“This is my sketch for levels two and three,” Wei Shengyuan says, gesturing for her to open up the files on her own screen. “This one’s set in a more autumnal forest, and this one is in a jungle. The autumn forest’s weather concept is ‘wind’, and the jungle is ‘rain’. Taking into account that any new enemy type is likely also going to be a shadow, all of the floors are set in daylight.”

  Zan Xinyi squints at the autumn forest suspiciously. He’s drawn a lot of individual leaves in different shades of red, orange, and yellow.

  “This is sounding like I might need to be making leaves move in the wind,” she says.

  “You don’t have to do that,” Wei Shengyuan says. “Just put in a wind sound effect.”

  Wow, that sounds like--

  Zan Xinyi grins at him.

  “You’re finally getting with the program and pushing work onto others,” she says approvingly. Now the sound effect is Jiang Jin’s problem. That’s right, implementing a wind whistling sound effect is way easier than moving leaves around. Movement is the enemy.

  She moves on to the jungle and her smile immediately disappears.

  “This looks complex, Wei Shengyuan,” she says. “And the rain...”

  “I’ve come up with some ideas for how the rain would be animated,” Wei Shengyuan says. “One is just drawing it in instead. So it would be a still backdrop.”

  “Great idea,” Zan Xinyi says immediately.

  “Or,” Wei Shengyuan says, his tail fin flicking in annoyance, “We can do a very simple animation cycle, where I draw the rain in about three different positions, and you can cycle between those three to imply it’s constantly falling.”

  Zan Xinyi crosses her arms. She still likes option one.

  “Why’d you even suggest option two?”

  “Because, Zan Xinyi, I am trying to prevent future problems down the line. Not your specialty, I know.”

  “What problem.”

  “It’s your character’s ability. Skies Beyond Skies. I know I’ve never seen it actually work, but I know what it’s supposed to do.”

  That’s right.

  It’s supposed to cause the weather tag to change to clear. But if he draws the rain directly into the backdrop-- then she won’t be able to set it up to swap it out.

  “So we’re going to do layers,” Zan Xinyi says. “There’ll be a rain layer, and the non-rain jungle background. The overlayer with the rain will be toggleable so that it can be turned off.”

  “The wind noise also needs to be set to be able to turn off,” Wei Shengyuan says. “And what about level one...”

  “I already have an effect in place where I drop a heavy yellow lighting in to imply that she’s cleared out some of the clouds and let more daylight in,” Zan Xinyi says grumpily.

  Now it looks awful and washes out the entire level, but that’s not her concern.

  “Now, about the enemies,” Wei Shengyuan says. “I think--”

  There’s a crisp knock on the door, and then no immediate entry. So it’s not Jiang Jin.

  “What is it, Guan Yu?” Zan Xinyi says.

  “Come in,” Wei Shengyuan says.

  Zan Xinyi had thought about putting effort into concealing that they still had running water, but then immediately nixed it. He’ll either investigate, or he won’t. And she’s not going a month without a shower.

  The immediate and welcome effect of that choice is that Guan Yu’s military uniform is freshly washed, his face is brightly scrubbed, and he clings to a water canteen full of their tap water like it’s sacred water from a dragon well. The last couple of days have stripped years off of him.

  The less welcome effect is the way he stares at her.

  “Miss Zan,” he says formally. “I’m wondering if I could be of assistance in some way?”

  “Were’nt you already helping set up Jiang Jin’s room?”

  “I finished,” he says.

  “Already?”

  He somehow straightens up even more.

  “I’m not bad with handiwork,” he says.

  What she really needs is a coder.

  She looks over at Wei Shengyuan.

  “Do you need anything?”

  Wei Shengyuan blinks, startled.

  “I-- no. I mean…”

  Wow, he’s so useless at this.

  “You told me just last week that the bathroom needed repairs, and the fan needs to be replaced,” Zan Xinyi says. Which she hadn’t yet done anything about because it seemed super annoying and the priority was Jiang Jin’s soundproofing.

  “I did say that,” Wei Shengyuan says. “You...remembered?”

  “Since all the fans in this building are the same, we can just use a different bathroom’s fan as a replacement.” Zan Xinyi generously uses the ‘we’ to mean Guan Yu. “Then I have a caulking gun in--”

  Where did she put it. She sometimes puts extra shit in some of the other apartments, but she’d moved stuff around first to store their haul from Zhang Hai and then again when she’d cleaned out a room for Guan Yu.

  “In one of the unoccupied apartments on this floor,” Zan Xinyi says, also firmly moving that problem onto Guan Yu’s shoulders. “Go look around when you have time.”

  Guan Yu looks stunned.

  “He didn’t mean more handiwork,” Wei Shengyuan says. “He’s asking how he can speed up the game time table. So he can leave here faster.”

  He gives Guan Yu a sympathetic glance as he starts up a new layer on his sketch.

  “We’re going as fast as we can,” he says. “We also want to wrap this up quickly and start cleaning up errors in the levels only found after we playtest them. The first level is still really wonky because Zan Xinyi didn’t debug anything.”

  “I did debug it,” Zan Xinyi says. She’d fixed exactly two bugs, which is more than anyone else is fixing.

  “When you mentioned you were working on a game, I assumed that was your euphemism for zombie core hunting,” Guan Yu admits. “But it’s an actual...”

  “It’s a real game,” Wei Shengyuan says. “Well. It’s the start of a real game. It’s theoretically playable.”

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  It’s currently only theoretically playable on Zan Xinyi’s own computer, but that still counts.

  “But who’s even going to play it?”

  Wei Shengyuan looks over at Zan Xinyi, like she has the answer to that.

  But she has to have the answer to that.

  “You,” Zan Xinyi says, annoyed and cornered. “You are going to play it.”

  Guan Yu pauses. “I--”

  “After you fix the bathroom,” Zan Xinyi says, both because that's a higher priority and because she’s not prepared to have someone else play the game yet anyway.

  But now she’s determined.

  “I’ll relocate while you do that,” Wei Shengyuan says, an unusual edge of eagerness in his eyes. Now, is he happy that it’s finally getting done, or is he happy it’s getting done by someone with more affinity for tools than Zan Xinyi? That bastard. Next time something goes wrong with the tub she’ll tell Jiang Jin to handle it and see how he likes that.

  “Oh, I didn’t realize you lived there,” Guan Yu says.

  Wei Shengyuan stiffens.

  “Until you finish the bathroom, you can live there,” Zan Xinyi says.

  Guan Yu backpedals quickly as she opens the door.

  “I didn’t mean-- I didn’t mean it negatively,” Guan Yu tries.

  But of course he did mean it negatively.

  Zan Xinyi rarely goes in the bathroom anymore, so of course it’s been a month since Wei Shengyuan moved in and now his crap is all over that small room. Extra shirts folded here and there. A makeshift handle is bolted close to the edge of the tub to help him pull himself out and up into a seat, and yet more handles on the wall let him pull himself all the way to the door where he keeps the wheelchair.

  He’s found a laminated poster of a beach and plastered it over the bathroom mirror, so it’s impossible to use it to see yourself.

  The fan is making a terrible little whine as it dies pathetically in its battle against the humidity.

  The shower curtains haven’t been changed out since Zan Xinyi’s girlfriend picked them out, so they show a blue haired girl waving a wand that produces bubbles.

  “I didn’t pick out the curtain,” Wei Shengyuan says.

  “Yes, a person with terrible taste picked that out,” Zan Xinyi says flatly. “Let’s blame her for everything, shall we? It’s also her fault that the place smells like mildew. Her terrible practices. It’s even her fault the elevators don’t work.”

  “I, um, think it’s comfortable and not anyone’s fault,” Guan Yu says, because he doesn’t even know Zan Xinyi’s not talking about herself. “I’ll try to get to work.”

  “She’s just taking advantage of you,” Wei Shengyuan says, words clipped. What’s pissed him off? “You don’t have to do it. Since she said we’ll get you back to the base within a month or so, that’s the deadline. Trying to do more won’t help you.”

  Zan Xinyi crosses her arms.

  “Getting Guan Yu back is just not urgent. Is that my fault? He can strike out on his own if he’s so afraid of time running out. It’s not wrong to take advantage of people when they already know the deal.”

  Guan Yu looks back and forth between the two of them, awkwardly caught in the doorway to the bathroom.

  “He can’t strike out on his own, he’s too weak. I doubt he’ll get more than a block away without a gun. If he’s lucky, he’ll still be able to make out our building amidst the fog and make it back.”

  Again, is that her fault?

  “You navigate just fine,” Zan Xinyi points out.

  “I can sense water,” Wei Shengyuan says. “And Jiang Jin can hear the vast majority of danger coming, and the danger that we can’t avoid, you--” He doesn’t even try to describe what she does, just gestures at the broom. “There’s no comparison.”

  “You can sense the mist...” Guan Yu whispers, awed.

  “It’s just water,” Wei Shengyuan says. “Really, really corrupted, difficult to control water.”

  “Where are the tools?” Guan Yu asks.

  Zan Xinyi looks at him suspiciously.

  He’s got a shiny edge of excitement to him now.

  He wants something from Wei Shengyuan that’s more than a way back to base.

  But that’s Wei Shengyuan’s fault for bragging.

  “Just go looking through the extra rooms ‘til you find them,” Zan Xinyi says. She’s not going to help.

  “Yes!”

  He even aborts a salute before he pivots on his heel and rushes off.

  Alone, she looks back at Wei Shengyuan.

  “You really told him a lot.”

  “I wasn’t telling him,” Wei Shengyuan says. “I was telling you. Sometimes it feels like you don’t...notice how things are actually happening. It’s not all inexplicable magic.”

  It’s not that she doesn’t notice, but that she doesn’t care.

  As long as he can navigate, does it matter what is letting him do that? What does it have to do with her?

  “My ‘explanation’ was that you and Jiang Jin had it under control,” Zan Xinyi says. “And that I’d be informed if that changed. So, if you suddenly can’t navigate, you should tell me.”

  She goes back to her laptop.

  She’s been tinkering with the summoning system non-stop, and she’s succeeded in setting up individual player save files. What a concept, being able to log into a game and then the game remembers which characters you’ve previously summoned.

  Currently the Witch’s rarity is set at 0.000018%. She’d previously thought about leaving her completely unsummonable, but she’s ended up using the Witch as the test summon for her overhauls. Hopefully she’ll remember to set the rarity to 0% after she’s done.

  And the summon system still doesn’t work at all, of course, because you can’t click on the summon button unless you have the currency, and she hasn’t implemented the currency.

  In fact, going back to level one and trying to figure out how to tack on receiving currency when you won the fight seemed so annoying that she’s just going to call that level a wash and declare you can’t get any currency until you win level two.

  It’s also because level one is so buggy that she’s really afraid putting in even one more layer of complexity will cause something terrible to happen. Her level two is already running better in every way.

  Though, she hasn't implemented any of the new player card mechanics yet. Or the new cards. And how exactly is Guan Yu going to be able to--

  “Zan Xinyi.”

  A water droplet splashes in her face to get her attention.

  While she’d thought the conversation was over, apparently not.

  “What?”

  “When it comes to investigating if people are back at the military base...” Wei Shengyuan hesitates. “Should I ask Guan Yu to look for my family, too?”

  Ah. Zan Xinyi closes the laptop.

  “Yeah,” she says. “Why wouldn’t you?”

  “It’s a weakness,” Wei Shengyuan says quietly. “Having family outside of this...bubble. It doesn’t matter right now, but it’s another thing that can’t be taken back once told. And our group isn’t currently powerful enough for the base to really care about us...but I have to think about the future.”

  ‘Our group’.

  Wei Shengyuan is really taking this seriously. First a studio logo, and now drawing a line between the interests of their group of three versus everyone else.

  At this rate...shouldn’t they have a name? Something way less stupid than Pleasant Hills. But all that can wait while she tries to recall what his parents had been like.

  That’s right. Wei Shengyuan had hated inviting her over, so she’d met his parents there only rarely and mostly when they showed their faces at the school-- but.

  She’ll be clear: they aren’t good people, and worse than that, they’re unreliable people.

  Even in a more peaceful world, she’d say that his mother was the type of person who’d definitely try to claim reward money on Wei Shengyuan’s behalf, and then maybe one tenth of it would be given to him if she was confronted face to face.

  And his father is a drunk with wandering eyes.

  Wei Shengyuan is worried about the base using his parents against him, she’s worried his parents themselves will be plenty of trouble--

  But in the end, her answer doesn’t change.

  “You’re braver than you used to be, Wei Shengyuan,” she says. “I said it’s fine, so it’s fine. Since you’ve pointed out that it could be a problem, then just be prepared to humbly bow to me and say ‘Zan Xinyi, I know this is all my fault and I take full responsibility.’ I’ll be looking forward to it.”

  Wei Shengyuan scowls at her.

  “I’ll never say that,” he says. “It’s not my fault. It’s yours, for being so casual!”

  There we go.

  Accepting responsibility is so scary, isn’t it? That’s why it’s not worth it.

  “I also need you to make new menu screens,” Zan Xinyi says. “I forgot to mention it earlier. And you also need to design some flare for the summoning animation.”

  “Zan Xinyi!”

  Back in high school, Wei Shengyuan was the only member of her art club that could draw. And yet, he always drew so much promotional material for that club and rarely complained. Where has that spirit gone? What happened to such a cute kid!

  “Zan Xinyi, this isn’t fair. You haven’t given Jiang Jin any extra--”

  Really. Adulthood can corrupt anyone.

  patreon members, who are 10 chapters ahead. Crazy.