Sublife Crisis - Chapter 26 (Patreon)

Something, nothing, something again.

I don’t think any of us are so dead to the wonder and the vastness of it all that we don’t feel fear every time through.  The last time each life that eyes close, the final drops of blood, the finale of hearts and lungs and neurons giving out.  There’s a terror to it, each iteration.  Maybe not always the same terror, but always in the same acreage.

What if, this time, this is it?  What if there’s no between, and no local afterlife besides?  Not that we’ve ever verified any local afterlives existing, but what if anyway?

Or, sometimes, the inverse.  What if it’s all real, and it’s all going to happen again?  What if I never get to rest?

I’m mostly split from life to life.  Mark leans fear of death, but he’s still young.  Ellin and Jules are fear of forever, but I think it’s a temporary thing for them, a flash of anxiety every time that gets pushed away as they approach their next project.  I don’t know what Molly is, but Six is, unsurprisingly, firmly on team fear of death.  Ceaseless existence has never bothered him, even as his mind grew and his capacity for morose poetry expanded with it.

[Welcome back to the between, Intercessor.  1,222,050 heartbeats remain.  Prepare yourself.]

Well.  There’s a point of evidence for endless cycle, I suppose.  Though it’s not like I’d ever know if it went the other way.

And so few heartbeats.  Less than last time, but more than I’ve had to suffer under in the past.  That’s what I get for dying early, I suppose.  I’ve been spoiled by the treasure trove earned from brainwashing an entire world.

Finding myself laying in the smooth sheets of my perfectly made sunken bed, staring up at the pipe chandelier that is the one souvenir I keep in my room and not in Bastion’s, I take stock.

Scars?  Gone.  Limbs?  All there, which is a nice change.  Different skin, different eyes, both feeding me different sensations than I’m used to.  But I’ve done this before, and I adapt fast, especially as I focus on the feelings.

I’m a different color than I got used to over the last thirty three years.  I think I prefer myself as I am now.  Warm organic copper, instead of the kind of inoffensively pale green.

Dying one second and whole the next.  At least, subjectively, if we ignore the feeling that I’ve been waiting in the empty nothing for a very, very long time.  The remade and fake body is a comfortable shell to come back to.  I keep checking parts of it.  Fingertips?  Sensing properly.  Tongue?  No longer pierced.  I might pine for that for a little bit.  Tail?  Oh, I’ve missed this tail.  Scales and diamond plates are a reminder that I’m back…

Home.

Back home.

I’m dead and I’m home.

I sit up in my bed, wrapping slender arms around my knees as I settle my face against my limbs.

I’m trying to figure out when I started thinking that way.  Was it last life?  Checking yourself for mental alterations is hard, but I’ve got experience with it, and I want to make sure I’m safe before walking into Bastion’s.

This life was almost a refreshing diversion.  No depression, no suicidality, no dysmorphia, not living long enough to bring back memory decay.  But here I sit, curling up on myself, trying to figure out why the word home resonates so powerfully with me now.

I am, admittedly, a little paranoid.  After my conversation with Jules last time, and getting a sharp reminder of just how easy it is to start the slide into optimizer philosophy, I’ve been worried about every little change to myself.  To the point that I know it influenced decisions in my last life, in several ways.  Maybe I could have lived longer, if I weren’t so focused on it.  Been so directly concerned with regulating my own thoughts and behavior.

And now that little burst of relief at feeling like I could relax my guard in the between is gone, as I wonder why I am suddenly glad to be back.  Or maybe I’m just lying to myself; feigning ignorance when I already know damn well what the issue is.

I twist, using my single existing arm to prop myself up out of the bed and start to rise, before I realize why the maneuver feels awkward.  Doing it again with both arms, I stand, kick the sheets away, and accept the truth of it.

I’m thinking of Bastion’s as home, because it is.  Because I don’t belong anywhere else, and I never will again.  I can fake it, I can blend in, I can even enjoy being alive.  But at the end of all those moments of putting up a facade, I’ll still be back here, listening for Ellin’s footsteps, arguing with Mark, learning from Six, being mercilessly roasted by Jules, laughing with Molly.  And others, too, I’m sure, as change is inevitable.

With that existential crisis quickly wrapped up, I extract myself from the remainder of the sheets wrapped around my feet, and open a door.  The only door my room has that isn’t just dropping farther into the between.

I step through, close it behind me with a light clack of the latch, and find Bastion’s to be as welcoming as ever.

How welcoming it is can sometimes be an open question.  Today, it is as welcoming as finding Mark behind the bar, cooking something that smells like peppers, and Ellin and Molly hanging off the side of the metal stairs up to the library so that they can reach a chancer that has wandered in.

“Luri!”  Mark greets me, cheerfully, flipping the knife he’s using as a spatula into the air and letting it drop effortlessly into one of the loops of his dragonfeather toga.  His thick muscles get shown off as he spreads his arms to greet me.  “Put that away, before-!”

“Wow he really does tell that joke every time, doesn’t he?”  Molly’s high pitched voice calls down from where she’s scrambling to reposition as the chancer floats slightly away from the stairs and closer to the library’s railing.  “Mark, you have decades to come up with better comedy!  You can do it, we all believe in you!”  Her encouraging words are cut with a bark of exertion as the industrial pylons she calls legs shoot her upward at a vicious angle, letting her grab the edge of the library’s flooring and reach out with her other claw for the floating… thing.

Ellin, deprived of her catch, just huffs and arches her arms over her head as she takes the stairs.  The horned warrior could probably match Molly’s athleticism, but she holds back, probably so she doesn’t flatten the much smaller kobold.  “Oy, oy!  Hey Luri!  I’ll be right down to greet yah proper!”  She yells.

I nod at them, offering a tired smile as the dissonance between living and dead starts to catch up to me.  I don’t feel more tired than normal, but I also don’t feel mentally ready.  I grab a barstool, the black leather sticking to my newly made skin as I settle onto the seat and watch Mark cook.

“Drive it this way!”  I hear Molly yell at Ellin from behind me.

“You push it this way!”  Ellin snaps back, though there’s a playful undercurrent to her voice.

Mark and I make eye contact and both bite our lips as we hold back laughter.  There’s something ever so slightly magical about the moment, hearing our friends going through a self imposed and somewhat silly trial just over my shoulder.  “So, taking a bit before talking again?”  Mark asks me quietly.

I nod.  Conflicting desires play inside my chest as I do.  I want to speak now.  I want to say it’s a silly old habit that I only keep for the sake of being stubborn.  I want to just let myself change. Let myself become a new Luri, who talks to my friends when I get here and not after some self-imposed deadline. But that’s not the only thing I want, and I also still do yearn for the experience of seeing long lost companions eventually walk through those doors, and holding to my promise that my first words will be for them.

I don’t know how long one person can keep a promise.  Saying I’ll do it to the end of the between and beyond seems a little presumptuous, given how fragile I know my own ego can be.  But it’s at least worth an attempt; all it costs me is a little time, and time is the one thing that I seem to have an endless supply of.

“Alright.”  Mark nods and pulls a familiar old goblet out from under the counter, filling it with a pour from a shining glass bottle that he produces with a flourish before sliding my personal cup over to me.  “No hurry.  I’m here for at least a subjective octob.”  I cock an eyebrow at him, and Mark sighs.  “Week.”  He corrects.  “You ever get a world where society insists on being quirky?”

I don’t have the heart to tell him that his homeworld was the weird one.  So I just offer a peaceful grin, trying to keep the exhaustion out of my eyes, and then spin on my stool to watch Ellin and Molly have a go at accessing the chancer.

Chancers are - I think - between constructs like vendors or servicers.  They show up from time to time, though it can be a score of lives between them and while I really don’t want to do the mental labor of applying statistical models to my peaceful Bastion’s half-existence, I know they’re the rarest.

The one that’s here now looks like a curling spiral of gemstones that glitter with light cast from directions that don’t exist.  Arms of the writhing glinting galaxy curl outward across several axes, before intersecting each other and making something like a ball with attitude.  It makes the kind of noise that metal makes when it’s being cut apart with high pressure water, which is sort of an aggressive squeaking, except modulated in a song that’s almost pleasant.  And it floats.

This one specifically is floating in the open space over the tables, just close enough to the library’s wooden railing that Molly and Ellin think they can grab it and access its menu.  And maybe they can, too.  Chancer menus are far, far simpler than vendors or servicers.  Usually they just ask what you want to wager, and what odds you’re willing to accept.

As for why this particular one is playing tag with my friends, I couldn’t say.  It’s not like it’s possible to offend the between’s constructs.

I pause midway through a sip of the mixed wine Mark has poured for me.  I must be tired if I’m having thoughts about how something isn’t possible.  The things the between sends through its endless fractured spaces haven’t ever reacted to us, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be offended.  So maybe Ellin was particularly rude to this one.

What I can know is why they’re after it.

We come back to the between changed from our lives, most of the time.  Or we come back tired, or triumphant, or maybe a little fucked up.  But every time we come back, the between shoves all these rewards into our metaphorical hands.  Traits, perks, boons, auras, abilities, masteries… I’m forgetting at least one here, and it’s on the tip of my mind, and it’s irritating to not know.  It’s not important.

What is, is that we quickly end up as hoarders.  Different people handle it differently, but in our little family, there’s a habit of treating our stuff collectively.  Now, I’m not ever going to ask Ellin to borrow her ability that gives her some kind of fiat-backed edge whenever she’s having a bowel movement.  Because even after all these lives, I still have some standards.  But if I did ask, she’d lend it to me.  We swap resistances and small perks constantly when we need to fill a little hole in our blueprints, and personally, I think it’s fine.  Often times we’re shoring up protections against things that worry us, or trying to avoid repeating the same failure twice; pretty far from optimizer territory.

What we don’t do, though, is throw stuff away.  We hand out some of the stuff we find to new people, we trade with guests, we sell piles of redundant and useless aura layers to people merchants that always seem to have more marks than sense.  But we never throw anything out.  Partly because throwing things out is an ordeal that requires us to take it somewhere far away in the between and dump it and hope the meta-item doesn’t find its way back to us like they tend to do.  But also partly because it’s just hard to let go sometimes.

When a chancer arrives, it gives us a strange opportunity.  To clear out the cobwebs, sweep out the silt, and empty the inventory of things that we’ve never actually needed to help us remember.  But not just to throw it out.  Instead, it’s a gamble.  It might go away, but it also might change; become something new, a part of a story that doesn’t need to come from any living world, but from right here, from us as we really are and not as we end up stuck when we’re alive.

Gathering up those old meta-things, the perks from lives long gone and the aura layers we never found space for, dusting them off, and putting them into the great wheel of fate to see if something comes of them?  It’s a game and a ritual all at once.

It’s a signal that we’re willing to move on.  We’re still here, still alive, still growing.

And also, now maybe we’ll be able to find the proper [Jump] ability when Luri asks to borrow it for a life.  But you can’t find it, can you Jules?  Because you’ve unlocked over fifty different abilities that start with [Jeweler] or [Jungle], and you only ever alphabetized your inventory once, and then you gave Molly the tool you used for it, and then you lost an entire upgrade.

“Luri, are you muttering to your wine?”  Mark’s voice makes me jolt as I watch Ellin winding up to throw Molly like a torpedo in an arc across the widest side of the chancer.  “Are you okay?”

I want to tell him that of course I’m not, because I’m saving my first words for someone who might be coming.  But I’m tired, and distracted, and there’s a good chance that I am talking to myself again.  It was a really bad habit that I thought I broke lifetimes ago.  But maybe it’s resurfaced.

The funny thing is, no matter how old I get, I still feel young.  I still feel like me.  I’m just Luri, that’s all.  I don’t have special wisdom just for being around this long.  All I have is a bunch of weird tricks, and the knowledge of how to build a submarine.  And also I’ve had the time to learn how to be a little more emotionally open.  That’s all.

At no point has the between given me a reward that would help me turn off bad habits that I don’t like.  Which is actually kind of frustrating, because at some point, every one of us has accidentally picked up a gambling or scarring or social media compulsion that we needed to spend time cutting out again.  And a perk would have really helped there.

Mark has [Addiction Resistance VII], I know, which probably opens up a lot of fun opportunities for drug experimentation.  Jules has [Overcoming Is Liberation], which is a pseudo-quest that rewards him for breaking addictions, but doesn’t do anything about habits or compulsions, and doesn’t actually do anything about addictions either.  I’ve got…

Nothing, actually.  Because I loaned Mark mine, and then forgot about it.

That’s less important than everything else I’ve been thinking.  Also, if there is a chancer here, maybe I should shake the exhaustion out of my unreal skull, and find a handful of stuff in my own inventory to wager on it.  Do a little clearing of my own.

“Hello Luri.  Hello Mark.”  Six’s calming and placid tone would make me jolt if I were alive, potentially spilling the half full goblet I’m still holding in twisted fingers.  But I’m not, so I don’t have the same kind of fear reflex.  Or at least, that’s what I tell myself.

“Hey Six!”  Mark pokes something on the heat flat behind the bar with his spatula.  “Welcome back!  How-“

He is interrupted by a heavy, meaty whump as Molly collides with the rough and sandy wood, narrowly avoiding clipping the edge of a table and ruining our limited attempts at interior design.  The little kobold slides about ten feet, her fur and scales hopefully keeping her from too much pain.

A single claw pops up from her crumpled form, fingers splayed in a V.  “I’m okay!”  She yells into the floorboards.

“…how’re you doing this death?”  Mark turns back to Six like nothing has happened as Molly pulls herself to her feet and makes a dash for the wall, using shelves and hooks and lamps as handholds to reach the library again in seconds while Ellin is still doubled over with breathless laughter.  “Feeling alright?  Want to try testing how durable you are?”  He points his spatula up at the duo who are reevaluating how to get to the chancer.  It looks like Ellin is planning another throw.

“I believe I am marginally too tired for that, thank you Mark.”  Six says as he stops next to me, leaning in to wrap dull grey flesh around my upper body in a hug that is far more compassionate and warm than anyone meeting him for the first time would think he’s capable of.  “You seem tired too.”  Six says quietly.

I pat his arm, and lean into the hug.  Just letting myself feel loved for a moment, as a treat.

My last life wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t this.  It wasn’t comforting.  Maybe I should be embarrassed that all it takes is a few seconds of contact and a few understanding words to make me feel like I’m melting, but if that is what I should be, it will have to wait until later.

Six pulls back and looks at what Mark is doing.  “Ah, we have food again.”  He says, before pulling up the inventory the between has for us and looking for something.  “I have a gift to add.”

“You checked your bells already?”  Mark asks with an easy smile on his stupidly handsome face.  “You’re always more efficient than me.”

“No, though yes, I am, thank you.”  Six answers as he procures a small cloth sack.  “Last life I spent a number of marks of labor and life to add to my personal room a supply of topnuts.  It refreshes on each death, and I have brought them back to share.  Luri and Ellin said they missed snacks.”

I did miss snacks.  Living in a place like Bastion’s, a place that is obviously a bar of some kind, feels wrong without snacks.

Six offers me the open mouth of the bag and I snag one of the… did he call them topnuts?  I pop the emulation of a roasted morsel into my mouth, and enjoy the dark savory flavor as I hold back my desire to make a joke.

“Topnuts?”  Mark says with raised eyebrows.

“Mark, please.”  Six stops him, and then gestures a flat hand toward me.  “Let Luri make the joke, once their allotted time is up.”

Mark bites at a smile as he meets my eyes.  “Oh, yeah, that makes a lot more sense.”  He says, not knowing that Six is banking on my poor memory for jokes.  The golem probably thinks that he’s consigned this to the graveyard of humor, but the real joke is on him, because Ellin and Molly are here.  “So, we’re just waiting on Jules now, huh?”  Mark says.  “And… I guess anyone else?  Maybe the kid will drop by.  Or that elf.”

“I do like the elf.”  Six nods.

“How?”  Mark snorts a laugh.  “She never talks.  How can you like… oh, yeah, okay.  That checks out.”  He shakes his head at Six’s stare.  “Well.  Want a drink while we wait for-“

There is a blur of motion and another heavy thud, this time accompanied by a chair skidding across the floor and a table tipping sideways, spilling the tiny potted fern to the floor with a scattering of dirt that quickly returns to the void.

“I’m okay!”  Ellin groans unconvincingly.

“What are these two doing?”  Six asks.  “And yes, I will take one of what Luri has.”  I point up at the chancer, Six following with pale eyes.  He shakes his head and makes a waving gesture at Mark as he stands up and goes to help Ellin find her feet.  “Perhaps hold on the drink, Mark.  I will be back.”

“Six!  Hey!”  Ellin exclaims woozily as she gets to her feet and throws a quick hug around the golem.  “We’re working on a thing!”

“Yes, I see.”  Six says, following Ellin to the metal steps pinned to the wall.  “Would you like some help?”  He scoops up the fern as they pass and settles it back in its place on the table.

The chancer continues to rotate its galaxy of gems, spiral limbs floating without purpose or concern, just out of reach.

I like this chancer.  It feels like it’s being sassy.  The between is a lot of things, at a lot of times, but it’s never really felt fun to me.  We make our own fun, we make our own home and our own family and our own love.  But while the between provides things, it doesn’t ever even dip a finger on the scales of meaning or joy.

Maybe the things that I think are constructs, like the chancers, aren’t.  Or maybe they’re one of the ways the between has to express a little bit of levity.  Or maybe I’m reading too far into how it’s hovering just out of Ellin’s reach, and how Six is trying to wedge the metal post of a coffee table into the railing so they have a platform to leap from.

“That’s going to end badly.”  Mark comments, before he blinks and frowns.  “Or… no, I guess it’s not.”  He whispers.  “Is it?  Nothing ends badly here.”

In the corner of my vision, the unignorable count of my heartbeats hits a number that I was half waiting for, half dreading.  I sigh, and look at Mark with a long familiar sadness in my eyes.  “It never does, no.”  I say.  “Nothing ends here.  It just keeps going.”

He tries to smile at me, but it barely comes out at all.  “Oh, hey.”  Mark murmurs at me.

“Hey.”  I say, looking around the walls of Bastion’s.  “I… I don’t think they’re coming.”  I speak the words.  The old ritual, the old hurt.  Bleeding out the sorrow to try to let myself let go.

It almost works.

Mark sets a hand on the bar, and I lean back to reach a little behind myself and meet it.  “Do you think they ever will?”  He asks.  “Really.  Honestly.  Do you actually… are you still hoping?”

It hurts to think about.  Hurts to even consider.  There’s tears beading in my eyes by the time I answer him.  “I think… I think I’m still hoping.  But I don’t think…”

There is a crunch as something grey and heavy drops from the library and lands on the green felt surface of our big table.  Then it rolls sideways, and makes another bone-grinding slam as it hits the floor.

Mark and I both blink.  Any kind of morose emotional vulnerability banished in an instant.

“Uh…” We both say at the same time, looking at the lump on the floor.

Six extends an arm upward, fingers reaching for something to grab onto.  Then slumps backward.

“Should we… help?”  Mark asks, whatever he’s cooking starting to hiss and sizzle on the bar’s heat flat.

“I live.”  Six groans, with more emotion than I’ve ever heard from him before.

“He’s fine.”  I tell Mark.  I spin on my stool, feeling the cool air of Bastion’s on my skin, feeling the warm laughter from upstairs.  My goblet slides across the bar as I give it a light nudge.  “Can I get another?  I feel like it’ll go well with the show.”

Mark looks at me blankly for a few heartbeats.  Then he smiles, laughs, and nods as he looks at where Ellin is coming down the stairs to help Six up so they can all try again.  “Coming right up.”  He says.  “And Luri?  I missed you.”

“Thanks.”  I smile as I duck my head.  “I missed you too.”