Seated around the table, the three of us stared blankly at the pile of opened letters on the kitchen bench, bits of paper with gold coin figures demanding their toll. Bills: the perennial scourge of the broke apartment-dwelling millennial. It was late, the clock hands ticking over past twelve, but the discussion wouldn't wait. With Leo at work during the day and Jenny at work during the evenings, the stroke of twelve was the only time that we were all in the same room together.

Not that time meant that much any more.

"The arcanic bill has gone up again this month," she said. "I already told you about this, guys, but the lights constantly being on all the time are driving up our bills something insane. We've got to scrape together enough to pay down the bill by the end of the month; it's getting ridiculous, but we can't afford to lose the lights. Not now."

"How much do we need?" Leo inquired. 

"In total, for all the bills here, we're looking at about 1700 Gold," Jenny said. "We'll need it by the end of the month."

"That's three days away?" Leo said.

"Yeah, it's going to be a close shave," Jenny replied. "Oscar brought in some gold today, enough to pay it down a little. Thanks for sharing that with us, by the way..."

Jenny gave me a bit of a glare, but there seemed to be a hint of sincerity to her words. I didn't speak, simply nodding affirmatively as she continued on.

"I'm afraid, for the next few days, things won't be easy," she continued. "We'll have to try cutting down our light usage while we're at home, keeping showers to under a minute, and we definitely stop spending half of the day watching TV. Go up to Wayne's and get a fucking book if you're bored." 

Leo and I looked awkwardly across at one another; the guilt in our eyes really said it all.

"Also, Oscar, whatever job you tried out for yesterday, please go back there - and beg to have another chance," Jenny pleaded. "It doesn't matter if it's just for a few days, we need whatever we can get."

"I'll try," I said reluctantly.

The kitchen lamp overhead continued to flicker, and after a moment of repeatedly flitting, light fluttering across the table like a butterfly's wings, the globe finally gave out. As we sat in the darkness, the room completely pitch black, I heard Jenny's sigh from across the table. She turned on her flashlight, illuminating the kitchen table with a tiny streak of white light. 

"Make that 1120 Gold now," she said, holding the flashlight in her hand - pointing it up toward the blown lightbulb. After a moment, she put the flashlight upright on the table next to the stack of bill-letters. It gave out barely enough light for us to see, but at least now we could see, I guess.

"Look, I know it's hard... but the next few months... maybe the next few years, they were never going to be easy for us anyway," Jenny said. "I'm sorry."

"Don't say stuff like that, love," Leo said. "We'll get through this, won't we, Oscar?"

He gestured to me in the darkness, and I nodded - though with the flashlight failing to illuminate me all that well, I was kind of invisible amid the pitch-black room. 

"We need to do whatever we can now," Jenny said. "Anyway, I'm going to bed. I've got to get as much sleep as I can right now. Goodnight, you two."

"Goodnight," we both said in unison. We sat there in silence for a moment, before Leo smiled, saying, "Sweet dreams."

"You too," Jenny said with a soft smile. "Sweet dreams, both of you."

As Jenny wandered away from the table, still wearing her pub slacks, she took the flashlight - leaving the pair of us in darkness. I went to reach into my inventory, to fish my own flashlight out amid the darkness.

Item Retrieval: Error
Item "Flashlight" not Found.

I stared down at my empty hand. I don't quite remember where I left the flashlight, but I guess in the confusion of the supermarket, it's possible I left it behind there earlier today. I could swing by tomorrow and see if I could find it, but honestly - I wasn't exactly keen to go back there. Through the gloom, I could hear Leo's hollow footfalls against the wooden flaws, before hearing the faint click as Leo turned on a side-table lamp in the lounge room. 

"Thanks, man," I said.

"No probs," he replied with a smile. 

Stretching as I stood up, I pushed my chair in, before going to take a step down the corridor. Taking one step forward however, I stopped in place. I knew I had the power to help people. I was haunted, conflicted, the thought that my power reflected my own desire to let others die gnawing at my mind. There was a part of me that didn't want to involve myself in his world. I may have had the power to help people, but I could still give that up, I still had the chance to live a peaceful life and escape all that... as I thought of peace though, the image of the horrified supermarket crowd burnt through that idealistic illusion like a raging inferno. It wasn't peace for them, it was peace for me.

They would scream in my stead. 

I was running from my problems once again. I had been given the power to run away because, deep in my heart, that is what I had wanted. Knowing that made me ashamed. However, the trauma I saw, the trauma I felt... I couldn't run from it. I needed to be able to protect myself from it. I'd almost been torn apart in a supermarket - if I didn't fight back, I would've been dead. I needed to fight, not for the sake of others, but for the sake of myself.

At the end of the day, it wasn't the moralism that won me over though. Pondering my question, I stared down at the stack of gold coins, my mind racing with the thought of that impossible figure we'd been given. The insurmountable thousand gold bill did more to convince me than any sense of ethics ever could. Standing in the hall silently, I finally spoke up.

I decided to ask him. The debts, piling up as they were, made it kind of impossible not to. 

"Leo," I said. "I want to help people. If I can help pay the bills, I want to be able to fight too"

With the mere mention of that phrase, Leo seemed to get slightly agitated.  

"I know what you're thinking, Oscar," he replied. "No. No, I am not going to help you sign your life away, and certainly not at 12 o'clock at night when you're completely fucking delirious."

"I want to do something," I said. "People nearly died today... You know yourself, you guys took twenty minutes to arrive. You and your team don't have the numbers to get where you need to be, and I... hate to say it, but I can help you."

"I didn't want to bring you into this world, Leo," he said. "If you want to do something, then be my guest - but there's plenty of other things you can do without flushing your life down the shitter."

Taking a card from his pocket, he raised it to the air, a number written on the backside of it and the words "Adventurer's Guild" printed neatly across the top. 

"I'll tell you what, Oscar. If you still think you can hack it tomorrow morning and want to become an adventurer, then I'll give you this card," Leo said. "I don't want to, but... it doesn't look like I have much of a choice. I know what you're like."

He dangled the card in the air, before lowering his hand to his side. I followed the motions of the card with my eyes. 

"You sure can be a stubborn asshole sometimes," he smiled.

As he finished his sentence, he slipped the card back into his pocket. I felt uneasy, as if I was making a mistake, but I figured I'd feel that way no matter what I did. Damned if I did, damned if I didn't: I was flanked on all sides by my own self-loathing.

"Does that seem like a fair deal to you?" Leo asked.

I nodded with a slight hesitation. However, Leo didn't seem to notice it.

"Alright, glad we could agree," Leo replied. "I'll see you tomorrow morning."

Heading off to bed, Leo began to walk down the passageway. However, in the poorly lit passage, he seemed to stumble awkwardly through the darkness. Leo wasn't the most coordinated at the best of times. As he wandered down the passage however, guiding himself through the night with his hand against the wall, I had a sudden realisation. 

"Wait, you said you'd see me tomorrow morning," I asked. "But don't you wake up, like, super early though?" 

"Yeah, you're waking up with me," Leo smiled. "You signed up for this bucko, I hope you enjoy it."

As Leo made his way through the passage, I sighed as I stood alone in the tenebrous kitchen at nearly one in the morning. Staring around for a moment, I wandered toward the living room light switch - before turning it off. The apartment surrendered to the night, and through the darkness, I stumbled through the memorised corridors back to my room.   

I turned on my room light. It was a mess, tossed clothes and old hoodies littered the floor, but I wasn't going to waste my time on spring-cleaning in the middle of the night. I clambered out of my pants and shirt, throwing them into the same piles I'd refused to clean, before turning the room light off once more. I jumped into my unmade bed, wearing nothing but my socks and a pair of boxer shorts as I stared up at the ceiling.

I tried to get to sleep for a while, but my mind was plagued by what I'd seen, flashes of suffering racing through my mind, leaping out at me like jump-scares in a bad horror film. The images just as visceral as when I'd witnessed them. Perhaps, now that I had the time to process them, they were more visceral than they had been before. Eventually though, the fatigue grew too great. Tiredness lured me to sleep, overpowering the anguish that kept me awake - and as I lay in the bed, eventually, my consciousness fell into the abyss of the eigengrau.

I succumbed to slumber, to the world beneath my eyelids, and as I did so - I was forced to relive the torments of the day once more as the nightmares played themselves over in my head.

As the terrors of the night plagued me, it was then that I truly understood: Leo hadn't given me a deal, he had given me a test.