Blaze waved when she found me in an upstairs meeting room at Convention Center around 11:30 am. She was wearing a a light blue blazer instead of her dark blue FBI jacket. She told me later that she'd finished early so she walked the few blocks from her new office to the convention center. Her badge and ID were tucked out of sight.

  Seeing her, I said, “Blaze, meet the two professors and five grad students who’ve been asking me questions for the last couple of hours.” Turning to them, I made it clear: “I’ll take one more question and then I have a lunch appointment. We’ll continue this later.”

  They switched topics on me. “How much have the people you know changed their interpersonal relationships since the Game started?” a female sociology professor asked.

  Several of us, including Blaze, laughed. She wasn’t the first to ask about relationships.

  “The answer is obvious. It has done nothing…and it has done a lot. We have married couples who are both doing this and, if anything, it may have strengthened their relationships. In other cases,” I said, looking at Blaze to underline the point, “people have made new relationships. I don’t know of any for certain, but there must also be cases where the Game has broken them…perhaps irredeemably, or perhaps not. Only time will tell. You’ll have to ask individuals for their stories. In my case, I have new friends I’d never met before. I’m certain some of those will become much more than just friends.” I smiled at her when I finished. Blaze nodded back, not quite laughing.

  “And with that answer, I have a new friend I’m taking to lunch. We’ll continue this in a couple of hours.” I linked my arm with hers on the way out. She held her laughter until the door closed behind us. I followed hers with my own.

  “Are you sure you want me to be your ‘thang,’ as Shadow calls it?” she asked.

  “As long as you want me to be your ‘thang,’” I answered. We laughed again.

  Before I started the interview that morning, I’d made a separate list of things we’d picked up in the dungeon. I wanted to move the higher-level items into the GUILD BANK. The rest of the game things in my INVENTORY were things I’d collected fighting spawns. At the WE BUY counter; I sold off half of each duplicated item. I planned to put the extras from the dungeon trip into the GUILD BANK.

  Selling them made me more than a few Moons richer. Blaze sold a lot of things she’d collected over the last few days and walked away with a little more cash than I did. I teased, “I hope your agents got a cut…or have they already been given their share?”

  “They got their share after the fights,” she said.

  “Good. Anyway, first stop is the bank. Drop anything you don’t want in your INVENTORY into your bank. I think we should do another dungeon run tomorrow or the next day. We need more of them to level up faster.”

  “Will, are you worried about something? You seem preoccupied. I see it now and then.”

  I nodded. People trained to see and remember minor details picked up on things easily. “Yeah. I am.”

  “What is it? How can I help?” she asked.

  “Now you sound like me. I’ll do my best to explain. It’s the MINION tag. It didn’t go away when Wild Bill died. PokerRun’s went away when Iago died. That means we have to kill whoever or whatever is controlling him. I have no freaking idea who or what it is, except that it’s evil…a big E, Evil. And it’s aimed at me because of the things Iago had. I’m the only one who knows where they are.”

  “It wants them…or wants them back?” she asked.

  “Right. Albert said I can destroy them by removing the MANA inherent in them. That’s a level 20 MANA spell. Getting to level 11 was hard enough. Twenty could take weeks… maybe months.”

  “Is the dungeon the only way to do that?”

  “Unless you can arrange another, bigger Battle of Eddington. I don’t think anyone wants another one of those.”

  The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  “We don’t. No.” While we talked, I offloaded items from my INVENTORY into the GUILD BANK. It was most of the better things we hadn’t already passed out among the five of us. I felt we should encourage others to share more rather than keeping all the goodies.

  “I’m done. How are you doing?” she said.

  “There. Just finished. Now we go around to the gear section. I have some ideas we’re going to try out. Then we can pass them on to the GRA and others.”

  “Keeping this mysterious, aren’t you?”

  “Yep. It shouldn’t take long and I’ll get you back to work.”

  “Good. I’ve got a 1 pm spawn scheduled. We need a half hour to get there. We’ve got a new guy who needs a lot of help,” Blaze said.

  We walked down the hall past arches that led to spells on the left and weapons and armor on the right. This section was simply labeled EQUIPMENT. I held her hand as we went in. It was mostly clothing and personal gear…almost anything that wasn’t spells, potions, or offensive and defensive gear.

  Signs hung above the internal aisles. I headed for the one marked FOOTWEAR. We passed by socks to sandals, shoes, then boots. I stopped at the sandals.

  “Find yourself a pair that looks like yours and will be comfortable…like the ones you have,” I told her. I picked something with fewer open areas, closer to my slippers. A few stools sat nearby to try things on. We both took off our shoes and socks to test the fit.

  “I get it,” Blaze said. “I can keep them in INVENTORY and put them on whenever I need them. I don’t have to carry them. This is a good idea.”

  “Exactly. My plan is to eventually switch out as much gear as I can. That makes getting dressed faster. As far as I can tell, these are as enchantable as anything else in the Game. They only show one of a type, but they resize to whoever claims them.”

  “Now you can get out of bed, or out of the shower, and be dressed in seconds. Same for emergencies. It won’t work for the things we put into pouches and pockets, but it will speed things up. It takes up space in our INVENTORY, but we’re finding enough bags we can dedicate one to clothes.”

  “Right, or more. And the price isn’t bad. Only 1 Moon. I could get several pairs.”

  I gave one of my big, theatrical sighs toward the ceiling. “Women and shoes. I should have known.” Blaze laughed.

  We moved down the aisle to BOOTS. There were lots of them. I looked for a pair that fit my armor’s period, sixteen to seventeen hundreds. Something with a turn-down top that might pass for a movie pirate’s boots. At 20 Moons they were tempting, but that would be a sizable chunk of the coins I’d just earned from the dungeon.

  “Boots take the longest to get on, and since I can’t use armored leggings, this may be the best option unless we get a drop that’s better.” I put my shoes back on and stood up.

  Blaze had already found a handful of shoes. She held the sandals and two other pairs: one that looked like her office shoes and another with a hard sole and laces like the FBI combat boots. They laced up.

  “You found something else you like, I see. Are you getting them?” she asked.

  “I don’t want to spend 20 Moons, but I think they’ll be worth it. Looks like you’re thinking along the same lines: work, dress, and adventuring.”

  “Ouch. My most expensive pair is 10 Moons. Fifteen Moons fifty for all three,” Blaze said.

  “Okay. We can come back for more when we have more coins. I’ll enchant them when we get home. I’m hungry,” I told her.

  “Me too,” she replied.

  We paid and put the shoes and boots into our INVENTORY. Then we went outside and over to the TAVERN. The noontime sun was warm through the front windows. The buildings I saw through them hadn’t changed, but the ‘people’ had. Most of them were still not human.

  A faint smell of frying onions and yeast hung in the air competing with the ever-present background aroma of beer. We sat across from each other at a long table and I ordered a mug of good beer for each of us and two bowls of soup with meat, plus a loaf of bread to share. We split a fairly large chunk of bread. Testing, I found that it would go into my INVENTORY. I could save some leftovers for later.

  “We should do this more often,” Blaze said as she dipped bread into her soup. “This is good food.”

  “If we can keep a steady income from the Game, we can. I think it’s designed so someone could live off the Game and STORE, if they had to. The next level of the dungeon opening up will make that easier, but it’ll require a lot of effort.”

  “I know. That’s why we have to keep doing it too. First to stay ahead of the game and second to take on whatever comes next. Will? Do you think we can do this and survive? Unless we have good Healers with REVIVE, as you put it, if we die, we’re dead and stay dead.”

  “Unless we have a Necromancer we can trust,” I said.

  “Please. I don’t even want to think about that,” she grimaced.

  “I don’t want to think about it either, but I have to. I must think about what’s behind those evil things and the MINIONS.”

  “I know. You think it’s your job. I still think you’re the best person we have to lead whatever we need to do to stop this. Whatever it is.”

  “Yeah. Thank you. Finish the last of your food. It’s time for you to get back to work and out in the woods killing things.”

  “I need to talk to those GRA people again. This group was much preferable to the ones that were outside the dungeon.”

  After finishing our lunch, I dropped Blaze off at her office, and returned to the convention center.

  I have a channel. (John.Malkin.Writer) if you want to ask questions, make suggestions, or just talk about the story, come join it. You can go directly to the channel. It is a never expires link. In case it doesn't work, you can always contact me for a current join request.

  My is now open for anyone who wants to read ahead. $5.00 US for 5 days ahead and $10.00 US for 15 days ahead. That’s each month.