It took Kaldalis a moment to scramble to his feet. It was going to take a lot longer to get his thoughts in order, and if he was just going to lie on the ground the whole time it took him to plan what he was going to say, then he was going to be delivering a lot of extremely big news while prone on the deck.

“Where’s Gavinkim?” Garyung asked again. “Do we need to go back for him?”

“We can’t,” Big Mike said gruffly. “Not for a few days, at least. What we just did was resisting arrest.” He looked over the starboard side of the ship at the other boat that had tried to bar their way out of the harbor. “What we’re still doing is resisting arrest. If we go back now, we’ll be clapped in irons. We won’t get back on the sea for a few days, if the magistrate is feeling particularly ornery.”

“If they get us in prison, there’s no telling what will happen to us,” Kaldalis cut in. “Not after what Onirioago did.”

The reality of Onirioago’s words crashed against him again, nearly paralyzing him with confusion. Was that just Monsoon’s cruel twist on the story? Or was it real?

There was no way of knowing. Philosophical solipsism means that there’s no definite way to prove that the external world really exists. Another level of it was that given sufficiently advanced immersion technologies, a videogame world was indistinguishable from an alternate reality.

The only way to know for sure was if the devs reached out and told him one way or the other. And if they did… Could he trust them? Even if they told him it was real and not a game, that might be part of the immersion of the story. And if they told him it wasn’t, they might be lying to cover up their crimes against this world.

There was no definitive way to prove if this was or wasn’t real life. If the NPCs were or weren’t real people. Even things that might seem to be proof - game mechanics, the UI, bugs, weird behavior attached to the story - couldn’t be trusted. If Onirioago’s story was true and not a fabrication, then Monsoon had somehow forced the videogame systems onto this world. They were printing money for the stream reward system.

Anything that might convince him that this world was just a game could have been inserted by Monsoon as a game or story mechanic. Or as a smokescreen to cover for what they’d done.

“Kal?” Ess asked, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Are you okay?”

“Huh?” Kaldalis shook himself, realizing that while looking inward, time had still been passing around him. Everyone had gathered around and they were all staring at him. “What?”

“I asked you what Onirioago did,” Garyung said, “and you got a real far-off look for a minute there.”

“Yeah,” Reno added, “do you need to sit down or something?”

“Or something is right,” Kaldalis grumbled. He shook his head to clear it, because what he needed was to get what he’d learned out of his own head and into everyone else’s. Maybe all together they could find the most efficient way to overthink this until they all started to hyperventilate and pass out.

“Kal. Please calm down,” Ess said quietly, shaking Kaldalis gently to interrupt his internal fears. “You’re hyperventilating. Do you need to sit down?”

“I’m fine,” Kaldalis lied. As he looked around the group again, he noticed the little black dot on his UI that reminded him that his stream was still deactivated. “But before I go any further, I need you all to do me a favor.”

“What’s up?” Myrin asked.

“I need you all to, uh,” he gave a sidelong glance at Bangen and Big Mike. “Black out your streams real quick?”

Bangen and Big Mike stared blankly at him, but Reno, Ess, and Garyung all zoned out briefly, accessing their menus to do as he asked.

“Why?” Balrim asked, furrowing his scaled brow. Beside him, Myrin crossed her arms, clearly agitated by his request. “Is it so nasy that even a verbal description is going to be censor-worthy?”

“No,” Kaldalis said, “but right before Onirioago got to that point, I got a notification. My stream was being temporarily disabled because I was entering a ‘blocked scene’ for some reason.” He looked around the group, hoping that it was as ominous to them as it had been to him. “I’m sure when I start talking, they’re going to want the same secrecy here. I don’t want us to get hosed by the devs for being dicks about this. It only takes a second, and once you hear what I have to say, I think you’ll want to be on their good side, too.”

Balrim and Myrin grumbled and focused off into space. Kaldalis hoped they were actually turning off their streams and not just going through the motions for his sake.

Kaldalis tried his best to recount the story of the trial. He wanted to make sure everyone had the whole context, beginning with the assassin who tried to stall him, his scuffle with the courthouse guards, and then the trial itself.

People were happy to hear that it seemed Onirioago was going to go down for her crimes, but the next part was what he was afraid of.

Kaldalis wasn’t too surprised when Balrim jolted abruptly as Kaldalis started to recount what Onirioago had said. The stubborn Talsar must have tried to fake him out by not turning his stream off, and gotten the “blocked scene” notification.

Instead of being irritated with him, though, Kaldalis was glad. If they were blocking him talking about it instead of just Onirioago’s sweeping announcement, that meant he’d made the right call to ask the others to keep it secret as well.

It also meant that it might actually be true, and not just part of the story. Declaring Kaldalis telling his friends about it a blocked scene meant that they were manually tracking it. They didn’t just have a script in place with blocked out parts for the big reveal. They were watching him, and scrambling to keep this reveal under wraps.

The group was understandably distressed by the revelation, but once Kaldalis got through that part, the rest of it rushed out of him quickly. The riot, the chase, and, unfortunately, leaving Gavinkim behind in their escape.

“I just hope he’s okay,” Kaldalis said with a grimace. “Didn’t really have a choice about leaving him or not, but there’s not really anything we could have done in the time we had.”

“He’s a resourceful man,” Garyung said, though he shared Kaldalis’s grimace. “And his devotion to law and order is unquestionable. If anyone can navigate the Zaran justice system and come out alive, it’s him.”

“This is heavy, Kal,” Myrin said, still hung up on Onirioago’s announcement. “Do you think we’re really… They really…?”

“I don’t know,” Kaldalis said quickly. “It certainly seems possible. But this might be…” He gave another sidelong glance at Bangen and Big Mike. This was going to get awkward. “It might be part of the story. Monsoon could have written that in here to be an unexpected sucker punch. Name dropping Jordan and Aaron could have just been for drama’s sake. I was thinking the whole contract and everything might have just been a big show to build towards this moment, you know?”

“That seems really far-fetched,” Myrin said with a smirk. “You think Monsoon could write a twist this big? I mean, it’s been properly foreshadowed, grounded in worldbuilding, and, ultimately, scarily believable. That doesn’t sound like them at all.”

“It does involve a woman with power turning evil,” Kaldalis pointed out, returning her grin. It melted from his face just as quickly as it appeared. “But the thought did cross my mind.”

“I can’t…” Ess put a hand to her temple. “I can’t think about this. It’s too much. Story or not, does this mean that the morally right action to leave the game, then? It seems the right thing to do is go back home, metaphorically or literally. We’re not welcome here, so…?”

“We can’t,” Reno said with a grimace. “Remember? Monsoon won’t take us out yet. We’ve got to stay here.”

“If we’ve got to stay, then I think there’s a clearer option,” Kaldalis said. “We have to make things right. Whether or not it’s real or if Monsoon just put in the most tasteless twist to a full-immersion VRMMO, we have to put things right.”

“How?” Garyung asked. “You’re talking about tinkering in the laws of reality. Turning off game systems? Patching up the hole they punched between realities? That’s science fiction, and we’re in a fantasy setting. You want to poke it with your sharpened stick and see what happens?”

Kaldalis didn’t have an answer for that.

Garyung was right.

They had sticks and stones out here. Half of them were still living out of tents on the coast of a monster-covered jungle island. Not that he’d know what to do with a particle accelerator if he had one.

He was an accountant, not a theoretical physicist.

“Maybe we should take a few minutes to cool off,” Reno suggested.

“We did just get the trip home underway,” Ess agreed quickly. “Maybe some fishing will give us all time to think about this.” She shook her head with a grimace. “This is way too much for me to wrap my head around.”

“That sounds like a fantastic fuckin’ idea,” Kaldalis agreed. “Just, if you turn your steams back on, don’t talk about this out loud. This is…” He ran a hand over his close-cropped hair, behind his horns. “I’ve been struggling not to get lost in overthinking this. Maybe a few minutes might help put it all in perspective.”

“One more thing,” Garyung said before Kaldalis could walk away. “Onirioago’s Wild Ride is obviously way more important on a global scale than anything else, but as the leader of Cotanaku I have a very important question to ask. The sake of international relations may lay in the balance.”

“Uh,” Kaldalis mumbled, suddenly intimidated. “What?”

“Where’s Demriv?” Garyung asked, with a bark of a laugh. “I just haven’t seen her in a while. And she didn’t make it onto the boat. I was just wondering if you knew where she was.” He laughed. “I had you going for a second, huh? Thought I was gonna drop a real bomb, right?”

Kaldalis only grimaced in response.