I reached into my inventory for two more canisters of oil and tossed them to Keratily. She lunged to catch them in midair, then winced in pain. “Wait, you mean the frail thing isn’t an act?” I asked. “I felt how strong you are. How can you be frail and strong at the same time?”

Keratily grimaced and lowered herself into her chair. “Frailty is relative, Sebastian. My strength far outweighs my durability, which means I have to be much more careful with every movement so as to not break myself with every idle motion. Stats can only do so much in changing that, and I can’t risk being seen as an armor addict like Okeria by Moricla’s devout.”

Okeria snorted at that. “Ya say ‘armor addict’ like I don’t gotta worry about being taken by the abyss every second I’m not protected by metal and magic.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t have made so many enemies, then.” Keratily retorted. “It will be bad enough when we have to present Sebastian as an armor addict. Juniper and myself will need to embody the far more… accepted image. But I’ve gotten off track. Okeria, may I see the list of ingredients you would be willing to part with?”

“Just… don’t be too harsh on it.” Okeria said as he summoned a small silver square with blue writing on it. He looked at it reluctantly, then handed it off to Jun who passed it to Keratily. “Don’t go wasting all of it just because I’m giving Sebastian here free reign of it, yeah?”

“Of course not, sweetie.” Keratily said, her eyes moving quickly as she read his list. “The oil won’t add much of anything if I tried to work it with ingredients that are a little too high-level, so those are safe from me. And I recognize that some of this is precious to your own advancement. I won’t touch that either. Everything else, however, I can’t guarantee its safety.”

Okeria grimaced, but nodded. “I guess that’s as good as I’m going ta get. Do ya need me ta make ya a table or something?”

Keratily smiled and stood from her chair. “That would be nice, thank you. This will take a while, and I will need Okeria’s help for a good long while, so you two can do whatever you want while we create these. Okeria, would you be a sweetie and put up another wall in this room? I don’t want to subject Juniper and Sebastian to the fumes this process will create.”

“Will do. See ya in a few long hours, ya two.” Okeria said as he stood, following Keratily to the other side of the room. “Thanks again for saving me, Sebastian. And for making sure I still got enough outta the signaleech ta make it worth it. I’ll make sure you’re repaid in kind when we get ta Rainbow Basin.”

I didn’t know what to make of that half-ominous promise. Before I had a chance to ask what the hell Okeria meant, a wall of silver erupted from the rocky floor and sealed away Okeria and Keratily. Jun and I had the doors out to the rest of the trawler and most of the furniture on our half, which meant comfort wouldn’t be a problem. I pressed my head back into the pillow and closed my eyes, but much to my disappointment I’d been fully rested by however long that little nap had lasted.

“How long was I asleep?”

Jun opened her interface before responding. “About three hours.” She said after nodding to herself. “I was messing with all of my equipment while you were out. I barely noticed how long it had been.”

That made me feel a little better. Restful sleep became something of a luxury when your recovery stat got too high. “Any idea how long it’ll take Keratily to finish up?”

“How would I know? I’ve known her for as long as you have.” Jun chuckled. She fidgeted with her hands for a moment while looking down, then swallowed hard and locked eyes with me. All four of hers. “Keratily wants me to marry someone important.”

I’d read and watched this story a hundred times back on earth. “Who cares what she wants? Do whatever the fuck you want and screw what she thinks.”

“That’s the problem.” Jun said slowly. “It’s not that she wants me to be with someone powerful, or rich, or a chosen, but someone important. Someone who’ll be able to protect me from what she thinks is rumbling down the horizon.”

I raised an eyebrow at that. The thought that Endra wasn’t going to be the only Embodiment to come down, but was just the first, was terrifying. Still, though, I couldn’t imagine that any staura that was Jun’s age would be able to protect her. If anything, it would be the opposite.

“I can’t imagine anyone your age being able to protect you. Especially not any of those recruits back at Walkalong.” I said with a snort of dismissal. “Even if Addia trains them all herself, I don’t see how they’d get stronger than either of us.”

“Right?” Jun said in exasperation. “That’s what’s bugging me about everything Rootia’s saying. She wants to protect me, but she won’t train me directly. She wants me to be safe, but she won’t give me shelter. Heavens above, she wants me to get married in less than a year so I can take someone else’s name.”

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

Something was off. Everything I’d learned about the staura told me that names were sacred to them. “Aren’t names super important to your people? Why would Keratily want you to take someone else’s?”

“The only reason I can make up is that the danger’s going to be directed at all the Keratilys out there.” Jun tapped herself on the chest. “Me included. But marrying away the Keratily name won’t stop someone from coming to kill me if they want to kill every Keratily out there. It makes no sense, especially not after she told me I didn’t have to fulfill the family obligation.”

“The family obligation? Wasn’t that just to come here to the all-world?” I asked. Was there more Jun hadn’t told me?

Jun crossed her arms and turned to stare at the partition that divided us from Keratily and Okeria. She stayed silent for a few long seconds, conflict plain on the half of her face that I could see. Whatever else this obligation consisted of, it obviously bothered her something fierce.

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.” I decided. And as I said it, I realized I really meant it. “You put a whole lot of trust in me, and now it’s my turn to trust you. Let’s go back to the dates Keratily wants to set up. If we can–”

“No, I think you need to know. Because you’re involved now.” Jun said with a shudder. “I didn’t know until I met Rootia the first time, either, so it’s not like I kept this from you since I first knew you. There’s… not a lot of good blood among the Keratilys. I thought that that would be left behind when I came here, but it didn’t. It was wishful thinking in the first place, but apparently it's even worse than I imagined.”

Jun shook her head sadly. “If I don’t pick a side or take another name, I’ll be targeted by both sides. Keratily can’t defend me for some gods forsaken reason, so the second I set foot outside of Rainbow Basin, I’ll either be recruited or killed outright.”

“That doesn’t sound like an obligation to me.” I pointed out.

“Right. It’s more like a violent family war.” Jun confirmed. “But that’s not the obligation. It’s a byproduct of years of fulfilling the obligation. We’re descendants of Moricla. Who’s only temple in this entire world is in Rainbow Basin. If we want to keep being Keratilys… our innocence needs to be shattered.”

“What the fuck does that mean?” I snarled, implications running through my mind at the horrible insinuation. “Because that means something very, very terrible back on earth.”

“And it means the same thing to us.” Jun confirmed with deadly seriousness. “Sexual assault. The loss of a loved one. Being manipulated and thrown out with a debt that might not be possible to be paid off. I’m not supposed to know that that’s what the obligation is. Because the obligation only says to send a kid to the all-world and have them seek out their family.”

“Motherfucking… that’s just fucking vile.” I spat, pushing myself to my feet so I could stare at the impromptu separation between Keratily and us. “And Keratily’s just doing nothing about it? Fucking why?”

“Because she’s old, powerful, and beyond hated. She only managed to come find me because I got lost in the hazard, or else I would’ve been…” Jun shuddered and hugged herself tight. “Abyss below, I wouldn’t have even known it was my own family that did it. The only people who know I’m a Keratily are the recruits I came here with, the people in this room, Addia’s chosen, and Endra. I could go into hiding, which is what Keratily wants me to do, but I have an awful feeling that Endra will tell both sides of my family who I am the second she knows it would hurt me.”

And that was wishful thinking, considering that Endra might have already spread the word to every Keratily out there. Not to mention that Keratily prime seemed to have taken a liking to Jun, which could only make things worse for her.

“Wasn’t there a ‘good’ faction of the Keratilys and a ‘bad’ faction?” I asked, half-remembering a conversation that I was pretty sure I remembered being on the outskirts of. “Why would they want to do anything horrible to you?”

“I don’t know.” Jun muttered. “Gods, I don’t know. But drown me for thinking that things might be better here than they were back home, right? How dare I have hope that my family weren’t all terrible people?” She laughed bitterly. “And now I have to choose between death and living a life I don’t want to live.”

Jun uncrossed her arms and let them hang at her sides. This wasn’t the same person I’d left to go kill a giant spider-rock. Something was very wrong here, and it seemed to be with the Keratilys as a whole. There had to be something I could do for her.

{Do you have any ideas for this?} I asked The End. I was in the middle of typing a clarifying message when The End’s answer came, and I could feel the disgust coming off of the plain text before me.

//JUNIPER’S FAMILY IS UNFORTUNATELY KNOWN TO ME.

//THEY ARE QUITE INFLUENTIAL AMONG THE STAURA, BUT I NEVER TOOK A DEEP ENOUGH LOOK INTO THEIR WORKINGS TO SEE THE ROT WITHIN.

//JUNIPER WILL BE SAFE FOR THE NEAR FUTURE, AS ENDRA’S DESCENT HAS SPARKED A CONTROVERSY WITHIN THE STAURA EMBODIMENTS; A LARGE AMOUNT OF WHOM ARE KERATILYS.

//YOU AND JUNIPER WILL SIMPLY HAVE TO BECOME IMPORTANT BY THE TIME ENDRA FALLS.

//SO IMPORTANT THAT NOBODY WILL VIEW HER AS A KERATILY, BUT AS A JUNIPER.

That made sense, but it also felt like an insurmountable task that The End was asking us to undertake. I knew that Persephonia and Keratily had made names for themselves, but was it something that could be done in a couple of months? Or less?

“Seb?” Jun asked with concern. “Did… it have anything to say?”

If I had any doubts that Jun could still see my interface, they were wiped away right then and there. “It did. It thinks we have a chance, but I don’t even know where we’d need to start. Maybe Nia’s inheritance can show us how to make names for ourselves.”