I’m sitting across from Mark about twenty thousand heartbeats later, the two of us going through the semi-necessary motions of reincarnation in our own ways.
The chairs in the library aren’t great. They’re actually uniform, unlike everything else we have in here. Bought out of one of the vendors in the halls of the between. They’re a fake wood - actually fake, not just between fake - a kind of lacquered brown with painted on wood grain. The dark color is pleasant from a distance, but looks kind of sticky up close. The cushions on them are a fragile lie, and make me glad that I actually kept Ellin’s robe. Even if it is awkwardly hiked up around my tail.
The tail is poking out the back of the chair, under the last of the three horizontal slats. These chairs are just wide enough to let me poke through, which is their only selling point over the mixed stuff we have downstairs.
Mark is writing with a two foot long feather quill on the back of brown diner napkins he’s pulling from our endless dispenser, and arranging them on the table. I’m just quietly poking at low priority notifications to clear them from my mind.
[You have completed 1,000 local hours of farming : +10 marks of labor]
[You have completed 1,000 local hours of farming : +9 marks of labor]
[Perk - Glutton Of Norinton has triggered : you have consumed enough food for 3,400 average locals : +1 mark of wealth, +3 perk cysts, +3 aura drops]
[You have completed 1,000 local hours of farming : +8 marks of labor]
[You survived the song of a stymeria kallukala (Eradicator Mountain Harpy) : +5 marks of battle, perk unlocked - Warsong]
“Another singer perk.” I comment to Mark, who looks ups from where he’s trying to get a stack of napkins to neatly layer on each other, and failing. The prop engine ceiling fan is just powerful enough that up here on the edge of it’s domain, all of my friend’s attempts are at constant risk. “I could finally try for that next life. I’ve never been a singer before.”
“How many is that now?” He asks, dragging a finger through the air to reposition one of his display windows so that he isn’t staring through some kind of translucent pane to look at me.
“Ten, twelve depending on how you count.” I shrug at him, my eyes drifting over to Jules’ bonsai terrarium tucked into one of the shelves, under an anemic row of paperbacks and over the shelf where we stack all the board games that have started fights. “Most of them are add-ons, not learners or uppers. So maybe not yet. I should spend a life messing with the profession and see if I get anything really defining.”
He shakes his head at me. “Luriiiiii.” Mark gives me a cute little pout that makes me want to offer him some kind of comfort, but in a very condescending way. “You’re doing it again! You don’t need this place to tell you what you can be!”
I freeze briefly, but for a shiver of anxiety down my tail, tugging my robe back tight on my thin shoulders. Mark’s right. I don’t have my mental defenses up, and I’m letting this get to me again.
There’s this somewhat odd, somewhat totally reasonable impulse, to try to optimize. I’d say it’s a human thing, but Six and Ellie do it too. This… whatever this is… this looping cycle of life and death and tweaking our soul’s power in between, it comes with a lot of perks. Or rather, [Perks]. Among other things.
We do things, and we get rewarded for them. If we take those rewards into a life and specialize, we can reach higher and higher, becoming better and better at the things we do. Iterations and retries letting us push our limits, and stress the worlds we land in. Sometimes for the better, often not.
Except…
What a lonely fucking way to live.
Say you like cakes. So you spend your first life, before you know, becoming a baker. You learn to make the batter, get the perfect oven temperatures down, you’re a master of the frosting thing. The bag thing, that they squeeze frosting out of. Whatever that thing is. You’re good at it.
Then you die. And you wake up here, in a flat form, with blinking yelling alerts in your head, prepared to offer reassurance that you did a good job.
You pick up a perk that lets you improve a cake three times a life. You trade your cysts for an aura layer, and fill it with a thing that makes your muffins taste better. You equip a tethered item that lets you learn your favored profession from your last life ten percent faster.
You’re born again. You know what you want to do. You want to be a baker. You were good at it last time, and now you can be better! Your passion hasn’t diminished just because you died once or twice depending on how you count.
So you do. Because it’s what you want to do. You live a full life, as the best damn baker out there. You meet someone at your bakery, you cater for kings and presidents, you take your craft farther than ever before.
Then you die.
And you do it all over again.
And it might be ten more lives before you realize that you can’t distinguish the faces of your apprentices. That you keep slipping up and asking for flour that doesn’t exist on this world, or fruit you haven’t seen in a hundred years. That your perks aren’t just helping you; they’re defining you. You’ve turned into a cake-making machine. Like one of those bag things, but automated. And what’s left of you, your hopes, your dreams, your passion, it’s being squeezed out like it’s fucking frosting to decorate whatever world you’ve landed in this go round.
Specializing too far and too long hollows people out, and it takes you to a level of madness that is hard to adequately describe. It turns a baker, into a cake.
“Right!” I flick my tail against the floor and my fingers against the small table. This is the perfect place for a romantic, if we had some candles, but instead it’s just cheap napkins and me being sad. “But hey, I want to make some art this next roll, I think. Jules brought back a fucking magic tree, and look how much it brightens this place up. I should do that!”
“Luri…”
“I’ve never sung before. Not really.” I tell Mark softly, reaching out to wrap my thin hand around his larger fingers still holding his quill. “It could be fun. And hey, I don’t have to be a singer. I’ll just take one or two of the passives, and it’ll be an option. I’m not slipping again, don’t worry.”
“Alright, alright. I’m in the anxiety too much I suppose.” He flicks my nose with the tip of his quill, and I sputter, flailing and sending half his napkins flying into the void they return to as my robe is flung off one of my arms. “No, my [Jumps]!” Mark throws himself over the table. “Monster!”
“Heh. What’re you working on anyway?” I ask.
“Oh, my own base build stuff. I’m trying to sort out my aura budget now, so I can avoid duplicate abilities.” Mark sighs. “I hate… having to do this here.” He sits up, and leans back, staring at the ceiling. His quill slips onto the tabletop as he takes a deep breath, his eyes glassy and far away.
One of Mark’s hands layers over the other, and I see his fingers making a well worn turning motion. Rings are common across a lot of our lives, as a symbol.
My face twists into pity, then a grimace, then a sad smile. “What was their name?” I ask in a low voice. I don’t want to broadcast it to the others, who are hanging around downstairs playing cards with the stakes as embarrassing stories from their last lives.
Mark doesn’t look down. Just keeps staring up at the dusty wood overhead; allowed to be dirty but forever missing the classic cobwebs. “Oona.” He says after a pause. “Her name was Oona. She was a florist in our city. There was… there was nothing special about her.” Mark’s face has a smile on it when he says that, and I can sense the echoes of an old inside joke.
“You must have loved her very much.” The words are part prompt, part reminder.
“I did.” He says, pulling his hands up behind his head, trying to look casual, infusing his voice with that classic Mark optimism. “I really did. I still do. Stupid, right? I’d been hoping…”
“It’s never stupid.” I tell him firmly. “I wait, every time, for ever changing someones who aren’t coming. You can too. There’s no rules here that make sense, Mark. We’re all making it up as we go.” I help him start to reorganize his surviving napkins, stacking similarly named notes on his available perks in messy rows. “Do you regret it?”
“No.” Mark’s answer comes instantly. “Never. Never.”
I almost shake my head. Almost tell him that people like us can’t say things like ‘never’. But I don’t, because, not so secretly, I agree with him. Never regret loving someone.
“Did she have a good life?” I ask instead.
“Best I could give her.” Mark smiles. “Well, best she could give us both, I guess. We lived in weird times. She took her business underground at one point, when petal runners were the only way to get anything into the country. And we ended up making the news sheets a few times, for evading the law!” He’s laughing, a nostalgic and sappy smile in his eyes. “Laws change, though. We weren’t really part of the whole thing, it was just… she wanted to be a florist, you know? And I was happy to be part of it.”
“I feel like there’s some stories there.” We both laugh at my words; Mark’s still fairly new here, but it’s a well trod humor between us all.
Down below, Jules and Ellin’s voices rise up, not loud enough for us to make out but enough to indicate they’re having fun. The warmth of it wraps around me and staves off the cold of loss for a bit.
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“Did you have anyone?” Mark asks suddenly. “Cause, Luri, I vaguely know you’re always waiting for people. But…”
“I had a few someones.” I say, staring past him. “Suitors, mostly, for social convenience. Nothing that went far. Just… I didn’t…” The words catch, and I shift against the seat, the hard cushion suddenly more painful now that I’m trying to find anything to think about. “I didn’t… want to. Not this time. Maybe later. I just didn’t want to add to the list this time.”
“I’m never going to see her again.” Mark whispers to me, voicing the dark truth that we’re both trying to not let in. “I’m never going to hold her. Or kiss her. Or be her getaway driver. It’s all done.” He meets my eyes with a grim panic dancing beneath the surface of those soft brown iris. “It’s happening again, Luri. How many times? How many times before I forget her name? How many new loves before loving hurts too much? Before I…”
Before he ends up like me?
I cut his thoughts off before they can ram him down the same path I almost took a dozen lifetimes ago. “I don’t think any of us should be saying words like never.” My voice is oddly steady. “Mark, where are we? What are we? We don’t know shit. Never? Never? Bullshit. We’re… wherever or whatever the between is, it can’t be everything. And even if it is, that means all we have to do is stick around long enough, and you’ll meet them again. All of them. Everyone you’ve ever loved. That’s just statistics; a non-zero chance is a surefire bet when you’ve got infinite time to roll the dice.”
“But how long before it doesn’t matter to me anymore?” He asks, a man begging for an easy answer and an easy out. I joke about Mark being young, but he has lifetimes of pain piling up in his soul, and it’s not hard to hear it. “Luri, when do the faces blur together and the names go away?”
And there it is. The question that he’s been worried to ask since he learned what my deal was. But he’s asking it now. And I don’t ever want to lie to my friend, not here, where friends are all we have left. “I… it… it’ll happen when you don’t notice it.” I say, curling my fingers around my arms and tugging the bathrobe back up to cover more of my skin. I’m not cold, but I don’t feel like being exposed right now. My voice is still easy, somehow, even if I can hear the hurt creeping in. “One day you’ll be making a list of your top ten lovers for fun to tease Ellin, and you’ll realize that there’s someone missing. Jules will ask you about that time you were a royal concubine and Six will have to fill in the king’s name for you. Or maybe you just realize that you can recall the soft moments and the feeling of being loved, but not the color of their eyes, or the texture of their fingernails.”
“And then they’re gone.” He states. “And what the fuck do we do then?”
“They’re not gone.” I disagree softly. “No, Mark. They’re never gone. If you want, we can get you a book, or a scroll, or have Jules make you some kind of memory tree or something. But... you’re still here. For as long as you’re with us, you’ll be here. Like I said; people like us shouldn’t say things like never. But you know what word I like? Always. Oona… you’ll always have part of her with you. The part of her that was interwoven with your life. Maybe it’s different because you knew where you were going and she didn’t, but that doesn’t mean she couldn’t change you.” I sigh, and look around for something to fidget with or drink. Failing to find, I settle for picking at the wood of the bannister. “Did you make a difference?”
“In her life?”
“Sure.”
The hum of the overhead fan takes over for a second, before he speaks. “Yeah.” Mark nods after a while. “I did.”
“Did she make a difference?” I press. “Not something that shows up on a perk or your pool list. But to you. Did she change you?” The question doesn’t get him off guard. But he still takes time to think about it seriously. And then nods once. “Then even if you forget her, what she did, it’ll be there always, won’t it?”
“It’s not the same.” Mark complains.
And he’s not wrong. Of course it’s not the same. It never will be. We’re separated here, by an enforced unknowable boundary, kept away from everyone we come to care for, whether they’re waiting in a distant afterlife or just gone forever. There’s no blissful reuniting, no joining them in oblivion, and certainly no going back.
Downstairs, Ellin bursts into a roar of laughter at something Six says. It’s no pure and untainted sound; she’s carrying just as much pain as the rest of us. But it’s real, and happy now.
We can’t live in the past. No one can, really; the past is another world. It’s just a little more literal for us.
“At least we’ve got each other.” I tell Mark. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Hah. Me neither.” He says, though he says it with that cadence that tacks on an unspoken “…unless…?”
The chair creaks under me as I let go of Mark’s hand and curl in on myself. Old memories and old fears floating on the surface of my thoughts like buoys in the bay. I need to sleep, soon, before I start to mentally crumble and waste more of my heartbeats here.
You would think that bodies that are more like suggestions than physical forms would be resistant to things like sleep, but it turns out, while they struggle against outside influences, you can make yourself tired just fine. Emotional exhaustion is real, and dangerous. Pushing through the waking moments to come to Bastion’s and meet everyone who’s here this time is a ritual that’s always worth it, but it can’t last forever.
Oddly, I don’t think of sleep as a waste of time here. This body can dream, and always wakes up without physical pain or ache. So it’s often a pleasant little reset; a good night’s sleep that eases woes and lets me adjust to being back among the never dead. The things that have my mind running loops settle down for a while, the worries seem farther away.
There’s only one problem.
“We still need a bed in here.” I grumble.
Mark glances up from staring at his napkin notes. “I appreciate the offer Luri but I’m not feeling it right now.” I give him a look, and the deadpan straight face he’s putting on slowly cracks. “Okay, okay. Well, we all know we need a bed. But… what’re we supposed to do about it?”
“Maybe I’ll go find a vendor and bring one back next life.” I sigh. “Or just gut my return room and bring that one in?”
“You will do no such thing young lady!” Jules’ voice doesn’t startle me, because I saw his tentacles creeping over the edge of the balcony we’re sitting on to pull himself up. Jules seems allergic to stairs. “Bastion’s is a shared place. We will find a way to manage a bed. Until then, Six is setting up a hammock down below, which you may avail yourself of.”
I don’t protest being chastised. He’s not wrong; all our doors to Bastion’s are one way and one use, and stumbling back by accident is unheard of. We could spend marks on better doors, but…
Usually we just spend them restocking the bar, or getting a new lamp, or something.
I’ve been cracking notifications open like geodes this whole time and I’m still only sitting at about nine hundred marks of labor, which might sound impressive, but isn’t enough to buy the chair I’m pretending to tolerate sitting on.
“And!” Ellin’s voice is closer than it should be, and I cock an eyebrow as I watch her crawling up Jule’s form like he’s a mobile training course. “You can’t ruin the atmosphere by doing anything uncouth in a hammock!”
“Oh no.” Mark and Jules sigh together.
To me, the words are like a challenge. How exactly Ellin has made it this many lives while still pretending to keep up a kind of strange shell made out of ideas from her original culture and a few new taboos picked up along the way baffles me. We live eternal, running observation laps through every kind of society. The idea of hanging onto the way our first life’s primary school etiquette class told us was how sex had to be, all the way to here, the end and beginning of dozens of lives? It’s insane to me.
And to everyone else, too. Which I know, because we’ve all enjoyed each other at different times for different reasons. Even Ellin, which makes her frequent verbal jabs something of a hypocrisy. And one that I quite enjoy taking aim at and zeroing in on.
But I am tired. And we have millions of heartbeats left here for me to remind her of just how creative I can be. So I wave off Mark and Jules’ concerned looks, like they’re wondering if I’m about to throw the bathrobe off and dive tackle Ellin off into open air. “You’re right.” I say instead. “Nothing weird about a bed made of rope.”
Ellin’s face shows that she has already seen the error in her judgment. “Now wait…”
“I’m kidding. Mostly.” I smile at my friend. “I just want to sleep. Does anyone else need it? I’d sleep on the floor, but…”
But I can’t. Because you can’t sleep when you’re not in a bed here. No one knows why, but it’s inconvenient.
“I shall give you a tap when Six is done.” Jules says politely, slowly lowering the black dome of his head back below our vision, tentacles uncurling from the wooden posts and slipping after him as he touches the floor below.
“Thanks Six!” I yell down, and get a cheerfully monotone noise of acceptance from the golem.
Mark and I sigh. We’re still here, and still happy to have each other, but we do need to sleep and let our minds reset. The first heartbeats back are the hardest; our last lives are still fresh, our return hasn’t sunk in yet. For me, I know the pattern, and I know how hard it hits me. Mark… well, maybe he’s still new enough that it won’t hurt him too bad. He could go a couple hundred thousand heartbeats and decompress on his own.
But I like waking up, and feeling new. It’s not a real reset, but it has a certain sense of a fresh start to it. Like novelty is just around the corner, but even if it’s not, that I’m new enough that things can look a little hopeful.
“Hey, do you have a three slot outer aura layer you don’t want?” Mark asks as the two of us sit. I’m just zoning out and staring into space, he’s actually gone back to trying to get his setup done. “One of the ones that’s a right angle, not a line.”
I flip through my own inventory, and grab something to hand to him. “Do you care that it’s dumb?” I ask, and he shakes his head as I pass over [Hiker IV].
“This isn’t dumb at all.” Mark gives me a worried look. “Are you sure?”
“I have spent most of the last ten lives in cities. The closest I got to a hike this last time was… well, you can win that off me after I nap.” I push the meta object into his hand and close his fingers around it. “Don’t worry about it. Finish your build, I’m gonna clear some more low priority stuff before Six is done.”
He’s still giving me a look that says I probably gave a gift that was a little too good, but I don’t care. I don’t need it. We don’t need any of this stuff; though it does start to take on weight and meaning when it’s what lets us help or heal those we come to care for. And that’s what really matters; everyone else, they’re just a little newer, and all still a little better at connecting with the real mortals we live with. They care in a way I’m terrified I’m starting to lose touch with. So maybe my gifts are better spent on them than on me.
I sit back, let my tail thump onto the floor, consider smashing this chair into a pile of debris, and go back to checking notifications.
[You have completed 1,000 local hours of farming : +7 marks of labor]
[You have completed 1,000 local hours of farming : +6 marks of labor]
[You have participated in 10 local religious ceremonies : +5 marks of spirit]
[You have spent 1 local year without speaking to a sophont : ability granted - Targeted Silence, +3 aura drops]
[You have completed 1,000 local hours of farming : +5 marks of labor]
I sigh and stop cracking open notifications as Six mercifully comes up the stairs and signals me. It’s daunting, to see a whole life reduced to a handful of after-action reports like this. At least this time, for me, it’s not messy. The chair thunks backward and the floorboards creak as I stand and stretch, winking at Mark as he looks up at me with my hands arched over my head. “I’m going to sleep.” I say. “And be better tomorrow.”
“Good night, Luri.” Mark grabs my hand as I pass by, and gives it a squeeze. “Hey. I’m glad you’re still here.” He says.
I look at him, then over to the main room where Ellin and Jules are staring at a golden bottle on the counter between the two of them, then over to the patiently waiting Six. My friends, through who even knows how many years. Still here. We’re all still here.
“I’m glad I’m still here too.” I surprise myself when I hear my voice. “I’ll be more fun to be around tomorrow. Promise.” I offer.
And I’m not even lying when I say it.