Today's Earth date: February 16, 1992

This part of the kingdom has it rough, it turns out. We were barely out of the desert when we picked up three more quests.

Three.

There's a ranch not far from here that doesn't have water anymore. The small stream that used to run through their land went dry, and they asked us to go upstream to see if that could be fixed.

There's an archaeologist who wants us to head into the mountains on the far side of the desert to look for his partner. He left for a brief excursion and is weeks late getting back.

And there's a family-owned hot spring closer to Bata. Their twin daughters have gone missing–possibly kidnapped–and the sketch that came with the job request… They're pretty. Really pretty.

We're doing that quest first.

-The Journal of Laszlo the Paladin

An hour or so into the wagon ride the next morning, the party left Sammy and Vanilli behind while they followed Kenny down a nearly invisible footpath. Before he ventured into the wilderness, Wayne looked over his shoulder and saw Vanilli practicing with his lasso. Wayne smiled to himself.

Along the way, Kenny coached the party through where to step and where not to step to avoid hidden bunches of coral. Even with her coaching, the chain mail stockings saved everyone in the party at least once from a painful cut. Feeling his own chain mail snag on coral, Wayne remembered the story the people of Mudsville told them about the paladin. He ran into the jungle in just his armor to chase down the rest of the rats.

How high was his vitality for that to not hurt like hell?

Eventually, Kenny stopped the party in front of a tall tower of bone-white coral, as big as any of the trees in the Cuts. A ramshackle wooden wall formed a barricade at the base and was covered in warning graffiti and miscellaneous bones. Every word and symbol screamed that the Dead Zone was on the other side of the line.

The Deadzone was too large to be completely surrounded by a fence, however, so the stack of lumber in front of the party now was a rough representation of where the border was.

"Biggest mistake people make is walkin' in by accident," Kenny said. "Real easy to do that out here, though."

Wayne could see how that would be the case. He wouldn't have known the border was here if they hadn't walked right up to one of the three corners. Ten yards to either side and he could picture himself easily walking in without ever seeing any warnings.

The party tied off to one another, assuming a marching order that put Kenny and Wayne at the front and Hector at the back. The slack between each person was roughly six feet, and it was already apparent that managing a daisy-chain of tied-together adventurers was going to be a pain in the ass. There were no straight lines in the cuts, so the ropes were endlessly snagging and catching, but Kenny insisted the frustration was worth the safety it provided.

On his HUD, Wayne couldn't see anything different about the region beyond the barrier. Given the stories, he wasn't sure if that was comforting or troubling.

Following Kenny in, Wayne found the abruptness of the Dead Zone disorienting. A moment ago, when he had just begun to lift a foot to take a step, the rainforest roared with all sorts of natural noise–bugs, birds, frogs, branches swaying, water dipping. As he brought that foot down just a few inches ahead of where it began, all of that sound stopped.

Like the entire jungle was suddenly set to mute.

Wayne could hear the sounds he and his party made, like their steps and their breathing, but the surrounding world was the most quiet place he had ever been.

And then his vision flickered.

"What the fuck?" Hector said, having experienced the same flicker.

The rest of the party looked around, frozen by the impossibility of it all.

Before their eyes, pieces of the jungle changed places. To Wayne, it looked like the entire Dead Zone was made of asset tiles, a 3D puzzle where every cube of space could be moved and repositioned. It reminded him of a sprite sheet from an old RPG. The one tree on screen was actually twelve individual tiles arranged in the appropriate order.

It was like that here, except the order got shuffled.

Fortunately, every tile didn't move. It was as if every tenth piece of the rainforest was affected, creating scenes where a perfectly normal tree trunk had a cube missing from its side, and in its place was the top half of a fern plant. Other trees looked like they were simply assembled incorrectly, leaving a zig-zag of interior surfaces facing outward to create structural physics that shouldn't work.

The experience reminded Wayne of playing Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals. Toward the end of the game, a required dungeon rendered as a mess of scrambled assets, making navigating it mostly a challenge of trial and error. As a kid, Wayne thought it was some strange effect to make the dungeon more challenging. When he got older, he learned that the developers ran into space limitations prior to launch and deleted a sprite sheet to make the game fit on a cartridge, apparently not realizing that those assets were actually in use.

And it shipped that way.

The environment flickered again. More pieces scrambled.

"Don't touch any of the weird parts," Kenny cautioned. "Those are the puddles I was tellin' you about. Saw a fella lose his arm climbin' a tree with a puddle in it. Reached forward and poof, whole damn thing was just gone."

Wayne noticed that his map and his History skill seemed to be tracking just fine. He could clearly see the route they had taken so far and hoped that meant he could follow it back should he need to. He had done something similar to outsmart a druid's confusion magic back in the Underway Mountains.

The first oddity they found was the hull of an Earth yacht with the name Witchcraft painted on the side. Little else of the boat remained from what Wayne could see, and this piece looked like it would disappear beneath the growth in a matter of days.

Which was dramatic. Wayne knew that, but this part of the Cuts, more than anywhere else, felt like a living creature actively digesting the world around him.

Beyond the Witchcraft, the Dead Zone began to truly embody its name. Bones of all kinds, a few obviously human but many obviously not, were scattered across the forest floor or hung from trees, as if the bones were dumped out of an airplane. The larger of the bones could be monsters, but many of them had fishlike characteristics to them.

Wayne desperately wanted to use Resource Values on everything he saw, but Kenny had already repeated the mantra "don't touch anything" seven times already.

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Then a massive commercial vessel blocked the path. Wayne didn't know enough about boats to say what it was, but the hull was heavy riveted metal and several stories tall.

"We call this one 'Big Boy,'" Kenny said, looking up at the husk of a ship. "It's one of the best landmarks in the Dead Zone. No matter how much of it might move, still plenty left to get your bearings with."

They walked parallel to Big Boy for some time until Kenny stopped again. She pointed at a square a few dozen feet up on the side of the ship. An entire cube glitched, blinking and transforming the way the prisoner's limbs had. It was as if graphics struggled to render and cycled through a dozen different styles and interpretations in the process.

"Those are the worst puddles," Kenny said, pointing up at the anomaly. "Knew a guy named Greg once upon a time. Tried showin' off by touchin' one of those. Ate him whole."

"Ate?" Fergus asked.

"Sucked him right in. Never saw him again." For the darkness of the story's content, Kenny shared it casually. Greg's death didn't seem to bother her or even seem to be that serious.

A short while later, Kenny stopped the group. A section of the trail she intended to use had glitched. Because of the growth and other glitches around the party, navigating around it meant doubling back and finding another trail. Kenny didn't seem to be bothered, and Wayne's HUD map still seemed to be operating just fine.

"That's weirder than hell," Kenny said, looking over a relatively open area of jungle.

Wayne followed her eyes and spotted a fighter plane covered in moss. He was certain it was World War II era and was definitely from Earth.

"You don't recognize that?" Wayne asked, trying to follow Kenny's eyes.

"Got one of my treasures out of those, but there used to be a whole bunch right here."

Looking back over the scene, Wayne could see several areas where large objects had laid recently but left only their shape behind. Every shape was that of a fighter plane.

"Is this change unusual?" Fergus asked.

Kenny nodded. "Puddles didn't do this." She pointed to ratman tracks in the mud. "Rats were here."

Fergus looked to Wayne. "The panel belonged to one of these machines?"

"Yep," Wayne answered. "That confirms the ratmen were interested in those Earth artifacts specifically. We can't forget Poltur found Targitaus' people here too."

Fergus thought. "These are weapons of war, correct?"

"That they are."

"The clobs won't even go in here," Kenny said. "Hard to believe the rats bein' braver than they are."

"So this is unusual?"

"Big time."

The party moved on, soon coming to another graveyard of boats and planes. Wayne spotted what he thought was a Cessna, a single-engine plane rich guys on Earth bought and learned to fly as a hobby. Most of the crafts, ocean or air, looked pre-1970s, all seeming like they'd be at home in black and white photos or grainy documentaries on the History Channel.

The old History Channel. Before it sucked.

The Dead Zone was definitely leaking items from Earth and a specific genre of items at that. Vanilli's gate treasures seemed to have come from anywhere in the world and had no consistent theme or commonality. One day, he got a Paula Abdul cassette tape. On another day, he got a coin. And on yet another, he got a Katana.

That's not how the Dead Zone appeared to work.

"Want to talk about this now or later?" Fergus asked. "My thoughts are numerous, I'm afraid."

"Yeah, same," Wayne admitted. "Do we agree that the ratmen seem interested in weapons of war?"

"Absolutely. Do we agree that these 'puddles' are connected to the system?"

Wayne wrinkled his brow in thought. "I would say I agree but with a footnote. It's very possible that what we refer to as the system is actually several smaller systems working together."

"Like spokes on a wagon wheel?"

"Well… Yeah, exactly like that. I don't have any doubts about there being some connection there, though."

Fergus leaned toward Wayne. "Why does that look so troubling to you? You're paler than usual."

Releasing a deep breath Wayne said, "We're surrounded by environment glitches, right? Whole trees and shit moving around. Before, I thought of the system as an interface laid overtop of this world, like they were separate but connected ideas."

"Okay…"

"Glitches like that would only be possible if the world itself was being run or rendered by a system because that's an error the system gets. The world doesn't work like that. Or shouldn't work like that is more accurate I guess."

"It's dangerous for a discussion to be this metaphysically deep before you've had dinner," Fergus said, "but I advise caution. There are too many unknowns related to perception for us to definitively define what reality should be. It's possible that the system is interpreting a physical world for us, so while we see a glitch that doesn't mean the glitch originates in the physical world."

"Y'all are makin' my head hurt," Kenny mused.

"So you're saying this is like Jeremiah's birthday party?" Wayne asked Fergus.

"Now that you put it that way, I suppose I am."

Before anyone else in the party could ask, Wayne briefly explained that Jeremiah was another Royal Scholar in the Capital. With an incredible amount of wine, Wayne and his scholar friends stayed up all night going round and round about theories about reality being a simulation and such. To the Scholars of the world, a simulation was like a board game manipulated by gods versus the virtual reality angle Wayne took, but the underlying logic was the same.

That branched into discussions about what colors really looked like. Then they talked about high and low audio frequencies.

For Wayne, it was a wonderfully absurd evening, but he needed a month of juvenile jokes to balance out that one night of ultra-intense thought.

"Returning to my original point," Wayne said, "I would revisit it to say that these glitches seem related to the system, but we have yet to observe a direct connection to prove that."

"I can agree with that position."

Turning to Kenny, Wayne asked, "How did you decide what was safe to pull out of here?"

She shrugged. "If I wanted it and didn't say no puddles around it after watchin' for a while, I went for it."

"And that's it?"

"That's my method. Workin' well so far."

By this point, the party had ventured as far in as Kenny had ever traveled. She led them back toward where they entered, looping around the opposite side of Big Boy the boat to cover new ground in the process.

When they were about as west as their course would take them, Wayne spotted red and gold on his HUD.

"Got a Spawner on my map. Want to check it out or–" He watched the dots break apart on his HUD. "We already tripped it. We're close enough to the edge of the Dead Zone we could try drawing the monsters there like we discussed."

"As tedious as it will be, I'd rather do that and fight on safe ground."

Wayne nodded. "Okay, guys. Before I send Skycat in, is everyone ready to book it if we need to?"

A shrill yell rang out through the rainforest.

"That's at least two, maybe three people north of us," Armond said.

Frantically, Wayne enlarged and manipulated his map. Armond was right. There were three blues to the north or north-east-ish of Wayne's current position. Watching the movement of the reds on his map, he was certain several of them were targeting the other group. They didn't sound equipped for the challenge.

Wayne cut himself free of the buddy-rope system. "Stay three yards behind me and step where I step. If I explode or something, you'll know not to step there. Kenny, you know the way out. Stay low and head back to the wagon."

Lacking the time to probe every step for glitch puddles, Wayne waved his sword in front of him, hoping that would warn him of danger before he walked directly into it. He wasn't ballsy enough to run, but he pushed the party to march aggressively to close on the enemy.

The bright side of this development was that the Spawner seemed like a small one. There were only seven reds on Wayne's HUD, and none of them were more than one pixel.

Seeing the barest glimpse of the enemy through the rainforest, Wayne's Emverdoo ability put two enemy health bars on his HUD.

The first name read:

proelium ranae

And the second bothered Wayne:

missing number

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