Alex sat in the computer lounge and sent his last email—just a quick hello to his parents. It felt strange after a weekend in the village. Two weeks ago he had shuddered at the thought of spending a whole weekend without his phone, now it felt a little weird to sit in front of a computer.

  He slid his arm back into his sling and stood up. Picking up his bag he strolled back into the Undercity lounge, making his way to the coffee maker. He was already back in his Earth clothes and was just waiting for everyone else to make their way down before they all headed back together.

  Finding a comfortable chair near the wall he sipped his coffee and just watched the various groups of people hanging out in the large space. There were a few small groups of people just sitting and chatting amongst the loose islands of furniture scattered across the room, and a larger group was playing a board game that Alex had never seen before but seemed to use a lot of dice.

  He felt disconnected from it all. Not just this space, but from everything. From his normal life. He wondered how long the feeling was going to last. Days probably. He secretly wished the ANIP could speed up this type of healing too.

  ANIP. After their first weeks of training it had made him faster and stronger and had taught combat skills like he’d been practicing them for months. He had to remind himself that it had been enough to keep them alive in the forest, if only just.

  But neither the ANIP, nor any of their classes so far, had prepared him to deal with the feelings that came with intense danger, or this one that lingered long after the danger had passed.

  What was he supposed to do with it? How did all these adventurers live with the knowledge that every fight might be the one that ended them? Or their best friend? How did they just set that aside and come down here and play a board game like they weren’t going to go out and face it again tomorrow?

  He thought of Reach again. Of the upper year adventurers—of Marcus and Kieran and their teams. Of Rowan Wylder and the Wylde Bunch and all their stories of battling crazy monsters in the lands to the east…

  Did they carry all this weight every day? Did it fade with time? Or did you just get used to it?

  Alex had no idea and could only hope that what he was feeling would fade over the coming days.

  He held out one hand and pulled at the mana that floated around him, even down here, below the village. Slowly, gently. It felt like using a muscle, as if he were pulling it with his fingers. As he watched, the mana swirled and collected on his palm. He swirled it around his fingers and palm. To him it looked like little golden-green fireflies dancing around his hand.

  Up until this point he had been interacting with magic mostly instinctually. But there had to be more that he could do with it. He was going to have to figure out a plan to find and test whatever limits there were with magic in this world.

  In the forest, and before, he had mostly created simple shapes like a spear, a mallet or a flat piece of wall and he wanted to know if he could form something more complex. He looked at the energy floating around his palm and started compressing it, wondering idly how people managed to do this when they couldn’t even see the mana.

  He thought about a set of dice. Square wasn’t exactly complicated, but he had only created a single item at a time so far. He felt a pressure fighting him like an invisible rubber band trying to pull all the mana away. He forced a little more of his own pressure back, although he doubted whether he could explain to anyone else how he did it. His hand started to shake gently as he watched the mana twist and buck on his palm, he was going to need more recovery time before he tried anything overly complex again.

  After a few moments, the mana solidified and settled into two gray cubes. He smiled. There were no pips and the colour was a strange gray, but he had created two separate objects at once. No one was going to mistake these for dice; he had been focusing too much on the shape maybe, but he was happy with the result.

  Creating shapes was interesting, but he wanted more. Fireballs and magic missiles would be classic and epic but he had no idea if that fantasy concept of magic was even possible here. Right now he could craft shapes, so the logical next step was to figure out how to make these shapes do things, like explode. Or maybe act corrosive?

  He unthunk the dice. Willing them apart while still trying to hold onto the mana itself. He pushed at it until the dice dissolved and all he could see was mana again, swirling in his palm. Could he alter a shape once it was created? Probably since he seemed to be able to undo something. That might be an important step in having his creations ‘do something’ else. He would have to experiment later though. His hand was shaking worse now and he released the mana back into the air, watching as it slowly floated away.

  That was his external magic. It was like sculpting shapes with stiff clay—effective, especially if he could make it pointy, but awkward to hold onto for long. It required constant attention and effort. It made him tired too fast, especially when holding larger shapes. He wondered whether he would be able to build up a stamina for it, and felt that must be correct—he had already been using more energy for longer periods of time than on his first attempts.

  There was so much to figure out about shaping mana already, but there was a completely different kind of magic, or use of magic, that he still didn’t understand. An internal magic.

  It had been easy enough for him to see how it was used. By the millipedes, boars, or the bear. Or even Hiro. He could see auras when he focused, which had something to do with how people and animals internalized mana. Or maybe that was a personal energy everyone had and the mana just enhanced it.

  He could also see when things circulated mana internally. Not like an xray vision or anything, but he could see it ripple through that aura layer. See how it was pushed out into the body, at least in the case of the animals, to perform feats beyond the normal. The animals weren’t casting spells. They weren’t shaping the mana intelligently. They were spamming an inherited ability that just happened to be powered by an internal pool of mana.

  Alex frowned slightly.

  To make his external magic work, he had to exert a lot of force or energy. But all those animals just seemed to use their powers instinctually. Maybe for internal magics, control wasn’t the point?

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  But that couldn’t be what Hiro was doing. He was directing something consciously. He chose when to activate his new ability and when to stop it. When Alex had thrown out his energy punches at Connor and then, later, the bear, he had hardly thought about it, but he had consciously wanted to hurt. So was he using it more like Hiro, or the animals?

  He shook his head. He was going around in circles. He felt like he was standing outside the system looking in. Like he could see all the wires and dials and if he could just follow all them back to the source, or peek at the codebase, he’d be able to understand it all better. But he didn’t even have the right words for what he was thinking, let alone any idea where to start. He only had a vague sense that there must be another way of doing this.

  He didn’t know how, but he needed to figure out how to understand the underlying system itself. Then he should have a better idea of how to move forward learning all this more efficiently and what his outputs were. Learn better control over the process at the very least.

  A faint flicker at the edge of his vision pulled Alex’s attention back to the present.

  His HUD stuttered, the translucent overlay briefly dissolving into static before returning to normal. A warning icon flashed, then disappeared before he could focus on it.

  Alex frowned and brought up a diagnostics panel he had previously found within the menus. Latency spikes and minor subsystem errors cascaded across the display still. He scrolled back through the data to see where it had started, although he already knew. It was something the bear had done.

  He had checked with some of the others and they were all experiencing issues with their HUDs. Everyone’s problems were all a little different, but consistently glitchy. Alex very much doubted that the bear had somehow developed an EMP type skill in the time that Alpha Base had been around, so it had to be something else.

  He thought about how hard it had been to control his magic—his external magic—whenever the bear pulsed. And it hadn’t been just a wave of disruption, it had been some kind of continued disruption.

  Maybe that ability was key to how the bear hunted. Everything here seemed to be able to internalize mana. Everything he had come across so far anyway. So maybe getting close and preventing other creatures from using their own powers was the bear's niche. Some sort of anti-magic or blanket counter spell. For the boars that would have meant no extreme bursts of speed.

  Alex didn’t know, but the idea that he could ‘cast’ a counterspell was a pretty appealing thought.

  Alex expanded the logs on his HUD, scanning through lines of data, a little surprised this level of access was even available to them. The engineers probably figured none of the adventurers would care about it. The interface lagged slightly as he scrolled through the data, another flicker of static rippling across his vision.

  There was a lot of interesting data, but he was just too tired to make sense of it all. He was going to have to spend more time looking over the logs later. After a solid night of sleep preferably.

  The question was going to be, is it broken now? And, he supposed, are there other things out there that can cause similar problems? In a lot of ways, the ANIP was their superpower in this world. If they lost access to it, even for a little while, it could really hurt them in the field.

  He closed the diagnostic logs and thought about the level of access he seemed to have and wondered what other doors the engineers here may have left behind. He wouldn’t be surprised if there was more. He knew from others that there was a wide range of customization features and figured the creators simply left a lot of open access for their convenience. The ANIP was a work in progress after all, with new versions coming out every few months.

  That idea actually made him a little uncomfortable now that he thought more about it. It was a work in progress embedded directly into his bio system after all.

  After a moment he shrugged. There wasn’t much he could do about that now, and if he were to be honest with himself, he would do it again in a heartbeat. He had never felt so strong, so capable, so in control of himself as he did now and he knew the ANIP was a driving factor in that change. Besides, if he could figure out how to interface with the chip, maybe he could add some of his own customizations or features.

  “Alex!” Jay stepped into the room, hair still damp from the showers. Alex waved at him. Jay walked over, smiling, looking a lot better than Alex felt.

  “What a weekend,” Jay said, smile faltering for just a moment. “I never thought I’d say this, but I’m actually glad to be heading back to classes tomorrow.”

  “Not me. I’m done.” Alex said quietly.

  Jay looked startled and Alex checked his tone, smiled and explained. “Not with school… Just with classes. I have an appointment with the registrar tomorrow. I’m switching to online learning moving forward.” Alex had been thinking about the change for a week now, and although today's experiences had made him pause, he knew it was still the right decision.

  “Wow, big change. Can you stay in residence if you go all online though?” Jay asked as he threw himself down onto one of the larger couches.

  “No, this will be my last week back on Earth for a while. I haven’t told anyone yet, but apparently we’ll have our own Guild Hall mostly finished by next weekend. Valentina gave me some sketches I can show you on the bus, but there are rooms on the third floor. I’m going to stay there after our training period. For a while anyway.”

  Jay stared at him for a few moments, absorbing all the new information. “You’re two steps ahead of me still. I can see the appeal. Honestly, its really hard to focus on school with all of Earth3 living in the back of my head. But I’ve barely even thought about what happens after I walk through that portal today…” He leaned back and looked up at the ribbed ceiling far above.

  “After today though…” he said after a moment before continuing. “I don’t know. I guess I can see it. For the last couple of weeks I wondered why so many of the adventurers lived here full time. I think I understand now. That fight today. It’s hard to let go of… and no one back home is going to know about it… or understand even if I could tell them. Not really.”

  Alex just nodded and the two sat in silence for a time, lost in their own thoughts.

  Eventually Alex said, “Hey, I have to talk to the Side Quest Heroes crew this week about joining us here. Do you want to join me for that conversation?”

  I saw the recent memo about manufacturing greater authenticity in our storylines, like it is something we can just ideate and build. I have to remind everyone that this is a false line of thought.

  Our job is not to create ‘authenticity’. That entire concept is an oxymoron. Our job is to identify it when it happens and amplify it where we can. We can hone in on it. Exploit it. Pave the way towards it even… but we should never even try to create it.

  This recent Forest Challenge provides a textbook example. We set up the challenge and attracted the boars. But the fight with both the plant and the millipedes tracked higher with audience engagement than anything we set up. We haven’t even broadcast footage of the fight with the bear, but I guarantee that will create a spike like we haven’t seen in a long time.

  Alex Mercer is the leading force in that. Unlike so many of our adventurers, he isn’t trying to wow audiences. He simply shows up and tries to do the best he can for his team. The whole unplanned, multi-team consolidation during the fight with the bear proved this. And proved his leadership skills to boot. That is authenticity that we could not force from any of our actors.

  So, I don’t want to see anymore office memos like the one that went around yesterday. Authenticity cannot be forced. Instead, focus your time figuring out how to amplify what happened this weekend.

  —V.R.

  Internal Memo

  Subject: Monetizing Authenticity

  Distribution: Executive Team, Writing Staff

  Author: Valentina R.