Ashley led her team through the streets of the Meeting space, glancing off to the sides to try to find a suitable destination for them to all try to earn some points. Naturally, she had seen the Programming Display building, but she had passed that over rather quickly, much to the dismay of her team. Although they had just released their first game, their skills were not at a level that would be considered impressive among Keepers.

“Hey, Ashley! Long time!” A voice called out to Ashley, who blinked, turning and seeing a blue-skinned woman walking over. A small smile formed on her face as she identified the speaker.

“Lora, how are you?” She asked, recognizing the woman as someone she had met in a previous meeting. Like herself, she was a goddess of another Keeper, one that was stuck at the second Rank according to what Lora had revealed.

“I’m doing great!” Lora smiled, glancing behind Ashley. “Got yourself a new following this time?”

Ashley thought about it, before giving a slight nod of her head. “These individuals work for me back home. We brought them here today to take part in the festivities, so I was just looking for something for them to do.”

Lora quickly nodded her head in understanding. “Want me to help? This year seems particularly packed. Guessing some big names decided that they need lots of points for upcoming matches.” She looked around at the especially busy streets, and Ashley couldn’t help but agree.

“Well, do you have any suggestions?” Ashley asked, turning her gaze back to the blue-skinned woman. “Ideally, it would be something with a reward, but as long as it is something that they can learn from, that would be fine as well.”

“Hmm… well, if you’re talking about team games, that narrows things down a lot.” Lora pursed her lips as she said that. “There are some team gladiator events if they’re fighters, but they don’t really look the type.”

“Since they give off more of a problem solver vibe, why not have them do puzzle games? There are some group puzzle games around here somewhere. You know, escape type stuff. The game locks you all up in this room, seals all powers, and you have to use context hints to figure out how to get out. If you get good enough, the room gets more and more complex, and you could end up escaping entire dimensions.”

There are escape room puzzles? Ashley blinked a few times, nodding her head. “Want to help me find them?”

Lora grinned, quickly nodding. “Sure! Don’t have anything better to do right now. It okay if I join your game? We’re both under speech restrictions, so it’s not like either of us will spill any secrets or anything.”

Ashley naturally agreed. Although she knew that Lora was a Goddess, and Lora knew the same about Ashley, neither even knew what domains the other had, nor could they say it. If prompted, they could say the title of the Keeper that they came with, but not their true name.

That was just how things went in the space of the Keeper Meeting. Ashley had met a few different people during her trips here, Lora being one that she had made rather quick friends out of. With Lora joining the group that walked along, it didn’t take long for them to find a building that itself looked like a half-finished puzzle.

After finishing up my business collecting the small payment from Bellarose, I decided to take the girls to have some fun. First, we had a rather nice meal at the restaurant that came with the Meeting space. The fact that you could always get a near perfect dish was something I never wanted to pass up.

After that, though, we went to the main gaming building for a round of Keeper Sim. Since there were four of us, we ran a team game. Obviously, that meant that there wouldn’t be any points since we were just playing against each other, but this was all just for fun to begin with.

The teams for this game were randomly chosen, ultimately being myself and Ryone against Terra and Irena. Initially, I wasn’t sure what races the other two would pick, but Ryone chose elves right away. As for myself, I picked the demon race. Not the demons of our world, but a more supernatural demon similar to what I used in my very first game of Keeper Sim.

I wanted to be on guard, in case Irena picked a spiritual race. If she did, and I didn’t have anything suitable to counter them, it could be a complete team wipe. Across the stage from us, I could see Irena and Terra discussing something, though it was impossible to make out what they were saying.

I shook my head, looking over at Ryone. “You’re going magic development, right?” I asked, and she nodded her head firmly.

“Gotta stick with what I know best, right? Though, hmm…” Ryone paused, thinking about it for a moment. “You know… I’m going to mix it up a bit. Let’s change their magic system to Elemental Seed.”

“Won’t that give the seeds to the other team, too?” I asked with a hint of concern, though Ryone shook her head.

“Description says that only a team that has chosen the relevant magic system can locate and interact with items of that system. They shouldn’t even be able to see it.” Ryone spoke in a confident tone. As long as neither of them picked the same magic system, that was right. And if they did… well, they’d be able to grab them anyways.

I nodded my head, but chose to keep my magic system as the default for the demon race, which was runic. Just as they were the first time I played this race, my first units were a simple set of imps that I immediately set to mining resources. Once I had enough resources, I began spawning more imps to begin building and researching.

Over on Ryone’s side, it seemed that she was lucky enough for one elemental seed to be located within her mining site. From what I could see looking over, it increased the mining rate of the unit that obtained it, allowing her to divert her other units to researching magic.

The first ten minutes of the match were rather standard, building up basic buildings and deciding development paths. For me, it was the path of spiritual evolution, allowing me to get demons such as Incubi and Hellhounds. It was… admittedly strange to have an imp evolve into a demonic dog, but that seemed to be the case for this particular species.

It was at the fifteen minute mark that my civilization first connected with Ryone’s, forming a trade agreement. They would use their excess of gems to exchange for ‘open borders’, letting their people come in and search for special seeds. And, given how seeds respawned in this game just as they did in real life, she now had more than a dozen elves that had all been boosted with the same mining enhancement.

However, it was also around this time that I started noticing something strange happening among my race. There were internal conflicts, various demons getting into fights for reasons that I couldn’t determine. At first, I thought that it might have been a problem caused by the very nature of demons, thriving in the face of conflict.

Then… I looked over and noticed that the same thing was happening on Ryone’s side. Typically, elves had a more peaceful outlook when it came to one another, but now… there were riots in the streets. “Someone’s using espionage.” Ryone spoke up, though I had a look of confusion on my face.

“I haven’t seen any troops, and I’ve got several detection specialists deployed.” Since I was wary of ghostly assailants, one of my first orders was to set up defenses against such things, such as looking for invisible or spiritual enemies. However, there had not been any such beings crossing my borders.

“Still, it’s happening. Do you have the ability to use third tier magic yet?” When she asked that, I couldn’t help but shake my head. I had left magical development largely to Ryone, so there wasn’t much that I could offer there, with my race only having to touch the boundaries of second tier runes. “I don’t have a suitable seed yet… Give me a few minutes to try to get a building up and running that can fix this.”

As she said that, she deployed forces to build three different buildings, each one heavily guarded. Her brow knit together as she watched the scenes closely. Soon, there was a fight at one of the building sites, and Ryone issued a harsh order. “Fire!” Immediately, the guards on site released a torrent of flames that enveloped the entire building site.

The rioters were silenced, the onlooking elves frozen in shock. Once the flames died down, Ryone ordered the guards to carefully explore the burnt ruins. Among the five builders, there were surprisingly six corpses retrieved.

Ryone’s eyes shook at the sight of the unfamiliar species. Sadly, it was burned too badly to identify. Instead, she was forced to send it to be studied, issuing a warning among her people. Similarly, I did the same. “There is a hidden race infiltrating the city, sparking conflict. Anyone found to be working with this enemy will themselves be deemed an enemy.”

Although this was a harsh order, it needed to be in order to deter whatever influence the enemy units had over our forces. This increased the paranoia of both of our troops, slowing progress in all fields. However, it did make it so that there were fewer outbreaks.

It took a full three minutes, which was a considerable time during play, for the report to come back. “Low level memetic field, leading to the unit being removed from the memory of anyone that sees it. Only active while its brain is functioning. That’s why we can’t see them on our map, because our troops can’t identify their presence.”

Almost immediately, a memory came back to me, looking over at Terra and Irena in shock. I knew this race rather well. In fact, I was the one that had submitted it to the system in the first place. “The Forgotten?” I asked, and Terra gave a playful grin.

This brought up… troubling implications. Going by the spread of outbreaks, there were at least ten units in each of our cities. “Terra had to have sent them early, scouting the way with their special ability and limiting her own development. Right now, they’re acting as spies. If she manages to sneak in any more, they will be assassins.”

Of course, all of this was giving Irena plenty of time to develop. Ryone nodded her head, understanding the same fact. “I’ll set up barriers around our cities to automatically attack anything that comes through without the proper conditions. Even if they’re removing themselves from our memories in real time, they would trigger the wards.”

I nodded at that, glad to have a means of defense against invisible assassins. There was still the problem of how to deal with the ones that had already gotten inside the walls, but that was not nearly as easy to resolve. If Terra ordered them to remain passive, there would be no way to find them, and they would just be silent spies, giving her information on everything happening within our borders.

In that case, I could only hope that Terra kept having them stir up problems, since that would make it possible to narrow down their movements. Unfortunately, she had the same thoughts as myself, the riots calming down before the barrier had even been established.