Sam felt his body jolt a little with some leftover adrenaline from his brush with death, but he forced himself to keep calm. Faced with the corporation behind the game that had everybody in their palm, he needed all his faculties to make sure he didn't give up the game.

Just to stall for time, he cleared his throat, actually feeling it still a little coarse, and reached for another cup of water.

However, apparently, due to his hospitalization and resulting exhaustion, he wasn't as good as he thought. Lucy snorted, which meant she saw something on his face. She sent him a rather pointed glare while the man in the lab coat simply stared at them with a blank expression, both of his hands gripping the thick tablet.

He opened his mouth, but Lucy cut him off.

"Come on, Sam… Do you think he would be here if I hadn't made sure he is legit?" she asked with a smirk, sending a gloating glance at the man who tried to suppress a twitch. "The lawyers already had their day on the battlefield. Every i was dotted, and every t crossed," she explained rapidly. "They're free to ask anything about the event that preceded your medical issues and the issue itself. Anything else, and you can stay silent. Nothing about private life or business secrets."

He squeezed Lucy's hand in appreciation, turned to the man, and cleared his throat again before speaking.

"If that is true, then who am I talking to?" he asked, trying to sound mysterious. But with the way he was feeling it came out hoarse, almost as a whisper.

The man just snorted. "Your friend may have put it rather crudely, but that's how things stand. I'm simply here to ascertain what caused the medical incident and to see if we would need to add more safeguards to prevent future incidents," he stated in a no-nonsense tone. "As for my identity…the company – due to the incredible interest from outside parties – takes great care in protecting our identities. Thus, you may call me…the Developer." He finished the explanation somewhat dramatically, clearly enjoying the subterfuge.

Lucy just let out a little chortle and leaned closer to Sam, raising her hand to cover her mouth from being seen, she began to whisper.

"His name is on the paperwork. I will tell you later…"

While it was whispered, the man clearly heard it and began to pout.

Sam glanced at Lucy before returning his gaze to the man. "It is nice to meet you. I think?" he shook himself a little before taking a deep breath. "How can I help you?"

The man grinned, tapped at a few things on the tablet, and Sam saw a red light appear at the edge. The universal sign of recording. Though he suspected that, the room was definitely bugged, and they were watching him from every angle.

"Well, first of all, are you feeling anything irregular? Headaches? Tremors? Problems with forming words or thinking of certain things? Balance issues?"

Sam spent a few moments introspecting, but he couldn't feel any of them.

"Mostly hungry and exhausted," he replied simply.

"Good. That's good," he said, stretching the o sound. "Memories? Remember everything?"

Sam nodded. "Everything until I logged out. The getting out of the pod things are a little murky…"

"That's expected. Having a stroke is not really conducive to forming long-term memories." The man then looked down at his tablet. "Any gaps in the memories? Mother's name? Last address? Childhood school?"

Sam just raised an eyebrow. "Are you here to test me or to steal my credit card info?"

Lucy reached out and swatted at his shoulder. "Behave!" she hissed.

Sam just smiled at her before turning back to the man. "Well?"

"We already have access to that information. There is no need to steal it," came the dry reply.

Sam just sighed and listed the answers while the man checked his list and nodded along.

"Excellent! A few more tests, then. Let's start with…"

They spent the next hour going through test after test, checking every aspect of his cognitive function, memories, thinking skills, and so on. They even repeated several tests, just to make sure to rule out false positives and such. At least, that was the reason the man gave them for all the tests.

However, for Sam, as the tests progressed, it became clearer and clearer that the man was deriving some kind of perverse pleasure by boring Sam to death while also annoying him with all those stupid questions. Not that it showed on the man's face, yet Sam still could feel it in his bones.

'What a weird man…' he mused while having a minute of respite as the man looked something up on his tablet.

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It took, based on the clock he could see, almost three hours to go through all the supposed 'medical' tests. By the last third, even Lucy looked as if she was close to ramming the tablet down the man's throat.

He wrote something on the table, looked up, eyes shining with an unknown emotion, then smiled. "Well, lady and gentleman, that's the first part of our conversation done."

"First part?!" Sam asked, inwardly cursing whatever deity had put him there. "There is more?"

"Why, yes! This was for the medical team, now I have to ask questions for myself and the rest of the development team. After all, if there is a situation in the game that causes a stroke, we must fix it!" he declared vehemently, while pointing with one finger at the ceiling.

Thankfully, this was the time that Sam's stomach made itself known.

GROWL

The man retracted his hand and looked a little sheepish.

"After lunch…"

Hospital lunch was, even in the future, hospital lunch.

He simply closed his eyes, shoveled the meal into his mouth, tried not to think about the taste while he made sure not to stare enviously at the giant sandwich Lucy was consuming and the noodle soup the Developer was eating with gusto.

It helped that one of the nurses was standing in the room and giving him a look that promised pain if even a morsel from those two meals made it into his body.

Finally, after the meal was vanquished, they all took a short bathroom break, the nurse took some measurements and gave him a few pills (and watched him swallow them), and they returned to their conversation.

Lucy was sitting next to him on the bed – which was thankfully big enough to fit both of them – after claiming the hospital guest chair was too uncomfortable, while the man was staring at him with a hungry look as he gripped his ever-present tablet.

"Now, Mr. Lawrence, let us talk about the events leading up to the incident and your actions."

"Sure, but don't you have the recordings and all your system information?" Sam asked curiously.

The man waved his hand with its palm facing downward. "Yes, we have that. But we still would like to have a record of your view of that information."

"Ah, makes sense…" Sam replied, while inwardly he started filtering what information he could share without any danger and what he should stay silent on. One slip would be enough to increase the scrutiny…

The man nodded, oddly happy, squirming in his seat before he began asking questions. Again.

Lucy, meanwhile, was just lying back in the bed and staring at them as if she were watching a mediocre tennis match.

"What made you decide to accept the last quest? Even with those requirements?"

"I was mostly thinking about the rewards. It promised some cool attacks, and seeing that my guild is soon to be under attack by an army, I wanted those attacks."

"What about your exhaustion? The system read you feeling the artificial exhaustion. Yet you still did the quest?"

"I mean, how can you improve if you stop the moment you feel a little exhaustion?" Sam asked, turning his head a little sideways, feeling a little confused. "In my experience, the most optimal gains are when I'm pushing the boundaries of what I'm capable of."

Lucy nodded along with him. "At first I thought it was stupid, but it works…"

The man on the chair looked at him, then back at the table, before his eyes returned to the two of them on the bed.

Silence followed that statement before the man looked up and stared at Sam, hard. "Are you aware that the amount of stress and mental exhaustion that the system measured at the highest point during this event was almost four times the maximum measured during our stress testing? Which, in turn, is almost double what the human body could handle?" At the end, he almost sounded as if he was begging for the universe to make sense.

"I mean, the results show that I clearly couldn't handle it…" Sam replied dryly.

The man leaned forward, seemingly desperate. "Do you have some kind of exercise that improves your brain's ability to handle stress? Maybe some kind of supplements?"

Sam really wanted to ask if they tried stuffing two souls into one body, but that would have been too much. Honestly, he was also rather surprised at the numbers the man quoted. In his inherited memories, he remembered several cases where people suffered strokes during gameplay. But overall, most of them were in ill health or had some preexisting conditions. There was one guy who had a stroke because some idiots decided to psychologically torture him in the game, disorienting him enough that he didn't even think about logging out. But that action required months of planning just to slip by the system's detection. However, players complaining about the load on their brains? Or having strokes just because they were exhausted…Never. Though the other Sam wasn't as connected as he was, so it was entirely possible that such things happened, but they were simply buried.

In the end, he simply shrugged. "I eat healthy, don't drink alcohol, no smoking or drugs, and try to exercise regularly," he answered before smiling impishly. "I also try to touch grass almost every day."

"Ugh," the man groaned. "That's what every basic health-conscious person does, you…" He seemed to swallow a word before shaking himself and continuing. "I'll just note that no known outside stimuli."

"You…do that," Sam replied awkwardly. "Anything else?"

"Yes! While we're here, I would like to ask your opinion about several game functions and behavior. You're one of the top players, so we would like to know your opinions."

Sam raised an eyebrow. "Really? Shouldn't I just fill out one of those forms on the log-out page? The game is always smashing it into my face…"

The man raised his hand and began to scratch the back of his neck. "Ahahahah, you can do that, of course, but why not tell me directly? I'm, after all, one of the developers."

Somehow, Sam doubted that. Still, it was worth a shot. He looked at Lucy, who looked back, then nodded minutely, giving him the go-ahead.

The man saw this and eagerly leaned forward, tablet ready to record. Some may have said, too eagerly..

"Well, the first thing is the menu, it's rather…"

An hour later, the door closed after the so-called Developer, and Sam and Lucy looked at each other in the light of the setting sun.

For a few minutes, neither of them said anything before Sam let out a huff.

"That was fucking weird."

Lucy nodded heavily. "I'm pretty sure they were fishing for something…"

"I mean, they weren't exactly hiding it," he pointed out wryly.

Lucy giggled a little. "I don't think he knew that."

They fell silent again, then Sam saw Lucy move as she darted forward and hugged him strongly, laying her head in the crook of his neck, squeezing him pretty hard.

For a moment, he sat there, stunned, before his brain rebooted and he placed his hands around her, too.

They stayed like that for some time before Lucy spoke up.

"I'm glad you made it… I don't know what I would have done if you…" She couldn't finish the sentence, instead she started hugging him harder.

Sam said nothing, just returned the hug while staring out of the window, overlooking the always awake city as the orange, red, and purple hues of the setting sun drowned the world in color.

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