Parental Controls

"I thought this game ran primarily off a hyper-realistic physics engine," Reeve said, not sure whether she expected Millie to hear or Dawn to understand.

"From what I know of how this world is constructed," Dawn said, "you are right. The basic physical interaction of things, and of us, is governed by physical principles. But…in my exploration, I learned that the constructs that oversee the world—"

"AIs."

"—yes, AIs, also assign descriptions to many, if not all, objects, because without discriminating between object types, certain elements of the world would be unpredictable in their execution."

"Magic?"

"Yes, magic foremost. Which affords an opportunity for the curious melióδin, starting with that staff and building from there."

Having questioned Dawn at her peril less than an hour earlier, Reeve decided to hold her questions for the time being, letting Dawn volunteer what she chose.

"Speaking of objects," Millie said from where she now stood on the other side of the table that held the candles, "why were you two talking stew during your little tiff?"

"Yeah," Reeve said. "Why was all I sensed from you stew?"

Dawn shrugged nearly imperceptibly as she worked with the object on the table. "I may not have seen you or your signature weapon in many years, Reeve, but well I remember it, its enchantment from Helia, and that it nearly saw her to freedom when you two met by the Deiluyne. Should I ever face a similar weapon, I thought it best that my intentions remain my own."

"So you got really good at concentrating on stew?" Reeve said.

Dawn shook her head. "I investigated how such an enchantment might work, and specifically how it would tap into the thoughts of its target, and warded myself against such intrusion."

As Dawn kept tinkering, Reeve stared at the table without seeing any of the items upon it, her mind racing. After some amount of time she couldn't gauge, she turned and leaned on the table that held the candles. Millie was now two tables away, still cataloging everything she could shake—or at least point—her stick at.

"Can we be one hundred percent meta for a second?"

"Sure." Millie didn't even look toward Reeve.

"You hear that?"

"A minute ago? Yeah. It sounds like sampling a process while it's running."

"Yeah, that's what I was thinking. And if she could store some sort of static image or thought to which the sampling algorithm gets pointed, rather than it actually reading live from her thought process, then—"

"Stew," Millie said, pointing her staff at a jar containing what looked to Reeve like internal organs. After considering whatever sigil she was seeing, Millie said, "Eww," and moved farther along the table.

"Reeve?" Dawn said.

"Uh-huh?"

"Are you open to what I assure you is my well-intentioned aid?"

"Yeah. You know I trust you, right?"

"I do."

"Good."

"Your bow."

In an effort to embody the trust she'd just professed, Reeve immediately unshouldered her bow and, gripping it by the lower limb, offered Dawn the leather-wrapped grip.

"Unstring it," Dawn said without looking up from her work. "Please."

Reeve grasped the upper limb with her other hand, dropped the lower limb to brace against her right boot, and flexed the bow with enough of her body weight that she could slip the bowstring up from the string nock. She carefully relaxed her pressure until the bow was fully elongated, its beautiful curve seeming to invert as it shifted shape. Reeve again offered the bow to Dawn.

"The string," Dawn said. "Bows are very personal things, as are most weapons, but I've never met an archer as attached to their bowstring."

Reeve shrugged and offered the string.

Dawn nodded, took one end of the string with one hand, ran her free hand along its length, and grasped the other. Pulling the bowstring taught between outstretched arms, she looked along its length and then dropped her arms to her sides, the string relaxing to nearly the floor. "A moment," she said to Reeve before walking away.

At the end of the aisle formed by the tables to either side, Dawn turned to her left and then immediately stopped in front of a tall, open-faced cabinet. She dropped one end of the bowstring and held the other at eye level, looking within the cabinet as she did. After a moment, she reached into the cabinet, drew forth another string, and then made her way back to Reeve.

When Dawn stopped in front of her and offered the bowstring from the cabinet, Reeve's inclination to make a snarky question made it so far as an open mouth before she heard in her head Millie's earlier question—'What are you doing?'—and closed her mouth. She took the bowstring with a nod, hooked the string over the lower tip, re-flexed the bow, and squeezed the string's other end over the upper tip and down into place in the nock. Still uncertain as to the point of replacing a perfectly good bowstring, and still having to suppress the inclination to make a humorous quip, she looked at Dawn and raised her eyebrows.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

"Draw your bow," Dawn said.

"OK," Reeve said slowly. She swung her left hand over her head and grasped the tail of an arrow in her quiver.

Dawn shook her head.

"Dry fire?" Reeve said.

"Just draw."

Reeve shrugged and left the arrow in the quiver. Since she personally never appreciated when a weapon was pointed at her, whether it was loaded or not, out of consideration she turned away from Dawn before raising the bow and, looking toward the passageway across the room, drew back on the string. As the tension on the string increased, Reeve gasped.

"What?" Millie said from several tables away, where she'd stopped her cataloging of the room to watch what Reeve was doing.

Reeve relaxed the string slightly and then began to draw again. As she did, the same two things that had caused her surprised gasp again began competing for her attention. Between her and the passage, a bright green crosshair appeared on the farthest table and, as she drew the string tighter, raced away off the table, across the floor, and through the passage into the far room. Simultaneously, as the tension approached the minimum useful for a ranged shot, she began feeling something hard pressing between the index and middle fingers of her left hand where they held the bowstring, and, in her peripheral vision, a long, thin shaft began growing into existence.

"What the flip!" Millie said.

Reeve relaxed the string slightly, the phantasmal arrow fading out of existence as she did, and smiled at Millie.

"Do it again!" Millie said.

Reeve again sighted on the passage and drew the string. The crosshair raced across the floor and down the passage, finally settling on a quivering spot on the far wall of the next room. An arrow fully manifested and sat perched on the arrow rest, ready for flight.

"Can I?" Reeve said, feeling as though she'd just asked if she could play toss with a friend in the living room of someone else's house.

"By all means," Dawn said.

Reeve loosed the arrow, which flashed through the room, down the passage, across the far room, and embedded itself in the wall at the precise spot where Reeve had last seen the crosshair.

A yowl of feline surprise echoed through the adjoining rooms.

"Ohmagod," Millie said.

"Once you are fully Attuned, there are additional mental means by which you can specify the nature of the arrow," Dawn said, "but I will teach you those at a later time. All the better, as most of the arrow types should only be tested out of doors."

Millie was rounding the corner of the table nearest Reeve. She quickly drew up and pointed her staff at the bow. Her eyes darted over a sigil, unseen by Reeve, for a few seconds, and then rose to meet Reeve's. "That is a flipping Legendary weapon. I'm not just being overly excited, I mean Legendary, with a capital L."

Reeve hurriedly pulled up her UI and examined her Inventory.

1 Legendary Ebony Recurve Bow

Even before she could dismiss her UI, Reeve's eyes sought Dawn. "Almost no Legendary weapons have been found in this game…this world before. And now I have one?"

"Do you now approve of your improved equipment selection?" Dawn said.

Reeve couldn't help but smile. "Number one, I love you. Number two, point taken. Number three, but also possibly actually my real number one, I want to shoot things."

Dawn couldn't help but return Reeve's smile. "I am glad, Reeve. But before you run off to shoot things," she tilted her head back toward the table where she'd been working, "your naginata."

Reeve looked at the tabletop, but her naginata was not there. Where Dawn had been working, there were two small, silver chains less than a foot long that lay in straight lines next to each other. The links were not simple circles or ovals; each instead appeared more like a sigil.

"Gyl, would you?" Dawn said, and Reeve looked up to find that Millie was already retrieving Reeve's naginata from a different table, where it lay on a thin slab of what looked like onyx. As Millie approached them with the weapon, it appeared unchanged to Reeve.

Dawn received the weapon from Millie, laid it on the table before them, and then tapped the table edge in front of Reeve. "Your foot."

"My foot?"

"Either one will do. Though I would recommend your dominant leg, as it tends to be the one positioned to the rear during combat."

Reeve turned, laid her bow on the table behind her, and then turned back to Dawn. "I want you to know that I'm intentionally resisting a lot of 'questioning' I'd like to be doing right now."

"Noted."

Reeve raised her left foot and placed the arch of her boot on the edge of the tabletop.

Dawn nodded and looked at Reeve. "You remember my dagger earlier?"

A corner of Reeve's lip curled, and she raised her hand to show Dawn her skinned knuckles.

"Indeed you do," Dawn said. "Pick up your weapon."

Reeve leaned forward, reached around her upraised knee, and grasped the naginata. It would not budge. She tried to get a better grip, but her fingers couldn't wedge themself fully under the handle where it lay flush with the tabletop. She tried pushing the shaft away from her. It did not move.

Dawn nodded and tapped Reeve's knee with one finger. Reeve removed her hand from her naginata and stood more erect, foot still on the table's edge. With both hands, Dawn gripped the bottom cuff of Reeve's cream-colored leather legging and slid it up her calf. She then picked up one of the silver chains and looped it around Reeve's calf just above the top of her boot.

"Please," Dawn said, and Reeve held the chain where Dawn indicated. Dawn performed a short cast of only a few strokes and then used pointer and thumb to squeeze together the two ends of the chain where they lay between Reeve's fingers. After a few seconds, she released the grip and nodded to Reeve, who did the same. The chain, now a continuous loop, slid down Reeve's leg into her boot to rest at her ankle.

"Now, your blade," Dawn said.

Reeve dropped her foot to the ground and picked up the naginata without difficulty. She bounced the shaft in her hand, its weight and feel that to which she was accustomed. "What gives?"

"Any who tries to wield your blade and who does not wear that anklet or one like it will find the weapon as immovable as you found my dagger and, temporarily, your own blade. I will do the same for your bow."

Millie's foot planted itself at the edge of the table between Reeve and Dawn, and the caster pulled her own leather legging up to reveal an identical silver chain around her ankle. "It's like all our weapons are Mjollnir now!" Millie was still grinning as broadly as she had been nearly the entire time they'd been in Dawn's secret room.

"I don't even know where to start," Reeve said, looking between Millie and Dawn. "But, unfortunately, we need to decide ASAP, because when I was in my UI to check out the bow's weapon description, I saw that my mom finally gave up on the Wampus Cat and logged out. We may not have much time til she pulls us, and if time might not pause again, I don't want to miss more years while we're having dinner IRL."

"I will need only a few more minutes, and we can depart," Dawn said. "The problem, of course, is choosing our destination. I have been giving it much thought. Before my hasty return to find Dusk abducted, my time in Wyste had been inconclusive, you see, but I did have one loose thread with which we could begin."

Reeve and Millie exchanged looks, and then Reeve shrugged. "I don't think we have any better leads."

Dawn nodded. "Very well. Then tell me, Reeve, did you learn any language from your orc parent? It may prove useful where we're going."