“We’re going to run this properly,” Honeydew told the party once they were through the door. “Full marks, one hundred percent completion, no speed-running.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah.” She caught Tanya’s eyes, then nodded firmly. “Seriously.”
A number of expressions traveled across Tanya’s face, unfettered by any pointless self-control. Her lover, after all, knew her almost as intimately as she knew herself, in mind and soul—and she had no reason to care what Nathan or Sam thought about her, for all that Sam was a friend and Nathan was… tolerable to her. They still flickered quickly that only Honeydew was able to pick out the individual moods; she was done pretending for Nathan’s sake that she lived at any sort of typical experiential speed.
“It’s because of that… whatever it was, the one that he gave you, isn’t it. You want to full-clear the objectives because it’s our last stop and you wanna say thanks however you can.”
“You do know me.” Honeydew beamed. “Unless you’re in a hurry, Nathan?”
“Nah,” he said with a shrug. He took a moment to think about it further, worrying away at the edges of his equanimity. Just why, he asked himself, was he so okay with the fact that he was going to die soon, even if he had so very many lives left to live afterwards? Was it because the world they described sounded quite frankly like shit, a post-apocalypse still ruled by either the institutions that broke their world or those which had grown worse afterwards? Was it because he was tired of ephemeral landscapes and wanted something more solid, more real? Was it because he didn’t feel like doing a long sequence of dungeon crawls which were mostly combat? “I’m good with that if Sam is.”
“I’m cool with it,” his friend agreed in their low-key androgynous voice. “Maybe we’ll get another of those hauls and there’ll be something that’s perfect for me this time!”
“Greedyguts,” Nathan said without rancor.
“Not likely to find something quite that fitting,” Honeydew observed. “That was a lot. In a lot of ways. I’m going to need a while to process it—”
“Or to digest it!” Tanya interrupted with a smirk.
“—but I think,” the other woman continued without gracing her partner with even the slightest of reactions, “that it’s going to boil down to one big empowerment, and there’s a bunch I might be able to refine it into. Parallel processing would be interesting; there aren’t a lot of ways to properly get my hands on that in a way that doesn’t risk reaving.”
Nathan nodded, understanding perfectly what reaving meant—the mixture of damage to the mind, the body, and soul that was brought about by trying to incorporate magic that was ill-fitting in some regard or another. All of this information was imparted to him based on the translation magic he had been granted, or which he had opted for; a metamagical representation of a genetically engineered, magically altered mystical fish that consumed communication and transmitted meaning into the mind of the person in whose ear canals, approximately, the fish lived. (All of this is a lie, dear Reader. But as metaphors and analogies go, it may amuse and entertain you, and that would suffice.”
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“Being wrong at the same speed in two ways at once,” Tanya noted dryly.
“Paying attention to two things at once!”
“Uh huh.”
“Anyway,” the sorceress continued, “I’m more interested in the Observer’s Mark. I could refine it in that direction and get another set of observational mechanisms! And I think it might also give me a way to act through that, but… I don’t know.”
“Better,” her partner agreed. “A different way of looking at things could be handy.”
“So, Nathan. You’re being quiet.” For once, Tanya didn’t bother adding. “What’s up?”
“Just… the view, I guess.”
The party lapsed into a momentary silence as they settled down next to Nathan to more deliberately appreciate their surroundings. There was a village before them, or rather something that Nathan recognized as a village even though most people would have considered it a town—some few hundred residents inhabiting a dozen square miles of houses, shops, shop-houses, workshops, shop-workshop-houses, and vegetable-and-herb plots. There was a wall around the village, two feet tall and made of logs of only middling fit, on the inside of which many-a-house was built in order to use the wood of the walls as one of its walls, and in not quite the dead center of the village there was a castle or keep set on a hill in the middle of a split river that served as moat and fresh water storage for the town alike, along with a source of fish, which they kept in pens and fed scraps in order to convert sunlight along with marginal and useless bits of food into nutrition.
Or rather, they would have done so if it was a real village. But despite the fact that it looked like a perfectly real place, despite the impeccably rendered sun above and the few wisps of cloud in the skies, despite the variegated grasslands the village was set on and the subdued riot of personal touches and finishings of the houses, all of what they saw was a construct and a simulation. The knowledge of this sank into their bones, causing Nathan no small amount of exhaustion and making very little impact on anyone else, and the Earther sighed and stretched.
“So,” he asked when he was done taking a moment to be morose about the fleeting nature of the artificial world he was seeing, “what are we supposed to do? Sneak through the village killing everyone without being seen and looting everything of value, or ghost through the village killing nobody until we get to the throne room, where we execute the Baron or whoever and then perform the magical ritual of whateverness?”
“More like the first, usually,” Honeydew said consideringly. “Usually there’s some sort of hook or complication. Robots are the most common one, but the top rest of the top five isn’t that far down from those. Spatial tears that release demons who consume each other and the townspeople to grow in power is a classic, and basically any other kind of cannibalistic demonology.”
“And the other three?”
“Environment hazards, the situation being reversed and actually you need to fix everything or deliver presents to everyone’s houses without getting caught, and various variants on doppelgangers.”
“Oh.”
And then without any further ado Nathan turned around and skewered Sam through their heart with Saucer, because he hadn’t been born yesterday.