Horse begrudgingly made his way outside and to the stables while Apollo, Athena, and Pan headed to their rooms.

  The three of them were standing before one of their rooms when Athena said, “Good night. I’ll see you both in the morning.”

  Apollo looked between her and Pan. “I thought we were going to share a room,” he said to his sister.

  She scoffed. “No, you get the room with Pan. I need my rest, and I’m not getting any if you’re in here.”

  “What does that mean?” he asked, offended.

  “You’re a big boy now. If we were still kids, it would be a different matter. Now give me the key, and you and Pan go right off and stay in your little room. Is it this one?” she pointed at a door adjacent.

  “No, he gave us the one at the other end of the hall,” he gestured vaguely down the corridor as he passed the iron key to her. The inn wasn’t big, so one could see the far wall of this straight boarding room hallway.

  Pan noticed Apollo didn’t mention anything about not wanting to sleep in the same room as Pan, but considering the monster attack in the grove, he suspected it was at least part of the reason for Apollo wanting to sleep in a room with his sister.

  “Then you won’t be far. Good night.” She disappeared into the room.

  Apollo sighed. “There’s no arguing with her. C’mon Pan.”

  Inside the room was one large bed. Its blankets were rough and threadbare, and the mattress was more of the same, folded up into layers to provide some cushioning from the hard surface.

  Why even bother with the bed if we don’t get a proper mattress? Pan wondered wryly.

  There was a small wash basin, like a bathroom sink, but no water. The window in the wall was cracked, but had no gaping holes in the glass. At the foot of the bed was a wooden trunk. The room was lit not by candles, but shards of the glowing crystals held in specially constructed stands. While the crystals glowed continuously, they could be lowered into metal sleeves thereby dampening the light.

  And that was it for furniture. The room was shockingly sparse, yet still more than Pan had expected.

  There was a sudden tenseness, he realized, over there being only one bed. He found himself wanting Apollo to offer to sleep on the floor.

  He’s probably waiting for me to say the same.

  “You couldn’t have gotten us three bedrooms?” Pan found himself asking.

  Apollo shook his head. “They seemed hung up over Horse being with us. I think they were worried we were going to insist he got a room. I couldn’t talk them up to a third.”

  Pan felt like he wasn’t being entirely honest, with how he’d assumed he would be sharing a room with Athena. He walked to the window, ignoring the bed for now.

  “Well, at least we can see the stables.” The window didn’t slide up on rails, like he’d expected. That would be too modern, he thought. Instead, it was on hinges and swung outward. He unlatched it and pushed it open. Horse was just making his way inside, but cautiously. “I think he’s a bit skittish about undead monsters,” Pan mentioned over his shoulder to Apollo, who was now sitting on the bed and taking off his sandals.

  “I don’t think Athena’s going to trust him as much, considering how he ran off.” The way he said it sounded like he wasn’t just speaking for his sister, though he didn’t explicitly give away his feelings about the trust he did or did not hold towards the centaur.

  “He’s just a kid,” Pan said. “He might be a centaur in the game now, but I don’t think that sped up his development.”

  “Oh yeah,” Apollo said as though light was dawning, “In the grove, you acted like you knew each other. What’d you call him? Tim?”

  Pan felt immediately like he’d made a mistake. I’ve gone and given these people Tim’s real name. Do I really want to break this anonymity? We could be working with these siblings for a while yet. It would be odd not to trust them with our real names.

  “I’ve never met him in person,” Pan lied. “I don’t know if Tim is his real name. It’s part of the handles he uses on other platforms. TimDestroyer, Your_Tim_Is_Up… Things like that. But we’ve been friends online for a few years.”

  “I never thanked you. He might have killed me. You probably saved my life.”

  Pan made a non-committal gesture.

  Horse, done inspecting the stall he had been assigned, started the arduous process of backing into the slim area. Pan waved at him, catching his attention, and he instead trotted over to the window.

  “Ugh. It’s clammy out here dude.”

  “Not much better in here,” Pan said, “I’m gonna wake up with moss growing in my hair.”

  “Hey, you guys got blankets?” he pushed his head in past Pan, eyes set on the bed.

  Apollo wordlessly dug through the so-called mattress, then said, “Looks like we’ve got four of these. If Athena’s room is the same-“

  “Hey yeah, where is she?” Horse asked.

  “She put us guys together,” Pan explained. “Looks like you don’t have any neighbors to worry about,” he commented, pointing out the lack of undead horses in Horse’s part of the stall.

  “I’ll go see if I can bum another couple blankets off her,” Apollo said. He left the room.

  Horse continued. “I don’t have any utility cards for sleeping dude. You got anything good?”

  Pan shook his head. “If you need to draw something with some chalk, I got you covered.”

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  Horse screwed his face up.

  Pan took the opportunity to change the subject. “So what are you doing in this game anyway?”

  The centaur looked sheepish. “Well, you talked it up so much…” he muttered.

  “You criticized the card combat. It’s just an MMO with random access to abilities, remember?”

  Horse jabbed the air with a finger. “Hey, I was right about that part dude. You add these cards to your deck, but then you gotta draw into them to use them.”

  Pan rolled his eyes. “That’s part of the challenge. It’s a deck-builder. You’re supposed to remove the junk cards as you go. Slim it down to a specific build.”

  “Yeah, well, look how well that’s going for you, dude.”

  Pan snorted. “I screwed up. If I hadn’t killed that stupid deer…” He began to explain indignantly to Horse the early events of his time in the game.

  When his rant was over, all Horse said was, “That’s rough, dude.” And Apollo returned to the room.

  The scholar carried a folded blanket, as grey and coarse as any already on the bed. This he passed to the centaur through the window.

  “She didn’t give me a blanket. I had to buy this from the innkeeper,” he said, sounding disgruntled.

  “Aww hell yeah,” Horse said as he took the folded blanket. “I’ll see you guys in the morning. I’m getting what shut-eye I can get out here.” And with that he retreated to the stall again.

  Apollo and Pan lingered in their room awkwardly.

  “I’ll take the floor,” Pan said, “if you’ll give me two blankets.”

  Apollo looked a bit ashamed before saying, “We can alternate. You get the bed one night, then I get it the next. There’s no telling how long we’ll be in this town, so we’ll be back to sleeping outside before we know it. You should get a bit of actual bed rest , too, even if there’s nothing we can do for Horse.”

  Pan considered this before nodding. “Alright. We’ll do that.”

  They divvied up the blankets, and Pan made a bed roll on the floor in front of the basin while Apollo did similarly on the bed.

  Neither went to sleep immediately. Pan was drawn to looking at his deck in his menu.

  I should study these cards to prepare for these effects.

  One by one, he looked at the descriptions of the cards, loosely ranking them as he went. Some were nothing but negative, like Fumble and Slow. Some had mixed results, useful in certain cases if one could offset the negatives, like Wheel. Drawing cards as he played them was starkly different from how the game typically went, but while he gave up the ability to draw five and select three, it meant he could combo better.

  Some cards had passive effects while they were in hand, and some were played immediately. Yet more still had effects that played from his deck.

  Wait, what? he thought, looking at a curse called Feast of Tantalus. The description said the card would trigger from his deck whenever he would activate a Prepared Food utility card. Why hadn’t this activated at dinner tonight?

  Pan flipped to his utility card inventory and looked at the food cards. There were the Traveler’s Rations, of which he had several, and the singular Breakfast of Champions. The Breakfast of Champions did indeed have a sub-type, Prepared Food. The rations were type Rations.

  I’m glad I didn’t use this breakfast card yet, he thought.

  When Feast of Tantalus activated, which it would do when Pan tried to use a Prepared Food Utility card, it would summon a random monster up to Pan’s level plus three, and then the card would-

  What does it mean when it says it will Evaporate? Pan wondered.

  Apollo hadn’t yet gone to sleep and was instead playing with the tablet that came with the Scholar class.

  “What does it mean when a card Evaporates?” he asked.

  “Hrm?” Apollo said, his attention shifting to conversation, “Evaporate? It sounds like a key word. Let me search the card index. I might have seen a few already.”

  “You can do that?”

  “Yeah. It’s part of the tablet’s features.” He tapped around on the scroll-looking device with his stylus. “I’ve only seen a few, and one appears to be a curse card.” He held the tablet up for Pan to see.

  Pan’s mind went immediately to the usefulness of this tablet. We can’t see each other’s cards unless we use them, but with this thing we might be able to get around that.

  To Apollo he said, “How does it work? You have to see the card for it to be logged?”

  The Scholar bobbed his head side to side, uncertainly, “Kinda. I have to either draw the card, or be in proximity of the card being activated, I think. There might be other ways, too.”

  Pan looked at the search results for cards with Evaporate. There was indeed one purple curse card among them. It was called Nightmare. He read the description and immediately wished he hadn’t.

  “So it really was my fault that we were attacked in the grove,” he said sadly.

  Apollo put the tablet away and rolled over to look at the faun. “Aww, c’mon. You couldn’t have known. And Athena and I, we’re both fine.”

  Except if I had actually studied what cards that goddess gave me. Except if I hadn’t been cursed in the first place. Except if I hadn’t gone and tried this stupid game out while I was at work.

  His mind filled with negatives and self-blame.

  “Pan, there’s nothing you can do about it now,” Apollo said sternly. “So you’re going to stop all that self pity going on right now. We need to get some sleep anyway, so you can’t let this thing hang over you like a dark cloud.”

  “It’s still my fault,” he started.

  “Listen to me. You couldn’t help it. You need to forgive yourself. I recognize what you’re doing. You’re spiraling. You can’t give in to the spiral or it’s going to pull you down and you’re going to waste all your energy on making yourself feel bad.”

  “I broke you guys’ trust,” he said. He felt miserable. The weight of his tiredness hitting him all at once.

  Pan had once seen a time-lapse of a decaying deer in a documentary. The events of several days happened in minutes as the camera crew had recorded the corpse from death until it was nothing but bones.

  The corpse of the deer had first inflated – likely due to the gases of decomposition – as bugs swarmed in and out of its orifices. But after it had inflated, and as the bugs did their work, the skin shrank, caving in where there had once been muscle and internal organs, shrink-wrapping the bones in its own skin.

  This is how Pan felt, like he was deflating and rotting. He was tired, and his shame, guilt, and self-pity were uniting against him in his weakened state. He felt trapped for the first time since he had come into this world, a jinx on Athena, Apollo, and Horse. Each of his poor decisions piled on top until it felt like there was a car balanced on his sternum.

  Apollo was right. He was spiraling, but he didn’t know how to come out of it. And what’s worse, he was spiraling over what he thought was the stupidest thing. He clenched and unclenched his fists as he lay on his bed roll, digging his fingernails into his palm.

  “Pan, for what it’s worth, I forgive you. You didn’t do anything wrong. You slipped up, but you slipped up when the rules changed on you. They changed on all of us.” Apollo didn’t shout these words, but said them quietly, firmly.

  Pan felt like he was going to cry, which made him more angry at himself. He’s right, it’s not my fault, he thought. But it didn’t make him feel any better for it. It felt him now stripped of agency, tossed about by forces beyond his control.

  “Isn’t that just the way of it?” he lamented, “First I’m denied the supervisor role because of obvious nepotism, then I lose to the bureaucracy when I try and update my driver’s license, and now I put us all in danger due to a technicality.”

  Apollo shook his head. “You’ll get through it,” he encouraged. “You’ve got us now. I don’t know what was going on in your life before this, but we need you, ok? I don’t know how, but we need you. We’re going to get through this together.”

  Pan felt like he was being selfish now. Apollo’s words felt like empty platitudes, but then he realized Apollo didn’t have to stay awake for him.

  He felt his spirits lift, ever so slightly. He wasn’t selfish. He wasn’t the only one going through this, but maybe he could afford himself some grace. “You all would probably be better off without me.”

  “We’re not leaving you, Pan. We need all the help we can get.”

  Pan, still laying on his bed roll, took a few deep breaths. His mood was regulating again. He felt a little silly, making such a big deal about all of it, but he found he was coming out of the spiral. He didn’t say anything to Apollo, but nodded.

  “Now let’s get some sleep,” Apollo said, “We’ve got to figure out what we’ve got to do about all of this tomorrow.” He lowered the crystal into the sleeve of its stand, plunging the room into darkness.

  “Hey, Apollo?”

  “Yeah Pan?”

  “Can you not tell anyone about this?”

  “Sure, buddy. I’ll keep this just between us.”