Morning came with bread smells and the clatter of someone hauling kegs. The guild hall has its own ecosystem: warm, beer-scented, slightly damp, always inhabited by three more people than you think can fit, and one of them was always a random person sitting at the bar, even at 7 am.

  I joined the line at the counter for breakfast, there was a person to take my two copper and hand me a bowl. I got a ladle of hot grain porridge of some kind.

  Not oats and not something I would care to repeat. Dekka trotted at my heel, looking impatient. This breakfast was of little interest to her. Until I got two small links of sausage placed on top of my bowl of mush, then I was her best friend. At the end of the counter was a person pouring tea. I had hoped it contained caffeine or some other stimulant.

  I handed her one as I went for a place to sit. I didn’t feel like talking to anyone. So I picked a spot in the corner that only had a single chair. The tea and sausage were good. I people watched as I sipped the hot beverage and planned my day. Everyone had their trajectories: they got their food, then either headed out or over to the quest board.

  Mornings were far more businesslike in the Adventurer’s Guild. No one lingered or boasted over their morning meal or mugs of tea.

  Pushing my nearly untouched bowl of unidentifiable mushy grains, I opened the HUD again, because the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting the system not to be a jerk.

  [Upgrade or consolidate primary class? Y/N]

  Still no preview. You’d think a world obsessed with labels would at least offer a sneak peak.

  I poked the “options” gear. The gear spun in a way that implied it was only decorative. I had a suspicion it worked just fine for Ayerelia and friends.

  “Fine,” I said to Dekka. “If the menu won’t talk, I’ll go bother a human-shaped option.”

  Her ears perked at “go” which was her favourite verb as it was often followed by other good noun-type words like “walk”, “swim,” or other verbs like “get”.

  The front desk woman at the guild was the kind of NPC I’d started to recognised: competent, unruffled, a little amused by the antics around her. She wore a vest with too many pockets and the expression of someone who had seen every variation of stupid attempt to game bureaucracy. I waited while she explained to a gnomish man that, while the guild would insure his cursed amulet against theft, but not for ‘moral depreciation liability.’

  But that he could try the insurance company Sneed & Co on the main street.

  When it was my turn, I leaned on the counter and gave her a friendly smile. “Hi. I have an upgrade and consolidation question, and the interface is not being helpful.”

  “Current class?”

  “Um, Fighter.”

  “For all Fighter class queries,” she said without checking anything, “you’ll want Master Trenwald.”

  Of course I will. “Where is Master Trenwald.”

  “Training Hall Two,” she said, crisp, her voice a stamp certifying my query was marked completed. “Follow the smell of oil and shouting. He’s the gentleman explaining to idiots that they will be dying wrong.”

  “That seems like good advice,” I said, but she had already turned her attention to the next person in line.

  We threaded through the hallways. Training Hall Two announced itself with exactly the published features: oil, shouting, the rhythmic slap of wooden swords on pads.

  I paused at the doorway. Racks of practice weapons lined one wall like a field of iron weeds. Someone had chalked advice on a slate:

  SPEND LESS TIME DYING.

  SPEND MORE TIME NOT DYING.

  Beneath it, in a different hand, “THANK YOU FOR THIS INSIGHT.”

  The room was large, but the air smelled of sweat, leather wax overlaid with a miasma of annoyance. I assumed the annoyance was coming from the man at the centre of the space.

  Master Trenwald was the largest thing in the room. I had never seen such a large person before. He had to be part orc. Or maybe troll.

  He wore his age like it was fashion and not reality. He had spent years honing his craft but that he hadn’t allowed time to take a toll on him. Scars laddered the visible parts of his forearms in tidy white reminders. The tiniest pair of very round glasses sat perched on his nose. No, not tiny, normal-sized, they just looked ridiculous clinging there so delicate and out of place.

  He sat on a woven grass mat in front of a line of recruits, correcting stances with two-word sentences and the occasional pointed look. When he turned his head toward me, it was like noticing that a cliff of granite had eyes.

  He didn’t move other than the slow swiveling of his head. “What can I help you with?” He asked. All his recruits frozen in the last postion he had told them to take. One that was trying to maintain a hand stand was already starting to shake so I hurriedly explained I was interested in learning about upgrading and maybe consolidating my class.

  Handstand guy fell over, but immediately tried again. Master Trenwald shook his head slowly. I wasn’t sure if it was at me or his recruit.

  “Describe,” he said to me. “Exactly what is the issue.”

  “The prompt is present,” I said. “The details are not.”

  He nodded once. “You have completed two branches?”

  “Yes.” I swallowed. Noticing the envious looks being shot my way by the recruits. Some were even standing straighter than before, something I wouldn’t have thought possible. I slouched a little, now I felt as if I’d done a magic trick by accident. “I filled both branches of the Weapon-Club tree” I said.

  He didn’t pull up a HUD or anything, but I could feel the system turning like a millwheel behind his gaze. “You have walked the path of force refined by intent. The result of consolidation is clear.” A fractional pause, like a breath caught in code. “Barbarian.”

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  I froze, my mind blanking, could the game read my mind? This was the last option possible of all options of all time that I did not want.

  “No,” I said. Not loud, but definite. Dekka, sensing the tone that meant drama, sat on my boot in solidarity.

  Trenwald did not look confused. It’s hard to confuse a script. “Combining those branches produces Barbarian,” he repeated, as if clarifying a recipe. “It is not an insult. It is a proud discipline. The indomitable spirit, the redirection of pain into action—”

  “You mean hitting things angrily,” I said.

  “There is honour in righteous anger,” he said, “and such anger can be well-applied.”

  “Anger can also make you reckless and stupid.” I retorted. But he just nodded calmly. He might think anger a useful tool but it was clear it wasn't one he cared to use.

  I didn’t think telling him I was squeamish about getting blood and bits all over me would get me very far. And it would likely hurt my cause if I complained that the wardrobe choice was bothering. I know it is a minor thing. But you don’t realise how much your choice of clothes affects your identity and how you see yourself.

  “I refuse to be Beth the Barbarian.” Was all the argument I could come up with.

  He regarded me the way one regards a person refusing gravity. “Refusal…?” he said, with a slight glitch around the word, like his mouth was borrowing vocabulary from somewhere else, this was clearly off script for this

  NPC. “Consolidation selects the nearest name the world has for the pattern of your acts. You have been a wall. A hammer. A front. The name is a recognition, not a leash.”

  “It feels like a leash,” I said. “It feels like a name tag someone else wrote in permanent marker and hot-glued it to my chest.”

  He tilted his head. For a moment and then for no more than the twitch of a candle, the light behind his eyes went wrong. “You can’t walk two paths at once until you’ve walked one to its end.” That voice was nothing like he had previously sounded like. A shiver ran up my spine.

  He waited. I waited. What in the fortune fucking cookie hell did that all mean?

  I had walked the branches. Exactly two. Now I was at the end.

  Master Trenwalk went blank for a second, then his face and tone of voice returned to the ‘Master of the Training hall’ NPC. “There are whispers,” he said then, and the tone had the cadence of not-quite-script. “Of hidden paths. That if one completes two branches and performs an act beyond their nature, the world may reveal a name not yet written.”

  My skin prickled. “Beyond my nature,” I repeated. “What does that even mean? Give a speech? Bake a cake? Kill a god with kindness?”

  “If it were known,” he said with admirably appropriate inscrutability, “it would not be hidden.”

  “I love this extremely helpful riddle,” I said. “I will cherish it. I will embroider it on a pillow.”

  “That would be a good idea. Give the idea a name and then form. Then internalise. The world watches.”

  Was that a threat? Or a warning?

  “Thank you for your advice.” I said.

  He nodded once, which doubled as both blessing and dismissal. The recruits were all sweating from holding static postures; he turned to them with his full, implacable attention. The one who had been doing a handstand had been cheating by using his toes up aggainst one of the central posts. I had a feeling he was going to regret that. Dekka and I sidestepped a lad who had been holding a squat this whole time.

  Maybe bashing things with a hunk of wood wasn’t the worst way to level up in this game.

  Regardless I was now more confused not less. I had more questions than I had woken up with this morning.

  “ Fucking barbarian,” I said to Dekka, tasting it. “It’s not even the violence. It’s the marketing, the insult to who I want to be seen as.”

  She sneezed as if agreeing that branding mattered.

  I tried to imagine picking YES. I tried to imagine waking up with a different word used as one of my main identifiers. I tried to imagine the unimaginable possibility that it might be fine.

  Instead, I decided to go see what I could distract myself with in the city of Bistmore. I had the better part of a week to kill.

  I learnt that a medieval city was like a person, or at least the game version of one was. Bistmore had moods and I loved them all.

  Morning in the city smelled like yeast and stable hay, like the start of something. That something could possibly be bread, possibly trouble. No matter how early I got up there was already fresh bread in the windows of the bakery and the stables I passed had horses and oxen chewing contentedly on hay. There was also always someone running away after causing trouble. You could tell the seriousness of the trouble based on who was doing the chasing. Like if it was somone’s mum or a city guard.

  And if mornings were the juxtapositions of peace and mischief afternoons were where all the productivity lived. Bistmore was a boss babe in the afternoons.

  Everyone was hustling. Traders trying to out promise each other. Buyers shaking their heads and looking disapointed in hopes of haggling prices lower.

  A constant cacophony of hand made industry filled the air as we walked past the armourers, blacksmiths, cobblers, and carpenters. The clink and bang of tools was interspersed by yells at hapless apprentices and the occasional curse of a mishap induced bruise.

  The streets were thronged in the afternoon. I gave up and carried Dekka not just so she wouldn’t get stepped on, but also to stop her thieving terrier ways. When the crowds were thick she had found she could snatch food out of a child’s hand and disappear into the dense forest of legs. She would scarf down the morsel of food so fast she looked completely innocent by the time she was found. The crying child always pointed her out as the culprit, it wasn’t as if she was hard to notice, being the only dog in the city.

  My metaphorical purse was a lot lighter after a couple of those incidents. But I didn’t want to draw the ire of the city guards.

  They were busy enough in the main square. One day, I sat on a barrel outside a butcher’s where I had gotten some meat and cheese to go with the bread I had gotten earlier that day and watched a group of dishevelled children work a pick pocketing scheme right under the guards' noses. I don’t know how long they had been at it before I sat down to eat, but it was at least 30 minutes before a guard caught on.

  Then it was a slapstick comedy routine complete with an overturned cart of apples rolling everywhere. I had to hold Dekka to stop her from joining in.

  Though I had to wonder why people didn’t just use their inventories? Maybe they were full? Smaller. I had no idea if all NPCs even got inventories. More questions to ask when I got the chance.

  Bistmore in the afternoons was prime for people watching. The amount of programming that went into this game was mind-boggling. I watched a cobbler argue with a broom for a few minutes before realizing the broom was actually arguing back. It had some strong and, I dare say, compelling opinions about boot laces. One street over, a woman tried to sell me "genuine monster teeth," which were clearly not, yet somehow I believed her. I bought one.

  As I walked away the belief faded and I realised it was just a cleverly shaped baked pastry. I was still stuffed from lunch, so I gave it to Dekka.

  I bought a new shirt. It was soft and complicated and had way too many buttons and superfluous laces. I loved it immediately. It looked nothing like the fur-trimmed nonsense I’d be wearing if I gave in to the game’s naming ceremony. Yes I would lose it the next time I died. But I felt the need to assert my own personality.

  By evenning things were winding down. Shops started to close, and taverns started to fill. One night I was feeling brave and tried a tavern I had been warned to avoid. The people all seemed a bit rougher but nothing happened other than a bard flirted with me. I eventually had to pretend I didn’t hear him; he was objectively terrible, both at flirting and at singing. I wished Copperbeard were here to show him up. Evenings were also when I felt the loneliest. And after that first night, I avoided the Adventurer’s Guild in the evenings.

  Dekka became mildly famous after chasing a griffin chick out of one of the Taverns mid-week. Seems a patron was trying to raise it as a pet, but it got out of control. I was worried briefly that Dekka would transform into her hellhound guise but the foal sized chick just ran blindly in panic from the little creature nipping at its heels.

  The bartender gave her a hero’s portion of sausage and me a few mugs of the good mead that night. I don’t know what happened with the chick or the dude whose it was, as he had chased after it and never returned.

  Possibly the gaurds. I remembered how they were very against their citizens getting tasted in any form.

  One night, we were stitting on the west part of the city wall overlooking the fields and watching the sun set when I heard a familiar voice.

  “Oi, you up there. Stop lolly gagging we got some planning to do.”

  I looked down to see Copperbeard grinning up at me.