Chapter 62 - Dodge a Bullet

“You shine up pretty well, Monk. Good thing too. You have no idea what I had to go through to get a hold of that outfit,” Samila said, reaching up to brush a string of something off my shoulder. She’d done that a lot since we’d left the workshop. There was always something I’d done wrong or left undone. At least now she was down to little things.

The doublet I wore, a black vest with sleeves, leather trim, shiny buttons, and a fake pocket on the front was a tight fit around the shoulders and chest and tended to shed from the seams. My shirt’s white collar liked to collect all the black fibers too like a magnet with iron filings. The worst part, though, was that the pants ‘fit’ the same way an ostrich egg might fit inside a python. It made going down stairs or walking or standing in general more than a little uncomfortable.

Samila herself had changed out of her armor while I’d been busy bathing and figuring out how all the pieces of the outfit went together.

Now the dragonkin warrior woman wore a yellow and white dress that had no shoulders but seemed to have transferred all of that material to the wrists and a gossamer-esque fold of white that connected the arms of the dress to the torso, giving her the appearance of having wings.

Her blue, scaled skin contrasted with the bright yellows and whites like the fabric had been chosen specifically for her, really bringing out the otherworldly brightness of her eyes. The dress definitely wasn’t made to fit her, though. Her muscular arms and back strained at the loops and ties that held the rest of it in place, and the fabric hugged her in the hips and thighs while being roomy everywhere else, like she’d been poured into an odd shaped glass.

With every stair we descended, the quellstones stung away in the tips of my boots. My toes felt like they were going to fall off with how numb they were, and I had to remind myself that I wasn’t actually cold so much as suppressed.

Progress on controlling my aura was slow going, if you could really call what I was doing ‘going’ at all. Once I mastered the technique, though, I was going to find a way to shoot these stupid death pebbles into the sun. I bet with the right shape and enough Volatility, I could find a way to make them break orbit at least.

“So, are you going to fill me in on why we’re all dressed up?” I asked as I reached up and re-tousled my hair. The outfit, I could do, but I’d just gotten this hair. I wasn’t about to let someone else tell me how to wear it, and I liked it just this side of messy, probably a holdover from home.

Samila held on tight to my arm, leading me down the stairs as if she were worried I’d bolt, but the smile on her face told me she was enjoying my discomfort somewhat.

“The word’s gone out that we’re doing something big soon, probably the evacuation. Everyone’s on edge, so, naturally, it’s time for spur of the moment life stuff.”

“Naturally,” I parroted sarcastically. “Wouldn’t want to make things too routine in the middle of an apocalypse.”

“Stop it.” She slapped my arm, but I didn’t feel it. Score one for being a cyborg. “Our world has already had its apocalypse, and we’re doing fine. Besides, you shouldn’t be a downer on someone’s wedding day.”

I stopped, mid-stride. Samila, with her arm in mine like it was, jerked to a stop as well.

“Wait. We’re going… to a wedding?” I asked, almost not believing it.

She grinned mischievously as she pulled on my arm to get me moving again. “Calm down. It’s not ours.”

Her choice of words did not help matters at all. If I’d have fed my Engine back at the workshop, it would have backfired at this very moment, belching a cloud of black smoke and despair. The woman really knew how to throw me off my game. I swallowed hard but tried to keep my discomfort from showing otherwise.

“Uh. Here? Now?” I asked.

“What other time do we have?” Was all the answer she gave.

My stomach twisted up in a painful knot of confusion and worry, and my mind whirled at the thought of doing something so… normal at a time like this. We were in the middle of a dead city with monsters battering our door.

Plus, I didn’t do normal. I hadn’t done normal in years, and I wasn’t good at it.

“Why?” Was all I could ask.

She shrugged slightly, leaning in to give me a playful nudge with her bare shoulder. “The usual reasons, I’d think. Boy meets girl, boy and girl fight monsters for a week straight right next to each other. She likes his thrust, he likes how she receives a charge.”

“You’re serious.” My mind still wasn’t ready to accept it. A wedding?

“What’s so hard to believe? Not everyone is content to sleep on a horde of shiny metal like some people. Very dragonlike by the way. I approve. These people went through something together and survived. Now they’re set to do it again soon, and they don’t want to do it single.”

“And we’re invited?” I asked.

She shrugged and wobbled a hand back and forth noncommittally. “Sure. In a way.”

“What does that mean?” I asked, raising a skeptical eyebrow.

Samila kept the pressure up, pulling me downward. I noted she really had to put her weight into it to keep me moving. “Relax, Monk, we’re invited. At least we were included when the word went out. I believe most that are not on wall duty are invited. In our cases, I think it’s one of those things where you invite someone, not really because they’ll show up but because it was worth a try. Like, it would be something to talk about on your anniversary twenty years from now.”

I groaned… loudly. “Wow. My celebrity is really taking off if I’m doing parties now. If only they knew, right?”

“Shut up. Whether you think you deserve the title or not, you’re the Rising Sun of Eclipse. Whatever you think of yourself or what history thinks of-” She hesitated slightly and looked around to make sure we were alone. “-your people, you’ve more than earned a little acceptance. People want to see you and, light forbid, talk to you.” She hit me with another playful shoulder check, this time lingering next to me a fraction of a second longer as she pulled me back upright. I let myself be moved, but I wasn’t done arguing about it.

“Still not convinced. Do they really-“

Samila rolled her eyes and blew a rather unladylike raspberry through her lips.“Do they really want you there? The answer is yes, but you can’t really accept that can you? You don’t have it in you. For someone as capable as you are, you have an overdeveloped sense of…” She trailed off, trying to come up with the right word.

“Humility?” I finished for her.

“Shame,” she declared almost simultaneously with a satisfied nod, as if she had nailed the word choice.

“I do not!“ I protested. What did I have to be ashamed of? Maybe I spent a fair amount of time naked among the locals, since I’d not yet encountered fireproof or acid-proof clothes yet, but I was barely conscious for a lot of that. It certainly wasn’t being human. I was born that way, and, as far as I knew, there was no way to change my species.

“You do, though. Shame just rolls off of you like stink from a bog,” she countered with a shrug.

I found myself spluttering, shaking my head, and gesticulating as I mounted my defense. “You just essentially used the ‘yuh-huh’ style of counterargument. That’s not a real argument. What would I have to be ashamed of?”

Samila shrugged again. “I don’t know, but you are riddled with it and I’ve spent far too much time trying to puzzle out why. I figured it was a ‘thing.’”

“A what ‘thing?’” I asked incredulously.

“Whatever thing was done to you to make you like this.” She said it so matter of factly, like saying something like that didn’t carry all sorts of implications and connotations and other -ations I didn’t want to address.

I leaned in close to speak to her softly. “Maybe it’s because I’m not what I say I am, and I don’t like lying to everyone about who I really am?”

“That’s different and you’re using your status as a world ending visitor from the stars to deflect,” she countered. “You don’t like lying, but this is something else. I can smell it.”

We continued on in silence for another flight of stairs before I could think of anything to say.

Shame. That wasn’t it. Sure, I had been a pariah back home, cast out and ignored on the good days. Hadn’t I moved past that, though? A kid with access to the Colonial network was never really alone, was he? While my friends and even my father tried to pretend I didn’t exist, there was the vast repository of human knowledge that was the net, right there at my fingertips. While everyone else was out learning to be the perfect warrior, I made myself something else.

Isolation suited me like it didn’t suit others. I was practically made for it.

Once I discovered my love for machines, I found a dark, comfortable hole to bury myself in, and I went about making it my own. Where others might have left the clan in shame, I’d carved my own niche that let me be part of the clan without the need to be accepted.

And without Mom, there was no one there to push me into the light anymore. Whose fault is that?

I forcefully derailed that particular train of thought before it could go any further than it did. I was past that. I’d worked hard to move past that. I became the clan mechanic, their heretic, and then their Exotic. I’d call that way way past

Now I was on my way to a wedding with a dragon girl. What a fantastical life this had turned out to be.

“I protest the use of that word, still,” I said quietly.

“Protest all you want,” Samila snorted. “I’m a dragon. I can sense these things.”

“Imagined motivations?”

“Weakness,” she said flatly. “It’s your least attractive quality but also strangely endearing.”

“Wow,” I muttered. “Thanks.”

My dragon captor led us away from the stairwell and through a hallway that went toward the center of the Spire. “This is our door,” she said, flashing me another smile with a few too many canines.

Once through the double doors, we came out in a neighborhood.

That was the best way I could describe it. The student accommodations in the Spire that I’d seen before were spartan, just a place to sleep and maybe stow your books. This place was different. Very different. Where the dormitories down below were plain and white, these rooms were set in a sort of big, circular spiral that went up and down in a corkscrew with rounded clusters of what looked like landings or ‘porches’ for elaborate suites at regular intervals on the spiral. Every front porch type area had their own angle on the view.

Oh yes, there was a view. The floor, a mix of shiny gray tiling and green metallic accents, hugged the outer wall and ramped up through the spiral with all the rooms, but toward the center of the spire was a giant wall of lush green ivy with blooming white flowers bathed in filtered sunlight, presumably piped in from somewhere outside, maybe even from the same lenses that kept the monstrous human downstairs in check.

Mist fell in little puffs from strategically placed spray nozzles that kept the ivy nice and damp while trickles of water cascaded down a series of inlaid steps and into little pools that drained into the ones down below them until they finally dripped into a grate on the bottom floor.

I’d never seen something so open and green, yet indoors. It was like I’d been shrunk down to live inside of a hydroponic grow tube.

Samila caught me gawking, leaning in to speak privately. “What?”

“Just hard for me to think of it as anything other than an evil wizard’s tower,” I admitted with a shake of my head.

“Well, he hasn’t been around for a long time,” Samila replied in a whisper. “and his death wasn’t exactly the end of history.”

I nodded slowly, trying to accept the sentiment. “Can’t really let a dark moment in the past define you, I guess.”

Of course you can. I’ve been doing it for years.

Again, I derailed that train. That track led to nothing good.

This place may have been built for some amount of privacy on a regular day, but today every door was wide open. Everywhere I looked there were people of every race, congregating outside their rooms and mingling with one another in a quiet sort of rumbling that crowds tended to do. Some wore bandages on fresh wounds, favored a particular side, or limped when they had occasion to walk, but no one let any of that hardship show on their face.

Not everyone was dressed like we were, choosing to wear something more modest, but Samila and I certainly didn’t stand out. Many of the well dressed attendees still had a military bearing that I’d come to associate with the warriors of this culture, but there were an equal number of others here, young and old. I scanned the faces of the crowd, watched how they stood together, the warmth of their expressions.

Another thing of note, despite lots of people being part of the guard, no one wore arms or armor, and I saw more than one uncomfortable hand on a hip where a sword might be.

Still, the atmosphere managed to be… warm.

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“You’re tense.” Samila whispered out of the side of her mouth. “Would it make you feel better if there was a monster to slay?”

I shook my head. “Probably not. It’s just that everyone just seems so normal, like they’ve just chosen to forget where we are.”

“You and my sister are so alike, it’s disgusting,” Samila sighed. “Of course, everyone knows the situation outside. Not everyone deals with it like you, though, slowly killing yourselves with worry. Sometimes it pays to put it aside for a moment and let yourself be.”

“I-“ I closed my mouth and thought about it. The way I handled problems, generally, was that I saw a problem, and I worked it. I worked that problem so hard until it wasn’t a problem anymore.

It worked with engines, it worked with games, and, theoretically, it worked with people. Did the attack-it-until-it-goes-away method work with something as big as a world-ending infestation of scourge, though? Did my method work on anything on a grander scale than what, say, a clan mechanic might face? If not, was it useful to me anymore? Was my clinging to it limiting me to only being able to handle clan mechanic scale problems?

Samila wasn’t thinking about the scourge like that, though. A problem for her to solve. For her, they were a force to oppose, too big to understand. They were something out of her control, a thing that would be tackled one way or another today or tomorrow. The trick, though, was that she had faith that either she or someone else would handle the problem eventually, just not today.

“I’m not sure if I can just let myself be,” I said.

“I know, but you need to try while you’re here. It’ll be good for you. And I need a date.”

I felt my eye twitch slightly at that. That was alarming. I had been on a date this entire time, and I…

“Okay. Just tell me what to do” I said, bringing my eyes back from wherever I’d been staring and finally looking at her, really looking at her. She stared up at me, her characteristic smirk gone, replaced by worry and a tinge of sadness. I wasn’t being good company.

“Seriously,” I continued, forcing a smile onto my face in hopes she’d reciprocate. “I’m clueless on how to proceed unless you need me to make something explode.”

I must have said something right, because her smile came back with a vengeance. “Just follow my lead,” she replied, reaching up to smooth my hair back, letting her hand linger on my cheek on the way back down. “You can start by unclenching your… All of it.”

I looked around at all the people. More than one pair of eyes were turned my way. Most of them looked curious, others had a sort of timid respect that was usually reserved for people like my father. I put on a little smile and purposefully relaxed, one muscle after another.

The bride and groom walked into the room then, a young couple, him in a fancy bright colored coat and her in the poofiest red dress I’d ever seen in my life. The bottom half of it took up so much space, it might have pushed others off the side of the railing and into the waterfall if they hadn’t moved out of the way to give her room.

“Did we raid the prom closet or something?” I asked Samila after they’d passed.

Samila quirked an eyebrow at me. “What?”

“Where did we get all the clothes?”

Understanding came over her face, and she brightened slightly. “Every door is open to a wedding. Lending and borrowing are a popular activity for the day, and it’s considered good luck. We don’t have something for everyone, but no one is refused. The women got together last night and found what we could.”

The happy couple took up positions in front of the wall of ivy, on a semi-circular patio that jutted out over the empty space, turned toward each other and held each other’s hands. The two of them were young-ish, probably a little older than me, but they had the look of soldiers to them, well muscled, good posture, rough hands. that kind of stuff.

Then, Bishop Kolash flowed in, in a set of white and daylight robes and a big smile on his midnight black face, the kind of smile that split his head in two like a waste bin.

I willed Stealth to activate, but it, as usual, gave me no hint as to whether it was working or not. Kolash gave no indication that he noticed me, though. He only had eyes for the two people in front of him..

The Bishop raised his hands to quiet everyone down and began the proceedings. “Friends. Comrades. Brothers. Sisters. We are here today to celebrate the beauty of life…”

————------------------------------

As weddings tended to do, the party after the ceremony was a bit more lively.

I wouldn’t say they had a full band at their disposal but a surprising amount of people knew how to play.

All tables and chairs were cleared away and every ‘porch’ turned into a dance floor. Children ran to and fro between dancing groups of adults, sometimes even stopping to join the dances and put their silly spins on the steps, but they never stayed interested for long.

Additionally, now that the lively part of the ceremony was on, the goblins had appeared out of nowhere. None of them spoke the language, but they certainly were enjoying the alcohol… their own… others’... sometimes straight from the barrel. They seemed to know nothing of moderation.

The children, as children tended to do, were the first to really merge as one group, tall folks and short. All it took was one group of children playing a game the others wanted to join, and that was it. Then the children were suddenly running around in one big blob, making trouble. No words necessary.

When I asked where the tall folk kids had come from, Samila told me the guard weren’t the only people at the gate they rescued in our initial operation. The reason the group had been bogged down for so long wasn’t because they couldn’t move to a more advantageous place. After the walls had been overrun, they had also become a collection point for civilians fleeing the horde, and the guard fought hard to keep them all safe for an entire week. When Sissa, Samila, and Geddon arrived to break the mini-siege, it was the first time these people had moved out of their defensible square in a long time. The children were part of that group.

The motion and the general good vibes of the crowd were intoxicating. The majority of the attendees were Miur, wearing decorative garland and ornate wraps on their horns, but our regular group weren’t the only standouts.

Geddon appeared sometime in the night in full armor and was popular on the main dance floor, picking up willing women and carrying them on his shoulders like children. A stubby mushroom person bobbed up and down next to a group of students as a lively song came on, and he seemed to morph and wobble in time with the music comically, making them the group to watch.

Samila and I sat on the side, watching the party go on without us, but she couldn’t seem to keep herself still. That only lasted for a handful of songs. Then, as if she’d had enough standing around, she snatched up my arm and pulled me forward so suddenly I felt my shoulder joint pop.

Then we were on the dance floor. Samila, a petite blue thing head and shoulders shorter than me, led as we danced since I didn’t know the steps. She laughed at my ineptitude, quick to point out where I went wrong, but she seemed to be enjoying herself. She even went so far as to put my hand in the right place on her lower back. That was interesting. I had to bend over to get to the right place, apparently.

Eventually, though, we found our rhythm, and she led us through the dancers. I slowly began to find my way and get more comfortable with the process. My higher body stat was probably doing a lot of the heavy lifting when it came to coordinating my body and making things easier on my mind. I even went so far as to start having fun… less worried about my feet and more into how it felt to have her right there.

Then, like a damned magician, Samila was gone, and I bumped into another blue woman, this one in a gray dress.

Sissa jumped as if something had just pinched her, and she put up her hands to politely pull away… before she recognized me.

Her eyes widened and her mouth opened to… protest? Say hello? I didn’t know. Nothing came out. She also didn’t punch me in the face, though, so our post-evacuation interactions were trending better, I guessed.

“Uh- Hi.” I said.

“Hi,” Sissa said back. She smoothed the front of her dress and seemed to fidget like someone caught in the act of something. Unlike my clothes, Sissa’s dress seemed to be made for her, a gray, flowing thing that hugged her in the right places before flowing out like a waterfall of mist to pool on the floor.

I looked around one last time for Samila, coming up with nothing. “I’m just guessing here,” I ventured. “But I think we’re supposed to dance.”

“Is that why you grabbed my- Ah, dammit, Samila!” Sissa fumed, looking around the crowd much like I’d done, a look of embarrassed disapproval on her face. “She takes her role as second too far.”

I raised an eyebrow at that. “Second?’”

“Second in our clutch. The youngest.“ Sissa stood up on her tiptoes. Unfortunately she was shorter than most of the tall folks here, and even if she were as tall as I was, she wouldn’t be able to spot her sister. She’d vanished in a cloud of smoke.

“Do you want to dance?” I asked awkwardly as she spun and searched for her sibling. The question seemed to surprise her. She spun back around so quickly, her hand swept across my face, and I had to duck or get another Sissa-special black eye.

Her mouth opened again, her cheeks flushing a dark navy that seemed to change the shape of her face, accenting her cheekbones. She nodded. “I guess I wouldn’t mind a dance. Seems like it’s what we’re meant to do.”

With a self effacing smile, I put my hands in the right places, and brought my body into line with hers. She was so small, tiny even, willow thin and soft. I couldn’t shake the feeling that a wrong move on my part might hurt her, but I knew better. She was strong. Stronger than me probably.

It took a full verse of the song before I got up the courage to speak. “I don’t get you and your sister,” I ventured.

“No?” She asked, stumbling slightly as we reset our steps.

Wow. She was just as good a dancer as I was.

“No, I really don’t,” I insisted. “I’m pretty sure your sister is- uh- interested in me.”

“No kidding? What gave you that impression?” Sissa asked a bit too sarcastically. “Was it the long, mournful stares? The intense interest in your backside?”

It was my turn to trip. She caught me though, before I could fall all the way to the floor. I swallowed, suddenly feeling a bit more self conscious. “Uh. Yeah. The clues were there, I guess.”

“Well, you get that. What don’t you get about us then?”

“If she- uh- Constance, I feel like I’m in middle school. If she likes me, why did she set us like this?”

Sissa’s gaze slid down, and she gained a new appreciation for the floor as we went through the motions of dancing. When she spoke again, her voice had a sad note to it, regretful maybe. “She’s second born in our clutch. Dragonkin are invariably born in pairs. It has something to do with how the divine power of the dragon cannot be contained in a single mortal vessel, but I don’t know exactly how it works.”

She took a deep breath as if preparing herself to explain something she didn’t really enjoy talking about. “The eldest is meant to be first in everything. From how tall we are to who gets the first roll at dinner. We’re meant to be the picture of excellence as a representative of our sire. The second is meant to help the first accomplish that. It’s a dragon rule, a sort of natural law, one that we follow instinctually.”

My stomach soured after hearing that. Samila was born to play second fiddle to Sissa? That sounded like something archaic out of myth and legend. Who would do that to one of their own children? Why condemn a child to second place from birth? It went against everything I was ever taught. We were all created equal, and no one deserved deference based on how they were born. You were not made to kneel to anyone.

“I see you are not pleased.” Sissa observed.

I shook my head. “Sorry. I just can’t wrap my head around it. You have free will, don’t you? How can firsts and seconds even exist?”

It was Sissa’s turn to frown. “Well, I’m not exactly a big proponent of the concept either, Ryan. I have tried to fight against it, even gone so far as to try and make her stop treating me as her better, but when I tried, it just came off as another order I was giving her. I hate how she’s been forced into the background, but, at the same time, she considers it a privilege. We naturally slip into these roles, so naturally, you might even think we were made this way on purpose. I am the leader. I make the decisions for the both of us, and she’s always there to back me up.”

Her eyes hardened as she stared at something in the middle distance, at something in distant memory.

“No matter how much we want to run from it, that’s how it always shakes out. Do you have any idea how infuriating it is to not know if your personality is truly yours or if it is simply a manifestation of natural law?”

I didn’t know what to say to that. Of course, I had the System slowly pushing me toward becoming a monster, and I couldn’t trust if my thoughts were my own anymore. This conversation wasn’t about me, though.

I looked around once more to find Samila somewhere out there. Nothing. The song was starting to wrap up too.

“This is her asking for your permission isn’t it?” I asked.

Sissa nodded, not meeting my eyes. “Not just mine, either.”

Oh, so it was that kind of moment then.

“So, what’s your answer?” I asked, fighting to keep my tone neutral.

The dragonkin shuddered slightly, then raised her gaze into line with mine. I could tell she was fighting to not look away, but she mastered herself and gave me the same stare she did every other challenge she met.

“For her, I’d give up everything,” Sissa declared, her determination slightly belied by how she had to wipe a tear from her cheek. The wet scales carved a dark line down her scales like an unhealed scar.

She sniffed and let out a little bitter laugh. “I think you and I are too much alike to work anyway.”

Muscles I hadn’t realized I’d been clenching chose that moment to relax. Was I feeling… relieved? No, that wasn’t quite it. It was a type of relief, though, I was sure.

“Too alike huh? Samila said something like that too. So, what does punching me in the face earlier this week say about your sense of self worth?” I teased.

“Too much,” Sissa laughed nervously, again reaching up to swipe at a tear before it could get anywhere. “In some ways, you’re who I want to be, actually. Taking the hard road. Sacrificing for others even if it means denying yourself. To be so empty of want is something I consider noble.”

Empty of want? What the hell did that mean? I wanted things. There were things I had to-

I stood there in contemplative silence as I took mental inventory. What did I want? I was an Exotic now. My life had changed. I wasn’t the outcast clan mechanic anymore. But now that I wasn’t my past self, what did I want in the future? It couldn’t all be running for my life and trying to get home. I wanted people to be safe, to not pay for what I’d caused. I wanted to see them all happy and alive, and-

“See? Empty,” Sissa said as the music finished. “Maybe in another life, I’d have claimed you, but not this one.” Everyone around us clapped.

That stopped my little crisis of self. I felt my eyebrows climb way up my forehead. “You’d have claimed me?”

“I’m a dragon, Ryan,” Sissa replied with a knowing smile. “I’d have claimed you.”

We parted without another word, awkwardly. She muttered something about getting a drink, and I just stood there like an idiot. I didn’t follow her.

It wasn’t more than a couple breaths before a familiar voice spoke from behind me.

“I told you. Shame.”

And Samila was back… funny how that worked. I gave her my best angry scowl and tilted my head to ask for an explanation. She didn’t provide one, though. She seemed unmoved, however.

“Come on,” she sighed with exasperation. “There’s a lot of people that want to shake your hand.”

“Just like that?” I asked.

“Well, if you’re not going to do the smart thing, you can at least do the gracious thing. People want to thank you for what you did.”

“Oh,” I said, already wishing for the comfort of whirring machinery and volatile chemicals already. “Oh no.”

“Nope. No getting away now. You’re committed. I told them the Rising Sun of Eclipse would sign their naughty bits.”

“No way. You better be-“

“Of course I’m kidding. I have an alternative plan, if you want to hear it,” she purred, grabbing my collar and pulling herself up on her tiptoes to whisper in my ear.

My breath caught in my throat, but I had the wherewithal to keep talking. “Uh. What plan?”

“How about we get out of here and do something… spontaneous.”

“Uh-” That was it. My brain collapsed like a dying star. No more thoughts. Just terror and… stuff. Sound was muffled, and the entire world narrowed down to a singular point of blue and gold.

“You spook like a deer, I swear,” she giggled up at me. “Seriously, though. I’m barely holding back your admirers. I had to growl at them to keep them away for so long. If we stay too long, the party might become more about you instead of them.”

We stay too long. We can’t stay too long. We’ve-

With a rushing sound, my world came back into focus, so hard it was like a physical blow. I blinked.

“What did you say?” I asked.

She frowned up at me, tilting her head slightly. “What? I said let’s get out of here. Sex is still on the table, but if you make me repeat my lines, things might change.”

“No. No,” I insisted, breaking away a little less gently than I wanted to. My mind was racing, whirling around a central point, around a nexus that I couldn’t see. “The thing about staying. Say that again.”

Samila’s frown deepened into a scowl, but she did as I asked. “Hmm. If we stay too long, the party might become more about you than-”

“That’s it!” I shouted.

“What is?”

“Samila, it’s the tutorial. I- The other guy… he’s stayed too long. There’s- Oh, Constance. The insertion point. They stay active. His insertion point has been active for over a thousand years, and now there’s- Oh, shit!”

“Slow down, Ryan,” Samila pleaded. “What do you mean?”

It all fit. Everything from the moment I was chosen to now, the goblins, tutorial, the stories, the city, the Dark Lord, the Spire, the undead, the other Animator. It all fit perfectly. I’d found the failure point.

I clenched my metal fist as the heat of conviction washed over me, and a thousand connections sparked to life in my brain. “I know how to stop this.”