Sarah hadn’t been sure what to expect, but it hadn’t been boredom. They had arrived less than an hour before, and the voice was repeating itself for the tenth time. The square had slowly filled with bloody and battered looking people. Some she recognized from the flight along the path, but some bore wounds and stories of completely unrelated creatures.

  The big man Sarah had come to know as Matt had stuck with her, though she wasn’t sure why.

  “Is it going to start again every time someone comes in here?” he muttered as the voice began its eleventh re-telling of the information.

  The spiel lasted a little over five minutes, and described their stats, something called affinities, and finally skills and level ups. Most of it was repeat information from the class selection suite. Sarah remained puzzled why the classes were excluded from the little speech.

  “I’m not sure,” she answered, “I listened carefully the first two times, but there’s really nothing to be gained from it. It just repeats what we were already told.”

  “It sounds like a required disclosure or something, but I can’t get what the angle is. Don’t these guys hold all the cards already?”

  Sarah only shook her head in response. She was tired, hungry, and only wanted to find a spot to curl up and nap. Matt stayed by her side as she slumped against the house, looking out toward the square.

  People were huddled in small groups all around, with only a few men and women staying by themselves. Sarah heard a smattering of different languages from all over the square.

  It was bizarre, the differences in language only registered about as much as an accent. She clearly understood what each person said, whether it was in French, English, Mandarin or German. In some ways it was the strangest part of coming to this world.

  Matt made a point of speaking in English, though he clearly wasn’t a native speaker.

  “Where were you from?” she asked him.

  “Helsinki most recently. I’ve lived in many places though, and I was looking to move again soon. How about you?”

  “I was from the United States. I had just moved to Virginia. I was starting an accounting job at a local university.”

  “Accounting, huh. Good job for any economy. Smart. I was a bouncer, but I’ve tended bar too.”

  “If I heard right about Finnish culture, that sounds like a good job for any economy too.”

  Matt grunted in agreement, and the conversation went silent. Sarah found herself looking around the square again. Matt interrupted her thoughts,

  “What class did you end up with? I got something called an Impulse Bruiser. ‘special attacks based on the concept of momentum.’”

  “Aren’t all attacks based on momentum?”

  “Guess so. The description says it focuses on melee. Sounded like it’d hit hard, and I figure you can always close distance but you can’t always make it, so I took it.”

  That logic made no fucking sense. Then again, she picked her class based on fairy tails. Sarah decided to just let it go.

  “Winter Priestess. Cold-focused magic class. I just chose it because I thought it’d be funny. I thought I was dreaming.”

  The conversation went quiet again, and this time it felt a little awkward. Sarah spoke up, feeling the pressure to keep the talk flowing.

  “I never thanked you for pulling me along at the start. Thank you for getting me moving.”

  “Of course. Little guy was ahead of both of us though, ya? I wanted to ask him how he knew. I saw the chickens and knew right away, I worked with chickens. Bad birds to be smaller than.”

  “Yeah, I raised some when I was a little girl. I wish I could have warned the others.”

  “Poor fuckers. Bad time to be too close to the back. We were lucky.”

  “We were,” Sarah said, but internally she wondered if that was true. It might have been better for it all to be over.

  She watched as a group of men moved to the center of the square. Each carried an armful of sticks, and they set them up in a pile. One of the men stretched out a hand and a shower of sparks flew out. A fire was soon burning briskly. People began gathering around the heat. It wasn’t cold, but it wasn’t warm either, and there was a lot of cloud cover right now.

  A thin man with a scraggly beard came scurrying up to the two of them. He wore a black long sleeve t-shirt that had large white letters framing a man riding a motorcycle. The letters said ‘If I’m riding you, you’ll get loud too!’ He had a faint whiff of body odor to him, mixed with the scent of stale beer.

  “You two wanna join up with our gang? We’re gonna go find some of those giant chickens folks are talkin’ about, see if they taste as good to us as we do to them!” He gestured towards a group of rough-looking men with a handful of women.

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  Sarah gave what she thought was a polite amount of time to think it over. Then she said,

  “No thanks.”

  The man shrugged and moved on. Matt visibly relaxed as the man walked away, moving on to another pair of people two buildings over.

  Sarah noticed a few other groups walking around and recruiting. There was a group of women walking between the houses, picking up another member here and there. They took only women with them. As they passed by, a few men from the scraggly guy’s group started calling something to them. The women ignored this for a few minutes, but eventually a dark-skinned woman with curly hair stopped and flipped them the bird. She was wearing a brightly colored dress. Her body language brooked no nonsense, and she sported a stiff back and a hard stare along with the gesture.

  Two of the men started laughing as she flicked them off, but a fat man wearing a baseball cap and a wife beater lost his shit. He started marching towards the group of women, yelling and screaming as he got closer. The woman in the bright dress walked out to meet him.

  The fat man kept screaming as he walked towards her, his pudgy face turning first red then purple. She stated something calmly, and he cocked a fist back as though to hit her. He never got a chance. As he closed the distance the woman slapped him with an open hand, knocking him to the ground with a CRACK loud enough to echo in the alleys around the square. Other groups went silent to turn and stare at the scene.

  The fat man got up from the ground, grabbing something from his back pocket, but was met with her other hand as he got to his knee. He landed back on his side.

  The man with the scraggly beard came up to him at that point and grabbed him by the shirt collar before dragging him back to their group. Sarah wasn’t sure if she was more impressed by the strength of the wiry man, or the material the fat guy’s shirt was made of. Neither looked strained as he was hauled back to the group.

  The voice from the square paused its speech, and Sarah was surprised when it responded to the situation.

  “Violence will not be tolerated in the village unless the village leader sanctions it. You have not yet selected a village leader, and the default rules remain in place. The rules are as follows:

  1. No violence of any kind will be tolerated within the village confines. The village confines end at the border of the houses.

  2. All goods must be exchanged for an equivalent worth item or service. No stealing.

  3. All members of the village must contribute to the security of the village.

  Rules will be enforced by system funded energy reserves for the first two weeks. Repeated violations will result in expulsion or incineration. During this time, a magical barrier will also be in place to prevent bestial waves. After this time, the barrier will gradually fade unless maintained by village inhabitants.”

  As the message concluded, a stone pillar emerged from the center of the village square, rising about two stories up from the earth with a plume of dust. The rock was rectangular and glowing. The light was red on two faces and blue on another, with the final face glowing green.

  “You may complete group or individual quests in order to further empower the security measures and energy reserves. High performance may allow for additional awards and temporary deference from inter-village competition. Check often! The rewards offered here may be the difference between life and death.”

  At this, people began crowding towards the pillar. The voice paused for a few seconds before resuming its prior message about affinities and stats as though nothing had happened. Matt looked at the pillar, interested.

  “Wanna check it out?” he asked.

  “Might as well,” she answered.

  The red faces had black text in the same symbolic language as the stone circle that had teleported them here. The writing stated the same rules as the voice had given them moments earlier. On the green face, Sarah saw a line at the top that stated:

  “Group Quests,”

  and on the blue face another line that stated:

  “Individual Quests.”

  The green group quests side had four items under it, with the individual quest list appearing significantly longer.

  “Group quests:

  1. Establish a village leader. Optional: establish additional ruling counsel. NOTE: first voting to be held in four days.

  2. Establish a village wall or barrier.

  3. Defend the village against three beasts of level three or higher

  Progress: 0/3. Time until next attack: minimum 3 days, maximum 8 days.

  4. Survive the first four weeks with at least 75% of the current population intact. Current population: 2473. Acceptable losses: 0/618.

  Rewards variable based on performance. Minimum reward for completing all group tasks: establishment of a village shop and introduction of basic profession trainer.”

  Most of the people had filtered over to look at the group tasks. The tasks seemed like things they would mostly want to do anyway. She followed Matt over to look at the blue side.

  There had to be a few hundred entries, with tasks including things like

  “11. Craft a suitable shelter”

  “22. Be the first from your village to kill a beast-type entity.”

  Most of the tasks involved either killing beasts, harvesting food, finding drinking water or building basic structures and supply chains. To Sarah’s surprise Matt walked up to the blue-faced rock and placed a palm on it. The stone glowed brightly, and line 22 disappeared after a check mark appeared on it, the rest of the list shifting and renumbering automatically.

  With a blue flash, a wooden club appeared in Matt’s hand. It was about the length of a baseball bat, with a broad end tapering towards a narrower handle. It had spikes driven into the end.

  As he held it, Matt grew visibly more muscled, and there were a few murmurs from the small crowd. He backed away from the pillar, and a space cleared around him. Matt gave a couple of test swings with the cudgel, and looked pretty pleased.

  “Beats punching hogs with my hands!” he said to Sarah. He wore a little grin.

  After seeing Matt’s reward, a number of people pressed in closer to the stone, trying to find anything on the list they had completed. Some people just threw their hands on the rock, but with no results.

  Sarah just kept scanning the list. There were rewards for exploration, for surviving encounters with certain beasts, and even for starting the first fire. The man who had made the sparks from his hands came forward and claimed that one, gaining a small wand in a flash of blue light. He immediately pocketed it.

  As she looked at the entries, Sarah noted markings that looked like asterisks or stars on some of the tasks. She found herself wondering at the meaning, with some tasks having none while others had up to three. She felt one of those little buzzes again near the base of her neck, and she had the understanding that the stars denoted difficulty ratings. She wondered if the rewards corresponded to the difficulty as well.

  Near the bottom, Sarah noted one of the tasks with three stars next to it:

  “384. Kill the bard: find the spider, end the threat. Beware its song.”

  What the fuck was that about?