Rich had a good dream, he remembered that much of it. There was a red-skinned devil woman, and she was doing things that made him burn. And she was watching him get worked up, and getting more worked up herself—

—and then she shattered like glass breaking, with a wail of despair. The rest of the dreams were a muddle, and nothing he could remember. But he woke up horny, checked to make sure his Dad was gone, and took care of matters by hand in the usual way.

Not long afterwards he was cleaning up in the bathroom, and testing his sore muscles. There was still an ache, but he thought he was over the worst of the sickness. No clue what it had been, no money for hospital to get checked out. All he could do was hope that it was a one-off thing, and that it wouldn't strike him down again.

The fading smell of coffee filled the hab as he walked into the main hall, settling a decent set of clothes onto his body. His stomach rumbled, and he checked the fridge.

No luck. Empty, even of bugyums. No problem, I'll just tell Mom...

Then he remembered that wasn't an option anymore. Then the hurt came back.

Mom wasn't here. Barring a small miracle she wouldn't be back. Not for years.

If we last that long. If she lasts that long.

Until then, he would have to make do. And that meant figuring out how to do groceries. Mom usually did that, but now he'd have to do that. But he couldn't until his Dad got home. He'd need his Dad's credit card for that, and he wasn't about to let Dad know that he knew the numbers already. That would open up a world of hurt.

Doing his best to ignore his hunger, he sank into the sofa and looked for a distraction. He didn't want to play Generica Online at the minute, knew he was too unfocused for the danger he was in. He needed his confidence back before he tackled that.

So instead he pulled up the exercises that Mister Tassle had given him, and got to work. He had a deadline for this stuff, and after all his teacher had done for him, he didn't want to let the guy down.

Weirdly enough, his compiler hung when it came time to open his workbench. It kept thinking things over, opening libraries, and patching. Rich thought about canceling the process, but then he thought about how much he'd have to reconstruct if the file got corrupted, and he forced himself to be patient. He didn't have a backup, and reconstructing it all from memory would suck.

But it sorted itself out, and Rich settled in to debug things. Mister Tassle had commented on a few parts of the program, and deciphering his comments was a chore. Some of them didn't make much sense.

One in particular left him puzzled.

#Count three characters in every third comment, repeat as needed, UNTIL endofline.

Try as he might, Rich could make no sense of it. He looked down at the third comment in the script, and it was just a single word.

#Static

He'd put that there to remind himself that the variable above that comment wasn't supposed to change.

Static.

Three characters in was A. Another three in was C.

AC.

And just as he thought that, the air conditioner sputtered and died.

Rich rolled his eyes. Not again. Annoyed, he pulled up the cooling unit's interface...

...and paused.

His code was back. The code that he'd thought was scrubbed was back in the system. It had been corrupted, but as he watched, his workbench started updating again, libraries unpacking and spooling, and the script shifted. The corruption vanished, getting commented away. He was left with strings and strings of random comments, just heaps of letters and numbers and characters.

Thirty three comments, to be precise.

This... this wasn't a coincidence. This was a puzzle, or a test or something, and Rich thought he got it. He opened up a notepad program, counted down to every third comment, and started counting every third character.

At the end of it, he had a link. His empty stomach forgotten, he followed it out into the net.

LOADING Houseflopper.app

Please be patient.

A loading symbol appeared, and started rotating. He snorted, and sat back. He'd heard someone call it an hourglass once, and he thought it was a good nickname for the symbol. It always seemed like things took hours when it appeared.

This was more like a minuteglass though, and in short order he was staring at a set of pixelated walls. They'd been half painted, and a paint roller and tray on the ground showed where somebody had left off their work.

He didn't even have an avatar in this, the game was that old. He was simply a pair of gloved hands.

Confused, and not quite certain of the next step, he picked up the paint roller and tried to finish the incomplete paint job.

Rich almost dropped the thing, when word appeared behind his paint roller. The paint had rolled over everything except jagged lines that made up letters.

You can speak and we'll hear you. We'll reply through the paint. Keep painting the walls.

“Who are you?” he asked. “Why am I here?”

Your mother wanted out. Do you want out too?

And then he realized what was going on. Who this had to be.

Now he knew why Mister Tassle had given him the software suite. Now he knew who Mom's smuggler contact had to be.

Rich stood there for a second, virtual paint roller dripping, and his eyes wide. “I... wow. I didn't... Um. Sorry. Let me think, okay?” He started rolling again.

Take your time. But not too long.

Rich thought, and thought hard. He hadn't expected a risk like this one when he woke up today. This was so far out of his comfort zone that he didn't know where to start. This was illegal, really really illegal. Not the trumped-up bullshit that had gotten him expelled, this was stuff that would get him in a camp. This would get him disappeared, if he handled it wrong.

But the people on the other end of this were in the same boat. So he reasoned that they'd make it as secure as they could, here. He could probably talk freely.

And after sorting that out, the answer to their question came to him easily.

“I don't want out unless it's with Mom. I want my Mother back. Then... then we can go.”

He thought of Dad then, a fleeting guilt at the betrayal... but things could never go back to the way they were. And Dad wouldn't want to go along anyway, Eascan was full of the Soshies that he hated so much. He couldn't live like that. Besides, he'd said that Rich was holding him back. So this was what he wanted, right?

The reply, when it came, made his heart sink.

There's nothing we can do for your mother. We have no influence inside the camps.

“Wait,” he said, remembering yesterday, and Agent Cutter's unexpected visit. “She might be out of the camps soon. Maybe.”

How and when?

“I don't know, it's weird. The agent who was working the case told me not to talk to the Haskeens, and in exchange he'd get mom out of the camps and into light custody or something. He said I could visit her.”

Agents lie.

“Maybe. But... what if he's telling the truth? I have to wait. I have to get Mom back!”

There was no reply, for a long while. Rich kept painting, feeling the pressure build up behind his sinuses, feeling tears threaten. “I have to try,” he whispered.

Slap slurp, slap slurp went the roller. For a long moment he despaired... despair that lifted momentarily when new words appeared.

Give us a minute. Talking it over.

Rich held his breath.

All right. We'll give this a shot.

Rich let his breath out. “Thank you. Oh God, thank you thank you thank you.”

God's got nothing to do with it. We're taking a risk here. Do not make us regret it.

“I won't. I promise.”

If you figure out where she is, contact us again. Do not do so for any other reason.

“Okay.”

And whatever you do, stay out of trouble. Do NOT attract attention to yourself. Now we're done here, so give it a few minutes and sign off.

“Thank you,” Rich whispered.

This time there was no reply.

Rich gave it a few minutes, then signed off.

ENDING Houseflopper.app

Rich sat there in his couch, the AC whirring along fine for once, and wept. For the first time in days he felt hope, and it was such a fragile, fragile thing. He had something to focus on that might work out, something that indicated the future wouldn't suck forever.

All he had to do was survive. All he had to do was keep going and keep his head down, and tomorrow might be better.

After a few minutes more, he mopped his face clean and stared at the wall.

There was no point in continuing the exercises now. Mister Tassle's reason for giving him those hadn't been academic at all. Rich would make a show at finishing them, and he'd enjoy them for a change, but the urgency was gone.

So in the meantime... why not celebrate by going back to the game that he'd been enjoying so much?

He could see no reason to hold back anymore. And it would take his mind off how hungry he was, so that was a bonus.

Rich headed back to his room, flopped down on the bed, and called up Generica Online.

WELCOME BACK! It greeted him, and he logged in with a sigh of relief.

A sigh that turned into a whispered “What the fuck?” when he ended up in an unfamiliar cave. There was no waterfall, Geebo was nowhere to be found, and there was a battered ring of silver next to him.

It had some erotic carvings on it, and Rich spent some time turning it over and considering it, recording it from various angles. That was hot... but he'd already beaten off this morning, and he was more upset at the mystery glitch putting him in a weird spot.

So he did what he'd learned to do in other online games. He sat down and sorted through the options screen until he found a bug report function, and wrote up a trouble ticket. He didn't really know what good it would do in a darknet game, but it was worth a shot. Didn't cost him anything really except for time, and he had that right now.

He did worry about Geebo, though. But a check to the party screen revealed that the little guy was still alive. He looked a little injured, but nothing serious. Geebo had a decent amount of HP to him, really... the benefits of being high-level, Rich supposed.

Then the thought struck him that a ticket might not be enough. And that there was something else that might work... pulling up his Chartreuse Plus suite, he started hunting around for a particular string of code.

He'd played a game once that was about dinosaurs and survival, and that game didn't log your character out when you left. Instead, it left your character's body asleep where it lay. That game had gone on to spawn a lot of others thanks to its sweet interface and gameplay, and a lot of modern games used its code. He had watched Metube videos on how to use the strings to enable recording after logout. It wasn't much use nowadays, since most games had moved back to vanishing logouts, but if this game still had the framework...

It did, and Rich breathed a sigh of relief. He checked Metube to make sure he had his syntax right. The devkit made it easy, and he spooled in a quick script to ensure he'd record post-logout. If they had active security scanning for stuff like that it wouldn't last long, but... well, it was a darknet game. He probably wasn't the first one to try this, and they probably expected some hacking. They probably wouldn't ban him over this. Maybe.

After that was done, he rose and headed out of the little bolthole he'd woken up in, and started trying to find his way back to something interesting. The ring was a problem... Rutger's dragon body was built to walk on four legs, and there was no easy way to hold the silver hoop in one of his hands while he was walking. After a while he just hung it around his neck instead and that seemed to work well enough.

Instinct pulled him downward. The tunnels around him turned to obsidian, growing smoother and warmer as he went. His claws clacked, and smoky heat pounded against his eyes, exerting almost uncomfortable pressure. He walked on...

And then something roared.

It was a wall of sound and fury, a cacophony that shook the cave, and froze Rich where he stood.

He knew this was a game, knew he was in no real danger, he knew this, but still that roar shook him to the core to hear it. He felt fear, and for a second he couldn't do anything but stare, even as the words that flashed in front of his eyes told him he wasn't afraid.

Baalbezath's roar deals you 6 points of moxie damage!

You have resisted Baalbezath's fear!

In the aftermath of the sound, in the fading echoes of the bellow, he heard a different voice scream. A familiar voice.

It's Geebo!

The thought broke him out of his paralysis, and Rich rushed down the passage, pushing himself to his limits. After a minute he decided that being landbound was doing him no favors.

“Scaly Wings!” he yelled, and soared up, pumping furiously to go as fast as possible.

And he managed.

AGL+1

Rich burst out of the obsidian passage, bounced off a low-hanging stalactite, and fell to the ground, stunned and watching a red '56' float up from him. For a second everything went black... but he shook it off.

“WHAT IS THIS?” A bestial, deep voice snarled. “TWO? TWO IN THE SAME DAY?”

Rich cleared his head and glanced around, fast.

He was in something that looked all the world like an arena. It was a large, bare spot of cracked stone, surrounded by rising rings of rock that had been carved into benches and seats. Stalactites hung down from a ceiling thirty feet above.

But upon closer inspection, many of those stalactites were fractured stumps. The seats and benches were about half smashed as well, fragmented by massive force or melted into black glass by unthinkable heat.

That was about all the time Rich had to spare on his surroundings, as the thing that had spoken stepped forward.

It was, quite simply, a demon.

Red skinned, twenty feet tall, with the last two feet of that height a pair of curling ram's horns. Its torso and arms bulged with muscles almost comically out of proportion to its waist and legs. For a second Rich thought it was wearing furry trousers, but no, that was all hair. It carried a sword that added about eight feet to its reach, a big curved saber of black iron that glowed with ugly looking red runes.

And beyond it, cowering on the far side, was Geebo.

RUTGER'S CHARACTER SHEET

Spoiler: Spoiler

Name: Rutger Royal

Age: 1 Day

Jobs:

Cultist 1, High Dragon Hatchling 3

Attributes Pools Defenses

Strength: 131 Constitution: 128 Hit Points: 259 Armor: 60

Intelligence: 37 Wisdom: 35 Sanity: 74 Mental Fortitude: 60

Dexterity: 13 Agility: 33 Stamina: 46 Endurance: 0

Charisma: 33 Willpower: 126 Moxie: 159 Cool: 60

Perception: 126 Luck: 32 Fortune: 158 Fate: 3

General Skills

Brawling – Level 13

Dodge – Level 5

Fly – Level 10

Ride – Level 1

Stealth – Level 2

Swim – Level 1

High Dragon Hatchling Skills

Burninate – Level 6

Chomp – Level 5

Draconic Tongue – Level N/A

Dragonseye – Level 15

Limited Equipment – Level N/A

No Thumbs – Level N/A

Scaly Wings – Level N/A

Slow to Age – Level N/A

Cultist Skills

Unlocked Jobs

Conjuror

Gear:

1 Silver Mirror-frame