In the days following Mai's streak across the field, I didn't hear from her. I sent a message the next morning asking how she was, and sat at my desk staring at the phone awaiting her reply, but it didn't come. I figured she was embarrassed.
Meanwhile, Eva showed up unannounced two days in a row, both times asking me to assign her some challenge so she could earn powers. The first time, I obliged. So as to keep my promise to Mai about not letting Eva surpass her in the skill tree, I only challenged Eva to do small, simple things. I asked her to show me her underwear, then take off her shirt and pose for me on the bed, and she was eager to do these things. Not for me in particular, I could tell. She saw me as a camera, or as the abstract concept of the male gaze, and wanted to expose herself to this concept. I as an individual person was barely in the room, as far as she was concerned.
Because she was eager, she earned only crumbs of xp. The challenges from the first night did not even earn her half of the 2xp needed to graduate the first level. Her reluctance scores were asymptotic to zero.
The second time Eva invited herself over, it was late, past eleven, and she was buzzed from a houseparty she'd just left. When I let her in and poured her a cup of water, she sat on the edge of my bed and slouched. "I bet you invite Mai over," she said. "Like you actively call her and text her, but I have to show up."
"You have to show up?" I sat on the small couch across from her.
"If I want to see you I have to. When I text you, you don't answer."
Only once she mentioned it did I remember she had texted earlier that day, but when I saw that the notification wasn't Mai's reply, I dismissed it and set my phone aside.
"Give me a big challenge," she said. "Please. Tell me what you want. Tell me what you want."
She repeated this last phrase so incessantly that I couldn't interrupt to answer, and became frustrated with her. She was too drunk to have a conversation with. I told her she could spend the night, gave her my bed, and lay down on the couch.
For a moment it seemed that the moderator's game had hit stasis. Mai was hiding from me. Eva's thirst annoyed me. We hadn't heard from or about Henry in a week.
Then came the card. When I woke up on my couch, it was resting on my forehead, as if someone had come in and set it there in the night. It read:
> Crew vs Crew Challenge
>
> Scope: Side dungeon
> Rewards: 1000xp to distribute
> Penalty for loss or no-show: One crew member expelled from crew
> Time: 12pm
> Location: Student Center 3rd Basement
We had only an hour before the start time. I asked Eva to get ready as fast as she could, then we hurried to the track where Mai had morning practice. We picked up a sports drink for Eva's hangover from a convenience store on the way.
When we approached Mai on the sideline, she blushed and looked away from me. I'd been right. She was embarrassed. Instead of bringing up the texts she didn't answer, I showed her the card.
Still not looking at us, she said, "But the student center doesn't have a 3rd basement."
Out on the track, Melissa was running, and several older adults with clipboards paid her close attention. Her speed exceeded even that of Mai's during her naked dash. The rest of the team was on the sideline too, watching Melissa speed through lap after lap. I said, "I wonder if her branch of the skill tree was the one that started with _10% faster_, and that's why she can get the boosts while still wearing clothes."
"Shut up," Mai said. "I don't want to think about that."
Just then, the sky flickered out. Flickered like a weak bulb to black, not even stars shining overhead. The stadium brights automatically switched on. A panic erupted among the track team and the marching band, who had been practicing on the bleachers: there were disappearances. From a quick scan around, I concluded that only students of the university remained. The clipboard-holders who had been watching Melissa, the band conductor, the coaches, all of them had vanished.
There was another card in my hand.
> Crew vs Crew Challenge
>
> Scope: Campaign Phase 1
> Objective: Establish governance over this pocket universe
> Reward: 100,000xp to distribute
> Time limit: 30 days
> Penalty for loss: Dissolution of crew
On the back, there were a list of campaign phases:
> 1 Campus
> 2 Atlanta
> 3 Georgia
> 4 US
> 5 World
I handed the card to Mai. While she and Eva read it, I watched the panic unfold. The sky flickered back to daytime, but no one who had vanished reappeared. The three of us, in a daze, flowed with the mob back to the student center, where the standing student government president, whose greatest reponsibility to date had been event planning for the football team's homecoming game, affected a demeanor of having everything under control about the student body branching out into a packet universe---en event they and many others had interpreted as the rapture.
We could not linger in the atrium to watch the new social order develop. It was 11:48, so we hurried to the elevator.
"There's no B3 button," Mai said.
The panel ended at B2. I spun around looking for another button somewhere, but alas.
"Wait." Mai grabbed the side dungeon card from my hand, knelt at the button panel, and fed the card into a small reader I hadn't noticed. It looked like a vending machine bill eater.
Once it accepted the card, the elevator lights turned red and we started moving down. At the bottom, the doors didn't open, but the floor number display changed to a countdown to 12pm.
"I'm sorry I didn't respond to your messages," Mai said.
"No, don't apologize. These are wild events. I can't hold any response to them against you."
"I hoped if I pretended everything were normal, it would go away."
Eva watched the two of us intensely. When the conversation stopped, she said to me, "I wouldn't ignore you." As in, not like Mai.
Before Mai responded to Eva's snub, the doors opened to a long white tunnel, divided into sections by walls of water. The walls fell from sluices in the ceiling and drained through gaps in the floor. In each section, including the first, a small white pedestal held a card.
Eva read the one in front of us aloud.
> Rules
>
> In each section, you will find a card asking one crew member a question. That crew member must answer openly and honestly.
>
> If the crew member's answer is open and honest, they will pass through the water wall to the next section without penalty.
>
> Victory condition: Reach the end with crew leader plus one woman before other crew
>
> Elimination condition: Crew members may not progress further if they
"If they what?" I said.
Eva handed me the card. "Oh. If they reach orgasm."
Mai snatched it from my hand. "What does that mean, 'without penalty'? What would the penalty be?"
I shrugged.
A wall of water started falling behind us, and slowly sweeping forward, so we reflexively jumped into the next section to avoid it. All of us were soaked through our hair and clothes, and but on inspection no one seemed to be penalized in an obvious way. I read the card on the pedestal aloud.
> Question for Eva
>
> Why did you join Aiden's crew?
Eva laughed. "That's easy. I wanted to make Henry mad. And jealous."
That was what I had guessed, myself. "So now that you've answered, should we go ahead through?"
Eva and Mai nodded. We held hands side by side and stepped through together. Immediately I checked myself all over, my hands, legs, face, clothes. Everthing seemed unchanged.
Then I noticed a beige puddle on the ground and looked up. It was the same beige Eva's dress had been, and now there was no dress. The water had dissolved it completely and it was now draining into the gap in the floor between the hallway sections. Being as comfortable exposed as she was, Eva did not seem too phased by this. Her bra and underwear were in tact.
"There's two cards," Mai said. "The first says Eva's answer was open, but dishonest."
"Dishonest?" Eva said, confused. "But I thought that was the real reason."
Mai set the card down. "I might know what happened. When I told Aiden I didn't want to play this game, I thought I was telling the truth too, but it added me anyway when I privately realized I did want to. It read my mind."
I picked up the other card. "Meaning," I said. "Saying it only half the challenge. Knowing what to say is the other. Now it's asking you the same question, Mai. Why did you join?"
Mai stroked her jaw. "What does it want me to say?"
Through the water wall right in front of us, it seemed to me we had seven more sections after this, and I could only suppose the penalties would increase. Otherwise how would the rule card's ominous allusion to elimination by orgasm make sense?
"Okay, I have an answer. I joined because I thought letting you use and humiliate me would emasculate Henry. I wanted to do for you what I wouldn't do for him."
It seemed open, and honest. We stepped into the next section with a cautious optimism. But Mai's clothes disolved. Not just her sports bra and short shorts, but her underwear too. She was naked. Before anyone could say anything, she ran to the pedestal and read the top card. "Neither open nor honest? I don't know what it wants me to say."
To Eva, Mai's escalating panic was something satisfying. She couldn't contain her grin when she read the card underneath. "It asks Mai again: why did you join?"
Mai pulled at the hair around her temples. "Let's try this. I joined because I had a crush on you, Aiden, when you were our TA in physics."
"Hold on," I said. Her answer this time seemed much less difficult to say than last time. Who hadn't had a crush? She was recoiling from embarrassment into herself rather than trying to really answer the question.
