I slip off the headband and let my phone slide onto the floor.

Ugh, this was a mistake...

“Alex?” I open my eyes to Fara, standing over me with a gentle, worried smile. Alex, Alex, I repeat to myself as I take her offered hand.

“Thanks, Fara.” I grab my phone and check the time. Dealing with everything when we got to Pollton took a while, so it's about one in the afternoon. Still Saturday though. Having a 'day' pass in just twelve hours in game makes everything seem so much longer out here. I mean, we've been gaming for one morning and we got so much done.

My stomach does grumble a little as we walk into the common room. Allie and Simini are lounging, watching TV. They hesitate briefly, before calling out to us.

“Hey, Fara, hey Alex. How's it going?”

“You guys good?”

“Yeah,” Fara responds. “We had a pretty, umm, hectic time in Planes.”

“Oh, really?” Allie asks, leaning back over the couch. “Do anything cool?”

With her head buried in the fridge, Fara shouts back, “Alex saved a town.”

“Ooh, neat.” Allie smiles, and I awkwardly smile back, even as I continue turning over the entire incident in my head. After a little more rooting through the fridge, Fara reappears with a number of things balanced in her hands. Deli meat, some tomatoes, looks like sandwiches. I follow up after her, grabbing some other stuff I think she uses, like mayo.

“Very neat,” she responds to Allie while going for the cutting board. “Saved a whole lot of people. Who knows what would have happened if we hadn't helped out. Right, Alex?”

Scratching my cheek nervously, I nod a few times. “It's kinda still freaking me out a little,” I admit. “The devs were making a big deal out of it, it sounded like it was their first live run of some new mechanics. Fara said they made a cutscene out of it and everything. I think twenty or thirty thousand people were watching.” At least that's my vague mental estimate based on the stream viewers and how many people there were in town.

“What?”

The response is simultaneous from all three women, all spinning to stare at me in shock. I jump straight up into the air in surprise, before ducking behind the kitchen counter out of pure embarrassment at my own reaction.

Fara quickly comes to my side, bending down to comfort me and pull me back up. “Sorry about that, Alex. That's just a huge shock, you know?”

I nod frantically, trying to calm my heart. “Can- just, umm, give me a minute.” I quickly retreat to the bathroom, away from the watching girls. I sit on the toilet, bending forward to cup my head in my hands.

Is this who Alex is? Isn't he supposed to be confident and strong? So why do I feel like a nervous wreck? It's been all of five minutes and I'm falling apart. Is it no good after all? I have to sit for another few minutes breathing and calming myself to get the anxiety to stop pounding in my head.

Taking a few extra deep breaths, I think I'm finally functional again. I take the opportunity to relieve myself, and when I wash my hands. I... keep staring down, away from the mirror. I don't have the heart to look into it, even as Alex. I'm too afraid that I won't see him looking back.

Illusions and lies won't be enough.

The message comes back to me and I shudder, clenching my hands into fists a few times to rid myself of the dread. I grab the edge of the sink, stare into the running water, and tell myself not to listen. It was evil and it was trying to make me doubt myself. That must mean I'm right.

The feeling eases, and I shut the water off. Returning to the common room, Fara is waiting with a plated sandwich in each hand. “Feeling a little better?” she asks hopefully.

I always want to be honest with her, so I tell her. “I don't know. The stuff that orb told me really got to me. I know it was just trying to get in my head, but shit, it worked.”

“Hey, come on,” Fara encourages me softly with an elbow nudge. “You did good, and you showed that it was wrong about you. I saw the way you used all of the characters you used to play to beat it. I recognized some of them, they were from back when we were kids, weren't they?”

“Yeah,” I smile weakly.

“You did so well, Alex.” Her smile quirks up at the edge, and she extends one of the plates. “Here, a reward. One that won't try to eat your brain.” That one gets a chuckle out of me as I accept the offer. She waves me over onto the couch while taking a minute to use the bathroom herself.

I sit down, kind of leaving some space between me and the other two, already finding myself feeling awkward and not knowing what to do. I have to remind myself that there's a TV and a sandwich, both of which are extremely helpful at the moment.

I use them to occupy myself, munching on the sandwich and watching whatever nature show Simini has playing. After a few bites, I close my eyes and just enjoy the food. It's turkey with plenty of fresh cut tomato on it. The flavor soothes my knotted stomach.

Fara joins us soon after, having made sandwiches for the other girls as well. We all eat and watch animals, well, eat each other. It's a little odd, but no one really minds it. Once we're finished up, we generally disperse. I keep trying to calm my anxious mind by distracting myself, I even look up Kelly's stream again and watch her fight monsters for a bit. Looks like she's really popular too, she has almost two thousand viewers.

Just seeing the creepy things she cuts down with her spear is giving me weird feelings though, so I close out of the stream before too long and just take a nap.

I wake up, a bit drowsy after my nap. When I yawn, I notice the girls looking at me and freeze up. “Fara said to go meet her in Planes when you wake up,” Simini says.

“Oh, umm, alright...” I pick up my phone as I'm slowly rising from the comfy chair I took my nap in, but when I see the time, I bolt straight upright. It's already six? Isn't that like noon in-game? Everyone must be waiting on me!

I head back to Fara's room as fast as I can without running. She's already lying down, her phone locked into its holder on her head. Why didn't she wake me up?

I lie down on the floor, rest my head on my pillow, shaking hands fiddling with my phone to get the game started and the device in my own jury-rigged holder.

Then I close my eyes and log in. The world fades to black, taking much of my panicking anxiety with it.

Welcome to Planes of Oblivion

My senses return, and I wobble a little on my feet. A hand steadies me, and I look around in momentary confusion.

“Hey, Mei, what's up?”

“Welcome back.”

“Good to see ya.”

A whole slew of greetings come as I look all around to my party members. Where are we? What's going on?

“Mei?” Lara asks, with a note of concern.

“Y-Yeah? Where are we?” I start scanning past them, and there's nothing but a sparse forest around us. I'm not stuck in some kind of vision again, am I?!

As soon as I think it, my hand comes up reflexively to grab and yank away any offending jewelry around my neck, but there's nothing there.

“Mei, it's alright!” Lara puts her hands up to calm me. “Just calm down. Breathe and think for a sec.”

“Ok...” I respond hesitantly, sucking in a deep breath. I hold it, then slowly let it out again.

“Good,” Lara coaxes me. “You looked really comfortable and I didn't want to interrupt your nap, so I logged in earlier. I went shopping with the other Mei and got to know her better. We left Pollton a few hours ago. Uhh, Nirvalla time. So about two-ish hours Earth time.”

“Right... The other Mei...” I respond blankly.

“Aww, you totally tunnel-visioned and forgot when you thought you were late, didn't you?” Lara giggles and scratches me behind the ear in a way that feels surprisingly nice.

“Yeah...” I admit, blushing a little, before I catch my trigger go off. I'm not being that cute now, am I? Trying to ignore my party's amused faces, I change topics. “Hey that actually feels really nice.”

“The other Mei told me about it, I wanted to see if you liked it too,” and she grins again, before giving me one last pat.

Together, we all start walking again. I glance up and see that my stream is already running again. I guess the other Mei started it again at some point.

“How does that even work...?” I wonder to myself. Without my computer running the game to stream, it must switch over to the server running Mei's AI or something.

Do they have streaming software installed on their servers? What would even be the logistics of switching over mid-stream...? Does Mei have to deal with it somehow?

“I... really need something else to call her, don't I...?” I slowly realize while my thoughts meander. I mean, even if she's also Mei, she's not like, me Mei, is she? “Hey, uhh, guys?” I ask hesitantly, and they all look my way again. “What is Mei like? The other Mei?” I wave my hands a little as they start to consider the question, wanting to explain further.

“I was just thinking it might be better if she has her own name. I mean, Mei is her name just as much as mine, it's not like I want to take it away from her or anything. But she might like another name better, to make it easier to distinguish between us. You know, if we're really different or something.” It's not like I can really talk to her about it, but maybe they can when I'm not logged in.

I decide to mention that too, and everyone considers it for a bit.

“Good point,” Hask agrees, and a few others nod along.

“We'll ask her about it when we have a chance,” Koru speaks up from behind, and Azra nods along enthusiastically.

“So...” Lara thinks aloud. “The other Mei is a bit similar to you, just in the feeling she gives off, you know? But I'd say she's less silly, more... serious. Kind of closed off, but I didn't get that long to talk to her, so that could be part of it.”

“Mmm...” I mumble, nodding along. It's certainly interesting, trying to get to know more about the other person I share a body with in this world, since I'll never be able to meet her. “Thanks, guys.”

With that out of the way, we keep on walking. Like Lara said, we're already a good way outside town, and the terrain is far less forgiving than our trip to Pollton. We're off-road, heading uphill with the sound of a good size river on our right. It comes in and out of sight as we work our way upward, the ground covered in varying size rocks, or choked out with tree roots.

Grass still pokes through, but there's hardly anywhere flat and level to step, so our pace has definitely slowed compared to walking on an actual road. Of course, we're alone as well, no one else nearby. We're definitely out past civilization.

Now that I'm with them again, I feel like the others want to ask about what happened back in Pollton, but Lara sends a few looks around, and it seems like everyone drops the idea. Given the overwhelmingly personal nature of what they all saw, I'm not too keen on the idea of talking about it myself, so I'm glad to just let it go too. I'd much rather focus on the coming journey instead.

Hask and Mary are in the lead as we go, clearly the most accustomed to traveling over rough terrain. They swerve here and there to collect things. Various plants and other materials they note that could be useful to use or sell later, when I ask about it.

Eventually stopping for a break at the riverside, I ask, “Where's our next stop? And actually, how close are we to Icutha?” I should have looked up a map earlier, but I totally forgot. Either Alex is just as useless as Ray, or I'm just not comfortable being him yet. No, no, it's not his fault. I went through a lot in Pollton and I really needed that nap.

“Next, we stop at Mebin, before the border,” Hask explains, pulling me back out of my own head. He takes out a crudely drawn paper map and shows me.

So, Mebin is southeast of Pollton. Then there's Thrun, just across the Icutha border. Looks like it'll be a long trip east to Icutha City, if the relative distances on the map are even remotely accurate...

I nod a few times. “Thanks, that helps.” Once I've taken some time to stretch and relax my feet, I check on my stream.

After the incident in Pollton, my viewers dropped off significantly again, but I still have a mind-boggling three thousand people watching. They're all just kind of chatting about whatever right now, basically hanging out while we travel and nothing important is happening.

The devs have been suspiciously quiet though, hardly a peep out of them. There are almost a hundred of them in the viewer list, so I know they're still lurking. Waving that away after a minute, I finally turn my thoughts to something more important: managing my character.

I've been strung along on so many events so quickly, I've hardly had time to keep up. I unlocked new Titles, leveled up, I should have more points to spend and everything.

I start by setting my stream to blur out my menu. I am not about to show every bit of information to thousands of potential stream snipers after Lara warned me.

Now, let's begin with the Titles. Pulling up the selection menu, I'm met with two new options. The 'Light Bringer' title comes from helping cleanse a significant amount of corruption. Unsurprisingly, it increases the effectiveness of cleansing corruption. Not bad, but besides that borrowed spell, I don't actually have cleansing magic of my own.

It says it helps with resisting the corruption effect too, which I'm sure would be super helpful for a lot of people. For me... I have no idea. I feel like corruption effects me differently, after everything that's happened. I think back on that strange pink crystal again... then shake my head and move on.

Next up is the Priestess Title from destroying that oblivion core. When I start reading, it looks like it's just a better version of Light Bringer, with bigger bonuses to corruption resistance and cleansing effectiveness. But there's one additional effect that immediately catches my attention. I tap on it for more info.

Party Affinity Support Boost – Increases power of Personal Affinities

So another ability to boost Personal Affinities... I wonder if it stacks with Dissonant? When I look at everyone around me, they all have a number of colorful motes, mostly from Lara's passive party buffs. Among them, everyone has one golden light for my Dissonant buff.

I try equipping the new title, and watch as... two more gold lights appear around them all? But it should only give the one buff, right?

While wondering about that, I tap over into the section of the menu where it lists out all of the buffs currently on me. There are Lara's, but that's it. Do my Title buffs only apply to others, not to me? I pout, that's not fair...

And what about my own party buffs? They must be overridden by Lara's since they're from the same Skills, I realize. Otherwise, there'd be no reason not to have every single person take all the support buffs, for ridiculous stacking effects all the time.

I'll have to keep that in mind as I take new Skills. While support abilities could be useful for me since I'm not very strong yet, Lara already has most of it covered, and a lot stuff might not stack. Not to mention, they could be wasted points later when I do get stronger. I haven't seen a single indication of a way to respec my stats, so anything I choose now is permanent.

None of that answers my question actual question though. What's up with my Priestess buff? I slide over next to Lara and poke her to get her attention while she munches on some jerky. “Hey, could you check these three buffs?” I point them out and she taps the lights to open them up one by one.

Dissonant, Priestess, Priestess. So Priestess is applying twice for some reason. And the second one is listed as a 'moderate' boost instead of 'small.' Why...?

“Woah, cool! You got another awesome Title, Mei!” Lara grins at me when she sees its effect.

“Yeah, I got it from destroying that core. Personal Affinities are really powerful, so this is probably my best Title now.”

“Nice, nice,” she chirps happily, giving me a brief head rub. Then I let her return to eating while I keep going through my stuff.

I still haven't forgotten my plan from earlier, to take more Skills so I can start leveling them up. If I just throw points at Aura for more AP, then convert them to SP, I'm sure I can pick up a number of useful ones pretty quick. Then I'll spread my stats out more at higher levels.

I pull up my base stats, a bit surprised by what I see.

Status Power: 25 Vitality: 23 (25) Finesse: 37 Speed: 31 Perception: 33 Spirit: 24 Sorcery: 38 Aura: 84 (135) Character Points: 15

Wow, my Vitality went up a lot this time! The rest of my stats all look pretty healthy too, so I tap to put another point into Aura, and come up short.

It went up by two. I pull up my abilities, to see that I have 10AP.

I put another point into Aura, and it goes up by two again.

And now I have 14AP. That's... 1 CP for 2 points of Aura. And each point of Aura is increasing my AP by 2.

I swear Aura should only increase AP by 1... right? Between all the weirdness with the Affinities, Curses, Titles, and everything else I've run into, I can't even begin to guess at the cause.

Let's just... go with it then.

I put all my CP into Aura, raising it to 114, which gets me up to 66AP to spend. Each level of Skillful uses 2 AP, so I take another 33 levels. That puts me at 37SP, with the 4 SP I already had from leveling.

With the points all moved around like I intended, I stop to look everything over.

Status Power: 25 Vitality: 23 (25) Finesse: 37 Speed: 31 Perception: 33 Spirit: 24 Sorcery: 38 Aura: 114 (180) Character Points: 0 Skills Stat Boost Vitality Boost II: 1 Defense Boost I: 1 Aura Boost V: 2 Spell Resistant III: 3 Melee Hammer I: 1 Boost II: 1 Ranged Bow I: 2 Sniper I: 2 Power Shooting I: 2 Magic Jewelry I: 1 Fire Attunement I: 1 Dark Curse Magic II: 3 Contagion II: 1 Melee Spell Trigger I: 1 Ranged Spell Trigger I: 1 Servant Expand Servant Limit II: 1 Piercing Exploit+ XI: 3 Warp Strike II: 1 Splash Field I: 2 Healing Life Drain Magic II: 1 Self Healing I: 1 Critical Healing II: 1 Support Party Defense Boost II: 2 Party Utility Boost I: 1 Control Blight I: 1 Mobility Running Boost I: 2 Wall Cling I: 1 Sense Keen Touch I: 1 Industry Item Modification I: 1 Skill Points: 37 Abilities Skillful: 193 Offensive Abilities Power Shot: 28 Counter+: 13 Stunning Blow+: 19 Sneak Attack+: 46 Weapon Parry+: 14 Offensive Magic Dark Curse: 23 Drain Touch: 22 Control Magic Blight: 3 Magic Modification Contagion: 4 Field: 33 Self Enhancement Boost: 18 Active Effect Warp Strike: 19 Crafting Modify Item: 0 Ability Points: 0

Alright, so... it looks like my new Skills from leveling up are Vitality Boost, Contagion, Critical Healing, Blight, and Item Modification. It's a pretty wide spread of different abilities, some of which I have no idea how I would use. Contagion looks interesting though. It's for modifying dark magic spells, like my Dark Curse. When I read through its description, it actually sounds really useful.

By attaching it to a spell, that spell will leave a mark on the enemy I hit, and then when they die, it will recast the spell on other enemies around it. The number of targets will increase if I put more points in to master it. So, it's a lot like an area of effect type Skill, but by killing and spreading. “Cool...” I murmur.

I also pull up Blight since it isn't immediately obvious what that would do. Looks like magic for decreasing enemy elemental damage resistance. That's why it falls under the Control category.

Briefly reading over the others to be sure I understand their details... Critical Healing gives a small bonus to healing effectiveness on allies with extremely low life, and Item Modification lets me, well, modify items. There's more nuance to it than that, like modifying material components, sockets, magic gems, and so on, that I don't have time to look over right now. I find a whole new section in the menu for dealing with all of it since it's my first crafting skill.

With that out of the way, I eye my remaining SP. Enough for seven new skills. What should I take...?