Diamond and Iron

**If you die in the game, you die in real life.**

## Synopsis

Juniper wakes up to Amaryllis informing him that it is his turn to keep watch, earning the achievement ***"Under the Moon of the First Night"***. Amaryllis decides that the pair should get going at first dawn, giving Juniper four hours by his reckoning to keep watch.

The clouds are gone from the sky, and Juniper notices the multicolored stars in the sky of Aerb, astrophysically impossible and not matching any constellations visible from Earth, as well as Celestar—once the home of the elves—in place of the moon.

He soon becomes distracted from his watch by the two points he has to spend on his character sheet from his previous level up. As focusing on the sheet requires that he keeps his eyes closed, his ability to keep lookout suffers. Juniper deliberates about the possible modes of growth of his statistics and abilities with respect to the numerical values of PHY, MEN, and SOC, unsure whether to specialise or to generalise. In an attempt to gain insight on the matter, he tries to uncover some of the game layer's mechanics. He thinks about how he would have encoded a way to access hidden menus if he was designing such a system for himself, and discovers a menu displaying game settings:

Settings

The current settings for Juniper are such that death on Aerb is precisely as impactful as death would have been on Earth: he has one and only one 'life' according to the game, he has no opportunity to retry or to do anything over should he die, and death on Aerb means the death of his real life body. These settings cannot be undone. Juniper is also locked out of the mapping, fast travel, and quest marker features due to Verisimilitude Mode being enabled, a setting that also cannot be undone. Juniper decides not to enable the Helldiver or Dead-man's Switch boxes. However, he enables Verbose Quest Logging as well as Hit points and Mana points in an attempt to increase the information he gains from the game layer.

Having not achieved his original goal of exposing game mechanics relevant to the assignment of new skill points, Juniper instead shirks watch entirely to practise his skill in pistols using the void tunneler. He increases his skill in pistols to ***lvl 6*** merely by shooting at an aluminum can on a wooden stake. He figures out that he has to make a genuine effort to improve in order to increase his skills, and that the rate of improvement decreases for each level he reaches.

After two hours—during which he doesn't get any critical hits or misses—he increases his skill in pistols to ***lvl 12***, at which point the notification informs him that the skill is capped at triple the value of SPD (a "primary stat" associated with Pistols). Realising that other skills will be similarly capped, Juniper's plan of specialising in PHY seems less palatable.

His pondering is interrupted when he gets hit on the side of his head with a rock—thrown by Amaryllis—and his hit points fall to 24/27. Juniper apologises for getting distracted, explaining the unnatural improvements in his ability to handle pistols, and Amaryllis scolds him for leaving her while she was sleeping.

Juniper and Amaryllis ride onward to Silmar City. Juniper quickly increases his skill in handling rifles to ***lvl 6*** by taking potshots at road signs and trees along the way, but the skill is capped at triple the value of its primary stat, CUN. He reluctantly decides to put his two skill points towards raising MEN (and thus CUN, KNO, and WIS) by one, opting for a build that won't lock him out of important skills such as magic.

After travelling for about four hours, Juniper and Amaryllis take a short break to stretch their legs. Juniper has gained the affliction "Hungry", which, while ominous, does not seem to give penalties at its current level. Amaryllis mentions that foraging should become easier as they move towards the city, but also that smaller animals such as rats and birds would have been turned by the necrotic field effect nearer the centre of the effect.

Amaryllis speculates that the Fuchsia Coterie thinks to intercept her on the way to the Host, which is part of the reason she and Juniper are going the other way towards Silmar City. She also speculates that the Coterie accessed a cache of weapons prepared beforehand by one of her opponents in the Lost King's Court. Juniper and Amaryllis finish their short rest and resume their journey.

## Featured characters

* Juniper Smith
* Amaryllis Penndraig

## Quotes

“You’re dead.”

—**Amaryllis** sneaks up on Juniper.

“Fewer misses, better clustering on the hits, both while moving further away from the targets.”

—**Juniper** describes his unnatural improvements in his ability to use pistols.

“They didn’t leave the plane armed, and their weapons weren’t outside of the norm for what might be found, but it strikes me as suspicious that so many of them would have found weaponry. There are laws against flying over the Risen Lands, but they’re poorly enforced. It wouldn’t have been trivial, however … someone spent a fair amount of personal and political capital in order to have me die in a way which could be vigorously denied afterward. In the Lost King’s Court, it’s acceptable to murder your opponents, so long as you don’t let anyone know that you’re doing it. So yes, I believe that the Fuchsia Coterie is better supplied than one would expect of men dropped into this wasteland with nothing but their clothes.”

—**Amaryllis** details the political landscape of the Lost King's Court while speculating on how the Fuchsia Coterie managed to arm themselves in the Risen Lands.

“Our enemies have made the crucial mistake of underestimating a Penndraig. Though one has to wonder how many Penndraigs died almost immediately after making a statement like that.”

—**Amaryllis** tempts fate.
## Notes

* The items in the settings menu contain tooltips which may be read by hovering over the text.

### Real-world references

* When Juniper thinks about how to access extra information from the game layer, he first thinks of keyboard commands that can be used on modern-day computers, then succeeds by attempting to input the Konami Code.
* The bleak landscape of the Risen Lands reminds Juniper of Kansas and Nebraska and other places in the Midwestern United States.