“They must have cheeped out on it, it looked kind of janky.” The green girl replied in her normal hissing whispery words, but this time Flower understood! She understood! It probably shouldn’t be surprising, that was the point of systems right? Translation, and with translation comes understanding!

“You can speak!” Flower exclaimed as she immediately turned and hugged the green girl.

“Of course I can talk, I’ve been talking all this time haven’t I? Rather you’re the one who just learned to talk my language aren’t you? So why is it me who gets credited with learning?” Her fanged mouth reprimanded, but their smiles and happiness were feeling so contagious it wouldn’t be surprising if the wind carried a smiling joy plague from them. No, actually she hoped that wasn’t a thing, it was hard to say with magic, but surely it wasn’t that wild was it?

“Oh oh! This is great, we can talk! What should we say, there’s so much! Oh, that one, what’s your name? Mine’s Flower!” She could finally think of her friend as something other than the green girl!

All of a sudden the green girl’s smile faded into a frown, her eyes serious. “That’s not your name.” She confidently said. “Was it that merchant? Did she do something?”

“What? How does everybody do that?” Flower exclaimed in shock.

“It’s” she trailed off “no, I guess it is important isn’t it? I can tell because of my, my heritage. My, um, betters” the word sounded bitter “are closely tied with names, they hold power and shouldn’t be casually sold, no matter what they offer you, so I can sort of feel it when you say the words. The more mainstream way of telling is with soul magic. So, did she, um, do anything?”

“No? Well, maybe, but that’s not about the story with my name, you see, before I met you I met a scary old man who asked for my name and-“

“You gave it to him?” She asked incredulously.

“Yes, I mean, that’s the polite thing to do right, but it’s ok because he said I can still use part of it.” Flower quickly tried to reassure her friend.

“Polite? Is it also polite to feed all your blood to vampires or walk into a hungry dragon’s mouth?”

“I. I don’t know, is it?” Flower asked, worried

“No!” her friend shouted before seeming to deflate with a sigh. “Here I was worried you’d sell something like that to the shady merchant and it turns out you had already given it away for free. Look, normally you only give part of your name, and maybe change the meaning when you give it. For example the middle of my name is ‘sings to vines’, but if I change the emphasis in sylvan it becomes ‘sings with vines”, which makes it harder to guess and not a lie if I tell people that’s my name, because it is, just not my full name. Also you never give people your name; you only give them permission to call you by it.” The green girl looked like she was starting to calm down as she explained, and slowly smiled as she said “Very well then, if you’re to be called Flower than you may call me Vine.”

“Oh wow! Our names match like sisters!” Flower exclaimed happily. “I always wanted a sister, but all I had was a dumb brother and” she cut off. It was weird; it felt like a lifetime ago, blurry and hard to place, had she come to terms with it? Had she forgotten? Why wasn’t she sad? Why wasn’t she panicked or disgusted or horrified thinking back to him? The answer seemed intuitive, she had cried her tears with Vine, she had sat with her thoughts in the dark, and she had found peace, but to move on after just a few days, wasn’t that too cold? Was she such a heartless person?

“Sisters huh?” Vine repeated, a complex expression on her face, but then strained lips turned back to a smile “Well, I couldn’t think of anyone in the whole world I’d rather have as a sister than you, but can I ask you one thing?”

“Oh my god, I’ve got a sister? And one as good as Vine at that! Best day ever! No, maybe yesterday, but yesterday was pretty shitty too, I mean I met Vine, which was great, but I started all wrong and there were monsters and we kept crying. Yes, today is the best day!”

“Flower, can I ask you something?” Vine repeated, pulling Flower’s attention back to her.

“Oh, sure sis, what is it?”

“Can we stay together forever?”

“Stay together forever?” Flower asked curiously.

“I mean um, as sisters, you know? I mean you smell of mortal youth and it’s just, I don’t want us to drift apart and hate each other over time, I don’t, I don’t want you to grow old and hate me. So can we, can we always stay close and never hate each other?”

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

Smell of mortal youth, now that was something to wrap her head around. “I mean, I guess I am still a child.” A mortal child, did Vine not age? Was that really important? Vine seemed to think it was important. At first Flower wanted to agree, but that might be rude. “To me we’re very close, and I can’t imagine why we’d drift apart.” but that was the problem wasn’t it? This was something important to Vine and she couldn’t even imagine it, so she tried. She imagined growing old, growing up, getting a job. Would that pull them apart? Would that make her hate Vine? Not really, they might be busy, but that wouldn’t make them hate each other; just spend less time together maybe? “We might not always have time to spend every moment together.” She admitted.

Vine waited anxiously, but nodded encouraging Flower to think through it all. What else could happen, maybe she’d get married and have a family? She’d seen that on television, friends getting in fights and hating each other because of a boy. It seemed strange, absurd as a thought, but maybe that’s how it works? She remembered seemingly nice kids in the past that she’d come to hate after they acted mean. “I guess it’s hard to never hate people.” She admitted. They had never seen each other again. No, they had, but they hadn’t talked. What did television say to do when that happens? “But if that happens we should kiss and make up right?” Yeah, maybe they’d have to give up on some things, or maybe lose to each other, but was that really a loss? She wanted to say she’d be happy for Vine if Vine beat her at something, but would she really? “Let’s try, let’s try our best to be happy for each other, okay?”

Vine smiled and hugged her so hard she couldn’t breathe, than there was a sudden snap of crunching bone and Vine quickly let go. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, are you alright?” She asked worriedly.

“I’m” Flower took a breath and slowly moved her back, than started looking around “fine?” She asked, uncertainly. Than they noticed the rabbits that were still in Vine’s hand, their necks had snapped. Vine laughed happily with relief while Flower smiled, feeling uneasy seeing death so close. She’d eaten meat before, but there was something different about seeing a dead animal.

Her stomach rumbled again. Looking up at the sky it was no longer early morning, how long had she been looking at the system? Vine passed her one of the rabbits. Flower stared at it for a moment before remembering “Oh yeah, I have a knife.” She’d never cut a rabbit before, but even she knew you don’t eat the skin. Wanting the knife made it appear in her hand. Setting the rabbit down she squatted over it and tentatively poked it to see how much force she’d need, but strangely the knife slipped in as if she were stabbing air instead of solid matter. Perhaps she was, she noticed in retrospect as the rabbit dissolved into dust around the knife.

“You’re bleeding.” Vine reminded, somewhat anxiously. That was a weird thing to say, of course she wasn’t; maybe there was rabbit blood? Looking closer however, she found the hand holding the knife was red with blood. Hastily dropping the knife she checked for wounds, but strangely there were none, just the blood on her hand and the bloody hand print on the knife handle. Poking her hand tentatively she still couldn’t find any cut, almost as if she’d just bleed out from her pores.

“psshavish pfekt ptssh…” a voice seemed to say. The language was familiar, but the voice was new, more monotone and disinterested, like a librarian who wanted to get back to their book. Just like with the old man however, the words made perfect sense to Flower. “Blood bonding host. System initiating. Registration complete. Sacrifice complete. Standardizing measures. Loading applicable tables. Checking soul connection. Error, soul connection weak. Detecting greater ritual structure. Error, ritual structure noncentered. Detecting ritual type. Error, ritual structure nonaplicable. Detecting world assessment, mid-low. Detecting auxiliary system, aligning directives, negotiating terms. Negotiation failed. Releasing threat, aligning directives, negotiating terms, negotiation successful. Tabulating credits. Retrieving options. You have one sacrifice credit; please choose from the following options. Strengthen soul connection zero of two thousand two hundred and fifty, Learn beginner ritual zero of five hundred, lesser conceal ritual evidence zero of seven hundred and fifty, obta- Error, soul connection insufficient.” The serpentine hissing went silent.

Flower wasn’t sure which was worse, the one that displayed things she couldn’t read, or the one that made it so that she fully understood a series of nonsense statements. Dimly she noticed the plink sound again. “Don’t tell me, is that…? Status.” Yes, the “notifications” rune had a pulsing glow again. Silently Flower leaned back against the stone arch, wiping any still wet blood onto the stone before she put her hands on her face, and came to terms with a very simple truth. “I’m hangry.” She said mournfully. “Which means I shouldn’t be dealing with any of this.”

Hearing a crunch beside her, she saw Vine with an entire rabbit head, ears and all, in her mouth, biting down on it with a sickening crunch, but, somehow, it seemed like she was using her mouth wrong? She was using her teeth to pry and rip, but unlike a human Vine didn’t have incisors. Rather, since they all pointed inwards it was exceedingly hard to pull anything out of her mouth once it went in, but it looked like she was trying to pull the rest of the rabbit back out by biting off the head and twisting the frail little body. Flower saw Vine’s teeth bend and twist with every jerk. Every now and again Vine would stop to suck on it and squeeze the body as if to force the blood out into her throat in between her attempts to dislodge the rabbit from its head. Then, suddenly, it was free, thick skin stretching and tearing, spine cleanly severed, muscles roughly torn.

Vine brought down the headless bloodless rabbit corpse and offered it to Flower. Even if she was hangry, that was offputting enough to make her hesitate, and even give a few glances to Vine to see if she was still, well, herself. The teeth had always been there, but it was quite another thing to see them used in such a gory display, but her friend’s smile still remained behind the blood. In fact a long serpentine tongue was slowly cleaning those up. “Can’t we at least cook it first?” She asked, pleadingly.