Unicorn, horse, nightmare, and donkey ambled along the road, and their riders made no effort to hurry them.

“So,” Neon said, “he’s swaggering around like God’s gift to women. One of the ones who creates a character built like a steroid-pumped jock and then adds a ton of armour to look even more big and bad. In this case, he went Dwarf, and damned if the little prick wasn’t using his height as an excuse for some extra grabs and gropes, y’know? And most of the women there were, Idunno, too young, too insecure, too new, whatever, to do more than yelp or give him dirty looks, maybe call him a creep, that’s about it, right? Well, he tried it on me. And I was having none of it. I’m good with guys as friends and all, but sex is girls-only, y’know? But I’d call out the cutest girl in the world on behaviour like that.”

“Personal space,” Jessamine said. “Learn about it and respect it, asshole. So what did you do?”

“I called him on it—grabbed his grubby little hand and yanked upwards, and offered to remove it for him if he couldn’t figure out where it was appropriate for it to be. Next thing you know, there’s this enormous freakin’ Orc pulling us apart. We argued back and forth a bit about the Dwarf’s behaviour. This Orc had only just arrived and hadn’t seen it, and refused to believe me just how bad it was. He insisted that this Dwarf was part of his Guild, and that he’d vouch for him.”

“Guild of Silence, I suppose?” Elavetha said. “And the Orc was BlightTheBloodied?”

“Got it in one. I finally got sick of the excuses, or maybe the misplaced loyalty if I wanted to be really generous, and challenged him to a duel. He could hardly say no with so many people around, although he did make one try at it—something about not hitting girls. We got outside and faced off, and he started swinging that damned club around. I’ll spare you the blow-by-blow account, mostly because I don’t remember all of it, but he couldn’t match my speed so he never managed a solid blow, just a few glancing ones. Mostly I didn’t have a lot of luck either, though, my staff was just bouncing right off him. Just between us, it was as much luck as skill: I managed to get my staff tangled between his legs and tripped him when he overextended just a bit for a swing at me—he was getting pretty mad by then. He went down seriously hard, just boom and the earth shook, and I finally got a clear shot. Slammed one end of my staff against his skull, right behind one ear, as hard as I could. That was it, duel over. I made the little Dwarf prick apologize to all the women present and promise to keep his hands to himself, and then walked out.”

Both companions laughed, Elavetha quietly, Jessamine with all-out merriment.

“Well done,” Elavetha said.

Neon shrugged. “Honestly, it was a bitch of a fight, and there were moments I started to worry a bit about whether I’d gotten in over my head, but hey, it worked. And maybe the Dwarf learned something about treating women as sex objects. Without consent and all. I don’t mind being treated as a sex object, but ask first, y’know? I doubt it, but I can hope.”

“It’s unlikely either one learned anything from it,” Elavetha said. “Other than to be careful about confident women who are perfectly willing to fight. But hey, who knows? It’s not like, in order to grasp the concept of respect, one really has to have been born...” She broke off.

“Nope,” Neon said cheerfully. “Gender and anatomy and chromosomes have nothing to do with it. Or with how I pick friends, just for the record. There’s just those annoying gamer bros that are so obsessed with their own...” She looked up. “Oh shit.”

Jessamine and Elavetha followed her line of sight.

A small humanoid figure in white hovered high above, visible mostly due to the extremely scaled-up brilliant hummingbird wings.

Circling it were a pair of black-and-white dire eagles, each larger than the hovering Fairy.

“There is just no way there’s a Fairy travelling with that bunch,” Elavetha said. “Where are all these people coming from? More immediately, Jess, can you stop those eagles?”

“I doubt it,” Jessamine said. “That’s almost certainly out of my range for anything that could subdue or charm them.”

“What kind of range does your healing have?” Neon asked.

“Oh, sure, that I can do. Why?”

“Because it looks to me like that Fairy has one arm hanging limp and one moving stiffly, and it’s already a tough fight.”

Jessamine immediately drew Glitter to a halt, and raised both hands in the air, fingers spread and the Fairy framed between thumbs and forefingers. Swiftly, she murmured the spell.

Sunset light glowed briefly around the Fairy.

Seconds later, something invisible pushed the eagles back. Every time they tried, they were shoved away again. It didn’t seem to hurt them, but it certainly frustrated them.

“Wind,” Jessamine said approvingly. “Not killing, just deflecting.”

The Fairy descended, with control so smooth that it was blatantly obvious: this was not a new player, or even an experienced one who had had no practice with Anterra’s flight mechanics. That was a skilled player who had seriously mastered flight.

“Should we go check whether they need help?” Elavetha wondered.

“My [Heal] worked,” Jessamine said. “The eagles must have surprised them... ‘scuse me, it’s a Fairy, so... must have surprised en and did damage before en knew they were there, because they couldn’t land anything afterwards. I’m sure en’s fine. Besides, we would have been visible, but en didn’t come towards us or try to signal or anything.”

“Yeah, probably we’d be intruding,” Neon said. “C’mon, you two must have some sweet adventures of your own, instead of me rattling on about assholes. At the very least, you’re entitled to describe your history with the assholery of the world. Or the cool players, for that matter, they deserve being remembered too.”

“I’ve been playing a lot longer than Jess has,” Elavetha said. “I got to the point of being a bit burned out on the game, actually. Then Jess went through a rough time, feeling really isolated while she was trying to figure some stuff out, and I talked her into giving the game a try. I created a new character to keep her company. It feels like a whole new game in ways, and not just because of the very different character. Jess plays at a totally different speed. She’s the one who got curious about Cooking recipes, actually. It’s a whole lot more fun than running around madly trying to do all the quests as fast as possible. And the friends we meet are a lot cooler. It’s not just quick pickups with a shared goal. It’s actual social interaction. And sometimes it’s surprising. Early-on, before Jess had all the kick-ass magic, we ran into a party that I swear were furries—all playing therianthropes, cats and foxes and wolves, all genders and classes.”

Jessamine laughed. “Oh, they were wonderful! All higher-level than us, and they obviously knew each other really well, but they just sort of absorbed us into the family for the rest of that session. I don’t even remember whether we actually completed that quest or not. I spent so much time laughing and just loving the whole thing. That might have been a big part of my deciding to keep playing. No stress, no expectations, they didn’t even mind when I messed up a couple of times just because I didn’t know what I was doing.”

Neon echoed the laugh. “Yeah, there are a whole lot of players out there on the friendly side of live-and-let-live and who are understanding about newer players. The tricky bit is finding them.”

“I’d start a new Guild,” Elavetha said, “but I wouldn’t have the first clue how to actually run it or promote it or, well, anything, really.”

“The Guild of Roses,” Jessamine chuckled. “As in, take your time and smell the. But I’m pretty sure there’s a lot of time and effort that go into that, and I’d rather spend my non-work time just playing. Shame, though. I’d actually join a Guild like that.”

“I’d break my no-Guilds rule for that,” Neon agreed. “Oh well. I wonder if the bridge over that chasm is sturdier than it looks? I really don’t want to lose the horses.”