[Adelie]

It's Friday night, and Chi Mirzakhani is pondering how best to pull off a skeevy illegal heist.

Wait, back up. She'd like to clarify - because she knows you're getting the wrong impression here - that it's not technically illegal. Like, it's definitely skeevy. And it's definitely a heist. But it's not illegal, because the only thing she's stealing are a bunch of pixels and bytes.

Wait, back up. Yes, again. Yes, she knows that piracy is a crime. Yes, she wouldn't download a car - although she'd like to know where you'd even find one, just for research purposes - and look, this whole train of thought is irrelevant. She plays video games. There is a little text box on the screen that tells her to commit minor felonies and the occasional murder in the name of experience points and gold, and she follows those instructions so she can experience the heady serotonin boost of seeing numbers go up. There's nothing illegal about any of this. Just a girl, and her digital substitute for happiness.

[Adelie]

Right now, the little textbox on her screen is telling her to explore the sewer system. There's even a nice little arrow, bright blue and inviting, pointing forward into an expanse of abject nothing on her mini-map.

Previously, the little textbox had told her to talk to a shady-looking NPC, who had introduced herself as 'You don't need to know who I am, 'kay?' which would've been a pretty badass line if the dialogue box in question hadn't outed her as a Nix, which simultaneously spoiled a good portion of the mystique of this whole quest line, because Chi's pretty sure she's seen that name mentioned in some other event. She's always right about these things. Has to be, really; her pride as the result game lore encyclopedia hangs on the line.

Ah, she should explain for the audience. No good to start out in media res and never serve an explanation, after all.

It's the Festival of the Golden Thread. You should know this part - it's not a video game thing, it's a culture thing. Everyone knows about the festival where the streets are dusted with gold and tourists from across the continent gather to commemorate the memory of the Golden Seraph and her Dragon. Everyone knows it's been held every year for hundreds of years, without fail, until an unfortunate epidemic and enforced quarantine decided to put an end to a few hundred years of tradition.

[Adelie]

So, some government officials and some big-name tech company representatives put their heads together and came up with a brilliant solution that would utilize an elaborate fusion of bleeding-edge augmented reality technology and unique cultural products to hold the festival virtually in an MMORPG setting - which is really just a fancy way of saying they saw an opportunity to make money and jumped at it.

The whole set-up had gone ... surprisingly well, honestly. The hosts put in enough design and animation work that their facsimile of Aldrect had come off as a loving homage to the city, rather than a cheap parody; they hosted multiple creative events that really brought the festival to life. And to throw a bone to their existing playerbase, they also added a miniquest plotline that rewarded players with unique items and cosmetics.

Which Chi had unfortunately missed out on, because the miniquest had been tied to performing in the Festival of the Golden Thread and she had been busy chasing down false leads in a completely different part of town at the time. She only got to hear about it later from some of her guildmates, and boy, that sure was a blow to her ego.

[Adelie]

This time, though. This time, she is definitely on the right track.

She'd found the right NPC, she'd listened to a good few paragraphs of exposition - and taken notes just in case any of that came in useful - and now she's crawling around in the sewers of mock-Aldrect like the good little questrunner she is.

Thank god this isn't real, because if they'd gone all out on animating the splendor and glory of the city last year, they'd clearly decided to do the same thing to the murk and muck of the sewers this year. Somehow, despite it being nothing but an image on her screen, the whole place feels claustrophobic. The walls seems to close in on her as she walks forward, step after boring step, with only the ever-changing water pattern and the occasional piece of mysterious runic graffiti to mark her progress.

She screenshots a few of them, noting them down in case they'd prove to be relevant later. Probably just flavor text - but it's always good to be prepared.

[Adelie]

Drip, drip, drip. Step, step, step. Boring, boring, boring.

The most exciting thing that's happened in the past three minutes is that she took a wrong turn and accidentally fell into the canal below and had to hop back up, but that's about it. Actually, at this point she's wondering if maybe she's supposed to fall into the canal and let the water sweep her away to whatever the next stage of this path is. They can't design a game this badly, right? Like, there's got to be something going wrong here because playing walking simulator for extended periods of time is a sure-fire way to bore your attention-deficit target audience.

But because that's just how things work - because whenever she actually complains about something not happening, it happens just to spite her - she then proceeds to turn a corner and nearly fall into a gaggle of mysterious hooded figures. Makes sense. Spooky scary tunnels, spooky scary mob characters.

Now, the question is what they're doing.

[Adelie]

-- PROMPT 2 BEGINS HERE --

The cultists, it turned out, aren't doing anything. Nothing important, at least, because after a good two minutes of observation, all she's seen from them are the same three idle animations. Pick up thread, monologue in some indecipherable gibberish language, put down thread. Repeat ad nauseum.

So if this is some kind of puzzle, it's an objectively terrible puzzle. There's no entry point, no clues, nothing beyond some pretty cool-looking cultist models and some bored designer's keyboardsmashes in lieu of dialogue. Briefly, she wonders if the cultists will drop their fancy-looking gloves as loot.

That'd be pretty cool, at least - a souvenir for all her sewer-trawling! - but right now, she wants to be careful. She can always come back and commit a little friendly murderhobo-ing later, after all, if it turns out these guys aren't important to the quest itself. For now, she simply casts an invisibility spell on herself and slips right past them.

[Adelie]

That's one of the perks of being a wizard, she supposes - access to ridiculous amounts of utility, on-demand. It leaves her lacking in combat quite often, and she certainly can't solo bosses or win arena bosses like some of her guildmates can, but her preferred area of expertise, for exploration like this - it's perfect.

And it's even more perfect when she turns the corner past the cultists and watches the path suddenly slant downwards until it's fully submerged in water. At least it's not sewer water, she supposes. Even if it's all virtual, there's still something viscerally unappealing about wading around in grime and liquified dung.

With another quick incantation, she grants herself underwater breathing - casts it twice to stack the duration, just in case this trip underwater ends up being more than a quick jaunt - then delicately maneuvers herself under the gently lapping waves.

[Adelie]

The path forward is unexciting, to say the least. There's water, and there's some creepy-looking pale fish with milky blind eyes that keep bumping into her unexpectedly. Purely out of curiosity, she lobs a simple spell at one of them, and it immediately dissolves into a shower of sparkles after one hit. No loot, no experience for an overleveled character like hers.

It's clear, at least, that this is the path forward - or at least, it's one path forward. The water had been concerning at first; she dimly recalled that this wasn't supposed to be a level-restricted or particularly challenging quest, but requiring some form of underwater breathing definitely increased the entry requirements significantly. Especially since the NPC who'd given the quest hadn't mentioned anything about it.

[Adelie]

But if she looks closely, she can definitely see evidence this pathway was carefully designed. There's odd turns and quirks in the path that reveal small pockets of air and the occasional larger dry island; they're placed irregularly, but invariably within reach for someone unprepared to reach them without succumbing to a drowning debuff. The spell means she can simply ignore this added layer of complexity, but it's not necessary.

On the other hand, you know what's necessary? A map, apparently - because she's pretty sure she's walked through this same intersection three times at this point. There's a minimap built into the game that she can glance over, but it only provides information on places she's visited before, so it merely serves to cross out some options on her map.

This place is strange, she realizes. There's a pattern here, but she has yet to figure it out.

[Adelie]

Most of the time, she relies on intuition. It's strange, really - she'd like to think herself a logical thinker, because that's what makes sense with the mental image she has of herself. She's a math major, for one; her job is to break things down into component parts and connect them together logically. But so much of that process is intuitive, too; a blind hunch the first step to a breakthrough.

It's the same here, too. She can't pin down what or where or why, but she can just feel that there's a pattern here that these paths are tracing out. The intersections are too regular - a three-way junction here, a two-way junction elsewhere - and there's something about the way they curve on her minimap that suggests a larger picture she simply hasn't seen yet.

So she trusts in her intuition, and walks towards the center.

[Adelie]

-- PROMPT THREE BEGINS HERE --
-- THE SERVER ROOM --

There's nothing noteworthy, at first. Just an intuitive sense, maybe, that she's going in the right direction, as the various rooms on the map fill in around her. The pattern becomes increasingly evident as she walks, though, and then the rooms themselves begin filling in the details - jagged stone replaced with smooth faces, remnants of civilization scattered around, half-abandoned.

Finally, she finds it - a smooth, almost anachronistically high-tech door sandwiched between cobblestones and dust. As she approaches, the door seems to detect the key card - the quest item Nix had given her at the very beginning - in her inventory and slides open with a smooth, mechanical hiss.

[Adelie]

If she weren't experiencing this digitally, perhaps she would've commented on the chill, or the antiseptic smell, or the lack of dust - but instead, all she sees is an abandoned facility, dimly lit by machinery and cold fluorescent lights. A stack of paper catches her eye, as well as a few levers and panels on the wall, but upon closer inspection, it becomes apparent that none of these are objects she can interact with.

There's a distinct sense of malaise around the room, noticeable even through her computer screen. It takes a few moments for her to pinpoint it before she notices the untouched coffee cups on the table, the way one of the notepads seems to trail off mid-word, the way everything seems like it belongs to some moment, caught in time.

But there's nothing here. Nothing she can see, at least; no signs of life on her minimap, either. Just her, and the three doors leading out of the room and into darkness, inviting her in.

[Adelie]

There's three doors, three choices. The first one looks like a disaster struck it - there's not enough enough left that she can really discern if it was even a door to begin with. It's more a hole in the wall, as if some monster had pushed its way through. Probably whatever she's supposed to be finding here - but considering she's looking for the monster that escaped, there's likely no point in her going to the place it escaped from.

The second set of doors leads further into the lab, as far as she can tell - and a quick examination of the door gave her little information to go off of. It doesn't seem to be locked, but it's hard to tell what's beyond it. Probably the next room in this area, but she gets the impression that it might be a one-way trip.

That leaves the final set of doors, which are almost entirely unremarkable. There's some machinery in there, maybe some computers; it doesn't seem like there's any other doors from her brief glance in, either.

That settles it, then. She'll check out the server room first, then go back and take a look at the rest of these doors when she's done with that.

[Adelie]

Just one step into the server room, and then - oh, maybe she misjudged. Because the doors slide shut behind her with a suspicious sense of finality, and suddenly, the darkness begins to move. One pinprick of red light appears, and then another, and then finally her surroundings are lit with glowing red dots, almost like eyes.

God, she hates it when game mechanics lean too heavily into the horror side of things. Even if she likes to say she's been on the internet long enough to see everything, no matter how disturbing, she's still weak to surprises. And when the audio in her headphones suddenly starts reporting a robotic voice muttering something about assimilation and elimination, she almost wants to jump out of her skin.

[Adelie]

And then there's the monsters. Damn, they're ugly. She's never been one for the whole patchwork eldritch abomination aesthetic to begin with, but these are just ugly-looking on top of that. Some kind of human-reptile hybrid, only it seems like they've taken the worst parts of either species and dumped a whole pot of black ink on top.

Well, the design's effective, at least. She's annoyed, but she's also just a bit spooked. She sends a few preliminary blasts of magic out of her staff, just to test the waters at first, stroking off a few notches of health off their health bars. So they're not exactly pushovers, but they're not exactly going to be a problem to take care of, either.

Well, then. Time for her to get to work.