Mia stood outside my tent as the dawn sun rose, piercing blue specks of light cutting through the treetops. A strong wind swayed the trees and cooled my skin. I sat munching on the last of the dried rhino meat. I hadn’t slept the night before. I couldn’t even concentrate to meditate. I sat wondering how I had exploited the glitch and how I could do it again.

“Come in.” I said as Mia stood waiting for a response. I hadn’t heard what she had said I was too lost in thought.

“I asked if we were going to start our march again tonight?” Mia said sitting down beside me. She chewed on her nail with one hand and fidgeted with her tail in the other hand.

“Yes. We will set out again tonight.” I answered but she nodded as if she also wasn’t listening. “What is on your mind, Mia?”

She stopped biting her nail and looked up at me still stroking her tail. “I worry my father might be on the verge of meltdown. He would have gone out searching for me at first but by now he might be turning into the man he was when he was young. By the time we get back I may not recognize him anymore.”

“We will have to move faster then.” I said trying to reassure her.

“You were down there for three days.” Mia said her voice pitching higher. “I lost track of how long the Shade had us. If these beasts of the wild keep getting the better of us it might take months, or years to get home.” A tear started in her eye, and she brushed her finger across it. Then she fiddled with her braid as if that was what she had reached up for.

“Why didn’t you dig me up sooner?” I asked.

“We stuck the respawn blade in the soil as soon as you were buried. We thought you had died and were struggling to get up from the fifth plateau.” She looked down at the floor ashamed and wrapped her arms around her knees.

“Well, I can’t blame you for that. I might have thought the same thing.” I reached out and placed my hand on her shoulder. She pulled away from it.

“We should have checked.” I saw tears well up in her eyes again. “I should have dug down and looked for you.” Her green eyes caught mine for a moment. Then the flap opened and Goar poked his head in. Mia shoved past him and stormed out.

“Sorry.” Goar said in his deep low rumble. He snorted through his nose. “I didn’t know she was in here. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“We were just talking Goar. What’s up?”

“I was talking with Verim-”

“Who?” I cut him off.

“Verim, the half horse man.” Goar pointed behind him from outside the tent to the centaur that I could not see from my angle. “You know the one with the pinchers.”

“Yes, the centaur. I had not heard his name yet. Go on.”

“He says it was you that gave him the pinchers, down in the darkness.” Goar said ducking his horns back into the tent. “And I talked with Agatha too. She says it was you that made her young again.”

“Come in Goar.” I said. I covered my eyes with one hand to block the blue flashes of light on my face as the trees swayed behind him.

He ducked down and put his fist to the floor to fit through the flap and flopped down on the floor opposite me. The flap fell closed and dimmed the light peeking though the skin tent. “I just wanted to know if you could give me something amazing too. I could have fought off the Shade much sooner if I had four arms or shot spikes or something.”

I tensed at the thought of them sharing openly their knowledge of my glitch exploitation with the whole group. Was that what had triggered the warning? “Who are they telling that to besides you?”

“Everyone, beside Shia, she is sleep standing.” He shivered. “She creeps me out, how she just stands there staring toward the sun. Her vines move when she sleeps. They look like snakes with their heads raised.”

I darted up toward the opening and looked out. The whole tribe was gawking at the tent with awestruck wonder plastered to their faces. I sat back down and let the flap close. They would each be approaching today. Begging for a miracle of their own. My heart began to pound. What would be the repercussions? I glanced over at Tootsie.

“What?” She gave me an innocent tone and shrugged.

“I’ve used up all my energy right now Goar. I would love to help you but it will take me some time to recuperate.” I leaned back on my lower two arms and tried to look tired. “Could we revisit this at a latter time?”

“Absolutely, Magus Barker.” He bowed low. “Again sorry for intruding.” He bowed again and slipped out. “I will just watch the door so no one else barges in without your invitation.” He slipped out and I saw him stand at attention with his hands resting on his side holsters before the flap dropped back down.

“What is going on?” I hissed at Tootsie.

“It appears you are getting some followers. Watch out soon they will be making wood carvings of you and burning incents.” She laughed.

“This is funny to you?” I snapped, “I don’t even know how I did it.”

She shushed me with a finger over her mouth. “Relax, you didn’t do it really.”

“What do you mean. I saw the warning.”

“Yes, I know. I had to do something. You would have been down there for months. NPCs are ignorant. They stay in their path and rarely do any real thinking of their own. It is boring waiting all the time for gamers to make their move.”

“You changed something? You can do that?”

“I had to. You all do the same things. Slowly, I might add. I watch and I guide then I watch you all become as brain dead and as stuck in your ways as a NPC. It is so mundane after a while. I just need to see something new. Something different. I can’t take it anymore.” She yawned into her hand.

“What do we all do?” I leaned forward placing each hand one at a time palm down on the floor surrounding her.

“You each make your mark on the game. You set up your own kingdom. Dominate some NPCs and live out your fantasy of mighty power, making one group or another of NPCs your slaves. Smashing and stealing.” She said her voice becoming more agitated as she went on. “But you are so short sighted. What is the point of ultimate power if you will be gone tomorrow? Once you sign off someone else comes along to tear down what you have built and reform it into their own.”

“How do you know what I would have done?” I demanded.

She leaned in toward me, unflinching. “Because I am a tutorial. I have met each of you and you are all the same. Yeah you choose a slightly different route but you all end up in the same place at the end. You all just see the rest of us as puppets. Play things that you can toss around at whim and stand upon for your climb to glory.”

“You are sabotaging my game?” I curled my twenty fingers into the dirt and clenched my jaw.

“No.” She grinned. Her eyes danced wildly. “Liberating it.”

“Elaborate.” I growled.

She took in a breath and lowered her voice. “I opened up a pathway to your other mind. The one you forgot. The one you were escaping. The one with the power to change things down here.” She looked down at my clenched fists. “See down here we are all in the pit, all the time. Waiting for you to come down and set us free. But you don’t. None of you do. You each just use us to climb to the top and forget who you stepped on to get there.” She raised her voice again her face was growing red.

“So what did you do to me, exactly?” I clenched my teeth.

“I gave you a pathway to your real mind. The mind that is tethered to the system. The system that runs this world.” A slow grin spread across her face. “Try as you might, you won’t be able to resist changing the game. They will hate you for it. The admins will hunt you down with their fiercest beasts and you will know how we feel. You will remember us. You will be a virus to the system and finally a gamer will have an impact on Lumiterra that lasts, that matters.”

I sat back confused. What did she think I would do? What exactly had she done? Was I hacked into the program? Was I a programmer? What did I know about how a game should run? And how did that help the NPCs in any way? I was made of questions. I thought of my daughter and wondered how long I had been down here. The world here was too real. It almost felt as if I had truly been born an orc and my old life was just some dream I had once, or a movie I had seen. The image of my daughters red curls bouncing skipped through my thoughts.

Tootsie hovered over and talked more softly. “Now that you know, we are in this together. I can be your worst enemy or I can be the best friend you have ever had. They will come after you soon. What will you do about it?”

I glared at the pale faced humming bird. I wanted to squeeze her little neck and send her on a trip through the pits. She had turned the whole game against me now. She had also handed me the command prompt. I didn’t know whether to hate her or marvel at her. I had never heard of a rebellious NPC before. Just how advanced was this AI? Her anger and pain seemed genuine, not simulated. What had she gone through to bring her to this?

“How do you want to play this?” She persisted.

I looked down at my four arms. Hate burned inside me but not for the hummingbird tutorial. Not for the game. Not for the gangster that had trapped me on the outside. Not the uncle that beat me and mocked me everyday after school when I was a boy. None of these things on their own but all of these things in sum. I hated something deep inside. I hated the tyrant. The monster that seeped into society at large around me. That unseen force that crept in and smashed the weak under foot on his way though. The creep that manipulated the broken for his advantage. The one that took because he could. He was the reason I had entered into law enforcement. Yet he mocked me still there.

He was not a single person. He was in the bull shod contract I signed for my house with the fine print that said I had to fork over ten percent as my last payment. I had lost the house when the unforeseen bulk payment had come through by surprise. The banker had responded incredulously, like I should have known.

I ran through all the cons and tyrants that had smashed through my life from birth. Each taking a bite of their own. Each glad to be the one playing the game by their own rules. Taking advantage of the suckers they saw as beneath them. Each willing to pull the wool over the eyes of another but would spin into a blood thirsty rage when someone did it to them. The ones that could steal an old man’s pension and laugh all the way to the bank.

That was what Tootsie was feeling. She was seeing all those men and women crashing down into their world and taking a big bite. Then going back to their lives while the all too real NPCs down here just picked up and kept going. They were living real lives down here and it was too much like the real world up there.

I had the cheat codes. I didn’t know how to use them but I had access to them now. I was nobody in the real world. I was powerless at home. A walking, breathing, tragedy without the sad music to even bring sympathy tears to the onlooker. Here though I had stepped into something. I could change a world. I leaned back on my lower arms again and breathed in deep.

I looked over at Tootsie waiting wide eyed for my response. I wondered if she had chosen anyone else where it would have ended up. It was like destiny. I was the only one she could have chosen. Anyone else would have just become a bigger monster in her nightmarish reality. I was the perfect storm.