Haggitha burst out laughing.

"What?" Lawlimi asked, alarmed.

"He can't talk," she pointed at me, "we put him in a body that can't talk!"

The glass tube Lawlimi was holding was chipped when it hit the floor.

"Is that true?" he asked me, which was self-defeating on many levels. If it was true, then I couldn't answer him. If it wasn't true, he wouldn't have had to ask. I tried to convey this with my saucer eyes to no avail. They were quite nice eyes, actually. I had about 290 degrees of vision, with one major blind spot behind my big, conical, and somewhat floppy head. Gesturing with my arms was useless, they pretty much did their own thing, all that I managed as a response was a squirt of ink.

>>

(Lawlimi is BLINDED).

>>

"Ack!" He wiped at his face, which did nothing, so he felt around for something useful until he had knocked over half the lab and Shippo brought him a glass of water.

"Is this my birthday?" Haggitha said. "Did no one tell me it was my birthday?"

Dokutsu picked me up, and it briefly crossed my mind that I was going to be eaten. Her face loomed over me, and I knew that I was helpless against her, could not so much as cry for help from Lawlimi, who couldn't even see that I was going to be devoured. Please not the lower mouth.

She hugged me to her chest and rocked me like a baby, burbling in the back of her throat. She was so soft; I sort of melted. Unlike aquatic cephalopods, I had a cartilage superstructure that kept me from being flattened by my own weight, but I could relax very effectively.

"WHAT IS HAPPENING!"

"Pamyu, so nice to see you again." That was Haggitha.

Dokutsu turned and I caught sight of the newcomer. It was very strange not being able to see around and through objects, but I could get used to it. Tall and rawboned, with long, feathery blonde hair and a sledgehammer strapped to her back, PamyuPamyu was the most normal person in the room by far.

"Lawlimi! You're heroic now? I wasn't even gone for a week! Do you have any idea how long it's going to take me to catch up with... WHAT IS THAT? Why is there a monster girl holding a squid?"

"Chi?" Dokutsu looked around for clues as to whether she was supposed to eat the newcomer. But Haggitha clearly knew her, so that was a disappointment.

Lawlimi could see once more even if he looked like the victim of a tarring prank, and he waved at Pamyu.

"I wasn't sure if I was going to see you again. You know the server's crashing, right?"

Pamyu put both her hands on top of her golden head as if to stop it from exploding. "Of course, I know about that, are you kidding me, they sent out high-priority notifications to everyone with an avatar here but that does not explain why any of this is happening!" This was all one breath.

"I finished the stuffy doll," Lawlimi said. "Look, it's a squid."

"You ... I ..." Pamyu was defeated.

"Hi. I'm Shippo." The kitsune extended his paw, and PamyuPamyu shook it.

“Hi, Shippo, nice to meet you. Can you fly?”

"Fly? How?"

"By spinning your tails around."

Shippo tried it, but he couldn't twist them like that. They weren't on a rotor.

“Too bad.”

"We've been busy," Lawlimi said. "Why don't we go upstairs and catch you up?"

The group took up a large table at the center of the tavern, and the bartender brought us all beer and bread, except for Dokutsu and me, upon whom he bestowed a slop bucket of entrails. Dokutsu kept hold of me with one arm and then tried to feed me with the other. Initially, I resisted. I had never eaten anything before, and it seemed wrong to start like this. But my skin did something analogous to a mammalian sense of smell, and the odor of the offal was shockingly inviting. My arms suddenly became very helpful when the task was getting morsels of organ meat to my beak.

"I'm not into this," Pamyu said. "Nope, nope, nope."

Lawlimi told her everything that had happened since she had logged out, from JammyJamsJams to Isekel. He didn't see a reason to hide anything from her, even though some of what we had discovered was potentially very sensitive.

"So, there's a spaceship flying around somewhere?"

"Yeah, it could be anywhere on the server."

"Not on the server," Haggitha said. "Now that Eternity is operational, it can potentially visit any ark world it chooses. Because it's self-contained, the ship can attach and detach itself from an ark at will. Eternity isn't inside of Mythopoeia, even if it appears to be, it’s a distinct world of its own that happens to touch on the boundaries of this one."

"How do you know that?"

"Daddy and the Maker were friends. He used this server as a testing ground for personal projects. Eternity was the big one."

Pamyu scrunched up her face as if she could crunch the information into something more digestible. "Pause. The Maker is Bill Yang's avatar, right? So, he used to talk to your dad, who is one of the Twelve on this server, and now a bunch of weirdo beardo stuff is happening all at once here, and it's about to get shut down. But you guys know Bill Yang is dead, right?"

That was confirmation of Orobos's claim, and I felt a passing sadness. While I had no memories of Bill Yang, he was my Maker, my father, after a fashion, if Orobos was to be believed. It wasn't as if I had imagined we would have a reunion, some manful digital embrace. Still, the Maker was the Maker, the seed of our world, and we would be less without him.

"How do you know that?" Lawlimi asked.

"My firm handles a lot of estates, rich people with families contesting bequests. I'm like a junior junior junior assistant on the arbitration of Bill Yang's will, which was insane. The executor has to complete some kind of easter egg hunt before it can be read. I don't know what's in it, but they're having us comb through the case law on competency because he died without heirs and Darkest Horse is arguing he was out of his mind when they ousted him from the board, and it has a claim on a lot of intellectual property he worked on for the game."

"Wait," Lawlimi said. "What do you mean he doesn't have any heirs? What about my dad?"

"Your dad? What are you talking about?"

"I'm Bill Yang's grandson."

"No, you're not." Pamyu looked around the table to see whether we were in on the joke. Dokutsu and Shippo weren't much help, and I was a squid. Haggitha had a quiet smile like she knew what was coming. "Are you kidding?"

"No, I'm not kidding. That's my family. I can't believe no one's contacted me."

That was a thought. To my knowledge, no one had contacted Lawlimi from the outside at all since he first logged in. There had been so much going on in the game that I hadn't considered how odd it was that a new arrival, a Resident Player with a family that cared enough to give him an afterlife, hadn't communicated with that family at all, nor they with him.

"Law," Pamyu said slowly, unsure of what this was. "Bill Yang never had any children. He certainly didn't have a grandchild that was like... like you."

"A fish," Lawlimi said. "I get why it wouldn't be well advertised."

"Not well advertised isn't it. If there was an heir, distributing his estate wouldn't be such a huge job for my firm. Everyone is talking about it. If he had kids, they would be talking about them instead."

Lawlimi got up and pushed his chair away from the table. Then he gently took me away from Dokutsu and went outside.

"I need a minute," he told the others.

The area immediately around the tavern was decimated. Smoke filled the skies, and fires smoldered in piles of rubble. There were Tellurian bodies in various states of decay, but nothing human, and nothing moving.

Lawlimi petted my cone like I was a cat, which seemed to be more for him than for me. But it wasn't a bad feeling.

"I don't know what's true," he said. "I have these memories, but the memories don't make sense. I remember the truck so vividly, the moment before I jumped, and then coming in and out of consciousness in the hospital. I remember my dad, I remember him saying he hated Mystic Seasons, and I remember Bill Yang. I remember a lot of him. But it's off somehow. I thought it was something that went wrong with my upload. That it effed up my memory. There's so much I can't remember, and so much that doesn't make sense. I feel like I know more about life eighty years ago than what the world is like now. And there are other people in my mind. I don't have names for them, but I see their faces. One of them looks like that pilot. When I saw her, I could have sworn I knew her. And I kissed her. I don't know why I did that." He adjusted his grip on me, and I made an effort to get my questing arms under control. I wasn't an aquatic creature, I had lungs, and I should be able to do more than be cradled like a baby. He loosened his hold when I started to squirm, turning myself upside down as I clung to his chest and then his arm, dragging myself up to his shoulder with a tremendous effort. Maybe tree squid had been a bad choice, but hopefully, I just needed to become better accustomed to the strictures of embodiment. I patted him on the face, then got stuck. The suckers were a muscular action that was mostly automatic. I forced it to relax.

Lawlimi sighed. "I wish you could talk," he said.

Me too.

"I was filling in the blanks before. I don't really know who I am."

The street ripped open in front of us, a jagged rent of purple and blue mana that resulted in a girl. Five feet tall with pink pixie hair, secure in a suit of imbricated stone plates that were somehow lighter and smoother than ceruleum.

>>

Tasma — Celestial Level 4

???? — Earth — Ultraviolet

(??????/??????)

>>

"Lawlimi! You're okay!" Tasma. "I'm so sorry I haven't been in touch, but I've been soooo busy with the server shut down. You'd be amazed how many people keep reporting bugs to the last minute."

"Sure," Lawlimi said, "no problem. Did you get my message?"

"Yeah, that's why I'm here." There was something wrong with Tasma, a slight discoloration of the eyes and nails, like jaundice. Here good cheer was fragile. "You should know that the Acarus problem is settled. The infected NPCs were all purged."

"What about the players?"

"You mean like Isekel? We can't help him if he's inside a quarantine zone already. But the few people Acarus got to here have all been cleansed."

Lawlimi backed up toward the broken tavern door. "I didn't use Isekel's name in my message," he said.

"I'm sorry." She really did look sorry, "I must have heard it somewhere else."

"Well, you're busy," Lawlimi said. "I've got one more quest to tie off and then I can get off this server. I appreciate you checking in ..."

A cicada crawled from under the collar of her armor up to her neck, fluttered its wings, and took off. Tasma blinked, tears were forming at the corner of her eyes.

"I'm so sorry," she said. "This really sucks." Energy gathered at her hands and behind her head in a halo of the faintest pink. Lawlimi ducked into the tavern and started shouting.

"Infected moderator! Acarus infected a moderator!"

Haggitha had a long, nasty dagger in her hand as she slunk over to the wall beside the entrance. Dokutsu produced the power sword from her extra-dimensional storage space and Shippo dove under a table.

Tasma didn't pass under the gap in the door. She called in an offer.

"Acarus wants you to join him. If you all take a beetle, I can let you go. I promise it doesn't hurt."

"Dad!" Haggitha shouted, and the bartender plodded out of the kitchen holding a mug and a rag. Lawlimi tried to keep her talking.

"What if we don't take it, Tasma? If you kill me, what will that accomplish?"

"Fallow belongs to Acarus now. Lord Vitae forces everyone who dies to take the change."

Lawlimi looked at Haggitha. "Is that true?"

"Yes," the Bartender answered for her, his basso profundo voice regretful. "He has taken my home from me." The big man met my eyes and nodded.

>>

[Quest Completed — Stuffy Doll]

You have returned to Aegis with the knowledge necessary to create a Soul Trap. With Haggitha's help, you were able to create a vessel for Wa Lim Li to occupy. Why the Unnamed God would care about whether he had a body or not is another matter.

(PamyuPamyu gets 334 XP)

(Lawlimi gets 352 XP)

(Wa Lim Li gets 333 XP)

(Wa Lim Li has enough experience to advance in level)

>>

That was a weird feeling. I'd never gotten experience before. Was I only first level? I didn't even know my own affinities. There didn't seem to be menus for me to check, at least I hadn't noticed any. While I was working that over in my mind, the bartender summoned an off-white cube and handed it to Pamyu.

"Ooooh," she said, "my mystery box. There could be anything in here, even a boat."

"If you're willing to cooperate," Tasma called, "come out. Otherwise, I'm counting to five."

Lawlimi grabbed the bartender by his apron. "Can't you god handle her or something?"

"No. I cannot harm moderators. I can only report them."

"One."

Pamyu put the cube in her inventory. "Lawlimi, this is getting too crazy for me. I've sent you my information, so I hope we can meet up again on another ark, but I'm out."

"Two."

Lawlimi was distracted by the countdown. "What? Where are you going?"

>>

(PamyuPamyu has logged off)

>>

"I wish I could do that," Lawlimi said.

"Three."

"Okay, so how do I make you my companion?" Lawlimi held me up in both hands and got down on one knee. "Do I just say, Wa, will you make me the happiest fish in the world and become my companion?"

"Four."

I made a squeaky noise and sprayed him with ink. That had not been my intention.

(Lawlimi has gained a companion)

Oh, good.

Haggitha grabbed Lawlimi's wrist while he sputtered on my excretion.

"And me," she said.

(Lawlimi has gained a companion)

Dokutsu felt left out. She tackled Lawlimi, and I felt myself bouncing across the dusty, beer sticky floor.

"Chi!"

(Lawlimi has gained a companion)

"I'm so sorry," Tasma said.

>>

(ION CANNON — Celestial Incantation Level 4

The greatest single source of energy in Mythopoeia is not a divine mantle. It is the sunflower, which showers the land with light and life each day. This spell utilizes the invisible power behind the light and warmth we all appreciate, the ultraviolet spectrum, condensing it into a deadly barrage of cosmic energy.

>>

The beam was broader than when she had used the same incantation to incinerate JammyJams. It encompassed the entire tavern, and it happened so fast it seemed instantaneous. One moment, we were piled on the floor of a tavern. The next, there was no tavern. The floor was a little wooden island surrounded by superheated earth in an ashfall. It was completely silent.

The Unnamed God was brooding over us, and he no longer looked like a bartender. His face was hidden behind a skull helm, and he was decked out in baroque, double heavy plate armor befitting the god of the dead. He actually reminded me quite strongly of the dark knight the ratfolk worshiped on Eternity.

"I'm claiming him," Tasma said, mana flowing around her in a shimmering cloud. "Moderator identification 142-1308. Lawlimi and his companions have violated game law by operating outside of game space and failing to report a significant malfunction, risk to players, and mod misuse."

The god in dark armor was silent awhile, seeming to consider her words. It was true, he couldn't attack her even if she blew up his house. She would never be able to destroy him, but he couldn't destroy her either. Worse, the charges she laid against us were largely accurate, if overblown. The most serious punishment Lawlimi could receive was a temporary suspension while an investigation took place. As he was a Resident Player, that meant being stuck in his adytum for a few days. As his companions and NPCs, we didn't really have rights of our own; under most circumstances, a god wouldn't interfere with moderator business at all.

These were not most circumstances.

The Unnamed God revealed his celestial hue, a grey nightmare of power that fell away from him in thousand-yard wings. Their merest flex disgorged tendrils of coruscant entropy bent in a series of killing strokes, but none of them targeted Tasma.

>>

(Resist Death : Failure)

(Resist Death : Failure)

(Resist Death : Failure)

(Resist Death : Failure)

(Resist Death : Failure)

(Haggitha has died)

(Dokutsu has died)

(Shippo has Died)

(Lawlimi has died)

(Wa Lim Li has died)