After poking her head out, she gave Lucas and Nick the “all clear” before disappearing into the room. Lucas went next, and when he finished climbing the ladder and had crawled into the room, he realized that the pathway had led straight to Sir Kegan’s study. There was a wooden desk covered with papers, books, ink bottles and a quill; shelf after shelf of books, covering every wall except one; and several chairs in the middle of the room that looked as if they had been arranged for a meeting of sorts.

“Woah! I wonder how much that thing is worth?” Bonnie questioned, admiration clear in her voice.

Lucas followed her gaze and discovered a giant oil painting with an ornate gilded frame. A beautiful, young woman was being awkwardly embraced from behind by a much taller, average-looking man. Her forehead was covered by the top of the man’s beard, but he was looking down at her as if she were the only person in the world. Lucas couldn’t take his eyes off the portrait. “Who are they?”

“Oh, that’s Kegan and some girl,” Bonnie answered as she walked closer. “I remember seeing a picture of him when I was looking up info on the place, but he’s much younger here.”

“We might not get much for the painting, but the craftsmanship on that frame is probably worth a fortune,” Nick replied in answer to Bonnie’s former inquiry about its value. “I can’t think of many people that would want a weird painting of two people they don’t know.”

“Does Kegan have a wife?” Lucas asked. He had noticed a small gold band circling the woman’s left ring finger. “I thought . . . he was single . . .” Lucas trailed off, his eyes fixated on the two people’s happiness, which had been perfectly captured by the paintbrush.

“Well, the info I dug up said he’s the only one that lives here . . .” Bonnie replied.

“Same from my source,” Nick said. “Maybe it’s an old fling? Or possibly his parents?”

“Nah. The only way that’d work is if his dad were his identical twin,” Bonnie countered with a shrug. “But it’s a game. They may have gotten lazy when generating the models.”

“Lazy? That’s not possible.” Lucas knew the answer this time. He might not have known much about the fighting and the game mechanics, but after seeing Xun Guan’s face, he had looked up exactly how faces were generated. They were made by the developers, each one custom created using a DNA simulator that had been taken from either the game’s original creators or generated from a random string of code. If two NPCs in a game had a kid, the game would generate a random potential DNA sequence from the pairing and use that to predict the kid’s face and features. This method essentially prevented any two people from having identical features or looking like copy-pasted versions of each other like the characters in many of the earlier MMOs.