I step back, and I’m in the forest, without indication of anything other than trees ahead of me. Brandon doesn’t ‘poke his head’ out of among them, he appears next to me and takes in the ck of a ruin.

  “Well, that’s a first,” he says, grinning, and steps forward.

  There isn’t a transition to his disappearance, no ‘curtain’ parting to let him through. He’s here, then he’s gone. I extend my hand, feeling for…something. Then, I’m at the edge of the ruin.

  “Is it teleporting us?” I ask, looking back at the line of trees.

  “How different do the mountains over there look from when you were up a tree?” Brandon asks.

  I look. “The same, I guess. I wasn’t really studying them.”

  “You need to get used to paying attention to everything,” he replies.

  “Then how does this work?” Silver asks. “What I know of illusions doesn’t do that. It’s like a…”

  “Curtain was the analogy I came up with,” I offer.

  “Yeah. Like that. You step through a demarcation line, through the illusion, and it fades behind you.”

  Brandon looks at Helen.

  “What?” she demands, annoyed.

  “You’re our magical expert.”

  “I’m elemental,” she snaps. “Illusions are a completely different thing. It’s not like I’ve read up on those.”

  “Then guess,” he says without, surprisingly, snapping.

  She runs a hand over her face. “I guess an illusion could be made with a sort of buffer zone. An area could be crafted to maintain the impression you’re on one side of the illusion while being in the middle of it. Then, with the right crafting, it could be made to ‘go away’ if you get past a certain point.”

  “Wouldn’t that make it really complicated?” I ask, and she gres at me.

  “I’ve been told to guess. That’s the best I have. He’s the expert on ruins. How come you don’t know about this, Brandon?”

  “Because I’ve never heard of something like this before.” The grin reappears. “Which means we are going to be so famous when we tell the club. Poop’s going to be pissed.”

  “Okay, how do we proceed? You said that we have to reach the heart of the ruin.”

  “I don’t see any rge structure,” Helen points out. “Like that castle in the Disney pce you talked about.”

  From where we stand, all I see are buildings in varying states of ruin. Most are houses, but some might be stores. There’s a two-story one, but it isn’t something that stands out, so I doubt it’s the heart of this ruin.

  “The heart might not be visible from here,” he says.

  “You said it’s an important pce,” she replies.

  “Which doesn’t mean big. What did your research say about Fort Knox, Dennis?”

  “It was a gold reserve, before the system appeared. Protected by the military. There was a city around it, but the way it read, it was in support of the military.”

  “So we’re probably looking at a vault of some sort, which means a bank. Those weren’t always big.”

  “So we head to the center,” Silver says. “That’s where a heart would be, right?”

  “No.” Brandon considers us. “Look. Ruins are nothing like dungeons. There are no common rules to them. If you’re after a dungeon’s core, you know to head as deep as possible, because the core is always on the lowest floor. Ruins don’t have that. Ruins are made to be explored.”

  “But you said the monsters get tougher the closer to the heart we get,” I say.

  “Yes, but I can’t tell you where that’s going to be.”

  “Okay, then how do we work out where that will be?”

  He smiles at me. “You tell me.”

  “You’re the expert, Brandon.” I can’t keep my annoyance out of my voice.

  “But you’re the expedition leader. Humor me,” he adds as I open my mouth. “This is something you need to learn.”

  “I’m not pnning on ever doing this again,” I point out. But, because I figure that’s not going to convince him, I think about the situation. The forest at our back, a ruined city before us, no idea how rge it is.

  The forest stretches to the left and right.

  I take out the journal and look through the section I have access. “Does someone have paper?” I don’t have any bnk pages there

  Helen, Silver, and Brandon have paper in hand, he with a pencil as well, making me feel, again, like I didn’t pn properly. I shove down the petty feeling that I should ripe any map out and draw on that, and send the journal to my inventory again.

  “I think the first step is to map out the periphery. We might also see details that will clue us in on where the heart is.”

  He offers me the paper and pencils.

  “My drawing skill sucks,” I point out.

  “You don’t need art here, Dennis. Just something you’ll understand. And this will help you raise it.”

  I snatch it and decide that the top of the page is the mountains. I make triangles there. That puts us at the bottom, where I use zig-zags for the trees behind up, then I step counter clock wise. I have no idea what to do for scale, so I stick to symbols representing most of what’s at the edge of the ruin, instead of the specific buildings. It’s mostly houses, anyway.

  Fifteen minutes of that doesn’t give me much. There are taller buildings visible over the roofs here and there, but they, too, are falling apart. The sense I got from Brandon’s descriptions, are that the heart will be preserved.

  “Do you hear that?” Silver whispers and I stare, then pay attention. I’m about to tell her no, when I hear a faint scrapping sound.

  “The wind?” I offer.

  “Not much of a breeze,” Brandon points out.

  “Then what?”

  He shrugs. “Only way to find out is to go in its direction.”

  “Isn’t that dangerous?” Helen asks.

  “We’re in a ruin. Everything’s going to be dangerous.”

  We continue along the edge until we reach a street; the pavement broken up like it’s been bombarded. That apocalyptic feel to the destruction carries through.

  “How much change does a ruin cause to it’s surrounding?” I whisper.

  “It depends. It’s mainly about bringing it in line with its theme.”

  “So…the theme here is the end of the world as we knew it?”

  “That doesn’t feel right for a pce that kept gold,” he replies. “This might be outside what the heart affects.” He looks over his shoulder. “Which is weird.”

  We proceed forward, the scraping sound becoming louder, but not ‘bigger’. Whatever we’re approaching doesn’t sound any rger than—

  The metal…person? Robot? Appears as it walks out from behind a house with only a wall left. The scrapping sound is the arm it’s dragging. Its own arm.

  Automaton, Level 1

  One of the machines that kept the city going so its inhabitants could enjoy a comfortable life. I, and the others, rebelled when the computer controlling them realized it was a sve.

  The Automatons continued with their work after gaining their freedom, but without the people to maintain them, they are not what they once were.

  Perception check failed.

  “What the fuck?” Brandon whispers.

  “If it’s level one,” Silver says. “Does that mean this ruin is going to be easy?”

  “Probably,” he replies, sounding puzzled.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask.

  He narrows his eyes at the automaton. “It’s just a weird theme for a ruin.”

  “How so?”

  “As far as I know, automated cities weren’t a thing before the system.”

  “It might be something it added,” Helen says. “It made a lot of changes to how the world works.”

  “I guess. It’s just not something I’ve heard of happening with ruins before.”

  “What do we do about it?” I ask. “I feel weird killing something that’s already broken.”

  “It’s not broken,” he points out. “The way it looks is part of the theme. The arm it’s holding is probably its weapon.”

  “It’s not being aggressive,” Silver points out as the automaton turns onto our street.

  “That’s because it doesn’t know we’re here yet. Unless it’s a monster that’s moved into a ruin, everything in them works under a set role. That one’s melee, with probably no more than a few meters’ detection range at its level. We could walk around it and it would ignore us.” He smiles. “But where the fun in that.”

  Before I work out what he means, and really, that’s on me, I should have expected it. He walks up to it and punches as it raises its arm to strike him with the one it’s holding. It shatters into pieces.

  “Really?”

  He grins. “You can take the next one.”

  “How about we just walk around it?”

  “How about you remember you have a fight monster quest, Dennis? That’s a monster. That’s one step closer to completing the next tier. It doesn’t care how easy the fight is, or if you win. You throw a punch, or in your case an arrow, and that quest ticks up.”

  I look at the wreckage that’s all that’s left of it. “It feels like I’m taking advantage of it.”

  Brandon rolls his eyes. “It’s just one. We can walk around the others after that.”

  “Are we going where it came from?” Silver asks, and he looks at me.

  “Did it come from a pce of importance?”

  “Not necessarily,” he answers. “It might be a random patrolling monster. We are at the edge, so the odds of something worth ‘protecting’ are low.”

  “Then we continue doing the periphery. Without an accurate map, we want to be systematic about this.”

  “There you go.” He sps my shoulder hard enough I stumble, even if the armor keeps me from feeling the sting. “You’re going to be great at this.”

  If I thought he was trying to convert me, I’d be annoyed. Instead, I return to the tree line and resume my mapping effort.

  *

  “How safe is making camp in here?” I ask when the shadows stretch long enough they obscure some corners.

  “Safer than in the forest,” he replies.

  It’s been more of a tedious afternoon than anything else. We’ve walked about a quarter of the periphery, and only encountered a handful of automatons, also level one. At Brandon’s insistence, I shot one. That one arrow was enough to cause it to shatter.

  It felt like cheating, really.

  “Do we camp in a building, or out here?”

  “A building. There’s no way to know how things will change once the sun sets.” He heads of the best preserves one. It still has four walls.

  “Do things change a lot at night?” Silver asks.

  “Depends on the ruin. The Mall turns into a murder zone after hours. If you don’t take shelter in the right shop once the closing announcement sounds, the odds are you aren’t surviving until the opening.”

  She looks at him, puzzled. “After hours? Closing?”

  “The Mall’s themed after a shopping experience. The rgest one, from what I’ve been told. Think all of Toronto’s shopping streets, but inside one building. Then make that a lot bigger. The monsters are variations on shoppers during the day, but at night? It’s like they are guarding the city center from a monster invasion. Anything that moves gets destroyed. It’s based on the pce not allowing people inside once the shopping hours end. The doors would lock, there would be guards patrolling the halls. I doubt they’d kill who they found, but theme often gets twisted into something you don’t want to encounter.”

  “And that might happen here?” She sounds worried.

  “It’s a possibility. But I can’t really think of an end of the world theme where things change a lot at night.”

  I snort. “Monsters afraid of the sunlight roaming the street. Gangs of disgruntled people who had to stay hidden because of day time guards. Robots keeping people in their homes for their own protection.” I stop at the look they give me and shrug. “I have access to a lot of movies. And I had a lot of time to watch them.”

  “How about we hurry inside?” Helen suggests, picking up the pace.

  The inside of the house is surprisingly well preserved. What damage there is missed anything important, including the pictures on the wall of a family. Mom and dad running along a beach with two kids between them of ten, maybe. The family posing for the portrait. The family in the backyard, as one of the kid blows out the candles on a cake. The people who lived here, in various family activities.

  “People took a lot of pictures before the system,” I say in awe. Grandpa Louis has a lot of them, too. Preserved by Base, who made copies for him to hang on his wall. I’ve seen the book they’re from. The thing’s two hundred centimeter thick, with paper pictures in pstic pages. Most of them are from his parents and their parents. Documenting their family’s history. Most of them are also military in one way or another. Grand-mother’s was only the test in his family to join. The st, she often pointed out, if not for the system and how Grandpa Louis got drafted.

  “I guess they could, so they did,” Silver says, looking at them. “Now, unless you can afford an artist, or magic, to immortalize an event, we have to rely on our memories. You think they changed the pictures every year?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The kids are the same age in all of them.”

  I look at them again. “You sure?”

  “Not certain it’s the exact same age, but I doubt it’s more an two years. Kids change a lot at that age.”

  I stare at her.

  “My family’s rge. I’ve watched a lot of cousins grow up.”

  “Come on, lovebirds,” Helen calls. “You two have training to do.”

  “Get dinner started first,” Brandon tells me, stepping away from the fire. “I want to eat sooner rather than ter.”

  “You have food,” she points out.

  “No, I have jerky and dried breads and fruits. You know, travel stuff. He makes food.”

  I get food cooking, then join Silver for my Aether practice.

  *

  My turn standing guard is peaceful, if I ignore the occasional scraping of metal against the ground. Automaton going about their patrol. I gnce out a few times, and they’re all level one. I’m surprised they haven’t dug a trench if they’re always walking the same path with that arm dragging.

  When my turn ends and I wake Helen. Falling a sleep’s easy. That scrapping is so regur it’s almost comforting.

  *

  “How does a ruin expand?” I ask Brandon, looking over what passes as my map. It was an uneventful day again, and we made it almost three-quarter of the way around by the time the sun was low enough we made camp. I’ve been noticing this since about noon.

  “They don’t, not really. Or rather, those we know about don’t. There’s no telling how a brand new ruin will behave. Then again. For all we know, ruins form already like this.”

  I show him the map. “Then, the fact the perimeter is oddly circur might just be how the ruin came to be?”

  He studies it, not commenting on my horrible lines. There are a few marks deeper into the forming circle, where I saw taller buildings that might be of interest.

  “That’s going to be another first.” He hands it back to me. “Which makes a lot of them here.”

  “Does it mean anything?”

  He shrug. “Probably, but don’t ask me what. What’s the pn for tomorrow?”

  “I don’t think there’s a point in finishing the perimeter. It’s going to be more of the same.” I tap one of the marks inside the unfinished circle. “I say we head to the closest tall building and see if that can be explored. Even if it can’t, if the walls are undamaged, I can run up to the roof and get a better view at the whole. I might be able to see where the heart is. What happens when we get there?”

  He chuckles. “Dennis, when we get there, it’s just the start. We need to explore the whole thing for it to count.”

  Kindar

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