Meanwhile, in the Real World

The next morning when Bo awoke, he tried logging into the game again.

"I'm sorry. But we encountered an error. We'll be right back soon!"

He sighed, closed the launcher, then started getting ready for school. At least it was Friday, so there were people at Corstaff who would see the error message and fix it. Then, everything would be fine for the weekend, and he could figure out where he was sitting with respect to the Dungeon of Azarbaalak.

It was a nice day, so he decided to walk to school. The cool morning air and the fragile stillness of the waking world would help clear his mind so he could focus on school instead of stewing over his account. Though a few steps down the sidewalk and he pulled out his phone. He tapped the Corstaff app. It spun for an unusually long time. He checked his bars to see if he walked into a dead zone. It was fine. After enough spinning, the app gave up, flashing a red error message with an equally saccharine error message.

He swiped his thumb down, triggering the reload. Too focused on what was happening (or, not happening) on his phone, he wasn't paying attention at the crosswalk. The last thing he heard was the air-horn of a water delivery truck. He looked up into its headlights and his brief life passed before his eyes. His parents, his older brother Doug, Marcy, Corstaff, and then, Aaron. Aaron? The world twisted around him.

The truck whisked past, and he felt the gust of its wake as it drove past, the horn still blaring. Bo was on his back, his collar twisted. Aaron stared down at him, his hair a wild mess of red, grinning like his goblin avatar.

"That was a close one, huh, Beauregard?"

Bo sat up and rubbed his head. He was lying on the sidewalk just before the crosswalk. "What happened?" he said.

Aaron laughed. "You walked into the street and almost got hit by the Sparkle Springs truck." He laughed again. "Were you trying to get isekaied or something?" He helped Bo to his feet.

Bo blinked, still a bit stunned. He looked down at Aaron. Though the boys were the same age (same birthday even, born one room apart from each other), Aaron was a whole head shorter than Bo. He hadn't actually spoken to Aaron in quite some time. Not since... Marcy.

"Thanks," he mumbled.

"No problem," Aaron said. He pulled out his phone and started poking at it. Bo noticed that he still had Marcy making a duck-face as his wallpaper.

Bo cleared his throat. "So, what happened yesterday?" he said, his unsure voice belying the casual, uncaring tone of his words.

Aaron looked up from his phone. His Corstaff app was also spinning. "I have a trouble ticket open," he said. "I hope we didn't waste that dungeon."

"Why do you care?" Bo said. "Don't you just buy or steal whatever loot you need?"

Aaron grunted. "I don't steal," he said. "I only take stuff from abandoned accounts." He looked up at his once friend. "But I care because of the prize."

"What prize?" Bo said.

"Didn't you see the email announcement?" He pulled up his email on his phone and held it up so Bo could see. He skimmed the email, then his eyes went wide.

"I never got this email," he said.

"Did you check your spam?" Aaron said.

Bo pulled up his own email and hit the spam. After scrolling past several emails in Cyrillic, he found it. He tagged it as "not spam" then read it in earnest.

"Greetings Adventurer!" it said. "We're pleased to announce our newest dungeon, The Dungeon of Azarbaalak. Since this event marks our 10 year anniversary, we'd like to encourage adventurers everywhere to try their hands (or, in the case of Sepidaes, tentacles) at this dungeon. We've packed a secret in it we hope you enjoy. The first 10 people to discover the secret will get a special prize, something unlike anything we've ever given out before."

The crosswalk sign changed and the two walked across the street together.

"See what I mean?" said Aaron.

"Yeah," said Bo.

"I wonder what the secret was," said Aaron.

Bo shrugged. He didn't say what he thought, which was that it almost certainly was triggering the battle between the demon lord and the cavewyrm. He smirked to himself, then frowned when he realized that if that was in fact the secret, then Aaron would get the prize too.

Outside the school, Bo found a stone bench and sat down. He did a quick search to see if he could find anybody else talking about the battle. There was nothing on the wiki, nothing on the boards, no videos, nothing.

"Hey," Bo said to Aaron, who was standing near the door. "Don't tell anybody what happened, okay?"

"Other than support, right?" said Aaron.

"Yeah, but like anybody," said Bo, indicating the other kids who were flowing into the school.

Aaron nodded. Then he caught his breath as if seeing a ghost. Bo followed his gaze and saw the same ghost: Marcy. She floated on past, having a pleasant conversation with Rob Peters. In her wake she left the scent of lavender and honey. Bo held his breath, noticing that she still had the arrowhead he had given her from his trip to Arizona dangling from her bookbag. Aaron, equally holding his breath, noticed the replica of Rakkgrim the Cursed Blade he had bought (and paid a small fortune for) from Japan, dangling from her bookbag. The two items jangled there, bumping into each other, amid the other ephemera Marcy had affixed to her bag, including a virtual pet, a figurine of a platypus wizard, and a keychain with a robin wearing sunglasses that says "Bird's the Word."

When she had passed, the spell was broken. The last vestiges of the glamour was shattered by the ringing of the first bell. Bo headed inside, seeing that Aaron had already disappeared. He locked his phone, and the digital painting of a pink-haired alchemist holding an Erlenmeyer flask and giving a mischievous grin greeted him before he put his phone in his pocket.

The entire day was encased in a fog. Between classes, he'd check the Corstaff app, but it still spun indefinitely. He even checked Am I The Problem to see if anybody else was reporting issues logging in. Apparently he was the problem.

At lunch, he saw Aaron pacing through the courtyard, animatedly talking on the phone. When he ended the call, he did a little victory jump. He rushed inside and found Bo. "I have good news and bad news," he said.

"Give me the bad news first," said Bo.

"The bad news is that our accounts are soft locked. It'll take them some time to figure out the problem, and can't guarantee that they'll have it all fixed by the end of the day."

"And the good news?"

Aaron leaned over and whispered. "We won the prize. Due to the account problem, they're going to overnight it to us, and give us some Coregems to compensate for downtime. What do you think it is?"

Bo shrugged. "Probably a figurine of Azarbaalak or something," he said. He sighed, not wanting to have to wait until Monday to play his game again, regardless of the Coregems they poured on him. He even contemplated creating a new account just to play, but the thought of having to start over, let alone the homespun noob clothes and wooden weapons, made him hesitant to entertain that idea beyond a passing fancy.

The rest of the day whizzed by, a frenetic Aaron always buzzing around him like a red-haired carpenter bee. Silently, Bo walked home. Aaron had split off at his apartment, but Bo didn't realize when that had happened. He drifted home. While he waited for his parents to get back from work, he sat on the couch and watched the latest handful of the Platypus Wizard webisodes. It was the closest thing he'd come to playing the game for a while.

His parents came through the door, his dad carrying a box of pizza. They were laughing and talking about something, and from the snippets of their conversation, it sounded like Doug and his girlfriend Belle were going to visit in a few weeks.

Bo ate the pizza in silent contemplation. When asked a question, he would grunt or give a monosyllabic reply. After dinner, he slumped off to his room and after trying, in vain, once again, to log into the game, resigned himself to reading one of the old Corstaff novels he had inherited from Doug.

The older books were markedly different than the newer ones, as they seemed to take the lore far more seriously. Reading the old books was like walking down a narrow hallway with fantasy paintings on the wall, while the newer books were like walking through an open field where dragons battled giants while nereids watched. Still, they were interesting enough, even if they had to devote pages to loredumps.

It was dark and his eyes were tired, and he didn't fancy reading several paragraphs about goblin courtship rituals or the forest of the necromancer, so he closed the book, turned out his light, and fell asleep.

His dreams were a mix of Corstaff and school, with the principal, Mr. Setchk, giving Bo a quest. Aaron stood next to him on one side, and Marcy on the other. They were themselves, but also their characters in Corstaff. Even though Marcy hadn't played in over a year, her avatar was burned into Bo's mind: a pink-haired alchemist human with heterochromatic eyes. She wore a lab coat and goggles and her hair was a frizz.

Bo insisted that it was he that had convinced Marcy to start playing, but Aaron would not accept that outcome willingly. Nevertheless, Marcy created her character, picking the obvious "girlfriend class." She would play alongside Bo and Aaron, back when they both played as Elves.

In the dream, Mr. Setchk had given them orders to hunt down and eradicate a dark necromancer named Lord Slythe. Bo hurried off, and before he knew it, he was standing before the castle of black, jagged stones. He turned to address his party, but didn't see them. He couldn't do this alone, so he turned back, wandering through a wicked forest of spindly trees like black bones.

Just around a large tree, he saw the tail of Marcy's white labcoat, and there she and Aaron were, kissing. Bo felt sick, sick like he hadn't felt in a long time. There was a pain in his chest, and he looked down. A blade stuck from his chest, right in his heart. It was a goblin blade. Aaron opened his eyes and saw Bo standing there. Then he began to laugh. His laugh went from mean to downright bizarre, starting to sound like the rattling of a windowpane. Tink. Tink. Tink.

Then Bo woke up. Tink, he heard it again. The sound came from his window. He crawled out of bed and wandered over to the window. It was not yet morning, but his clock insisted otherwise. The sun hadn't yet risen, so he couldn't clearly see what was outside making the noise. Then something bounced against the window. Tink!

Bo slid the window open and peered out. "What's going on out there?" he said in the loudest whisper he could manage.

"Hey, good. You're awake," the voice said from below. "Can I come up?"

Bo blinked. "What?" Who is it?"

Down in his lawn, he saw a flashlight flicker on. It illuminated a pale face with a brush of red hair. "Aaron?" he said.

"Who else would it be?" said Aaron. "Can I come up?"

Bo almost shut the window. Then he stopped. "Sure. Let me go down and unlock the door for you."

"No need," said Aaron. He stuck the flashlight in his mouth and started scaling the trellis along the side of Bo's house. Bo watched him, knowing full well that if his mom was seeing this right now, she'd be having some choice words with Aaron. The boy squished a few of the ivy flowers as he climbed up the side of the house like a squirrel. Then he clambered onto the ledge of the roof in front of Bo's window. Bo held out his hand and helped Aaron climb through.

After catching his breath, Aaron pulled off his backpack and sat cross-legged on the rug in the middle of Bo's floor. This was "his" spot, back from when they were younger. He was grinning like a maniac, and this made Bo appreciate the care he had put into creating his most recent character. It looked just like him.

Aaron unzipped his back and pulled out two packages. "When they say overnight, they mean it." He handed one of the packages to Bo.

Bo looked at the small box. "What is it?" he said.

"Our prize," Bo said.

"Why do you have mine?"

"I had it sent to my apartment," Aaron said.

"Why?"

"I couldn't remember your address."

Bo just stared at Aaron.

"What?" he said. "Sure, I can come here with my eyes closed, but that doesn't mean I bothered remembering the number on the side of your house."

Bo crossed his arms.

"Tell me your phone number," Aaron said.

Bo reached for his phone.

"Without looking."

Bo stopped. "Fine," he said. He looked at the package. "Thanks for taking care of this."

"You're welcome," said Aaron. "Now, let's see what they sent."

Bo sat down on the floor across from Aaron, on "his" spot. It brought back memories, playing action figures, then video games, then pen & paper RPGs, and then finally, when they were old enough to get their own Corstaff accounts, playing that game together on their janky secondhand laptops.

Aaron had already ripped the tape off his own package, and Bo used his ornate replica dagger to break the seal on his. Within was a velvet bag. He pulled his out and looked over at Aaron who held his own bag.

"Ready?" said Aaron.

Bo nodded. He pulled open the drawstrings. Within was a chunk of crystal. He pulled it out and looked at it. Aaron was holding his own.

"I don't get it," Bo said. It didn't remind him of anything.

Aaron looked at his own piece, turning it in his hand.

Bo looked down into the box and found a piece of paper. He set the rock down and started reading the paper. It was written in a fancy script which he had to work at to understand.

Greetings, adventurer, and what you hold
Is a treasure once lost, ancient and old.
It is part of a whole, shattered and broken,
And acts as a medal of valor, a token
Of pride you might find, and when met with its fellows
Will fan flames of lore like a blacksmith's bellows.
Bring only what you need, leave your technology behind
Because where you will journey will treat that unkind.

"I still don't get it," he said.

Aaron finished reading his own. "Maybe they're looking for new writers. That poem wasn't that great."

"I think it's supposed to be a puzzle," Bo said. "But, yeah, it could have been better written."

Aaron looked from his piece to Bo's piece. "Do you think they fit together?" He said. He reached for the other shard. Bo tried to stop him, but he was too quick.

He clicked the two stones together like he was a kid again, and they were action figures battling. Bo was worried he'd scratch the stones. He reached his hand out to get his piece back. When he touched it, his hand pushed it toward Aaron's, and somehow, the two pieces slid together with a click.

The stone started glowing. Both boys dropped it. It floated in the middle of the room and began to spin. A holographic platypus wizard appeared on the floor between them. "Please gather what you need. And remember, no phones or other technology. You have ninety seconds." Then he started counting down.

"What?" said Bo.

"I don't know," said Aaron. He picked up his backpack and looked around the room, looking for anything that would be beneficial. "Grab your bookbag and put some stuff in there."

Bo grabbed his bookbag and started putting things into it: some clothes scattered on his floor, the half-read Corstaff book, some pens and pencils. He stopped at his phone, remembering the platypus' words. He grabbed the knife he had used to open the package and dropped it inside. As one, the two boys zipped up their bags and met in the middle of the room again.

"What now?" said Bo.

Aaron chuckled. "Wouldn't it be funny if it was nothing? Then we're just two idiots standing here waiting for a platypus to count to zero."

Before Bo could say anything, the platypus wizard reached zero. The room was filled with a glow. Bo felt his body being tugged toward the middle of the room. He heard Aaron say "Puggles!" and then everything went dark.