Li Na sat in the middle of the common room, hovering a foot off the floor. She glowed, and her good eye remained closed. The other, mechanical eye twitched, clockwork gears spinning. A large group of us had formed around her. Standing next to her were Mordecai, Mistress Tiatha, and Rosetta. The white cleaner bot also hovered nearby.

Mongo stood at the edge of the room, posted up near the Bopca at the storefront.

Just behind Mongo was the entrance to the guild’s pet stables. I really needed to get in there and check on Rend. He, Gonk, Simoom, and now Penelope were all in there, supposedly all having a great time.

Prepotente was also here in the room. He was examining a pet carrier. “Interesting,” he said, handing the case off to Mordecai.

“So,” Mordecai was saying to Li Na, who did not acknowledge him, “this is how this works.”

I released Samantha, and she zipped over to Louis, who stood right next to me. Donut jumped to my shoulder.

“Has she said anything?” I whispered.

“Nothing,” Donut replied. “But she did cast some gooey dread thing on your cactus when Rosetta asked her to.”

“She did what on my what?”

Mordecai held up the pet carrier, which had some sort of device installed on the outside. “This is an XL pet carrier. As we all know, they can’t hold crawlers. But as some of us also know, they can still suck crawlers in if the crawler allows it. What happens is a crawler gets sucked up by the pet carrier, and approximately ten seconds later, the carrier breaks, and the crawler is expelled. They have a Bonked debuff that lasts for about twenty seconds. Unfortunately, if the crawler gets zapped into the pet carrier and someone attempts to add the carrier to their personal inventory, it will not work. However, the cleaner bot’s weight-based utility inventory system does work. What we’re going to do is zap you into the pet carrier, and before the carrier breaks, we will have, uh, Suckira here suck the pet carrier in.”

“Suckira?” I asked.

Donut scoffed. “That was Louis’s idea. I wanted Anna Nardini. I insisted we name the cleaner bots now that we had two, and he said that was the name of the robot vacuum his mom had in Florida. We flipped a coin for the right to name it, but Samantha was the one to do the coin flip, and I think she cheated.”

“Anna Nardini?” I asked. “What?”

“I did cheat,” Samantha said from Louis’s shoulder. He’d given up trying to shoo her away. “That’s what a woman does for her man.”

Louis let out a spray of water. “She didn’t cheat. It was a fair flip. Please stop sticking your tongue in my gills. It freaks me out.”

“Freaking you out is my love language, Louis.”

“Wait, what did you name the one in our space?” I asked.

Before Donut could answer, Mordecai started droning on again.

He continued like this for some time before Elle interrupted.

“Holy shit, we get it. It’s going to work. Can we get on with it?”

“Carl, did you understand any of that?” Donut whispered.

“Sort of,” I said. “Basically, Li Na gets sucked into the cleaner bot, the cleaner bot gets put up for sale, Herot buys it, and he empties her out inside of the other place. And now Li Na has left the game because this Cabaret place is outside the playing field. She’ll be considered to have been ‘lost.’”

“It’s like trading a Pokémon between devices,” Louis said.

Donut snorted. “You wouldn’t catch me dead doing that.”

“Are you absolutely, positively positive that the contents of the bot’s storage will still be there when this stranger purchases it?” Prepotente asked.

“No,” Rosetta said. “But we believe they will be. It’s a container. And containers and their contents do transfer. But it is a risk. We are also not positive that Na will survive when the floor collapses. The rules suggest she will survive, but as this has never happened before, we’re not positive.”

“It’ll work,” Mistress Tiatha said, speaking for the first time. “It has happened before.” She was drunk again, swaying where she stood. She didn’t elaborate.

“Okay,” Prepotente said. “But how will we know if it’s successful? We’ve already established that the regular messaging system probably will not work. She is partied with Zhang, but she will automatically leave the party. Will we even receive a this-crawler-has-perished message if we send her a note?”

“That’s actually a very good question,” Mordecai said. “But we have a solution for that as well. Rosetta?”

Rosetta produced a tiny cactus plant with a plastic pot. The cactus glowed blue. “Li Na has cast a dread trap on this plant. Deadly bloom. We’re in a safe room, but the trap will still activate if you touch it, so leave it alone. You won’t get poisoned, but it will ruin it. Normally, someone comes near the plant, the flowers bloom, and they release a spore that will paralyze you.”

“Hey,” I said, “that’s from my room! I got that from picking an Earth class. It’s just a little cactus from Home Depot.”

“It didn’t match with the new rug,” Samantha said. “I put it out. It’s covered with poky parts. Much too aggressive for the vibe I’m going for.”

“You put it out?” I made a mental note to go check on my room.

“The condition of the plant will tell us Li Na’s status,” Rosetta continued. “If it’s glowing in the ready status like it is now, Li Na is alive and in the dungeon. If the plant activates on its own, blooms appearing and spores spread but no longer lit up, that means Na has physically left the game. She is outside the dungeon. If the spell fails suddenly and doesn’t activate and the cactus dissipates into dust, that means Na is dead and that she died inside the dungeon.”

“Interesting,” Prepotente said, leaning in to examine the small cactus. “You best keep this someplace safe. What if she ends up trapped inside the cleaner’s storage, never released?”

“That is another possibility that will be indicated. The glow will slowly fail over the course of several days. And finally, if she believes it’s safe for the others to proceed to the Pineapple Cabaret, she will be able to remotely make a single flower bloom on the top of the cactus. There will be a single flower, and the trap will still be glowing. If she’s still alive but she believes this is not a safe method for crawlers to come, she will make three flowers bloom.”

“I get it. Sort of,” Donut said. “If Suckira and Na make it to this Pineapple place and there’s a single flower on Carl’s cactus at the end of this next race, then we know it’s safe to send everyone else using Ezra Fitz.”

“Using what?” I asked.

“Keep up, Carl,” Donut said. “If we get the go-ahead from Li Na, we’ll have everyone we can get sucked up by Ezra Fitz the Second, and they’ll go there, too.”

“Wait, you named the cleaner bot ‘Ezra Fitz’? Why?”

“Because Ezra Fitz sucks, Carl.”

“Who the hell is that?”

And then I realized I didn’t actually care, and I returned my attention back to the important conversation.

“It’s not a perfect solution,” Mordecai said. “XL pet carriers are expensive, and there’s limited room in the other cleaner bot, especially after we had it clean up all the leftovers from Carl’s Naga inheritance. We can maybe send fifty more people with just one bot. We do have some leads on other bots but not many. We can’t have this Herot sell the cleaner bot back to us, either, unfortunately. All dungeon upgrades such as the bots have a timer. He won’t be able to re-list the bot for thirty days.”

“Shit,” I said. Fifty people? That wasn’t nearly enough. But surely we weren’t the only party with a cleaner bot. I started to compose a message to send out.

Prepotente made a noise that sounded like a bleat. “Very clever. This still seems like a surefire suicide method to me. Good luck, Li Na.” He turned and strode from the room, but he paused at the door. He stood there, running his hand along the wall near the couch. There was a table there containing the two wrapped Christmas presents. One for me, and one for Imani. “I do like this place, I must say. Maybe you can, you know, allow me to attach my personal space to the guild?”

Imani crossed her arms. “You said no the last time I offered.”

“That was before I knew about the pet stables. And the Bopca! This place is a delight.” He turned to look at Donut. “I have a karaoke kit in my space I can add to the main room. I bought it to practice for my performance that never happened.”

Donut gasped.

“I will see you and Carl in the factory,” Prepotente said, turning away. “I will send you my plan after I confer with Jurgen.”

“Can we continue please?” Mordecai asked.

I spied Linus the tourist on the other side of the room. He was whispering something to Bautista, who did not look amused. Donut followed the path of my gaze.

“He keeps trying to get Daniel to make tea,” Donut said. “Apparently, Bautista tea is a trending thing right now. Daniel doesn’t even have an outreach manager, so he’s sure to get ripped off. The folks on my social media board are all jealous of him. Of Linus, I mean, not Daniel. Elle’s Snow Cones fan club did a raid on my server the other day, and they and the Posse were all fighting, but now they’re friends and working together.”

“Okay, we’re ready,” Mordecai said. “Uh, Suckira? Are you ready?”

Suckira let out a beep.

Zhang stepped forward, head lowered.

“I’m sorry it was your brother and not me,” he said, his voice a whisper. “If Jun is watching this now, I hope he isn’t angry with me for not watching over you like I promised.”

Li Na looked up at that, her one good eye opening. The other, mechanical eye twirled and zoomed.

“I am no child to protect. I never have been, and you have nothing to apologize for. You have been a good friend to me. Jun loved you like a brother. I will do this. I will clear the way for you and everyone else who is to come after this next race, and then I will make certain the war mages do not turn on us. Do not die, Zhang. I hope to see you again soon.” She paused. “Do not ever lose your smile. I used to smile at you so you would smile back at me, and I would pretend, in my mind, that you and I were married and that your smiles filled me in a way that I could only pray for. Thank you for always trying to protect me, even when I didn’t deserve it.”

She turned to Mordecai. “I am ready. I do not wish to speak to anyone else.”

“Uh, yeah. Sure, kid,” Mordecai said, handing the pet carrier to Zhang, who had to do it.

And then it was done. Zhang held out the pet carrier, pointed it at Li Na, who nodded. He pressed the button, and she disappeared within. The pet carrier started buzzing. The white cleaner bot Suckira picked it up. It disappeared without so much as a beep.

We all waited, holding our breath. Nothing happened.

We all turned our attention to the cactus. So far, there was no change. The one thing we didn’t want to happen was for it to activate and then turn to dust. That meant Na was dead.

Mordecai reached over and hit a button on the back of Suckira, and the robot unit turned off. He held it in two skeletal hands.

“Okay, then,” Mordecai said. “Donut, let’s sell this at the terminal.”

We moved to the shop-interface terminal in the common room located right next to the Bopca station. Donut swept her paw across it. We all watched as she made a new For Sale listing.

“Yay! I did it right. Okay, Mordecai, put it in front of the light thingy, and it’ll be done.”

Mordecai reached over, and with a beep, the white cleaner bot disappeared.

Mordecai’s hood was suddenly down, and his eyeball head was on fire.

“The Oak Fell lives up to her name,” he said in his deep voice. But then the giant eye blinked, and he was back to himself. He pulled the hood up and patted the fire out on his head.

The interface beeped, and text appeared. Your item has sold!