[Adelie]

The memory honestly is a really funny one, when you get past the initial frustration of going through twelve different bosses, each exponentially harder than the last, surviving multiple full-team wipes while you learned their mechanics, and finally landing the killing blow on the final one with just single-digit health on each of your teammates.

Almost forty-eight hours. She'd been proud of that.

And then, there had been nothing. Just an empty, featureless white room and a black void in the center of it, soaking light.

'See, it turns out the devs hadn't expected we'd actually finish all the runs immediately,' Chi explains. 'So the meta-boss hadn't even been added to the game yet. I don't think they'd even finished coding him.'

[Adelie]

'How does that even happen?' Ven asks, genuinely surprised. 'I mean, I guess I can understand that for like, an indie game? But this game's got a pretty big dev team, doesn't it?'

Chi shrugs a little, noncommittal, then remembers that doesn't convey much – or really, anything at all – over voice chat. 'Not sure,' she says. 'The game's always been pretty vague about the actual staff behind it. But we did have one of the devs reach out to us and apologize for the problem.'

'Did they say anything interesting?' Ven follows up.

'Very little,' Chi says. 'Just an apology, and that they really hadn't expected us to finish the miniquests so quickly. Apparently, they were very impressed.'

[Adelie]

'That's really cool,' Ven says. She hmms a little, as if she's unsure what to say next or how to phrase it. 'I kind of wish I'd had the chance to talk to a developer.'

'That's the same thing Zari said when he heard about it,' Chi says, laughing. He'd been so salty, and it had been a – well, it didn't seem correct to say it had been a treat to see someone so prototypically chill actually get annoyed, but it had definitely been funny. 'He'd fallen asleep at the computer right before the last boss, so we just did it without him. When he woke up, he was so mad about missing out.'

'You could say that you missed out on Zari missing out,' Nebula adds.

'I'm kicking you out of the party for that joke.'

[Adelie]

'Huh,' Ven muses. 'I didn't even know Zari could get mad.'

'There's a first for everything,' Chi says. 'I guess it's a developer thing? He really looks up to the people who made the game, so he was really disappointed to miss out. We told him he didn't miss out on much – it's not like they really talked to us, just apologized and left – but he was still frustrated.'

Her tea's almost run out again, with all this standing around and talking they've been doing. Force of habit, she supposes – she tends to take a sip or two whenever she talks. 'Anyways, now what?'

[Adelie]

'Wait for the devs to show up again?' Ven suggests, a little half-heartedly. 'Well – wait, how do we know it isn't implemented?'

'We don't,' Chi says, and then stops to think about that statement for a moment. 'Oh god, we don't. We've just been sitting here reminiscing about the past like decrepit old men, because why not.'

'I was just waiting for you to notice,' Nebula says – the very image of innocent, except for the part where she's just a voice in the microphone.

'I was just enjoying listening to the story,' Aster says. 'You like to talk when you're tired.'

[Adelie]

'Sheesh,' she hisses, more tired than venomous. It's not like that's wrong, exactly, and she does like telling stories about the 'good ol' days.' 'You could've said something.'

'Yes,' Aster says. 'I could've.'

She can't help but shake her head at that, just a little – it's exactly the kind of useless answer that she'd just-so-helpfully set herself up to receive. 'Well, it's all moot if this is actually unimplemented,' she says, thrusting one hand into the black void. Nothing happens; it's pointless except as a symbolic gesture, because they've already studied how much of 'you' needs to cross into a portal to count as crossing over, and a hand is certainly not enough for that. 'Let's find out, then?'

[Adelie]

She pauses after that, waiting for some kind of response or affirmation from her team – but they're almost unexpectedly quiet. Not the planned sort of quiet, either. Just an unfortunate, empty silence that no one really wants to break.

Ven laughs, suddenly. 'The way you said that – I honestly expected Nebs or Aster to push you in!'

'Oh,' Aster says. 'There goes my secret plan.'

'We can still push her in,' Nebula says, making absolutely no moves to do so.

'Don't talk about me like I'm not here,' Chi protests. 'That's not nice, you know?'

'We definitely should push her in,' Aster responds. 'She'll never see it coming now.'

[Adelie]

'I hate all of you,' Chi says, but she can't hide her smile; it's a good thing, really, that she's alone in her darkened room, with nothing but the stark light on her monitor to see her face.

It's so dumb. They're so dumb – these jokes aren't even particularly funny or innovative, or even ones she hasn't heard multiple times, before. But she laughs at them, enjoys them, smiles when she hears them because it's just different, really, when it's with a group of friends.

Warmth. That's what it is.

'So, are you guys going to push me in or not?' she asks. 'Don't be so coy.'

[Adelie]

'I've spent the past fifteen minutes punching a wall for our collective sakes,' Nebula says, with a bit of an amused snort. 'My arms are tired. Push yourself in.'

'Your arms aren't even real,' Chi retorts.

This entire conversation is pointless. There's no real way to push someone into a different area – you can try and it's certainly been done, but it's not an intended design and often doesn't work in expected ways. Aster likely knows the exact mechanics, because Aster knows anything that could ever possibly be used to screw over another player, but it's really not even worth investigating.

'Well, I'll see all of you on the flip side,' she says, and walks in.

[Adelie]

Darkness.

That makes it sound far more dramatic than it actually is. In this context, darkness isn't even marked by the absence of light – it's simply black, the color, displayed on her monitor. She can even see her hands, glowing in the faint reflection of the monitor.

For a while, the game had had loading splashes – pieces of art, mostly delicate watercolors of landscapes in the game – which appeared whenever you moved from one area to another. They'd been beautiful, yes, but Chi and the rest of the playerbase had quickly gotten tired of seeing them every time they wanted to do anything in the game.

[Adelie]

Luckily, the game devs must've gotten tired of looking at the loading splashes as well, because after a while, there had a been a series of patches devoted entirely to performance improvements. Apart from fixing a number of well-known bugs and pain points, there had been a noticeable reduction in the amount of time spent on loading screens when traveling within a region.

It had taken a few more patches after that, but eventually, loading times had improved to such levels that it only took mere milliseconds to move from one screen to another, and the loading splash was little more than a colorful blip.

People even started to complain about it – it was distracting to have something appear and disappear too fast for the eye to really process. Eventually, the loading splashes were quietly removed from the game.

[Adelie]

And thus, darkness.

She's surprised, of course – normally it doesn't take this long to move from one area to another. What usually takes a blink of an eye has been a good fifteen seconds, at least. If there hadn't already been a slow transition – when they'd entered the second stage of the battle – she honestly would've thought the game might've just crashed on her.

'Hello?' Aster brings her back from her thoughts. 'Any words from the other side? I hear the grass is greener there.'

'Nothing yet,' she says. 'Still on a loading screen. What are the chances I'll die if I go refill my teacup?'

[Adelie]

'Any luck?' Ven asks, breaking off from the conversation. She seems the least invested in the debate, after all.

Chi inspects her screen. 'Still loading – oh, hmm.' Now that she's looking at it again, she notices that her status bar and skill selections are visible on the HUD, but the screen itself still appears entirely black. 'Did I just not notice this before?'

'Notice what?' Ven asks.

'I seem to have moved areas successfully, but I can't see anything,' she says. That seems to be the most likely explanation, at least. 'Not sure what's going on.'

[Adelie]

[CLAN] Chi Squared: '[^2] testing 123'
[CLAN] Chi Squared: '[^2] Can anyone hear me, or am I typing into the void?'
[CLAN] nebu!a: '/// hi'

'Cool,' she says. 'Looks like everything's functional, just that nothing's showing up.'

'Maybe they forgot to implement graphics for the area?' Ven says, a little optimistically.

'Maybe,' Chi says. 'Let me try something first.' It's not much of a leap of logic – the whole quest so far has been about black mist, there's been a bunch of references to darkness, it's all pointing at the obvious. And for once, it seems like the 'light' spell is actually going to serve a purpose.

[Adelie]

She flips through her spells, a little absently – the game might pride itself on its realism, especially in its environments, but it also understands that practicality and convenience are important to keeping around an active playerbase.

No one wants to have to constantly scramble for light sources at night, in the same way that no one wants to have to deal with your character getting hungry or thirsty every few hours, or falling asleep from exhaustion when you decide to play for too many hours in a row.

And so – there'd never been much of a demand for a spell that just provided a light source. A few dungeons, here and there, had stages that light made easier, though, so she'd shoved it into a spellbook somewhere for future use.