“Great,” Lucas said. He caught the book with his left hand and hid the journal behind his back with his right. “Now, uhh . . . look for some wax for seals and the royal stamp. I don’t know if Kegan’s dumb enough to leave them lying around, but if we can find those, we’ll be set.”

“Oh, sure. I saw those earlier.” Nick moved to a shelf adjacent to the one he was in front of and then lifted away a false segment, revealing a hidden compartment. “I thought the accounting book would be hidden here as well, but this old goon had them in completely different places.”

How in the heck did he discover a fake board on a bookshelf? I would never have noticed that, Lucas thought as he finished hiding Kegan’s journal and took the accounting book over to the table.

“That’s all we need then,” Lucas said, opening the book. There were no modern slice-of-life conveniences from the real world, leaving most players to create magical devices in place of electronic ones, but one feature that the game did allow was a camera. Players were allowed to take “screen grabs” and photos that could be posted to the game’s forums or on social media accounts. It was an easy way for players to share their experiences and capture memories, and it was a fast and easy promotion for the company.

Taking advantage of the tools given to him, Lucas used that same tech to quickly snap pictures of each of the book’s forty-nine pages. When he was finished, he rifled through the pages on the desk until he found an incomplete contract. Grabbing the nearby quill and dipping it into the inkwell, he scribbled in a few bogus numbers and statistics. When he was finished, he took the purloined seal, dabbed it in some wax, and made his handiwork official. He repeated the process ten separate times, setting each page aside after taking note of the modified numbers, dates, and the minutes he listed on a separate sheet of paper.

“What are you doing?” Bonnie asked as she watched Lucas work.

“I’m making fake contracts,” Lucas replied. “Kegan’s signature is pretty easy to copy, and these will be indistinguishable from real ones. The noble’s wax seal is like this age’s version of a notary, so if the signature and the seal both are authentic-looking enough, no one will believe either is fake.”

“So, you’re going to put him out of business? I don’t get it,” Bonnie replied. She walked across the room and hovered over Lucas’s shoulder uncomfortably, studying Lucas’s every movement. “And why bother? Do you really think even with his seal he’d honor a contract he knows is fake?”