Broken Lands

“I broke games,” Dav answered. “Not the ones where you can just change the game client, but the others, the ones where they have people looking for that. The big games, the ones where bots are easy to catch because they can’t quite imitate humans. It wasn’t what I wanted to do, but it paid back my debts for the move and continued to pay for my living expenses. At least, that’s what they said it was going to; after the first year, it was obvious that that was just as reliable as the continued reassurances that they’d pay for a scholarship.”

Sophia fed mana into the tent’s enchantments. It was completely possible to set it up by hand, but that was pointless when she wasn’t low on mana. The tent’s enchantment was robust; it was made to handle hundreds of uses, maybe even a thousand. The comfort enchantments inside the tent would fail first; they had to be continuously active while the tent was in use, after all. The only one that might not fail early was the privacy enchantment, because Sophia usually left it unpowered.

The tent made noise as it snapped itself together. It was possible to muffle that, but Sophia decided not to; that particular enchantment was relatively fragile and they’d already made enough noise here that they’d already attracted anything that was nearby. After a particularly loud snap, Dav looked up and blinked. He didn’t say anything, but Sophia didn’t miss the way his hand went to his hilt.

Dav’s eyes stayed on the tent and his hand stayed on his hilt as he continued. “I’d been there for about four years when they were caught. I was lucky; I was locked in my pod at the time, so I didn’t know anything until it was over. Even better,” Dav’s voice didn’t sound like he thought it was actually better. “They’d been experimenting with creating Dust; I didn’t know the details then. I do now, of course; you probably do too. It was pretty famous.”

Dav paused as if he expected Sophia to say something, but she didn’t know what to say. If this was a fiction created by his experience in the Origin, it seemed awfully detailed. “I was lucky the Knights decided I was a victim instead of one of the Dusters, even though I was one of the people effectively funding them. Instead of sending me to the courts and my death, they threw me at the Modern Slavery Recovery program.”

Dav snorted and shook his head. “They were thrilled that I had technical skills, at first, but they were the wrong technical skills. Most of the people they knew who could offer quick employment were hiring for things I couldn’t do; finding game flaws doesn’t prepare me to fix slates or even to find the flaws in anything else. I could break False World physics and interactions, not financial systems. I certainly couldn’t safeguard things I couldn’t break. It wasn’t until Cori reached out to a friend of hers who worked for FalsePods that I had a way forward: they were willing, even happy to have me show them how I broke their systems so they could fix it. It paid well, and the pay got even better when they started pulling in the developers whose games I knew how to break. It even paid well enough that I was able to pull my parents out of Alinport a couple years ago when the Dust started advancing into New Hartford. It’s not to Alinport yet, but it’s still better to not be there.”

Sophia poked her hand into the tent and started to fill the tent’s mana reservoir. It wasn’t that low, but it was low enough that it was clear she hadn’t filled it the last time she put the tent away. That was probably a mistake; she rarely needed to use mana immediately and it was always better to have the reservoir full rather than empty. It would bleed off in time anyway, just like a battery, and she didn’t have enough mana to completely fill it if it was totally empty. It held several days’ worth of mana, but if she set the tent up while she was low on mana and the tent was empty, she might not be able to power the enchantments all night even if she took a couple hours to try to regain mana. That wouldn’t be fun.

When Sophia finished filling the tent’s mana reservoir and triggered the enchantments she knew they’d want that night, Dav was still staring off into the distance without speaking. He’d clearly either forgotten to talk about the current situation or he’d gotten lost in his thoughts. At least he’d stopped staring at the tent like it was about to eat him; that was progress. “Dav? How does that lead to you being here?”

Dav looked up, like he was startled. “Oh, right. I guess I didn’t say that. I thought it was obvious. World Transit Thirty-Two is under development; I’m supposed to be testing it for Transit Game Holdings. It’s extremely different from the previous incarnations; I figured that was a combination of it being early in the development process and World Transit changing the game systems again. It’s a little odd that there was no character creation process, but using my body as a base is usually an advantage so I can’t complain. The combat is far more real than normal, but World Transit’s tried realtime before. The weird thing is that none of the normal pod commands are working; I can’t even find them. I haven’t been able to since the game started.”

Sophia frowned at that. He really did seem to think this was a game. That was frustrating; it might be hard to treat everything around them as real if he didn’t think it was. The one good thing there was that he wasn’t reckless; that would help, even if she couldn’t convince him. She’d try to convince him, but she’d only try so hard; he was an adult, after all. She felt somewhat responsible, but none of this was her fault.

The funny thing was that he still hadn’t explained how he’d ended up on a delve. She might as well ask. “So how did you end up buying a delve escort?”

Dav shrugged. “I didn’t know what else to do. The entrance was near the Adventurer’s Guild, so I figured that was probably the primary point of interest for this World. It seemed like a sidequest, but the receptionist wouldn’t let me sign up for anything other than a guided delve; she said my Tier was too low for anything else. I guess you’re supposed to be higher Tier when you get there; it seemed like I’d activated either some sort of failover for glitches or it was the beginning, just without the explanation. If it wasn’t really World Transit I was working for, if whoever I was working for hacked an incomplete game and wanted me to catch things they could use to make some quick money … well, that makes sense. You’re a real tester, aren’t you?”

Sophia squinted at Dav. A World Transit game, arrived at the Guild … oh, of course. He wasn’t from Earth, even though some of the terms he used sounded awfully Earth-like. She didn’t quite understand how he spoke English, but she wasn’t certain how the Wanderer spoke English either. Bridge would make a lot more sense, but Dav seemed to avoid even the common Bridge loan-words. “You came through the portal, then?”

Dav nodded. He didn’t seem surprised that she’d ignored his question. “Yeah, waking up and exiting the pod then walking through a tear in space was the game intro. It was pretty confusing, really; it felt like I actually woke up from the pod. They had to remind me that they’d told me that was the intro. I have to remember to compliment-”

“That’s because you did wake up.” Sophia was tracking what was going on now, and whether or not Dav’s story was true this was the most obvious way to make the point that this was all real. “I suspect you weren’t working for the company you thought you were, but more than that you aren’t working on breaking a game. You’re exploring a new world. Worse, I think you’re not exploring the world you thought you were, either; we’re not on Earth anymore.”

“Earth?” Dav sounded confused. “Is that the name of the planet we’re on?”

Sophia shook her head. “No, it’s the name of the planet we were on before the bandits tried to break the dungeon. I don’t know what planet we’re on now.”

It would explain a lot of the oddities about him. She’d prefer to believe that he was from somewhere the Voice hadn’t gotten to yet but that didn’t explain the portal use or the language. It seemed highly unlikely, but some sort of transit from a parallel universe seemed like a simple explanation, even if it just pushed everything back a little. She’d just have to wait and see.

She decided not to mention that she still wasn’t entirely certain that Dav wasn’t from Earth with very messed up memories. It was better to work with what he thought was true and tell him he’d misinterpreted it. If what he said was true, though, she might be better off treating him as someone with similar training and experience to hers; he’d learned it for games, probably, while she’d learned it to delve. Either way, it was their professions and he clearly took his as seriously as she took hers.

“Why don’t we have dinner?” Sophia invited Dav. “I’m carrying food if you aren’t. Oh, and do you have a blanket of your own?”

Dav did, as it turned out, have both food and a blanket in his pack. He also turned out to be fun to talk to; they traded stories about delves and games. Sophia had to admit that Dav’s job sounded like it was often a lot of fun, but at the same time it sounded horribly annoying in other ways; he wasn’t playing the games, he was breaking them, so he rarely got to see them as they were intended. More than that, he had to look for everything which wasn’t as simple as it sounded.

“That’s how I found the beetles,” Dav said between bites of his Homestyle Mac’n’Cheese with Grand Lobster (Tier Two). “They were clearly intended to be found, but only if you look. I doubt they’d even attack if you didn’t; they were probably a warning for the grasshoppers but only if you pay attention. That’s not the important thing, though; the important thing is the monster-maker. It’s pretty clear that you aren’t supposed to take it out of the cave; it’s just too big. I don’t yet know if it’s a reward for people who are thorough or something you’re not supposed to redeem at all, but taking it apart and recovering it is exactly the sort of thing I was trained to do. In an economy that values scrap, there’s a good chance it’s ridiculously valuable if we can get it out. It could be a bad bet, but there’s so much in there that it’s worth trying to see if it’s already been closed off. This place seems so real so far that it might well be treated properly.”

Sophia shook her head. She kept having to remind him that this wasn’t a game. “That’s because it is real. I figure the odds are about even that it’ll be worth a lot and worth nothing; we just don’t know enough to pick odds.”

“Right. I knew that.” Dav’s spoon scraped the bottom of the plastic container as he tried to get the remainder of the sauce. He seemed to like it even more than Sophia did, and she only carried food she liked. It was expensive, but there was no reason to carry the nasty reconstituted food when you could afford the stuff that cooked itself while you waited. On longer delves, she often carried food that she actually cooked herself, but this was supposed to be a simple day trip; she hadn’t expected to eat in the dungeon at all.