Play of Shadows

01.8 Soul Mask

It was too quiet.

Ann stood in front of an unlit hearth. The kitchen was dark, as was the rest of the small house assigned to Ann's in-game character. Ann looked around, blinking heavily. The windows were still shuttered. It was quiet, the kind of silence born from absence.

Ann remembered, then. Her NPC mother was gone. There was a Witch in the river and a glitch in the game, and a handful of hours between Ann and the wrong end of a silver rifle.

The sun shone with full cheer outside. Ann scowled at the sky until her eyes watered, and was then forced to stand still like a fool, blinking the haze from her eyes. Top marks for realism.

Ann found that she couldn't muster any true appreciation for VELES ingenuity. Her nerves were tight and her temper was poor. Shadows flickered at the edge of her vision, everything moving too fast and too slow at once. It was as if she was just a step out of sync with the rest of the world.

In short, she was tired. Really, truly tired, in a way she had never experienced in a VR instance.

Voices broke Ann from her thoughts. A familiar group was making its way up to the house, led by a flustered Mara. The woman's curly hair looked as frazzled as the rest of her and she nearly stumbled when she caught sight of Ann.

"There she is!" she exclaimed, pointing at Ann in open accusation.

Ann blinked. Mara's fuming face looked fuzzy around the edges. "What?" she remembered to ask when the silence stretched.

Grant let out a laugh. "See, told you she's fine," the man said.

"That's because you didn't see that thing pull her under!" Mara snapped.

"You saw the Witch?" Sasha asked, a flicker of interest in her large eyes.

"Yes," Ann said. The others kept looking at her. "It was very ugly," she added.

"Who cares about that! Are you alright?" Mara asked.

"Do you know whose skin it's wearing?" Grant spoke at the same time.

"Fine. And no, but it had a woman's hands," Ann told them.

She related the altercation, from the moment on the bridge to the last words exchanged under the water. In the end, they found little of use in identifying the Witch, save that brief glimpse of her human hands breaking the river's surface to pull Ann into the Witch's domain.

"Maybe its nose will still be gone," Louis said.

"I doubt it. That face belonged to the Witch's true body, not her false one," Ann said.

"Still can't believe you bit off its nose," Grant teased over a yawn.

Ann eyed the man. He looked as chipper as ever, but there was something a touch frantic under his usual cheer. The others, too, bore traces of fatigue – bruised eyes and sallow skin, slight tremors in their hands.

"We're running out of time," she told Grant and Sasha when they got a moment alone together. Louis and Mara went off to scout the village for women with delicate arms that stunk of silt.

"Tired?" Grant guessed.

Ann nodded. Sasha, too, murmured in agreement.

"Is it strange? We've been here for a while," Grant mused. Ann gave him a strange look and he grinned, looking chagrined, "Ah, haven't really been under this long before," he said.

Ann knew she didn't imagine the dangerous undercurrent in the man's voice. She dropped the topic, uninterested in digging. No experienced gamer would make such a comment, especially not the kind of people VELES would be recruiting for the rescue missions. Which meant Grant was either in through connections, or –