“I had a feeling she’d be better at this game than you expected,” Walter said, turning with a large smile to Reeve. His smile melted into a confused frown. “Honey? Are you crying?”

Reeve squatted, dropped her bow, and covered her face.

“Evie, what’s wrong? Mom can log out! Isn’t that what you were hoping for?”

“Mom,” Reeve said through her hands, “has logged out. We have not logged out. Mom is now in the lobby. We are here. Mom is alone, without anyone to tell her what she needs to do.”

“Your mother,” Walter said, “is a resource—“

“Resourceful lady, I know!” The shout seemed to blow Reeve’s hands away from her face. “And maybe, eventually, she’ll figure out how to log us out. After she figures out that we need her to log us out. Maybe even before she leaves the lobby and can’t figure out how to reconnect the neural interface.”

Walter smiled. Reeve glared at him and his eyes widened apologetically as his smile faded.

“And if that miracle happens to miraculously, amazingly, happen,” Reeve waved her hands with frantic energy but no clear purpose, “maybe in no more than a few hours out there,” she pointed toward the sky, but Walter had a suspicion that she was talking about outside the game, “it will be seven hundred times longer for us in here than it is for her out there.” Reeve stared at her father. “Do you remember how long it took her to figure out how to preheat the networked oven?”

Walter nodded, and an optimistic smile began to bloom. Reeve’s glare quickly wiped it from his face.

“Dad! I was there, explaining to her, and it still took more than an hour. An hour of real time is a month of game time.”

Walter nodded, less optimistic.

“We need to talk, half-orc,” a minor key chimed from behind Reeve.

“Oh, flip me.” Reeve twisted in place, coming to kneel on one knee, and looked at the twins, both of whom now stood before them, and both of whom scowled at her, the injured one leaning heavily on her sister.

“I,” Reeve said, “had the Stollwurm in my…listen he didn’t mean to, but my dad knocked my bow arm and, well…” Reeve gestured quickly at her own rear in acknowledgment of the arrow’s unintentional resting place.

The twins’ scowls slid silently to Walter.

Walter cleared his throat. “Ladies…” his voice was apologetic, confused, and, Reeve imagined, intimidated. Whether the intimidation was a result of the twins’ anger or their exaggerated physical attributes, Reeve did not want to guess.

At the sound of the single, uncomfortable word, the half-elves’ expressions changed so suddenly and completely that Walter forgot what he was going to say next and Reeve’s mouth dropped open.

“Uh…” Walter managed, as the twins approached him. The injured half-elf placed a gentle hand on his upper arm and her sister grasped one of his hands in both of hers.

“We can bear you no ill-will, brave halfling,” the injured twin said, her usually darkly-accented voice almost as light as her sister’s, “you, after all, were not the one who wielded the weapon.” Their gazes, soft and warm while directed toward Walter cooled as they turned back to Reeve.

“Ohmagod, seriously. He—“

“He,” the lighter-voiced elf said, “slay the wurm.”

“He? He?” Reeve sputtered.

The elf looked back at Walter and squeezed his arm. “Reclaim your weapons, Wurmslayer. Then we must seek your counsel.”

Reeve’s half-orc eyes were wide, and her mouth moved silently.

Walter, still trying to remember what he had planned to say after ‘ladies,’ nodded dumbly and, with what looked like some regret, walked from the close attention of the half-elves to the side of the Stollwurm, picked up his knives, and tucked them in the waist of his pants.

The half-elves addressed Walter as he began back toward them.

“I,” said the brightly-voiced twin, “am Dawn, and this my sister Dusk.”

“Subtle,” Reeve said loudly as Walter stopped in front of the two.

Obviously unsure what to do, Walter extended a hand toward Dawn. She ignored the offered hand and instead bowed to the waist as Dusk mirrored her gesture perfectly, despite, Reeve thought, the excruciating pain it must have caused the injured half-elf. Walter quickly jerked back his hand as the plunging necklines inclined toward him.

“We are already indebted to you, Wurmslayer, for rescuing us from these kobolds and their dark patron,” Dawn said, “but without respite, we must forthwith call again on your largess and your fighting blades.”

Walter gripped the knife handles at his waist and looked uncertainly at the twins.

“Of course!” Reeve said loudly, facepalming. “Charisma. Forty-three in Charisma.”

The twins side-eyed Reeve and then fixed Walter once again with looks that bordered on adoration. “Will you hear our tale and consider our supplication?”

“Suppli…I…well…” Walter said. “It’s really my daughter here,” he smiled in Reeve’s direction, “who’s the expert.”

The twins looked at each other and nodded, something unsaid passing between them. Dusk was the first to speak. “We may not have many seasons to our names, but we have learned that a humble leader is a leader we can trust.”

“If,” Dawn said, “you trust your second,” she nodded toward Reeve without sparing her a look, “we trust her to accompany us, should you choose to come to our aid, once our story is told.”

“Her penchant for assailing us with arrows aside,” Dusk said, still not looking at Reeve.

“Ohmagod, whatever.”

Dusk spared Reeve a threatening glance. “You mock my injury? My movements will be hampered for weeks.”

“Yeah,” Reeve said, “trust me, I get it.” She rose quickly and walked toward the Stollwurm, which was slowly melting into the ground. She plucked the loot bag from its disappearing corpse and began shaking the contents into a pile. She felt slightly queasy as she remembered the time in 2nd Grade when her dad had given the Lannie twins a ride home, and they spent the whole ride ignoring her and telling him about their trip to Niagara Falls and how cool it was that he was wearing a poncho from there.

“Sit, Wurmslayer, and we will tell you how here we came to be,” Dawn said to Walter and gestured to the kobold camp, “and why we must pursue greater peril if ever we can hope to return to our home.”

“Pay attention, Dad,” Reeve said, pausing for a moment from her review of the loot bag’s contents. “Unless Mom manages to come back before we time out of here, our best bet is probably to try to work quickly through the story mode. I think there’s about, oh, a one-hundred percent chance that whatever they’re about to tell you is the next objective. And probably the basis for the main story arc.”