TheDitchKing went for his sword and discovered that his arm was already inside the broad mouth of a young Emerald Jungle Dragon, clutched firmly among its many teeth.

>>

(Grapple: Successful)

>>

The hero with weighted gloves shifted smoothly forward, assuming a combat stance, and the female with a wand summoned a pale sparkling orb at its tip. PamyuPamyu tugged the cloth from the oversized hammer strapped across her back. Its head was a metalline marble, orichalcum, a sample twice as large as the tooth of Trogdor and geometrically more valuable. It would be worth a ship’s hold in gold, and yet the material itself was irrelevant to the true value of the weapon. Many players had seen it depicted in the Major Arcana, and I recognized it instantly.

She swung the Celestial artifact like a golf club, and it slammed into the monk so hard he was lifted bodily off the ground.

>>

(DEATH ATTACK — 1000% Damage — The Hammer of the Unnamed God deals 999,999 Bludgeoning/Entropy Damage)

>>

His soul was visibly thrust from his body, looking appreciably surprised, before being sent to Fallow. Then that body disintegrated, leaving behind a sack of loot in a mound of fine gray dust. The Hentai Clansman with a wand allowed her spell to dissipate.

“Mod help us,” she said, “the dwarves were right.”

“It was a quest reward,” PamyuPamyu said. “It’s legal.”

“Let me go!” TheDitchKing ripped his arm out of Falcor’s grip, accepting some shallow cuts for his trouble, and backed away. “This isn’t the last you’ll hear of the Hentai Clan!”

“I’m getting real Team Rocket vibes here,” PamyuPamyu said.

The woman with a wand started to pick up her party member’s loot sack, but stopped when the hammer twitched in her direction.

“I’m going to report you,” she said.

“Go ahead.” PamyuPamyu shouldered her god-level weapon. “I told you, it’s legal.”

The Hentai Clan left with a few more backward glares and promises of revenge, while PamyuPamyu concealed her hammer in sackcloth once more.

“Is this legal?” she asked the bartender.

“No.”

“Oh, then we should go.”

“Yes.”

I did a quick scan.

“Our names have been shrouded since we entered. As long as we leave Aejis before a moderator arrives to investigate that report, we should be safe.”

The bartender nodded in confirmation. He had been protecting our identities. This meant shopping for the ingredients to improve my avatar would have to wait. I mounted Falcor once more, and we ventured into the night.

(The other Unnamed God gave you his hammer?) I messaged PamyuPamyu.

(It was the mystery box. I opened it and it just transformed into the Hammer. It was kind of kaleidoscopey, and I didn’t realize at first how crazy it was that I had it, the biggest smashy thing in the universe just handed to me for no reason… I know it’s messed up, but I guess he figured he didn’t need it anymore with the server shutting down and everything, so why not?)

(It will be interpreted as a hack by the moderators.)

(Yeah, I guess. But I can’t avoid ever using it—come on, that was a special situation. And I know I got it fair and square. It registers as a quest item, but yeah, that’s why I keep it covered. Those guys were higher level than us. They could have ganged up on your dragon and we would have been rice krispies.)

(This isn’t criticism, I was merely curious.)

Because it was not yet morning, we had to continue to avoid Watch patrols on the lookout for curfew breakers, but once we reached the docks I knew the location of a group of smugglers who did their most brisk business when the sunflower was closed. Esgar and Rhovan were brothers who ran a shipping concern and were only periodically questioned by the Watch on suspicion of various and sundry regulatory crimes. We knocked at the small house set behind their business front. A patrol was coming down the main street, lantern light already painting the edges of the house when a small slot opened in the door.

“Who’s this?” said a gruff voice.

“Customers,” I replied, and because we were in a hurry, I tossed a gem worth five hundred lions into the slot. I heard it bounce and clack across the floor.

“Hey! What are you… alright then.”

Locks were undone, and just as the patrol was about to round our corner, the door opened and we were ushered inside. Their house was a mess, with nautical bric-a-brac cluttering the floor of the hall and hanging from the walls. Esgar was the younger brother, and he usually kept the night hours while Rhovan slept. We had interrupted him at the kitchen table, where a meal of ale and crusty cheese without bread waited.

“You’re an odd bunch,” he said, addressing himself to PamyuPamyu because she was the only obvious player. “What’re you doin, creeping around at this hour?”

“We need to get out of the city,” she said. “Tonight. And we don’t want to answer a lot of questions. Oh. And I want my own cabin. Like, with a real bed.”

“Ooh, fancy-like.” Esgar sat and chewed thoughtfully on his cheese. “Where you have in mind you’re wanting to go?”

“Yamatoei, the main island.”

He stopped chewing. “That’s a tall order. Don’t have any ships going to the Fae islands, no trading to be done there. You’ll have to pay for the privilege.”

“We can do that,” I said, shaking the bag of gems.

He spit the cheese onto the table; it was in roughly the same shape as when he had started chewing. “Alright, so you understand you’ll pretty much be hiring a private ship. Can be small though, just a couple of crew. Long journey. I’d say… ten thousand lions.”

PamyuPamyu threw her hands in the air in exasperation. “That’s crazy pants!”

“I take it you guys don’t have a lot of other options,” Esgar said. “Desperation comes at a cost.”

“Ten thousand for all of us,” I said, “there and back again. I don’t know how long we’ll need.”

Esgar crossed his arms. “I can’t have my guys waiting around those islands. It’s lost work, and if the waters are dangerous, the shores are worse. Once they drop you off, you’ll have… three days before they pull up the anchor.”

“We will try for fewer, but they need to be willing to wait for five. The island is substantial, and we may be traveling on foot.”

“What have you got to go to the Fae folk for? There’s nothing but shame and bad deals to be had from the likes of them.”

“Our business is our own. Tell me your men will wait five days if they have to.”

Esgar looked up into the ceiling as if he were counting knots in the wood. “Fine, but they sail at the first sign of trouble. I’ll not risk my ships or my sailors on some secret errand.”

“That isn’t what I ask.”

(You have ten thousand lions?) PamyuPamyu messaged me.

“When we are safely ensconced in the hold of a ship you will have your money.”

“Nothing’s leaving the dock until morning. We’d need special permission for that, and there’d be too many questions on this short notice. I’m going to load you up in some barrels, except for your dragon. Him we load on a cart under a tarp. Not much else to do. Are you ready to go now?”

“We are.”

“Then I’ll wake my brother.”

Esgar was a professional, and once the particulars of our arrangement were worked out he had the four of us wheeled down to the appropriate dock in short order. I could see our ship out of a spigot hole in my barrel. It was barely more than a fishing vessel. In fact, from the smell of my barrel, that was exactly the charade we were engaged in. Falcor presented a problem. He was cranky from being up all night and separated from me by a strange man who kept trying to cover him in a ratty tarp. He calmed after being fed, and though the tarp shifted continuously, no one was around to question why there was a juvenile dragon under a blanket.

Once we were safely unloaded in the belly of the ship, I promised Esgar more money if he could fetch me supplies for the journey before we set sail.

“What’s all this for?” he asked, taking down the list.

“We’re going to do some trading in Nihon.” He didn’t entirely believe me, but I had temporarily boosted my Persuasion skill to help with these interactions, and the prospect of additional gems was more than enough to win his cooperation. We wouldn’t be betrayed—the Watch wouldn’t post a reward, if there was one, until the morning, by which time we would be on the water. There was a cabin, hardly more accommodating than the hold, but PamyuPamyu claimed it so she could place her Marker in the ship and log out.

Apart from warping, which was a rare privilege, there were few methods of covering long distances quickly in Mythopoeia. Joining a caravan, or taking a berth on a ship, meant you would get where you were going when it got there, which was often hours later, or as much as several days between stops. If a player wanted, they could spend their entire gaming experience wandering the wilderness between cities and towns, never speaking to anyone. You could get lost in the arid semi-desert to the west of Allognoscia and even die of starvation and thirst if you made an effort at it. Implementing approximate real-world distances into a game meant changes to the way people thought about recreational games. Most quests were local, and regions like High and Low Valanthia were like their own servers in that the players in one rarely, if ever, interacted with players from the other. Leaving your region could mean leaving all your friends, and big trips had to be planned ahead of time to fit with out-of-game schedules. Some people loved the richness that geographic size and distance allowed the world to develop, while others engaged in letter writing campaigns to try to force Darkest Horse to institute faster travel mechanics. So far, they hadn’t capitulated. The policy acted as a safeguard against overplaying, the tendency of gamers to continue their adventures without breaks until they posed a health risk to themselves. The ADIs monitored log-in session lengths and were more likely to assign quests that required at least some travel to players who had been active for more than six hours. In addition to sleep requirements, these measures helped indemnify the company when players did suffer the consequences of overplaying, namely malnutrition and death. You cannot force human beings to make good choices, but you can reduce your own legal liability for their bad choices, in regards to an addictive product.

PamyuPamyu logged out, promising to check in with me every day or so while we traveled. Because the ship was Marked, she would reappear in the cabin whenever she logged back in, unless it sank, in which case she would materialize on the docks of Aejis instead. Esgar brought me nearly everything I had asked for, impressive enough considering the markets hadn’t opened yet. After the jewels were exchanged, we were left to wait for our crew, two men so minimally programmed they barely qualified as NPCs. They used stock phrases and wore identical colonial sailor outfits. Esgar gave them a few gruff instructions before bidding us farewell.

Falcor did not love the water, and if he hadn’t been covered in a tarp he might not have come aboard the fishing vessel at all. My control over him was limited: go, stay, and don’t eat this fox were the extent of my mastery. That was one thing I intended to change with the space of time we had been afforded. Aside from the practical benefits of a well-trained companion, there were the Achievements to consider.

Achievements were the ideal way for Mortal Level players to advance without serious risk or trauma. Many people weren’t interested in going on epic quests or engaging in combat, or else they needed a break from one or the other. In my previous incarnation, I had gotten to know dozens of off-the-grid players who didn’t participate in the main storyline or even interact with NPCs except when absolutely necessary. One woman I’d befriended had joined Mystic Seasons as a form of cognitive therapy. There were entire clans dedicated to therapeutic play, but she had remained determinedly alone, doing nothing but weaving grass bracelets in a meadow. A task like that, once quantified as an Achievement, earned the player about one experience point a minute. So-called “Grind” achievements in Mystic Seasons replaced the “grinding” common to other MMOIRPGs, murdering endlessly respawning monsters. Because of how experience scaled to higher spheres, Grind Achievements were virtually worthless after Mortal levels unless you dedicated your life to them. If you spent ten thousand hours as a fantasy blacksmith, netting over 60,000 experience in the process, you clearly weren’t in it for the levels. You would be Heroic 6.

The other thing about Grind Achievements was that they weren’t incremental in the sense of actually rewarding one XP per minute. They were triggered at intervals equal to powers of ten.

>>

How to Train Your Dragon — Achievement

Congratulations! You’ve taught your companion his first real Trick. If you continue down this path, you may one day be a real Beastmaster.

Reward — 10 XP.

How to Train Your Dragon 2 — 20% Complete

>>

I had spent roughly ten minutes teaching Falcor how to sit in response to my whistle. Bird sounds were easier for me than speaking like a human. From the parameters of the Achievement, I could surmise that it would take four more Tricks, and about ninety minutes, to be awarded with How to Train Your Dragon 2 and 100 experience. But while I was playing with my reptilian companion, there was no reason why Shippo couldn’t make use of our downtime as well.

Shippo was not like me. He was a true NPC, but many players failed to consider the gradient nature of consciousness. True, if the ADI responsible for running Shippo withdrew for any reason, and on this server, I suspected that would be the ADI that identified as the tiger goddess, Sing, then he would lose his mind. He wouldn’t go crazy. Instead, he would be reduced to the basic instincts of an insect or an animal that had not been dealt with as a potential companion. But that didn’t mean he was Sing’s puppet. She wasn’t aware in any meaningful way of anything Shippo said or did. Instead, he was a kind of framework that her fractal intelligence plugged into to create something new. Yes, NPCs could change or deactivate at any time, but that just made them ephemeral. It didn’t mean they weren’t real. An ADI and their AI appendages were a kind of superorganism, unlike anything that existed in nature, because ants did not have identities. I thought Lawlimi’s instinct to treat NPCs as if they were people was the correct one, though not one often adopted by players.

So I gave Shippo the job of preparing ingredients for the improvement of my body. We didn’t have everything I wanted. Esgar had only been able to secure the basics, but whatever we didn’t have could largely be substituted by valuable crystal dust. Money as an alternative ingredient was built into the alchemy system to appease those players who were less enthusiastic about spending hours collecting herbs and rare minerals in the wild. Shippo spent most of the day rediscovering one of the first achievements Lawlimi had ever earned.

>>

Grinding Away 1 — 10 XP

Grinding Away 2 — 100 XP

>>

I felt proud. He was farther from achieving his next level than I was, but I liked seeing Shippo doing something other than following us around. Many NPCs would fade out, mentally, if they weren’t stimulated. Reaching Heroic 1 required thousands of experience, not hundreds, but he’d been slowly accruing since Lawlimi picked him up on Eternity. In fact, if Lawlimi had thought to add Shippo to the major quest lines for that zone like Dokutsu, they would have split the award and the kitsune would be Heroic already. But because Shippo had been added as a companion after those quests had been accepted, he hadn’t automatically been party to them.

In addition to training my dragon, I completed a few more minor achievements to tip me over into Mortal Level 7.

>>

How to Train Your Dragon 2 — 100 XP

You Can’t Swim, Bro? 1 —10 XP

Acrobatics Aren’t for Quitters 1 — 10 XP

Hide and Sneak! 1 — 10 XP

>>

According to the itinerary, which could change according to the wind and any Kulu sightings, we were going to be on the water for five days. Our route took us down the Valanthian coast, High to Low, staying safely within sight of land, until a final jaunt due east brought us to Yamatoei’s primary landmass. Five days was a lot of grinding.