It was over quicker than Hirrus could follow. GM Dave’s iron grip on him was inescapable, and yet the next moment, he was free of it.

So too was he free of all other bonds.

The ground was no longer beneath his feet. There was no longer a city waking up around him.

Hirrus floated in black nothingness.

After a moment, a single white letter appeared.

N

After a moment, another joined it. And then another.

No

Now

Within a second, several more letters appeared.

Now Loadi

Hirrus could only stare at the floating text, mystified. It was significantly different from the previous messages he’d received in his awareness, especially those he received the last time the world had been replaced by a featureless void. For one thing, these letters were white, not yellow. Instead of being plain blocky text, these letters were smooth and stylized.

They were also taking their sweet time to appear.

Eventually, two more letters followed, and then two dots.

Now Loading..

After another moment, a third dot appeared, and suddenly the black void was gone. Hirrus was once again in a physical space.

The room was dark, with only a single burning brazier for light hanging from the high ceiling, nearly thirty feet above him. The walls were made of huge stone blocks, each one at least five feet tall and seven feet long. There was no visible mortar around the edge of the blocks, but nor was there any light leaking through the gaps between.

It smelled damp, but Hirrus could see no sign of water damage or standing water at all.

But that wasn’t worrying.

Instead, Hirrus only became alarmed when he noticed that there were no windows or doors.

He spun around once quickly and then again much slower. No, he didn’t just overlook it. There was nothing. He was in a solid stone box. A spacious one, but one in which he wasn’t leaving anytime soon.

“Hm.” Hirrus grimaced as he tried to come up with any rational explanation for the current predicament.

The only thing he could really figure was that GM Dave had imprisoned him somehow. The man had displayed supernatural powers - even beyond the capacity of Arcana - and so transporting him to a perfectly-enclosed location was within the realm of possibility.

Hirrus suppressed a frustrated sigh and began exploring his stone box. Specifically the walls.

He pressed his hand against the wall. It was made of extremely dense sandstone. He ran a fingernail across the stone and examined the nail to find a few grains of sand stuck there. That was good. Solid as the walls were, they weren’t indestructible.

Despite his imprisonment, his icy greataxe was still available. With little thought, Hirrus reared back and slammed it against the wall. The weapon bounced off the surface, leaving no mark, but a few granules of sand cascaded down to the floor.

He struck again, aiming for the same spot.

And then again. And again.

After a solid minute of hacking, there was a faint shadow of a crescent of missing sandstone pieces where he was striking. Barely noticeable, but present. It would take him hours - maybe even days - to chip his way through the several feet of stone that he suspected were between him and freedom.

The inoculation debuff drew his attention. He had just a little over thirty minutes remaining. If he got a good start now, perhaps the additional strength it granted might carry him through. It wouldn’t be the best use of his time, but with nothing else to occupy him, he really didn’t have a choice.

Hirrus reared back with the axe to chop away again. But this time, something different happened.

As he brought the weapon down, a hand reached out and caught the haft of the axe, stopping it so suddenly that his own momentum almost flung Hirrus to the ground.

“Easy there, Jack,” GM Dave said in a flat tone. “Don’t you think Shelley Duvall has suffered enough?”

Hirrus tried to yank the weapon free, but the man in red plate armor held fast. He would not budge even a fraction of an inch.

“What does that even mean?” Hirrus said, unable to hide the frustration in his voice. “I’m tired of pretending you’re not speaking nonsense. What are you talking about?”

GM Dave shook his head in sadness. “No appreciation for the classics. What is this world coming to?”

The man in red armor let go of the axe, letting Hirrus fall back with the weapon at the ready.

Despite knowing better, he was tempted to attack GM Dave. Striking out might provide some much-needed catharsis. Only the memory of their previous encounters kept him from lunging. Striking GM Dave with a weapon was a cosmetic display of defiance, nothing more. The best Hirrus could hope for was to mildly irritate the man.

As satisfying as it might be to grind the blade of his axe against that stupid-looking beard, it wouldn’t be a productive use of anyone’s time.

“I hope you’re comfortable,” GM Dave said, gesturing at the surroundings. “You’ll be here for the rest of the week.”

Hirrus let out a single, barking laugh. “You think you can keep me here? A bold claim.”

“Cool your fucking jets, man.” GM Dave laughed, although his was a lot less threatening. He motioned at the walls once more. “The room doesn’t have to be this spacious. Most GMs just cram troublemakers into literal coffins.”

“Why don’t you?”

“Well, when someone really pisses me off, I like to have a little fun with it. It’s hard to fit a big purple dragon into a coffin when I want to seriously torment someone. So you get to have a thirty-by-thirty killbox all to yourself.”

“Dragon?” Hirrus hesitated. The mythical creatures were children’s stories, nothing more. How could this man have access to something that no longer existed in the world?

“You want a dragon? I can give you a dragon. It’ll kill you, but...” GM Dave raised a hand and then hesitated. “Actually no, that’s probably a trap.” He snapped his fingers and pointed at Hirrus. “You almost got me.”

“What?”

GM Dave shrugged. “I mean, as much as I like playing the god card, I have to admit, I have no idea how you did it. The banhammer didn’t do shit to you. There’s no account to disconnect or even a connection to terminate. You actually made me walk down to the fucking server room to make sure you weren’t sitting in there with your spinal column plugged directly into the server jack.” He gestured at the room around them. “This will hold you until Tuesday no problem, but if I kill you? Fuck, I don’t even know what happens there.”

A thin line of pain wormed its way across Hirrus’ forehead. Speaking to GM Dave was somehow worse than conversing with Alric. “What are you talking about?” Hirrus said again. “You’re not making any sense.”

GM Dave squinted at Hirrus for a long moment.

“Alright, kid.” GM Dave sighed, his shoulders heaving with the effort. “I’ll admit that the RP is really convincing. But you can stop now.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Hirrus said. He brandished his axe at the man in red armor. “I stayed my hand from attacking you out of respect for both our time. If you think talking nonsense to yourself is extending me the same respect, I can use this time instead to limber up my arms.”

“Instead, do me a favor real quick,” GM Dave said. “Humor me. Just for one second. I have a very definitive test I want to run.”

Hirrus narrowed his eyes at the man. “You’re not making any more sense now than you were before.”

“Say ‘fuck’ for me real quick?”

“What?”

“How about ‘shit’ or ‘cocksucker’?” The man in red armor waved both hands through the air as if he were conjuring Arcana. “Whatever you’re comfortable with.”

“I don’t-” Hirrus said, but then paused. “You still think I’m an adventurer?”

“I’ll admit to a general lack of knowledge about you,” GM Dave said. “But looking at you from the code end, you’re not an NPC. That means you’re a person, and you can say all of George Carlin’s seven dirty words.”

“Who?”

“Okay,” GM Dave said, “I’m going to choose to hope that you don’t know who that is because you might be a computer program and not because I’m old.”

“I’m not sure why you’re wasting my time with this,” Hirrus said.

“Just say ‘fuck’ to me,” GM Dave repeated. “I won’t tell your mom, I promise. In fact, I’ll make a deal with you. You say ‘fuck’ right here right now, and I’ll give you one request. Any one thing you want to amuse yourself while you’re in here. I’ll spawn in a pack of cards or a dog or a hooker or something.”

Hirrus considered that for a long moment. The man obviously didn’t intend to stay here for several days on end to watch over him. He could request something that might dramatically reduce the time he’d take to get through the stone walls. A quarrying hammer, perhaps? A chisel? A drill? It felt strange in his mind even acknowledging that it was a word at all and not a foreign assemblage of sounds, but if he could use GM Dave’s bargain to secure a means of escape, that was worth stumbling over a few strange syllables, right?

Hirrus opened his mouth.

Nothing came out.

He frowned, and tried again, trying to force the sounds out of his mouth.

Nothing.

“Holy shit,” GM Dave said, interrupting Hirrus' struggle. “You can’t? You really can’t?”

Hirrus grimaced, and then tried again. No matter what he told his throat, lips, and lungs, nothing happened. At best, he let out a weak gasp of air.

“I’m not sure if this is better or worse,” GM Dave said, letting out a surprised little guffaw. “I’ve never seen anyone actually act that out so energetically. Kind of amusing.”

Hirrus gave up with a snarl, fixing GM Dave with a glare.

“On the one hand,” the man in red armor said, “if you’re not some new hacking method that looks like it’s coming from inside the house, that means you’re probably the only one of you I’ll ever have to deal with. Tuesday reset will come and go and you’re resolved forever. I’ll shoot a report up the pipe and nothing will happen and all's right with the world.

“On the other other hand,” he said, digging his fingers into his beard to scratch his chin, “you can’t log off. You can’t disconnect. My niece is an AI Rights Activist, and I’m already on thin ice with her for taking this job. If she finds out I locked one of you in a featureless tone box for five days, I’m gonna lose my ‘cool uncle’ badge to fucking Richard, and he’s not even her uncle. He’s her mom’s cousin.”

Hirrus chose to focus on the part of the conversation he could follow. “What happens on Tuesday and why do you keep talking about it like it’s the solution to this?”

There was a long pause, as if GM Dave didn’t know what to say. Was he at a loss for words? For how to explain it? Or was there worry he’d be giving something away? Hirrus watched the man, waiting.

“Okay,” he said eventually. “I’ll give you the short version, but only because I think it’ll calm you down.”

“You better hope it does,” Hirrus said, brandishing his axe again. He knew the threat was useless, but his drive to try violence against this problem was hard to ignore.

“Tuesday is the weekly reset,” he explained. “That’s when the players and NPCs all respawn. Basically, you and everyone like you gets re-instanced by the system. I’ll send you home and take away whatever’s making you all screwy.” He gestured vaguely at Hirrus. “We could reset the whole thing just to make you go away, but that’d disrupt the game too much for the execs to stomach. They see a QA action taken that corresponds to a half-penny drop in share price, and my whole fucking branch of the company gets an extra-thick audit shoved up our asses. And that’s after my direct boss fires me as a sacrifice to try and save himself.”

“You’re not talking sense. Re-instanced? Respawn? Audit?”

GM Dave tapped a finger to his chin. “How can I explain this in a way that won’t mystify you… Without referring to you as a primitive screwhead, as well?”

Hirrus let the man think silently for a minute before he started talking again.

“On Tuesday, the world will set itself right,” the man in red armor said at last. “The adventurers you’ve killed will return to life - humbled and humiliated, sure, but alive. You will return home, and whatever happened will be undone. Bing bang boom, life goes back to normal.” He gestured around himself, at the room they were in. “I’ll keep you on ice in this room so that you can’t burn the whole world down before that happens.”

Hirrus blinked a few times, seeing his whole world unravel before him. “They’ll… I’ll…”

“You don’t really have a choice here,” GM Dave said, “but I do feel a lot better asking nicely for you to just hang out rather than slam-dunking you in here and fucking off.”

“I have to…” Hirrus tried to struggle to get his thoughts in order. “My revenge… They killed all my friends. Burned down my house. My wife-”

“Will be back as well,” the man in red armor said, tentatively reaching out and patting Hirrus on the shoulder. “It’ll all be put right, don’t worry. Your wife, your friends, your house, all of Yenon. Hell, you’ll probably be the only one even remembering that anything happened. NPC memories are weirdly flimsy about that stuff. Some kind of inbuilt defense mechanism against trauma. I don’t know, I’m just a GM, not a dev.”

“Then it’s all…” Hirrus looked down at the head of his icy greataxe. The weapon was still coated in Orlina’s blood, dried and flaking now.

“Yep. It’s an exercise in futility,” GM Dave said, squeezing Hirrus' shoulder in a way that was probably supposed to be reassuring. “You’re not changing anything. On Tuesday, the whole world will be back to normal. The same beautiful day. The same cool morning mist melted away by the rising sun. The same birdsong.”

Hirrus reached out and tentatively brushed away a few flakes of dried blood off of his axe.

That was it then. His revenge was useless. They would be back.

Breaking free of his decision tree was useless. It would be back.

Saving Dahlia was useless. She would be back.

“All I’m asking,” the man in red armor continued, “is that you put this nonsense aside. I can’t keep chasing tickets about you. So just relax, wait it out, and everyone can live happily ever after at the end of this.”

But Hirrus wasn’t paying the man any mind. Instead, his whole existence came into sharp perspective.

Hirrus only existed to obey his decision tree. To go on patrol as set dressing to make the town of Yenon seem more alive. Act as a walking signpost for adventurers. Charge to battle as a safety net - or even as disposable fodder - for their adventures.

If he tried hard enough, he could remember these resets. Remember grievous wounds that were gone the next day. Deaths that never happened.

This reset happened with or without his consent. Would happen again.

Forever.

His axe slipped from his hands, hitting the sandstone floor with a dull thumping sound. All he could do was stare at the callouses and scars across his hands. The bloodstains.

How many of them were real? Were his?

“Glad you understand,” GM Dave said, apparently mistaking Hirrus' existential crisis for acquiescence. “Just sit tight for a few days, alright? It’s what’s best for everyone.”