Mark and Jules are sitting across from each other at the main table, eyes narrowed. Mark’s into soft almonds that blink on reflex, Jules’ into flattened red diamonds.
I’m not actually sure about most of the details of Jules’ body here. Are his eyes even eyes, or just convenient illumination on the flexible black skin he wears? Jules spends a huge chunk of his spare points trading for form adjustments or body modifications, and at this point, I’m not even sure if even he knows everything about what he is here in the between.
The two of them have been thinking for two hundred heartbeats, and I’m in the process of waiting for Ellin to lean into me and whisper that we should leave them alone to their weird game when Mark raises a finger up to tap at his nose and speaks.
“Okay. Okay, here’s one. It is early morning. You have ten minutes before you have to leave the house. You have eaten an oat and fruit bar, but have nothing to wash it down with except cold water. The light through the windows is grey, you haven’t put on socks yet, and you are standing alone on a hardwood floor in a house that doesn’t feel like yours anymore.”
“Old Hol’s shit, Mark.” Ellin’s words are a huffed breath of surprise.
Six folds his arms and approximates a glower. “I had assumed we were friends.”
I say nothing. I’m busy trying to rebuild the mental walls that were previously keeping a few lifetimes of the experience of primary school at bay. Mark’s words acting like something between a scalpel and a siege cannon to open up wounds I didn’t even know I was holding shut.
I can fucking taste what he described. Forget trying to convince people with optimism and hope to engage with their lives as a thing of value and joy. I’m just gonna get Mark to craft me more memetic weapons like that and go around trying to lobotomize anyone who slights me.
Jules doesn’t say anything, but he does roil a pair of his moving tentacles in an undulating motion that makes me think he’s doing his version of biting his tongue. Instead, he spends a hundred heartbeats studying Mark’s gambling face, and humming to himself. When he speaks, he draws the word out like he’s suspicious of his own thoughts. “Ffffffour. Four? Four.” Jules loops his tentacles over the table. “Yes. Four lives.”
“Dammit!” Mark throws his hands up. “How do you do that?!” His question isn’t so much a demand as it is an incredulous burst of disbelief. “We’ve known each other for, what, a subjective two or three years now, in all total? Tell me your secrets, you goddamn french octopus!”
“He’s not going to tell you.” Six, Ellin, and my own words all overlap, a triple echo of the same intent with different levels of delighted humor to each of our voices.
“It is a trade secret, my good friend.” Jules polishes his rubbery skin with a curled tentacle, eyes slanted up in satisfaction that somehow doesn’t seem smug. “And really, I couldn’t simply tell you. That would steal away the deepest satisfaction of discovering for yourself! After all, it isn’t as though you lack the time to learn.”
“I’m gonna run out of heartbeats sooner or later.” Mark says, and I see his eyes flick away from where I know his counter is; he refuses to look at it as often as he can when he catches himself.
I smirk, covering my mouth with the rim of the mug I’m sipping from. “You’ll be back.” I remind him. “Hone your skills out there in the worlds! Give Jules a run for his money when you get back!”
“Oh, that reminds me. Do pay up, friend.” Jules wobbles his central body back and forth as he unfurls a tentacle. Mark grumbles and makes a show of pursing his lips and scowling, but the man is fundamentally incapable of actually being mad at anyone. He pulls a meta-item out and drops something that looks like a weird iteration of a [Brachiation] into Jules’ waiting limb. “Thank you, thank you, and of course, I am always willing to play again!”
“Luri, how, exactly, am I supposed to learn how to guess how many lives an experience is from, when I’m alive?” Mark turns on me as he closes off his inventory. “Wait, actually, I forgot to ask since we got sidetracked for a week there! Did anyone meet another of us? Like… out?”
A subdued quiet comes down, and we all shake our heads. Or vibrate a no, in Jules’ case.
We don’t have a lot of overall goals, as a group. If we did, we’d probably be a little more organized than just throwing points into the pot to restock the bar and filling our shelves with board games we liked from past lives. We might even have some kind of group name, if we weren’t careful.
But we do have a few things we’re aiming for. Gradually, bit by bit. Things we’re on the lookout for, or prepared to take chances on. Beyond just the way we like to live our lives on the worlds we get tossed into.
Contact with real divinity, if it’s out there. Similarly, looking for life outside the worlds we’re born on; sometimes you’ll get an inhabited moon, or another world around the same sun, but never anything extrasolar, so we’re curious and keep our eyes peeled. Any other gaps in reality, like the between, or maybe some kind of way to jump between worlds.
And most importantly, and a little bit related to that last one, we’re looking for others like us.
Reincarnators, or transmigrations, or externals, eternals, immortals, endless, whatever. The five of us can’t even agree on what our designation is, which I suppose is good news for the part of me that doesn’t want us to give our social circle a name. We’d spend a subjective week arguing and then get distracted and forget.
The point is, we look for others like us, on worlds we land on.
We’ve never found anyone else, so we can’t claim to have a working strategy. But we keep trying. Looking for people who are a little too good at things, or motivated in bizarrely specific ways. People who sometimes say things that just don’t make sense. None of the leads have ever turned up an actual person like us, and it’s not as if there’s some force that keeps us from talking about our experience in the between when we’re alive. Usually it’s just someone vaguely neurodivergent, or with a great sense of timing, or really lucky. Once it was a serial killer, for me.
Actually that one was doubly disappointing. I’d thought I’d run across an optimizer getting started on trying to rack up [Murderer] or [Butcher Of Kin] achievements, and I’d spent a while planning out how to intercept and take them down. Only to learn that I was up against a much more mundane monster, and that the average human on that world lacked the capability to simply walk off an alpha strike that involved commercial grade demolition equipment.
The main reason we’re looking is because… because it gets lonely. Admitting it sometimes hurts, because it feels like it gives a bit of power to the almost cosmic despair that we’re constantly trying to fight back. But there is no shame in accepting it; it doesn’t take more than five or ten lives before you start to realize that you’re growing past what anyone you meet will ever really get to know. You can have friends and loves, family and foes, but there’s going to be a bit of a barrier when you would need to spend years just to catch them up on things you’ve done, and then have to leave them when you die.
Not even death, actually. Sometimes people just get separated. Circumstances pull you in different directions, geographically, and you end up not talking to a person you knew for a while. Which does deeply suck, yes, but it’s a bit worse when the more time passes, the more it feels like the people we meet in our worlds will never actually understand the whole of us.
Here, sitting in Bastion’s, in the between, the five of us have spent a billion heartbeats apiece just talking about our lives. All of them. We’ve shared triumphs and failures, we’re there for each other after every painful ending, we’re here for each other before every new beginning. We treat anecdotes like pretzels to go with a good board game, and we have no limits on learning about each other and absorbing the whole of who we all are.
I know these people better than I knew my thousand year father during one of my technically immortal lives. I know why Six keeps his affectations in speech and appearance and I know how many times he’s been married and the names of every child he’s left behind. I know about Jules’ near-constant body dysphoria in a way that only sharing hundreds of softly spoken pieces of poetry can accomplish. I know the source of Ellin’s comical hypocrisy, and I know how to crack it with a small touch to the right part of her body. I know what Mark’s first name was, and why he shuns it so utterly. I know how proficient all of them are as kissers.
When I’m with them, I am not alone. Because as much as I have fun pretending otherwise sometimes, I know they know just as much about me.
And in… I check before I can stop myself… in a little under nine hundred thousand heartbeats, I’ll be gone, and they’ll be somewhere else, and I’ll be alone again, no matter how many mortals surround me.
So yeah. We spend some time searching for people like us. Because if it happens even once, that means it could happen again. And if it can happen again, then perhaps we can make it happen.
It doesn’t really matter how many lives I go through, I’ve never really wanted to be isolated. Maybe that’ll change in the future. I doubt it, but then, I’ve been wrong before.
“Well, this got fucking depressing.” Ellin comments, shaking me from my thoughts. “Thanks Mark!”
“I’m about where I was before, really.” He replies. “Still reeling from being laser targeted by Jules over there.”
I smile as I stand up and stretch, enjoying the feeling of my body moving with no pain. Last life had a lot of aches buried deep in the bones, and this is a delightful reprieve before I go out and get back pain all over again. “Jules is both wise and powerful.” I snicker to myself.
Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.
“You’ve been saying that for ten lives now.” Six comments flatly. “Is there a reason?”
“I heard it a lot from a… friend? I think? And it stuck in my brain.” An emotional ache slips in as I realize I cannot remember who it came from, or if I could pick their face out of a crowd. “It amuses me!” I don’t let it drag me down. All language is a memorial to the dead, and this is no different. Except that it’s a little more personal.
“You only say it about Jules, or Ellin, though.” Mark protests as he starts clearing away this round of cups to take back to the bar. “Am I not wise and terrible?”
“Wise and powerful.” Six corrects automatically. “And no, you do not qualify. I regret that I am the one to inform you of this.”
“What?!” He looks at me with his puppy dog eyes. “Luri! Six is bullying me!”
I nod sagely. “This is why you’re not powerful.” I tell him, patting Mark on the chiseled muscle of his upper arm as he grumbles with good natured humor, playing the straight man to our jokes while we clean up.
I’m about to ask what we’re up to next, when the sound of a door opening and the roar of moving air interrupts us. A handful of cards from the top of one of the stacked decks we left on the table flutter away, only to be snatched out of the air by Ellin’s deft fingers, while on the other side of Bastion’s, a woman steps in.
She’s six feet tall, rail thin, with a face that looks like it was sliced from a gemstone and then given living flesh as an afterthought. Ears like throwing knives sticking up on either side of her head. She’s wearing armor, and has a bow slung at her side, and every part of that is irrelevant to the look of utter exhaustion on her face.
The sad elf looks around Bastion’s with a muted spark of curiosity in her eyes, before landing on the five of us. Her hand goes to her bow like she’s preparing for a fight, but none of us really have an interest in allowing for one, so it just won’t work anyway.
“Welcome in.” Mark says with an almost unreasonably perfect nod that would make him fought over to get hired in a high dining establishment. “Have a seat, you’re safe here, and someone will be with you shortly.” He adds as he passes by and takes our assorted cups and things behind the bar.
Well, it’s only fair he pawn the job off on one of us. He did say he’d be playing bartender this time, but that means we need someone to be a serving wench, I suppose. All good taverns need one, and I make sure my bathrobe is secured before I go to fill the role. This isn’t that sort of tavern. Yet. Not until Ellin caves to my suggestions and we can tip the majority vote.
“Hey there.” I say, sliding up to the smaller table as the elf sits herself down. All our stuff is mismatched, and this one is no exception. A pale white wood surface, but with a flourishing base of wrought metal that makes the thing a pain to move. We keep it off to the side, so we don’t have to think about it, and it’s where she’s chosen to sit. Far from everything, and a little bit obscured from the view upstairs. It’s where I’d sit if I were nervous, too. “What do you fancy today?”
“…you have a tail.” She says, which isn’t a drink order, but okay.
I look behind myself, seeing the scaled limb poking out from under my robe. “Huh. So I do.” I flash her a smile. “I’ve got lots of appendages, really.”
“What are you?”
“I’m Luri. Pleased to meet you.” I sketch a bow at her. The sad elf is not amused. But that’s okay. A lot of our guests aren’t interested in my jokes, and so my jokes are mostly for me, not them. But I do take pity on her. “I’m a between modified human, and I’m generally friendly.”
“Is that what this place is? Between?” She looks around at the walls of Bastion’s, mostly staring up at the prop engine slowly spinning and providing airflow.
“No. This is Bastion’s. The between is… this whole place. Have you been here before? Not to our little spot, but…” I give her a curious look. “Have you died before?”
“I think so.” She says, setting her bow on the table and looking down at her own hands. “I thought it was all a long dream.” Her words are a mutter.
I take pity on her. “How about I get you a lemonade, and you can have the table for as long as you need.” I say. “You don’t need it, but, well, it looks like you need it.”
“I… I died.” She says, looking up at me with eyes like cut emeralds. “Yes. I would like a…lemonade?”
“Coming right up.” I move away, and hear her behind me as she begins to repeat back the notifications she has started to open up. Kill and survival and lifespan achievements rolling in as she either doesn’t realize she’s speaking, or doesn’t care to hide it. When I make it to the bar, Mark already has a pitcher for me. “She’s not exactly new, but she’s confused. Elf things.” I shrug, but there’s a sadness in my voice.
Elves tend to live a very long time. If someone’s first life is an elf, it can take them several lives afterward before their mind in the between catches up to the fact that they aren’t just having a strange nap.
“I don’t wanna charge her.” Mark says.
“No, no, we should.” Ellin says, reclaiming a barstool near us. “I remember being that way. It’s hard, but you need something to focus on. Look, she’s still got her bow, she’s got the marks for it. It’ll help ground her.”
Ellin doesn’t offer personal insight like this very often, but when she does, I tend to trust her. It also matches what I sort of knew about how elves start out in the between, so it isn’t like she has to work to convince me. I take the pitcher and a thin glass cup over, and get ten points back in payment from a woman who blinks at me before paying, but doesn’t complain. Ellin’s right, it does seem to ground her; her eyes are a little more active as she takes a sip and puckers her mouth at the taste.
“She’s barely awake.” I sigh when I return to Mark. “I hope she’ll be okay.”
“All we can do is be here if she wants to talk.” He returns the sigh. “Also, that’s two wanders this cycle. Are we getting busier, or is it just-“
Whatever he is about to say is cut off by another door, this one on the other side of the room so they have a nice view of the bar and the glass shelves behind it as they enter. The soft smell of artificial pine comes in with the new arrivals, a pair of boys who could easily be twins. But around here in the between, are almost certainly something weirder.
They take seats at the bar like they’ve been here a million times, order something strong, and pay up in [Placement Firmament], which is an unexpected boon to our ability to keep the place going. Not that we were short on anything we actually needed for Bastion’s, but there’s a certain satisfaction to knowing it’ll be around for ten lives and not just three if we have to abandon the place.
The twins drink, and talk with one voice as they try to convince Mark and Ellin to convert to their religion of being the same person. They’re a bizarre form of optimizer; looking for the ultimate personality, as opposed to the ultimate set of between-given rewards and upgrades. I bail out of that one to check on the elf, and to fail to be surprised when yet another door opens.
Usually, the five of us are enough to attract one. But they come faster when we have guests, so I think they show up to gatherings quicker when you have more people. The thing that comes through the door is a vendor, and the door isn’t really the same as most between doors. It’s not for us, it’s for something halfway between a natural force and an administrator.
There’s a million and one things that you can convert your rewards into in the between, but a sizable portion of them aren’t available options just from the natural menus and selections that you have on your own. Vendors have seemingly random inventories of a variety of nonsense, both upgrades for our next lives, and creature comforts to stock the between with, and more besides. This one is shaped like a hateful nautilus mixed with a metal lamp, and has roughly a hundred thousand things on offer.
At the bar, Mark pours most of his drops and marks into Ellin’s hands as she rushes to join the rest of us approaching the thing and flicking open its shop window. Vendors rarely stick around for long, and we form a plan of attack as we approach.
I find myself assigned to looking through furniture, scrolling through overpriced lists of [Beds] looking for something that we can put upstairs without bankrupting ourselves. Here’s one that gives a bonus to [Agility] perks for each heartbeat slept in it, here’s one that gives a weird per-life ability to inflict crippling orgasms on a target for each sleep, both of these sound great, and cost more than I make in five lifetimes. I’m just looking for something that will let us sleep without having to have Six reassemble a hammock every cycle.
“I’ve got a room here!” Ellin says excitedly. “Space addition, it’s affordable, and-!” She cuts off and swears, and I know she’s found some stupid drawback. “Nevermind, I saw the number two, and didn’t realize the cost was in [True Achievement]”
I wince. We have precious little of that right now. I keep up my search, not knowing how long the vendor will be here. Something catches my eyes as I frantically put to use all the speed reading tricks I’ve learned in my lives; nestled here in the section that’s sort-of furniture, a two by two stack of barrels. It’s listed as a between decoration, and tether equipable.
Equipable items are the kind of thing you can take into a world with you. Somehow. Either they’ll show up like you’re destined for them, or you can summon them, or something like that. Most weapons here, like the elf’s bow, are usually equipable. Barrels were not what I was expecting. Tether equippable means that the item is almost like a part of you, and a whole lot of weird things that apply to you, like your auras, overlap onto it. They’re as rare as any of the weird things are here can be, but I’ve never seen one this cheap.
But we were thinking of doing some home brewing. And I don’t know if they’ll work, but it can’t hurt. And it costs me basically nothing. I shove thirty marks of labor at the vendor and give an exasperated grunt as the creature raises an arc of burning wrought iron to drop a small shelf with four heavy wooden barrels on it directly onto our floor with a loud thud.
I keep searching, but the Vendor isn’t staying for long, and following it as it drifts toward the far side of Bastion’s and then pops open one of its weird doors to slip out doesn’t actually buy me the time I need to get anything else.
“Dang. No bed.” I sigh. “You two get anything good?”
“I have acquired sixteen bottles of something that is labeled as [Mockery Spark Wine]. It is my estimation that this will advance our experimental tests to see if we can die of alcohol poisoning in the between.” Six says. Six’s jokes are my favorite.
Jules doesn’t have anything, and seems down about it. We all reassure him that it’s fine, and we’ll have more chances, before Ellin gives her own answer. Ellin picked up a perk, and we’ll have to figure out who to pass it off to. [Garden Retrieval] is a pseudo-quest, and it lets us generate half-alive plants here in the between if we satisfy its requirements while we live.
It’s been so long since we’ve had a splash of life here. She’s embarrassed at the cost, but Jules and I put that to rest quickly. Jules’ new bonsai tree is cute already, and I can’t wait to spend some lives accruing more tiny little bits of greenery to add to our home.
Our home. That thought that I’d been kind of avoiding. I think I said it out loud, going off how Six and Ellin are looking at me. “Yeah.” I add to the words I spoke without realizing. “Well. It is. Maybe we should stop pretending. Maybe it’s not forever. But Bastion’s is home right now.”
Ellin wraps me in a hug before we head back to rescue Mark from where he’s learning about a religious schism in a group of voluntary copies and begging us with his eyes to save him. Jules asks how I plan to move my own acquisition of furniture, and I suggest handing it off to Six to equip and see if whatever he brews in his next life he can bring back.
I make sure our new visitor is doing okay with her lemonade, too. She’s confused, and I think she was about to try to shoot the vendor. But she likes the drink, and is thankful to me.
I offer her a smile, and a warm hand to hold. She tells me her heartbeats are running out in a voice that says she doesn’t know what that means or where she is, and I tell her she hasn’t got anything to worry about in a voice I hope calms her down. I want her to be okay, and I make a wish that we’ll see her again.
It’s strange. You’d think that hope would be in short supply around here. But as I watch while Mark fails the most important role of bartender, which is to know how to kick people out of the bar when they won’t stop preaching, I find my spirits high. And my supply of hope, which I admit ebbs and flows, grows to match what I need.
Still haven’t found a bed though. But I suppose I’ve got enough hope to cover that, too.