Monday evening blurred into Tuesday evening in a way that only travel days between worlds ever could. Alex wasn’t sure, but he felt like it was getting harder every time he returned to Earth. He felt drained being back at the university, a place he had worked so hard to get to once upon a time. It was crazy how fast priorities could change sometimes.

  Getting off the Dungeon Bus and walking through campus was as surreal an experience as always, but this time they didn’t arrive until after 10pm and the campus was dark and mostly empty, making it even more so. Back in the real world once again. It was safe and familiar and yet felt increasingly disconnected from his new reality.

  He went straight back to his room and crashed for almost twelve hours before getting on with his morning task list, mostly organizing his school affairs and packing up his dorm room. Now it was 7pm and he was off to meet up with his friends and somehow tell them all about Earth3 without sounding like a crazy person.

  Standing outside Jake’s townhouse with a handful of heavy tote bags, a box of books and more cash than he’d ever seen in one place before though, he was having a hard time taking that last step.

  Beside him the outside light buzzed faintly and was surrounded by a small cloud of insects trying to get at the bulb. He felt agitated, but wasn’t really sure why. The events of the weekend, or at least his memories and feelings about them, had already faded a little and as long as he could stop himself from thinking about it, they seemed less desperate and immediate than they had been.

  But he was here, back on Earth, and he still felt agitated. It was probably because he was about to sit down with his oldest friends and try to explain how he had been casually travelling to another world every weekend.

  Oh, and by the way, there are terrifying magical bears as big as pickup trucks that shrug off bullets and always wake up on the wrong side of the bed…

  He pushed the thoughts away for the hundredth time that day, took a deep breath and opened the door, passing inside.

  Ryan was sitting in the front room with Jay. The two had become fast friends by now and Jay had come with Ryan since Alex had been busy clearing out his dorm room all afternoon. They both got up as Alex came in. Ryan grabbed the box of books and threw them on the table with little ceremony, a broad smile on his face.

  “You look like hell,” he said.

  “Travel,” Alex said. “Probably stress too.”

  “Wait, you mean he doesn’t always look like that?” Jay said with a wink. Alex thought he looked a little out of sorts too but didn’t say anything.

  Ryan laughed. “Most of the time I suppose.”

  He tilted his head, studying Alex for a moment. “You good though?”

  Alex considered the question before finally replying, “I’m functional… just, rough weekend.”

  Ryan rolled his eyes. “Right, long days on set and snacking off the craft table I’m sure. What’s all that? More junk from your room?” he asked, pointing to the tote bags.

  “No, only the books are room stuff,” Alex responded, nodding towards the box on the table. “This is just some Dungeon Inc. merch I brought for everyone.”

  “Sweet! Loot!”

  Ryan went to grab one of the bags but Alex pulled them out of reach, earning a scowl. “Patience young jedi! You have to wait for everyone else.”

  Alex glanced over at the small box of books on the table. Outside of the few things he was taking with him back to Earth3, these were his only possessions here at university that he really cared about… a box of books. He had never been the sort of person to accumulate a lot of stuff, which had made packing easy. School books, laptop, D&D manuals and some clothes all went to Earth3. The rest of the books went to Jake. Everything else was heading to a local thrift store tomorrow.

  After that, especially now that he was done changing his courses and packing, he really just wanted to get back to Earth3. Maybe that was why he felt agitated. This was his last week on Earth for a while and he wasn’t very good at waiting around once he had a plan.

  Alex realized he was standing in the room by himself, Jay and Ryan having moved to the back of the house, so he moved through the small kitchen to join them.

  Jake’s living room had been rearranged from the standard school cookie-cutter format into something designed for gaming. There were too many tables in the room and a stack of small, square folding tables leaning against one wall just in case. The main dining room table was stacked with TTRPG manuals, board games and MTG boxes. Throw pillows lay haphazardly around the room. Dice trays and notebooks were stacked on the TV stand and playmats were rolled loosely and piled beside them.

  Someone—probably Jun—had lined up a variety of cheap beers on the dining table, labels facing outward as if presentation mattered for his terrible choices in alcohol.

  Jake stomped down the stairs and hurtled into the room as Alex was setting down all the tote bags in a corner. “Yes! Finally! You’ve been avoiding us all day again and I’ve been dying to hear about your weekend - did you guys win the Challenge?” He looked from Alex to Jay but must have seen something in their expressions because he said, “Oh, well, it’s not everything right? It's that dungeon on the final weekend that everyone waits for anyway…”

  Kira arrived then, banging the front door closed and saving Alex from having to answer Jake. She walked into the room and straight at Alex, throwing her arms around him and giving him a big hug.

  “You kind of look like shit,” she said, backing up to give Alex space again.

  “That’s what I said!” Ryan said.

  “Well, you’re here and I smell pizza so let’s eat!” she said. “Wait, where’s Jun?”

  “Just upstairs doing some homework I think,” Jake said. He walked over and thumped on the kitchen wall a few times. They could hear Jun start moving around above them.

  Kira went into the kitchen and, helping herself to a stack of pizza slices, sat down at the table. She grabbed one of the cans of beer and gestured towards the kitchen. The rest of them followed.

  Jun came down the stairs a few minutes later, and joined the group at the table.

  “Thanks for pizza,” Jay said between bites.

  “NP - now that you are one of the crew you get to buy next time!” Ryan said, laughing as he clapped the big man on the back.

  Jay smiled but, catching the look on Alex’s face he said, “We should probably just jump into it.”

  “Yeah,” Alex said, hesitating. He’d been thinking about this all day, but still didn’t really know how to start.

  Fortunately Ryan had never been shy and launched into questions. He looked from Jay to Alex and, seeing that something was up, turned to Jay first. “It’s going to take Alex all night to get to it—What’s going on?”

  Jay smiled a little and said, "Unfortunately, I can’t tell you.”

  “Can’t?” Ryan asked, looking confused.

  “Literally can’t,” Jay responded and gestured to Alex.

  Everyone turned to look at him. Alex froze for a moment, then forced himself to relax. He had been thinking about this all weekend, he just had to get started.

  “I’m going back to Earth3 on Thursday,” he started, “and I’m not coming back. Not anytime soon anyway.” Everyone except Jay reacted to that, but Alex rushed on before they could ask any questions. “I switched over to online courses this morning and hand in my dorm keys at the end of the week.”

  He drew a deep breath. “But that’s not really the big point. The thing is… Dungeon Inc. isn’t exactly what you think it is. I mean, it’s a show of course, but it’s so, so much more than that.”

  With that opening, Alex launched into his speech. He told them about the retrofitted mine base and the portal and their ANIP systems and physical improvements and Alpha Base and Earth3. He told them how the village wasn’t just a set piece and how whole families lived there full time. He told them what he knew of the Eastern Empire and the Western Kingdoms and he told them what he knew of dungeons and their jobs as adventurers. Jay let him talk and expanded on several things after Alex mentioned them.

  They talked until the pizza was gone and the kitchen counter had collected a pile of empty beer cans. As he wound down he thought there would be a barrage of questions but the table was silent for a long moment as everyone digested the story. Alex could only imagine what they were thinking at that moment. He had come by this knowledge in pieces over a couple of weeks. His friends were getting it dumped on their heads all at once. The looks on their faces ranged from interested concentration to shock to Ryan’s look of pure joy.

  Finally Ryan turned to Jay and said, “When you said you literally couldn’t tell us… You literally meant ‘literally’?”

  Jay nodded. “I can’t talk about anything on Earth3 that you don’t already know,” he said with one hand clenched around his throat for emphasis. “Only Alex had his system turned off so he could talk to you.”

  “Shit, that seems pretty invasive,” Kira said, scowling at Jay.

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  “It is. But it’s okay really and amazing in a lot of ways too. The benefits far outweigh not being able to talk about what they’re up to over there.” He shrugged, then laughed. “I tried for years to learn French but I’m really bad at languages… now I think I can speak all of them! You just have to take the bad with the good I guess.”

  “The bad? They are literally preventing you from speaking about your experiences. It’s like an NDA around your throat! What happens if you try to tell someone anyway?” Kira was getting worked up, and Alex understood.

  She wasn’t wrong of course, but neither was Jay. They had talked a lot about the ANIP over drinks at the Silvergate over the past weeks and the general feeling was that everyone felt the benefits far outweighed the potentially invasive nature of the ANIP.

  Alex looked around the room until he found something he could use to show her more of what they had gained. Getting up from the table stopped the conversation. He knew everyone was watching as he walked over to the sliding glass doors and retrieved the thick wooden mop handle wedged into the tracks of the door. His friends were using it as a security bar, preventing the door from opening.

  “You’re right of course Kira, but it’s a narrow restriction, not being able to talk about Earth3. On the other hand, it provides a ton of benefits that would take all night to explain. We have universal translators so we can talk seamlessly to anybody on two worlds. We have HUDs that give us a crazy amount of data about the world around us. And the system is giving us other benefits too.” With that he held the handle out in front of himself and snapped it in half. Then he snapped one of the halves in half. And finally, holding the smallest piece in his hands so it almost disappeared in his palms, he snapped that in half as well.

  “Dramatic,” Jay said with a laugh.

  Ryan and Jake jumped up hooting. They grabbed some of the remaining pieces and tried unsuccessfully to copy what Alex had done.

  Alex walked back to the table and sat down, looking at Kira, who looked impressed, but still a little upset. “I understand. Trust me. We have talked around the same concerns. But think about it Kira. A new world. A fantasy world. All our campaigns over the past ten years, come to life!”

  Alex watched Kira, saw her relaxing. He smiled. He knew that under her concerns she was as excited about the idea of a new world as Ryan and Jake, who were now having a mock sword fight over the couch on the other side of the room.

  “Alex is being humble here though. He told you about Dungeon Inc. but he hasn’t told you everything yet. Like the guild and the magic.” He looked surprised for a moment then continued, “I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to say either of those things actually.”

  Ryan stopped at the mention of magic and came back to the table. “Magic?”

  Alex nodded. “Magic is real.”

  “Bullshit,” Jun said. “No way. Look, this is a crazy story, but hey—Multiverse. It’s not a new concept. But Magic?”

  “Show them.” Jay waved a hand to Alex. “You can, right? Here I mean.”

  Alex nodded. “Yes, it’s just harder because there is such a little amount of mana here.”

  “Hold on,” Jake said, “Are you fucking serious here?” Ryan sat down beside him, eyes wide and not talking for a change. Everyone was silent as Alex held a hand out over the table.

  He took a deep breath, concentrating on seeing the sparse mana in the room. He had been working on this all day. Continuing to take long, deep breaths, he imagined fire.

  The idea had come from Hiro. Alex had talked to him about how he used his internal mana to create those purple energy punches. And although what he was going to show his friends was an external type of magic, he realized that a lot of what he and Hiro did with mana was very ‘intent based’. The mana seemed to follow the path of their thoughts, in a way at least.

  When they had first arrived, one of the scientists had told them that Earth3 was full of ‘quantum foam’ and that was the cause of all the dungeons appearing. Alex doubted that now, but he did think the quantum foam they were monitoring was the same thing as the mana that he could see and use. The scientists called the quantum foam a universal building block.

  Assuming mana was the same thing they were looking at from a scientific perspective though, that meant that the mana could be used to do, or make, pretty much anything. A universal building block. The next steps were just trying to figure out how. Alex wasn’t sure this theory was one hundred percent accurate yet, but he felt he was on the right path.

  And so he had spent a few hours today trying to create different shapes and different elements out of the mana. It had been difficult at first, but every time he succeeded at something new, it became a little easier to replicate.

  Fire was his favourite so far and he had played around with it the most. Now, he held his hand over the center of the table so everyone could see clearly, palm facing up. Concentrating for another moment he drew in the sparse mana in the room and formed a gray block in the centre of his palm. Then he changed the colour to a light red. He wasn’t sure if it was because he was learning something new, or just the difficulty of drawing enough mana on Earth, but he had found it was easier to do this step by step.

  Concentrating on the cube in his palm, he imagined the fire. After a few moments the cube seemed to waver and break apart into ever shrinking cubes that climbed into the air above the core cube until they shrank so much they just disappeared in the air above. It was fire—but pixelated.

  “Fuck me,” said Jun.

  Ryan jumped up and cried out in excitement and Jake was clapping. Kira's eyes were wide but she just stared. She had always played spell casters of some sort in their campaigns and Alex could only guess what was going through her head right now.

  Even Jay looked a little surprised and said, “That’s new.”

  Alex just smiled and then focused on the flame again. He changed the colour from red to blue. He was pretty sure he could increase the heat, but didn’t want to test that one inside. Then, with a puff of energy the blocks melted into a real flame dancing weakly on his palm. He changed the colour a few times, letting them take it in before closing his hand and dispersing the mana once more.

  “Fuck me,” Jun said again.

  Ryan was laughing and clapping along with Jake now.

  “Can I,” Kira started, still looking at Alex’s hand, then into his eyes with an intense stare, “Can I do that?”

  “I don’t know. Sorry. Maybe though. I will help you if I can.” Alex smiled over at her and knew she was in, regardless of her concerns with the ANIP.

  “There’s one more thing that I have to say,” Alex said and waited for them to all quiet down and take their seats again.

  “Earth3 is everything—EVERYTHING—that we have always talked about in our campaigns. I mean, minus the elves and dwarves maybe. But I really need to stress that it is also dangerous. I didn’t think about what that meant enough in the beginning and it wasn’t until this weekend…” Alex trailed off, his voice cracking.

  He could see the bear towering over them. Felt the blow of that giant paw on his side again. He felt his throat constrict and grabbed his drink.

  Jay stepped in after a quick, concerned look towards Alex. “We ran into some problems in the Forest Challenge this weekend. We handled the actual challenge fine, but somehow caught the attention of a giant angry bear. It took out the ops team and a lot of the upper years. We had to fight it and it was a close thing. If it hadn’t been for Alex though, I think it would have been much worse.”

  “A bear?” Jake said, looking confused. “They have bears over there? Like a Grizzley?”

  Alex shook his head. “Like a grizzly’s older, angrier brother. It was… huge. And a magical beast. It could teleport and somehow kept shutting down our HUDs.”

  Ryan whistled at this. “But you beat it? Was everyone ok?”

  “We drove it off,” Jay said. “Marcus was still in the infirmary when we left and some of the guys on the ops team…” He just shook his head. “Alex took a direct hit from the bear that messed up his arm and cracked some ribs, and I got this,” Jay said pointing to the scar on his forehead.

  “You told me that was a training accident!” Ryan said in mock anger.

  Jay laughed. “I couldn’t tell you about the bear, remember! Besides, the forest challenge is part of our training.”

  Alex waved his hands over the table like he was clearing the air. “Look. I just want you to go into this with your eyes open, because mine weren’t. It’s dangerous. What we have to do over there is dangerous. We have no idea how much more dangerous it’s going to get because even the company has only explored a relatively small area in the region around the base. There is a whole world of magical beasts and who knows what out there. Just think about all the fights you’ve seen on the show—they were all real.”

  Jay added, “There are safety systems. We have trainers. There’s oversight. People watching the video. Medical facilities that would shock you. But nothing removes the core fact that what’s happening there is real. And occasionally dangerous.”

  Jun shifted in his chair. Jake’s jaw tightened. Kira didn’t look away but did look concerned.

  Ryan leaned over and poked Alex in the shoulder, “Your arm seems fine.”

  Alex nodded. “My shoulder is a little stiff still, but it’s fine otherwise. Even my ribs are barely bothering me anymore.”

  “In one day?” Ryan looked incredulous.

  “It’s the ANIP. We don’t just get stronger and faster, we heal faster too.”

  Jake leaned back and whistled. “That’s some X-men shit right there. Where do I sign up?”

  “You are all in if you want it. I just wanted to make sure you know the danger part of this as much as all the cool amazing stuff. Yesterday I wasn’t sure if I even wanted to tell you any of this. That bear… it was rough. But I finally realized that, even knowing about all the danger, I’m choosing to go back anyway. And you should all have that option too.”

  Jay stepped in smoothly. “He’s right, it’s dangerous. But you’ll have a team around you and I think it’s fair to say, even though I’ve just met most of you, that you’ll all regret it if you don’t jump on this.”

  Alex nodded. “You don’t have to decide right now. Skip a few classes and come back with me on Thursday. Spend the weekend in the village and check the place out.”

  “Can you do that? Bring them I mean?” Jay asked

  Alex shrugged. “Valentina said I could offer them whatever it took. So, sure, why not?”

  “Well, I’m already hired,” Ryan said with a huge grin on his face. “I’m with the next cohort already, so, I’m still in.”

  “Do we get to stay at the Silvergate?” Kira asked, smiling now too. “I mean, is it a real inn?”

  “Yes,” Alex said. “And probably, if you want, but I may have a better place for you to stay, because we’re getting our own Guild Hall and apparently it will be up by the time we get back.”

  “What do you mean? Dungeon Inc. doesn’t have guilds,” Jun said, looking confused.

  Jay leaned forward and answered with a smile, “Shhh, it's a secret—but it does now.” He pointed towards Alex. “This guy made the pitch and they’re changing up the whole structure of the show starting with the next cohort.”

  Everyone looked back at Alex, but it was Kira that asked, “Guilds?”

  Alex smiled. “Yes. They accepted it pretty fast really, so I think they were already considering it, or looking for the right option to fix some of their growth problems. But, the most amazing part of it is that we get our own.”

  “I don’t get it. Get our own what? Guild? For just us?” Jake said and scowled at Ryan after he punched him in the shoulder.

  “The Side Quest Heroes,” Alex said. “Dungeon Inc. wants all of us to come to Earth3 and they gave us our own Guild to build. It’ll start with us, and our current team over there. But we’ll recruit others too.”

  Ryan burst out laughing. “I already said I’m in right? How soon can we leave?” He put a fist into the centre of the table as he spoke. One by one everyone else did the same.

  Alex smiled, his friends were all in. He couldn’t wait to see the look on their faces when they opened their tote bags.

  ***

  Personal Field Journal

  John Reach; Head Trainer

  Pressure doesn’t create leadership, it reveals it.

  When the room for error is as thin as the tip of a dagger, people stop performing and start acting according to their built-in habits. Some react quickly. Some freeze. Some reach for authority. Some wait for it. Some break entirely.

  Training can sharpen skills, but what it cannot do is force character change in the moment it’s needed.

  We force repetition under stress and have to accept that not everyone will rise when it matters. One of our core jobs is to identify the natural leaders.