“Defense,” I said.

  Lianna wrinkled her nose. “Say what?”

  “You asked what my reason was for uniting people and making them stronger, Players and NPCs alike. It’s defense.”

  “Against what?”

  “Against what is inevitably coming.”

  “That’s not at all ominous. And what’s coming exactly?”

  I took a sip of my drink and watched a loon dive under the water before reappearing to bob on the surface of the lake ten feet away from where it went under.

  “There’s a big world outside our little map game board,” I said. “I’ve gone a few hexes beyond where most people have explored and it’s mostly just wilderness with pockets of monsters here and there. If there are more dungeons out there I didn’t find them, but I wasn’t exactly looking for them either.”

  “That doesn’t sound particularly threatening to me.”

  “Well, we could assume it just goes on like that forever, empty wilderness, or that there’s a wall at the end and we’re trapped in a bubble we haven’t reached the boundary of yet. Either of these effectively limits our game to the area within a few hexes of the city. But that doesn’t explain all the NPCs migrating into town.”

  “You think all those NPCs must be coming from somewhere,” she said.

  “Yes, and they keep coming, more and more each day. Word of Toronto is spreading.”

  “Which means we can assume the active game board is significantly larger than what’s been explored so far,” she said. I stayed quiet as she worked through the idea. “As word spreads, someone nefarious will inevitably hear about us and they will inevitably come. So you’re planning for defense now against that coming eventuality.”

  “You got it,” I said.

  We sat in silence, drinking and listening to the loons call.

  “You really think something’s out there?” she said.

  “I think we can assume there’s much more to this world than you have dreamt of, Horatio.”

  “The correct line is—”

  “I was paraphrasing,” I said. “Look, if I’m right and this was designed to be a zero sum game with only one team winning and taking control of Toronto and its region, then that’s our opportunity. The game balance will be set to contend with the strength of a single winning team, but what if it isn’t just one team, what if it’s every Player united in the defense of our city, and with trained NPCs backing us up?”

  “And that’s your plan.”

  “That’s my plan.”

  “You’re an idiot.”

  “Harsh!” I said. “What’s wrong with it? Working together we’d be able to drive off anyone who came at us. Well, unless they pulled an Iliad and all united against us, laying siege for ten years to starve us out, but I think that’s rather unlikely.”

  She shook her head. “How can someone with the History and Literature and Trivia skills not know what always happens when one group is quantifiably stronger than everyone else?”

  “Subjugation?”

  “Call it subjugation, call it Manifest Destiny, call it a jihad, call it what you want. The strong always look toward conquest and expansion. Usually trumped up with some lame rationale like national security.”

  The word jihad made me think back to her earlier Dune comparison. “Like Paul and the Fremen?”

  She nodded. “And the Padishah Emperors and their Sardaukar before them.”

  “And Leto II and his Fish Speakers afterwards.”

  “I forgot about the Fish Speakers,” she said. “If we’re sticking with Dune analogies, your situation actually seems to be most like them.”

  “How so?”

  “You seem to think you can see the future and your fanatic following is mostly women.”

  “I—”

  Lianna cut me off and began rattling off the names of all the female NPCs and Players I’d allied myself with and counting them on her fingers. “Alice and the Doppels, Petal and the Matriarchal elves, Devorah and her courtesans, Sigrid, Chika, Morgan, Jane—”

  “I’d hardly include Jane—”

  “Please. Kiki, Tiff—”

  “Come on.”

  She looked over at me. “Me.”

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  “You make it sound like a harem.”

  She almost choked on her drink. “If I thought it was a harem I would not have included myself.”

  “There’s that at least.”

  “Jeebus. You’re not just the Spacing Guild, you’re the Imperium, the Fremen, CHOAM, the Tleilaxu, and the Bene Gesserit all rolled into one.”

  It was funny because in a way it was true. “I think you mean we are. You’re part of this now.”

  “Jeebus.” Lianna took a few deep breaths. “Okay. I think I’m calm now. Sorry, you threw me for a loop with all this Toron-do jazz and the nameless threats from beyond and I just needed to process it by flipping out for a bit. Coming here actually helped a lot, it’s hard to be upset in this setting.”

  “You see why I really don’t mind spending so much time here. And it’s okay. I am an idiot. I’m sorry I wasn’t bright enough to think of mentioning the whole thing with the NPCs learning my martial art before.”

  She lifted her hand from the wide armrest of the Muskoka chair and waved it. “Bygones. Now. Let’s talk about where you’re wrong and what to do about it.”

  “You mean how I’m being naive and we need to shut it down before this turns into a game of global conquest and Imperialism?”

  “Yes,” she said, “all except for the part about shutting it down. I think we should run with it.”

  “You want to take over the world?”

  “There are more ways to conquer than by force. Haha, I can see your brain working.”

  “Just give me a second. I’ll get it.”

  “I’ll wait,” she said, reclining fully into the chair and closing her eyes. “Here’s a clue: why are all those NPCs coming to Toronto?”

  “Waffle irons?”

  “You’re being facetious but you’re actually pretty warm.”

  “Prosperity? The city’s doing pretty well right now. I think attracting more NPCs was bound to happen as Players took over dungeons and started using their resources.”

  “I disagree. You say the game is designed for conflict between teams, that we’re supposed to fight amongst ourselves until one team prevails. That kind of battleground doesn’t exactly make for a tourist mecca.”

  “But if we don’t fight amongst ourselves we can work together to make this place a haven. A very well-defended haven.”

  She opened one eye to look at me. “I think you’re missing the opportunity here. Our purpose shouldn’t be defence, at least not primarily. I think our purpose should be cultural expansion.”

  “What, a mercantile empire rather than a military one.”

  “Yes and no. What if your Toronto martial art—”

  “Toron-do. Do.”

  Big sigh. “What if your secret society spread to all the places where these NPCs are coming from along with our trade goods? Imagine those colorful bands around the arms of all the fighters everywhere.”

  “There’d be nobody to defend against because they’d all be on our side.”

  “It’s still the same endgame, only bigger.”

  Holy crap, she was right.

  “Strength and unity not just of Toronto, but of Crucible,” I said. “Colonialism done peacefully.”

  “Colonialism? Really?”

  It was my turn to quirk an eyebrow at her. “Sending in missionaries to convert people and overwhelm them culturally sounds pretty Colonial to me.”

  “But this is different. We don’t want to supplant their culture, we just want to create an atmosphere where we aren’t seen as a threat or a prize, but as a valuable ally.”

  “And avoid violent conflict,” I said. “Peace through superior firepower.”

  “More like peace through waffles, but yeah.”

  “I’m convinced.”

  “Really? Just like that? That was easy.”

  “Lianna, I’m really glad this happened before the coming quest.”

  “What does the quest have to do with anything?”

  “Whatever this quest is, it’s going to try to pit our teams against each other. But if we’re going to pull off our master plan it is crucial that we do not let this happen. We have to find a way where everyone wins this quest together or it might be too hard or too late to get everyone on board.”

  “If anyone can find a way, it’d be you.”

  I realized something then. I started chuckling and Lianna gave me that what’s-so-funny-then-eh?” look and before I could help myself I blurted out, “I’m the protagonist.”

  She gave me a different look then. I didn’t know what it meant, not until she said it out loud.

  “Of course you are. We are all the protagonists of our own stories. Idiot.”

  We’d finished our conversation and our drinks, so after one last look out at the serene lake we returned to the Cathedral. As far as anyone back on Crucible knew we’d never left. The few minutes we’d spent in the inventory were only a few seconds in the real world.

  Lianna and I did a walkthrough, going through the plans and brainstorming new ideas for the reconstruction. The more we talked about it, the more she got excited by the prospect. Not that I had a single iota of doubt anymore, it only reinforced that I’d chosen the right person.

  Once we were done, there was still lots of time before we were due to present ourselves at the arena. Outside the Cathedral, a few teams had already shown up to wait.

  “I’d rather not go out there yet,” I said. Then I remembered a certain room in the catacombs my ferret had ferreted out. “Want to explore the catacombs?”

  Lianna’s eyes lit up. “Hell yes.”

  I felt a pang of sympathy for her. All this time she’d been craving adventure but thanks to her odd set of abilities she’d been shut out of the fun until now. How many more Players were there like her? People who wanted to play the game but for whatever reason had been left out. All the more reason to get the Players Guild up and running as soon as possible.

  The rubble blocking the door that the cultists had been guarding had been cleared away, but the passage down had collapsed and was unpassable. This was a good thing, it meant that nobody else had been down there since I sealed up the hole I’d bored down.

  I reopened the hole, then jumped down. Lianna was nervous to follow, but I reminded her that her suit had the Able To Leap Tall Buildings power on it and a drop of a mere twenty-three feet and five inches was nothing.

  I let Lianna lead the exploration for a while, I even let her take care of the few monsters she found with her P3s, but I did subtly guide us toward the large metal door I’d seen last time, the one with no keyhole.

  It wasn’t until the door was right in front of me that I noticed something my ferret hadn’t been able to see before: a shallow indentation in the middle of the door, the size and shape of a baby’s hand.

  I immediately thought of the item I’d liberated from that head cultist, the thing he’d worn on a chain around his neck. It appeared from my inventory, a small metal hand, about the size of a baby’s. I placed it into the indentation and was rewarded with the sound of many bolts sliding and gears grinding inside the door. Lacking any kind of handle on this side, I pushed on the door and it swung in to reveal a large room behind it.

  “Oh yeah,” I said. “Jackpot.”