(Strive 11:4)

I turned my plunger Purgator over in my hand, and saw that it had been newly augmented with a trigger on the handle. Bizarrely, it was also now equipped with what appeared to be a safety switch. Other than that, it looked almost the same as ever, gaudy and ridiculous, with its brass handle and gem-encrusted suction cup. Clearly, the Scroll of Fuse Weapon had combined my pellet gun and plunger. But what exactly did that entail?

I toggled the safety to the Fire setting, placed my finger on the trigger, and pressed it down.

With a thwip sound, the plunger’s cup ejected upward, spun through the air, and stuck to the ceiling of the arcade far above us. We all craned our necks back, dumbfounded, especially Artem and Selene, who’d never seen me use the thing before.

At first, I wondered how I’d get it back, but then I saw that the cup trailed an almost invisible thread behind it. As soon as I released the trigger, the line began to reel itself back in like a tape measure. But instead of the plunger cup returning to me, the handle yanked me up into the air.

The floor rushed away from me as I clung onto the plunger’s handle. The ceiling approached quickly, and I switched hands on the plunger to hastily sign Harden. Aura flared about me a moment before I slammed into the ceiling, with a speed that would’ve pancaked me.

“You okay up there?” called El, her voice small and far below.

Both of my hands were white-knuckled as I gripped Purgator’s haft. “Obviously not,” I groaned, as the ceiling started to blacken from my coat of flames. “Why does this keep happening to me?” I looked down, then back up again, and in a lower voice muttered, “I hate heights.”

The safety switch on the plunger could be toggled between Fire and Release. It seemed pretty clear what the second option was for, but dangling this far above the floor made me, it didn’t seem like a great idea. The ceiling suddenly sagged as it continued to burn.

“Y’all probably want to move,” I said.

“What?” bellowed Artem. “Speak up.”

“I said—”

There was a crack and a stretched-out moment of falling, and then I crashed down on top of a Galaga machine, turning it into scrap metal that immediately burst into flames. The others backed up as my heat spread through the room, setting grassy ornaments on fire.

“Be right back,” I said, as I ran out from the arcade, leaving a trail of smoke and flames. I dashed through the entrance cave and plunged through the waterfall to splash down with a cloud of steam in the rocky pool outside. Then, I waded out and went another few meters for good measure before I detonated.

With an enormous bang, an eruption of sand and rocks flew everywhere, and I ended up standing in a dug-out half-sphere, sand slowly pouring back in to bury me up to my knees. I sighed.

El popped out of the cave entrance and swam up next to me. “That was something else.”

“Sorry. This tail-end explosion is a real pain in the ass.” I paused. “Where are the others?”

“The Russian Hulk went to sleep. He says to be up by twenty. I don’t know where the lady is.”

“Twenty thousand on the Epoch timer, I guess.” I took it as a vote of confidence that they knew I’d be fine. “You should sleep, too. I wanted to practice with Purgator a bit more.”

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

“You know raccoons are nocturnal, right?” El twitched her whiskers. “What’s Purgator?”

“It’s not important. Never mind.”

“Suit yourself. Oh, by the way, there’s a back entrance to the resort. So you don’t have to get soaked every time.” She padded off across the sand.

Then I was alone, seemingly for the first time in a while, with only the occasional thwip of my plunger breaking the silence of the night. By the beach, the stars were twinned in the glassy ocean, making the sky seem twice as tall as it should’ve been.

I shot my plunger for a while before growing bored and heading over to the other side of the waterfall, stepping lightly to avoid waking any crabs. As El had said, there was another way in, a small aperture that led to a rocky tunnel. No pounding waterfall guarded this entrance, only dense shrubbery that obscured the opening.

Outside the passageway, Selene sat with her arms wrapped around her knees, chin tucked to her chest, her slender figure almost swallowed up by the moonless night. I thought about leaving her be, but she’d see me if I walked past to use the entrance. I approached and sat down beside her in the sand.

For a long time, we were in silence, and I didn’t think she would speak. She didn’t acknowledge my presence in any way, just stared out at the sea and the stars. Then she said something in a quiet voice.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that,” I said.

“You need to work on your finger independence,” Selene repeated.

“Um.” I had heard the words correctly the first time, but it was so out of left field that I hadn’t parsed them.

“Practice with me.” Selene turned to me with surprising intensity in her eyes. Her fingers flashed before me, and a small flame flickered. “Copy me. You don’t have that spell, but copy the motions.”

I did my best, signing laboriously. It wasn’t a spell I’d practiced. I formed the letters T-H-E-R-M-O-S. As expected, nothing happened, but Selene was looking at me oddly. “You can’t read my signs, can you?”

At some level, I’d known that others could do it. Mia had interrupted me midway through my usage of Examine. That was only two signs long. And after all, sign language was originally a medium of communication, so of course it was meant to be understood. It galled me to admit I couldn’t, though I told her so.

Selene simply nodded. “Then we’ll need to work on that too. For now, I’ll go slower. It’s Therme, by the way, not Thermos.”

I felt foolish. I’d relied on context clues and a faulty memory instead of using my eyes. Carefully, I formed the signs. Therme.

“Good, now this one. As fast as you can.” Cryos. She signed this one slowly for me, and I had an odd realization.

“Why American Sign Language?” I asked. “Isn’t there some other form of sign language native to where you’re from?”

Selene just shrugged. “You’d have to take that up with the one who designed this system. But it’s not so difficult to learn. For now, there’s no need to focus so much on the why. Let’s worry about the how first.”

I snapped back into focus. Cryos, I signed. She nodded and continued.

Glamour. Meteor. Indignation.

My fingers were moving a bit easier, and I wondered if my dexterity stat had anything to do with it. Or maybe those long-lost hours of tickling the ivories had been useful after all.

And so it went. It was like Spanish class dictation, and I found myself enjoying the game in spite of myself. After some time, she dropped her hand to her side. “Practice left-handed too,” she said. “It might come in handy someday.”

“Thank you,” I said. “You teach well.”

She gave me a smile that made my chest tighten. “Helping you helps me.” Then, she looked away, back toward the water.

I’d lost friends before. I knew something of grief and the relief that distraction could bring. I wished that I could help more, say something more. But everything I could think of, any insight or comfort, seemed comically small, almost insulting, in the face of her anguish. The one that you’re meant to cherish through good times and bad, in sickness and in health—for them to betray you and then to just be gone, not give you the satisfaction of explanation, argumentation, or even empty excuses. Hate them? Avenge them? I couldn’t imagine the storm of emotion going through her head, although her face gave me some hint of it.

So I did what I could, which was sit there by the well-hidden passage with Selene and her well-hidden pain. The sea was like glass, and together we watched the spinning of the mirrored stars, above and below, clockwise and counterclockwise, like an old cassette unwinding the night, unspooling the dawn.