When I next returned to the dream, I pulled the pad out of the pack and was glad to see I’d established communication. But I was confused by the content of the message. “Dear Sarah,” the message began. “I’m Tommy. I’m also in high school. I named my character Elissa.”

So somebody responded, but it’s somebody else who visits here like me and not the girl herself. And it’s a boy. Being a girl here might feel strange to him.

Maybe that’s why he doesn’t identify with the body as much as I do, and gave her a different, female name. I’ve always just considered her my dream self and if I had to name her, she would have just been named Sarah. But now that I know, I can call her Elissa too.

The message continued, “I live in Fardhop, in Gyllaria. Where’s Atlanta? I’ve never heard of it.”

He lives in some country I’ve never heard of. He knows English, apparently, but he doesn’t know major cities in the United States. What the heck?

“Are you enjoying Death March 6? You shoot well, but you should shoot more and run less.”

What?! Enjoying it? Does he think this is some sort of game? And how does he know how I shoot? Is he watching me?

And I noticed another weird thing. It looks like he typed the message to me, on an old-fashioned typewriter where there were small defects in the shapes of the letters. Every lower case e has the same small notch missing from the top. My Dad has one of those, but except to show me what a typewriter is, and to let me play with it, and once to fill out a printed form, nobody’s ever really used it, since we have computers with printers that can write things more easily. Where would Tommy find a typewriter in this place, and why, when there’s a pen attached to the pad? And how would he type on the paper in the spiral-bound notebook anyway? Something doesn’t make sense here.

The first page of the small pad was now full, so I flipped to the next page of the pad and took up almost a whole page with my reply:

I put the pad away and got moving, thinking about trying to shoot more, and watching not only for food and drink but for ammo clips. If I shot more I was going to need to pick up more of those.

At my last rest stop of the night, I found three of those gold coins in a corner. It wasn’t something I had been looking for, but it’s obviously money. Tommy had about 50 of them in a bag in the backpack, so I’d figured they must show up somewhere, but this was the first I noticed any. I held onto one to see if I could bring it home, stashed the other two in the bag with the others, and squeezed in a little more on my note:

---

Tommy read the note. He was excited that Sarah wrote a lot more. But now he realized that he’d made a mistake. Sarah isn’t really another player, he thought. That “Atlanta” thing should have been a tip-off. She’s the real Elissa... except the real Elissa doesn’t really live in this place, but somewhere else, and she’s been cursed into coming here in her dreams. And naturally, just at the point I started playing. And it’s not a game for her. Do I fess up that I am playing a game, or should I pretend that I’m coming here the same way she does?

Oh, and there’s a weird aspect of this curse that lets her take stuff out of the game, or at least she thinks so. She really did find two coins, though. My G.P. has been at 54 since I killed that boss three days ago, but now it’s 56. He searched the area but didn’t find another coin anywhere nearby. If she found three coins, she really did take one with her, somehow.

Tommy couldn’t think of any way to explain being able to see her shooting statistics without admitting he was playing the game, so he wrote:

It filled two pages of the notepad. Tommy thought, It’s fun to have this role-playing element. I wonder how detailed the A.I. is. It does seem like Sarah really responded to my first message, but I bet they’re looking for certain words and phrases. There are only so many ways to say where I’m from, and they found that and included it in Sarah’s reply.

---

I awoke from my eighth night in the horrible place I had learned was called Death March 6, holding the coin in my hand. It was heavy for such a small coin. I thought it might be real gold. I knew gold was heavier than most other metals, and it looked right, but I couldn’t really tell.

Then I realized: “Aha! Evidence! Now I can tell other people about the dreams and they can’t think I’m completely nuts, because I have the coin.” I examined it more closely. It didn’t look like any coin I’ve ever seen. It wasn’t from Gyllaria, that place Tommy said he was from. It said “Dystrophania” and had a face of I guess their president or king or whatever they had there on one side. The other side simply had the words “One Gold Piece.”

I showed it to Mom and Dad in the morning. When I tried to explain where it came from, they were worried about me, but since I was OK, they said we’d talk about it in the evening so I wasn’t late for school or Dad late for work.

I took the coin to school, and asked my chemistry teacher how I could determine if this was real gold.

“Well, for starters, we could weigh it, estimate its volume, and from that compute a density.” A high-precision scale said it weighed 8.316 grams. Its diameter was 25.1 mm and its thickness was 0.91 mm. This gave it a density of about 18.5 g/cc. “This is slightly less dense than pure gold, but gold in coins traditionally is alloyed with a small amount of silver, which is a lighter metal, because pure gold is very soft and the silver helps make the coins more durable. There are few other metals this dense, and none of them look like gold. So it’s probably real gold. It doesn’t look like any gold coin I’ve ever heard of, though. ‘One gold piece?’ Who writes that on a coin? It looks like something from a game, or would if it didn’t seem real.”

“Yes, I thought it looked like it was from a game, too. Thanks,” I replied as he handed me back the coin.

“Keep in mind, if that coin is real, it probably has about 7.5 grams of gold in it. The price of gold has shot up lately, to nearly 60 dollars a gram, so that coin may be worth over $400. Keep it safe.”

Wow. $400 for this coin, and Tommy had about 50 of them. I’d have to figure out if there was something I could buy here to help Tommy cheaper than he could buy it in the game. But for now, I’ll just bring in some extra food. I took two boxes of Cheez-Its to bed with me. Still crackers, but infinitely better tasting ones.

I tried to bring it up in the evening, but something more important was going on and my parents forgot about it.

That night, when I entered the dream, I found Tommy’s reply on the notepad. I thought it was weird that it was a game for him. He thought I was cursed somehow to be spending my dreams there. Do people in whatever the heck world he’s from have real curses that can be broken? Later it seemed like he thought I’m a character in the game. Weird, though, that for part of the message he’s trying to explain things to me as if I was a real person. Maybe he’s used to really realistic games in Gyllaria. Wherever that is.

Over the course of the night, I ate one of the boxes of Cheez-Its and stashed the other in the pack. And I wrote:

---

Tommy read Sarah’s note. She says she’s not a game character, but I would expect her to say that, to make me feel more inspired to help her. It’s not necessary; I’m already planning to do that. The money thing is more interesting; stores are few and far between here, so maybe I can use her as a sort of mobile store. And it sounds like the money goes a lot farther for her, a much better store than the ones here! I could never get anything for a single gold piece in the stores here, much less a lifetime supply of food. I spent almost all of my gold before entering the maze, and I have found so little here that I am wondering if that was a mistake.

Also interesting about the taste of the crackers. Are these any better for Elissa than the ones some of my enemies drop? Tommy had Elissa eat them, but the effect seemed the same as the normal crackers.

And North America? I’m in North America, but obviously not her North America. Tommy wrote:

---

I brought more crackers and drinks the next night, but Tommy’s note indicated they would only help me. Well, still somewhat useful.

Tommy apparently lives in a different North America. Instead of the United States, he only has New England. And New Spain which I assume is his version of Mexico. Was the American Revolution different there, or maybe it never happened? That’s probably right, and I guess due to that, Canada and Mexico were also not inspired to separate. And New Russia is probably just Alaska, which his New England was never convinced to buy, though they either bought out or forced out the French. I wonder what else is different. Interesting that he thought New Russia was not a nation but New England and New Spain apparently are. Did they separate from their European homelands but for some reason kept their names?

So he wants first aid supplies, bulletproof armor, and sexy clothes. Well the first is easy enough, and I can probably give up some of my clothes. I bet bulletproof armor is expensive though. What’s that stuff cops wear? Kevlar, I think. There must be some place that sells that stuff.

Meanwhile, I went on with my night here. I found one new coin, and tried to take three more to add to the one I had, matching what I found so far. I wrote to him:

---

Tommy returned to the game to find Elissa back down to 54 coins. Then he read her note. When at a safe spot in the game, he copied down into the notepad some events from a history book: