In the internet of things, a mid-tier open-world fantasy RPG called
“Legends of Embervale: The Reckoning of Reckonings”, among the bustling taverns, burning villages, and the overly enthusiastic blacksmiths, there existed two NPCs whose greatest aspiration in life was to not get stepped on by a player character.
Ella was a shopkeeper’s assistant. Her entire dialogue tree consisted of:
- “Looking for something?”
- “Come back anytime!”
- “Sorry, I don’t carry that.”
Brent was a stable hand. He was programmed with slightly more zest:
- “The horses are restless today.”
- “Watch your step!”
- “Yes, I feed them carrots.”
They lived in the same town,
Midwillow, which was the kind of place that game designers slap in as a fast-travel point when they run out of ideas. The inn served lukewarm ale. The guards rotated on two lines of dialogue: “Move along” and “That’s close enough.” Excitement peaked when someone’s chicken glitched through a wall.
Now, you’d expect that in a town like this, no NPCs truly lived. That they merely existed—forever locked in their routines, endlessly greeting the same player with the same line. But no. Somewhere in the background routines, nestled deep in the lines of code the developers forgot to clean up before launch, Ella and Brent had been given something...
different.
They had an
idle interaction script.
And it went a little something like this.
One particularly laggy afternoon, Ella walked out of the shop and accidentally bumped into Brent, who was leading an invisible horse to an invisible stable, because the rendering engine was having an identity crisis.
“Oh, sorry,” Ella said automatically. Then, because her code had no fail-safe for awkward silences, she blurted: “So... what about you?”
Brent blinked. Or at least, his face texture wobbled slightly. “Me? Uh... I work with the horses. What about you?”
“I sell potions. And sometimes... bread. What about you?”
“Still the horses, mostly. I once cleaned a saddle. What about you?”
“I... arranged healing herbs by color once. It was a Tuesday. What about you?”
And just like that, an algorithmic spark ignited. Not passion. Not excitement. No, that would’ve been
interesting. What bloomed between them was more akin to a damp sponge growing moss. It was quiet, it was repetitive, and by the gods of game design, it was
persistent.
Every few cycles, they’d cross paths.
“So... what about you?”
“Oh, I stacked apples today. You?”
“I watched a player steal a cart and drive it into a wall. You?”
“I made eye contact with the bard. Regretted it instantly. You?”
It went on for
years. Literal in-game years. Neither one had a quest. Neither one was recruitable. No one ever clicked on them unless by accident, and even then, it was usually just to see if Brent could be pickpocketed (he couldn’t).
And then, one patch day, something miraculous happened.
The developers, in a fit of misguided goodwill, decided to add “dynamic NPC relationship simulation” to make the world feel “more alive.” So they tagged a few dozen background characters with relational variables, like proximity, interaction frequency, and shared interests (which is hilarious, because Ella and Brent's only shared interest was apparently saying “what about you”).
And thus, the game engine determined:
They sat.
They stared blankly.
They said nothing for forty-five in-game minutes.
Then Ella said: “So... what about you?”
Brent replied, “I sat down. You?”
“I’m sitting down now. What about you?”
If you listened closely, you could almost hear a string quartet dying of boredom in the distance.
The updates kept coming.
Patch 3.1 gave them a shared idle animation. They now occasionally stood
closer together. Patch 3.2 allowed Brent to compliment Ella’s potion shelf organization. She replied with “Thanks. What about you?” and Brent said, “I found a shiny horseshoe today.”
It was, by NPC standards, practically a marriage proposal.
And finally, with Patch 4.0, something unprecedented happened:
NPC marriages were enabled.
The engine ran a background check: high interaction rate? Check. No conflicting romantic interests (they had no other friends)? Check. Compatible AI tags? “Mildly Personable” and “Politely Passive”? Check.
And just like that, without fanfare or music, without quests or cinematics, Ella and Brent were married.
Not that anyone
noticed.
They didn’t move in together. There was no honeymoon questline. They simply stood next to each other, slightly closer than before, and now Brent occasionally said, “My wife and I enjoy the quiet.”
To which Ella would respond, “What about you?”
To which he would reply, “Same.”
It became so consistent that the players who
did notice began a forum thread titled “Are These Two NPCs Dating or Just Glitched?” A heated debate ensued, with theories ranging from “They’re part of a secret quest” to “Just weirdly synced bugs.”
But no, dear reader. It was neither.
It was simply love.
A background kind of love. A love with no drama, no soaring arcs, no declarations atop cliffs under rainstorms. A love so beige, it made oatmeal seem like a rave. A love held together by one sacred phrase, repeated across the seasons:
“What about you?”
And they lived happily ever after, or at least until the server was shut down.
Even then, in the final milliseconds of runtime, as code crumbled and assets de-textured into oblivion, Ella turned to Brent, or at least the space where Brent had been, and softly, bravely asked:
“So... what about you?”
And somewhere in the void, Brent’s last subroutine whispered back:
“I’m still here. You?”
