“I guess?”

“What’s that mean?”

“I dunno, I just guess it’s better…? I can tell now that I was acting weird, but that might’ve been a Mana deficiency. You’d know more than I would.” she muttered. Erica nudged open the bedroom door, glancing at the practically bleached sheets of Lenny’s bed. “Certainly explains why I went to town on you last night… s-sorry, about that.”

“It’s fine, I… basically liked most of it?”

“Most of it—?”

Their conversation was cut short as Jerry noisily patted his jeans, pointing to his mouth as he mouthed something with a panicked expression.

“Oh, right, you don’t have to shut up now.” Lenny said.

“Thank you, I just wanted to tell you guys that I might have something you could use your Transfer-whatsit on, perhaps in exchange for releasing me from that weird spell you did from that green card…?” Jerry said. “Look, I don’t want any part of the weird shit you got going on, just lemme do this one thing and I’ll dip. Just, remember, keep it quiet every other weekend.”

The two looked at each other, and shrugged.

Jerry led them to his apartment, which was much more empty. In terms of furniture, at least. The stuff he did have was noticeably nicer than Lenny’s. Either way, he showed them his PC gaming rig, and booted up Skyrim.

Clicking through his character’s inventory, the man pointed at his money supply, something like 2,863,921 gold pieces. “That’s gotta be enough for some cool shit, right?”

Leonard sighed “It would be, but it has to be something that I own. If I could use other peoples’ stuff I’d be having the government pay for my Gacha pulls.”

Jerry’s face drooped. “Oh.” Then he got excited. “Wait, actually, I’ll give you the save file! It’s not my main character, so you can just have it! Let me know, and you can come and play it on my rig! Or I can put it on a flash drive, you got Steam?”

“N-No…? I just have a laptop for when I gotta do banking stuff online, I don’t have space for computer games.”

“Whatever, then. Look, just sit here and play your file that’s on my game.” Jerry sighed, getting up from the high-quality ergonomic gaming chair he purchased on Amazon.

Leonard sat down tentatively, adjusting the height so he was a little higher up and more easily able to reach the controls. Experimentally, he walked around in the game, observing the landscape as he roamed the wilds of whatever fantasy world his new character was in. He didn’t really follow The Elder Scrolls.

“What’s he waiting for…?” Jerry whispered.

Erica said “Probably playing it safe, actually doing stuff in his save file so it’s more likely to be construed as his file.”

Jerry’s eyes narrowed. “How’d you hear what I was saying?”

“I have good ears…?”

Eventually, Lenny had his cat-man sit down, and look at his inventory once more. Everything was the exact same. Though now he felt more comfortable with it, perhaps. He asked “But, what would be a good thing to get…? This game has a ton of magic stuff too… wait, what’re these?” before noticing a large count of identical potions named “Rexxor’s Brew Type Beta”. “Isn’t that the name of the character I’m playing as?”

“Oh, right, you can make potions with alchemy in the game. Those’re something I cooked up with special effects available from a Mod.” Jerry explained, before muttering “What shit did I put in them, again…?”

Lenny shrugged, saying “Okay, maybe one of those would useful.” as he exchanged one of the potions and almost two million gold to get a version of the item in real life.

He squinted. “Wait, what happened, you just spent all that gold for nothi—SWEET JESUS FUCK WHEN’D THAT GET THERE!?” Jerry screamed as a bottle identical to the one shown in Rexxor’s inventory popped up next to the keyboard.

“It’s the potion, I guess.” Leonard sighed, grabbing it as he stood up from the chair. “What does it do? Do you remember?” he asked the apparent Skyrim fanatic.

“I dunno, it’s just something that I made to give to NPC’s and have them drink it…” Jerry muttered, before continuing “It’s not fuckin’ poison, though. I ain’t about that, it just does magic shit.”

Erica nodded, saying “Okay, then how about you drink it? Show us what it does?”

Jerry scoffed. “Yeah, right.” Then his face turned grave. “Oh, you’re serious, um… please don’t. Like, I know you can order me to do whatever cause of your magic trading card, but what if you chose to… not do that…?”

Lenny raised an eyebrow, saying “Uh huh? Look, just try a sip of it. You said it’s not lethal, so it’s not like you’re gonna die from it. We can fix things later if it does weird stuff, but for now just test it. I’ll release you from the Snatch Steal after we’re done.” as he handed the man his potion.

Jerry sighed, and took one of the smallest sips of his life.

His eyes widened.