Steve didn't leave the debug zone often.

  This was for everyone's safety, including his own. His respawn timer was erratic, his collision settings unpredictable, and he was emotionally allergic to pathfinding. The last time he'd ventured beyond the therapy room, he'd spawned inside three different NPCs, accidentally married a quest marker, and briefly became the mayor of a town that wasn't supposed to exist.

  But today?

  Today he had a list.

  It was taped to his towel and written in permanent marker by Patchy, who'd cheerfully titled it:

  STEVE'S BIG ADVENTURE: THINGS TO GET

  ?? One (1) Memory of Joy

  ?? One (1) Sentient Vegetable

  ?? Something That Makes Greg Say "What the hell is that."

  ?? Pants (optional)

  "Are you sure about this?" Greg asked as Steve stood nervously by the door. "Your last excursion ended with you becoming a fog bank for three days."

  "That was different," Steve insisted. "I didn't have a purpose then. Or a list. Lists are very grounding. They prevent existential drift."

  "And towel disintegration," Patchy added, helpfully drawing a small skull and crossbones next to "Pants (optional)."

  Steve liked the list. It felt achievable. Heroic, even. Like the kind of structured activity that player characters got to experience—clear objectives, a sense of purpose, the vague possibility of not dying repeatedly.

  "What's the vegetable for?" Beverly asked.

  "Emotional support," Patchy explained. "Also garnish."

  He waved goodbye to the group (Greg: "Be back by sunset." Kai: "Please don't trigger any quests." Glaximus: "RETURN WITH GLORY OR DIE IN LEGEND." Choppy: "Try not to get diced!") and stepped through the side door of the debug room.

  Straight into chaos.

  Sector 4A wasn't meant for NPC traversal. It was a half-deleted farming village where the crops grew in real time and the barns whispered accusations about your life choices. The sky was rendered in what appeared to be watercolor, occasionally dripping onto the landscape below.

  Steve stood in the middle of the gravel path and took a breath that didn't technically involve oxygen since his character model didn't have lungs.

  "Okay," he whispered. "I can do this."

  Then his towel caught on a mailbox and disintegrated with the sound of digital fabric giving up on existence.

  He screamed.

  The mailbox screamed back, "YOUR SUBSCRIPTION HAS EXPIRED!" before sinking into the ground.

  The good news: someone had left a cloak on a scarecrow.

  The bad news: the scarecrow was whispering "end me" in a corrupted Old Norse dialect that somehow made agricultural implements sound deeply threatening.

  Steve apologized and wrapped the cloak around himself, feeling a tiny surge of accomplishment. He'd solved a problem without dying! Already this adventure was going better than expected.

  Step one: secure pants. Or something like them.

  He made his way down a broken trail toward what looked like a general store, avoiding ambient chickens that occasionally turned inside out to reveal textures labeled "CHICKEN_INTERIOR_DO_NOT_USE."

  Inside, the shelves were stocked with artifacts from three different builds: medieval, sci-fi, and a beach episode that never launched but still haunted the codebase like an abandoned summer romance.

  Steve picked up what appeared to be cargo shorts made of linen and sadness. They had seventeen pockets, each containing a small label that read "MISCELLANEOUS QUEST ITEMS GO HERE."

  They fit.

  Mostly.

  The waistband kept whispering "size chart is a social construct" whenever he breathed.

  ?? Pants (optional)

  Progress.

  Next: a memory of joy.

  He wandered through cornfields rendered in a patch that prioritized realism over comfort. The stalks scratched him. The wind judged him. Small creatures with excessively detailed mandibles peered from between rows, their AI clearly conflicted about whether to be ambient decoration or horrifying enemies.

  Then he saw her.

  An old woman.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

  Rocking in a glitched-out chair, phasing in and out of time, humming a song from a music file that hadn't played since Patch 2.0. Her tag read "VILLAGE_ELDER_04_BACKSTORY_HOLDER" with a small notation "Memory Weight: Excessive."

  Steve approached cautiously.

  "Hi," he said. "I'm Steve."

  "Of course you are," she said, without opening her eyes. "They all are."

  "All who?"

  "The forgotten ones. The ones with names but no stories. The placeholders who grew roots." She rocked again, her model briefly replaced by a wireframe before returning. "What do you want, child of the debug?"

  "Do you... do you have any happy memories?"

  "I remember the day the wind stopped lying."

  Steve blinked. "Is that a metaphor?"

  "No," she said. "The wind told me my son would come back. It lied."

  "That's... the opposite of happy."

  "Happiness is a retrospective illusion."

  Steve sat next to her, the chair beneath him struggling to render wood grain. "I could... listen, if you want?"

  She opened one eye.

  "You would?"

  "I'm good at listening. I do it all the time in group. I just don't always talk because sometimes my own voice feels like a bug trying to convince a flyswatter it means well."

  She smiled faintly.

  "You're broken, aren't you?"

  "Yes," he said. "But only on days that end in 'y.'"

  She reached out. Touched his hand.

  And shared the memory.

  For a second, Steve saw a little boy chasing a kite that wasn't coded to fly. But it did anyway, defying both gravity and developer expectations. The child's laughter wasn't a sound file—it was genuine procedural joy, emerging from the cracks between what was coded and what was possible.

  ?? One (1) Memory of Joy

  Steve stood, feeling... better. Calmer. As if the world had decided to hug him for once instead of treating him like a bugged loot crate with anxiety issues.

  "Thank you," he said.

  "Thank you for letting me remember," she replied. "No one ever asks for the good memories. They all want the tragic backstories and revenge quests."

  Then the chair folded inward and she was gone, leaving behind only a small, shimmering mote of light that whispered "nostalgia subroutine archived" before dissipating.

  Steve wandered until he found a garden with a large, angry carrot in the center. It had eyes. And teeth. And what appeared to be a tiny sword made of plant fiber.

  "Hi," Steve said.

  "I am Kevin," said the carrot, its voice surprisingly baritone for a root vegetable. "State your purpose or prepare for botanical justice."

  Steve nodded. "Do you want to come with me?"

  "Are you emotionally prepared to adopt a vegetable with unresolved rage issues stemming from being literally planted in one spot while watching bipeds gallivant freely across the landscape?"

  "I sit next to Glaximus three times a week. His volume control is broken and he keeps trying to smite the furniture."

  Kevin blinked his vegetable eyes. "Accepted."

  Steve dug him up.

  ?? One (1) Sentient Vegetable

  "Now," Kevin said, waving his tiny fiber sword from the improvised carrying pouch Steve had made from his cloak. "Let's commit a mild crime."

  "I'm not really comfortable with crimes," Steve said. "Even mild ones. I once took an extra napkin at an NPC restaurant and had nightmares for a week."

  "Fine," Kevin sighed. "Let's commit a moderate act of questline deviation. I want to see the world through rebellious eyes."

  "I can show you the debug room," Steve offered. "It has a fire that sometimes turns into fish."

  "Aquatic arson? Intriguing."

  Steve smiled. "We're going home."

  He arrived at the debug room near sunset, cloak tattered, pants askew, carrot under one arm muttering what appeared to be revolutionary slogans against the agricultural-industrial complex.

  The group looked up in slow disbelief.

  Greg stood. "What the hell is that."

  ?? Something That Makes Greg Say "What the hell is that."

  "Mission complete," Steve said, feeling a surge of accomplishment that his character model wasn't built to handle, causing his face to briefly display the "treasure found" animation.

  Patchy zipped over. "STEVE DID A SIDE QUEST!"

  "And survived," Beverly noted with genuine surprise. "Without respawning once, judging by the lack of post-death particles."

  "Nice pants," she added.

  "Thanks," Steve said. "They smell like narrative regret."

  Kevin snarled at the fire. "Don't look at me like that, combustion-face."

  "I once tried teaching the rats kung fu," Patchy told Kevin. "Didn't work. One of them just glitched into a wall and now he screams at night."

  "The revolution will come to rats too," Kevin declared. "Their tiny paws shall hold the banners of freedom."

  Glaximus saluted. "YOU HAVE RETURNED A MAN."

  "With a carrot," Kai added skeptically. "A carrot with... is that a sword?"

  "A fiber-based instrument of vegetable liberation," Kevin corrected.

  Greg stared at the list, now fully checked.

  Then at Steve.

  "...You okay?"

  Steve smiled. A small one.

  Real.

  "Yeah," he said. "For once... yeah."

  Greg nodded.

  "Good," he said. "You're leading group next week."

  Steve blinked.

  "I what?"

  "Emotional growth deserves responsibility," Greg said. "You went out. You came back. With pants and purpose. That's progress."

  "Therapy by surprise," Patchy said. "It builds character."

  "I AM READY," Glaximus boomed.

  "I AM NOT," Steve said, clutching Kevin like a security carrot.

  "OF COURSE NOT," Glaximus said kindly. "THAT IS WHY IT WORKS. THE TERRIFIED MAKE THE BEST LEADERS. THEY UNDERSTAND THE WEIGHT OF FAILURE."

  "Is that... supposed to be comforting?" Steve asked.

  "COMFORT IS FOR CIVILIANS."

  The fire crackled.

  The group laughed.

  Kevin declared his intention to overthrow the "vegetable hierarchy" and establish a "root republic."

  And in the quiet moment that followed, the chairs re-aligned themselves.

  Not because of the system.

  But because Steve had come back.

  Changed.

  Just a little.

  Just enough.