“You have got to be kidding me!”

“I’m afraid not, herr.” A barrel-chested az with wiry, hairy limbs that in no way matched his torso shrugged apologetically at me from behind the counter of the Frozen Salamander, a narrow inn crammed into the cramped alleys on the wrong side of Brum. His accent was as thick as his tiny, beady eyes were apologetic.

“It ain’t a big deal, chief,” Red yawned, “Wysteria an’ I don’t take up much space. We don’t need more than one bed.”

“It’s a big, fluffy bed,” the az supplied hopefully. Somehow we got caught at the back end of the glut of travelers looking to stay in the Astonian capital for the night, and all the inns were booked up save for this teeny little building that looked more like a converted military barracks. The four of us were cold, exhausted, and rapidly losing our patience. At least, I was.

“It’s… it’s fine,” I sighed, rubbing the balls of my hands into my eyes. My frustrations wouldn’t make any sense to the people around me, so there didn’t seem much point in voicing them out loud. It did give me an uncomfortable reason to reconsider our story being directed by some kind of divine intervention, though. “I can take a blanket and make a pallet on the floor or something.”

“Ah, well, you won’t want to be doin’ that, jeg tror. This room is the last I have available for a reason, I’m afraid. No private hearth, an’ the warmth from the rest of the building don’t reach so strongly there, ja? Beggin’ your pardon but it gets powerful cold at night, an’ I don’t want a dead body on my hands by morning.”

“Of course,” I seethed.

“Look, I’m not exactly thrilled about it, either, but it is what it is, right?” Tanis put what was probably meant to be a comforting arm around my shoulders, and it was all I could do not to throw it off. I was being petulant, sure, but there were reasons beyond simple inconvenience that I was upset. She didn’t know, of course. How could she know? “I promise not to try an’ warm my feet up on your back. Let’s just get this over with, get some rest, and try to find more room to spread out tomorrow.”

“Nhhh…” At some point early in my life I’d perfected the art of grunting and whining at the same time. I must’ve been a wonderful child to try and reason with. Turning to Red, I tried to measure my tone a bit more, to be more polite. “You’re sure this is the last place in Brum we haven’t checked?”

“Look, I’m as tired as you are, Glenn, but I sure as hell ain’t tryin’ to put a rush on this just to expedite some Zs. We can go take another look around, but I’m honestly concerned we’d come up with bobkes and lose our spot here in doin’ so, an’ I don’t fancy our odds of setting up a camp any warmer than what this gentleman has on offer.” ‘Bobkes’, not ‘bupkis’. Interesting. In context they seemed to have the same meaning, and I made a mental note to ask later, but I wasn’t sure when a private enough ‘later’ would come or if I’d remember by then, given present circumstances.

“All right,” I sighed as hard as I could, hoping it would make me feel less pigeon-holed as I put my coin on the counter. “One bed, please.”

It wasn’t just isekai or litRPG, but fiction in general that liked to pull on the trope of there being ‘only one bed’ available for the protagonist and their not-quite-love interest to sleep in after a long, arduous journey. Michael and I used to like laughing at the absurdity of Herman Melville using it in his works; lazy, sexy writing for preteens trying to get their personal ship off and sailing was good enough for a man most English teachers seem to consider one of the greatest American authors. I’m sure there was some brilliant commentary in there about how all forms of creative expression are valid, given a level playing field of skill, but as we hauled our stuff down the stairs to a back room of the cold brick basement of the Frozen Salamander, I was in no mood to try and discover it. Perhaps it was all just circumstantial; one awkward night’s sleep didn’t mean there was a deific hand guiding the events athwart us. Surely this kind of situation had cropped up before, inspiring Melville or whoever coined the trope before him in the first place. Hell, I’d run into similar clumsy sleeping arrangements before in my life on Earth, but something about the current predicament felt too coincidental for my liking.

The room was entirely dark, bluish brick, dominated by a sizable red and white woven rug that helpfully made a path from the bed to the storage chest so you wouldn’t have to step barefoot onto ice-cold stone in the morning. The path to the bathroom wasn’t so complete, but at least they had indoor plumbing. I hadn’t yet stayed in a room that didn’t, but when it rains it pours and I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a chamber pot or something instead of the familiar commode waiting to sink my mood even further. It was really a quaint room, and if we hadn’t been settling into it at the start of Astonia’s most aggressively chilly season I would’ve been a bit romanced by it. There was also the issue of the pointy-eared woman stripping off her armor that would soon be sharing the fluffy, blanket-laden bed with me souring my emotional state. I tried to put it out of my head and get ready for sleep. Every second I stood on the floor tiles without socks felt like it was leeching heat from me, but it gave me something to focus on as I packed away my things and grabbed a quick shower, which was thankfully drawing hot water. My mind harkened back to those bed warmer things I’d seen in video games that looked like a flat cookpot at the end of a long handle, wondering if I could fill it up to keep us warm through the night and maybe grant some other options for sleeping arrangements, but I didn’t see anything resembling one in the room and assumed the innkeeper would’ve supplied it if they were available, given his speech about frozen corpses.

Much of my shower was spent convincing myself I wasn’t taking one solely for Tanis’ benefit. Sure, unless I absolutely hated someone I wouldn’t want to actively stink while sleeping next to them, but there was a petulant part of my thoughts that was still quite busy crossing his arms and pouting about the whole arrangement, and he wanted to make it known this shower was a utilitarian and self-serving activity to scrub off the last ten days of grime, not a polite thing to do for the comfort of someone who so efficiently tasks me. Without her around I might have actually waited to shower off so as to avoid the uncomfortable mix of a wet head and cold air, but there was a grimace-inducing tinge of dirt and sweat to the water washing off of me, so I allowed myself to be a little grateful for her influence. I spent a little more time toweling off my hair to split the difference, and when I’d settled on an outfit of my thickest, longest pair of breeches and the T-shirt I’d arrived here in (inside-out because I didn’t want to answer any questions about the screenprinted logo if I could avoid it) I stepped out into the main room to trade places with Tanis. Thankfully she’d stopped short of going down to her smallclothes, still dressed in the tight, black garments she wore beneath the armor to keep her warm and reduce chafing.

“If you used all the hot water, I’m taking back my promise not to warm my feet on you.” A guilty grimace crept across my face as I tried to estimate my water usage. I don’t remember it having gone cold on me before in any other inn, and I didn’t think I took too much longer than normal to get clean tonight, but who knows how much was left in the tank? “Hands, too!” she threatened, before closing the bathroom door.

There was a part of me that wanted to snuggle into the farthest side of the bed from the bathroom door and try to go to sleep before I had to deal with sharing a bed with a relative stranger and the added layer of questionable narrative sexual tension on top of that, but I had a few things I wanted to consult within the Grimoire di Magi e Mythe. I’d been too exhausted after our encounter with the yeti and all the healing magic I’d done to have the wherewithal to consult the tome in what little private time was afforded to me, and otherwise Tanis had been too close at hand for me to comfortably interact with it. The first order of business was to remove Wysteria from the position she’d occupied buried in the covers of the bed, instead wrapping her in my extra blankets and nestling her in the open lid of the chest. Red had already fallen asleep curled up on a small table, ensconced in a couple of spare pillowcases the innkeeper supplied him. Quietly, I pulled the chair out from Red’s table and sat down, book in my hands. I’d suffer the cold to make sure I could stash the grimoire quickly when Tanis was finished with her shower. It’s not that she’d been especially curious since our conversation in the tent a week ago, but much like the cartoonish logo on my T-shirt, I didn’t want to create a reason to ask questions.

The first thing I noticed was that my experience was back up to eight, and while it hadn’t yet been enough for me to purchase a Trait, it was glowing like I could use it for something. The second thing that drew my eye was my Willpower was down by three, not even a measly single bubble remaining filled in on the Personal Record. It didn’t take much consideration for me to remember forcing myself to cast a spell that cost one quarter of my max mana three more times than math would dictate was possible. So… one of the things a Willpower could do was allow me to cast a spell without paying the cost. I wasn’t sure how far that would go, whether it was one to one or if a Willpower was tradeable for a quarter of my max mana and that’s just exactly what I needed to spend… but in any case it was more information than I had about Willpower than before. Out of curiosity I tapped the bubbles with my finger and lo and behold, for one experience each, I could return my Willpower. That seemed reasonably cheap, so I went ahead and topped myself off. Having those reserves on hand was far too handy, even if that’s the only thing Willpower did, and I had a sneaking suspicion it was not.

There wasn’t much else new or noteworthy in the pages. The Record of Achievement had expanded to include a budding Bestiary, with the sole entry occupied by the yeti with a Monster Manual-like depiction of the beast, including a number of details I didn’t personally experience, making it something like a more brief version of the Esper Index. The incredible slowdown to my experience gain was also concerning. I’d spent so much to grab spells and improve Wysteria that I felt like I dedicated the early, ‘easy’ levels to building on things that might not help me in non-esper-based situations. If I’d put more into my own abilities, I could’ve been more useful in the fight, or had more mana to spend healing its victims. I wasn’t trying to kick myself in guilt or anything, but more considering a change my Xp-spending habits, especially if the rate of gain had slowed so drastically. We were in Brum to have Wysteria’s first qualifier fight at the coliseum, and before we tried that the plan was to recruit another esper to our ranks. So long as they didn’t have any issues defeating whatever challenges were set before them, I would make the effort to dedicate experience to myself; first off, increasing my Charisma so that Red and I could operate independently of one another in social situations. He had a tendency to go off on his own for information gathering and whatever else he got into, and there had been enough risk in me wandering around on my own that I would like to be able to talk my way through more situations without feeling like I needed his protection. After that… well, I wasn’t sure. More spells, perhaps, if the opportunity presented itself. I still wasn’t sure how to pull up more Trait options for myself like I had for Wysteria.

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I closed the grimoire and put it back in my pack, no fresh answers coming and the cold getting to me more than I was able to stand. Typically, I wasn’t a fan of wearing socks to bed but I was concerned my feet might freeze, so I put on my cleanest pair, grabbed the outermost robe of my warmer set and wrapped myself in it, climbing into bed. I took the sheet for myself and hugged it over me, leaving the warmer quilted blanket for Tanis. I was hoping there was still time for my original plan of getting to sleep before she climbed into bed next to me, but even if I hadn’t taken time to look through the book, I was having difficulty finding my way to dreamland. This happened to me now and then back home; thoughts were pinging too fast and too hard for me to relax and succumb to slumber, no matter how absolutely trashed I was. Fortunately, I didn’t have anywhere specific to be in the morning, which usually added to the anxiety keeping me awake and compounded my inability to sleep. Still, I was wide awake when Tanis finally exited the bathroom. I glanced at her just because it’s my inclination to look at things in my periphery, especially when they’re moving. She had clothed herself in a long, dark gray tunic that extended past the middle of her hips, slit on either side to allow for a better range of motion. Or, I assumed. Maybe it was a fashion thing. I couldn’t see that she was wearing bottoms underneath, but I figured if her intent was to be bizarrely seductive about our situation, she would’ve skipped the tunic and tried to sleep naked.

It was unfair of me to be putting these intentions on her. This was only the second time my journeys through Barbavia had seemed unexpectedly tropey. Third, if we counted my encounter with the clown girl while I was trying to lay low back in Lion’s Head, but that ultimately didn’t go anywhere. Tropes existed for a reason, of course, and they were often based on how million-to-one chances seemed to happen nine times out of ten in reality. I had no reason to assume Tanis was trying to get fresh with me beyond the narrative conventions of genre fiction; we had just met and had mostly maintained a professional (if friendly) relationship over the last ten days. Furthermore, she was a strong, shapely woman with commanding red eyes and skin like fresh cream, while I was every bit the wild-eyed old swamp witch with twigs in his hair growing quickly past its blonde dye-job whose own magic book described him as ‘pudgy’. Even if I had the Attractive Trait, I’d seen dozens of people on the road who were both more conventionally sexy and would likely be game for a quick tent-rattling one night stand. The very idea that I might actually have to think about my life following the silly nonsense a game master or fiction author might pen was complicating my usual considerations in a way I didn’t like, but it was also hard to put out of my head. For the time being I settled on a firm exhale and began thinking of something else. Clearing my mind. I began silently listing monsters from Final Fantasy VI to myself, one for each letter. I’d played the game enough times that I could usually remember them, but not enough that it was an easy exercise. It was a trick like counting sheep, and I usually fell asleep somewhere in the middle of the alphabet.

Tanis became a weight next to me at ‘B for Bleary’, shivering slightly against the cold. The subtle vibration of her body didn’t stop, and she scooted closer when I got to ‘F for Fidor’. I assumed my girth wasn’t giving her enough room to stay on the bed and under her blanket, so I repositioned myself to be at the absolute edge of the mattress. A small noise escaped her throat, but I was trying to focus on getting to sleep and didn’t pay it much mind. ‘G is for Gobledeygook’, ‘H is for Humpty’, ‘I is for…’ damn. ‘Io’ was the obvious answer, but I tried to avoid bosses and boss-like creatures because they were too obvious and would let me get to the end of the list too fast, thus invalidating the exercise. Already my thoughts were racing less quickly and my body was prompted to yawn, so the recitation was doing its work. Getting stuck, however, could simultaneously be a blessing and a curse. My mind wandering while I tried to think of a monster name I couldn’t bring to fore was prime real estate for me to doze off, but if it wandered too far and latched on to other thoughts, I might fall right back into the loop of thinking too much, too fast. ‘I is for… Iguana.’ Was Iguana a monster in FFVI, or was I thinking of other games in the series? There being multiple translations of the game across different consoles didn’t help matters, and while I wasn’t trying to be a stickler for accuracy, the whole point of the practice was to slow down my thoughts and focus softly on dumb trivia my brain had filed away, not to get through it as fast as possible. ‘I is for…’

“Can I ask you a personal question?” Tanis’ voice wasn’t quite a whisper, but it was lower and more gentle than her typical speech.

“… sure?”

“Why do you hate me?” It was a very frank way to ask that question, removed as much from emotion as one could phrase it. For that reason I assumed she was being hyperbolic, either in her estimations of my feelings toward her, or in expressing the question itself in favor of being blunt and getting to the point. It was probably better than if I had been the one asking, full of waffling and preamble.

“I don’t hate you,” I mumbled. Surely, that would not be enough, but I could hope. She was silent for a moment longer than I expected, and I returned to my thoughts. ‘I is for… … Intangir!’ He fell sufficiently on the acceptable side of the ‘boss monster/difficult rare mob’ divide to satisfy my internal rules, so I moved on to J.

“All right, maybe that’s a stronger word, but you don’t like me.”

“We barely know each other.”

“But you don’t like what you know.” This was the first time her voice sounded at all genuinely hurt, or perhaps just raw. “Which… I should be used to. I rub people the wrong way. But after you an’ Red told me about the amnesia, I thought maybe you wouldn’t be so… well, I dunno what I thought, I guess.”

“You seem like a well-intentioned person, Tanis. Just because I’m not especially fond of some of your idiosyncrasies doesn’t mean I don’t like you.”

“What does it mean, then?” The shivering came out through her words this time, and my suspicious brain tried to transform it into an affectation for sympathy. Maybe it was, but it was also incredibly cold in here; I was still cold despite being bundled up.

“What do you want it to mean?” I tried not to sound annoyed. “When we first met you held a knife to my throat. Was that a bid to try and make friends?”

“It was an attempt to impress you,” she explained. “It worked, right? You hired me.”

“We did, and you’ve done your job very well. But it didn’t exactly set us off on the best foot in terms of… being friends or whatever.”

“Right…” she sighed. “I’m sorry. I… have that effect on people, I guess. It’s how I got my name, after all.”

“… Tanis?”

“No, Vex,” she laughed. “Balt don’t really do surnames the way humans and other species do. They’re more like nicknames or titles, or… sometimes we just use our hometowns, especially if there’s another baltic with our same name.”

“… so I take it being named ‘Vex’ was not a choice.”

“Not at first, but I sorta took ownership of it. Wear your weaknesses like armor an’ they can never hurt you, right?” I’m pretty sure that was a Game of Thrones quote, but I filed it away as something to look into later, for now. “Plus, it sounds pretty cool. Tanis Vex. Like a good stage name, like Johnny Az.”

“I would agree, it's very cool,” I chuckled. “I don’t hate you, Tanis. I think I’m even starting to trust you… but between our introduction and the fact that you’d been following us for a few days beforehand…”

“Well… I did have ulterior motives. But I’m not so sure now. At first you were just a mark, but… I dunno. Even if you don’t like me, I like you. Red, too. And Wysteria, though she’s not as much of a conversationalist.”

“I… like you too, Tanis.” My hesitation felt gross in hindsight; it shouldn’t be so difficult to tell a person you appreciate their company, but I didn’t want to lie to her, even if it was to spare her feelings. In truth, however, she had grown on me since we’d met, even if she also had a tendency to drive me nuts now and again. “I don’t have a lot of friends right now, and even if you spoil the plot of plays for me and don’t have the biggest grasp of personal space, you genuinely seem to give a shit about my well-being, and I like having you around.”

“Well, thank you. That… that makes me feel really good, honestly. I don’t have a lot of friends, either.”

“Well then, let’s put an effort into becoming friends.”

“I would like that.”

It felt childish to say that all out loud, since it was the kind of lesson you learned from Saturday morning cartoons or special guest speakers that came into your class in elementary school, but below the shame a society I no longer belonged to had pushed into me was a nugget of golden light. A warm feeling at the idea that someone who seemed so much more capable and so much cooler than me was just another messed-up nutcase trying to find their way in the world, and that my camaraderie was something appealing enough for her to be disappointed not to have, to be delighted that it might be something attainable. It didn’t feel like a rook to gain my trust, and besides, Red said she wasn’t quite good enough to pull that off and I trusted his judgement. Who knows? Maybe the more Tanis and I got along, the more she’d be willing to divulge about why she was so keen to gain our specific employ in the first place.

“So… now that we’re making an effort to be friiieeeeends…” she paused after drawing out the word, probably from a sense of comic timing more than anything, “do you think you could take down the blanket barrier and share some of your body heat?”

“No cold feet. You promised.”

“Cross my heart,” she confirmed.

I flapped my sheet up behind me and she slid in, wrapping the blanket around the both of us, as well. It wasn’t quite skin-to-skin contact with my robes and her tunic still between us, but she relaxed into me, and her shivering eventually slowed to a stop. It was intimate in a way I hadn’t experienced since I was very young, sharing a bed with cousins or friends of a similar age. Even then, it was more the norm for one of us to sleep on the floor. Once as a teen I had a classmate sleep in bed with me, but we made a sophisticated wall of pillows between us to avoid accidental snuggling. Otherwise, I hadn’t platonically shared a blanket with someone who wasn’t a parent. It was… nicer than I expected. It had been around a year since I’d had any intimate contact with another person, and even if this activity was only meant to be a way to share warmth and fall asleep, it still brought me an unexpected sense of comfort and ease. I fell asleep before I could even resume considering what Final Fantasy monster’s name started with ‘J’, Tanis snoring softly behind me.