I spent my incredibly hard-earned money on new stuff. Loading the worst truck at my job would have been better than what we just did. God, that life seemed so far away.

  My old body didn’t have annoying broad shoulders and this damn thing between my legs doing whatever it wanted.

  I got myself some leather pants. They were made of sturdy stuff from the Salt Spears Trade Post, pebbled buffalo lizard skin in rusty brown and boots of the same. They chafed. Instantly.

  I skipped the shirt, leaving me feeling incredibly naked. I couldn’t afford it. I’d sculpted my muscles to perfection, but my bare green chest made me feel self-conscious as hell. No one looked at me askance. Other orcs around town didn’t wear a shirt, instead going for belts with metal rings for hanging useful items. I needed to get over myself.

  Still, walking around with my man-tits out felt weird. Had I known during character generation that I'd feel so exposed just from this... Then what? It would have been worse if I'd rolled a female and had to choose bare-assed or bare-chested. I shut that thought down. I chalked my stress up to coming from a time and place where it was not acceptable and left it at that. There was little use in regret.

  Jake and I agreed to meet again after I went ‘home’ to get a change of clothes. As I made my way to our meeting place, I glanced down at my chest and arms, looking at the new scars. The damage dealt was shallow. Pale scars. My low HP pool meant I could recover quickly. Heal fast, die fast. Low-level stuff.

  The next job had a green marker, but was shady as fuck. The task monitor on my aspect screen said: Pick up and deliver a package, but under no circumstances should you look in the box.

  Not sketchy at all.

  I finally noticed that I passed level 2 and had hit level 3 after the last quest turn-in. I spotted spare, new XP points to spend from hitting level 3, so I put one in Vitality—the fewer the Magetech needles, the better. A paltry Vit +1 was better than nothing. I put another in DEX, because I’m clumsy, and I needed to be shiftier. My last point went to Unarmed Combat.

  It seemed that XP dropped points in batches. Hopefully, every third level had gains.

  I flicked a glance at the street I strolled, ignoring my HUD. A short human girl speed-walked just in front of me, her robes flapping around her ankles like purple wings. A ribbon that matched her robe banded her dark, curly hair into a cloud at her crown.

  Player. An abductee. One of us—the once-living, the maybe still alive. Archive called it stasis. She had to be.

  As if she knew I thought about her, she shot a glance behind her. The blue sun hit her dark skin, highlighting her features in a white light that made the look she gave me severe. Little but fierce.

  I looked past her and kept my pace. The last thing I wanted to deal with was someone thinking I was being a creep. Then again, that might be better than having a hundred slimes blowing up in my face. Anything was.

  Jake lurked by the task marker in the shadows of the Twilight district like a Slenderman with wings. The street was nearly empty. It wasn’t night beyond the borders of the district, but most of the locals kept a nocturnal schedule. Good. Less competition.

  The man with the job looked like he crawled out of a dumpster. He had no teeth, dry, shriveled skin, and patches of wispy hair that defied gravity. His robes had been fashioned from mismatched swatches cloth, frayed at every seam. The nameplate said, generically, Patchwork Priest.

  Jake waved at me to hurry over. I didn’t want to overtake the girl, so I just inclined my head and wandered along.

  The girl—Akilah Moonshadow—breezed up to the scruffy quest giver and spoke the magic words briskly, all business. “Give me the job.”

  The man handed her a box, about the size of my open palm, and, before he was done talking, she’d whisked away again. Fast, efficient, and single-minded. I respected that.

  “We ought to do it like that,” I said, nodding at her.

  “And miss the story? No way,” Jake replied, tail wagging behind him.

  I wondered if he knew he did that.

  He pivoted on cloven hooves to face the man. “What’s the job?”

  “I need you to take this box to Shade and give it to the ghostly priest called Gerdet. Do not open the box, and avoid being noticed. This box is very valuable, but if you open it, Gerdet will gut you.”

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  “Ugh, rogue quest,” I mumbled. Then I triggered the dialogue to get the box, too. “There was no story to that. We could have just followed the notes.”

  “You never know until you listen,” Jake said, his box vanishing into his inventory.

  I did the same. The box had a reddish glow that I didn’t like. The glow pulsed at steady intervals. When I glanced at Jake, he pulsed with the same red aura.

  Yeah, it was bad. “Let’s run.”

  I took off, following the minimap’s directions into the fog. Jake’s hooves clip-clopped on the pavement behind me. We burst out of Twilight’s pall and into a barren patch of ground. Deep, wide, shadowed holes dotted the earth. Juts of rock rose up to shadow the multiple creepy-as-fuck entrances of many of them. It was like an ambush haven. As the fog on my map cleared, a name appeared: Subterania.

  At the edge of the district, a sheet of rain came down. Through it, I could barely make out a hill of sodden green grasses and stray shrubs rising to a lonely cluster of buildings huddled at the crest. In the center, at the pinnacle of the hill, a church perched, an enormous cross-like symbol dangling off the roof. Nearly upside down.

  My map revealed Shade ahead.

  I crashed into the storm, instantly sodden. My anger spiked at the wet leather clinging to my legs. What was this, ‘Get soaked day’? I missed the memo.

  I almost lost my footing once on grass laid flat and slippery by the rain before adjusting my stride. The hill stretched higher with every step. It hadn’t seemed this steep from a distance.

  I powered uphill, legs pumping. Before Archive abducted me, I had decent endurance, and I was used to pushing myself. At least some of my positive skills translated well. I could go for a while.

  Jake fell behind. City streets were one thing, but the steep slope was another. I glanced back, shouting over a crash of thunder, “C’mon, goat foot! Let’s go!”

  “I’m… gonna… die…” he wheezed, chugging along at a plodding pace, wobbling on his skinny goatish legs.

  I mean, it was possible, but not likely that he’d die from running up a hill. Bursting up the last ten feet, I gained reasonably level footing. I glanced back.

  Jake staggered up a moment later, moaning. “Ahh, that was trash. I don’t like this game.”

  I rolled my eyes. Oh, now he doesn’t like the game? The slimes were fine, but the hill was too much?

  I slowed my pace a bit so he could catch up. He didn’t. Jake gasped, hand on his chest, complaining about how his legs were on fire. That didn’t seem right to me. Why should pain or discomfort exist in virtually generated bodies? Pain wasn’t necessary. We never had to be in danger, did we? Were these bodies real in some way?

  I wasn’t ready to play with that theory.

  Stopping at the church door, I watched his blinking red form stagger up the steps. He paused and looked up. My hair streamed rain, sticking to my face, so I raked it out of my eyes to glare at him.

  “Why are you stopping? We’re lit up like beacons,” I grumbled, shoving the double doors open.

  “Will I be struck by God? I mean, I’m a demon, now…”

  I grabbed his arm and yanked him inside, pushing in after him. I slammed the door shut and hissed, “Look, you didn’t spontaneously combust. It’s fi—Oh.”

  A handful of specters dressed in genetically puritanical clothing sat motionless in the pews, hollow-eyed, watching us.

  The church hunched, small and simple, built of wood and whitewashed inside and out. Black rot streaked the bone-pale boards. A gothic bell tower soared, open above us to the peak, with the bell rope dangling just beside me. I resisted the urge to pull it.

  I peered up into the dim tower at the bell and then beyond. No bats? Too bad, it would have added a warm ambiance to the place. A touch of life. I returned my attention to the ghosts.

  “Hi. Hello. Delivery for, um, Gerdet, here.” I pulled my box out of inventory and showed it.

  Wind screamed through the bell tower vents, whistling a spine-chilling tune. The congregation was dead silent, staring at us with hollow expressions. I tried again.

  “Gerdet? Anyone?”

  A spectral priest drifted along the aisle. His upper half appeared solid; below the waist, his black robes faded into mist that didn't quite touch the floorboards. He held out an ethereal hand, voice barely above a haunting whisper.

  “I am Father Gerdet. Please, the box.”

  The door slammed into my back. I barely had time to react before the short girl in purple elbowed past me. Akilah Moonshadow had her hood up against the rain but flung it off as she stepped inside. She shoved the box into the priest’s hands.

  “Ah, the first part of my reliquary,” Gerdet said, cradling the box like a precious gift. His greedy eyes flared red, and he stated, “Now I must ask you to retrieve…”

  She plopped another box of similar size and shape on top of the other one. His eyes lit up.

  Gerdet intoned, “Just one more piece and I can…”

  A third box was set on the stack.

  “Our time has come, my congregation. Witness, my flock. Worship in His name!”

  A chant rose up, sounding more like wind through branches than a church hymn. The girl flared a brief rainbow aura. She just leveled up on the spot.

  I had to ask. “What level are you?”

  “Five,” she said briskly, then yanked her hood up and swept out the door, into the slashing rain.

  “Dude, we have got to do what she does,” I sighed, watching her go with more than a hint of jealousy.

  Jake scoffed. “Quest farming isn’t immersive.”

  I stared at him incredulously. “Nerd.”

  Jake scowled and elbowed me. I folded my arms over my slick, chilly chest, observing the spontaneous sermon while my hair dripped on the floor. Gerdet opened the boxes and gently placed the relics in a glass pedestal for display. I drummed my fingers on my bicep as I waited with all the patience I could muster.

  The despawn time took maybe five minutes. By the time it ended, I was shivering, wishing I’d had the money for a waterproof cloak. Spooksville embodied the damp cold—probably from all the undead gathered together, radiating the chill of the grave.

  We delivered our boxes. It turned out that Jake got two more quartz than I did. My luck sucked.

  I theorized, “Next time, you turn in your box first, then I’ll do it. Maybe it’s because we turned them in so close together, or maybe it’s like, the more quests that are turned in, the less the payout is.”

  “Could be. Or the pickup determines it. We'll see,” he said. We left Shade, and I got an eelskin cloak at the nearest vendor. I wasn’t getting soaked again.

  Or so I thought.

  -ARCHIVE-