The inn was similar in architecture to the rest of Gravestone. A sturdy stone building constructed from blocks of the volcanic stone which made up the rest of the cavern, and severely aged. Some kind of plant which had managed to take root in the harsh ground spread up the wall in places, but were now brown and desiccated. There was a wooden sign hanging from the establishment, though the paint had dried and cracked and almost entirely flaked away. Pan guessed the image might have been that of a bird, but it could also have been something else entirely.

  Inside, the inn was sparsely populated. Horse had had to duck to make it through the doorway. There were some skeletons, all of which were the crispy blackened sort. One ivory skeleton worked the bar which ran along the entirety of one wall, which was lined with shelves and stocked with unmarked bottles and casks. The room was lit by strategically placed gemstones, bathing the inside with an eerie glow.

  “You can eat and drink here,” the bartender started unbidden, “but you’ll have to stay in the stables around back. I’ve only got humanoid beds.”

  Pan looked up at Horse, who was maintaining his Strong Silent Type demeanor.

  There were a few skeletons at the bar, and one at a table with a plate in front of it. The ones at the bar were drinking what looked like the pale green water they had seen flowing past the town. The one at the table had a plate with the remnants of a meal – a steak bone and the uneaten greens of some vegetables – but was actively eating from the plate.

  It reminded Pan of the barbershop they had seen, with the barber only pretending to cut hair as the bald skeleton remained seated in front of him. It had stricken him as odd and he had found it a bit funny, but he started wondering of the people of this town saw substance where he saw none.

  “I’ll go talk to the bartender for rooms. You guys mingle,” Apollo said.

  “What about food? Can we buy meals from him?” Athena asked.

  Apollo nodded. “Yeah, I’ll ask,” and approached the bar. Athena followed him, Pan guessed, to hover over his shoulder.

  Pan looked around the dingy room. The air felt clammy. There was a fireplace in the corner, sized and angled to hold a fire big enough to heat the whole room, but it was cold and dark. While the building was mostly made of stone, the rafters and furniture were made of an equally dark wood in great thick timbers. It looked entirely burned, but was apparently strong enough to support whatever it was meant to hold, whether that was the roof or, in the case of tables and chairs, the patrons inside.

  “I hope they aren’t stabling any horses right now,” Horse whispered to Pan in his regular surfer accent, “I saw those skeleton ones earlier, and it looks like not everything here is a skeleton. Some things are zombies.”

  The skeleton eating its dinner shot them a disgruntled look, having potentially overheard Horse’s anti-undead bias. If it had, it didn’t make anything more of it.

  Pan took a seat at one of the tables and flipped open his menu and began navigating through them. Now that he had a moment to catch his breath, he could take a stab at actually studying his stats and things.

  “What kind of class is Skulk, anyway?” he asked of the centaur. “What kind of perks do you get? Athena being a Hoplite, she gets bonus actions in combat, but hadn’t told me more about that, and I’m curious what counts.”

  Horse wasn’t able to sit at the table, so he stood nearby and loomed over Pan. “I get a Move Silently passive that makes it harder for others to detect me so long as I’m within cover. I also get a First Strike bonus to damage when I’m hitting an enemy that either doesn’t know I’m there or is otherwise helpless.”

  Pan nodded, reading through his own stuff. The Cursed class had no benefits listed where there obviously would have been for any other class. As he had noted before, his stats had all been reduced to 1 across the board. Now that he had leveled slightly, he had more than 1 in a few stats, but nothing higher than a 3.

  There were seven stats, and he took a moment to read through their descriptions. They each provided two types of benefits. There was a direct benefit, which increased for each point in the stat, and there were staged bonuses. These were awarded at intervals with the stat increased.

  Unarmed Power, which functioned like a strength stat, increased the damage dealt by melee attacks like Kick and Punch. For every eight points, it also increased a melee attack multiplier, which started at 1. This multiplier applied to damage dealt as well as increased resistance to melee attacks.

  Esoteric Mastery functioned like an intelligence stat. It increased the effect of so-called elemental sources. Pan recalled the types of attacks Apollo had used, which could be construed as elemental types: lightning, earth, and so on. He also noted the wording here. While Unarmed Power increased damage, this description worded it as “effect”. The stage bonuses increased both the maximum number of targets for targeted elemental sources, and this number also applied as an elemental damage resistance multiplier. This bonus increased every ten points put into the stat.

  Deft Reflexes was the dexterity stat. It increased a dodge chance for the player and increased ranged attacks, which was yet another flavor of attack. Pan wondered briefly how much overlap there was between Physical, Elemental, and Ranged in the cardbase for this game. Looking more into dodge, he found it was a chance for physical damage to be negated. The stat also provided additional actions at every fourteen points.

  Below that was Physical Fortitude, which provided bonus block and did something else apart from the stage bonus. For every point above ten in the stat, it would grant the player bonus barbs whenever block was gained. The tooltip described barbs as a buff which dealt damage back to an attacker using a basic attack. The stage bonus, however, was an inverse multiplier applied to the duration of debuffs. The higher the multiplier, the shorter the duration of any and all debuffs. It was a regular multiplier for the duration of buffs.

  It took Pan a second to realize the next stat, Stage Presence, was a kind of charisma stat. He had had to read the description a few times over. It increased the duration of summoned allies, a mechanic he had not yet encountered, while also decreasing the cost of purchasable items from merchants and other NPC vendors. The stage bonus increased max party size, which apparently started at 6. It didn’t make sense to him at first, but he had navigated away to the party menu tab.

  The screen told him he was in a party, which he guessed the system had done automatically when he had joined forces with Apollo and Athena. The party leader was Apollo, who had a 16 in this charisma stat as listed on the party screen. While he was party leader, it allowed them to have up to eight party members: the base six, plus two more from Apollo’s Stage Presence bonus. From what he saw on the page, neither Athena’s, nor Horse’s, nor Pan’s own – non-existent – Stage Presence bonuses applied to their party’s size.

  “Ok,” Apollo said, both him and his sister approaching their table and distracting Pan from reading the other two stats. “Two rooms and a stable stall.” Pan had more stats to read, but he closed the menu for now.

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  Horse snorted. “I was hoping he’d been joking.”

  Apollo shook his head. “Sorry, man, you’ve gotta take it outside for tonight.”

  “What about food?” Pan asked.

  “He had some meal cards available for non-undead like us. They’re basic, but it’s actual food.” He gestured at the skeleton sitting behind him at the other table. The plate in front of it, formerly full of the leftovers of some previous meal, was now empty. The skeleton had apparently eaten the bone and vegetable scraps while Pan wasn’t looking. “It sounds like these guys eat the skeleton of food, stuff left over from when the meal has been ‘killed’.” He shrugged. “I dunno. This place is wonky.”

  Athena spoke up. “Isn’t is a mainstay of some ancient cultures to sacrifice offerings to-“ she waved her hand vaguely, conjuring the words from memory “-some god, or ancient ancestors? But the meat or lamb or crops or whatever stay in the real world, with the worshippers, and the priests or whatever actually eat the offering later. So it’s like the ghosts or whatever they’re worshipping get the spiritual version of the food. The dead version.”

  Apollo shrugged again. “I hadn’t put that much thought into it. Anyway. We’ve got crab chowder, a turkey leg, bread with cheese, and some kind of roast fish.” He passed out the brown cards.

  “I want the turkey,” Horse said, offering Athena the bread and cheese card. Apollo used the crab chowder card he had kept and began eating.

  “We used my money,” Athena said flatly, “I’m keeping the turkey leg.”

  “Do you want the fish?” Pan asked.

  Horse made a face and shook his head. He kept the card he had been dealt.

  The meal Pan summoned was a small roasted whitefish, seemingly caught and dropped straight on the fire. He had to dig through the flesh to pull out the million tiny bones as he ate.

  “Did you ask him what time it was?” Pan asked conversationally.

  “Wha whould whe do thaht?” Athena asked, mouth full of turkey straight from the drumstick.

  “I got that Breakfast of Champions card that gives me a bonus if I eat it in the morning.”

  “You can go ask him. I want to turn in,” Apollo said. He had been provided a bowl of fishy smelling white chowder, but no utensils, so he drank from the bowl like it was a cup.

  Horse sulked as he ripped pieces of bread and ate them with chunks of goat cheese.

  “We should talk strategy,” Pan said. “Horse has got those two Skulk abilities, the Move Silently and First Strike ones. Athena, you’ve got the one that gives you bonus actions when a party member attacks-“

  “Flanking Maneuver,” she said.

  “Is that what It’s called? Anyway, do you have any others?”

  Apollo spoke up instead. “I’ve got the Field Study ability. It gives me this tablet and stylus.” He pulled out the implements. Pan remembered these from when he had first met the pair. Apollo hadn’t been using it lately.

  “What does it do?” he asked the Scholar.

  “Well, it lets me record details about monsters and cards I’ve encountered. Maybe some other stuff. There’s an upgrade screen, but I’m not sure what game currency it uses. It’s not money, like what we got trading with that cyclops guy.”

  “The other ability I have,” Athena said while giving Apollo a look. He was suddenly absorbed in the contents of his tablet and didn’t notice. “is just a passive that gives me a buff to Unarmed Power and Deft Reflexes. Frontline Training is what it’s called.”

  Pan nodded, picking out another fish bone from a chunk of whitefish. “Do you have another ability, Apollo?”

  “A flat bonus to Esoteric Mastery, and I start at the second stage of Natural Aptitude,” he said. He put away his tablet and slurped his soup. “Academic Savant gives me that.”

  Pan pulled up his menu again. He crunched something – a missed fishbone – and dug it out of his mouth.

  Natural Aptitude was one of the bottom stats he had missed earlier. For every point, it increased the luck bonus, and for every point beyond ten it increased deck size. Luck, it seemed, was a second kind of dodge, but for elemental damage instead of physical.

  “So you start at stage two? What does that mean?” Pan asked.

  “Well,” Apollo said, chewing as he talked, “Natural Aptitude, in addition to increasing luck and maximum deck size, has a staged bonus that increases both the limit for duplicate cards in your deck as well as increases your base hand size.” He counted on his fingers as he iterated the two effects.

  Pan flipped to his own stats. He had a 3 in Natural Aptitude, having thrown his level bonus stat point into a random stat. It now had one point base, one point from levelling, and one point from his race.

  He saw he had no stage bonuses. Not in Natural Aptitude, not in anything.

  I’m guessing that new characters have an average of 10 stat points per stat. Getting cursed like this really set me back.

  But he also had racial bonuses to Deft Reflexes and the last stat he hadn’t read yet. One called Vigor.

  His Vigor stat increased his health by a factor of his overall level.

  Woah, Pan thought as he read it. Higher levels must have godly amounts of health. Level 40 with 20 points in Vigor would give an 80 point max health bonus.

  His own health pool was fairly small. The base was also determined by his race, and at the moment his max health was 10: A base of 6 health for his Faun race, plus his level of 2 times his Vigor of 2 for a total of 4 bonus health points.

  He wondered briefly how much base health the other had. It was likely more than his, especially considering how big Horse was, plus they had a higher stat total than he did. He figured they easily had three times the max health.

  The stage bonus provided by Vigor for every five points was an increase to regeneration, health points per minute. The tooltip was clear to mention that regeneration was only active outside of combat.

  But still. With only a Vigor of 10 at level 1, a player could have 10 bonus health on top of their racial base. If that was also about 10, then out of combat they would recover 2 health per hour without any health potions. They could get back to full from almost nothing in ten hours. A little more than a good night’s sleep.

  It didn’t scale too well as levels increased, he noticed however. A level 40 character with all 40 bonus stats in Vigor alone would do well enough. With some mental math, he found that came to 1,610 max health with a regeneration rate of 8 per hour. Recovering from empty to full on regeneration alone would take more than a week.

  He spoke with the group about this.

  “You did all that in your head?” Horse asked.

  Pan thought he was missing the point. “Yeah. It’s not a requirement for the kind of data entry I do, but it helps if you can.”

  Athena nodded in agreement.

  “With scaling like that,” Apollo said, “the upper levels must get a lot of support from external buffs. I think our equipment and deck building is going to have to carry us into our late-game builds.”

  The pieces of fish vanished from in front of Pan. He had finished eating as much as he’d wanted, but it startled him a bit nonetheless.

  The card’s time must have run out. Anything uneaten seems to disappear.

  To no one in particular, Athena said, “Is this still a game?” No one answered her, so she explained further. “When I discovered I couldn’t take off my equipment – my VR equipment, I mean – I wasn’t as shocked as I probably should have been. But I still can’t take it off. It all feels real.”

  Apollo seemed to shrug it off, “Vagrants is next-gen. I think they just included some new tech that makes us think we can’t leave the game.” He sounded unconcerned, but Pan suspected he was a little freaked out. “I’m sure the more we play, we’ll come across something that lets us access a rig-level menu.”

  “I’ve seen this before,” he started.

  “You’ve been stuck inside your rig before?” Athena asked before he could continue.

  Horse shook his head. “No, I mean in games and TV. Getting stuck in the game as a setting. The MC has to learn the game or die.”

  The table was quiet as they processed this. Apollo eventually spoke up. “You think we’re in a tv show?”

  Again he shook his head. “I’m just saying, if it’s happened to us, being stuck in this world and forced to play this game, then we’ve got to get good at it. We could be here for any reason, but it doesn’t change the fact of the matter that we’ve got to play while we’re here.”

  “What if we reach- What was it again? Elysian?”

  “Elysium,” Apollo corrected.

  “That might be how we get out,” Horse replied.

  He didn’t sound certain enough for Pan’s likeness.

  The remains of their food had all vanished, but they sat in silence, each stewing in their own thoughts.

  We’ve got to find a way to get out of here, Pan thought. The real me could be rotting at my desk for all I know. Or maybe we’re actually here. We could actually die. He considered how strong a player could get at the higher levels and considered what kinds of challenges would await a fully powered character. He looked again at his miserably low stats, and his heart sank.

  Athena’s chair scraped the floor as she stood up, taking Pan out of his thoughts. It was time for bed. This time, he might actually get to sleep.