A clarified moment occurs.
The five of us all look up as it passes through Bastion’s. Mark is behind the bar, picking out bottles and one clay urn from the thin selection we have on the shelves, preparing to engage in some kind of alcoholic war crime against the rest of us. The rest of us are at the nice table, Six and I seated in old chairs, Jules on a pile of sand pillows, and Ellie standing over us, hands flat on the worn green felt surface.
A clarified moment is hard to not notice. They don’t happen often. We swap stories, constantly, and none of us have ever felt one while we were alive. So they’re probably a thing that only happens here, which is nowhere, which is odd.
The feeling sweeps the room, and briefly, everything makes sense. Which turns our heads, because that never happens to any of us.
Then it’s gone.
And I’m crying again. Stupid eyes that I saved leaking tears as the moment is replaced by a hollow void. The abstract memory that I saw the shape of it all, and then had it taken away. And elsewhere, a spot in this between nowhere contains someone who has it even worse than I do. Someone who started it. Learned something so well they spread an infectious sense of understanding through the fake air.
“Ah, my word, I will never become used to such a strange thing.” Jules shivers, a high frequency buzz coming off the central stalk of his form as his tentacles wave in anxious patterns.
Six nods. “Odd.” The golem agrees in his monotone. “Luri?” He doesn’t exactly sound concerned as he looks at me, but Six only ever says people’s names when he’s addressing them, or concerned.
“I‘m fine.” I lie, wiping off my face on the sleeves of the bathrobe Ellin has me in. The prude. “Ellin, keep going.” I’ll shake it off. Our large friend was telling a story from her last life.
She doesn’t seem entirely convinced by my words, but Ellin doesn’t question me. “Well!” She says. “Like I was saying, got meself started early this time! Had to ditch the family route after I took out the second brother and got caught. From there, wasn’t much for me to do. Couldn’t route into a trade or study, since I rolled the wrong sex. So I just survived. I was picking up bits and pieces when I learned about the orbit fragment thing this world had going on, and how you could petition physics for a change in operations.”
“Ugh, one of those.” Jules sounds contemptuous as a tentacle daintily wrapped around a fork spears one of the cold sausage strips on the plate in the middle of us. “I find myself shocked it wasn’t already dying.”
“It likely was.” Six comments, the golem’s grey skin wrinkling as he turns to address Jules. “Though perhaps not faster than any other world.”
“Ouch.” Mark says, seating himself on my other side and sliding two mismatched glass pitchers onto the table. “Okay! I’ve got… wait, where are the glasses?” I point behind the bar. “Okay, well, I made the achitas, so someone else get the cups.”
I stand and flap a sleeve of my new robe against his face. “Lazy.” I say with a smile as I head to lean over the worn wood and collect our drinking tools of choice. Mine’s a goblet, because I felt like it. Six has some kind of ceremonial basin, Jules just has a thick glass stein, and Ellin some kind of art deco blue frosted dinner glass. Mark’s isn’t here. “Mark, where’s your cup!” I interrupt whatever part of her story Ellin is on.
“Is it not there?” He leans over the boxy metal frame of his seat. “Look behind Molly’s!”
I make a trip back and lay our drinking vessels out on the table. “Molly’s is there, so’s… everyone else’s. But yours isn’t.”
“Just bring me a spare.” Mark shrugs as he starts to pour from both pitchers into each of our cups, the liquid steaming as it meets its counterpart.
I stare at him. I want to say something, but I don’t know what. The thought of replacing anything, especially here, makes my teeth hurt and my breath stop. My lungs itch as I struggle to articulate what is wrong with this situation. To tell him that when we start treating things as disposable, we give up our fleeting rearguard action against the impermanence of all things. And every surrender is one step closer to giving up everything.
Every waking moment, alive or here, is exhausting. It leaves me tired beyond limits I thought I had. But the thought of giving up is anathema to me. It is the one thing we cannot do.
But also…
It’s just a cup.
And maybe Mark doesn’t need my anxieties, now, before we’ve even settled into our deaths this cycle. Also, really, what’s more important is that he’s the one drinking out of it. Especially if I’ve been given free reign to pick anything for him. So I find a half a dried coconut shell and a loopy straw, and add that to our table as I sit back down.
Mark gives me a look, but I just offer a fluttering smile, and his gaze softens to the at peace understanding that my friend has for me. “I love it.” He says. “If it doesn’t melt from the achitas I’m making this my new mug.” Mark wraps an arm of corded muscle around my shoulders and gives me an awkward squeeze. “Thanks.” He whispers.
“It’s just a cup.” I say. “Really, though. It’s a cup. It’ll be okay. Life goes on, right?”
“Hah!” Ellin barks out a noise that fills the room with its volume as she tosses back her horned head to continue her rowdy laugh. “It does! For us at least!”
“So, what happened to you next?” I’m curious about the story; we’ve all had a lot of lives and a lot of quests, but that doesn’t make the stories any less interesting. “Did you find a… shard?”
“Orbit fragment! Pay attention, you delinquent!” Ellin reprimands me.
Six looks up from the steaming drink that he’s been staring into like he can scry the future in its fumes. “Will there be a test?” He asks.
“My dear boy,” Jules snakes a tentacle over the table and between the two pitchers to pat Six’s hand. “Ellin is our test.”
Ellin wraps long and nimble fingers around her cup, tipping it up to down a third of it with one brave swallow. She lets out a long gasp of satisfaction after she drinks, and then shakes her head at us. “Didn’t find shit. It found me. Some mercenary group that had delusions of grandeur. Picked me up when they stumbled across my camp.”
“As a mercenary?” Six inquires.
“As a sex slave.” Ellin snarls the word. “I was subjective about twelve at the time. Took me a good two months before I could unlock enough to start killing them. Oh, the new [Strike] variety I got? Unlocks at adulthood. Wrong call to take that one. Should have stuck to the classic.” She takes another drink, and I see her hand shaking. “We should… I mean, if you’re all cool with it… maybe spend some marks on the [Ability Compactor] thing that… that we…”
Silently, I rise from my seat, and circle the table. Ellin is strong. It’s the image she projects, and the persona she cultivates. Strength. But not invincibility. Not imperviousness. Ellin persists with us because she loves life. Loves being in it, loves engaging and giving it her all. She’s never separate from the worlds she lives through.
Usually, I need hugs when I get back. Physical comfort makes me feel safe, let’s me let out just how bleak I feel without tearing myself apart or burning away my memories. It’s bad when I’m the first one back. I got lucky, this time, and Mark was here first, and all the others hot on my heels. But Ellin?
Ellin needs hugs when she needs to be reminded that her lives aren’t still happening.
I wrap myself around her, engulfing her in the bathrobe she gave me and trying to pull her off balance as she drinks. It doesn’t work, because applying pseudohostile effects out here is made harder, and also because she’s two feet taller than me and weighs more than our collection of furniture. But I still hug her.
“Ahhhh…” She breathes out as she finishes her drink, and lets me cling to her side. “Hah. Yeah. Okay, that one…” she trails off as Jules adds a comforting layer of smooth tentacles to her shoulders, like a fleshy mantle.
“There is no shame in pain.” He tells her, red eyes formed into triangular notes of sympathy. “We all know this.”
“Bah.” Ellin says flatly. But doesn’t shake us off.
“So, you left a trail of bodies out of the camp?” Mark asks her as we disentangle. He’s technically a pacifist, and doesn’t approve of us starting wars or anything, but for this? Mark’s not going to have a problem with Ellin’s path of carnage. And I admit, I’m hoping for a bit of catharsis there too.
She shrugs like it’s no big thing. “Something like that. I unloaded a lot of my per-life charisma shit on the ones that were left, and led them on a crusade. Took out some kind of doge, conquered a bunch of small towns, tried to end slavery.” Ellin shrugs again. Ending slavery is a hobby of hers. “I wasn’t expecting it though. I was taking Molly’s advice, yeh? Going for a quiet life this time. So. Dead.”
“Was it spectacular?” Jules asks curiously.
“Was it stupid?” Mark adds his question.
Six and Ellin look at me. “What?” I say. “That’s what I want to know too. Wait, no, was it both?”
“It was both!” Ellin taps her cup down onto the table, one of her fingers running around the wet rim before she slides it gently toward Mark for a refill. “Some old guy who was collecting orbit fragments thought I was competition! Like I’d want to break reality even more! Hit me with some kind of curse mid-skirmish that made me shit myself to death.”
“Eugh.” “Vile!” “Unpleasant.” “I’m drinking you can’t say that!” Our chorus drowns out Ellin’s laugh for a minute.
“That’s not the best part, though!” Ellin adds. “The best part is that I still got the guy I was dueling! Spear through the eye! While shitting to death!”
“Please. Stop. I regret this intently.” Jules begs, tentacles wrapping around his eyes.
“I’m joining team Please Stop.” I add my own nod, shifting in my seat and taking a small sip of the nutty liquor Mark poured for me now that the acidity has settled. There’s one question I do want to ask though. One that’s still important to me, no matter how many lives and deaths I struggle through. “Did you… did you make a difference?” I ask.
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Ellin’s shoulders droop, and she drops her eyes down to stare at nothing in particular. With a short huff, she grabs her refilled cup and drains half of it. “Not enough.” She states, lifting her hand to run the base of her cup along one of her horns. “But for someone, yeah. I made a difference.”
I think it could be all too easy to forget. Forget so many things, that should be important to us. Forget why they should even be important at all. So we ask each other these questions sometimes. Just to remind ourselves of what matters. And that there are other people out there; people who never end up here, as far as we know. People who just had the one life. And they deserve their lives too. If we’re going to be meddling in the worlds outside these walls, then we should make a difference. Good or bad, we should do something. Stagnation, isolation, non-interference, those are all just different words for dying. Really dying. Dying in the spirit, if not the body.
“Oy. Well. That’s my life in brief.” Ellin arches her back, bones popping with a satisfying sound. “A handful of things for war, no souvenirs since nothing really mattered to me, another resistance unlock. The only good ability was [Desecration In Defecation], which I know you can guess at. But it’s bad, even by your low standards, and it takes three slots with high weight.”
“Ability, not a perk?” Mark asks curiously.
Ellin shrugs as she sits herself back down. “Haven’t gotten a new perk unlock in two lives. And I’d rather spend what I have on us. Speaking of, I’ve got about eight hundred thousand beats left. At two hundred thousand, I’ll be heading for the halls, wandering until I find a shop or vendor. Anyone want anything specific?”
“That’s days away. We can worry about it later.” I say quietly, and Ellin gives me a rueful look. “I mean… no, sorry…”
“No, you’re right.” Ellin laughs. “I can run pretty fast! Maybe I’ll cut it shorter. Get some games of Encounter in before we split?”
Six coughs lightly, the noise alien coming from the normally unemotional golem. “I will agree to that only if you are not allowed to sit near the card piles.”
“Decks, Six.” Mark laughs. “But yeah, Ellin you cheat at a cooperative game! Who does that?”
“You lack vision!” Ellin scoffs.
“You cheat against us!” Mark’s words have a slight lisp to them as the alcohol catches up, even though alcohol doesn’t work properly here. “Oh, whatever. Jules, how was your last life?”
“Disappointing.” The noble gives a sibilant sigh, and begins to regale us with a tale of youthful romance, transgressed boundaries, Jules-standard body dysphoria, and a career rising through the ranks of some kind of sacred museum to attain societal permission to create art. His story is punctuated with readings of his notifications, the list of achievements and their unlocks, some of them known to us and many not. Some understandable, many impractical to replicate.
Like, for example, [Lost Heart Of An Ascendant Dreamer], an aura layer that Jules has earned for a hyper specific combination of artistic talent, civilization wide popularity, and heartbreak.
I make the mistake of asking what it does, and get an explanation that wastes three hundred of my precious heartbeats, only to amount to a fairly simple end result. It makes [Charisma] and [Wisdom] traits and skills that work through art amp by about ten percent. It’s… more tedious and complicated than that. Also possibly more subtly powerful. But it’s an aura layer, so that’s more or less normal, and it’d always be on at least. I still regret asking.
Jules’ life was almost singularly focused around his pursuit, so he has a lot of achievements, but they tend to be stackers. Piling up on each other, and upgrading rewards. The only really interesting thing he brings to the table now is a souvenir.
“Behold!” He says, flourishing his tentacles as we all become increasingly drunk. “My prized creation!”
A glass rectangle pops onto the table, about two feet displaced from where he’s gesturing. All of us lean forward to look inside, at the splash of green and brown vegetation growing within. A tiny willow tree, roots growing out of an uneven dome of rock. Around it, grasses and reeds spring up, proportioned at the same ratio as the tree itself. They sway in the wind, the white clouds passing overhead against the pink and purple evening sky. A summer evening captured in moving stillness, complete with the chirping of cicadas.
“I made this…” Jules stops, staring at his own work. His eyes turn away, and his tentacles droop. “I made this.” He says finally. “It seemed… important at the time.” His enthusiasm has lost some of its luster.
“It’s beautiful.” Six monotones. “Is it alive?”
“In a sense. This… this place has stripped some of the artistic magic from it. But we can feed it heartbeats to move it in time.” Jules pushes it away with a curled tentacle. “It will serve no purpose but to be a pretty bauble, though.”
The sadness in my friend threatens to crush my soul. Jules looks so alone, in that moment, looking at anything except the most beautiful art he made in his last life. “I think it’s beautiful.” I murmur to him. “I think you’re beautiful, too.”
“Ah, well. I suppose I must be, to make something you find value in, yes?” He chuckles with a bass pulse. “Perhaps we can stick it on a shelf.”
Mark glances up at the library balcony. “We’ve got a bunch of shelves.” He nods. “Who feels like climbing stairs right now?” None of us reply. “Cool! You know what we need in here? A bed. For napping.”
“Or other things!” I suggest.
“I thought for sure Jules would beat you to that one.” Ellin has long since stopped sounding disappointed in us. “Lewd perverts, the lot of you. Especially you Luri! Strutting around in the nude! We could have guests!”
“Prude.” I stick my tongue out at her. “Also Bastion’s has a strict no-making-fun-of-the-proprietors rule, haven’t you read our signs? And I’m not nude, you gave me a robe!” I’m proud of the signs. It took a long time to get the resources to make them stick in this unreality.
“The signs degraded to elsewhere.” Mark shakes his head sadly.
“Fuck, my signs!” I exclaim. I’m feeling better. Alcohol and friends and a little momentum. I could do this all day. All cycle. All life. Over and over and over. I could do this forever.
In the moment, I almost believe it.
Jules glances between Mark and me. “If we are not actively generating beds for activities, perhaps some food? I could prepare us a real meal. I have some small things to share and the faith marks to activate our kitchen.”
“I could eat.” Mark concedes.
“I have not eaten in two hundred and four years.” Six’s eyes, neutral as they are, seem to peer into the beyond with the most harrowed look I’ve ever seen on the golem. “Oh. And these sausages. I would eat.”
Ever so slowly, Jules slides his eyes sideways to where Ellin is carefully turning her own head to meet his gaze. “Yeeeeeah… food sounds… good right about now.” She says. And then perks up. “Oh! Who wants to help me plan my next build?”
“Will you be optimizing for murder again?” Mark asks, exasperated with our friend.
“Well it’s either that, or marine biology, and some worlds don’t have oceans, but every world has punching.” Ellin says, staring up at the slowly rotating aircraft prop engine that we use as an overhead fan for airflow. “So far anyway. And the last world I never made it to an ocean. Because of the-!”
“Yep, thanks!” I cut her off. “Jules go make food before Ellin keeps up her kill streak and takes out our appetites. I don’t wanna know if she gets a notification for that.”
“How bout you, Luri?” Mark asks, thumping one of his legs into mine under the table as Jules heads off to busy himself and Ellin starts waving her hands to open up a barrage of translucent screens and windows that contain her collected upgrades and associated nonsense. “How was your life?”
I pause. Consider lying. But Mark’s would notice, and I don’t really feel like it anyway. “Could have been better.” I say with a little strain. “Could have been worse!”
“I know you don’t like to see anything until toward the end,” he says as Six bluntly stands and walks away to stand at the counter and stare at Jules while the tentacled noble cooks, “but got anything for Bastion’s? Like, anything that might be a couch or something? I love that we have all the chairs, but Luri, I’ll love you forever if you can give my hypothetical ass a cushion here.”
“You’ll love me forever anyway.” I smile at him.
Mark gives me a goofy grin, the handsome man half my age not denying it. “I would.” He says serenely. “I really would. But it’d be better with a sofa.”
“You damn romantic.” I flush a deep red that creeps up the copper skin of my face. This body isn’t even real and I’m still blushing. Subjective centuries alive and I’m still getting flustered. “That’s supposed to be my job. Why are you suddenly this suave?”
“Eh!” Mark shrugs. “Picked up some wisdom last time around. Real wisdom, not the knockoff between variety.”
I laugh at his derision, as the smell of something savory and hot starts to fill the air. “Well, I’d invite you back to my place, but I burned my only door.”
“Which is why, a sofa…” Mark waggles his eyebrows at me as Ellin comes back from clearing off the table. “Ellin, back me up here. A couch. A loveseat. Anything.”
I shake my head as the two start coming up with more words for cushioned seating, playfully laughing with each other as we fall into the familiar routine of friendship and shared jokes. Internally, though, I’m glad I dodged answering for now.
My notifications, the scroll of unopened messages from… well. The unopened messages list out in my soul, waiting to be acknowledged. Waiting for me to receive my just rewards for accomplishments, as recognized by the strange and shifting set of parameters we find ourselves living under. They flicker with familiar indicators; colors and textures and in some cases smells, all denoting type and rarity and sometimes more specific things.
One of mine is an off-yellow, metallic, and tastes like strawberries. And I know what that one will say. That I changed the fate of a world. That I am due a reward.
I don’t want to talk about it. And I doubt it will give me a couch.
“I got nothing.” I tell Mark and Ellin, as I notice them watching me. “Well, on the seating front. Uh. I might have a new book for us though?”
“Ah, check it later, no rush.” Mark’s easy words wash away my woes. “So Ellin, got any less gross war stories for us?” The woman’s face lights up, and she launches into another story from her life. Something about a river, a goat, and a humiliated opponent.
I listen, but also I just exist. I try to etch this moment into my memory, though without the heartbeat counter ticking down. There’s never enough time with them; so I want every moment to count. Even Ellin’s somewhat disturbing stories of goatnapping and drownings. Not of the goat, she is quick to remind us. The goat is fine.
The joke breaks me out of my dip back into despair. How can I be sad, when the goat is fine? I repeat the words just as Jules and Six call us over, and the others stare at me with confused looks until Jules himself perks up. “Yes!” He cries. “Yes, that’s it, isn’t it? How can we be sad, when the goat is fine?” The tentacled chef raises the duel spatulas he is wielding over his head. “Ah, Luri, you bring us the finest metaphors.”
“I… didn’t, no.” I try to say.
“No no.” Mark pats my back. “Let him have this. He needs a good metaphor.”
“The goat is fine, and dinner is served!” Jules announces to us.
“The goat is fine, and thank you.” Six says.
“I’m eating in the library, you’re all barbarians.” Ellin grumbles. I join her, and we manage to get up the wobbling metal steps braced against the wall of Bastion’s without spilling anything. Sitting at one of the small tables near the rickety fence and listening to the others continue their happy yelling below us as we eat the unreal fish and fake rice that still somehow manages to be savory and filling. “Luri.” Her voice catches me out, and I look up to see her pointing a curved and possibly cursed fork from ten lifetimes ago my way. “How are you holding up?”
“Bad.” I’m honest with our resident warrior. But I say it with a shrug. “But what else is new? It’s fine, Ellin. I’ll be fine. I’m always fine.” I take a bite, and something meaty and citrusy explodes across my tongue. Jules is an excellent chef, especially here. “Really! Don’t look at me that way.”
“I’m worried.” Ellin tells me, like she’s confessing a dark secret. “And I just… what are those idiots doing down there?” She sighs. We look over the edge. The three of them are composing a song about the goat. “You did this.” She accuses me.
I smile. “I made a difference.” I say.