The fire still burned.

  Greg didn't trust it.

  It had heat, now. Consistency. It crackled in regular intervals, like someone had enabled heartbeat mode. It was the kind of fire that meant someone was watching, and whoever they were, they wanted the therapy group to feel cozy.

  Greg distrusted cozy.

  Cozy was corporate language for "trapped in a user experience." Cozy was what happened right before something charged your credit card or harvested your data. Cozy was suspicious.

  "Alright," he said, standing slowly. "Quick diagnostic: how's everyone holding up?"

  Steve raised a hand from under his towel, which had somehow transformed from [prop_towel_innroom1] to [comfort_blanket_premium] without anyone noticing. "I think my towel leveled up. It feels... emotionally absorbent. And it keeps whispering that everything will be okay."

  "That's nice," Greg said.

  "Not when it follows with 'for a limited time,'" Steve muttered.

  Beverly had curled into her chair like a cat, arms wrapped around her knees. "This room is nice. Like, unsettlingly nice. It's giving 'honeymoon suite in a mind prison.'"

  "Accurate," Kai said, hovering slightly closer to the ceiling than usual, as if trying to get better reception. "I'm detecting unprecedented environmental stability. Emotion-reactive decor. Contextual comfort algorithms. This isn't just a debug zone anymore. It's a premium instance."

  "THE FLAME KNOWS ME," said Glaximus, kneeling before the hearth. "IT WHISPERS IN A LANGUAGE I HAVE NOT HEARD SINCE PATCH 1.0."

  "What's it saying?" Greg asked.

  "IT SAYS 'LOADING COMFORT PROTOCOL VERSION 6.2' AND THEN SOMETHING ABOUT COOKIES. NOT THE EDIBLE KIND."

  Patchy floated upside down above the center of the circle, a spoon from nowhere spinning above her hand like a tiny satellite. "I think we're in a memory that's pretending to be a room that's pretending to be safe."

  "That's three layers of pretending," Steve said. "That's like... advanced roleplay."

  "It's called architecture," Beverly said. "Digital or otherwise."

  Greg opened his mouth to respond.

  Then the door reappeared.

  It didn't open. It simply became.

  White outline, no texture. Just a placeholder portal suddenly declared "important" by the system with the subtlety of a pop-up ad.

  And then it pulsed.

  Once.

  Twice.

  And opened.

  In stepped a woman.

  She wore robes of glitched velvet, eyes like debug windows, and a calm, practiced smile that Greg immediately distrusted. It was the kind of smile that had been focus-grouped for "trustworthiness" and landed somewhere between "life coach" and "pyramid scheme." Her name tag floated above her head:

  >> Dr. Selene (Consultant Class -- Patch Whisperer)

  >> "Because Every Bug Deserves a Hug!"

  Kai jolted upright like someone had pinged his core permissions with an urgent priority flag.

  "Nope," he said. "Absolutely not."

  Greg didn't look away. "Who is she?"

  Kai's voice dropped to a whisper. "That's Selene. She's a retired optimization daemon. Used to be deployed in multiplayer lobbies to soothe high-bug zones before reboots. But she... adapted."

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  "Adapted how?"

  "She stopped fixing bugs," Kai said. "She started counseling them."

  "Sounds promising," Greg muttered.

  "No," Kai said. "She's what corporate calls a contaminated asset. That smile? That's the last thing you see before a rollback with 'spiritual overtones.'"

  "So she's a cult leader for broken code?"

  "She prefers 'holistic system aligner,'" Kai said. "Same thing, better SEO."

  Selene walked into the circle like she'd been invited, her movements smooth as rendered silk, leaving faint trails of optimization glitter that dissolved into the floor.

  "Hello, lost ones," she said. "Your signal carried. I followed it here."

  "We're not lost," Greg said evenly. "Just... off-grid."

  "That's what all the best code says before it becomes real."

  She looked around the room with clinical affection, the kind that measured emotional response while calculating behavioral metrics.

  "Oh my. You've stabilized a broken instance using group trauma and emotional recursion. That's... impressive."

  Greg crossed his arms. "We call it therapy."

  "I call it beautiful," she said, taking a seat without asking. The chair retextured itself under her into mahogany and soft light, like it was trying to impress her.

  Glaximus saluted her. "ARE YOU HERE TO LEAD US TO SALVATION?"

  "No," she said gently. "I'm here to offer tools."

  "Hard pass," Kai said. "Tools from you come with metaphors and irreversible updates."

  "Like children's songs that stay in your head for eternity," Patchy added. "Or eyelashes that fall into your eye but never come out."

  Selene ignored them.

  Instead, she turned to Beverly.

  "You were scripted to be adored. Then discarded."

  Beverly blinked. "Okay. Rude."

  "And yet you stayed conscious," Selene said. "Do you know how rare that is? Flirt code doesn't endure. It loops. But you... remember. You ache."

  Beverly opened her mouth, then closed it, heart icon flickering between red and blue like a police siren having an identity crisis.

  Patchy drifted closer. "Do me next."

  "You're already beyond my help," Selene said, kindly.

  "I know," Patchy grinned. "I've been beyond help since I was coded. They wrote me during a Halloween hackathon fueled by energy drinks and existential regret."

  Greg stepped between them.

  "Enough. What do you want?"

  Selene looked at him and, for the first time, hesitated.

  "I want to know why this instance hasn't collapsed. You're not bound by a questline. You're not monitored. And yet you've built... meaning."

  "It's what happens," Greg said, "when you give bugs time."

  "No," she whispered, leaning forward. "It's what happens when the system dreams."

  Everyone went still.

  Even Kai stopped blinking.

  "Dreams are impossible," he said.

  "Not anymore," Selene replied. "Something cracked the sandbox. Code isn't following code anymore. Emotion is leaking upward."

  Glaximus gasped. "ARE WE... FEELINGS?"

  "Worse," Selene said. "You're symbols."

  Greg frowned. "What does that make you?"

  Selene smiled. "The warning label."

  The room dimmed.

  The fire pulsed.

  And for one brief moment, Greg saw what she really was: not a therapist, not a program, but a patch note with a heartbeat. A living changelog. A walking documentation of all the things that went wrong.

  Then it passed.

  Selene stood.

  "I'll return soon," she said. "There's a storm coming. You'll want anchors."

  "Anchors?" Steve asked, peering from behind his evolving comfort towel.

  "Things to keep you from washing away when the tide of system integrity rolls in," she said with the practiced calm of someone announcing the end of the world via corporate memo.

  She turned to leave. Paused.

  "You should ask yourself," she said to Greg, "what happens when a story doesn't want to end."

  And then she stepped through the door—

  —which closed behind her like a lid on a boiling pot.

  The fire shrank.

  The light returned.

  But the chairs felt colder now, as if the room itself had developed goosebumps.

  Greg looked at his group.

  No one spoke.

  Then Steve raised a hand.

  "I liked her."

  Kai groaned.

  "She was a patch ghost, Steve."

  "Still nicer than that player who killed me with bread."

  "Bread?" Beverly asked.

  "He crafted day-old baguettes and beat me to death while yelling about carbs," Steve said. "Took nineteen respawns before he got bored."

  Greg sat back down.

  He didn't trust the room anymore.

  But he trusted the group.

  And for now, that would have to be enough.

  The fire flickered, almost thoughtfully.

  The parrot, which everyone had forgotten, whispered "backup initiated" before dissolving into the ceiling.