Sami’s prisoner was named Kershaughn. She wished she hadn’t asked, because she knew their retionship would end with his death. There was no way around it. Knowing his name gained her nothing, and would cost a piece of her soul when it came time to kill him. But she’d been raised to be polite, and introductions were good manners, and it had come to her by reflex.

  Kershaughn had been bound. She’d had no rope herself, but apparently her attackers had a set of chains and manacles, alongside a colr with them, which marked them as some kind of svers. She’d expected nothing less. She’d been attacked enough times to see the pattern. Either underfed or underwatered fools thinking to relieve her of her property, or men such as these, with instruments of their degenerate station.

  Odd that this group had a Criobani among them, but she hadn’t figured out how to ask why. It might be relevant. It could be nothing. A simple twist of fate, an opportunity knocking at her door.

  While she herself hadn’t found anyone to give her anything resembling a tutorial in this game, information was slowly getting out by word of mouth. One pyer would ask a person in this world a few questions, answers would be given, and that would be passed along the grapevine. She’d had to trade information in turn, such as what little she knew of Pacts. While Rua hadn’t wanted that to get out, what Sami knew was effectively worthless. She knew what one was, but not how to form one.

  But one thing she’d learned in trade was that the Fortune stat was the most important stat of all, but also the most dangerous.

  It wasn’t simple ‘luck’, like so many people thought. It offered no benefits to critical chance or damage. It had nothing to do with damage at all. It wouldn’t make you better at cards, or dice, or any other game of chance. Fortune was best described as ‘opportunity.’ Investing in it meant that, through fate or action, a person would be more likely to have a chance at something useful or valuable. A fortuitous encounter, where one traded paths with something desirable.

  But nothing was free.

  An opportunity was just that – a chance. It didn’t mean you’d get it, just that the possibility to py your hand was there.

  So, if you happened to be walking down the street with a high Fortune stat, it might mean that at the same time a local garrison might be receiving a shipment of coinage to pay their soldiers with. Maybe the wagon carrying it might break an axle right in front of you.

  But at the end of the day, it would still be guarded.

  Or, if you were to invest somewhat into Fortune, choose a location at random as your starter zone, and end up next to some inattentive bandits carrying all the gear and supplies you could possibly need to survive the area.

  Sami pulled up her menu, staring at the stat that had nded her in so much trouble since the game had started.

  Strength: 18

  Agility: 18

  Tenacity: 14

  Allure: 10

  Will: 10

  Fortune: 15

  Awareness: 23

  She’d thought it a simple Luck stat at the beginning, and thrown in her lot with it. She’d always enjoyed a high risk/high reward pystyle, but hadn’t realized that was what she’d be signing up for when dumping five points into Fortune right at the beginning. She especially hadn’t expected to be gambling her actual life away.

  The more points you put in, the more danger the opportunities presented. That was the theory anyway. But also the greater the reward.

  Those points had allowed her to get this far. She probably would have died of dehydration already if she hadn’t allocated them the way she had.

  She chewed on some jerky she’d found in the supplies of the raiders. It wasn’t particurly good, but it was better than the raw meat she’d been forced to choke down before Holt finally broke down and gave them actual food. She wasn’t much of a cook, and with nothing to really burn for a campfire, the few snakes and lizards and overly rge bugs she’d caught hadn’t been able to be put through any heat beyond what she could muster from leaving it out on a rock in the desert sun.

  “I don’t suppose I can get some of that,” Kershaughn said.

  He gave her a look that might be considered charming, perhaps innocent, but he’d just been trying to kill her not two hours ago. Even bound, she viewed him as a snake, a scorpion, or something equally venomous.

  “I’ll consider it,” she said, taking another bite and maintaining eye contact.

  All the previous bandits and svers she’d encountered had been a rough sort. Clothes falling apart and filthy, equipment old and in need of repair, and in a poor state of hygiene. Not that she bmed them. She wasn’t in a good state herself. She longed for a shower. And a comb. And to be wearing clothes that didn’t stink of someone sweat, both her own and the previous owner’s. And pants that didn’t have a hole in the leg, now stained with her blood.

  The wound had been tied up, and her Tenacity was repairing it nicely, but she was still worried about infection. She wasn’t sure if her Tenacity protected her from such things.

  How many times had she run the thought experiment of inventing penicillin in an ancient civilization, should she ever be transported to one? And now, here she was, and now unable to make it since this wasn’t her world. She had no idea if mold cultures from a foreign biome would behave in the same way as they would in her world.

  Focus. She brought her mind back in line, difficult to do without her medication. She beat out a pattern on the hilt of her sword, three sets of three. That helped settle her.

  This Kershaughn was a little too clean. Oh, he was certainly sweat-stained. But his clothes were a little too nice. His face had seen a razor in recent days. His hair was neat. And his skin had a fresh sunburn on it. It wasn’t weathered in the way you’d expect someone who lived in these kinds of conditions for any length of time to be. No, this man was a recent addition to the Sass Wastes.

  He was an anomaly. A piece to a greater puzzle. But Sami wasn’t sure if it was a puzzle she wanted to solve.

  First, Sami set her chat to an ad-break. Not even her subscribers would be able to skip it. None of her mods were in, and she wasn’t sure if she trusted even them with this information. And chat? Chat was comprised of a bunch of goblins, no matter how thoroughly you tried to curate your community. And since starting this game, they’d become increasingly more goblin-like.

  She picked up one of the swords she’d collected from the bodies, and held it aloft. Kershaughn gave a panicked noise, but she paid it no heed. Instead, she began dragging its tip through the sand in front of him. She pulled up her message history, going over the screenshots that the Pandemona impersonator had sent, and copying the text exactly in her drawings.

  There was a lot to go through, and she didn’t know what was valuable, and what was useless. Still, this particur line appeared a lot among Il-Su’s discoveries of Holt’s room.

  “What does this say?” she asked when she finished.

  Kershaughn looked at it, then to her, then the jerky in her other hand. And then back to the sword in her dominant one.

  “It says, ‘I am him, and he is me.’”

  What did that mean? It sounded like gibberish. But it had to mean something. She made a note of it, and then scratched it out with her foot, then drew another line of text in the sand.

  “And this one?” she asked.

  “It looks like… notations for music?”

  Another dead end. She swept her foot out, and then drew more lines. There were notes about ‘patching’ the game, but not what was to be included, a notation about making sure everyone in the beta test group viewed the game’s trailer, vague references to Mythwalkers but nothing specific, just information she already knew, and then finally, the jackpot.

  “This… this is the name of the Criobani Dreamer,” Kershaughn said. There was a strain to his voice.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “I can’t tell you. You’re not Criobani. It’s forbidden, you know that.”

  She’d likely have to torture that out of him ter then. But it wasn’t anything she was burning to know. From what Rua had told her, she wouldn’t be able to form a Pact with the Criobani Dreamer. Still, there was no information that wasn’t completely useless. It could be traded to pyers stuck in the Criobani Empire in exchange for favours, alliances, or information.

  She moved onto the next, and scribbled out all the lines from this section of notes. Kershaughn was more than willing to sell out the names of other Dreamers, so long as they were not his own. He repeated them to her, one after another, and she made note of them, committing each to memory, and typing them out in a message to herself, just in case.

  “The Sassian Dreamer,” he said. “This is it, this is the one you want. It’s her name, and the ritual to invoke her.”

  Finally. She was going to make a Pact of her own.