“Hello!” Rezin called cheerfully as he slid open the door of the hospital room. “My name is Rezin Anish. I’m here from the Fiends For Hire to fulfill your request.”
“I’m Niloy, and I’m here because I was bored!” she introduced herself when she walked in behind him.
“Fiends For Hire?!” the bedridden teenage-girl’s eyes started to panic. “Oh no! I’m so sorry. I thought it was ‘Friends For Hire’!”
“Don’t worry about it!” Rezin reassured her. “People misread it all the time. But we take on all kinds of jobs. So we’ve accepted your request to be your friends. What would you like to do?”
“Uhh, I don’t know,” the girl admitted. She looked a little dumbfounded by the situation. “I can’t do much, and I haven’t left this bed for a long time. What do friends normally do?”
“Well, why don’t you start by telling us about yourself?” Niloy suggested. She pulled up the other free chair in the room and slumped down into it, ready to listen.
“Umm, okay,” the girl thought about it for a bit, collecting her words. “My name is Yonee. I have a father and two little brothers. My mother… she—”
Yonee told them all about her life and situation. It was pretty tragic, but the two Fiends sat and listened patiently with a smile on their faces and eager ears. Yonee seemed to get a bit emotional during her retelling, but they supported her through it.
Three years ago, she and her mother had been in a car accident. Her mother had died and she’d been paralyzed. Now, she could only move her head and her right arm. Everything else she couldn’t even feel.
Fortunately, she lived in a country where all of her medical expenses were covered at least, but that basically turned the hospital into her home. She hadn’t set foot outside since. At first, her father would visit her every chance he could, but he started visiting less and less as the burden to take care of and provide for her brothers grew with each passing day. Now, she was lucky if he visited once a week for an hour or even a few minutes.
Yonee had done well in adapting to her new life. She always kept a positive attitude and had come to know the nurses who took care of her very well, but nothing ever shook the crippling feeling of loneliness. On occasion, she’d get visitors from charities who would spend the day with her, but that was a seldom event. In reality, she didn’t have a single real friend left.
Once Yonee had finished her story, Rezin and Niloy told theirs in return. The girl was enthralled to the end, perpetually entertained by their wild lives and experiences—finding some hard to believe, but still enjoyed hearing about them. All they’d done at that point was simply talk, and time had flown by. Now, the sun had long set, and it was time for Rezin and Niloy to head home.
“You’ll… Will you come back?” Yonee pulled her covers up above her mouth, too scared to look at them directly when she asked.
“Of course!” Rezin didn’t skip a beat, a big smile on his face!
“See you tomorrow!” Niloy waved her farewell.
“Okay- Eh, tomorrow?!” Could she really get her hopes up? The next morning, after a poor night of sleep, Yonee kept staring at the door. Her heart would clench a little in anticipation every time it opened, and her stomach would twist a bit more when it was just one of the hospital’s staff.
Eventually, she gave up on the idea that they’d just pop in suddenly and began constantly checking her phone—one of the few things she could fiddle with easily in her condition. They had her contact information from her original request, would they think to reach out to her that way if they couldn’t make it or were running late? Or would they just forget her, for today and from hereon.
Her thoughts eventually spiraled into exhaustion, causing her to take a depression nap just after lunch. She awoke suddenly to murmuring voices and something being shoved into her hand. After a couple of blinks, the drowsiness started to clear and she could focus on the smiling faces of Rezin and Niloy.
“Oh, hey,” she greeted them groggily as she continued to wake.
“Hey, there! Sorry we didn’t come sooner,” Rezin apologized, “We had to have our friend finish making that for you first. It’s a controller designed to be used entirely with one hand. Oh, here, let me get that part for you.” He came over and slid a strap around her wrist that was attached to the controller. “Just in case you drop it.”
Yoone wasn’t sure what to make of it. The controller looked a bit overwhelming with so many buttons crammed close together, but she had to admit that it felt comfortable in her hand. “I really appreciate it,” she had a huge grin at the present, but then it curved to a frown. “But I haven’t played many games, so I don’t think you all would have much fun playing with me. I’m happy to watch, though!”
“Nonsense, that’s stupid, you’re stupid!” Niloy pouted at her. “We’re here to be your friends, and friends play together. Don’t worry, we’ll start with something chill to help ease you into it.”
“Yup, and you can be Player 1!” Rezin bestowed upon her the highest honor. They attached a portable projector and the console itself to Yonee’s bed so that the angle would change with her line of sight when she raised and lowered the bed. Normally, she’d just stay laying flat since she couldn’t feel any sores elsewhere on her body, but her neck would start to ache if she looked up from that position too much.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
They started off playing a simple puzzle game where they all had characters that pushed blocks around and cooperated to get to the end. It was childishly easy in the beginning, but the learning curve ramped up after not too long. Eventually, even Rezin was having to wrack his brain for the solutions, so they moved on from that one once it started getting a bit more tedious than fun. To Yonee’s credit she managed to keep up with them the entire time.
Next, they moved on to a cooperative dungeon raider game. It was meant to be more artsy and fun than serious, so the controls were pretty simple without too many buttons to press. Still, Yonee was clearly struggling more with this one, even if she didn’t admit it. The other two caught on pretty fast so they moved to something else despite everyone still having fun.
For the final game of the day, they played a party game that had a reputation of pushing weaker friendships to the breaking point. But everyone was patient with each other and they got through it without any devastation to speak of.
“Don’t you need to take all this stuff with you?” Yonee asked when the two Fiends were about to walk out the door for the day.
“Nah, that’s a spare console,” Rezin assured her. “We thought we’d leave it here with you so that you could practice if you wanted. Then we can have even more fun next time!”
So of course that’s what Yonee did. From the moment they left, all she did was play the dungeon-raiding game to try to improve. At the very least, she wanted to reach a point where she wouldn’t be a hindrance. She lost track of time completely, only finally stopping when a nurse came in during the middle of the night to offer her a sleep-aid.
The next day, they didn’t actually play more video games, so her efforts went to waste for the time being. “We were thinking about going outside today,” Niloy informed her.
“Uhh, I don’t think that will work,” Yonee’s eyes wandered. “I have to stay plugged into all these machines. If we disconnect them… Well, I don’t really know what will happen. But if they weren’t important, then they wouldn’t be there, right?”
“That’s fine,” Rezin reassured her. “We don’t need to move you to go outside.” He closed his eyes for a moment and waved his arms.
If Yonee could move her body, she would have leapt up in surprise. All the walls around her vanished, as did everything else in the room except her bed. Through the power of Rezin’s Curse, and his and Niloy’s memories of the area outside the hospital, he was able to recreate a near-perfect replica of standing on top the hospital’s roof. What they didn’t know for certain, their imaginations filled in the gap.
“No way…” the girl muttered. “I can feel the sun and smell the air! And I hear birds too!” She couldn’t actually, but Rezin’s Curse had just gotten that strong. He could now even trick other senses beyond just sight. They just sat and enjoyed the outdoors for a while, letting Yonee bask in the sunlight that she’d only seen behind her unopenable window for years.
“Is there anywhere else you want to go?” Rezin asked once some of the excitement had waned.
“Uhh… Uhh… Uhh, I’ve always wanted to see The Drain!” she had trouble coming up with an answer and just went with the first thing that popped into her head. It didn’t matter that Rezin barely knew what The Drain looked like since he’d only ever seen a picture or two in passing. Yonee’s own beliefs would make the illusion everything she dreamed it would be. In that case, Rezin and Niloy got an experience themselves, able to see something neither of the two of them would ever imagine.
He took the two girls to the southern ice shelf next, then to the peak of the tallest mountain. They visited the Cotagerie Museum and the square in Prosper where the Drazahs had announced themselves to the world—endless sights, all from the comfort of the hospital room. It was a shame they couldn’t take her there in real life, but maybe someday.
◆◆◆
Yonee grabbed the mirror that Niloy had been holding in front of her face and pulled it close. She had seen many things beyond imagination lately, but the idea that the person in the mirror was actually herself blew her away most of all. After being confined to a bed for a few months, she refused to look at herself in the mirror anymore.
She had grown up so much in just these three years, but it was the height of puberty. For a while now, she’d have the nurses keep her hair short since it was such a nuisance, but now she wished she’d let it grow out. Still, she was inconceivably beautiful, or at least far too beautiful to ever trust that it was actually herself.
“But that’s because of your makeup, right?” Yonee kept moving the mirror around and shifting her face to get a view from every angle.
“No, I just did some light stuff,” Niloy draped herself behind the girl’s head and fidgeted with her hair a bit more. “That’s all you. In fact… could I take some pictures of you? You’re so pretty that I’d like to make you one of my models.”
“Really, me? A model?” she wasn’t sure that she’d heard correctly. “You’d really let someone like me…” Yonee didn’t finish her question, her face drooping in sadness at the thought.
“Of course!” Niloy’s smile couldn’t have been brighter and it forced Yonee to smile again too. “My makeup is for everyone. Just because there’s some part of you that you’re not happy with, it doesn’t mean that you can’t be who you want to be and present yourself the way you want to look. Everyone should get to see you for who you are, inside and out. And you’re perfect.”
That almost brought Yonee to tears, but she didn’t want to ruin her makeup.
“Say, Yonee,” Rezin changed the subject. “I’ve been meaning to ask, but have the doctors ever mentioned anything about a possible treatment for you? With how amazing technology has gotten, I’d like to believe there’s hope in the future that they might find something.”
He hadn’t actually been meaning to ask. In fact, they’d been purposefully dodging the subject entirely. First and foremost, they wanted to fulfill her request—let her experience real friendship—give her a break from feeling like a patient and let her just be a person instead. Now that they had built a bond, it was time to see if they could do more for her, not as friends, but as Fiends.
“Umm, they haven’t brought it up in a while,” she thought back. “They said the words ‘experimental surgery’ a few times, but I’m pretty sure that they think I wouldn’t survive it. My body is just too weak, but it’s fine. I’m fine. And I’m better than I’ve ever been now that I have some friends!” She gave them a big grin, but it was obviously fake and painful to see.