“I don’t think they’re optimizers. Not the way you mean it, Luri.” Mark sighs as the five of us relax in the empty-again space of Bastion’s. We’re not anywhere in particular, or doing anything special, just lounging around and talking.
Rushing to try to compact as much time together as possible into our heartbeats just makes us resent it. We’ve tried before. It’s not worth it to us. We’ll feel like drunkenly sharing songs, or playing more cards later. Right now, it’s a casual conversation, while Jules naps and snores with an odd whine of a vibration that is… more pleasant to experience than it should be.
“I do love how I keep getting surprised.” I admit to Mark. “I mean, we’ve all met other people here in the between. This is just the first time we’ve met the same person twice at the same time.”
“They aren’t really the same person.” Ellin mutters into her cup of wine. I don’t know where she found it under the bar, but she doesn’t seem to be enjoying it at all, which makes me wonder why she’s drinking it at all. “They’re just faking it.”
I shrug, pulling my tail up to hold it in my lap and scratch at an itch where one of the plates meets the scales. “Does it matter? They’ve got forever to get it right. Sooner or later they’ll find their unity.”
“Their unity is unsettling.” Six monotones, sniffing his portion of the wine Ellin offered to share with him and carefully setting it back on the counter. “Why children?”
Mark perks up. “Oh, I did ask that! They said it was metaphorical of our place in the cosmic… thing. That we’re all children taking our first steps, in the grand scheme of affairs.”
“Ah, yes, a perfectly normal claim that we have an easy way to verify.” Six monotones.
I just roll my eyes. I’ve heard all this before in half the real lives I’ve lived. It seems like the common language of religion persists here in the between.
Not that I’m surprised; it’s certainly comfortable. Having an abstract goal that you can aim for that will give you a perfect final reward, and making that reward something intentionally unspecified and outside your understanding so you never have to think about it, is just… it sounds nice?
I’m not even trying to be sarcastic or dismissive. It really does just sound pleasant. If I thought that I could manage to do it myself, and not have some kind of emotional breakdown after a few lives, I might even try it. But I don’t actually believe it, and I think forcing myself to change how I think would have worse long term damage when I start questioning it later.
I’ve done it before. Not for a faith, but still. It wasn’t great. While I hold no belief that people are immutable, I didn’t really change my core self, and it was like there were two versions of me constantly having a fight in my thoughts.
But that’s not what we’re here for. “No theological snark!” I chastise Six. “We should get a plaque that says that.”
“We don’t even have a bed in this place that is, ostensibly, some kind of rest stop.” Ellin comments.
“Yeah, we only just got barrels. Which we can’t sleep on.” Mark comments as he rinses out our cups and stacks them behind the bar. “Thanks for handling the vendor, by the way. Those things freak me out.”
“Really? That freaks you out?” Ellin doesn’t sound chastising so much as she’s confused. Like it hadn’t occurred to her that someone might be unsettled by a thing made of floating folded wrought iron and ancient street lamps. “More than the weird twins?”
Mark shakes his head, and speaks with that voice that says that he’s worried about being too vulnerable, before he makes a decision to do it anyway. “They make me feel small.” He admits. “Not that, you know, it’s unearned.” A hand motions around Bastion’s, but I know what he’s really pointing at is the between beyond the false wood of the walls, and the endless number of worlds we’ve lived on beyond that, and the utter vastness of all things that we can’t even glimpse the outline of. “It’s not even how they look, it’s that they sell a million things.”
“This one had one point eight million, rounded for convenience.” Six states. I love how Six is willing to round the number, but then uses some of the breath he saved doing it to explain that he rounded the number. It’s just a quirk of my golem friend that makes me smile when he does it.
“Yeah, see, that’s what gets to me. Not the kids trying to make themself the perfect person.” Mark says with a glib humor that belies his unease. “Also the fact that they barely have a search index. It makes it feel like you’re supposed to get lost in there. Or that half of what we buy for ourselves is just random luck.”
Ellin raises her glass in a toast to him. “Oy, yes! I’m with you there, sexy man! How many secrets are buried in the miscellaneous section of the vendors?!” She slams her glass down and starts pouring more bitter wine into it. “We’ll never know.”
“Don’t say never.” I reply on reflex.
“Also stop getting drunk and calling me ‘sexy man’. I have a name.” Mark gripes.
Six gives him what I think is meant to be a reassuring pat on the arm. “You do. You chose it when you chose to sculpt your body.”
“Six, no, don’t encourage her.” Mark looks like he wants to hide under the bar.
“Okay, this is hilarious.” I speak in agreement with, but also past, Ellin’s lively laughter. “But Mark, go back to the start. What do you mean you don’t think they’re optimizers?”
He latches onto the conversational floatation device I’ve thrown him. “Okay, so, you say ‘optimize’ and you mean… at least I think you mean… the people who turn themselves into achievement machines, right?”
“Fuckers.” Ellin elocutes.
I nod like an excited dog. “What she said.”
“Right. Well, they’re just not doing that. They’re trying to achieve their idea of perfection, but they’re basically doing it… the same way we do?” Mark shrugs and flicks the towel he’s been drying cups with over his shoulder, the perfect image of a disgruntled bartender. We all smile at the small action. “They want to live forever as the best person, so they’re trying to build the best person. Calling that optimizing isn’t right, because they aren’t actually doing what the between incentivizes. They’ve set their own unrelated goal, and they’re working for it on their terms. It would be like saying that we’re optimizers because we sometimes talk about what copy of [Strike] we’re going to run, or if we want to intentionally seek out a specific profession to try. You all just bought that one perk that can spawn plants here, as an example, and we need to figure out who should take it. That’s not optimizing as a philosophy, it’s just… you know…”
“Playing the game.” Six says. An almost alien gentleness to his voice.
“Six?” I cock an eyebrow at him.
He makes a small hand motion, his round eyes still focused on our group. Six doesn’t fidget as much as I do. “When we sit down to share a game, we agree to engage with the game’s rules. Because even though there is no meaning to them outside the game, it makes the time we spend more pleasant to do so.”
“I hear ya!” Ellin slaps the bar. “It’s fun to go into lives with upgrades, as long as we’re treating the lives as mattering!”
Six nods at her. “Yes. Seeking to live good lives - or to win a board game - neither of them have stakes. Not in a way that matters to us. But that does not mean it is flawed to engage with the game.”
Mark hums as he rolls the thought over in his head. It’s one that I’ve grappled with for a while, though I rarely have people to talk it out with. “Wait, so, what are optimizers then, in this game analogy? Card counters?”
“Not cheaters, exactly. But… imagine if we sat to play Leaves and Branches, and it was possible for Ellin to secure victory six turns ago, but it has been thirty thousand heartbeats and the game is still continuing, because she is infuriating and wishes to drag it out for her own amusement.” Six suggests. Ellin has the good grace to look a little embarrassed at the comment, and I get the distinct impression this has happened before, perhaps while I was asleep.
I don’t remember it happening, but I’m really bad at Leaves and Branches, and so if a player could have won and didn’t, I might just not notice.
“Is now a bad time to tell everyone that I’ve spent at least one life with [Card Counting] [Gambler] [Falseluck] [Trick Card] [Marked Deck] and [Terror Of The Rivian Dice Hall] all slotted in some permutation or another?” Mark asks sheepishly.
“That is… no, Mark, I am using a metaphor.” I don’t think I’ve ever heard Six do a verbal double take before. This is great.
Though I do have a question. “Why did you want to be a gambler so bad?” I question Mark.
“Oh, I didn’t. This was my third and or fourth life, before we met. And I was a very good gambler in my second life, because I thought I was in some kind of purgatory, so I didn’t care if I lost. And then I had a bunch of gambling related upgrades.” He shrugs wide shoulders in a gesture that feels a lot less confident than I’m used to people who look like Mark being. That’s part of why I love him, though. It’s rare to find real open vulnerability, even here in the between where it’s harder to exploit. “I traded half the perks from that for a door a long time ago, though.”
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“Well, I don’t think you’re a problem.” I tell him reassuringly, half throwing myself over the bar to look up at his face from a different angle. “Six is right though. Or is helping me crystalize a thought, at least. I should be more careful with words. It’s not bad to plan, or to play the game of lives. It’s just bad to forget that what’s a game to us isn’t to everyone else.”
“Also to get bored.” Ellin points out. “Your career aversion thing, Luri. You’ve got that because you’re afraid of getting foxholed. You don’t want to feel locked into anything, right?”
I blink at Ellin as she rubs at one of her curved horns. “I wanna know where that word came from for you.” I tell her. “But later. Yeah, I don’t want to get funneled.”
Ellin gives a shrug, rolling her neck around as she does so. “I think it’s fine, though. What’s wrong with a life lived figuring out what you don’t want to do? Remember that time I was a blacksmith? I didn’t need upgrades to figure out I hated it!”
“But you… you did that for three lives. Every time you complained about making nails!” Mark stares at her with a baffled look on his face. “You could have stopped whenever you wanted!”
“Yes, but now I have a [Box Of Nails]!” Ellin declares. “And I don’t have to do it again if I don’t want to.”
I chuckle. But on a deeper level, Ellin’s words make me uncomfortable.
Intellectually, I know she’s right. What we do isn’t who we are, and we do have lifetimes to figure ourselves out. To learn what we do and don’t like. But I’m still terrified of getting wrapped up in a single path so much that I forget to actually live. I’m glad for my friend and her ability to do something she hates for subjective decades, then casually trade away the rewards for it, shrug, and move on.
But I don’t actually know if I could do the same. And that scares me.
“Well, whatever.” Mark snaps me out of it. “I’m still getting used to the idea of living with upgrades anyway. Even if I do start really planning, it’ll be a long time before I can do it in a meaningful way. Most of my plans are me coming up with bold ideas, then never doing them for some reason.”
“Yes.” Six shakes his head sadly. “I had planned to learn to fish.” The cryptic words have the rest of us looking at him with expectant stares. He barely turns his head down to meet my eyes from where I’m still laying on the bar. “Yes?” He asks.
“…And?” I try to prompt him.
“And I did not.” Six states. “Circumstances made it nonviable.”
“Six, I love you, but sometimes you’re infuriating.” Mark comments, leaning on the bar over me.
Six nods. “Luri tells me I add variety. You are welcome.”
“You made him like this?!” Ellin gasps at me. “Monster!”
“Technically I didn’t make him, that’s someone else’s responsibility.” I defend myself. “Also hey! Six is perfect! Just like you, you bully!” Ellin sputters at my words, the woman never having had an easy time accepting compliments. I’m waiting for her to come back from one of her lives with self esteem, but I kinda worry that she doesn’t seem to be doing that. Her worlds and lives are often violent, and while she has a confidence and a decorum that I know I can’t match, she always has this strangely durable sense that she isn’t valuable herself.
So I take opportunities to remind her that she matters to us. And then she’ll act like she hates it, but secretly feel good on the inside, and I’ll be satisfied for a bit while Ellin performatively blusters.
I know I’m a messed up person, but you stick enough years under anyone’s name, and they’ll learn a few tricks.
The conversation drifts for a little bit as we all try to pry Six’s story of failing to learn to fish out of him. I have an impression from how he described his last world that he just didn’t have access to a lot of bodies of water, but no one is sure, and he’s the best of us at being stoic. Jules wakes up halfway through the endeavor and joins our side.
Eventually, after multiple attempts at both rhetoric and bribery, we manage to extract the truth. Which is simply that Six got distracted, and his singleminded nature had him continually putting fishing at a lower priority than the things that caught his attention. It’s deeply anticlimactic, and by the time he answers I had been expecting to hear that the entire world he’d been on had lost all its rivers in some kind of orbital impact or something dramatic.
The process is still fun, though.
Time and heartbeats pass by in a warm flow. Not a blur, really; every moment of my time here is clear to me. I know the little conversations we’re having, and the shared touches, and even the occasional time when I work up the stomach to check another notification. I remember all of them, and it’s not like I’m not paying attention.
But there’s a rhythm to it that I’ve missed. My last life was lonely. More than simply the sorrow of knowing that you’d be leaving people behind; because everyone knows that, even if they aren’t joining us here. Instead it was just devoid of people, for most of it. And being back here, with people I’m familiar with, and growing more familiar with by the day, it’s not even that I’m falling into a routine.
It’s that, if there is to be a routine, it’s one that we’re constantly building and expanding on. And the process of constructing something together, even if it’s just this abstract, is emotionally satisfying.
I’m reading a book thousands of heartbeats later, one of our newer ones so it’s only for the third time, and trying to force myself comfortable in the chair I’ve taken downstairs, when Jules says something that makes me look up.
“I think this life, I am going to tell my parents.” His voice stills the room, all of us looking at him, the only sound the almost imperceptible buzz of the lamps, and the clicking of the overhead prop engine.
No one wants to tell him that never goes well. We don’t really talk about it most of the time, but we’ve all tried it. And it’s always made things worse.
“Are you sure?” Ellin, for once, doesn’t sound particularly prickly with her words. “Because I don’t wanna come back in a hundred years to see you all glum again.” Ah, nevermind. There it is.
“It would be dependent on the world, I admit.” Jules rearranges his eyes like he’s staring up at the ceiling in thought. “But it would be… oh, what is the word to describe it? I don’t wish to call it relaxing, as no life ever is in whole. But wouldn’t it be grand to have someone to not hide from?”
“Well yeah, that’s why I tell anyone I date for more than a year.” I offer to him. “But not parents. Especially you, Jules. What’re you going to tell them? ‘Ah, yes, I have lived many lives, and my true form is a very sexy squid thing. Now, may I assist with dinner, dearest parents? Also how much do tentacles costs in this world?’ You know how that ends.”
Jules flushes a strange blend of orange and grey at my imitation of his accent. “My good Luri, I do not sound like… Mark I can hear you laughing! Six, no, not you too!” Jules tries to wrap his face in his tentacles, but I can see his eyes peeking out. “Well. Hmph. Regardless, I wasn’t planning to reveal… all of myself. Simply to tell them I was an old soul in some way. Assuming there was no reason not to. I don’t fancy being executed a heretic again.”
I wince. We’ve all been there at some point. Those executions are never fun.
“It just seems like a great way to mess them up.” Mark idly sits surrounded by the translucent panes of information from the between, still trying to organize his aura, and still not actually putting that much mental energy into it. “Like, imagine if you had a kid, and as soon as they could talk, they told you they weren’t your kid. That’d fuck anyone up, I think.”
“And lying is somehow more moral?” Six asks.
“I do not know what the moral choice is.” Jules cuts in. “I do not think there is one. Though we lack the choice to be born, but we do not lack the choice in how we approach it. While there is no right answer, I would like, at least, to give my next parents the choice.”
“What if they’re assholes?” Ellin asks.
“Oh. Well in that case, I will assume I am some form of cosmic punishment.” Jules states, eyes shaped in cheerful diamonds.
Ellin cocks an eyebrow at him. “Really?”
“No.”
“Didn’t think so.”
I don’t add anything to the short exchange. Mostly because I don’t want to worry anyone by admitting that sometimes I do wonder if I, personally, am supposed to be some kind of universal answer to injustice. In some worlds, things like karma are more literal than others, but what if there is a method to where we’re put? What if trying to live a quiet life as a farmer is actually me denying the role of righting wrongs that I was put there for?
Of course, that’s about as easy to prove as saying that I was stuck on a world to cause wrongs in the first place. And just like that, those thoughts loop back into circular logic and an utter lack of understanding about our own existences.
“You know what?” I say, surprising even myself as I come to a conclusion. “If Jules is gonna do it, I think I will too.” The others look at me, and I shrug, tugging on the sleeves of the bathrobe. “It’s been a while since I’ve tried. And I kinda get where he’s coming from. So maybe it’ll go better this time. I’m smarter than last time, at least!”
“Hell, why not. I’m in.” Mark adds. I give him a raised eyebrow look, and he grins at me. “What? Why not, like you said! It’s a thing to try, right? I might slot a [Charisma] stacker ability though, just to help. Actually, does anyone have anything that confirms a truth? I feel like I saw one once, but I can’t find it in my inventory.”
“Oh, are we doing a group thing? Is this a bonding moment, eh?” Ellin adds a laugh, pounding once on the table with a fist. “We could make a bet on how it goes!”
“Absolutely not. You just heard Mark tell us how many ways he has to cheat.” Six reminds her. “But I am not averse to the attempt. I will join you all. Now, if that is settled, how many heartbeats do you all have remaining? I do not wish to rush us, but I believe if we begin now, we can comfortably enjoy another round of Encounter.”
My heart jumps and my eyes sparkle, and I see similar reactions from the others. It is just a game, after all, but it’s one we’re all sharing. Maybe if we can’t live our lives together, then experiencing a story on the same team is a close enough emulation that we can all be fairly easily convinced to try.
I help set up, while the others talk about different [Charisma] tied upgrades that might help us. I’m still not into the period of time here in the between when I will almost begrudgingly read the remainder of my notifications and hastily assemble my soul for the next life. But I listen in anyway, and consider what they’re saying.
Part of me is still terrified of losing myself to the conditioning that the between seems to be pushing. But…
It’s been forty lives. Forty one now, I think, unless I lost count. And maybe Six is right. Maybe what matters more is that we play the game, and throw ourselves into it. I hope my next parents won’t mind too much, but I am going to try my best, whatever that entails. And if they do mind, I’ll blame Jules and Six. I’m sure they’ll understand.
Halfway through covering our largest table in mercifully immortal cardboard and chits and decks of cards, I remember how setup of Encounter always goes, and escape to see if there’s something alcoholic enough to make me dizzy while Mark and Ellin restart their argument on including the module for advanced diplomacy rules.
We are building a familiarity, and a family. Right down to the increasingly stupid lines in the sand.