about out of mana, but… uihanywyl!” Tyrian snapped his fingers, and the darkness clouding the edges of his vision solidified and started pulsing ominously - presumably that had taken the very last dregs of his juice - but the infobox popped up nevertheless.

Quiver of the Inexhaustible Volley

Magical Equipment

When empty, will automatically refill itself, provided the user has more of the same ammunition in inventory.

Has compartments for two different types of arrows or bolts, which refill separately.

Tyrian read the infobox aloud, and Rave’s face lit up like a kid on Christmas morning as he hugged his new toy against his chest. “Dibs! Obviously!”

Aster reached out to ruffle the jerboa’s headfur wearily. “I guess you won’t mind if the three of us split the coins, then?”

“Deal!” Rave bounced in place, nearly bumping his head on the ceiling.

---

None of them had felt inclined to continue their outing after that encounter, and even Rave was dragging when they made it back to Duskreach Fort. Grolph hadn’t returned yet, but one of the other League members told them it was a tradition to share the story of their discoveries whenever a group made it back, and the four of them related the tale of their escapades to a handful of NPC mammals over bowls of beef, carrot, potato and celery stew. Tyrian found himself wondering if there was a kitchen hidden somewhere in the VRcade; it tasted fresh. When they were done, Rave updated the map by drawing a fangy head with a fish tail on the lake, and a stylized bear with X eyes at the approximate location of their last battle. At last, it was time to return to the real world. Waving to each other, they all touched their holy symbols and spoke in unison.

“Mother, take us home!”

All four of them were lifted from the ground by a gentle force that settled them into a reclining position in the air. After they hovered there for several seconds, spherical distortions erupted around each of them; when the effect faded, Tyrian found himself back in his library, standing in front of the map, where Yasim was grinning at him with folded arms.

“Have fun, bro?”

“I had a blast. But I feel like tenderized meat at this point. I’m kind of tempted to just collapse in the bed back there, but if I go down now I’m not getting back up, and I’m not sure if it’s kosher to sleep in game.”

“It is! But the subscriptions have kind of a hybrid setup; you have to pony up more credit if you spend more time in the system per month than it allocates. You do not want to know how much power this thing eats, dude. So unless you really want to sleep here, I’d say head home for that, at least until you’re rolling in spare credit from knocking up as many babes as you can get your paws on.” He winked.

“I could use a dose of reality anyway. This game is almost too good at what it does; my lines are seriously starting to blur.” He looked around the room. There were a few different containers of praxis waiting for him at the alchemy bench, along with the bottle of glowing Favor Yasim had told him about after he healed Haran. On the table in front of him was a stack of books, and two of them were glowing.

He opened ‘On the Treatment of Injuries’, which had Radiant Healing on its very first page. He was mildly surprised to note that the basic version of the spell was just ‘sani rai’; the version he’d been using was halfway down, and apparently the added ‘la’ upgraded it to a more powerful form. That was worth remembering; he could probably save some mana by using the lesser version for minor injuries. The gesture was also even simpler. He quickly discovered the reason that the book was trying to get his attention; there was a new note that having practiced the spell, he could now heal at a range of up to ten meters without having to touch the target, by pushing his palm toward whoever needed patching up. He looked up at Yasim. “I already got a rank up on the healing spell? I think I used it like four times.”

“You guys were punching above your weight class in that fight with the bear! In traditional game terms, it was worth a ton of experience, and the skills you used in the fight decided where it went. It may have knocked you silly, but your combat skill went up noticeably from you going at it with your sword, and both of the spells you used ranked up. But you’re right, it normally would’ve taken longer than that. You have a talent called Perspicacity that causes you to master spells faster than other Emissaries. Doubling down on magic exclusively to start has its benefits!”

“Oh, so kind of like Rave’s Pathfinding thing. Neat. Why didn’t they have to use incantations for their magical tricks, by the way?”

“Because those weren’t spells. They’re called Arts. You just have to do the physical action and say the name to activate them. They still eat mana to use, though. Well, except for the thing Aster did to heal you. That’s an instant full heal and debuff cure, but it has a really long cooldown. I’m glad you didn’t get splatted twice!”

“You and me both. That was a pretty stupid thing for me to do, but I was running out of mana and it looked like it was gonna kill Winona. And then I remembered that she’s carrying my kits and… something snapped in my head. I know the game won’t hurt her physically, but I felt like just… subjecting her to that could be bad for the babies.” He shivered. “This is still alien to me, worrying about my… my children.”

“I get you, bro, but don’t worry. They had a bunch of doctors sit in on this when they were beta testing it. She’s pretty well safe for at least another week or two; after that her daemon will tell her to avoid getting into fights, so you might not see her in game for a while. Remember where you live, and what we do here. I doubt Mother would even let her log in once it got dangerous for her to play.”

While Yasim was talking, Tyrian opened the other glowing book, “The Fundaments of Arcane Combat.” Radiant Bolt had been updated as well, with a note that his experience allowed him to cast the spell more efficiently, using less mana per blast. After what had happened with the bear, that was very welcome… but there was another line that just said ‘Now eligible for Librum Cannon.’ The squirrel pointed at it. “Good to hear. But what’s a Librum Cannon?”

The wolf’s ears perked up. “Oh, that’s like… the magic equivalent of a ‘basic attack’ for book users. You can program a spell into your grimoire, and then just sort of ‘fling’ copies of it out without having to use the incantation. They’re not quite as strong as the original spell, but they’re really fast and they cost less mana. Did you get one?”

“Yeah. I only have one attack spell, so I used it a bunch. Perspicacity eff tee double-u I guess! How do I set it up?”

“You just cast the spell like normal, but instead of pointing or throwing it, you slam the book closed on the script when it appears. You can’t do it here though, you’d have to go to the practice room.”

Tyrian rubbed his eyes. “I’ll do that next time.” A glance over at the bottles waiting for him at the alchemy bench drew a groan from him. “You know what, I’ll do all of it next time. It is leaving o’clock. Do I just… walk back through the mirror to get out?”

“Yup. No magical fireworks this time. I’m looking forward to getting back to normal, myself. I’m totally into this whole ‘angel’ thing, but something about the instinct library I have to load to control these wings is making my digital brain itch. I’ll see you on the other side, bro!” Without further ado, Yasim stepped back up onto the statue base left of the exit, turned around, and turned back into stone.

The squirrel hesitated, suddenly feeling a little hollow as he realized he should’ve asked for one more hug before Yasim petrified himself. Oh well, there was always next time. He regarded his ‘real’ self critically through the exit mirror: gray furred, brown eyed, and as naked as he’d been since day one in town. He frowned slightly, looking down at his fabulous outfit and gorgeous snow-white fur, wishing with surprising vehemence that he could just stay like this full time. Sighing, he let his tail droop to the floor and stepped through the mirror, reclaiming his mundane self.

It was a very peculiar sensation; he could actually feel his clothes ‘peeling away’ as he passed through the portal. He paused in the VRcade hall, looking longingly back at his far more impressive reflection standing in the Dimensional Interstice on the other side. Forcing a halfhearted smile, he waved apathetically at his mystically gifted alter ego in the mirror.

“So long, Tyrian. Time to be Shawn again.”

The squirrel slunk down the blacklit hall, which no longer bore the torches and marble of conflicting realities. Rubbing self-consciously at his bare left arm and feeling more exposed than he had since he first stepped out of the intake office, he emerged back into the daylight, and saw the other three looking about how he felt. Paradoxically, he perked back up a little at the sight.

Everyone else also being naked was a definite bonus.

“Yo, Shawn. It’s hitting you too, huh?” Matt’s curly tail was low and still. “The game’s like a drug. It’s hard to go back to not being a hero.”

Shawn nodded wearily. “I went to an anime convention once a few years ago. Leaving that felt like this too. Normalcy’s just too normal after you’ve been out of it for a while.” He forced a wan smile, and halfheartedly punched the husky’s arm. “At least you’re still hot as hell.”

Matt’s ears perked up at that, and his tail started to twitch side to side a little bit. Caleb padded up beside his boyfriend with none of the usual bounce in his step and casually rubbed a paw over the husky’s heavy sheath. “Hey, I think Shawn’s got the right idea. What do you say? The four of us, my place, fucking like animals until we feel better? We should fix this the New Dawn way!”

Shawn winced as he remembered what Jason had said earlier, and sighed. “God, I wish… but even if I wasn’t dead tired, I shouldn’t. I found out after breakfast that I have assigned breeding tomorrow. Gotta make sure I’m pent up when she gets here.”

Becca smiled, walking up beside him and running a paw down his arm. “She doesn’t know how lucky she is. But she will.” The rabbit winked at him, and the squirrel felt himself blushing again. “I think I’ll have to pass, too. I’m still feeling a little shaken from the thing with the bear, and unlike you gentlemen, I’m off my fertility pills for the next couple of months, so I’m not in ‘fuck everything that moves’ mode anymore. I think I have a date with a tub of ice cream and the trashiest romance movies I can find.”

Caleb’s big ears drooped. “Aw, alright. But, raincheck, alright? I still need to pay Shawn back for calling him out on his first night here at least.” The jerboa reached out for a hug, and the surprised squirrel slipped his arms around the unusually subdued bouncemouse, who leaned up to whisper in his ear. “You. Me. A solid two hours of uninterrupted rodent 69 time. You got it?”

Oh yeah. He got it. And so did his dick. He gave Caleb a brief, tighter squeeze, then released him before his erection progressed to the point that he couldn’t even pretend to ignore it. “Count on it, cute stuff. As soon as I don’t have a lien on my balls anymore.”

Matt snagged the jerboa around the waist. “C’mon, dude. Let’s find one of those couples conditioning rigs and let it work us until we can only drool and talk in single syllables for a while.”

And so they all went their separate ways. After the wolf-drawn chariot race to the game center, the Zoomy ride home seemed almost prosaic, and Shawn found his mind wandering to daydreams of fighting goblins in the streets of New Dawn. The only monsters he encountered, though, were the stairs up to his third floor apartment, and he was practically pulling himself up by the railing by the time he reached his front door. He had definitely taxed his legs too many times without enough of a chance to recover.

The door clicked in response to his approach, but he paused, spotting a small bag lying just outside his home. Unwilling to risk crouching down to grab it and being potentially unable to get back up again, he just kicked it gently across the threshold and out of the way, as Jason coalesced inside.

“Welcome home, bro! The bag’s just so you can carry stuff around town. In case, y’know, you wanna fill a water bottle with that tea for while you’re out. I managed to get one in Tyrian’s colors, too.”

He glanced back at the day bag. He hadn’t even registered its white and brass color scheme. The thoughtfulness brought a genuine smile to his face… but then he realized he had missed the truly important part of the daemon’s greeting. He fixed his refrigerator with a predatory stare.

“Tea. Now.”

Shawn simply upended his current jug of the stuff into his muzzle and started gulping it down like a half-feral rat-child. As if it was some kind of biological fuel needle, his droopy tail rose as he guzzled the cold sweetness, until it was once again curled into a graceful sciurine S behind his back, and he put the nearly empty jug away again, wiping his mouth on the back of an arm.

“Fuck I needed that.”

“Yeah you did. I almost ambushed the four of you with drinks outside the arcade, but I figured you needed a little time to process before I butted in. Feeling better?”

“I still ache all over, but… yeah. Thanks, bro.” Shawn blinked in surprise; he hadn’t intended to mimic his daemon’s term of endearment, but now that it was out of his muzzle, he realized that saying it felt pretty good. He let it stand.

Jason smiled warmly and started wagging. “Don’t mention it. I’ve got one more surprise for you. In there.” He pointed toward the bathroom.

The squirrel half walked, half shuffled his way through the open door, flicked on the light, and looked around. Just as when he’d been searching for the source of Mother’s voice earlier, nothing appeared out of place. He was about to start rummaging through drawers as Jason walked up behind and pointed into the mirror. Shawn had just enough time to start examining himself in the reflection before the wolf passed both dark paws slowly in front of his face… and when he removed them, the squirrel saw Tyrian’s lavender eyes staring back at him.

He reached for his own face, then paused, not exactly sure what his paw was planning to do when it got there. The daemon chuckled softly right in his ear, and Shawn wished he could feel the warmth of Jason’s nearness again. “Yeah, that’s real. I can’t turn you white - I’m not allowed to inflict illusions on other mammals without their permission - but tinting your contact lenses? That’s nothing. You like, bro?”

The squirrel felt tears welling up in his eyes again. It was a silly little thing, but somehow, seeing Tyrian’s eyes in his gray-furred face was enough to let him feel like he’d taken a bit of his stronger, braver, more respected counterpart out of the game with him into the real world. “Yeah. Yeah, I like.”

Wiping his eyes, Shawn used his bathroom for its intended purpose. One of them, anyway; he’d already gotten one and a half showers before Mother had whisked him off to Tethryll, and he had nothing like the energy to go for another now. He swiped his perpetually charged phone off the table and went out for a smoke while he caught up on messages. The flow of mildly to wildly inappropriate questions and requests from his friends was already starting to ebb. The squirrel found it hard to stay engaged with a lot of them now that he basically lived in an entirely different reality - and that was without any consideration to the new game!

New today, though, were a couple of emails - from a private firm that sounded halfway legitimate, and from an organization that sounded like it had the market cornered on tinfoil hats - that were trying to headhunt him. Or… testicle-hunt him? Shawn shuddered, immediately regretting that he’d even thought those words. The former offered what they claimed was a more lucrative compensation package than the government’s Cradle program if he signed a contract to breed for them; the latter offered a slightly deranged screed about personal liberty, federally-backed eugenics and… an upcoming visitation from some kind of Messiah?

“Hey Jason, are you seeing this?”

“No way, bro. You know I don’t snoop on your email.”

“Go ahead and snoop for a sec.” He flicked back through both of the messages, scrolling quickly. It wasn’t like the daemon needed time to read through word by word.

“Oh yeah, dude, better get used to it. Everyone’s gonna want a piece of those big, potent squirrel nuts for the foreseeable.”

Shawn squirmed slightly. The idea that he was, by definition, more virile than 99.9% of the male population of the entire planet still blindsided him regularly, and he felt his body responding to the idea again. “Don’t worry - I’m not even vaguely considering replying to either of these - but how do these people even know I tested negative for MRV-1? And are they at all legit?”

“If you think the government’s leaking the info, well, why would they do that? It sure doesn’t help them if they have to compete with the private sector. But you know how everyone tries to track everyone else these days; once the info breaks containment, that’s it, it’s sold to the highest bidder, and then the next twenty bidders after them. If I had to guess, they just scrape social media. Whenever someone finds out they’re potent, someone always has to post a yip or something about it, and at that point it’s all over.”

“As for legit… well gee, I don’t know bro, I wouldn’t want to piss off whatever crock of shit evolutionary deity the Genome Liberation Front is babbling about there. He might untwist your helices or something.” The squirrel snorted smoke as a chittery laugh escaped him. “StorkCorp is… mostly above board, I guess. They have to be; the Repopulation Bureau has them under a permanent magnifying glass. At the risk of shilling for the people who made me… the Cradle is what Korya needs to survive. And you’re starting to see that we treat our mammals pretty well, right? This program is how we get through the Empty Nest Plague without going pre-industrial all over again. StorkCorp is a play by a bunch of people with more money than sense to get control over who gets whose babies, so billionaires can shape how society looks when the pre-plague generations all start dying off. Y’know, more than they already do. But the lucky few still own their own bodies, and the government isn’t going to force them to use them a certain way if they’d rather sell out.” He paused. “Oh, and they don’t have me, so, y’know. Dealbreaker.”

Shawn grinned. “Absolute dealbreaker.” He stubbed out his cigarette and went back in to wash his paws. “Hey, you said a few minutes ago you can’t inflict illusions on other mammals. But you can change what I see if I ask, right?”

“Well yeah bro, as long as you don’t ask to see someone else’s private info or something. Why? I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to make you see yourself with white fur when no one else does.”

“No, no, not that.” He yawned expansively. “I’m just dead tired after the last couple of days. Can you like, make the sun go down early for me? And maybe make it seem like it’s raining really hard? I just wanna pass out so I can skip to when my legs aren’t trying to end me.” He took his pills with a gulp of water.

“Oh, yeah, I can do that! Disclaimer: if you ask me to mess with the sun more than once or twice a week, your rhythms will go to shit, but it’s your call.” Shawn started hearing the first heavy drops on his roof before Jason had even finished speaking, and finally allowed himself to flop, spreadeagled, in the bed that had been singing him a sweet siren’s song ever since he’d walked back in the door.

“Ohhhh fuuuuuhhh… If any axe murderers come by while I’m asleep, ask them to reschedule. I think my moving license just got revoked.”

“Hah, you got it, bro. Oh, when do you wanna wake up?”

“Just keep the rain coming until I wake up on my own. I don’t care if I sleep until noon tomorrow.”

“Ten-four. Sleep well, Shawn.” The roar of imagined rain on his roof built to consciousness-crushing levels, as the light leaking in around his curtain dimmed and reddened.

The squirrel’s eyes closed inexorably. He was dimly aware of Jason turning up the air conditioning just enough to prompt him to snuggle up under his soft comforter, and he smiled. It was weirdly reassuring to have his wolf calling him by name for a change, and… he felt the urge to say it again while sober, just so the daemon knew he meant it.

“I love you, Jason.”

“I love you too, bro. G’night.”