It was immediately obvious that he wasn’t as good a liar as he thought he was. Courbois gave him a doubtful look, and so Kaldalis launched into complaining about Baimer. Even if he couldn’t perfectly sell that he wasn’t hiding anything, he had more than enough bitching in him to fill the space between the truth and the lie.

Not to mention that it felt nice to get some of that off his chest. Complaining about the dungeon had her grimacing and nodding in acknowledgement. Every tank player in the world has a story about a half-cocked unprepared party of newbies like what Kaldalis had. It seemed to satisfy her.

“So I know I’m not going to be happy about the answer,” Kaldalis said, “since the Contender shut down all the dungeons. But was there a new Lataxinan ability floating around? The registrars at the pier only asked about the two I already know about.”

“No, unfortunately,” Courbois said. “The second Infernal Horde raid was triggered by downing the first boss, not doing the whole thing. We weren’t able to get much farther before the Contender locked the doors.”

“I’m glad things went smoothly, at least,” Kaldalis said, furrowing his brow. He tried to picture what he would have done if Cotanaku had come under attack when he was first doing the dungeon. Would he have turned around to rush to the camp’s aid? Or would he have pushed through to complete it?

“We had a good idea of what to expect,” Courbois said with a shrug. “Between Cotanaku and Panbu, the only surprise were what crazy bullshit monsters the Infernal Horde sent at us.”

“We should get out there,” Kaldalis said. He remembered Garyung’s advice back in Baimer, warning him that if he wanted to avoid city life, he would need to stick to the frontier. “Even if we’re still stuck in a little bubble around it, I’d like to see something new out here in the wilds.”

“Sounds like a great idea,” Courbois said, standing up. “I can give you the tour. We should grab everyone else, too. There’s a lot of intel I’d love to discuss that I only want to have to say once, and I’m salty enough that I’ll have to say everything I’ve already said again.”

The pair headed out to gather the group together. Kaldalis knew where everyone was, so he led the way. Their first stop was Martok’s quarters. The Vathon cartographer wasn’t there but Balrim and Myrin were. They were waiting there just as Courbois had been waiting for Kaldalis.

“You’re not going to find him here,” Courbois said as they approached. “He’s across the pond in the new town.”

“Damn,” Balrim grumbled. “What new town?”

“The Zarans built a new town,” Kaldalis explained. He paused for a moment, giving Courbois a glance. “Well, Cotanaku built it, but Zara paid for it.”

“Of course,” Myrin said. “And if there’s new land to explore, that’s where he’ll be.”

“He can’t explore the land, though,” Kaldalis cut in.

“Why not?” Balrim asked.

Kaldalis did his best to summarize everything Courbois had told him, in particular, that the Contender had the whole place on a lockdown. She chimed in with a few details, but seemed overall grateful to not have to repeat herself this time.

“That’s a problem,” Balrim said, once that was done. “But we should still talk to him. Our viewers probably expect a certain amount of exploration content, and if we can’t get out into the jungle, the best we can do is Martok’s maps.”

“If nothing else, getting an exclusive tour of the new town is good,” Kaldalis offered. “Better than sitting here in Cotanaku waiting for the Contender to get tired of fucking us over.

“A tour from the person who led the efforts to build it,” Courbois said with a smirk. “Just call me the Kaldalis of Kayore.”

Balrim and Myrin had a pretty good laugh at that, but Kaldalis felt a little bit weird about it. During Onirioago’s trial, he suddenly became really concerned about how he might appear to someone looking at what he’d done with an unfavorable eye. He’d been smack in the middle of every crisis since the second the islands had come into view on the horizon. It didn’t seem like a good sign to him that people were joking about it.

Again, Kaldalis knew right where to go to find Reno and Ess. The crafting part of Cotanaku had been expanded, and the building housing the extra facilities was starting to look like the sweatshop Kaldalis had visited in Baimer. It got him a little bit worried, until they confirmed that there was no charge to use the crafting stations. The expansion was just barely enough to keep the line down for use, though he feared it was only a matter of time before the council decided to start collecting a fee to fill the town’s coffers.

The two of them were working close together, so when the full group reunited, Reno and Ess didn’t have to stop grinding their crafting to talk. Reno was elbow-deep in making a complicated potion out of mushrooms and monster fur, while Ess was busily forging a shield to match the sword she had cooling next to the anvil. Kaldalis quickly explained the situation to them while they worked.

“Definitely sounds like a good idea,” Ess said while the shield heated up on the coals again, in between hammerings. “I definitely like getting back to real adventuring out here. Baimer had us spoiled for quests, but the actual experience point gain was slower than what we got out here.”

“Experience points good,” Reno agreed, though she was concentrating on chopping up just the right part of the mushroom for her potion, rather than the conversation.

“I wouldn’t mind just hanging out sometime, too,” Ess said with a laugh as she pulled the red-hot shield out of the fire with tongs and positioned it for hammering on the anvil. “There’s been a lot going on lately, so I wouldn’t mind a mental health check-in.”

She gave Courbois a sidelong glance, and Kaldalis figured that she might be talking about Onirioago’s news drop. If she wanted to have a private chat about that, it seemed like a reasonable request. Reno made a harumphing sound, and Kaldalis tried not to read too far into it. She had worked on Project Rundan, right alongside Aaron Stevenson and Jordan Carver. Maybe she was worried they would blame her for this whole mess. She obviously didn’t have any clear answers - or she would have volunteered them by now - and so he found himself wondering if she had been misled about it from the beginning, too.

“Can’t go now, though,” Reno said. She finished chopping her mushrooms and was now carefully adding them to an alembic, presumably to distill the desired component out of them. As she waited for that process to begin, she was able to turn and focus on the conversation, right as Ess threw herself into hammering her shield into shape. “We just got started here. Obviously, I don’t mind walking away if we absolutely have to, since it didn’t cost us anything to be here, but it took us a while to find an alchemy station and a forge right next to each other, and I don’t want to lose our spot.”

“Should we go tonight, then?” Kaldalis asked. “At or around dinner?”

“Balls to that,” Myrin cut in. “I want a proper night’s sleep.”

“Yeah, Kal,” Courbois said in a teasing tone. “It’d be a shame for you to dump all that money into a nice bed and then go sleep on another cot as soon as you get back to it.”

Despite the teasing tone, Courbois did have a point. A big soft bed sounded like a nice break in between the Rambutan’s cramped accommodations, or the rock-hard beds at the inn in Baimer.

“In the morning, then,” Kaldalis said. “Unless anybody wants to push it past that?”

“Tomorrow morning is good. I don’t mind having time to close out my business here in town, anyway,” Courbois said. “I commissioned Sivima for a new staff to my specifications, and it should be done sometime tonight.”

“Tomorrow, then,” Balrim said. “I had some work I wanted to queue up on my quarters here when we got back, so that it’ll be ready for my next step by the time we get back from there.”

“We should also be getting our stream payouts tonight,” Reno added. “In case that changes any of our plans.”

“In the morning, then,” Kaldalis repeated. He drew himself up and said, as decisively and ominously as he could: “at dawn, we plan.”

With that, the group split up. Reno and Ess stuck to their crafting, while Balrim and Myrin went off on their own business. Courbois wandered off to check on the status of her commission. Kaldalis found himself wandering through town a little, trying to figure out what his own business to finish up was.

Ultimately, he probably needed to upgrade his weapons as well. Getting an upgraded spear sounded good, now that he could get his double jump charge mod reinstalled again right away. He could also stand to get an at-level sword and shield as well. It didn’t make sense to make the purchase now, though. He didn’t know what to expect from his stream rewards. It seemed unlikely that someone could send him a weapon, but he wasn’t familiar enough with the system to know for sure. He didn’t want to buy a new sword and shield and then have someone give him one at great personal investment.

With nothing left to do for the rest of the evening, Kaldalis was at a loss. He picked his way through the town towards the food court tent and got himself dinner. A few of the cooks were faces he recognized, but there were new cooks now, too, and so he went a little bit out of his comfort zone and got something that appeared to be a grilled sausage sandwich served with a fruit salad that was a medley of familiar tastes from the local jungle. He absolutely inhaled the sandwich, finding it just to his liking. Just the right mix of spicy and savory.

Eating the fruit salad alone got Kaldalis thinking about Heluna. The only face he’d been looking for that went unaccounted for. He’d found Courbois quickly, and she’d told him that Dalgaard was at large in the jungle. She’d also confirmed that Martok was in another town. But he’d neither seen nor heard of Heluna yet.

And after a few weeks out of town, he found himself missing her. A sappy part of him wanted to see her smile. A more practical part of him wanted her help with sorting through the mess in his head.

But half of the mess in his head was wrapped around her already. The most worrying thought about all of this was he had been approaching their whole relationship from the perspective of her being exceptionally thorough code on a server somewhere. He decided that she was worthy of his respect and - eventually - his affection, but the idea of the world of Rundan being a whole dimension of its own and not a videogame world presented an unexpected twist.

Heluna wasn’t just pixels. She wasn’t going to just go away when the servers went down. Heluna was flesh and blood.

Extremely firm, warm flesh, as he remembered their kiss on the beach.

There was a very real heart beating in her chest, and if Kaldalis wasn’t careful, he might break it.

Once his dinner was done, he knew he was going to take the coward’s way out. He sneaked back to his quarters, trying to avoid major thoroughfares on the way, and immediately crawled into bed, even though it was barely seven o’clock.

His feelings for Heluna was a problem he was going to have to solve, but tonight wasn’t going to be the night to solve it.