Book Six, Chapter 28: Drinks!

“Say what you will about Dr. Andrew Hughes, but the man does keep his head, even in the most perilous of situations,” Logan said with a smirk, raising his glass. “To Andrew.”

Logan rarely actually drank, but tonight was an exception. We were in the restaurant downstairs from the Loft, Grain Matter. Their team had only returned hours before. They were weary and tired, but they didn’t want to sleep.

They wanted food. Real food.

“To Andrew!” Antoine, Kimberly, Michael, and the others cheered.

“Very funny,” Andrew said. I got the sense there was an inside joke somewhere, because Andrew distinctly looked like he was being teased.

“Oh, come on,” Isaac said. “Why are you acting so crabby?”

Andrew looked at him and said plainly, “I’m craving nicotine. It may be the worst craving I’ve ever had in my life.”

That did explain some things. He looked green.

“But you don’t smoke,” Cassie said. Both she and Isaac looked concerned for their brother. He had always been the responsible one.

“I’ve never touched it in my life,” Andrew said, “but my character did, and he was craving it every moment of every day.”

That struck me as odd. It wasn’t unprecedented for a player to get information like that about their character, but the type of player who could do that usually wasn’t analytical or logical like Andrew. They were usually emotional and empathetic, like Kimberly.

But still, it was a little funny. I felt sorry for him.

The storyline they had run was not over-leveled for them. Most of them had gained a single stat ticket, except for Antoine and Lila, who got two.

Both Antoine and Kimberly had even gotten rescues. Antoine’s was a more run-of-the-mill case called Baseline Anomaly, where he could investigate the cover-up of one of his old friends’ deaths, where the official story didn’t match what Antoine knew of them.

Something in the vein of, “He couldn’t have drowned in that river. He was always cautious. He would never risk taking that path.”

That sort of thing.

Kimberly’s was a trope called Breath into the Franchise, which allowed her to revive and star in a dead franchise. It was also straightforward.

The run was a success.

Still, though they may have been smiling and cheering and throwing back a few cocktails, they looked genuinely disturbed any time they spoke about their storyline.

It must have been pretty bad because my team was doing all right, and we had literally gone to hell.

Bobby had gotten down to the restaurant late because he had to put his dogs back up on the roof.

He sat next to an NPC named Jules. She had gone on the storyline with them due to the effect of his trope, The Bickering Duo, which gave him a partner for his assumed NPC duties. We weren’t sure about it, but the Atlas spoke highly of tropes like that.

Jules was a character in every sense of the word, outspoken, funny, and domineering. She would never tell us about her real background, although she seemed to imply she was part of a military unit stationed on an alien planet at some point in time.

Though she may have been messing with us.

She was in her fifties but remained in great physical shape. She wore short, spiky blonde hair and military fatigues, but that might have been from the storyline they were on. I wasn’t sure.

“If you had died, I would have missed you,” she said to Bobby after he finally came down to the table. “At least until someone else got my trope. But even then, I’d miss the dogs.”

“Thanks,” Bobby said. He took a deep breath. It would seem that she took the bickering part of The Bickering Duo very seriously.

“I’d just have to hope my next player knows how to drive a stick,” she said.

“I do!” Bobby said. “I told you, the bridge was collapsing. No one can drive a vehicle vertically.”

“Well, if you had been driving in the right gear like I told you, we would have been halfway to that supply depot before the bridge collapsed, and we could have avoided that whole dodging-rocks-while-climbing-the-broken-bridge scene.”

Jules buttered her rolls excessively before eating them.

“Miss,” she said, flagging down a nearby waitress. “My friend here ordered the red-eye gravy. This looks like the standard brown.”

“It’s fine,” Bobby said.

“No, you ordered the red-eye.” She continued talking to the waitress. “Can you go ahead and get us a replacement? And some more rolls and butter while you’re at it? Thanks a bunch.”

The waitress apologized and walked back toward the kitchen.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

“You didn’t have to do that,” Bobby said.

“Life is full of things you don’t have to do. A full life is one where you do them anyway. Now slide over that extra roll you have there while it’s still hot. I intend to eat my weight in butter before I have to go back to the barracks.”

Bobby passed her the roll, as commanded.

My mind wandered back to their run. Had things gone poorly, or was this just normal post-storyline trauma bonding?

I tried making eye contact with Kimberly, as if to ask her nonverbally if things had gone wrong, but she was dejected and giving all of her attention to Antoine.

It was kind of funny.

The two groups had both gone on fantastical and horrific adventures, and yet we couldn’t actually tell each other about them. Because there was a real chance that we would each need to run the other storyline at some point in time, and we couldn’t risk spoilers.

Still, each time the topic of Antoine Stone and the Sunken Cradle came up, there was a palpable uneasiness. A fear. Something unspoken.

Camden had picked up on the same things I had and had gone up to get the Atlas. He shoved the book in front of Antoine and Kimberly and flipped to the spoiler section, which he was careful not to look at himself.

“Does the storyline you played line up with this?” he asked.

“Man, I don’t know,” Antoine said, not even wanting to look down at it. “I don’t want to think about that cradle ever again.”

Antoine must have done well, because in one storyline, just one, he had not only started tracking the Adventurer advanced archetype, but gotten five points in it.

He was halfway to achieving it.

Now, part of that was explained by Athletes being very predisposed to the Adventurer advanced archetype, which covered things like the athletic aspect of exploration, with tropes related to climbing, cave diving, and general outdoor survival.