When Calvin finally showed up, I couldn’t help but sigh in relief.

  Before Bobby and I could deal with the Shedd Aquarium, I had so much to do, and Calvin was exactly the person I needed to help me do it.

  The three of us—Calvin, Jessica, and I—sat on the Field Museum’s steps, with the swirling fog gate to the Reliquary of Bones only a few feet away. It wasn’t comfortable, but the only chair in the sloped room had been destroyed by the fight with Saul, and no one would have wanted to sit on a throne anyway.

  “This is the first meeting of the Museumtown Council,” Jessica said. “On the agenda is dealing with human needs in our community, finding an alternative source of food, and…dungeons.” She said the last part with a certain amount of vitriol.

  Calvin had managed to level up a few times in the days he’d been gone—to Level Seventeen. He was almost a respectable level—almost. He snorted. “Food’s easy. Found at least a dozen coolers while I was looking for those kids—untouched ones. I’ll show some of the folks who don’t want to clear dungeons where they’re at. They can bring the food back here, and we’ll be set. Can’t move the coolers, though. They’re stuck. I tried.”

  Jessica looked at Calvin with a mix of annoyance and relief. “Thank you. Back to our first point, though. Human needs.”

  “Hold up,” Calvin said. He looked pretty much the same as he had the day I’d met him, but his gaze was locked on Jessica’s like a falcon on a mouse. She couldn’t look away. “I know what you want from me. It ain’t gonna work the way you think it will.”

  “And what do we want from you?” Jessica asked.

  Calvin smiled. “You want me to drill sergeant this camp into shape. Here’s the thing, though. Not everyone has it. The military drive. I can propose ideas for how the best base commandants did it in the jungle, but I can’t make it happen. Neither can you, huh?”

  “No,” Jessica said. “They don’t listen.”

  “You’re missing command structure. Orders have to come from someone who knows what they hell they’re talking about, but they have to come from someone people respect even more. Right now, these damn levels are screwing us both over. We need to either change the numbers or change how people see them.”

  I nodded. “What do you think?”

  “I think you grab the strongest couple of people you can find and tomorrow, you check out that aquarium. I’d say that guy you said you ran with yesterday, and Tori if Ms. Silvers wouldn’t try to kill me for it. If that dungeon breaks, you either lose Museumtown or everyone in it loses their sense of safety. But if you keep them safe and make it obvious you’re doing it, we all get some pull with them.”

  Jessica’s glare could have bored through Calvin. He met her look with a raised eyebrow. “I’m not asking you to sacrifice Tori. I’m just saying she’s got expertise, she’s in the top four or five most powerful in Museumtown, and most importantly, she’ll listen to Hal. He’ll keep her safe. Right, Hal?”

  “Absolutely.”

  She hesitated. Then she nodded. Once. “Only if you promise me that unless there’s a possible dungeon-break or you can’t leave, you’ll get her out as soon as you can. That means you either peek in and kick her out as soon as you know it’s safe or you fight as little as you can before you’re allowed to leave.”

  She didn’t have to say that if Tori died, it’d all be on me. I could feel that in every breath and every pass of her narrowed eyes.

  “What about the United Center break?” I asked. “Do we need to deal with it?”

  “Maybe, but right now, our priority has to be keeping Museumtown safe,” Calvin said. “Mission creep’s pretty typical—and pretty disastrous. We all know it. Let’s stay focused on our priorities here.”

  “Which, now that we’re committing people to the aquarium, should be making this a functional community,” Jessica interrupted.

  I sighed. This was going to be a long conversation.

  The rest of the conversation was about those basic needs; Calvin eventually agreed to play drill sergeant to Jessica’s firm civilian leader. None of us wanted to call it good cop/bad cop after Saul, and when Tori—who’d just walked in—suggested it from the corner, we hit her with a combined glare so hard that she said, “Okay, whatever, I’ll go find Zane and Carol. See you later.”

  The key was at 19/30 to charge its defensive ability. If Bobby, Tori, and I could clear the Shedd Aquarium dungeon, it’d hit twenty, but after that, it’d be waiting for dungeons to reset and getting Calvin’s militia of Delvers to clear more.

  I begged off the rest of the meeting, but before I went, I looked Jessica in the eye. “You’re sure about letting me take Tori?”

  “No, Mister Riley, I’m not.” She took a deep breath but didn’t look away. “I’m scared. This integration stuff’s messing with what I know about keeping families and communities together, and I don’t like it at all.”

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  “I’ll bring her back.” It felt like an inadequate thing to say, but it was all I could think of.

  “You’d better.”

  I headed for the door, leaving Jessica and Calvin to figure out the details of keeping Museumtown running for the next couple of weeks.

  Truthfully, I’d rather have stayed. I was curious about how they were planning to make this work, because to me, a city or community had always felt like a machine with a lot of parts that were both redundant and impossible to get rid of. The experiment they were about to start felt a lot like trying something new to get a car to start up; there was a checklist, but in the end, it came down to tinkering until something clicked or stood out.

  The System changed everything about that, though, because everyone knew how powerful everyone else was. Now, if someone wanted to get part of the town working on something, they either needed to be powerful, know someone who was powerful, or try to get people to trust them in spite of their weakness. Power mattered so much more in this world than it had before the tutorials.

  Or did it? The way power was wielded, and who had it, had definitely changed, and that mattered, but to me, power was the same as it had always been. It was a way to solve a problem quickly and efficiently—both in terms of tools and in terms of what they did. Right now, I was probably the most powerful person in Museumtown. Bobby could give me a run for my money, but once I filled the Warrior’s Sheath slot with a new piece of equipment, that would change.

  The place my power would do the most good was in solving problems, just like it always had been—whether those problems were station wagons, Ford Explorers, or the possibility of a Tier Two Dungeon boss spilling out of the Shedd Aquarium and onto Museumtown’s streets.

  But before that, I needed more tools in the kit—just like I’d needed others to deal with Saul.

  “Hey Tori, how big is the Shedd Aquarium?” I asked.

  She was hanging out with Carol and Zane. Neither looked much better, but even the healing a chance to clean up had done something to pull them out of their fight or flight brains. Still, they looked exhausted and shell-shocked, so it was a surprise when Carol said, “Pretty big. Took us a full day to explore, and we missed some things, but Zane kept going slow and doubling back.”

  “I wanted to see all the eels. Did you know they and sharks both sense other animals in the water through electrical pulse senses?” Zane said listlessly.

  Tori only shrugged. “Carol’s right. If you’re planning on clearing it, you’ll need to be ready for a long haul, especially because there’s absolutely no way it’s not a water dungeon.”

  I waited, an eyebrow raised, until she continued. “Look, every game tries a water dungeon. It’s always flooded, and the gimmick is either draining it, finding a way to breathe underwater, or finding a movement item or power so you can get from air pocket to air pocket before you drown. They’re never fun, but everyone always remembers them. The Legend of Zelda one’s supposed to be the hardest—the Water Temple. The thing is, there’s always a gimmick in the games.”

  “Think the Consortium put one in the aquarium?” I asked.

  She shook her head and rolled her eyes. “Probably. There’s always a gimmick in these games. Usually figuring out how to breathe. Why? You going to clear it?”

  “Maybe,” I said noncommittally. I had more business to take care of before I told Tori the truth, and it’d be harder to get the twins to take me seriously if she was losing her mind off to the side. “We’ve got to check it, at least, and make sure it’s not the kind of dungeon that breaks.”

  Then I turned to the twins. “Zane, Carol, I’m going to need your help. You don’t have to leave Museumtown to do it, and you won’t have to fight, but you two are the only ones I trust to get it done.”

  “What?” Zane asked.

  “I need you to walk around behind Calvin and Jessica and stand there.”

  No one said anything for a moment. Then Carol snorted. “Really?”

  “Really. Look, the previous guy who ran this place was high-level. No one questioned him. I’m powerful enough that a lot of people listen to me when they see the forty-six next to my name. But neither of them are interested in leveling. Maybe they’ll find some other way to earn experience. I don’t know. What I do know is that if they have two or three people in the mid-thirties, people will take them more seriously.”

  I hadn’t talked to either Calvin or Jessica about this. Instead, I’d come up with the plan while I looked for Tori. The idea was simple; in this world, power mattered. Jessica and Calvin didn’t have that power—but they could borrow it. When I was around, I was happy to act as the muscle, but if Tori and Carol were right, we could be in the Shedd Aquarium dungeon for a day or two. Worse, it’d be right when Calvin and Jessica needed me around the most.

  I also needed to get Zane and Carol engaged and moving. The worst thing for them would be to wallow; they could mourn Brian and the others who’d been in their tutorial, but they needed to feel productive. When Beth had disappeared, I’d moped for a while, and it hadn’t helped.

  This would be a win/win.

  They both looked hesitant, and that same unspoken dialogue flew back and forth between them as I waited.

  “What do we get out of it?” Carol asked after a minute.

  I hadn’t expected that answer. “Honestly? I’m not sure. But you two shouldn’t be leaving the town by yourselves, and you can’t just sit and wait.”

  “We wouldn’t be. Tori’s going to team up with us for dungeons,” Carol said.

  “You didn’t waste any time asking them, did you?” I asked Tori, then kept going when she rolled her eyes. “Okay, yeah, Tori and I talked about the three of you clearing Tier Ones, but things have changed. The dungeon break issue is serious.”

  I took a deep breath before continuing. “In fact, it’s serious enough that she’s going with us.”

  Carol started to say something, but before she could, Tori exploded.

  “I’m what!?” She kept going, steamrolling me as I tried to interrupt and get control of the conversation again. “Hold on, let’s see, water dungeon, we usually prep for that with water breathing potions, but that’s not a thing. Do any of you know any water mages? No? How about—Burnham Harbor! One of those ships has to have scuba gear on it. We’ll at least be able to prep for until we find the gimmick.”

  “Didn’t you just say it was underwater breathing?” Zane asked.

  “Shhh! Don’t break my concentration!” Tori snapped. She kept right on talking, already standing up and heading for the nearby marina to loot boats until she found what she wanted.

  I shrugged as she disappeared. “So, are you two interested in helping us out?”

  Carol nodded slowly. “With Jessica and Calvin? Sure. But I’m not fighting anyone.”

  I glanced at Zane as he nodded, but his face had changed. It wasn’t blank and empty anymore, and his nod was half-hearted. When I looked more closely, though, the look was gone, leaving me to wonder if I was imagining things.

  “You’ve got a lot to do before the aquarium,” Carol said. “You can count on us, though.”

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