"This is some kind of skirmish game?"

"Yeah, Combat Sims. It's all safe, they use tech to make it so you can feel everything - dulled down, but you feel it - but you're fighting in virtual space, none of it actually happens. It's pretty incredible."

"My plane has mockboxes. You put a weapon in it and you get a mock weapon out. It hurts and impairs as normal but doesn't do real damage and you undo it all at the end of the game."

"Nice," Isaac says. "How do they handle magic?"

"I'm not actually sure. I've never played skirmish. They have something that works for it, people definitely use magic in skirmish."

Isaac nods. "Sounds cool. I'm not as into the combat sims as some people, but you get some really good fights sometimes."

"Does everybody do these or is it optional?"

"It's optional as long as you don't join a team."

"Okay. Probably not my thing."

"Fair enough. I don't fight recreationally either, I just watch the fights. The cool fights, at least. Nobody watches the Underdogs versus... whoever they put the Underdogs up against, once again I don't watch their matches."

"They named themselves that?"

Ethan speaks up. "Oh, yeah, they're one of the really old legacy teams. Been around since the 80s. They're the scrappy kids with shitty powers - the kind of thing that rates maybe a 1 or 2 on the power scales. They're surprisingly good actually, usually if they're angry enough to be on the combat team they're dedicated enough to really hone that one little thing they can do. There's also an Underdogs social club, the social club is bigger than the combat team because most of them don't want to fight people with their shitty powers."

"An understandable preference."

"Yeah," Ethan says. "We've gone up against the ones who do in the sims, though, and they're surprisingly vicious. Nothing says just because you can't bench-press a pickup truck you also can't pack a handgun."

Isaac raises his eyebrows. "Who the fuck on the Underdogs carries a handgun?"

"Hazzan. He's all happy-happy in person, but the son of a bitch shot me in the leg during capture-the-flag."

"Damn. Note to self, don't fuck with Hazzan."

"I don't know what that is."

"Launches small lead bullets at astonishing speeds. A powerful enough gun can punch a bullet right through you. He had a little one, though, it just went a couple inches into my leg. Still hurt like hell, of course."

"Charming. Uh, what do these look like?"

Isaac thinks about it. "Basically like a crossbow without the bow part. -do you have crossbows, or are they too techy?"

"We have crossbows."

Ethan furrows his brow. "I wonder what the development process on that was like. I guess most of the surviving inhabitants of your world would probably end up with some kind of instinct of where the world starts biting back?"

"Yeah. And it's usually safe to try something that seems like it should work once."

Ethan shudders. "You're probably going to get tired of people saying this, but I would hate living in a world like that. Science is cool."

"There's a reason I'm not going back! I mean, that and it might kill me if I tried for having touched the science."

Ethan nods and absently pushes back his hair with one hand. A couple of little sparkles fly up from his scalp and then settle back down.

"What was that?"