Parental Controls

Reeve floated in the void and considered how it was kind of astonishing that it had taken this long for one of her father's falls also to take her out.

Two prompts and a slowly crawling progress bar hung before her.

Lobby

Recall Party

She looked to her left. Her father's halfling avatar floated next to her. He was smiling at her apologetically.

"Hi, Evie."

Thoughts—a lot of thoughts—rushed through Reeve's mind like an unsafe crush of Black Friday shoppers forcing their way through a store's doors. One main thread focused on her dad. She hadn't seen him since just before the attack on Deilmarkt. How long ago was that now? Between the twins' casts that had changed her position in both time and space more than once since she'd logged in this session, she wasn't positive. She knew it was a few days at most, but it was such a blur. At least she knew he was safe now. Well, safe aside from the fact that he'd just died and killed her simultaneously. Apparently, by falling from a dragon. Or being dropped. Twice.

Another thought-thread evaluated what she knew of his party. Was it a party? Who was with him? Anyone? A dragon. Was it friend or foe? Where was Leaf? And Nyx and Bunce? Where had he been? And how had he found them here at what surely must be close to the northern edge of the habitable world?

Around those two threads were jostling loose thoughts. How she'd get back from her most recently updated respawn location. Whether her mom was about to pull them out, and, if not, where the unpredictable Wanda Williams would next appear. Whether her mom might already have logged back in and be doing who knew what, who knew where. If her mom pulled them soon, whether the game would keep running while Reeve was logged out? All signs pointed to yes. Could Reeve risk a forced shutdown of her VR system without loss or irreparable damage to the twins' world? To the twins? Could she do anything to help the twins anyway? Was she the weakest link in the party now that the twins and Leaf had advanced so much over the last eight years of game time? Reeve's attention coalesced on her dad's goofy grin, and she thought, I'm not the weakest link here, am I?

"Hi, Dad," Reeve said.

Walter started to speak, but Reeve placed a calloused hand over his mouth.

"Listen, Dad, we don't have much time." She tilted her head toward the progress bar, which was maybe a fifth full. "I need to ask some quick questions before I respawn at last night's camp and you respawn wherever you'll respawn."

"On Moody."

"Moody?" Reeve stared at her father. "The dragon is named Moody?"

Walter nodded.

"Put a pin in that," Reeve said.

"We could come pick you up."

"The dragon is with you? An ally?"

"In a fashion."

"And you could have it come pick me up?"

Walter nodded.

"Will it then drop me to my death?"

Walter's face fell. "I think you will be fine. He and I are still working out some things, but that's just between him and me."

Reeve glanced at the progress bar.

"OK, fly sout—"

Reeve took a deep mental breath as her exchange with her father was interrupted by the momentary loss of physical control over her avatar and the blurred vision that accompanied the transition back to gameplay.

The biting cold that greeted her provided a slight distraction from the death debuff. She was standing in light snow up to her calves. Feeling around with the toe of her boot, she found a small stone and knew the respawn she'd set the night before had worked. Doing a slow three-sixty, she saw nothing but shades of white. The light of the sun, which brightened a region of clouds high above, was the only reference by which she could orient herself. Even Kuura's substantial tracks had been swept clean by the wind.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

Would her dad and, she frowned, Moody be able to find her? And if they eventually did, how long might it take? That morning, she, Millie, Dawn, and Eero had travelled for a while on bear back. She allowed herself a small smile at the unintentional wordplay.

"OK," she said to herself, "could have a bit of a wait. Or a lot of a wait til someone other than my dad comes to find me. Might as well make use of the time."

Reeve opened her UI and spent several minutes reviewing her Inventory, much of which she hadn't looked over since their last session, more than eight years ago in game time. Satisfied that she had a pretty good sense of key staples as well as more unique items that might imbue conjured arrows with interesting properties, she pushed away the UI, swung her naginata onto her back, and unshouldered her bow. She assessed the vicinity of the campsite.

"Literally nothing to target," she said. She shrugged. "I can still practice with arrow types."

Thinking through a mental menu of arrow features she'd been developing, she drew the bow and aimed north.

"What?" She said, standing still, bow drawn. She slowly let the tension out of the bowstring and squinted into the sparse, blowing flakes.

A dark speck barely visible against the gray backdrop of clouds floated above the northern horizon, or where she thought the horizon might be, due to the difficulty of differentiating snowy ground from snowy air and snowy sky.

"No, that's real," she said. She shook her head. "Wow, OK. Fast." She shouldered the bow and drew her naginata. She looked at the weapon as she held it across her body and considered Eero's recommendation against pricking one's terrifyingly large mount. She also remembered the strange pull she'd felt when the dragon had passed over her at the rim of the crater…and when something similar had happened when they saw the dragons on their way to ford the River Deiluyne. She swung the weapon into her Inventory. She wasn't sure she'd ever placed her naginata in her Inventory before, and it felt unnatural to do so.

In the few seconds it had taken her to consider and then stow her naginata, the speck had grown enough that she could make out wings and body, and it took only a little more than another minute before the giant beast flew low over her, again releasing a shrill roar as it passed. Reeve was careful to watch for any plummeting parents, but none appeared from the dragon's back or claws.

As soon as it passed, the dragon began to bank to its right, and seconds later, it came in low from the west and pulled up just short of her, wings spreading fully to kill its momentum before it dropped a few yards to land on its rear legs. As it shifted its weight forward to rest on all fours, Reeve found herself looking up at the terrifying beast and hoping—actually quite a lot—that it was not alone and that she was not about to reenact her father's ill-fated sequence of respawns right next to a hungry dragon.

"Helllloooooooo!" Walter's beaming face appeared from behind the dragon's neck as it settled on all fours and tucked its wings. "We had better communication on how I wanted to reach the ground this time! I guess you can teach an old dog new tricks!" His grin widened for a second, but then faltered. "I'm talking about me, not you, Moody." He patted the beast's neck. "And, to be fair, the threat of falling to my death is a pretty strong motivator to learn, I guess."

He was clearly beside himself with the improved communication, and Reeve couldn't blame him. Not only had he avoided another painful death, but he probably still had two stacked death debuffs and had just managed to avoid a third.

"You got here fast," Reeve called, not yet moving from where she stood.

Walter shrugged his shoulders, and his smile returned. "Dragon."

Father and daughter looked at each other and nodded. Reeve then spent almost a minute looking over Moody. There was a lot to look at.

"So," Walter said, "come on up!"

"Listen," Reeve said, "I hope no one," she looked between Walter and the craggy face of the dragon high above her, "finds this question offensive or anything, but is this," she jutted her chin toward Moody, "the dragon that ate you over and over again in the nest on our way to the ford?"

Walter managed a chuckle while also looking slightly nauseated. "No."

"For sure?"

"For sure."

"I'm glad to hear that."

"It was Toothy that kept eating me."

"Toothy."

"Moody's sister."

"Moody's sister." A chill ran up Reeve's spine, and she couldn't avoid a reflexive shiver of her shoulders as though to dislodge an unwanted creature crawling up her back. She scanned the horizon and then the sky. "Where is Toothy?"

Walter frowned.

Already feeling a similar vibe herself, Reeve frowned back.

They stared at each other for almost half a minute before Reeve realized that her father was navigating his UI. She rolled her eyes and stopped frowning.

"Somewhere north of where we found you next to that cliff," Walter said.

"Is where Toothy is?"

"And her parents."

Reeve pursed her lips and looked down at the snow that rose up her legs. Is there, she asked herself, any chance this will not end poorly? She looked back up at her father, who seemed to have dispensed with his UI without tumbling from the dragon's back. She cleared her throat. "You are traveling with a four-dragon posse?"

"We followed Tom's crows to see who he'd been talking to. Well, not Tom, the person pretending to be Tom. Leaf and the other three continued on when I stopped to see if you were who I thought you were. You were! And, technically, they're part of a Colony, not posse."

Another half-minute passed as daughter and father looked at each other.

"I guess I might as well come up there," Reeve said, "because I don't want to stand here for as long as it will take me to ask all the questions I have after what you just said."

Walter nodded and pointed—as far as Reeve could tell—to Moody's butt. "Climb aboard!"