In the end, they fought three times before Tanya was satisfied with their practice bouts.
Three fights, each ending the same way—Honeydew disarmed and bleeding, the flat of Tanya’s sword informing Nathan that he could easily be bleeding himself, and a solitary cherry blossom resting on top of the victor’s boot.
“Alright, that’s enough for now.” She nodded at him and at Honeydew, different nods for each of them, as was suitable for the fact that her relationship and history with each of them was so completely different. “Get cleaned up. No knowing what’s on the flipside of this segment, other than, you know, not a fight. Or not a fight right away.”
“If we fuck up a social challenge badly enough,” Honeydew clarified at Nathan’s inquisitive look, “sometimes it turns into a fight.” The vortex of ice and flame around them spiraled into her skin, leaving her squirming for a moment and spiral patterns in her skin protesting in blue, purple, and pink. “Usually a pointlessly hard one,” she continued with a hitch in her voice, “one which is unlikely to teach us anything useful or give us adequate rewards.”
“Still worth it to punch that smug fucker in the face,” Tanya murmured, “but yeah, it’s not like we got anything out of it. Other than the satisfaction of punching him.”
“He was,” the other woman allowed, “extremely punchable.” The electrical charge that had hung in the air and the lightning which had coursed through her and Nathan’s nerves grounded itself in the tattoos of her spine with a flash. “But,” she hissed as the fragments of her weapons melded back into the scenery, “we should try to do better anyway.”
“What kinds of stuff should I be expecting?”
“Anything from making friends to teaching someone to solving a murder. Taking care of a baby, making a party run perfectly. Defusing a fight or a war, or starting one; clearing out a casino without getting thrown out, or talking a politician into making the world a better place.”
“Solving two hundred and thirty seven puzzles with a team of near-strangers who are also heart-dear friends,” Honeydew added hopefully as they started walking towards the rooms they’d been in earlier, “each puzzle more fiendish than the last, with every step in every solution an a-ha that will sear your heart with joy?”
“Honey. Really.”
“Just because it hasn’t happened yet doesn’t mean it can’t happen eventually,” she told her lover with a pout. “And when it does, I’ll be ready to enjoy it fully!”
“By which you mean you’re going to fuck your way through every person in sight while tricking them into figuring out the solutions ‘for themselves’.”
“Please,” she sniffed with haughty faux dismissiveness, “who do you think I am? I’m going to fuck my way through everyone in sight twice. And I’ll get the invisible ones, too.” Her eyes flickered to Nathan, and she smiled. “Except for the ones who aren’t interested.”
“Most of those sound… nice?” Nathan turned his head to shoot a quizzical look at first one of them, then the other. “Why do you have a weird dungeon thing that puts you in life-or-death battles but also social situations that seem, like, nice?”
Tanya glanced at Honeydew, who shrugged expressively. “Nobody actually knows,” the sorceress and Priestess said with what Nathan suspected, correctly, was uncharacteristic bluntness. “The closest there is to a coherent theory is Zi-Arthudro’s hypothesis, the Perfection School; that we’re being groomed to be better people, more controlled people. People who can live Topside, all the way Topside on the surface, without breaking reality, and delve down to relieve the pressure and bring back the goods to run civilization on.”
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Nathan looked over at Tanya, half expecting a scornful rebuttal. He was less surprised than he thought he would be to see a serene shrug instead. “I guess you were able to do your thing without letting the magic touch anything just now?”
“I can stop it from touching the real,” she agreed.
“And I can tell it to shut the fuck up,” Tanya added. “But both of those are loud, louder than a firestorm, a whole lot louder. If we did that where we live, forget Topside of where we live, we’d break everything nearby, best case.”
“Perfection is about being perfectly yourself, being so perfectly a unison of your physical and metaphysical Selves that there’s no friction or turbulence, and there’s people who’ve done that. I’m.” Honeydew blushed, pink and red starting to creep up her jawline and trail its way down her collarbone. “I’m one of them,” she said as though it were an admission, “if anyone can be said to have. But I leak constantly.”
“Leak glory,” Tanya agreed, smiling fondly. “Magic and crackle and hunger and glory.”
“There’s folks who’ve become one with the world, but they can’t use magic, they become magic, I guess? They’re the only ones who can actually travel Topside, so we know that they’re only as magical as their surroundings, and they’re…”
“You can’t notice them. Like they’re in the background.”
“Yes! Thank you, dear.” Honeydew nodded. “They’re one with the world. How often do you notice the lensing effects of the air on the light that passes through it on a clear day?”
“Honey’s exactly herself, whatever anyone else or the world says,” Tanya said with soft seriousness. “She lapped me there, but I’ll be there someday, if we don’t die first. How can anyone go from that to being part of the world? How can she go from… from being so full of glory that it pours out to fill every trough to being so self-contained that she leaves no trace? It’d be an act of violence to ask it of her.”
“Poetry,” Honeydew protested, sounding embarrassed. Even as she did, though, Nathan noticed that her blush receded and her body language became more comfortable than it had been a moment before. “What’s wrong with being able to keep it in my pants?”
“Because you definitely wear pants of your own free will so very often,” Tanya huffed in amusement. “Because that’s totally up your—”
“Holy shit, now that’s a door,” Nathan said, ignoring them both completely as they stepped into the arena and he saw the entrance into the next segment. “How are we even here so fast?”
“Travel through a cleared segment is fast,” one of the two women said, and he paid just enough attention to vaguely process their words, which was not enough attention to notice—much less remember—which woman it was.
“Behold,” he read as he walked slowly towards the twelve-foot edifice of metal-banded wood. “This is a door. It is a masterwork door. It was crafted by the crafter of this door. It is twelve feet tall. It is described as an edifice. It is made out of wood.” His fingers came up as if to trace the glyphs. “It menaces with bands of metal. It perplexes with the nature of mystery. It leads from this location to another location. It is a product of Magic, of Reality, and of Existence. It is ephemeral. It is indestructible to all things which do not destroy it. There are many doors like it, but this door exists for the purpose that this door was created for, and the other doors like it do not exist for that specific purpose. It is carved with runes, which describe it in the manner that these runes describe.”
“Really?”
“Yes. No,” he corrected himself with no small hint of wryness and a fair bit more glumness. “It says all of that… passive-aggressively.”