“I’m at level two!” Mike cheered, but no one could cheer with him. Sergeant Macintosh was being bitten by two wasps and stung by a third. Steve had three wasps stinging him and couldn’t stab with his trident anymore. A wasp came in to bite him and the sight switched to black. He was going to respawn in the village, but the fire was already going. It would catch on the canopy and whatever the wasps used to build their nest.

  He was floating, again, and the pain from the stings faded. His hands could move normally again and he didn’t feel so swollen anymore. His feet touched the ground near the town bell and his sight returned. There beside him was Sergeant Macintosh, gripping his trident in a mild panic.

  “You’re allergic to bees?” Steve asked before anything else.

  “And wasps. And yellow jackets. I’m lucky I kept a hand on the trident or I’d have to go back and get it. I thought Mike would be right with us, I hope he’s not out there by himself overnight.” Sergeant Macintosh looked around the town bell. Mike was not here and he clearly was back at the nest still fighting.

  “Oh, I got to level two.” Steve watched the announcement come up across his sight and was glad he got a health increase with it.

  “Yeah, I made it to level three. Those wasps were worse than I thought. Well, make sure you eat something and then get to bed. I’m sure your brother wants to know you’re safe. I’ll wait here for Mike, he’s bound to show up soon.” Macintosh leaned against the support of the bell and pulled out a roll to eat while he waited.

  “They’ll send us out again with the next wagons?” Steve asked.

  “Yeah, if they’re smart they’ll want the next as soon as possible. But we should be able to ride in the wagons. Make it to the capital and back in one day.” The sergeant nodded and Steve walked away.

  “Did you bring me anything?” Max said as soon as Steve came into their house.

  “First, how was school?” Steve folded his arms and sat at their table. His bag was not food-safe, especially with parts of dead animals in it, so he had to eat at home. The food system was weird to Steve. In a game that was realistic to the point of having yearly minor illnesses and realistic metal recipes, everyone only had to eat once a day. Eating once a day allowed what it considered normal health regeneration and stamina recovery.

  “Eh, school was school. I didn’t get sent to the Principal’s office. I got a forty-eight on my writing assignment and a six hundred on the MERT.” Max didn’t sound very excited.

  “Six hundred? Are you serious? That’s nearly perfect! I bet no one else at your school scored that high.” Steve stopped gathering food and looked at Max with what he hoped was an excited expression.

  “It’s the highest on the ship, but it’s not a big deal.” Max was staring down at the table.

  “What happened? Are you ok?” Steve asked and Max folded his arms.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Max, please talk to me. You’re saying ‘I’m fine’ but everything else says ‘I just got swirlied three times today’ and not in a clean toilet. Please tell me what’s going on.” Steve remembered what their therapist had suggested. It would have been nice to finish their sessions before fleeing earth, but there hadn’t been a lot of notice for that.

  “What would you know about swirlies anyway? Did they even have toilets when you went to high school?” Max snapped, but he didn’t leave the table.

  “Ok, that’s rude. They definitely had toilets and I got plenty of swirlies at school.” Steve could smile about it now, but he hadn’t smiled a lot at the time.

  “Liar, you were the high school hero. Mom showed me all of your trophies before we had to leave. No one goes to college as a wrestling and football dual athlete like you did. You were prom king twice!” Max slid his dirty plate across the table angrily.

  “That was high school and what college I got. But I’m not talking about high school. Middle school was different. I was smaller than the other boys and I constantly smelled like Mom’s perfume. It was bad Max. There is a reason Mom didn’t show you any yearbooks from middle school. I had a busted lip in the first year and an actual broken nose my second year.” Steve visibly cringed at the memory.

  “Mom must have been furious.” Max covered his mouth. “Did she burn the school down?”

  “Close, you definitely didn’t go to that school and that principal was working a hydroponics farm last time I saw him. She sued them for thousands of earth coins and had the principal and three teachers fired after my broken nose picture. She ‘quarantined’ me for a month until the bruises cleared up.” Steve’s teeth grit a little at the mention of quarantines.

  “A month? I only got quarantined for a week a few times.” Max remembered and Steve frowned at that admission.

  “Quarantining was not mom’s best idea.” Steve didn’t want to go into it, but he couldn’t mention the quarantines without condemning them.

  “I didn’t get sick. She kept me out of school during those chicken pox outbreaks and Dad said it got really bad.” Max said.

  “How old were you when you got quarantined by mom?” Steve had never asked this. This was not something they had been able to cover with the therapist.

  “Six. Seven. One of those.” Max shrugged.

  “Max, you got chicken pox as a three year old. You couldn’t get it again even if there were outbreaks while you were at school. Mom and Dad would keep us home and isolate us there for her own reasons.” Steve had been thinking about how to explain this since he and Max left earth.

  “What reasons? Why would mom do that? I missed birthday parties, my best friend hated me for weeks.” Max was starting to get angry.

  “I don’t know.” Steve admitted.

  “You keep saying things about Mom and Dad. They were hurting us, but you won’t tell me how. How were Mom and Dad so bad?” Max demanded.

  “Ok, I owe you an answer. I just want to make sure before I tell you what I suspect. Even just isolating us like that is abusive. Yelling at us like that is abusive too. The pressure they put on me in high school was unhealthy and they were going to do the same thing to you.” Steve admitted.

  “You don’t know that. Maybe they wouldn’t. Maybe I could just be a kid for them.” Max started to cry.

  “They were definitely going to do the same thing to you. It might not be football or wrestling, but they were going to push just about to death.” Steve didn’t like the tears he could feel coming on.

  “How can you know? You don’t want to tell me your suspicions and then you tell me this? Mom wouldn’t do that to me, I’m a good kid.” Max sniffed the unpleasant snot clogging up his nose.

  “I was a good kid too. I did everything Mom and Dad asked.” Steve would later regret letting Max steer this conversation.

  “Mom didn’t think so, she told me you left college early.” Max glared at his brother.

  “I did. I left college early to join the Security Force and Mom did not like that. Once I found out, I couldn’t keep doing what they wanted.”

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  “That’s stupid. You couldn’t stay in college? Mom was furious, it was my longest quarantine.” Max used his sleeve to wipe the tears on his face.

  “See! That! I dropped out of college and they pulled you out of school. It was the same crap they did when he fought with them.” Steve pointed accusingly across the table.

  “Him who?” Max suddenly stopped everything midwipe of his nose.

  “Oh no, I’m not supposed to tell you that. The therapist said I shouldn’t tell you my suspicions. I shouldn’t put that on you.” The tears suddenly attacked Steve and he suddenly felt like he was talking through a swamp.

  “Tell me what?” Max had never seen Steve break down like this.

  “Henry, his name was Henry. He was my big brother, seven years older than me. He swam and ran crosscountry. He was pre-med at NYU. No matter how weird Mom and Dad were, we had fun. He smuggled me webcomics and took me to see the last dog.” Steve couldn’t stop now.

  “What happened? Where’s Henry?” Max asked.

  “Henry brought home Jennifer. Mom and Dad didn’t like Jennifer, so I got a month-long quarantine, especially from him. He never graduated, there was a car accident. His car drove off a bridge and that put an end to my quarantines for a while.” Steve stared at the table while he spoke.

  “Cars don’t do that. Cars don’t just drive off bridges. Was he manually driving?” The color drained from Max’s face, but he wasn’t crying anymore.

  “No, cars don’t do that, and no, he wasn’t driving. I was a kid, I didn’t know how suspicious it looked. Mom and Dad wouldn’t talk about Henry after the funeral. I got to college and hired a private investigator. He didn’t find anything more. The hard drive had been destroyed and the information on it was lost. There is no way to know where he was going or what the automated driver did before the accident.”

  “Did Mom and Dad kill him?” Max asked.

  “The police didn’t think so. The private detective didn’t think so. I don’t know and it’s not important.” Steve took a deep breath and leaned back in his seat.

  “It’s not important? How is it not important?” Max demanded.

  “The police didn’t do anything about it. I can’t prove something did happen and Henry is gone. You’re here. I saw what Mom and Dad did to Henry, to me, and then to you. I had to get you out and to do that we had to go to Mars. I got that job with the exiles as a miner and they helped me get you out. And I mean, the yelling is done. There’s no more quarantines. If you want to go to college, you can go. If you don’t want to go, you don’t have to. We have a completely new life ahead of us on New Corsica.”

  “I…I need to go to sleep.” Max left the table and went upstairs to his bedroom.

  “That’s the best idea we’ve had all night.” Steve whispered to himself and looked at the food he hadn’t touched on the table. Chicken, tomato, bread, and cheese. There was no other food in the house and tomorrow he would purchase the same thing again before going on patrol again.

  Steve moved to his bed by the door, ate his chicken-tomato-cheese sandwich, and then laid down to sleep. No matter how out of sorts or stressed, he never had any trouble going to sleep here.

  “Hey, is anyone home?” A loud voice and banging on the door woke Steve up the next day. He rolled out of bed, grabbed his looted trident, and opened the door really quickly.

  This would be the third time the alarm went up during the night. The lizardfolk had attacked twice during the night and killed a few of the less combat oriented people. But it wasn’t someone raising the alarm at the door, it was a rabbit.

  “Oh hey, Steve. Good to see you man, I was worried I had the wrong village.” The brown rabbit smiled, a disconcerting sight as it had human teeth, and came in to give Steve a hug.

  “What am I looking at?” Steve asked and took a step back into the house.

  “Oh, yeah. I’m a Lagromorph, a rabbit person. You can see that. It’s me, Dave from the exile movement.” The rabbit man didn’t chase after Steve, which Steve would have considered quite the nightmare.

  “Dave? From the exile resistance?” Steve didn’t know many guys named Dave. And the only Dave in the exile helped kidnap Max.

  “Yeah, that’s me. We had good times. I’ve been looking for you.” Dave the rabbit man nodded eagerly.

  “I didn’t think I’d see you again after we…kidnapped my brother.” Steve looked each way on the street to see if anyone heard him say that sentence. It was almost dawn and thankfully there was no one on the street.

  “Can I come in? I just escorted a merchant from the capital here and we went all night.” Dave adjusted the sword on his belt.

  “Yeah, come in. Is there something you need from me?” Steve stepped out of the doorway. He’d worried that the exile would want some sort of payment for getting Max. He just didn’t expect a rabbit to be the one to deliver the news.

  “No, not really. I was checking on you. Is that your best weapon?” Dave stretched and twisted.

  “Yeah, a lizardfolk dropped it.”

  Steve set down the trident and pulled a chair over for Dave while he sat on the bed.

  “It’s hard to get good weapons and good armor is almost impossible. There must be fifty experienced blacksmiths in the capital and they hate the bad iron we have.” Dave slipped his sword out of his belt and laid it across his lap. It was more like he was crouched on the chair with his rabbit legs bending differently from human legs.

  “A katana? Did you loot that?” Steve was surprised to see the curved blade in a rough, wooden sheath.

  “Yeah, it’s one solution to the bad iron. They’re making straight blades too, but this was one of the first batch. The guy knew how to make katana, so I’m swinging a katana. But how are you guys? Is Max settling into school?” Dave lifted his blade, realized he might be rambling about it, and set it back down.

  “He’s having a hard time. He really wanted to play a video game for 17 years and he didn’t expect to have so much school to go with it. He’s got a good class trainer, he’s pretty good with a bow.” Steve explained.

  “Yeah, he’s not the only dude struggling. A bunch of the older students are arguing that they aren’t minors anymore because in earth time we’ve already spent a few months in here. They’re arguing they should be able to go out and fight like the adults.” Dave shook his head and ran a hand over his floppy ears.

  “Would they cancel school?” Steve asked in surprise.

  “Maybe, not really. These kids are going to be the same age as when they went in, so they’ll still technically be school age when we arrive. We might have teenagers helping with patrol and city defense after the year tutorial is up.”

  “I don’t get it. This place is nuts right now and it’s still in tutorial? How’s it going to get worse at the end of the year?” Steve hadn’t had anyone to ask until now.

  “I guess you really haven’t played this game in a while. The ice wall will retreat over the course of this year and it will release other kingdoms into our region. Hostile kingdoms. We have a year to get settled, organize, and then it’ll be war for sixteen years.” Dave’s bright outlook dimmed a little at that statement.

  “But, like, video game war.” Steve had to clarify. Over the weeks, the game had added in elements and challenges slowly. If it suddenly updated with the horrors of an actual war, there was going to be a problem.

  “Yeah, video game war. Toned way down. We’ll still die, but I must have died forty times already. We’re probably not going to have to deal with a famine since we only eat once a day. But we do need to be ready for the tutorial to end. Are you on your way to being ready for the end of the year?” Dave’s nose wiggled as he spoke.

  “I’m fine. The village will get better iron and we’ll get issued better weapons and armor.” Steve nodded.

  “That is not the Steve I knew in the exile. You’re gonna wait for your boss to decide what you need? You’re going to take just the loot you can find?” Dave asked.

  “There isn’t a weapons trainer here. And I can’t leave Max here while I travel to find one. What are you getting at?”

  “There is a trainer near here, it’s a bit of a slog to get to him though. He has a few quests that would give you better equipment and experience. You could get out of the starter class long before the tutorial ends.” Dave took a folded piece of soft leather out of his jacket’s inner pocket.

  “Is that a map? Instructions on how to find him?” Steve asked. “And how did you find him? Why don’t you use him?”

  “It is a map, I bought it from one of the rare NPC brokers around. Right now he’s a low level trainer and needs multiple visits for all of his training. Later on, with the war on, he’ll move I think and we’ll have to find him again.” Dave smiled and held out the map.

  “Why are you doing this? You don’t owe us and I can’t pay you. My parents took all my shares and earth coins when we left Earth.” Steve didn’t take the map right away.

  “I’m doing this because we need to take care of each other. Everyone here has lost and lost a lot. We’re not just looking to rebuild a place, we’re rebuilding our people. The Prime Minister asked everyone leaving the capital to look for someone they know they could help.” Dave wiggled the map and Steve finally took it.

  “What is the capital’s name? Is it just the capital?” Steve set the map on his pillow.

  “It sucks. Lost Sock, it’s a city named after something eaten by a drier. We’re here in Davtown and I’m on my way to Glossy. Dude, if I find the AI that named these towns, I’m going to pee on its hard drive.” Dave shook his head which made his ears flap. “That trainer is a Canid, a dog person, so don’t be surprised when you see him. Thank you for letting me rest my feet. I have to catch up to the caravan.”

  Dave shook Steve’s hand, smiled that disconcerting smile, and left without another word. Steve was left with the odd realization that he had been visited by a bunny, gotten a present, and his little brother would never believe him.