Blood drained from my face. The fact we were somewhere else was difficult for me to handle, enough that my shoulders tensed up. Naturally, I drained my cup of what was a terrible, single-distilled vodka. I coughed a little. That shit was harsh. “What do you mean, like another dimension or planet?” I croaked.

  He nodded sadly before pouring more into my cup. “I won’t lie to you. I have been trying to find a way home for a long time. Maybe there isn’t one.” He sipped from his own cup. “But the Voice in the tutorial talked of a way back. And everyone who, unlike you, finished the tutorial has reported the same thing.”

  “Wait, what did it say? Is there a quest? A set of powerful objects? A wish? Maybe a starship? What did the Voice say?” I sat at the edge of my log. “Whatever it is, I’ll do it.”

  “Finn. I don’t think you are able. I don’t think any of us can do it.” Juan drained his cup and refilled it, looking in the harsh liquid for strength before he continued. “At the end of the tutorial, we’re given a riddle. To find the way back, there is a creature to track. Take it from its broken place, to the frozen night in lace. Stop the theft of light so true, and straight home I will send you.”

  It took me a moment to think about the riddle. “Juan, that’s just bad poetry. How is it that no one has cracked it? I mean, really. That sounds like something from a kids’ show.” He looked at me with confusion. “You know, like the one with the kid and the monkey? They travel all over the world solving riddles and finding things.... never mind, it’s after your time.”

  “Kids’ shows were different before I came here. And on Saturdays. But Finn, no one knows what creature it refers to. And without the first step, the rest is useless. No one has found a frozen night with or without lace. Or knows what the ‘light so true’ is.”

  “Hey. What if the frozen night is a play on words, like it meant a knight in shining armor? Only a black knight. Maybe a woman?” I felt like I was on to something here, but was to tired to get excited.

  “Yes, and that has never been thought of in the entire time I have been here. I’m sorry, Finn, but other than a few people, we all think this is a dead end. And even if it wasn’t, the amount of information available to us suggests we are missing something. People have looked at tracking-type quests. Big quests. Earthborn have started wars in this place, trying to find whatever it is.”

  I took a moment to process this. Wars. “How many dead?” I asked quietly.

  “Too many to count. Most of the victims were native to this world, which just makes it worse. Many of those were friends, and I watched too many good people die because of wasteful, useless conflicts. All of us who were involved have to carry the burden of our actions. I have to carry that.” He sat for a moment, lost in thought. A deep sadness flashed across his face, as if he had lost everything that had ever mattered.

  As soon as it was there, it was gone again, and a small, wistful smile formed. “But enough of the past, young Finn! For tonight, at least, we both need sleep. Tomorrow, I, Juan Santino Vanegas, will teach you everything about what you missed by skipping the tutorial!”

  I slept through the night, the exhaustion of the previous day and the shitty moonshine doing their work. Though the moonshine wasn’t done with me come morning, I awoke with the worst hangover of my life.

  Juan was already awake, making what I assumed was breakfast. And accompanying it with the most god-awful singing I’ve ever heard. Or maybe it was just the throbbing boom in my overly tight drum of a head. I groaned, my eyes narrowed to slits to keep out the hellishly bright light. “Must you?” I said in a painful whisper.

  “Ah! You’re awake! Good.” He placed a cup of something steaming near me. “Drink this, Finn. It tastes horrible, but it’ll treat your hangover.”

  I looked at him suspiciously with one eye. I looked at the cup suspiciously. It smelled... very unusual. It was like... burned banana peels and horseradish. At his urging, I got up on an elbow and took a sip. I gagged, but got it down. I felt a tiny bit better. Enough to sit up and lean against the log, which had seemed a monumental task only a moment ago. I took my time, but when he handed me a plate of food, some sort of stew with root vegetables, I was feeling quite good and suddenly ravenous.

  The stew was not only delicious, but filling. It was mostly an unfamiliar root vegetable with the consistency and taste of potatoes, carrots, and a hint of turkey. The tuber was called a Glot root, supposedly after whoever had discovered it, according to Juan.

  After I had finished another plate of the amazing stew, Juan figured I was ready to learn about how this world worked and how to access various things. He explained the stats were my base stats and would increase over time as I leveled. “Wait, the voice mentioned that, but didn’t tell me how that works,” I said, still sitting against the tree.

  He sighed. “There is something that is done to us when we come here. Like we are, as my young friend Rachel used to say, upgraded,” Juan said, uncomfortably. “Here, we can call up our stats and skills screens. We can also summon a map of the world around us that gets more information as we enter new areas, complete or start quests, or otherwise gain location-specific information.”

  “Sort of like when I read that mercenary’s mind and found the location of the nearest village? I glimpsed a map in front of my eyes, showing my location and the location of the village. It gave me the fastest route there before disappearing.”

  He looked surprised. “What! You shouldn’t have been able to read his mind so easily unless — unless he didn’t see you as a threat. Or, Finn… tell me you didn’t force yourself into his mind. That is wrong, and won’t be tolerated,” Juan said softly.

  I pulled back, sensing the disapproval and quiet anger. “Hold up, I don’t know what I am doing! When I did it, I saw what it did to him and it made me sick. I never want to do that to anyone ever again,” I responded.

  The old man stroked his goatee for a moment, his eyes seemingly piercing my very soul in judgement. Slowly he nodded. “Good. I believe you,” he said, as if that was the end of the matter. “I’ve never heard of anyone pulling up the map until the Voice or a mentor like me trained them. Why don’t we start with the map?”

  A breath I hadn’t realized I had been holding escaped my lips. “Okay, walk me through it,” I said, trying to sound normal and not shudder at the memory of what I had done to that man. It didn’t matter that he could have killed me; I was the one who had assaulted him. Was I comfortable with what that said about me?

  Juan’s voice cut through my thoughts. “This is all in the mind, not like the computers I’ve been told about with a mouse and a pointer. You don’t clack on anything.”

  “Click,” I corrected, taking a deep breath.

  “Click. You don’t click on anything. Instead, I want you to think about the surrounding area. Not anything specific about it, just think of it in general.”

  I closed my eyes and thought about everything around us: the land, the trees, the pile of rocks between us and the road. For a moment, an opaque map appeared before me before vanishing again. The rocks. I had been thinking specifically about the rocks. I swore at myself and tried again. This time, I didn’t think about the rocks, just the land and trees. The map snapped back, showing me the local area. I looked to the south, and the map zoomed out some, showing the road and the surrounding area, from the village to the farm. I noticed the area where I started, east of the village, and the wolves’ den east of the farm. But nothing else.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  “Hey, Juan?” I asked. “Why can’t I see more than where I’ve been?”

  “Rebecca called it the fog of war. Apparently, in our world, it’s a common thing in computer games. It goes away the more you explore. Were you able to increase the area covered by the map?”

  I nodded, still looking at the map. As I tried to look more to the right, I zoomed out further. And further. There was so much I just couldn’t see, blocked by a vague cloud with ambiguous outlines indicating things like mountains or a coastline. There was an odd blinking spot to the far west, but I re-zoomed the map into where we were now. I noticed two colored dots on the map, which were labeled. The blue one was labeled Juan Santino Venegas, while the green one was labeled Finn. “What does the color coding mean for the dots? Does everyone have a different color, like in old video games?”

  “It depends. For people from our world, we see each other as blue dots on the map and ourselves as green. Unless we are enemies or attacking each other. Then it’s blue with a red outline. Hostile creatures are always red, while non-hostile creatures are yellow. Oh, and usually, the people of this world are white dots.”

  “Usually white?” I asked.

  “It depends.” He pushed some embers around the fire pit with a stick. “If they are hostile, they have a red outline around their white dot. But if they are being controlled it’s pink.” He was quiet for a while, lost in the past. But then he whispered, “There are... things that can control us too. I’ve seen it myself. There are also rumors that some people can do it. The Lich, for example.”

  Juan had a haunted look about him, reliving whatever horrors he had survived. But then he shook himself. “There’s these floating brain things that look like they are made of Jello. They come in different colors, but the clear ones are the worst. They float about until they sense a sapient being nearby and move to latch on. Fortunately, you won’t need to worry about them or any other of the monsters with mind-control capabilities until you’re much stronger. So let’s talk about your inventory. Again, I need you to focus. But this time on your backpack.”

  It took me several tries to get the right mindset for accessing my pack or my inventory, but I finally got the feel for it. I could access my backpack by physically rooting through it or mentally opening it. By accessing it mentally, I could pull something from my pack without even touching it. I could pull a snack out while walking, or a health potion in the middle of a fight. I played around with it a bit before Juan explained to me how much I could carry and the other limitations.

  “Your strength plays a big part in how much you can carry. You said you thought your strength was 15? So that means you can comfortably carry 300 to 350 pounds, and a max of about 400 pounds. But the big thing is that the size of your backpack affects how much and what you can carry in it.”

  “Wait. I can carry 300 pounds easily, but it has to fit in my backpack? Do I have that right?” I asked.

  “Yes. You can carry it some other way, like in your arms. That’s usually a bad idea. There are better backpacks, like mine, that are enchanted to have more space, but they are very expensive.”

  I needed one of those. “How expensive are we talking?” I asked.

  He frowned. “I bought mine for 2,500 gold. And the lives of a few friends.”

  My jaw dropped. Two and a half thousand? I read a side note in a textbook that stated if US quarters were made of gold, they would weigh about a quarter of an ounce. But these were thicker, say about an ounce. If my bad math skills were right, two and a half thousand gold would be a little over two hundred pounds. Oh God, the gold rate at home was what, four thousand dollars? Making it eight million dollars? And I only had a measly 38 gold coins! Plus a handful of silvers and coppers.

  The loss of life was a sobering thought. Its addition to his total gave me the feeling that Juan had seen enough that it was normal. Yet another ominous item I could add to my mental catalog of shit I’d have to deal with. I was willing to bet all my money that he wasn’t telling me everything.

  After that, I was happy to move on to stats and how to look at them. And subsequently, how to level up. It turned out that leveling up wasn’t automatic. You had to accept the experience “energy” and focus on which stats the points were to go to. The stat points could be put into one stat or spread out. But not all of it. 1 point each went into intelligence, wisdom, and endurance to increase health and mana points. I’d gain new health points at every level. And that was without my doing anything. The rest I could put where I wanted.

  As it turned out, my quest to kill the wolves for the farmers gave me enough energy to level up. Juan walked me through the process, and I went up to level 2. My endurance, intelligence, and wisdom stats all went up one, and I had two more points which I threw into stamina, raising it up to 14. And I found out that my health jumped from 79 to 86 health points. My mana points increased by 20 to 100.

  Apparently, even though the Voice had said that it would only change every 2 points of intelligence and wisdom, it would have explained the level bonus when we got to that point in its lecture. And I would have gotten some experience energy for finishing the tutorial. Thanks for that, Xander, you prick!

  “Now that you have leveled up, I want you to hold the feeling of your magic in your mind. Since you’ve used your spells, this should be a lot easier for you than many of the magic users I’ve trained,” Juan said. A thoughtful look had crossed his face. “How did you cast your spells at first?”

  “I just pretended my right hand was a gun and aimed it,” I said with a laugh. “Then I just said the spell out loud.”

  “Hmmm. Did the voice tell you to do that?” the old man asked, grabbing a surprisingly modern-looking notebook out of his backpack.

  “No, it just told me to say or think the spell,” I replied. I gestured at the notebook. “How did you get that here?”

  “The notebook?” he muttered as he wrote in the notebook with a sharp piece of charcoal wrapped like a crayon. “The design is from Earth, but made here. There,” he remarked, closing his notes. “I like to keep track of different classes and their peculiarities, as well as what the Voice tells people. Alright, as I instructed, focus on the feeling of your magic and the thought of curiosity. Close your eyes if you must, but focus on just those two thoughts.”

  “Okay,” I said. It felt similar to pulling up my inventory and my stats. Which likely helped me do it quickly. “Got it,” I muttered, a little shocked at the amount of information I was seeing. Almost in response to that notion, the list simplified into a comprehensive list of the spells, their levels, range, and the cost.

  “Whoa, what do MP and ACT mean?” I asked.

  Juan grinned. “Well done, mi muchacho! ACT means activation. MP stands for Mana Points, which you draw from your personal mana pool. You’ll have to get used to keeping a running count in your head, because nothing tracks it for you. Otherwise, you’ll be caught flat-footed by running out of mana. Have you used up your mana pool yet?”

  Thinking of the wolves’ den, I shuddered. “Yes. I fell on my ass when it happened,” I said unhappily.

  “Of course you did!” Juan said, nodding. “That was a bout of vertigo from running out of mana. Most of the time it won’t be as bad, but if you let it sneak up on you, it will be worse.”

  I swallowed. That was something I’d like to avoid. “Counting mana points, got it. And is Upkeep something I have to keep paying?” I asked.

  “That’s right. As long as you aren’t using spells that use Upkeep in a fight, it won’t be too much of an issue.”

  By the time we were done, it was early afternoon. Juan busied himself around the fire, presumably to make some lunch. I wandered off to grab some wood, but mostly to find a place to empty my bladder. It had been hours since I had last gone, and I quickly found some bushes that gave decent cover.

  I was halfway done when I heard an ominously loud twig snap behind me.