Tense heartbeats pass as I face down my foe. Across the table from me, a creature that looks like some kind of aphotic castoff stares into my anima with a trio of red eyes. Though that’s maybe not especially impressive because I think we just sort of are oddly shaped anima in the between. Or something soul-adjacent. Motivation with temporary bodies. Something like that.

I’m trying to keep my thoughts away from what I’m about to say to Jules. I think he’s cheating at this game by reading minds. I don’t know how he’s doing it, because none of our upgrades or perks work here, except for the ones that visitors have implied do, but none of us are using those. Unless… unless Jules has been lying to us this whole time.

The evidence mounts against him. Of everyone here, Jules is exactly the person who would mount a lifetimes-long campaign of deceit just to pull a party trick. Six wouldn’t do that to me, we’ve been through too much together for that. Mark I don’t think could keep a straight face. Molly… Molls would love the idea. She would absolutely want to do it, and then she’d talk about how funny it would be, and then realize she’d blown the joke early. But Jules? The man has patience beyond anything even I have, and I lean hard into being immortal.

My eye twitches as we gaze at each other across the wire mesh table that comes from the coastal pavilion of some long gone boardwalk that one of us used to visit with our lover. One of Jules’ own eyes fragments in tiny particles at the edge of a corner. Heartbeats pass as I look for any sign of weakness, all while I studiously push my thoughts away from my goal.

“I’m not reading your mind Luri.” Jules says smugly, balancing back on his thicker tentacles.

Part of me wants to bark out that I knew it, but I reign it in. Centuries of life don’t really prepare you for how you feel in the between, how your impulse control feels peeled back and exposed again like you’re back to being a hundred years old. But I have a pretty good grip on most of my flinch responses, and now I’m actually pretty sure that Jules is messing with me.

The information isn’t that relevant. Whether he can read minds or not, I think I’ve already got my answer. I take a long drink of the beer Six brought us, the drink that has become familiar enough to be close to enjoyable by now helping me with an old social trick to change my voice patterns, and speak.

“It’s just after dark, but still warm. The breeze moves trees around in the night, but not enough to spook you as you plod back to your apartment. Your eyes burn, and you know you are awake far too late, but you don’t feel tired so much as you are simply aching and screaming inside at yourself for your own stupid lack of self control. The stairs don’t take long to climb, but eat up ten times that many seconds as you stand at the bottom and stare at them, not wanting to actually make the ascent. When you finally make it back to your front door, just before you walk inside and can finally relax, you walk into a spiderweb. It gets in your nose.”

I set my drink down and lean forward, one arm across the table in front of me in a way that would be leaving a grid of lines pressed into my skin if I weren’t wearing the occulted pilot’s suit. My eyes focus on Jules as he twists a tentacle across his face in consideration, his body wavering back and forth.

And then with a vibrating hum, he speaks. “Three.” He says, with utter confidence.

“No way.” Mark softly protests from where the others are sitting. They were setting up a game of Encounter, but went silent as I challenged Jules and the two of us entered our battle of wits. “Luri is, what, seventy lives? I feel like I’ve had that…”

“No helping!” Ellin shushes him by wrapping a heavy hand around Mark’s head and pulling him backward with a muffled wail of despair. “Let him screw this up on his own!”

A small kobold chimes in without looking up from where she’s sorting through her character grid. “He’ll get it.” Molly says with unwavering confidence. “Can’t trick my love.”

“No helping!” Ellin leans over the table and sends at least one stack of cards into a messy pile as she wraps her other hand around Molly’s muzzle, adding a muffled howl to Mark’s own protest.

Part of me wants to get sidetracked and say that I don’t really think Molly was helping. Mark wasn’t either, since Jules already made his guess, but Mark called me old so he can suffer. “Three? You’re sure, Jules?” I ask the smooth jet black creature across from me.

“Positive.” His voice plucks the strings of the air as he settles back, his eyes turning to placid ovals. “Three. So, Luri? Have you anything to say?”

I settle back, trying to pluck nervously at the sleeve of the pilot’s suit and finding for not the first time that the material is flush with my skin and does not like being plucked. “You absolute monster.” I grumble as I lose my challenge. “How do you do that? How do you even get close?”

“This time?” Jules says as he sighs in contentment, rising up on his mobility tendrils to stalk his way over to the larger green felt surface that we’ll be playing a game on once Ellin releases her victims. “The stairs.”

Mark breaks away with an unneeded gasp of air. “Of course, the stairs!”

“The stairs?” Ellin asks, caught up in the furor. “I’ve got not… what about the stairs?”

“Well, I know, of course, but Jules can explain it better.” Mark’s words earn Molly an early release from her own capture, as Ellin pulls back and looks prepared to grapple him to the floor for his antics.

Jules gives a laugh, a cheery vibration that can be felt in the heart of every one of us. “Have none of you noticed in all our time together? Luri despises stairs.”

“Well hang on…” I start to say.

But I am given no quarter, nor chance to defend myself. “Half the terrible memories Luri shares? Over the ground floor. Luri’s favored dwellings? Street level. The one thing Luri intentionally keeps slotted despite the use of precious ability weight? [Fall Mitigation].”

“You count that?” I’m a little impressed, and a little worried about what Jules does with his free time. “Also I could just be afraid of heights.”

“I would count that, if this form allowed for more perfect memory storage.” Six muses aloud as he dutifully repairs the part of the board game setup that Ellin demolished. Placing the last few cards back where they belong with a crisp snap, he looks up at Jules. “I would like a journal, should anyone come across one. But also I do not believe for a heartbeat that Jules ‘counts that’.”

Jules makes an awkward buzzing sound. “Well. Yes. I can hardly be expected to track data. But I am certain Luri dislikes stairs. Which rules out the majority of lives where there was a choice in dwelling. Oh, I have a dozen small moments of insight that I could tell you add up to an answer. But the truth is, simply, that I am just so good at this.” Jules polishes a tentacle against his central body stalk.

I love Jules so much sometimes. Not now, obviously, because he’s being utterly smug and insufferable, but also actually kind of now, because that smug insufferable jerk of a man is still just so impressive. And it’s really hard to stay mad at someone who keeps their casually noble composure even when they’re showing off.

As I find my place at the table, I tell him as much, and he hums a laugh at me. The others join in as we all turn our focus to our shared time here. Mark closes the book he’s been trying to read, Molly fans her claws as she shuffles her personal deck of cards, Ellin checks in on the elf still sitting at the bar and staring with flinty eyes at the back wall, and Jules takes a little more time to be smug.

“Okay.” Molly declares as Ellin swoops back by the table and steals kisses from myself and Mark in turn. She tries to get one from Six, but is politely rebuffed, and one from Jules, but is dramatically rebuffed. Molly just keeps talking, ignoring Ellin towering over the back of her seat as she does so. “I know how long these rounds go, so I’ve got time for one play, okay? And then… and then I have to get going.” Her muzzle splits into a toothy grin, even as she delivers sad news. “So someone catch me up on what I missed in the story? Luri said you all lost a planet or something?”

We did. It was Ellin’s fault. Everything in this game is Ellin’s fault, a lot of the time. But I still love it, and I think the others might actually earnestly share that feeling.

Ellin gets her final kiss and takes her seat next to me - and away from the threat deck - while Mark and Jules fill Molly in. And then the lot of us look over the organized chaos of our biggest table; piles of cards, hundreds of small tokens, dozens of map pieces, and at least one drink for each of us. Our individual cups are as special to us as the characters we’re playing. Well, mine is, at least. Mark’s character dies more often than the rest of us. I think it’s a coincidence that we had to replace Mark’s personal drinking vessel though.

The orderly but complex arrangement doesn’t last. It takes two turns into the game before we have things stacked on each other, discard piles taking up too much space, and we fall into the familiar and amusing pattern of someone pointing to a few face down cards and asking where those came from.

We share an adventure this way. The only way we really can, here in the between. A game between friends who can’t ever have a real adventure together. But that’s okay. It has to be okay, and so I make it okay in my heart. And after a few turns, the flow of gameplay and the passing of heartbeats carries the imagination deep into immersion. Ellin and Mark arguing about how to handle someone who might betray us feels so vividly possible. Jules getting caught up in the minutiae of our local star system’s orbital laws is just who Jules would be in any life we lived together. Six and I having to herd the group like a bunch of feral bel to actually hit an objective before the hidden timer runs out is worryingly plausible. Molly asking about changing her character so she can try a new form is exactly Molly, and her accepting the in game rules for biomodification is equally Molly.

We can’t go out into our lives together. Not really. But we can face imaginary challenges like this. We can share our time as the plucky crew of a rogue starskimmer, pushing back the line of the dark and being champions for people who will never neither meet us nor be real.

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Mark says it’s poetic. Jules says the metaphor doesn’t map. I think they’re talking past each other. We flip an event that starts a crisis about belief in an afterlife among a planet’s population, and everyone gives Ellin a look before the game adds another complication to the ongoing tableau of complexity. She shrugs and says something about coincidence and how she couldn’t have actually had the time to read that much ahead just to set this up, and for once, I believe her.

I don’t believe her defense at all when the next turn our ship takes a turbulence strike while our defenses are down for maintenance. I think that’s entirely her fault. I think Ellin has convinced herself that Molly’s lifeline is arbitrary. That if the game goes on forever, Molly won’t leave.

But no one has infinite heartbeats, and our time with the energetic kobold, as well as this particular scenario of Encounter, both have to end sometime. It’s not a short time, not at all; a little over a subjective day goes by as we play and banter and argue and laugh together. Our group builds our strength, shores up our weaknesses, and gets into messes that we are woefully unequipped for. We lose another planet; though this one is on purpose. Ellin tones down the cheating, and the challenges turn from backbreaking to simply spicy enough to keep us on our toes.

The only thing missing is snacks.

“Okay.” I announce to everyone as the final piece goes back into the box, many thousands of heartbeats later. We could clean up by sweeping it all off the table and letting the laws of the between banish it to the void and remake it anew. But the ritual is important. Or at least, Six says so, and I trust Six. “Next life? I’m gonna find a way to bring back some snacks.”

“It has been some time since anyone received a souvenir snack, hasn’t it?” Jules ponders as he casually hoists a giggling Molly on top of his form with several of his tentacles. “I miss the restorative [Box Of Bark Chips]

Mark flicks the edge of his thumb across the bridge of his nose as he shakes his head. “Those weren’t snacks and you know it.” He accuses Jules in good humor. “Just because you can eat something doesn’t mean the rest of us can. Also wait, what happened to the box?”

“Oh.” I sigh deeply. “I had to sell it to pay the upkeep cost.” I admit. Even in the between, poverty can come too easily. “Bastion’s… well, you know. It costs to keep it here. Or maybe just to keep it accessible. You’ve wandered the between at least once, you’ve seen the weird stuff out there. A lot of that is… leftovers. Places people made, or started to make, where they couldn’t or wouldn’t keep paying for them. So they’re just out there, around.”

“You can find loot in them!” Ellin proclaims, missing the point of the morose and hostile nature of entropy and also rent. “Not most of them. But sometimes! I got a base [Strength] once!”

Mark ignores Ellin, and focuses on me. “Hey, you have what you need to keep Bastion’s going, right? I know we chip in a little, but if you need more…” He looks around at the others, some of whom nod in agreement. Six doesn’t, but Six knows already.

“Mark, you’re fantastic, and I love you. But it’s fine for a long time.” I glance at the rough wooden floorboards, with their omnipresent layer of sand, before looking back up. “I can cover the maintenance costs with a single prize, and the way the between hands them to me like festival candy, we don’t need to worry. Save your stuff, have fun with it.”

The look he gives me is utterly suspicious, but says he’s willing to play along for now. “Alright. Well, how do we get snacks then?”

“First things first.” Six stops the conversation with a flat voice. “Molly?”

Ah. Of course. A parting. The worst part of living forever is that you have to say infinite goodbyes. And this one, as Molly darts around, flipping up onto chairs and over the table to give each of us a hug in turn before being enveloped in Jules’ comforting tentacles like he’s terrified to let her go, is no different. A little painful, a little scary, a little sickening. No one wants to let go of the people they love.

Except this one is a little different. There’s an undercurrent to it of unstable hope. Molly was gone. Gone for whole cycles through the between, lifetime after lifetime of not seeing her face or hearing her voice. She was a missing component that we were worried would do worse than leave a wound in our hearts. We were worried that wound would scab over, scar, and fade.

But no. Because she came back. Not through force of will or strength of character or devious cunning. But just because it turned out that way.

And that is weirdly reassuring. It’s almost like an affirmation of my unlife motto. We live forever, and nothing is never, and on a long enough timeline, surely we will all see each other again. It’s just that this time it didn’t take long at all, and my friend is back with us, and I have a confident hope that we’ll see her next time around.

“Oh, I missed you guys.” Her muffled voice comes out from a muzzle poking through the rows of Jules’ rubbery limbs. “And I’ll do it again! I’ll miss you all over! But it was so good to see you.”

“Any plans for your last beats, my darling?” Jules asks her, his voice caring even while it’s subdued.

Molly’s arms drag her up through his grasp like she’s swimming against a particularly clingy ocean. Cresting the top of his enfolding tentacles, she leans her elbows on Jules’ head and gives a cocky nod. “Take me to the tree you made.” She says. “I wanna see what it’s like when it changes. And also I wanna hear more about who you made it for! And… and… and I want more time…” her voice strains, and threatens to crack, but she sniffs in a heavy breath and holds her composure.

Jules hesitates for only a second, before he hums a nod. “Of course. Anything of that I can provide, I will.” His longer mobility tentacles slither up the tall wall to wrap around the library railing and begin tugging him upward, Molly still half wrapped in his grip.

She waves to us as she is carried off. “No being sad!” Molly commands us like a towering sorcerer-queen, borne aloft by her loyal summon. “I’ll be back, and if you’re sad about this, I’ll be very upset!”

I can’t hold back a laugh that comes close to being wet with tears. It is, word for word, what she told us the last time she vanished. Well, ‘us’, though it was only Six and I at the time. Everyone else was gone already. So Ellin and Mark get to hear it for the first time, maybe, and be impressed by her bravado.

Some of the stuff we bring back, the souvenirs and relics and equippables, they fall into a rough category of ‘sinks’. Things that we can pour currency into, and get a consistent output. Marks or cysts, sometimes, and I’m sure there’s others. But the most common one, the one that we don’t tend to play with, are the ones that eat heartbeats.

Molly left a jar of glowing bugs on a table that turns them into brighter bugs for a little while. Someone, probably me, bought a bottle of rice wine that turns them into more rice wine. We used to have a resin orb that turned them into a pheromone burst, but Ellin apologized for that a long time ago and I haven’t seen the orb in a while.

Or, maybe, they take the form of an arcane terrarium. A semi-sculpture of a fluffy tree on a grassy hill, the scene of it set sometime in an indeterminate spring day. Jules made it. His magnum opus from an old life as a city’s designated artist. And it’s beautiful, it occupies the space of one of our coveted end tables in the library upstairs.

It takes heartbeats, and turns them into time. Time from us taken away, and made into time for the tree. For the whole piece. In theory, the season would progress eventually, but no one wants to feed it a million heartbeats to find out. Maybe eventually, in ones and fours, it will get there. But not for a long time.

Molly, though? Molly doesn’t want to flick a few heartbeats at it so her reminder from the between is a round number. She doesn’t want to make a leaf or two blow in the hint of a breeze. Molly is a lot of things, but accepting of the way of things is not one of them. When Molly leaves the between, she makes sure she always leaves on her terms.

Being perfectly honest, a lot of the time those terms involve enthusiastic sex with her lover, which is a little bit why I’ve chosen to stay downstairs and check the little tree later. I’ve said before that I’m no prude; you can’t go into lives expecting to change and grow and learn and then stay as a stuffy boor forever. Even Ellin barely lasted twenty lives before giving in at least a little bit. But my mood right now is somewhere between sobbing and weeping, and really, I don’t feel like exploring how that mixes with unabashed lust this time. Maybe later. But also, the moment isn’t mine. It’s sex, yes, but it’s also an unfiltered intimacy between two people who have loved each other like shining beacons across whole lifetimes. And neither sad nor horny feels like a good reason to interfere with that kind of longing.

“It was good to see Molly again.” Mark says as we return to the bar, a flip of his shiny new [Coin] making it my turn to serve him. I circle behind the smoothly polished surface as he sits down, Six and Ellin joining on either side of him. “It’s always a…” he pauses as a delighted squeal sounds from upstairs. ”…well it’s never boring is it?”

“I could accuse Molly of being many things, but unengaged is not one of them.” Six says in his placid monotone, agreeing in a roundabout but technically correct way. “She adds something to us while she is here.”

Ellin snorts. “What she adds is a constant sense of primal fear that she’s planning a kobold-shaped projectile ambush.”

“That’s not really something you should worry about.” Six politely informs Ellin as I pour out tall glasses of what’s on tap right now and slide them one by one down the bar to be caught by my friends. Six catches his with a flat pap on his grey palm, and mechanically takes a drink before shaking his head at his own creation.

Mark catches his with a light twirl of fingers, lifetimes of doing pub tricks for free drinks coming up as distant reflexes. “Oh, yeah. Don’t be afraid of that at all. Or, well…”

When the last drink gets to Ellin, she just clamps her hand on top of it and stares at them without raising the cup. “Why not?” She demands.

“I can answer that!” I cheerfully interject. “It’s because it’s not an uncertainty!” And it really isn’t. At no point is Molly not planning to rocket into someone’s torso. Or, rather, it would be more accurate to say that while Molly doesn’t have a plan, what she does have is a constant prepared nature, always ready to move, always ready to push into physical contact. Molly is body-oriented in a way most of us aren’t anymore, but I think we all can still appreciate a good hug from her. Even when they come in the form of a meter tall mixed blood kobold slamming into our gut at high velocity.

The between mostly stops damage, but often not the sting.

I pour myself a drink, and the four of us quietly clink glasses together. “To Molly.” I say. “Good luck in her next life.” They echo me, a series of ‘good lucks’ pouring out as Jules joins us, his tentacles seeming to drag sadly across the floor. I send him a drink, which he lethargically catches. “Hey. She’ll be back.”

“Of course she will.” His tone, even saddened, is still so vibrantly filled with something bordering on arrogance but not quite tipping over the line. “She’s perfect. How could she stay away?”

“Exactly.” I say like I’m proving a point somehow. “You know, Jules, we were talking about optimizers earlier. But you know what? I don’t think we need it for a totally different reason.”

“Oh?” His eyes turn to suspicious diamonds.

Ellin flicks the rim of her glass with a long finger. “Yeah, I wanna hear this latest Luri wisdom.”

“Yeah.” I say. “You’re all already perfect.”

The sappy moment lasts for twenty heartbeats, soft smiles and emotional swelling in the breast making everyone on the other side of the counter feel like they’re not just alive, but alive. Alive and loved.

Then Six ruins it by speaking. “Well. Subjectively perfect. Mark still requires basic education in math.”

“It was one mistake!” Mark’s protest, feeble as it is, is buried under laughter and cheers and the requests for more drinks and talk of how we plan to find a way to fetch some new snacks and Ellin retelling her semi-adventure in the between where she once found something that was almost worth it.

And at the far end of the bar, a near silent elf who has been staring at her lemonade for a subjective day, quietly raises the half empty cup up to eye level, and I barely catch her whisper. “To Molly.” She breathes out, taking a tiny sip of the herbal citrus drink. “May your trail wind.”

I offer her what I can in comfort. A small smile, a kind word, and a refill.