[Adelie]

Y-you don't understand just how I feel, seonbae! I've alwa-

Discordant violin and swelling piano flare into abrupt silence as Ven frantically hits pause on the Korean drama playing on her second monitor. Confessions - especially one that has been painstakingly teased for twelve straight episodes - require her full attention, but she's hard-pressed to spare even a single thought right now.

A few distracted mistakes - although watching her idol bias blush adorably was totally worthwhile - and her casual evening grind session had turned into a battle for her life against a full party of murderous fire ants.

[Adelie]

Which - well, you wouldn't expect fire ants to be bad, especially when your player character is a fully kitted-out kannagi capable of soloing - albeit very slowly - nine-headed hydras, towering dragon-roc crossbreeds, and ill-tempered convenience store managers. Realistically, a few insects shouldn't pose a threat.

But, of course, this is a game, and so game logic applies. Faced with three-foot-tall game ants, with strength to scale and fast-acting paralytic venom, she can only do what her real self would do when faced with real fire ants - and run.

[Adelie]

At least kiting's something her character's optimized for. Kannagi isn't a true class archetype so much as a self-proclaimed aesthetic, but her skill allocation's mostly in damage mitigation - shields and timed immunities - and field-of-battle control.

With a quick incantation - a few button presses, in the real world - gusts of wind swirl behind her, gathering into tiny dust devils that whip up trails of browning leaves behind them. A few fire ants brush against the vortices and are thrown back, their health bars dropping by a minuscule amount; the others move towards her but stop, as if hitting an invisible wall of wind.

[Adelie]

That won't last for more than a few seconds, but it buys time for her to summon a familiar for some offensive power. Swapping from one hotkey set to another hotkey set, she watches her player character draw out sweeping circles with her hands as she initiates the five-second channel to call her familiar of choice from the void.

The progress bar is about to complete when suddenly - her entire screen goes black.

Ven practically jumps out of her chair. There's a brief flash of white - text, maybe? some of it looks like it might've been letters - and then she's back where she was, a three-tailed fox by her side.

[Adelie]

[WORLD] F4NT4S14: 'wtf'
[WORLD] Arayuki: 'omg what wsa that'
[WORLD] xxKilya: 'did the game get hacked or something'
[WORLD] Silver Sextant: 'what's happening'

Honestly - she's wondering that too. Right now, though, she still has some massively oversized insect abominations to put down before they put her down, and much as she'd really like to know what's going on, she'd also rather not die. Dropping half her gear's a minor inconvenience, but having to reorder her inventory after looting her corpse - now that's a pain.

Besides, puzzles aren't really her thing; someone smarter than her'll probably figure it out soon enough, anyways.

[Adelie]

[CLAN] Chi Squared: '[^2] So.'
[CLAN] Chi Squared: '[^2] Did anyone catch that text?'
[CLAN] Gumiho: '>g< freaked me out'
[CLAN] Gumiho: '>g< id idn't have a chance to screenshot'
[CLAN] Sagittarius A*: '[a] NQIRAGHERE'
[CLAN] Sagittarius A*: '[a] LBH UNIR PBZR SEBZ FGNEQHFG'
[CLAN] Sagittarius A*: '[a] NAQ GB FGNEQHFG LBH FUNYY ERGHEA'
[CLAN] Sagittarius A*: '[a] FRRX GUR OVEQ'F NOBQR'
[CLAN] nebu!a: '/// lemme translate'
[CLAN] nebu!a: '/// [keyboard smash noises]
[CLAN] Gumiho: '>g< lol'
[CLAN] Chi Squared: '[^2] is that actually what it said? Or are you just trolling me again? :<'
[CLAN] Sagittarius A*: '[a] yep.'
[CLAN] Chi Squared: '[^2] ...'
[CLAN] Chi Squared: '[^2] I should've expected that answer.'

[Adelie]

And as she expected, her clan's already on it. Not much of a surprise, really - a lot of the Cat Mafia members are notoriously ultra-competitive and pride themselves on being the first to discover and solve new content.

Chi, especially - before she'd been invited to the clan, Ven had known about Chi. Really, most players knew about Chi - she single-handedly maintained one of the best third-party help sites for the game, known for putting up detailed walkthroughs and guides for new runs and miniquests just hours after they were released.

Amazing, honestly. Ven bites her lip a little, thinking about it - some days, it seems miraculous she's a part of all of this.

[Adelie]

[CLAN] nebu!a: '/// so, letter salad'
[CLAN] nebu!a: '/// what does it mean'
[CLAN] Chi Squared: '[^2] Hmm, there's an apostrophe.'
[CLAN] Sagittarius A*: '[a] don't ask me! i'm just the messenger.'
[CLAN] Chi Squared: '[^2] ADVENTURER'
[CLAN] Chi Squared: '[^2] YOU HAVE COME FROM STARDUST'
[CLAN] Chi Squared: '[^2] AND TO STARDUST YOU SHALL RETURN'
[CLAN] Chi Squared: '[^2] SEEK THE BIRD'S ABODE'
[CLAN] Gumiho: '>g< !'
[CLAN] Chi Squared: '[^2] Caesar cipher. Easy.'
[CLAN] Sagittarius A*: '[a] well. that's pretty edgy.'
[CLAN] Chi Squared: '[^2] So we're supposed to go to the Bird's Abode? New Area?'
[CLAN] nebu!a: '/// not on my map'
[CLAN] nebu!a: '/// maybe the roc nest? or the penguin island? idk, there's lots.'
[CLAN] Chi Squared: '[^2] Yeah, same. Devs must love birds or something.'
[CLAN] Chi Squared: '[^2] Let's split the map? We check out all the bird-related areas in our part.'
[CLAN] Chi Squared: '[^2] Who's online? Just you, me, Aster, Ven?'

[Adelie]

[CLAN] Gumiho: '>g< uhhh'
[CLAN] Gumiho: '>g< i've been trying to kill these fire ants for 10 minutes lol'
[CLAN] Gumiho: '>g< but yeah i can def help!'
[CLAN] nebu!a: '/// be right there, ven'
[CLAN] Chi Squared: '[^2] Okay.'
[CLAN] Chi Squared: '[^2] You two take the east side, Aster and I take west?'
[CLAN] Chi Squared: '[^2] Kind of a dumb system, but w/e.'

Two fire ants down, seven more to go. She's not much of a math person, but by crude calculation she can guess she'll be here for another hour or so at this rate. It's really a problem of build - her character's designed to support, and certainly does a very solid job of that, but slinging debuffs and damage-over-time spells doesn't take down anything reasonably quickly.

[Adelie]

Backup arrives in a flurry of arrows; one of them, black-fletched and rippling with some arcane magic, buries itself between a chitin joint and explodes, knocking the victim and the ants in its vicinity down. Ven watches as in an instant, Nebula chunks her opponents' health bars down an amount that would've taken several minutes for her to carefully chip down.

Sometimes she's not sure if it's just a difference in build or if it's one of skill; she tries not to think about it too much.

[CLAN] Gumiho: '>g< reported for ks!'
[CLAN] nebu!a: '/// git gud'
[CLAN] Gumiho: '>g< thanks <3'
[CLAN] Gumiho: '>g< legit would've been here forever without that'

[Adelie]

Now that she's finally freed her character from the prying grasp of her arthropod overlords, she's able to investigate the situation herself; not that she'll contribute much. Cursory inspection of world chat suggests no other clues have been uncovered - or if they have, the other clans are keeping them to themselves, much as Cat Mafia's doing with the cryptic message they caught.

Bird's abode. The words spin curiously in her mind; there's an oddness in how they're phrased that seems like a memory just out of reach, like a fragmentary syllable on the tip of her tongue. Somewhere, sometime - she's seen that before.

[Adelie]

But that's silly. Of course the wording's awkward; the entire phrase is awkward, engineered to be dramatic and imposing, like the pronouncement of some long-forgotten god or some majestic other-worldly being.

Fantasy game, fantasy cliches - case dismissed.

A simple keystroke brings up the world atlas, and Ven clicks and drags into focus the section of map she was asked to cover. In some ways, she's gotten the short end of the stick - there's a good three or four bird-related areas in her area, and none of them are particularly quick or easy to get to.

[Adelie]

An intentional sacrifice on her part, though; she and Nebula had talked it over already. While some of her own power budget lay in utility spells, Nebula's character is so hyper-specialized that she lacks most of those luxuries - asking her to hop up a mountain cliff or travel across the ocean would be like asking Ven to kill fire ants. Thus, it's only natural that she volunteers to cover the more difficult to get to locations.

Besides, it's not every day that you can say you had a chance to help out the undisputed 'PK Queen' of the game.

[Adelie]

First on her list is Stormseeker's Archipelago; it's the most remote of the areas she has to visit, but she's also much closer to it now than she would be from anywhere else.

Normally, visiting the Archipelago requires waiting ten minutes for the notoriously slow in-game ferry - disgruntled players often derogatorily refer to it as the 'sight-seeing cruise' - but Ven has her own trump card. Pulling up her inventory, she flips through the pages until she finds the icon of the item she's looking for.

[Adelie]

With a soft ping, a tiny origami boat appears in front of her.

It's not much to look at - glossy white paper, a simple design with a little triangular hump like a sail in the center, maybe a little larger than the size of her hand. It's also worth maybe five or six million gold - and that's based on the last time one sold, a whole two years ago.

Not that it's really worth that much, though; the thousand-folded boat of the eight immortals certainly has little supply, but there's also little demand. To most, it's little more than a rare collectible or trinket; to someone with the right skill set and a little knowledge, though, it's an incredible gift.