Kira gave a little half twirl and watched over her shoulder as the green dress flared out around her. She couldn’t help but smile. This was going to be the best LARPing weekend ever and she idly wondered if everyone in the village dressed in the same way all the time as she spun left and right, watching her reflection. The dress made her look older somehow. Or maybe just that she looked like she was from an older time. She would certainly fit in well in a fantasy village.

  She collected her things and stuffed them into one of the keypad lockers as she considered her own closet back at university—hoodies, jeans and comfy clothes mostly. And, of course, that one black and white dress she loved and wore to most formal events. It made her feel sophisticated, like she was stepping into another life for a night.

  This dress wasn’t like that at all. This one felt comfortable and right and didn’t change who she saw. It accentuated a core part of her, instead of turning her into something else. She took a last, longing look at the second outfit before finally turning and heading back out into the hall.

  They were all waiting for her, because of course they were done already—they probably didn’t have to choose between different outfits. Alex was talking quietly to Laila off to one side while the others were making a general spectacle of themselves, aping it up in their new outfits.

  She took a moment to look over their outfits as well. The Dungeon Inc. show didn’t spend a lot of time on village moments and Kira was really interested to see how realistic village life actual was here, knowing what she knew now.

  Alex was wearing a very plain outfit in tans and browns that only looked strange because of all the bright and colourful outfits the others were wearing. Other than Alex's plain linens the rest of them were wearing colourful fitted tunics and vests and fine pants with dramatic belts. They all had a pouch or two hanging from their belts too.

  The boys whistled and hooted as she stepped into the hall of course, bringing a blush to her cheeks. She leaned into it though and tossed back her half-cape with a touch of flair, letting her hand rest on the feather pin at her shoulder as she struck a pose. The pin was warm from her skin.

  “Well gentlemen. I would say that we have arrived.” she said in a mock formal voice and then broke down laughing.

  Laila ushered them through security with a smile and a wave and then said her goodbyes as Alex took them down a hall that led towards the cafeteria. Kira was surprised at the size of the brightly lit cafeteria.

  “Does everyone eat down here?” she asked when she saw the crowds of people.

  Alex looked around the room before answering. “No, I’d guess about a quarter to half the village eats any given meal here. There’s also food at the Silver Gate and a lot of people cook at home. Especially if they have families. But, this is easy when you’ve had a busy day, or don’t want to cook I guess.”

  Jake cheered when he saw a platter of lasagna behind the counter and asked for a double helping. “I will be spending a lot of time down here apparently.”

  Jun laughed. “Probably a good idea. I’ve never seen you cook anything without burning it.”

  The group made their way down the counter, pointing out their orders and thanking the staff, then scarfing down their food as fast as possible. They all wanted to get out and explore the village.

  “Feeling better?” Alex asked as he sidled up beside Kira once they were back in the Undercity tunnels.

  “Yes,” she said with a smile, and she was, mostly. Sitting and eating had helped. He just smiled in response, but she noticed that he kept staring at her as they walked.

  Alex led them down a series of large hallways as he explained everything they needed to know about the Undercity and how it connected to most of the buildings above. He pointed out the COIN offices as they walked, describing what he knew of the various company departments. When they reached the medical centre he poked his head in the door to look around, but ushered them on again quickly.

  After about 5 minutes he stepped up to a door that opened automatically in front of him and they all filed up into the main floor of the trainee hut.

  The room was built like a hunting lodge, all timber beams and wood plank floors with a large stone hearth at one end of the room. There were mismatched couches clustered around floor rugs and a small kitchen on the wall opposite the hearth. Kira walked over and looked out the small windows at the cottages across the broad street.

  Kira’s head throbbed with a mild headache but she tried to ignore it as she craned her neck to look as far down the street as she could. “I see the Silver Gate! Over there, past the houses.” She pointed through the window and the others all ran over to look. Her stomach was still unsettled, but she thought it was mostly excitement at this point.

  “Nobody’s going to find it weird that more people come out of the house than ever went in?” Jake asked as they stepped out the front door.

  “Not really. There are twelve of us in this house. But also, everybody that lives here is part of the company. We get merchants and travelers at the Silver Gate, so you know, try to pretend like you are an Earth3 native when we’re there, but otherwise it’s all locals.”

  When they finally stepped out into the daylight of a whole new world, Kira stopped and closed her eyes and took a few deep breaths.

  “Kira, come on!” Ryan called, already through the small training yard in front of the house and out in the dirt street.

  “Ryan… We’re in a new world! This isn’t a trip to a theme park man. Let me enjoy it!” Kira said but laughed at Ryan's overly dramatic pout. He stopped though and turned around in the street, taking in the sights around him. He really was just an overexcited puppy sometimes.

  After a few moments they headed down the street together, with Alex pointing out various buildings and talking about some of the people he had met. Kira watched him as he talked. Earth3 had been good for Alex. He looked stronger and more confident than he had before. She wondered how much of that was due to the ANIP system he had told them about, and how much was just the fact that he had spent the last two weeks living out his dreams.

  Around them, the small wattle and daub cottages gave way to stone-and-timber buildings as they headed into the heart of the village. Most of them were two stories here, although a few were three. The dirt and gravel street gave way to a pretty, mismatched cobblestone that curved gently around the hill that made up the heart of the village. At the top of the hill, the tall Silver Gate inn was clearly visible now, but Kira forced herself to not stare and enjoy the sights around her as they walked.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Many of the buildings here held shops on the ground floor and she assumed the shopkeepers lived in the upper floors. She saw a large bakery that was dark inside—they probably only worked early mornings. There was a grocer’s with a sign that read ‘Samsons Provisions’. Beside that was a cute little tea shop. There were clothiers, a small bookshop and even a jewelers shop.

  Most of the roofs were of some dark shingle and smoke curled lazily from chimneys everywhere and smelled wonderful. A cart rattled over cobblestones pulled by a stocky animal that looked like a shaggy cross between a horse and a bull.

  “What is that?” Jake asked, pointing to the animal wide-eyed.

  “Brantharns,” Alex said. “It means Fieldhorns. That’s what the farmers here call them. There is a farm in the fields to the east of the village where they are raising them now. They came from the Western Kingdoms apparently.”

  Kira watched as the animal moved. It was bigger than any horse she had ever seen. Not bulky looking like a draught horse exactly, just, proportionally larger.

  “Oh look—no hooves.” Jun said, pointing.

  He was right. There was no clopping on the cobblestones. The animal had three broad toes and probably padding, although it was hard to tell because it had shaggy hair down the bottom half of its legs.

  “That’s a female,” Alex said. “The males are a little bigger and have horns that look a lot like a deer.”

  Kira realized they had stopped in the middle of the street to watch and people were breaking around them like water around a stone in the middle of a river. She also noticed that nobody seemed upset by this. Some were even smiling as they stepped around the group.

  “Is everyone here so patient?” Kira asked as she grabbed the boys and moved them towards the edge of the street.

  “Usually,” Alex replied. “That omnipresent urgency everyone carries with them back home just doesn’t exist here. Not that people aren’t occasionally in a hurry for one reason or another, but it’s not the same. Also, there are new people here all the time, and apparently we all react the same when we first arrive,” he said with a laugh.

  “This wouldn’t be the first time I’ve seen people standing in the middle of the street and just staring, and I’ve only been here a few weeks.”

  Kira watched the people walking past them. Everyone was smiling, greeting the people they passed and waving to those further away. Some even waved at her as she watched. The clothes were varied, but she noticed the repeating patterns that must be the local style. A pair of kids screaming and laughing caught her attention as they dashed across the street from one alley to another, chasing a dog.

  The village was everything—everything—she had ever dreamed about. Years and years of playing in Alex's TTRPG campaigns, dreaming of something like this. She wanted to just stand there for the rest of the day and watch. She started to feel weepy again.

  The buildings, and people. The animals and smells. Those crazy tall trees that towered beyond the village and in the far distance mountain peaks blended in with the sky. And everywhere around her were little pockets of green.

  The smaller cottages they saw when they first exited the trainee hut all had little gardens overflowing with plants, but even here on this busy street were window boxes overflowing with flowers and herbs and flowering vines crept up the sides of some of the buildings. Someone had even planted flowers in an old barrel standing at the mouth of one of the small alleys.

  Unlike Kira, Ryan didn’t stop moving. He criss-crossed back and forth across the street, looking up at the architecture and staring in windows with Jake and Jun trailing behind him more slowly.

  “This is insane,” Ryan called over to them. “Guys. GUYS. It’s like—like—”

  “Like everything you’ve dreamed about for years?” Kira asked as he came back towards them. “Or maybe that’s just me?”

  “No!” He said sharply. Then took a deep breath and, shaking his head, he said more softly, “no. Not just you. That’s exactly it. This is our campaign come to life. I want to move in tomorrow. Screw university. To heck with Earth. This is what I want,” Ryan said. Kira laughed, but Ryan had spoken much more seriously than he usually did.

  Jake laughed as well, took a step back into the open street and spun slowly, arms wide. “I accept this quest.”

  Kira noticed that Alex had stopped paying attention to them. He was staring up at a roof across the street. “What’s up?”

  He stared for another moment, squinting, and then turned to look back at her, finally smiling. “Nothing. I just thought I saw something. A bird on the roof maybe. I don’t know, but we should keep going or we’re going to lose the light.”

  They started walking again.

  Kira had imagined walking through villages like this while playing D&D a thousand times. Now she was standing in a place that had all the details she used to invent, plus a hundred she’d never have thought of: the way the cobbles had shallow grooves from cart wheels; the way gutters were designed to divert rainwater into a small stone channel that ran down the side of the street. Even still, it was so hard to think of this place as real, it just seemed so impossible.

  Ryan fired questions at Alex as they walked and Alex, oddly enough, took to the job as their tour guide with gusto.

  “How many people live here?”

  “Can you buy property?”

  “Do they have, like, a blacksmith? A real one?”

  “Are there police, or just city guards? Um… village guards?”

  Kira just listened and took in the sights, rubbing her temples lightly as they walked.

  And then they were standing on the cobbled street in front of the famous Silver Gate Inn & Tavern. The centre piece of the entire Dungeon Inc. franchise.

  The building stood at the top of the highest rise in town. The north end of the village Alex told them. There was a large yard and what looked like a cottage behind the main building, but behind that stood the timber palisade wall. Kira realized that all the main streets here were actually built around the focal point of the inn and the road they had climbed to get here, ran straight to the front door.

  At ground level, the Silver Gate was traditional western architecture with a base of pale stone and white-washed walls with broad dark wood boards framing broad muntined windows. Above the front door rose a tall, sweeping A-frame peak with extensions to the right and left that ran perpendicular to the main section of the building. Iron lanterns hung from forged brackets above the doors, their metalwork simple.

  A few shallow steps of dressed stone led up from the road to the tavern’s main doors. They looked like solid wood, double-leaf and reinforced with iron bands.

  Above the main building stood a tower. Rising four stories above the stone-and-oak ground floor, the inn portion of the building climbed in a stepped stack, each level set back from the one below in a very eastern design with layered eaves with upturned corners edged with metal that caught light in thin lines. Slender pillars supported each overhang, and the balconies were enclosed with carved railings that repeated the same pattern from floor to floor. The windows up there were narrow and tall and fitted with wood lattice.

  The two styles looked very different, but somehow it worked.

  The sign over the entrance was painted wood—silver-toned and heavy, set into a frame that matched the lantern brackets. The sign featuring a pair of silver crescent moons, points almost touching, and swayed gently in the evening breeze. Yellow light spilled from the windows, carrying the sound of music and clinking mugs.

  Alex stopped on the first step and looked over them for a moment before saying, “I really want to go check out the new Guildhall before it gets dark, so we’re just going to have a quick drink.”

  Jake looked offended. “That’ll hardly be enough time to start adopting the local culture.”

  “We can come back later,” Alex said, rolling his eyes.

  Jun put a hand on Jake’s shoulder, stopping whatever he was about to say. “The dungeon master has spoken. Now let’s get that drink. I want to meet Tomwell.”

  Alex nodded but didn’t respond. He was watching a roof across the street again.

  ***

  Blood scrubs off, but the stories never die.

  Overheard at the Silver Gate Tavern