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He has the grace to look very slightly ashamed. “I wanted to tell you, but once it all blew up, I couldn’t find a good moment and I thought maybe it would all blow over before I really even needed to tell you.”

“What blew up, Equinox?”

“Well, you know, the humans were hiding from the sickness, and we couldn’t go and visit them for years. I missed their company.”

“Go on,” I prompt him.

“So I used the computer to make a video game. Which…” He looks at me, as if trying to gauge how much I will possibly understand. “It is a digital world that people could enter from their phones, or their laptops, or their desktops, and then it came out on consoles. The phone version was a cut-down version, in which some currency could be transferred to the main game, so you never had to stop playing.”

“None of this explains why a human just told me the geography of a world she has never seen before.”

“I had to make a world for the game to take place in, and I already knew this one, so…”

“Inspiration? Or you designed our world inside this game world and now millions of humans have been exposed to the realities of a realm they were never supposed to know about, let alone be familiar with.”

“Okay, so. It might be more the latter, but to be fair, Uncle Ornix, nobody ever said I couldn’t do that. Am I wrong?”

“Yes, Equinox. You are wrong. The primary edict when it comes to the human world is that the secrets of the realm…

“Should never be shared unless the human is to be brought here for all eternity.”

I hear my voice come through the speakers of the computer, finishing my sentence the way Melissa finished one earlier.

“I might have recorded some of your more common sayings and used them for the world boss,” Equinox explains.

“I’m the boss of a game world?”

“Well, sort of. It doesn’t mean the same thing to them. You’re not in charge of the world, assigning tasks. World boss means you’re more the final villain. Humans have to team up in groups of fifty to try to defeat you.”

“You created a game that reveals our world, and encourages them to group up and slay me?”

“It sounds bad when you say it like that.”

“It is bad, Equinox. It is very bad. I should destroy that computer of yours.”

“Well I don’t run the servers from here anyway so all that would do would delay the release of the DLC.”

“And the DLC is?”

“I’m adding an expansion pack in which players can build ships and use them to battle dragons.”

“Oh, so yet again, the humans are encouraged to, let me understand this correctly… hurt dragons.”

“Humans have always wanted to slay dragons. It’s not my idea. I’m just running with what works. You’ve got to follow the market. You can’t define it. That’s just arrogance. Humans slayed us out of existence in their world. They’re very into it.”

“Equinox, you are on the verge of spending the rest of your life in my deepest, darkest dungeon. I imagine they are also a playable area in your little game.”

“They might be.”

I sigh. Deeply. “Shut it down. Shut it all down.”

“Uncle Ornix, the game is on track to make eight hundred million dollars this year.”

“Excuse me?”

“It gives humans the chance to use their natural impulse to gang up and slay a dragon. It calls to them. It’s designed to keep them coming back for more, more gear, more levels, more content. I have a studio in the human realm that employs hundreds of artists, coders, musicians, writers… the list goes on. Shutting this down means removing a cultural touchstone. There’s merch.”

“Oh, there’s merch? Well, I didn’t know there was merch. If there’s merch, then by all means continue to slather our sacred, ancient business all over a mortal realm that does not deserve even a fraction of our magic. Continue to break all the laws handed down to us by our ancestors because the humans are entertained.”