They couldn’t hear Claudia unlocking the door; they did hear her call, “Guys? It’s just me!” and, seconds later, see her come into the living room. She had a stack of three medium pizzas balanced on her left hand and her laptop bag slung over her shoulder.

“That was fast,” Harley observed.

“Well, yes, I dropped everything and ran,” Claudia said. “Darin gave me a ride, which was faster than a cab. The rest of the gang are on standby if I need their brains or someone over server-side. Oh my god. You two are absolutely the most adorable sight ever. If cameras actually worked on Reverie illusions, I would so be taking pics of that.”

“I thought cameras worked on illusions,” Marisa said, sitting up.

“In general, yes. To keep Reverie from being easily misused by someone creating an avatar of someone else and recording, well, anything, we set it up so that the illusions flicker. It’s too fast for eyes to detect but it’ll mess up recording. Settings and avatars flicker at different rates, too, so camera speed can’t just be adjusted to compensate, and in between it shows the Reverie logo. Nobody’s using our work for deep fakes. Or spying or interrogation or anything nasty like that—we built safeguards deep into the code and made sure that anyone trying to just snip out those bits will collapse the whole thing. Although we are looking at safe ways to allow streaming. But oh, man, I so wish I could take a pic of the two of you all relaxed and comfy, looking like that. Just epic levels of brain-melting awww.” She set the pizza down on the chair, where it remained pizza boxes, unchanged.

“You still look like you,” Harley observed. “No illusion on you or the pizza.”

“Food won’t change. Neither will medicine of any kind. And neither will people who aren’t part of the game. I told you. Safety precautions. We’re all trying to figure out what we missed that could disable the ability to shut it off. Did you try pausing it, or just save and exit?”

“Both,” Harley said. “Both of us tried it, one right after the other. You can see for yourself that the dongles have even been removed from the phones. We can try to get into the phones while you’re here, if that will help.”

“But it did auto-pause so Marisa could use the bathroom. So the safety features haven’t somehow broken down.” Forehead furrowed, Claudia crossed the room to the Reverie device. “All right, baby, why are you being cranky?” She pressed and held both buttons. The frown deepened when nothing happened. “Okay, it’s supposed to give me an opportunity to prove I get top-level access and then go into debug mode. It should not be able to just not do it.” She perched on the arm of the couch, Marisa’s phone in her hands. “And it should not be able to lock a phone that completely. All right.” She set the phone down. “Your choice. I can zap the box and force it into about the hardest of hard reboots, and I will if you tell me to. However...”

“You might not be able to replicate whatever’s happening,” Harley said. “Which would mean always knowing it could happen but not why or how.”

“Well, um... yeah, basically. If I zap it, we’ll probably lose any data telling us what led up to this, and unless it’s a strictly hardware issue, we might never know what caused it. Alternatively, I can plug myself into your session and take a look at exactly what’s happening when you tell it to pause or exit and so on, so I can, with any luck, sort out what’s gone wrong so we can fix it and make sure it never happens again.”

“I don’t think we’re in any particular distress,” Marisa said. “Not now you brought food. And, uh, I’d really like you to find why, especially if we get to do this again. Maybe with a bit more control over outfits.”

“Hm? Oh, you have that,” Claudia said absently, her own phone now in her hands. “Anything you’re wearing is about two-thirds your own visualization and one-third whoever you play with, taking setting and all into account. We only gave it extremely limited templates for outfits, since everyone’s tastes differ so much.”

“What.”

“Yeah, we gave it some general templates for settings and role types and story structure, and then taught it to fill in the rest itself from what it detects the players want—like adding a skin and tweaking some preferences. I’ll take responsibility for the bug that’s keeping it from shutting down, but not for the content. That’s pretty much yours. Between you, I mean. And it looks like it might be fun, possibly I’m jealous.” Never looking up from her phone to see the expressions of her speechless friends, she did a lot of things very rapidly on it. “All right, my cyborg avatar is going to clash with the setting, so let’s use the steampunk one instead. Not sure it’s a perfect fit but it’s already there and it doesn’t really matter other than aesthetically. I’ll be able to interact with your session this way, although my presence won’t actively shape it. We haven’t found a way to integrate more than two sources of input yet, and besides, yours is already running. Oh, help yourselves to the pizza, eh? There’s a knife in the outer pocket of my laptop bag, since I wasn’t sure what the situation here might be. They never cut it deep enough. There we go.” Light flickered around her, and her appearance changed.

Her skin stayed light, although it smoothed out to an even porcelain that looked almost doll-like, with the exception of the long-healed scars down the far right side of her face and neck and collarbone; her blonde hair darkened to a richer gold with copper highlights, and was now gathered into multiple loops of braids, under a set of steampunk goggles that had been pushed up out of the way. Her eyes were heavily lined with deep brown, and her lips were dark bronze. Over a simple white blouse with a very low neck, that corset, partly brown leather, partly navy-striped beige fabric, with lots of rings and metal bits, was all steampunk and enhanced her natural assets considerably. Her flouncy layered skirt was hitched up at the front, white petticoat under a navy skirt with brassy-yellow ribbons and ties; her ankle-height laced boots had low heels and were the same brown leather as the corset. Around her narrow waist was a brown leather belt supporting a variety of tools.

Her right arm and leg, as high up as Marisa could see, were apparently made of seamless glass with clockwork moving inside.

“There we go.” Claudia stretched. “That puts me inside the same enhanced reality you’re in. Okay, what can I get from inside? There is very limited data available from the server side. Everything personal is so heavily encrypted that even we can’t actually look at anything but a few extreme basics, but from here, I should be able to track what’s going on.” She pulled her goggles down over her eyes and laid her three-fingered clockwork hand on the Reverie box. “One of you tell it to pause, please.”

“Reverie, pause,” Harley said.

“Hm. Exit?”

“Reverie, save and exit.”

“Here, plug the dongle back in and do that again.”

Harley obeyed.

“It’s in a loop. What the hell could have sent it into a loop? It’s not strictly a code loop, or it would have been interrupted when you unplugged the dongles. It has to be something witchy, because it’s breaking tech rules, but I bet you know that.” Claudia tilted her head, regarding the box thoughtfully. “Okay, baby, what on earth are you doing? Let’s see if I can trigger a debug report on the server end, so Sal can start analyzing that.” She pulled her goggles up to rest above her hairline, then laid her clockwork hand on the box again.

Marisa investigated the pizzas, identifying which was for whom by the familiar topping combinations, and retrieved the knife from Claudia’s bag so she could separate slices. With no plates, it was still going to be neater to leave it in the boxes.

How did Harley manage to make that look elegant, and keep those golden claws from interfering?

It was a memorable image, to say the least: red-scaled, winged, black-leather-clad dragon-lady, sitting on the blue velvet couch, delicately eating pizza out of the box.

“Oh, that is so much better,” Harley said after a few bites, and it came out as a sigh. “Lunch feels like a long time ago.”

“Seriously, Mistress,” Marisa said.

Claudia blinked, and looked in her direction. “Sorry?”

“Huh? Oh. Yeah. Along with giving me clothes that I would swear I did not ask for and have been feeling extremely self-conscious about, it keeps making me say ‘Mistress’ when I’m talking to Harley. I honestly can’t keep from saying it. I’ve given up fighting it at this point.”

Claudia looked at the Reverie box, looked at Marisa, then at Harley, then let her hand fall. “The pizza smells good and I think I need to hear everything, and I do mean everything. Anything personal I’ll keep to myself, but it might still give me a clue about what’s going on.” She settled herself on the floor facing the pair on the couch, and accepted her own pizza and the knife. “Let’s go. All of it. Right from when you left the restaurant at lunch.”

Between them, they did.