Sublife Crisis - Chapter 20 (Patreon)

“Oh!”  Mark exclaims in the middle of Ellin daintily trying to balance a notched piece of resin in the stylized shape of a leaf onto a similarly stylized branch.  “I got to ride a motorcycle for the first time!”

It has taken him six loops around the table of us playing Vyrd’s Arbor to think of a positive element from his last life.  Molly made it a requirement, something about how my own sorrowful infliction of memory had to be balanced out.  Which really, I thought was pretty unfair.  My life wasn’t sad, it just sort of… got out of hand in a few places.

By contrast, Mark’s life is pretty sad.  And since he already told us about his dogs, he had to think for a bit to come up with something positive to start with.

Vyrd’s Arbor is a dexterity game, though, and it was made by a species of orcs that I would bet half my soul evolved from raccoons.  This is the polite way of me saying that none of us are very good at it, even if it is a lot of fun to fail, having someone yell and slap the table when you’re perched on your toes and placing on a third tier branch is undesirable.  It’s also one of I think four games we have that are tree-themed, but that’s less important.

Ellin doesn’t even flinch.  But she does stop moving, locking every one of her newly created imaginary muscles in place as she freezes, nothing so much as twitching except her eyes as she flicks an iron glare in Mark’s direction.

Molly and Jules are catching up up in the library, actually talking and taking a look at the living piece of art that Jules brought back a couple lives ago, so it’s just me and Six who get to witness this drama.  Slowly, ever so slowly, Ellin tries to lower her hand back to delicately balance the game piece, moving with the kind of apprehension like she knows someone is going to interrupt her in a few seconds.

“Did you not previously reside on a world with combustion engines?”  Six asks.  “You have a quarter of the lives of Luri or myself, but you have had opportunities.”

I add to the problem, trying not to grin as Ellin grits her teeth in concentration.  “Also, also, Mark was a smuggler!  In one of those lives!  I remember this!”  It was a hundred subjective years ago or so, but it stands out to me.  He was talking about his wife, and being a florist, and how afraid he was of forgetting.  I choose to set that aside, to remember the important part for the sake of this conversation.  “You had to have gotten on a bike at some point.”

“First off, they didn’t do motorcycles in that world.”  Mark starts.  “Something about how gravity worked, it made balancing weird.  But also, I was a classy smuggler.  I wasn’t getting into chases with the law, tearing up the byways, I was-“

“Hang on, that’s exactly how you framed it!”  I squawk out in protest.

“I seem to remember you also saying that you were part of a roving band of misfits in your last life as well.  Did that one also have cars but lack velocipedes?”  Six inquires flatly.  I point a finger at Six, nodding in agreement.

Unamused, Mark just folds his arms. “I had other stuff going on.”  He grumbles.  “Do you wanna hear this story or not?”

“I think Ellin wants to finish her move first.”  My voice carries a sly lilt to it.

The multi-tiered spindly tree, constructed out of dozens of pieces that we’ve all been adding one by one, breaks in four places and clatters to the table with a noise like a house being demolished.  Ellin, still standing with her arm outstretched, takes a deep breath, and then lets her hand open, the single leaf piece adding one last plink to the noise of the loss.

“I’m going to throw you into one of Six’s barrels.”  Ellin vows an oath in a voice somewhere between ominous and deeply sexy.

“I’m both aroused and terrified.”  Mark says what we’re both thinking.  Though he’s probably a little more on the terrified side. “Wait, into as in, against the side of, or into as in you’re going to turn me into beer?”

“That is not how fermentation works.”  Six states, sipping the lemonade I brought him earlier and tipping the refurbished bottle toward Mark in punctuation.

Ellin stares at Mark for a while, before making a grumbling sigh and sitting back down to start sweeping up the resin pieces and splitting them back into piles for us.  “Just tell me about tha fucking motorcycle, yeh?”  She says as she shakes her head, frustration slowly being replaced by a little smile.

Looking a little sheepish, Mark leans over the arm of his rough hewn wood chair to reach out to her, and Ellin’s smile comes back in full force as he does so.  “Sorry.”  He mutters softly, before actually going into his story.  “So, the… wait, do we want to grab Molly and Jules? This was her idea anyway.”

I point upward.  “They’ve been lurking and watching us for a while.”  I tell him without looking.

Mark’s head tilting upward, and the somewhat surprised expression on his face, tell me I was right.  Our friends are probably directly over my head, staring down from the library.  “Okay, that’s… no, that’s about what I expect from them, sure.”  He chuckles and leans back in his seat.  “Okay.  So.”

“So motorcycles?”  Ellin prompts.

“Yeah!  Well, probably not what any of you are… Six did you call it a velocipede?… no, no, don’t answer.”  Mark shakes his head.  “More like a stripped down car than a built up bike.  Huge, thick wheels, and a lot of shock absorbers and suspension.  Really made for off-roading.  I didn’t build mine, but I’ll bet anything that when I check my notifications later I’ll have something for all the maintenance I had to learn.”

“Did you live in the prairie or something?”  Ellin asks.

“I didn’t live anywhere.  Refugee, remember?  Mass climate crisis.  Everyone was running from something.”  Mark shakes his head.  “It wasn’t… I don’t know how to describe this.  Have you ever lived on a world that’s ending? I know Ellin has.  But it doesn’t seem that common.”

I shrug, the pilot’s suit putting up the barest hint of resistance to my shoulders, reminding me that it’s there.  “A few.”  My answer is noncommittal.  Six just nods.

“Well, I don’t know what’s normal, but the one time I did, everything happened fast.  Like, one day, the cloudseeds fell, and people started dying, and it was like a wave.  Like the world got swallowed up.”  I remember this.  Mark was hesitant to share anything about that life.  Absolutely one of his worse memories.  We give him somber nods, trying not to get lost in our own bad memories.  “This, though?  This wasn’t like that at all.  This was… everything fell apart, but it did it slowly.  Social collapse on a time frame of decades.”  He sighs and tries to shrug, only to find Ellin’s hands on his shoulders, comforting.  “Farm yields went down, so food got more expensive, but there wasn’t mass starvation.  Places got too hot, but not enough to wipe everyone out, so cooler places got more expensive.  Fights started, but not wars.  And more and more, people just… left.  Why live somewhere that was going to kill you slowly?  If you didn’t own anything of value, it was easy to just pack up and get on the road.”

“To one of the better places?”  Molly asks, her head poking out between the wood rails overhead.  “Like a road trip, but with your life on the line?  That almost sounds fun…”

Mark gives a bitter chuckle.  “What better places?  Things were getting worse everywhere. That’s the point.  You ended up with more people traveling, fewer and fewer havens, less food, less power, less… everything.  It was like the whole world was quietly dying.  But there wasn’t anything to fight.  A few people turned warlord, and there were some mild bandit gangs, but… eh?   They were in the same situation as everyone else, and there were less than I expected.”

“So… what did you do?”  I’m curious, because he was talking about a motorcycle, and I’m not sure how we got to here from there.  “I don’t usually ask this, but, nothing from here would help?”

It’s not that I like to pretend the between doesn’t exist, or that I actively avoid using the upgrades.  I just try not to think of the powers as an integral part of our lives.  Or at least, I have been.  Trying to treat them more as… as small intercessions from a moment of luck, instead of things to plan around, or ask after.    Normally it’s Ellin or Jules asking about things people did with their powers, or Six and Mark discussing build ideas.

I’ve been staying out of it.  But, maybe, I’m changing a bit.

And clearly Mark notices it, but all he gives me is raised eyebrows and a little reassuring smile and nod before he shakes his head.  “It wasn’t any one thing.  Besides, I used up half my perk slots on [Cyles Of Romance And Caste].  And then all my ability weight on… uh… [Acting]…” He rubs the back of his head, looking incredibly embarrassed.

“Oh right, we talked about this!  Because Ellin was being a creepy child, right?”  I perk up.  “Did it work out?  I actually might try that, since I sort of… I don’t know how to be a kid anymore, either.”

Jules lets a very long mobility tentacle drape down from upstairs to pat me on the head.  “Oh dear Luri, I think you make an excellent child.”  He says, the smooth comfort of his vibrating voice making it take me a second to be insulted.

But I do get there.  “Hey!”

“Honestly it didn’t make much of a difference.”  Mark intercepts the squabble before it can start.  “A lot of the early stuff related to it is… short term?  One-off [Charisma] abilities that can get you through a single conversation or one good lie or something.  Being a kid is a long term responsibility.”  Something about how he phrases that makes me start giggling.  Or maybe that’s because I’ve cut my herbal lemonade with wine, the bottle is almost empty, and it’s helping me relax.  “Anyway, Luri, no.  I don’t think anything really tipped the life one way or another.  I just kind of wandered around looking for work.”

“And eventually adopted dogs.  And a motorcycle?”  Ellin asks.  “Which sounds very manly of you, truth.”

“I was a woman in that life.”  Mark comments, and Ellin throws her arms up in exasperation, getting an “Oof!” From him in reply as she practically launches off his shoulders.  Mark might be the newest of us, but Ellin is the one who seems to have kept the most concrete idea of gender norms between lives.  Which I find kinda bizarre, because Ellin seems to take delight in stabbing people on worlds that she defines as ‘too sexist’.  “And yeah, dogs.  One, at first, then a few more.  Then some puppies.  I tried to find them good homes, but there weren’t a lot of homes to go around, so I took care of them as best I could.  Hunted a little, did mechanic work for food; there were a lot of people traveling, like I said, and once I got good at repairs, there was always someone new on the road who was willing to pay.”  Mark sighs.

I don’t ask him how it ended.  None of us do.  He’s got the mood; the look that says that he doesn’t know if he wants to talk about it, the slump to his body that tells everyone that he didn’t really enjoy a lot of his time, but he pushed through it anyway, and sharing probably wouldn’t make him feel better, but that he might anyway in a bit.

“Hey!”  Molly’s voice exclaims, shortly before she lands on Ellin’s back.  “What’s the thing Mark said?  The cycle perk?  I’ve been gone, you have to tell me stuff!”

Ellin gleefully explains, even as she tries to shake the energetic kobold off of using her horns as a handhold.  “Mark had a threesome with a king and ended up with a perk that generates coins when he gets promoted.”  She says.

“That’s… none of that is true!”  Mark protests.

“Some of that is true.”  Six counters, and because he is Six, everyone believes him.  “Ellin is being comical, but not entirely incorrect.”

I shake my head at them as they banter back and forth, and stand up to collect some empty cups and bottles and go get more drinks for people.   I miss having food here; it’s been a long time since we’ve had snacks to go with board games.  As I head to the bar, Mark and Ellin argue behind me about checking his notifications to see if he got a coin.  Mark says he’s saving them for later, Ellin says she’s saving hers for later so Mark has to do it now, and it all turns into a circle of silly banter.

It’s a bit lovely, and a bit exhausting, and a bit like having a family.  A real one, a permanent one that will keep on not dying with me.

Molly follows me over to the bar after a while, taking a hopping path across some of the multitude of styles of chairs to reach a barstool.  I think she’s playing at not touching the floor, and I find her antics adorable.  Molly is good at making games out of everything.  “What’cha drinking?”   I inquire as she lands and spins once before leaning on the counter.

“Do we still have the stuff for a tropical storm?”  She asks with sparkles in her eyes.

I glance at the glass shelves behind me, bottles and Molly’s face reflected in the backing mirror of the bar.  “No.”  I state with a sigh.  “Also we’re missing fruit.  And, uh… the tiny jade spears?  Though I guess I could just use toothpicks but that seems lame, and doesn’t work without the fruit, and also we don’t have toothpicks.”

Molly sprawls her upper body across the counter, arms outstretched to me.  “Then I’ll take a…” She draws the word out, her long forked tongue lolling out of the front of her muzzle.  “Mmmmhh….”

I try to look like someone who is badly trying to look like a professional bartender, staring over her head with a mock stoic expression as she ponders the limited selection that we have here in Bastion’s.  I can’t even offer her bar snacks, we’re so tapped out of a lot of things; it’s not often that I’m the one wishing for a vendor to come through, but I think that today I’d tolerate one of the twisted semi-feral presences if I could buy some popping zel.

Eventually, Molly and I crack, and start laughing with each other.  The little kobold reaches out a claw for me to take, and I do, and she looks up at me with serious eyes that are still watering slightly.  “It’s good to have you back like this.”  She says softly.  And then, as is her way, gets immediately distracted from the emotional moment.  “Oh!  That reminds me!  I got a souvenir for this place!”

She raises her hands like she’s grabbing something, and plucks an item out of her inventory, before setting it on the counter between us.  It’s a glass jar, and a pretty big one.  Maybe four gallons, a copper banded screw on lid, and made of thick and slightly clouded glass, not that the durability matters as much here.  It’s what’s inside that I peer closely at, though.

Dozens of tiny little spots of light.  Not will o wisps or sprites though; no, each of them is a buzzing little insect body, putting off a bioluminescent glow.  A shimmering yellow or shocking orange, afterimages trailing after them as they flit around in the inside of the jar, sometimes landing on the outside. Or some of the sticks and leaves that fill the space.

“Aren’t they adorable?”  Molly asks, a fanged grin on her face as she presses her snout up to the jar on the other side of where I’m practically doing the same.  “You can feed them heartbeats to make more, though they fade over time.  Not alive, really, but… it’s a cute little lamp.  And a fun reminder for me.”  Her voice has a bittersweet tinge to it, and I look up like I want to ask her a question.  She waves a claw in the air between us.  “Someone I met when I was young.  We loved each other, and we caught lightbugs together every summer.  They’re gone now.  But now I won’t ever forget them.”  She states the last with iron certainty.

“I love it.”  I whisper.  “How about…” I look around.  Bastion’s needs more shelves.  Or shelves in general.  “How about in the middle of one of the tables?  Not the felt one, but maybe the round slate table?  A centerpiece and ambiance lighting all at once.”

“Perfect!”  Molly beams at me.  “You’re a good decorator, Luri.”

I look around at Bastion’s, with its rough wood, black glass and mirrored bar, tables of three different makes, metal utility stairs up to a library filled with books for twenty worlds, and wall hangings in just as many styles.  “You fucking liar.”  I don’t manage to keep my voice from breaking as I say the words.

Our laughter cuts off suddenly, when I see a line cut through the wall just to Molly’s side, and hear the familiar sound of a door opening.  Molly is still wiping at her eyes as she turns to see who’s come in, but I’ve already frozen, mirth suddenly gone, as a figure I haven’t seen in a hundred subjective years walks in.

He’s still just a kid.

The body is exactly as he left.  Blank white default clothing, ebon skin, whiskers sprouting from sharp cheeks over a flat line of a chin.  The young boy who I last saw two… three?… some lives ago.  He stares up at the hanging prop engine, eyes filled with wondrous tears as he takes in Bastion’s decor.

Then he sees me.  The kid takes a halting step, head tilting to the side like he’s trying to remember something long forgotten.  One footfall at a time, he approaches the bar, pausing only briefly to look at Molly and her kobold mutt body before he finally struggles up onto a barstool.  Moving like he doesn’t know how to be small anymore.

“Wh-“ he starts to say, then claps his hands over his mouth at the sound of his own voice.

“Hello!”  Molly exuberantly says, eager to welcome someone new.  “First time around?”  She spins on her barstool, a tail that looks a lot like my own wagging in a way mine definitely can’t.

The kid looks at her briefly, then fixes his eyes back on me. Slowly lowering his hands, he’s trembling slightly when he speaks.  “It wasn’t a dream, was it?”  He asks.

“No.”  I shake my head, the smallest motion as I gently set down the empty glass bottle I’ve been cleaning out in the hopes that this one sticks around and doesn’t return to the void.  We have a surprising lack of bottles around here.  “It wasn’t.”

“I died before.”  He states.

“Yup!  And again, just now.”  Molly unhelpfully tries to answer with a dipping nod of her scaled and furred head.  “It gets easier, if it’s any consolation.”

The kid is still staring at me.  “Your name was… Luri?  You… you… helped me.  You told me it was going to be better.”

I have a question that I’m a little terrified to know the answer to.  “Was it?”  My voice asks without my permission.

The haze of confusion drops away from the kid’s eyes, and he straightens up on the barstool.  His face, clearly unfamiliar to him but still subject to some instincts no matter how much the between makes things disconnected, cracks into a smile.  The coiled knot in my chest feels like it melts in relief as I get my answer.  “It was.  It… it was better, I think.  Was that a dream?”  He gives a strange look around the back of the bar, like he’s suddenly noticing that Bastion’s is a tavern.  “Just something nice before I pass on?”

“No, that was real.”  I clarify before Molly can say something abrupt again. “All our lives are.  As for passing on… well, we don’t really do that, either.  But I’m glad you enjoyed it.”

“My family, though…” He looks around, looking for the doors that aren’t there.  “Will they be here?  Will I get to see them?  And… no, no, I know I can change this body.  You showed me how.  I can… it’s been so long since this was me.  They wouldn’t recognize me if…”

Molly looks at me, her gleaming yellow eyes dilating into wide slits before she nervously looks back at the others.  The kobold inches away, before suddenly exploding into motion, clinging herself off her stool and away from the conversation at high speed to impact Jules halfway across the wide open room.

The kid and I watch her go before he turns back to me, voice steadying as he gets more familiar with it.  “Is she okay?”

“No, she feels guilty.”  I say.  “And even though it’s not our fault, I do too.”

“I don’t… follow.”

I sigh, a mask of sympathy on my face.  I’ve been here before, been in his place before.  When I was new, and then over and over and over again.  Every time I tried to love someone, I’ve been here before.  “There’s no easy way to tell you.  They aren’t coming.”  He looks at me, a haze of confusion coming back.  “Your family.  Anyone you knew.  Your old world.  They won’t follow you.  I don’t like the word never and the between is a big place but… but it doesn’t happen.  We haven’t once seen it happen.  They… they aren’t…” I wave my hands helplessly, for some reason thinking that all my experience would have let me make this conversation easier.  But no, of course not.  It just drives home to me how it can all feel so hopeless.

He stares into me, face covered in betrayal.  “I… no, no. That doesn’t make sense.  What happens to them when they die, then?”

“We don’t know.”  I whisper.  “We’ve never known.”

“That… but I… I did better this time!  I got to live!  And you’re telling me it didn’t mean anything?!”  Halfway between anger and fear is where his tone lands, an adult’s words with a child’s voice.  Not the strangest thing I’ve ever heard, but it still hurts.

The words aren’t a surprise.  They’re ones I’ve screamed before; at the walls, at myself, at the between.  At my friends.  But at least right now, this time, I know what I would have wanted to hear after my first second life.

I reach out a hand and set it on the bar between us, palm up, an offer of reassurance.  “Of course it mattered.”  I say with utter conviction.  Because it has to, I don’t add.  Because it would be so utterly cruel if it didn’t.  “You lived it, and you did your best, and everything you did was real.  Just because there’s a gap, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”

The kid - well, the person in a kid’s body - flinches as Mark drops onto the stool next to him.  “Took me some getting used to, too.”  He adds, making a motion like he expects me to serve him something.  I roll my eyes, but still flip a cup over in my palm and start filling it from what we have on tap while Mark talks.  “Luri’s right, though.  No one’s really gone if they changed you.  Even a little bit.”

“And, of course, our worlds tend to follow us home.  The trappings and decor of old lives and old memories are not so easily shaken off here in the between.” Jules rich voice and equally varied vocabulary adds to the conversation as he settles in at the end of the bar, his mobility tentacles moving with a little restraint as he has brought Molly along with him, whether she wants to be here or not.  “Hello again little one.”  Jules adds.  “I hope you found joy out among the world.”

“Either that or something exciting!”  Ellin throws in her thoughts.  She doesn’t sit with the others, instead circling behind the counter to wrap her arms around me.  I try to tap away her attempts at kissing my neck with a twitch of my head, but her horns make that hard.  “Or something very stupid.  Tha very stupid things are usually funny.”  The towering woman adds sagely.

Six sits on the other side of the kid.  “And if you didn’t” his keeps his voice quiet, the soft sound a counter to the lack of emotion in his words, “then you will always have another chance.”  He looks over at Mark, taking long gulps of the beer that Six himself brewed and brought back, and then makes an identical gesture to me.  He gets an identical eye roll, but I serve him too.

“But I…” the new kid’s voice cracks, his mouth moving silently as he stares at the polished black oak of the bar.  “I just… I… they…” His hands clench and open loosely as his vision loses focus.

I reach out and take one of his hands.  “Yeah.”  I say, everyone around me quietly nodding or sighing.  Or just being Six and silently drinking his beer with a look like he’s disappointed in himself.  “I know.  We all know.”

He looks up at me, with eyes that beg me to give him all the answers and fix everything and I just know that I can’t.  But he’s not actually a child, and he seems to realize that I’m not actually a goddess or a blessed dream or anything else with real power pretty quickly.  He gives a sigh, and slumps his shoulders, before glancing at Six, the golem holding his glass up to eye level and getting as close as he ever does to scowling at something.  “Can I have one of those?”  He asks.

“We can’t serve a kid beer!”  Ellin’s voice catches me so off guard that I bark a feral laugh out before I can stop myself.

The not-really kid gives a tiny wisp of a grin, taking his hand back and brushing at his shoulders before feeling the shape of his face.  Fingers twirl whiskers he probably hasn’t had for subjective years as he nods.  “Oh, yeah, that would be cruel.”  He can barely get the words out without a choke of something that’s part laugh, part sob.  “How do I…”

The rest of us pile marks and drops and crystallized abstracts onto the bar in front of him, a series of hands and one tentacle depositing the currencies of the between - familiar to us by now but certainly bizarre to a newcomer - onto the wood.  Jules gives him some advice, Ellin and Mark give more grounded advice that will end with fewer tentacles.  Molly offers enthusiastic encouragement.

He changes rapidly, as is the way of the between’s modification choices.  First taller, falling off his stool as he shoots upward.  His face changes, more effeminate, different eyes, a different shape to the nose.  But keeping the whiskers.  Longer hair, smaller ears, skin color lightening to something that looks like it’s secretly a very dark crimson.  The first set of white clothing from the between shifts with him, so it’s hard to tell much else, but as he finishes up, his hands come up to touch his face again.

“No wrinkles.”  I hear him mutter.

“You can add those in, if you want.”  Six says simply.  “There are several options.”

“No! No, I… I’ll get used to it.  I guess I don’t need to be old if I’m dead.”  The kid… the man… says.  He looks like he’s later in his life now, past the point when most people are ready to take on the world.  A little tired, a little worn down, but still healthy and hale.  Most people’s first new bodies are like this.  It’ll be later, one or two lives from now, when he’ll want his form to be younger, sharper.  “What… what do I call myself?”  He asks us.

“Up to you!”  I cheerfully smile as I fill a cup for him, and slide it across the bar, before I start pouring a round for everyone else as well.  “I stole mine from a piece of fiction in my third life that no one will ever get the reference for, but I assure you, it was very clever.”

“I just liked how mine sounded.”  Ellin leans on me again.  “Oy, you can’t just be normal about anything can you?”  Her voice mutters into my hair.  Of course I can.  But I don’t want to, and I’m dead, so I don’t have to.

The newly remade person looks down at his - I think his, I’ll ask later - beer, hand around the glass like if he lets go he’ll lose his grip on everything.  The foamy head of the lightly golden drink stares back, and the rest of us wait patiently.  It’s not like we lack for time to wait for a dramatic moment.  Eventually, he raises his cup to his lips, speaking before he takes a sip.  “I think I’d like to be called Shavoy for now.”

The rest of us drink with him, before slamming our cups down on the bar with varying levels of vigor.  “Welcome, Shavoy!”  Ellin declares.  “To the rest of your lives!”

Our voices echo the cheer.  Bittersweet, sorrowful, hopeful, angry, excited, and probably a thousand things besides.

I’m glad he had a good second chance at life.