"Come on, it's just a glitch."

  "A glitch? With this sensory realism? Trust me, not even thoughts can be bugged here."

  Nico moved with difficulty. His head hurt and he had a rock stuck in his back.

  He heard clapping.

  "Ah. See, I was right," said a shrill, know-it-all girl's voice. Someone bent over him, a shadow moved against the light.

  "Hey, you? Are you okay?"

  Nico opened his eyes. Two eyes so clear and lively were staring at him that for a moment Nico didn't know whether to laugh or run away. The fog cleared and he focused on a smiling girl with dark skin. She was leaning over him, her hair a cascade of chocolate-colored curls, ready to fall into his face.

  "Here it is!" exclaimed the girl, adjusting a huge bag on her shoulder. Nico noticed the corner of a hardcover book sticking out. The girl smiled cheerfully.

  Nico sat up. They were in a clearing. The grass was damp and, here and there, illuminated by the sun filtering through the foliage.

  "You must have had quite a flight," said a tall, lanky boy with thick, curly hair of a strange blond color, like burnt straw. His nose and cheeks were covered with freckles. The light hit his face and the freckles on his nose stood out, and it seemed to Nico that new ones were appearing every minute. He looked like someone who had woken up late and got dressed at random. She, on the other hand, gave a different impression, more tidy, even though her curls exploded around her face, frizzy and untameable.

  "So? What do we do now?" asked the boy, looking first at the girl and then at Nico.

  "We introduce ourselves, obviously. This is an innovative gaming experience, 100% immersion." She smiled, turning to Nico: "Have a nice day, sir."

  "Sir?!" the boy exclaimed. He turned to Nico with a theatrical grimace, as if he were acting in a swashbuckling movie, then became serious again. "What is this, the Middle Ages? The only thing missing is you calling him ‘sir’."

  The girl raised an eyebrow. "It's just a formality. It's called thematic consistency."

  Nico intervened before the argument escalated. "Excuse me... you're players too, right?"

  The two turned to him. For a moment, Nico felt ridiculous. Then the girl's face lit up while the boy stared at him with a half-smile, tilting his head slightly.

  "See," said the girl, pointing at Nico, "I told you. And you wanted to leave him there."

  The boy held out his hand to Nico, who grabbed it to help him up.

  "I'm Leo, and this is..."

  "Serafina Pekkala," she interrupted him.

  "So you're a witch?" Nico said, smiling.

  "That's right! So you know Pullman's saga? I love it."

  "All she needs is a broomstick," Leo teased her, laughing.

  Kiah pointed a finger at him. "Well, my dear Long John Silver, if it weren't for this witch without a broomstick, you'd still be tied to that pole washing dishes for at least two months and back in jail at night."

  "What?" Nico asked curiously.

  "Ah, never mind," Leo muttered, somewhere between amused and embarrassed.

  Nico laughed. "Okay. I'm Nico, aka Grampasso. Um, I know you don't want to break character, but who are you?"

  She hesitated for a moment, staring at him thoughtfully. "Kiah," she said, smiling.

  "How did you fall from the sky?" Leo asked, looking up.

  Nico raised his head. One of the branches of a large tree had broken. The fallen piece was not far away. He stretched his aching back and realized he had fainted on a rock.

  "You could use a nice healing potion," said Leo.

  "Yeah." The pain in his head exploded in a sharp twinge. It was just a game, he told himself. Yet the pain in his head was so real. "Why do you have it?" he added seriously, holding his right temple.

  "No, I don't even have a dagger like in decent games."

  "This game is more than decent," Kiah scolded him nervously. "You have to experience realism first and foremost. Do you understand what it means to feel the wind on your face? This helmet," she said, pointing to her head of dark curls, "most likely stimulates the primary somatosensory cortex in the parietal lobe."

  This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

  Leo grimaced, Nico smiled.

  She snorted: "Oh, enough. You're exhausting," she said, turning her back on Leo and focusing her attention on Nico. "So? What's your mission? Where are you headed?"

  Between one wrong turn and another, between a thousand apologies and uncertainties, they ended up telling each other about the first moments they entered the game. Nico told him about Roheryn, the farm, Broow, Cass, and Flog, and how Dylph had saved his life by pushing him out of the Nothing. The two boys were very impressed by the story and asked him questions, which Nico often answered in monosyllables.

  Nico's stomach growled, and he felt himself blushing. "Sorry, I haven't eaten anything in a whole day. "

  They sat down by a stream to drink. Nico didn't think he could feel such satisfaction drinking from a "digital" stream.

  "Do you realize how much programming it takes to achieve this result?" Kiah asked, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

  "What do you mean?" Leo asked, splashing water on his face.

  "The water, the wind, the taste of food..." said Kiah, echoing Nico's thoughts.

  Leo shrugged. "I'll wait until I've tasted a nice cheeseburger before I decide."

  Not far away, in a sparse grove, they found some strawberry bushes. They ate them straight from the plant. Nico couldn't remember ever eating such tasty strawberries.

  Then it was Leo's turn. He stood up as if to narrate a movie trailer.

  "I started out on what looked like a merchant ship," Leo said mockingly. "Actually, I chose the class... thief." He made quotation marks with his fingers when he said thief, and Nico noticed the smile of someone who already knows how to handle situations.

  "I went down to the port, talked to a few NPCs—standard stuff," Leo continued, shrugging his shoulders. "One, a shady character in an alley, gave me my ‘first mission’: to retrieve" he made quotation marks with his fingers "some goods from a room on the first floor of the ‘The Lame Goose’. I go there, take the goods and... I also find this summons letter." He paused, as if the scene needed to be more dramatic. "Then something went wrong: I was reported and captured. End of the heroic chapter."

  Kiah intervened, her voice a mixture of amusement and smug wisdom, and Nico sensed Leo's sardonic gaze even before the girl opened her mouth.

  "I, on the other hand, started at a school of magic," she declared as if stating an indisputable fact.

  Leo lay down on the grass, her hands clasped behind her head, listening while nibbling on a leaf.

  "Lots of reading, books upon books. I even borrowed some of them," said the girl, patting the bag next to her. She sat up a little, as if to make her testimony more solemn. "That's where I got the letter for Taynor."

  Nico listened, mentally noting the difference in tone: Kiah's didactic confidence, Leo's irony. When Kiah resumed, his voice became sharper.

  "And it was in the town square that I saw Leo for the first time," he said with a smirk that seemed to Nico to be pure satisfaction. "He was tied to a pole, like a poor little dog being punished."

  The description sounded both ironic and haughty to Nico. "I freed him with a few magic tricks, nothing special, and from there we traveled a bit together."

  "The way you talk, it sounds like you saved me from the jaws of a dragon."

  "But you have to admit that without me you wouldn't have been able to..."

  "Look, I'm a thief. I could have freed myself at any time."

  "Do you have lock picks?" she insisted. Leo opened his mouth to reply, then closed it again, narrowing his eyes.

  "You don't, do you? Well, if you'd done the tutorial, someone would have explained how to use them to pick a lock."

  Kiah was right, Nico thought. He reflected that neither he nor Leo, unlike Kiah, had received the letter easily. Maybe he should have stayed in that forest; maybe there was something he was supposed to do there, some kind of initial test. Maybe Leo, instead of accepting the mission from that shady character at the port, should have stayed on board. After all, he and Leo had no equipment and had learned no skills.

  He felt a twinge of regret, and the thought made his stomach clench.

  "How do you have abilities?" Nico asked abruptly, interrupting Kiah and Leo's bickering.

  As if the game itself had heard his request, a semi-transparent window appeared in front of him, floating in the air at the top right of his field of vision. His heart leapt into his throat. He still wasn't used to that feeling: the world responding to his thoughts. The letters moved like a cascade of light, arranged with almost maniacal precision.

  Kiah tilted his head toward Nico, his gaze questioning. "It all works through skills. You develop them as you study, fight, or simply try new things. I started at the school of magic, so my first skills were concentrated there."

  The window displayed an endless list scrolling downwards. The entries followed one another in dense alphabetical order:

  ...

  ? Fencing

  ? Runic writing

  ? Magical sensitivity

  ? Survival

  ? Subterfuge

  ? Physical structure

  ? Elemental attunement

  ? Arcane study

  …

  Nico followed the hypnotic flow of the words, as if each one contained a tiny fragment of light. It was impossible to tell where the list ended.

  Kiah smiled slightly, with a flash of irony in her eyes. "There are practically endless possibilities. They activate when you use them or when you learn something new. Of course..." she continued, raising her eyebrows like a perfect "know-it-all," "you also have to spend some time figuring out how. Maybe do the tutorial missions, for example."

  Her gaze shifted from Nico to Leo, with a half-smile. "Perhaps you two, in your rush to explore, skipped that part."

  Nico looked down, feeling that subtle pang of regret return.

  "Come on, Nico, don't make that face," Kiah continued, looking at him with an affectionate smile.

  "You worry too much," said Leo, picking a strawberry from a bush and popping it into his mouth. "I don't know about you, but I always skip the tutorials when I can. If I don't die at least once, I'm not having fun."

  Nico smiled unconvincingly.

  Kiah stood up, brushing the grass off her tunic. The sun filtered through the branches and illuminated her curls with warm, almost amber glints.

  "Okay, guys, I don't know about you, but I have things to do outside of here. First, though, I want to catch up with Taynor."