"I found this thing and I want to try it," Jet said, waving a loose stack of papers in one hand and staring at the datapad he had in the other.

"This thing," Aji tilted her head.

"Yeah, it's a game, people used to play it back on their old world." Jet placed papers in front of his sisters and on his portion of their shared table. "We're supposed to make characters and pretend to explore and adventure! But I don't know how we're going to make them, that part of the file was corrupted."

Baata squinted at their brother, "you've lost your mind, my brother," she said.

"Oh come on," he replied, "we used to pretend we were things when we were little, right? This just puts it on paper."

Aji gave a grin, "you just didn't want to lose to us even when you cheated.."

"I was not cheating, I just remembered something that I could do that would stop you from winning."

The sisters both snickered, but also both reached out to that paper he'd given them. There was information printed on it, things about names and 'character type', a list of features such as Strength and Charisma.

He did know just enough to rein them in when both his sisters attempted to give themselves 'all the best scores'. "We have dice though! We're supposed to roll them and then put them on the paper."

Slowly but surely, they pieced together the stages of this process. Roll the dice, fudge some others, write them down... Decide a lot of things: what did this character do? How did they get their abilities, all kinds of interesting backstory. A lot of it was confusing at best to the trio, since it was not only fantasy and not real, but half-corrupted data to boot.

In the end, though, they put characters on the papers and appraised the results. Aji made a Bard - she wasn't far off from one in theory, though she'd never expressed too much interest in becoming a harper. She figured, she loved to travel, and so did her character, but also with a strong side of 'talking to people to get the better of them'. Which is possibly something a harper wouldn't really... do. "Well mine would." She muttered with a grin. Her bard was a Tabaxi, a cat person, just to make some of the lower rolls she'd done get a little boost here and there.

Baata developed a Warlock, reasoning once Aji's words drew an opponent in and lulled them, Baata's character could manipulate them with magic. She'd considered rolling up a Monk or something similar, but then thought the better of it. She'd rather have a good bit of range and an external contact that would be able to hook her up with new things, than just swinging a staff or kicking. She did that herself, already. Her character was, of course, a Dragonborn... Because what else would be more perfect? Maybe a Tiefling, but she wasn't real clear on that whole angle, the data wasn't all there, so she went with what they had the most information on.

And Jet made himself an Artificer: exploiting his own desire to create and fiddle and tinker, but now he could pretend that those devices were far more effective than they could ever be in reality. Fairly, he knew that he was pretty darn good at those things, already; maybe some day he could design a door that recognized the person gripping its knob, or a smart net that only entangled its targeted enemy. He chose a Halfling for their dextrous fingers and their quick and dirty navigation ability.

"So... that leaves how we're gonna actually... play it." Jet said, leaning back. But they did need to wait for that first session, because the entire day had been spent working on these characters and digging through the half-garbled data. The sisters did finally get into it, not just to coddle their brother, but rather some of it sounded pretty fun! A list of weapons? Magic spells? Enchanted gear? Those things were still in the data! Enemies too, which was the fun part as Jet described how they might find a Cyclops or a Crawling Claw - and there was a big gasp around their table when he talked about their 'ignorant views on dragons', some of whom were absolutely 'monsters'.

By the time dinner was ready in their home, everyone had already started formulating goals, backgrounds, it was a lot more fun than the girls wanted to admit.

They had to study and work the next day, but into the evening Jet set about looking for more information on what the meat and bones of this game really was about. They needed a map, maybe some little figurines of their characters - that would be fun to fiddle with, and he asked both his sisters to describe their characters so he might put something together. A starting point and an end destination, a treasure, and monsters in between.

How hard could it be?

***

Over the course of the next few weeks, they had to develop a schedule. School and training came first, of course. Their folks were fine with them taking over the table and going into the evening with their enthusiastic storytelling, as long as they were in bed by a decent hour and not shouting so much at their 'bad dice! bad dice!' that the nearby weyrs would be kept up by it. Truth be told, both Ibej and his sister Beji kind of wanted to join in. Ata chuckled about their recordkeeping methods, but also, she redesigned their character sheets with her own expert hand. As a Scribe herself, she had an appreciation for such things.

They got a good number of sessions through their game, from meeting one another in a little tavern, being hired by some stranger to retrieve a missing item ("huh, sounds familiar, a missing time-piece?" Baata winked at her sister.) and needed to fend off not only the wildlife along the way, but a group of shady bandits that wanted to rob them blind. It was when they were in the 'actual dungeon' - the namesake of this whole game - that Jet's ability to think on clever traps got the better of him.

"I know you guys have been listening in," Jet said to his father, "so... if you wouldn't mind, this is a list of the things I made for this map. But... I don't want to know which ones are there, y'know? I don't want to cheat," he raised his voice a bit so that his sisters both laughed, "I just want to play and have fun, not make it impossible for anyone to win. So... y'know. If the dice say we all die horrible deaths because of my stupid amazing traps... Y'know."

"Re-roll the dice," Ibej grinned widely.

They did get through that dungeon, a little worse for wear - while Ibej did have to reroll one entirely horrific mangling ("I'm so proud of you son, you designed the single most amazingly deadly trap I've ever seen!"), he didn't go entirely easy on them either. Made the kids work for their eventual goal, and added quite a bit of his own style to the telling of it too.

Ata knew why: she'd heard the man's gloating stories, of their own adventures. It was in their blood, her children would thrive in such conditions if they were given the chance. They knew magic was real, too, at least real on some worlds. Ibej and his sister had gone to such worlds. Planets distant and exotic, yet sometimes quite familiar. They'd gone and stolen things, liberated this or that... And then came home to Eden's Gate and related wild tales. Ata listened with more than half an ear, because while a lot of it had to have been complete wherry dung, some was very accurate, she'd been in the hall they described, she'd seen one or more of those office doors... And she knew that she had to believe those stories, because there was a box in their private chambers that Beji kept with many of the items in question.

Come to think of it, that's probably where this datapad with the half-degraded game on it had been 'discovered'. Ata got it into her head that perhaps her whole family was far more adventuresome than most. She'd written their tales down too, her husband and sister in law's, though they had to keep the evidence private until the 'untimely death' of this or that Dawnlight official who would very much have thrown the pair in jail for their deeds.

So when? When would the triplets get their own chance to shine in the real world, and not merely made-up on paper, so she could document their wild tales too?

***

It turned out... earlier than expected! "Isla! Isla Weyr has eggs!"

Someone shouted down the hall, and several families came to their doors. What was this about? Isla? That was on the Old World. That was on Pern, and...

"Wait, that's where?" Jet asked, somewhat surprised.

"It was where our own Weyr was, well, the plateau - our meeting place," Hollis said, "until we left. They used what was there, I suppose, and more power to them - no really, they should have electricity by now." The bronze rider elicited a few chuckles, but mainly he was in the area because he wanted to pick up the triplets.

For that clutch, on the Old World, in a Weyr that took up residence in the same island that the Kshau Protectorate had inhabited apparently hundreds of years before.

"If that's not the start of an adventure, I don't know what is," Ata told her family, preparing her gear and getting ready to take them across dimensions and perhaps even through time if need be.