Outside the window, it has begun to rain heavily. Nothing that’s managed to stay unpolluted while outside is going to remain that way for very long.

  Zan Xinyi looks away from the dreary outdoors in favor of staring down her principal artist.

  “So this is the work you’ve done so far?”

  “Yes.” Wei Shengyuan’s arms are already crossed, and his shoulders are so high up his neck that they’re practically touching his ears. Why’s he acting like this? She hasn’t even said anything yet.

  Maybe it’s just because she insisted on holding the meeting in the living room instead of the bathroom. No more of that fucking stool. He can be the one in the wheelchair, and she can judge him from the comfort of her couch.

  She flips through the designs with interest. Emailing things between their devices is itself a delicate affair, as the wifi has long stopped working. But it’s still possible as long as there's a tag on both sending and receiving devices.

  She’d been expecting a lot of flat sketches, but he’s already started coming up with the 3d models for a lot of this. Even the landscape that’s just a road with trees now has depth, and not only depth...

  It has atmosphere. The trees are haunted black silhouettes, the path is twisty and barely visible, and what little patches of sky are visible are completely covered in clouds.

  He’s really not taking her ‘It doesn’t have to be good’ motto seriously.

  “You know we have to have this level done in three more weeks,” Zan Xinyi says. She taps on the trees. “If you can do work this good, then you should be able to make worse work even faster.”

  His jaw works. She watches in fascination as the gills on his neck also flex.

  “I’m also pretty far along with the characters,” he says. “It’s been difficult, since this game has no story.”

  She flips through the stuff he’s sent her to find the right folder.

  “First up,” Wei Shengyuan starts, “I designed the main character. The player avatar. That’s the one with the lantern.”

  Zan Xinyi raises her eyebrows.

  On her screen is a character in a cloaked grey robe whose face is cast almost entirely in shadow. The most distinctive trait of the character is the lantern that hangs from their shepherd's crook, which is lit up with an eerie blue flame.

  Is this a player avatar? But it does fit the requirements she gave. Ambiguous gender, a summoner type who stands back.

  The only problem would be animating the flame. So maybe it will end up as an eerie blue glow.

  “Alright, passed. I like it. Next--”

  It’s rare for her to become speechless, even momentarily.

  The first true gacha character that Wei Shengyuan has produced is a tall woman in a black pointy hat, a black dress, and a broom stick. A red lettered tag that reads VICTORY is tucked into her hat brim. A shadowy haze is drawn in around her, rendering any further details impossible to see.

  “You’re certainly taking shortcuts when it comes to inspiration,” she says finally. What can she even say? She’s not going to bring up that it’s based on her if he’s not going to. And maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s a complete coincidence.

  “Because there were no character notes.”

  Now she’s really scared of the final character.

  The final file shows a man in a dark green three piece suit and a fish head cane, with an orange glow coming from the man’s boots. There’s an additional sketch that shows the concept of fighting using the steam from the red hot coals in the soles.

  “So we’re doing a fairytale concept for him?” Zan Xinyi says, for the second time choosing not to address the elephant in the room. Him deciding to draw himself both without a fishtail and out of a wheelchair is his own business. “Combination of Ariel feeling like she’s walking on knives when she’s on land and the Cinderella step-sister’s punishment of dancing on hot coals?”

  “...Yes,” Wei Shengyuan says, in the same familiar tone he always used whenever she’d been telling him about fairy tales for too long during recess. “It matches the other two.”

  “Alright. Character designs accepted. Did you come up with any names?”

  He gives her a look of horror. Well, obviously they wouldn’t be using their own names. Then she realizes that this game might force her to make up dozens and dozens of names over time. No way in hell.

  “I think everyone in Sunny Hell–”

  “Is that what we’re shortening it to?”

  “–is going to be using titles instead of full names,” Zan Xinyi announces. “The Lantern-Bearer for the avatar, and then for these two--”

  Thunder rumbles outside, giving her an idea.

  “We’re naturally going to be following through on the weather theme. The suit is Siren Hidden from the Storm, and the other...will be Witch Beneath Clear Skies. I’ll give them both weather tags. Since the weather for this battle is ‘clear’, same as the Witch’s tag, she’ll gain a damage bonus.”

  She waits for him to loudly approve of her idea, and gets nothing.

  “Why is he called Siren Hidden from the Storm?” Wei Shengyuan asks instead. She should tell him that when he’s distressed he picks at the tiny scales on his neck.

  “Isn’t it because he’s based on you?” Ah, if she pushes any further he might cry. Oops. “Lorewise, he’s obviously a sea-creature cursed-- or wished-- into a form that causes him unbearable agony. Naturally he’s hidden from his own element.”

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  She considers it further.

  “It could be Siren Hidden from the Rain.” She’d just picked “storm” because it’s storming outside right now.

  What she needs to do is start making a list of basic weather tags. But just thinking about that makes her annoyed, because then she has to think about all the levels she’ll have to work on after this one. It’s much easier to only take this game from main task to main task. Otherwise, the amount of work is truly...crushing.

  And the red timer in the edge of her vision never, ever goes away. It’s the first thing she sees every morning, and the last thing she sees when she closes her eyes.

  “Xinyi.”

  Beyond the fact that she’s still getting the battle system straightened out, she also needs to figure out how to add in audio, and still scarily looming on the horizon is the Video Game Design system itself. Two weeks have passed since her newest main task began, and she can’t guarantee that she’ll always be able to make every deadline, and she can’t know that the rewards she’ll receive will be what she needs to survive as the world continues to crumble. She doesn’t even know what will happen if she fails a task. None of it is within her control, absolutely none of it, not even--

  “Zan Xinyi! Are you alright?”

  A cold, clammy hand shakes her shoulder.

  She blinks. Wei Shengyuan’s wheel is much closer to her, and his grip is painfully tight.

  “I got distracted,” she says, the ‘sorry’ at the end of the sentence failing to so much as form in her mouth. “Anyways. For your next steps, make a model of the enemies, and then each fighting character is going to have two character abilities that show on screen as cards. One damage ability and one support ability each.”

  She pulls out her own notes, which still refer to the Witch and the Siren as Pyramid1 and Pyramid2.

  “After that, start on the UI. There’s going to be a sparkle resource system during combat.”

  At midnight, Zan Xinyi is still up, adjusting the graphics in Tunity and trying to animate the new character models. The Witch is fine since you can’t tell that her knees don’t bend inside of her skirt, but the Siren not only has two legs, he has a cane.

  Next time she’s telling Wei Shengyuan absolutely no more canes.

  Wait.

  The Witch and the Siren only need to be present during the fight, so all this is useless anyway. Only the Lantern-Bearer needs to be able to walk.

  She stares at the character models again.

  The Lantern-Bearer also has a staff.

  Zan Xinyi carefully closes her computer before she throws it at the wall. In her pajamas, she goes to stare at the closed and shuttered window, listening to the rumble of thunder and the loud drum of the rain.

  Her ex used to keep plants on that windowsill, always going so far as to take them with her whenever she left to visit her parents.

  You’ve got a black thumb, Xinyi. If I leave them here, they’ll just die. It’s strange, actually. You’re so methodical. Why are you so bad at taking care of a few plants?

  There won’t be any bad consequences if plants die. Why bother carefully remembering a watering schedule? If they're lucky, the sky will feed them. If they're unlucky, then no one will.

  She doesn’t leave her bedroom.

  Wei Shengyuan usually sleeps in the tub, but some nights he likes to pretend to be more human, and he takes the couch. She can hear the low tones of the radio’s occasional broadcasts, proving that acting human doesn’t actually help him sleep.

  She sighs, and then finds a bright spot. At least she won’t have to go to work in the rain.

  Then she hears something.

  A violin’s wail.

  It twists up her spine, louder and more pervasive than any sound should be over the din of the storm. Who would dare make such a racket? No one she wants to meet.

  >The Subordinate’s Compass has detected a valuable prospect nearby. Would you like to activate it? The Find Subordinate subtask is repeatable up to 10 times.

  No. No, is she not even getting the choice of when to use her own rewards?

  In response, the System only flashes the timer. 14 days left. She knows.

  What would it have done if she’d used the compass to find Wei Shengyuan. But then...there’s every chance that the System’s compass would have never pointed at him in the first place. Under those circumstances, the only answer is that her old acquaintance would have died in the basement, food for a four eyed-rat.

  But on the other hand--

  “The Subordinate’s Compass is a one use item. If I activate it now, isn’t that a loss? When it can keep detecting ‘valuable prospects’. So in that case, the best thing to do is nothing, and wait for the Compass to activate at a better time when I can use the information to its fullest. Not to use it now and have to stumble around a dark city block at night, with only the wind, the rain, and the monsters for company. The winning strategy is to stay here.”

  No response.

  Zan Xinyi puts her rainboots on over heavy cargo pants in addition to the rest of her usual equipment. The red tag that usually stays on her computer is tucked inside her mask, the safest she can make it. Then she hesitates, eyes catching on the tiny shard that had gotten caught in her hair after that spider.

  Her lucky sparkle. She pockets it too.

  When she steps into the living room, Wei Shengyuan’s wide awake, the harsh light of his tablet reflecting back onto his scales and making his eyes shine. His head jerks in her direction, and his nose twitches.

  “Xinyi?” Wei Shengyuan says, eyes wide. “Where are you going? And what smells so good? There’s no way you cooked something...”

  “You’re talking nonsense.”

  “No, really.” He licks his lips, and his eyes slowly drift down to the pocket of her apron. “It’s in there.”

  “The only thing in there is a rock, idiot.”

  “No. It’s not a rock. It’s-- Huh? What am I talking about?”

  “If you don’t know, how would I know?”

  But there is one obvious reason why he would know and she wouldn’t know. Since the rock was probably buried in that spider she killed. Maybe the spider had eaten it or something.

  She pulls the shard out of her pocket.

  “Maybe it’s a mutation only snack.” She sees his eyes latch onto it again. “If I find more you can have some, but this is my lucky rock. Get your own.”

  He gives her a poisonous look.

  “I’ll just leave the apartment and do that, shall I?”

  For one second, the images of him and the dead woman down the hall overlap in her mind. What’s he going to do if she dies?

  Though, maybe...

  “You could head down the hallway and check out the last apartment. See if the corpse in there-- she’s not rotting, don’t worry-- has anything that smells good.”

  In the heavy air, the wailing begins again.

  “But do that tomorrow after you finish the UI elements, and rework the character models to have less pixels,” Zan Xinyi says. “I’m heading out. I just remembered I have to go get something that I left behind.”

  She can tell he has a lot more questions he’s swallowing down. More than a week with her and he’s hatefully perceptive about when she’s going to be answering more questions, and when it’s a lost cause.

  “What, your morals?” He says finally. “Find them soon. You’re a terrible boss, Xinyi.”

  Zan Xinyi pauses with her hands on the door knob.

  Is she really doing this for a moral reason? That would be terrible.

  No, it’s probably pure, uncontrollable spite.