Sara stood at the head of the concrete patio and looked out at how big her found family had grown.

From bringing on the twenty new Shafted laborers to adding Muffin the Githzerai to their ranks, her chest swelled with a profound, terrifying pride. It was weird. Being responsible for this many lives wasn’t something she’d been used to back on Earth, but she was genuinely happy to be here, and fiercely protective of the good people looking back at her.

“Thank you, everyone.” Sara raised her pen hand, signaling for quiet over the crackling fire pit. “First, I want to say that I am so absolutely happy to be here with all of you. I believe in what we are doing, and I believe in all of you.”

“We couldn’t do it without you,” Simone reassured her from the front row.

“That’s not true,” Sara smiled softly. “You guys do all the heavy lifting and the actual fighting. I just tick boxes and write on this clipboard. But, speaking of fighting... let’s address you first.”

Simone reached into her leather pack. She pulled out the stolen weapons and placed them heavily on the metal patio table in front of Sara. “Sig Sauer P320s. Standard issue police weapons from Earth. Loaded.”

Sara sighed, staring at the matte black steel. “Ok. So, Earth, huh? How was that?”

“Shit.” Simone shook her head, her Elven ears pinning back. “I’m dying in Tawagato. I'm never going back.”

“So, just to recap the logistics: we have semen-vomiting Knoblins running loose on Earth, and a giant, undiscovered glitching portal room sitting directly under our store?” Sara asked, rubbing her temples.

“Yes,” Simone nodded. “That’s accurate.”

Sara stared at the guns, wondering what it would do to actively introduce modern firearms to a medieval fantasy world. It would make someone fairly invincible for exactly however many shots they had in the magazines, but it was a massive liability with innocent NPCs running around.

“I’m going to put them in the office safe,” Sara decided, her Managerial voice taking over. “This kind of power can’t just be left unchecked in the wild.”

“I think I should keep them,” Simone argued, her posture stiffening. “I have real-world experience. I own three of this exact gun.”

“Why three?” Cody wondered, leaning forward in his chair.

“One stock, one modded, and one strictly for replacement parts,” Simone shrugged, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

“It’s not that I don’t trust you, Simone,” Sara said, nervously tapping her pen against her clipboard. “It’s that I don’t know what introducing ballistics will do to the game engine here. I have always been extremely anti-gun. You know that.”

“I know,” Simone shrugged, her eyes dropping to the concrete. “That’s exactly why I never brought up the fact that I owned over fifty of them back home.”

“You owned fifty guns?” Sara asked, genuinely shocked.

“When you look like I looked on the outside, and felt like I felt on the inside?” Simone took a deep, shaky breath, her voice raw with years of suppressed Earthly terror. “You make goddamned sure that no one can take what little you have.”

The weight of the confession hung heavy in the evening air. Sara nodded slowly, her rigid anti-gun stance softening against the reality of her friend's trauma.

“Okay,” Sara compromised. “You’re going to take me out to the woods and show me exactly what they can do later. With the taser glitch, and the code going wonky, I want to make sure I’m not unleashing something horrific. But you hold onto them.”

“Done,” Simone said smoothly, tucking the heavy Sigs back into her pack.

“Now…” Sara stretched her back and cleared her throat, returning to the agenda. “I’m going to recap our Q3 projections and—”

“Sara,” Mark interrupted from the back row.

“Yes, Mark?” She directed her attention toward him. The Changeling was sitting near Kaori, and someone else she couldn’t quite see because of the seating arrangement behind the Druid.

“There’s something you need to know,” he said, his tone entirely matter-of-fact. “We saved Erin.”

Sara’s brain processed the phonetic information, but her body refused to accept it. “Didn’t I specifically order you not to engage the sweatshop?”

“You did,” Mark nodded calmly. “And I take full managerial responsibility for the insubordination. I had a tactical opportunity, and I took it. But that’s not what you need to worry about right now.”

“I decide what I worry about, Mark,” she cut him off sharply. “Kaori might be new here, but I still care about her and I don't want her getting killed because you went rogue.”

Mark looked down, ignoring the reprimand, and nodded at Kaori and the cloaked figure.

As soon as Kaori moved slightly to the side, the second girl stood up. She reached up with trembling hands and pulled her black hood down, revealing faded rainbow hair.

Sara’s adrenaline spiked, freezing the blood in her veins.

“Erin? What are you doing here?” Sara panicked. The clipboard slipped from her fingers, clattering loudly against the concrete as she took an involuntary step backward.

The girl, who Sara now saw was an Aasimar, looked absolutely terrified. She clutched her own arms tightly, her eyes darting around the large group of heavily armed strangers.

“I… I got sucked in here with Kaori,” Erin stammered, her voice shaking. She looked at Sara, her survival instincts defaulting to the only baseline she had ever been taught. “I'm sorry. Am I ruining this for you, too?”

Sara’s heart pounded violently against her ribs. She’s bringing things up here. In front of my entire staff. Sara thought she had finally escaped this specific, suffocating dynamic. “I—”

“Quit.”

Raven stepped smoothly to Sara’s side, inserting herself between the Tiefling and the Aasimar. She looked at Erin with cold, unbothered authority. “I don’t know what happened between you two back on Earth, but we don’t talk to people like that here. If you have personal problems, you talk them out in private, with a mediator. Not in front of all these people as a guilt trip.”

“Yeah,” Chadwick stood up, his massive Minotaur frame casting a protective shadow over Sara's other side. “We don’t gaslight our management. No DARVO tactics here.”

Erin flushed deep crimson, looking genuinely shocked that her defense mechanism had been instantly dismantled. She shrank back into her chair. “Sorry.”

Sara took a deep, grounding breath, incredibly thankful for the protective wall her found-family had just formed around her. She bent down, picked up her clipboard, and forcefully wrote Meeting with Erin, triple-underlining it so hard the paper nearly tore.

“Don’t be sorry,” Sara said, her voice steadying. “We will talk later. Privately. Right now, we have much more pressing corporate matters to discuss.”

Two Shafted laborers had set up a scavenged rolling whiteboard earlier for her to use. She grabbed a green dry-erase marker and began writing furiously as she talked.

“We’ve been open for a full week now, and you guys are absolutely crushing it.”

“Yeah!” Mark yelled, rallying the group into a loud cheer.

Sara gestured for silence, tapping the board. “We’ve grown the initial strip mall into a functioning small settlement.” She pointed the marker at the quick-fab homes the Shafted had thrown up on the east side, and the beginnings of a permanent logging camp on the south end of the parking lot. “And, we’re about to officially open the toll bridge after an aggressive marketing campaign to rename it from the Bridge of Guaranteed Death to the Suckin’ Vapes Highway Wesley Wyndham Price Memorial Bridge.”

“Who’s the one coming up with silly shit now?” Mark chuckled at the Angel reference.

“It's a lot better than some of the location names I found digging through your old DM paperwork,” Sara rolled her eyes at him. “Salty Dick Licky Licky State Park?”

“Dude,” Mark went completely straight-faced. “Big Bone Lick is a real state park in Kentucky! I just thought I would be more honest about my tabletop intentions.”

“Well, you certainly were,” Sara sighed. “Once the bridge opens, we can expect a potential double, or even triple, in our daily sales. This doesn’t just open us up to Beachwatch; it opens us up to the entire vacation economy surrounding the coast, and the impoverished worker bubble trapped there, to boot.”

“We’re going to do something about those workers, right?” Chino asked from the back. “Some Northern Shafted clans live up there. Lot of Goblins as well.”

“Of course,” Sara tapped the whiteboard firmly. “We’re going to actively tap into that bubble, break Craig's monopoly, and get them fair wages. For sure.”

The Shafted murmured their approval. She moved on. “Next, I want to officially introduce you all to the newest member of the team. Muffin.”

The green-skinned Githzerai girl stood up next to Sara and gave a warm, but highly guarded, bow to the crowd. “Hi.”

Sara reached out and gently touched her shoulder. “Sheet!”

Character Name: Muffin Class: Monk 12 Race: Githzerai Stats: Strength: 18 Dexterity: 20 Constitution: 8 Intelligence: 16 Wisdom: 26 Charisma: 10

“How in the hell do we keep picking up people who are a higher level than us?” Sara shook the glowing UI sheet away in wonder. “Twenty-six fucking Wisdom?”

Muffin turned and lightly tapped Sara’s leather shoulder. “Let me look. Sheet!”

Character Name: Sara Class: Bard 5 (14) Race: Tiefling Stats: Strength: 14 Dexterity: 16 Constitution: 10 Intelligence: 16 Wisdom: 14 Charisma: 22

“There it is, right there,” Muffin said, pointing at the glowing numbers. “See the little 14 in parentheses? You’ve been earning experience and leveling up this whole time, but you aren't actually spending your points.”

Simone, Mark, and Cody all called their sheets simultaneously.

Mark shook his head in disgust. “Are you fucking kidding me? I thought I set the engine to auto-level the players.”

“Why would you do that?” Cody asked, pawing over his own glowing sheet. “That would have been catastrophic for anyone wanting to multiclass, or do a weird, highly-specific build.”

“Fair point,” Mark conceded, tugging at his goatee. “So how do we manually level up?”

“You just call out ‘Level Up, Motherfucker’ and the system walks you through it,” Muffin nodded, smiling.

Sara sighed. Of course, all the commands she tried were useless. Mark just added motherfucker to the end of a command. She imagined little old ladies yelling it and sighed again. “Level Up, motherfucker!”

Instantly, a massive, glowing user interface appeared directly in front of her face. Why a UI for a tabletop game?

The first screen was a dropdown menu that read: Select your class. She scrolled the massive list and saw the entire SRD list of standard classes. Most were grayed out, likely because she didn’t meet the prerequisite stats. Fear gripped her. She hadn’t planned this character build at all, so she had no idea what to take. She tried to swipe the screen away to do it later, but she couldn't find a way to exit. There was no 'X', and no response to shouting "Exit" or "Quit."

She was locked in. She had to finish the transaction.

She scrolled back up to select Bard, but froze before her finger tapped the glowing rune. At the very bottom of the currently visible list, something glitched.

[ENTRY REMOVED] The text was actively flickering, buzzing with digital static. That was new. It wasn't a pre-programmed glitch; it was an entry actively being deleted from the database in real-time.

She shrugged, her curiosity peaking, and quickly selected the flickering text before it could vanish completely.

The engine stuttered, but it accepted the input. The next screen popped up.

Allocate your stats: (2)

Two stat points at level six? Wasn’t the standard D&D ruleset supposed to be one point at level four and another at eight? She shrugged. Everything in this world was fucked up. She hastily dumped both points into Strength and hit Next.

Fuck. It was a pure muscle-memory habit from her old Warrior-class days on Earth. She frantically searched for a 'Back' button to fix it, but there was none. She sighed heavily and looked at the final confirmation window.

Confirm your choices? Class: Wrestler   Level: 1 Stat Allocation: Strength x 2 Yes? / No?

What the fuck? Wrestler? Sara narrowed her eyes at the floating screen. An entry actively being removed, and then completely absent from the final confirmation screen, smelled strongly of administrative sabotage. Just two nights ago, she had beaten the absolute shit out of Craig’s Owlbear guards using the physical skills of someone who could recite the Attitude Era by heart.

Was Craig actively messing with the world's code?

She smashed Confirm.

She instantly felt a massive, rushing wave of physical power surge through her Tiefling muscles as the UI vanished, returning her to the patio where the rest of the group was finishing up their own levels. This is what they needed. All the failed tests and practices because everyone thought they were leveling up automatically would work now.

Mark was staring into the middle distance, his eyes wide. He looked dead at Sara. “Craig is actively infusing MMO code into my tabletop engine.”

“This changes everything,” Cody said, jumping to his feet, his tail lashing. “He’s actively hacking into the source code of your game because the taser shot opened a backdoor.”

“We need to talk about how exactly you know that later,” Sara said, scanning the much bigger group of faces, her Managerial instincts locking into absolute overdrive. “We need to figure out how to stop him. Now.”

“Already have a shadow-team working on it,” Cody said smoothly, draining the last of his Captain Morgan Sliced Strawberry Margarita. “I know. Talk later. Gotta go.”

Sara let the Catfolk go. Cody had never let her down when things got serious, and she trusted he wasn’t about to start now.

“Chadwick,” Sara barked, pointing her pen. “We’re moving the bridge launch up to tomorrow. Chino! Get everyone. Set up a fortified, physical perimeter around the entire forest. I am actively declaring Eminent Domain on this territory.”

The Shafted sprang into action instantly, crushing their drinks and stubbing out their joints on the concrete. “Aye, boss!”

“Mark.” Sara looked the Changeling over once, praying she wasn’t letting a lifetime of friendship betray her logistical judgment right now. “I need you to go talk to Craig.”

“Standard info gathering?” Mark asked, raising an eyebrow.

“No.” Sara drew a thick, black line straight through Mark’s name on her clipboard. “I need you to get caught.”

Mark shrugged casually, an insane grin spreading across his face. “Ok. But why?”

“No one else knows the back-end of this world better than you,” she started. “And no one else is as chaotic of a creative problem solver. Get in. Solve the coding problems from the inside. Get out.”

Mark’s lip pulled up further. “I thought you’d never ask.”

“Everyone else,” Sara yelled over the rising din, scanning her clipboard. “Up production by fifty percent! Give me some new vape flavors that scream 'beachy bitch' for the tourist launch!”

Everyone snapped into action, scattering across the patio to their stations, as Raven closed the remaining distance to Sara, nodding appreciatively.

“Fuck, you’re incredibly sexy when you’re working,” the Drow smirked.

Sara rolled her eyes, her adrenaline finally crashing, and dropped her clipboard onto the table. “We could literally die tomorrow. Fuck me.”

Raven shrugged, stepping entirely into Sara's personal space. “We could die every day.”

Sara grabbed her hand and pulled the Brawler toward the barracks. “Oh, please. Like I have that much physical energy right now.”

 

Character Name: Sara

Class: Bard 8 Wrestler 5

Race: Tiefling

Stats:

Strength: 16

Dexterity: 16

Constitution: 18

Intelligence: 16

Wisdom: 18

Charisma: 22