Sublife Crisis - Chapter 27 (Patreon)

There's three more chapters after this one.

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“Do you ever worry that you’ll come back, and the between will have rearranged stuff on the shelves, and, esk, nothing is missing exactly but something is still missing, and you can never get it back, because what was stolen was the organic and deeply personal evolution of the state of things and there’s no way to get it back because you’ll always be chasing something that was lost instead of just enjoying the way things are going?”

The thought spills from me like a thunderfall of chaotic noise, speech with only the barest layer of thinking between the words and the feelings that drive them.  I’m teetering back in my chair, the thin black metal frame supporting my weight with the help of my tail hanging out of the back slot.  In a real world, it would have collapsed by now, but the universal resistance the between grants means I can smoothly rotate on one leg as I push and staring with my tail to hold myself there.

Across from me, Mark looks up from where he is slowly creating a pile of food-related meta items on the table as he goes through his inventory.  So young, and already so cluttered.  Though that’s also perhaps our collective faults.  After a certain point, random rewards don’t feel like things that are meaningful to hold onto, and the new guy became a willing receptacle for bonuses and extras.  And now Mark can’t remember which of [Cook], [Chef], [Gilded Barista], or [Sampler] he had available.  So far his pile includes none of those, but does have [Dice Round Vegetable Mastery III] which I quite honestly think is the most important if he’s going to try to be a kitchen apostle next life.

While I get distracted by the shimmering stack of intangible physical objects, Mark is looking at me like I’ve made use of the between’s personal editor to give myself a second head again.  “You.”  He accuses, pointing at me with a weirdly pointy iteration of [Cleaver Skills].  “Have the weirdest possible fears.”

“Do not!”  I protest, feeling for a tiny moment like I am a child again.  A real child, crossing their arms and frumping at their parent and defensively denying everything. “It’s reasonable around here!”

“You can just put the bookshelf back.”  Mark pointed out.  “And if you don’t know how to put it back, then it didn’t really matter, and however you do it this time will be its own story, because some kind of power that transcends death itself decided to mess with your sorting system.”  He looked over at the shelves and the handful of accrued texts.  “Of course I says ‘system’ with a bit of irony.”

I think Mark has missed my point entirely.  Of course there’s no actual system, that’s not the thing.  But we, all of us, put those books there.  Picked them up and messed with them, flipped through flawlessly worn paper, read them, fended off boredom with them, put them back in the wrong spots.  The way the mismatched shelves look now is the result of chaos that cannot be replicated without lying.

“It’d be something lost.”  I say in a voice so quiet I’m not sure if I’m trying to hold the words back so that the demons of the between won’t hear it and try to realize my fear.

Mark goes back to arranging aura layers into a pattern he finds acceptable enough, though he’s not ignoring me and he certainly heard me with his elegant little ears.  “I’m not saying nothing would be lost.”  He says as he tries to use his somewhat less elegant fingers to trace the shapes of his auras in the air and plan out a new shell in his mind.  I think he’s only half paying attention to me, but that’s still more than I’d ever ask from someone working on their build; I don’t believe in optimization, but I still believe in making things work and trying stuff out.  “What I mean is…” He pauses as he hits a dead end and stows one of the apparently unsatisfying aura layers back in his inventory.  “…I’m saying that every time you remake something, you’ll be making something new and special.  Because the scars from last time will change your approach.”

I watch him for a few hundred heartbeats.  The silent reminder of my finite time with my real family ticking away in my vision as he toys with the idea of either being a master chef, or just not having to order takeout so often.  Takeout in some worlds just isn’t a thing.  I’ve had to reinvent it three times, but it never took off enough before I died to make it easier for me to order in.  That is where a bunch of my business and finance perks come from, as well as one for evading the authorities, which I maintain doesn’t count, but the between doesn’t like arguing.

Something about what Mark said worries at stray threads of ideas.  I keep watching him, trying to remember something that feels like ancient history.  Which is to say; something in my life.  Every part of everything feels like ancient history to me.  Yesterday is sometimes just as far across the chasm of the past as a century ago, though every now and then, every yesterday catches up to me at once and I feel the weight of all that time.  Never in the between though.  Here, I only ever feel alive.

Midway through getting distracted staring at Mark’s broad shoulders and arms that could suplex a sunline bear, I get distracted instead watching Jules arrive through the archway that leads to our little courtyard, and then seeing Molly tackle him from the side in a way that I know he could have defended against.  I know because Ellin tries the same maneuver from his flank, hopping the bar in a smooth slide to throw herself at the mass of tentacles and red eyes, and getting promptly pinned down before she can slam into her target.  I barely get a “Hello Luri!” To go with Mark’s “And Maaaaar…” before Jules is dragged back into the hall he emerged from to be reunited with his love here in the between.

“Hi Jules!”  I call back.  “Have fun!”

Mark turns to watch the spectacle before shaking his head and turning back to his work.  But his motions are stiffer, his smile sadder, and the living energy he brings into every death is gone.

So I ask a question I’ve asked before.  “What was their name?”

“Hm?”  Mark doesn’t look up, which is how I know I’ve hit on something.

“Whoever changed you this life.  What was their name?”  I repeat.

Mark sighs and drops the meta item he’s holding.  For a few heartbeats, I think he might not answer at all.  He turns in his seat, watching over his shoulder as Ellin piles reward after reward from her notifications on the bar, digging for something that she wants to show off to Six.  I sit with him, still balancing on my tail and one chair leg, twisting back and forth like I’m impatient about getting to the endless expanse of time ahead of me.

He does look back eventually, because he’s Mark, and I know him very well.  “Ahri.”  He says.

“Ahri.  That sounds pleasant.”  A good name.  Simple, clean, but with a lot of potential infliction.  I’ve known enough Ahri’s in my lives that I can’t track the number anymore, but I don’t think I’ve hated any of them.  “What were they like?”

“Kind.  Quiet.  We were students together.  I was trying to get into veterinary medicine, but biology worked just differently enough there that I needed a refresher.  And also some credentials.”  Mark doesn’t smile as he talks, instead just watching me carefully.  “Then the invasion started.  And one day Ahri didn’t come home.  Siege missile took out his train.”

“Oh…” I stop playing with my chair, bringing myself down to sit properly and focus on Mark.  “I…”

But Mark keeps going.  “After Ahri, it was Phada.  He was less quiet, but just as kind.  You’d probably call him fiery if you wanted to be flattering at the moment.  The university was still trying to operate back then, and he was always looking for ways to help.  He was arrested for agitation, and I never saw him again.”  Mark takes a deep breath. “It was longer before the next one.  Her name was Remmy, and she wasn’t kind or quiet, and by that point the university tunnels were resistance bunkers and there weren’t many of us left.  After she died, it was Corta, and they were quiet, and just… empty.  We were all empty by then.”  Mark runs a finger around the glowbug centerpiece of the table as he talks, not adding heartbeats to it but just slowly tracing his skin across the glass jar.  “You know what the worst part is?”  He asks.

“I know what the worst part for me would be.”  I tell him honestly.  “But not for you.  What?”

“I… I know that I’ll forget them.”  Mark tells me.  “The names are like wounds, Luri.  I’m bleeding out little bits of love and compassion from each of them.  I’m sitting here fucking around with [Chef] abilities, but I don’t feel like making food for anyone in my next life.  I feel like getting a cowl and a knife and becoming The Crow.”

I tap my fingertips on the table.  “I don’t get that reference.  Is that like the Green Knight, or like the Green Knight?”

The question draws a long blink from Mark.  “What’s the difference?”

“I realize now as I say it that they come across the same.  Uh… a spooky figure that might not be a person and operates on some form of alternate morality but also has powers, versus some kind of fallen noble that goes around murdering for vengeance.”

“Oh.  The second one.”  Mark sighs and rubs at his neck.  “This doesn’t matter.  You see what I’m saying, stop… stop making it a game?  Please?”

I nod, my face serious.  I wasn’t trying to play around, really.  But I can reassure Mark of that later.  “So you’re worried about when you’ll forget?”  I ask softly.

“No.”  Mark says, with a hard bite to his words that I don’t hear from him often.  “I’m looking forward to it.  And it feels so painfully guilty to do.  I know I’ll forget.  I know the wounds will turn to scars, just like they always do, but I’ll be different.  What am I going to learn from this life?  Do you ever think about that when you come back here?  We get showered in prizes like we hit the big benny, but what do we learn?”

His voice has been getting louder slowly as he talks, until Mark is nearly yelling the last word.  Six and Ellin looked over our way at the sound, and I saw Ellin make a motion like she was asking if she should come join us.  I shrugged, and she swiped at her horns in agitation before deciding to sweep her pile of lucre off the bar and make her way between the mismatched chairs of Bastion’s to our table.

“I don’t know.”  I was saying to Mark as Ellin arrived and settled onto his shoulders without so much as moving him an inch, wordlessly trying to comfort the man.  “Sometimes I feel like the only thing I learn from a life is how much people can disappoint me.”  The words feel like a poison on my tongue, stinging and harming their way into the world.  “Sometimes I learn how bad things can get.  Sometimes I learn how bad I can get.”

“Kinda hard to think of you as a villain, heh?”  Ellin says from over Mark’s head.

“I mind controlled a world.”  I say.

Ellin nods.  “Yeah, and I love you for it.  All the power of a world and you decided to try to make people feel good about themselves and stop stabbing each other!”  She flicks her eyes up.  “I think.  That was a couple centuries ago, sub.”

Mark pushes her back, but Ellin just circles to drag a chair over.  Plush padded purple leather that’s eternally cracked and exposing foam that will never go bad.  “My point…” Mark trails off, as he realizes he doesn’t have a point.

So I tell him that.  “You don’t have a point.  You don’t need a point.”  My words are as kind as I can make them, even through the hard truth.  “You’re hurting because you’ve been hurt.  There’s no version of me that would tell you to ignore that.  But you will heal.  And… and I hope you’ll still be a Mark I love at the end of it.  Scars and all.”

“Bah.”  Ellin adds diplomatically.  “I’ll love you through the scars.  Scars are what make you a fighter.”

“I hate fighting.”  Mark says, with the voice that I use when I know I’ve got a stack of notifications from the between piled up that are all going to give me accolades for the people I’ve killed.

“Every good fighter hates fighting.”  Ellin tells him bluntly, and Mark looks over at her like he isn’t sure what to make of that, coming from the woman who seems to get stabbed in every life she lives.  “Oy, hey, I don’t like fighting.”  Ellin defends herself from the unspoken accusation.  “I just won’t like anyone own me.  You live enough lives, you get good at spotting the sources of injustice.  And we can kill those.  Maybe we should kill those.”

I fidget in my seat before standing, flicking my tail behind myself as I do.  “It’s in the label the between gives us.”  I offer.  “Intercessor.  What are we supposed to be doing if not interceding?”  I laugh at my own words, because if I took my own advice I’d probably live a lot differently.

Mark is similarly unconvinced.  “I just feel lost.”  He whispers to the two of us.  “They’re gone, and I’m not, and how is that fair?”

“Nothing about this is fair.”  Ellin shrugs, the motion of her shoulders so sharp it’s like she’s trying to cut the air for daring to be too close to her.  “What’re you gonna do about it?”

I stop pacing and look at her, while Mark keeps his eyes locked on the tabletop.  He seems more deep in thought than shocked, though.  Me, I’m just not used to the question.  It’s the one question I tend to avoid here in my infinite endless ongoing string of lifetimes.

“Maybe I should just get comfortable interceeding.”  Mark’s voice is halfway between defeated and determined.  “Maybe I shouldn’t let it happen again.  I mean, what do we have to lose?  It’s not like dying hurts me.”

“Oh, ashes, that’s a fuckin’ lie.”  Ellin laughs.  “Dying hurts me every time!”

“Well, you get stabbed every time.”  Mark tells her, a line of a smile starting to reform on his lips.

Ellin reaches over and places a long finger on those same lips.  “You should try it sometime.  Live a little!”  She instructs the man we love.

With a roll of his eyes, Mark starts collecting his project auras off the table, making to stand himself.  “All we do is live.”  He huffs.

“Then you don’t have a choice!  May as well lean into it!”  I mouth the words along with Ellin’s boisterous declaration.  I don’t know if she knows she’s repeating words spoken here before.  It’s been so long, I don’t even know if the memory is correct anymore.  Lifetimes and years and days wearing away my precision when it comes to what happened between us, and what happened in my dreams.

I feel like I’m feeling too much.  I feel like I need a drink.  And I say as much out loud, Six arrives at the table with a tray balanced with mathematical precision on his palm.  Tall glasses of a bubble filled pale pink liquid are placed before us.

“Typically,” Six explains, “this would be served in a curved horn.  Though the tradition of it being a literal horn ended hundreds of years before I was born to that world, so I would prefer to use shaped glass.  But we do not have malleable glass, so I choose to present this to you incorrectly.”  As I’ve always known him to speak, Six’s voice is mostly monotone; as flat and grey as his body is.  And yet, it takes no real effort to feel the passion for the art of inebriation.

Ellin holds hers up and looks through the bottom of the glass.  “How do I drink it?”  She asks, a similar sort of respect for the cultural motivators of alcohol.

“Slowly, in sips.”  Six says.  “The people of the world were especially susceptible to the secondary substance - a form of honey - used in the fermentation.  So it was a form of social drink that was often used for longer group gatherings and conversations.  A small sip, after each addition to the conversation.  Or rather, that is what the noble presented image was.  In reality, cheaper versions were imbibed regularly by the younger generations during bonding gatherings.”

I love Six so much, and I smile into my glass as I take a small sip, halfway between respect for how things have been and how things are.  No one else would turn an explanation of a drink that bursts across my tongue like a glittering lemon into a history lesson and an exploration of changing values.  Well, no one but Jules.  And sometimes Mark.  And occasionally Ellin or Molls or me really if I have a good story to tell.

“So this is your own creation?”  Mark asks, smiling as he takes his own, much more noble, sip.  After properly adding his weight to propelling the conversation.

“It is, in fact, not.”  Six says, and we all give him mock shocked looks as he settles into a chair along with us, the table becoming less lonely.  Mark and I raise eyebrows, Ellin curls her horns slightly in toward themselves, which I didn’t know she could do but looks decidedly strange.  “A lifetime is of course enough time to master brewing.”  Six tells us.  “But it was not what I wished to do.  And while much carries over, every world is different.”  We nod; we’ve all been there.  You can’t even trust that you won’t have to relearn how to breathe in a given life.  “So I simply paid someone who was more adept than myself to use my unorthodox method to create a batch.  Barrels are not what is desired for a true batch, but they agreed, so long as I swore an oath to never blame them.”

“Huh.”  Ellin says, downing a third of her cup.  “This is… weird.”  She looks up over our heads and reels slightly. “Ahshoy.  Kinda dizzy.”

“That happens when you drink more than a sip, yes.”  Six says with a tiny sip of his own, and a hum of mild appreciation.  “A good flavor.  My compliments to the brewer.”

In all likelihood, the brewer is long dead by now.  Maybe off to their own afterlife, maybe just now getting their own odd reward for the compliment.  Maybe we’ll never know, but I hate the word never, and so I choose to imagine that one day they’ll visit and meet Six and the two of them can complain about how the rest of us uncultured fools are drinking in the wrong pattern.

In time, before we’ve hammered away too many heartbeats, Jules and Molly come and join us, looking slightly more exhausted than when last I saw them.  Six adds two glasses to our table and refills the four already there, and we all simply sit together under the slowly clicking prop engine, sandy floor under our feet.  Or tentacles.  Or whatever Molly has.  Or…

“Ellin, do you have feet, or, like, talons?”  I ask as the first thing said in minutes, which gets a few smiles and sputter of laughter from Mark.  That last part matters a lot to me; Mark isn’t going to be okay, in the same way none of us are going to be okay.  We’re all going to get hurt over and over until we eventually break, but that doesn’t mean we can’t laugh at distractions in the meantime.

“Feet, you little gremlin.”  Ellin scowls at me.  “So hey, since we’re here.  And talking.”  Her angled eyes flick across the group as she talks, like she’s working herself up to say something.  “I’ve got a little story.”

“Ooh!  Ellin life stories!”  Molly clacks her claws across themselves in her form of applause.

Ellin laughs, setting her cup on the table still half full and sliding it away from herself with one long finger.  “Oy, uh… no.”  She says almost casually.  “Not from my life.”

“Not…” I catch on first, before the others say anything.  “From the last go round here.  When you went out exploring.”  My voice carries through the false summer afternoon air of the bar.   “You found something?”

“I found something.”  Ellin swipes a hand over her horns.  “I found something weird.  One of those things we kind of assumed we’d find after a life or two, but never showed up, you know?”  She looks like she’s waiting for us to interrupt her, but none of us do.  Jules rolls his cup between two tentacles, Molly lays her long jaw flat on the table surface to look up at Ellin, Mark and I just wait patiently.  Six looks like he’s waiting to say something before drinking again, shackled to tradition.  I won’t be bullied by a culture though, so I take a small drink and enjoy the pop of the odd beverage on my tongue.  “Alright, well.”  Ellin sucks in fake air to fake lungs. “I found a map.”

Molly and I raise our hands at the same time, eager students ready to prove ourselves.  Six overrides us by actually talking.  “We’ve found many maps.”  He points out, and then literally points to the wall under the library.  “We have a heatmap of the chargebeast spawns of Corrirriar right there.”

“Oy, I’m telling the story!  I get to be dramatic!”  Ellin’s anxiety shatters as her natural state of righteous indignation blasts through.  “Fine!  I’ll spell it out!  I found a map that showed the world I was gonna reincarnate into!”  The woman I love folds her arms across her chest, and I realize this is the closest I’ll probably ever see her to pouting.  “I was building up to it, you ass.”

Mark reacts first.  “Okay, that’s… really cool.  Right?”  He asks us all.  “I think that’s cool.  Did you get a door to it or something?”

“Nah, I didn’t have any marks on me.  I gave them all to some kid.”  Ellin shakes her head and then sits back down as the lingering dizziness from her drink flattens her.  “Whoooof.  Okay.  More of that please.”  She reaches back for her cup and pauses before sipping.  “I have no idea how to get back to it, I just know… it can happen.”

“We could know where we’re going.”  Molly says slowly.  “So we could prepare.  Know what to ‘pack’ for the trip.”

Jules curls his mobility tentacles up underneath himself, tightly wound springs of black leathery flesh pulling together into spirals like knots.  “There is something we never speak.”  He hums slowly.  “Because it is the one thing too painful to continually be denied.”  His triangular eyes spread out on his face, looking to each of us around the table.  “But we now know this can be true.  We know that we can influence our future lives through Mark’s [Coins]…” His near constant motion stills as he tightens in on himself in a tense ball.  “What we thought was impossible may not be.  We could… maybe… find a way to go… together.”

The word spoken is like a curse of the worst kind.  A tiny errant spark of hope that we’ve all long since stopped nurturing.  And I see the others frown or wince or turn away as they remember why we stopped talking about it.

I would have too, once upon a time.

I don’t know when I started changing.  Or maybe that’s stupid to say.  Maybe I never stopped changing.  Maybe I never will, and that’s what it means to be alive.  We die so fucking much, that I think we sometimes forget that we’re alive.

So my voice startles them a little.  “That sounds like it’d be a lot of fun.”  I say, sipping the pink fizzy honey thing that Six brought back to floor us all with.  “Probably not something we’ll have ready for a while, but I can see it.”  The casual tone, the easy acceptance, it catches my friends off guard.  My family turn to look at me like I’ve done the extra head thing again, and I smile over the rim of the inappropriately shaped cup.  “What?  You don’t think it’d be neat?  We could run a tavern together or something!  We’ve got the experience!  We can grow old and get sick of each other together, and then come back and laugh about it.”  I’m looking down into the still trapped bubbles in my glass as I speak.  “It doesn’t have to be something we bank on.  But yeah.  Jules is right, you know?  We know it can be done.  And you all know me.  I don’t like the word never.”

Mark quietly stands up, and I worry for a moment he’s about to run away.  But then he shifts to behind my chair, and leans forward to wrap a hug around my bare shoulders.  “Alright.”  He says after a while of nearly crushing me.  He doesn’t say anything else, just stands back up and breathes deeply before walking off to take some time to himself.

“Anyone else gonna be dramatic?”  Molly asks, and Jules uncurls just enough to bop her on the top of her furred head.  “What?!”  She demands.  “I’m not saying it like it’s a bad thing!  I was gonna be dramatic!”

I can’t help it.  I start laughing.  And then it picks up, with even Six joining us in a geometrically perfect chuckle.  From where he’s leaning on the black stone of the bar, Mark laughs too.  And for a moment, Bastion’s is filled with the sound of people who are either accepting a different version of their lives than they expected to have happen, or people having a manic breakdown.  Depending on your perspective.  Maybe a bit of both.

Then there is the sound of a door closing, and someone new steps in.  Not totally new, it’s a familiar face; Shevoy, the kid who isn’t a kid any longer, but is still younger by millenia than all of us, freezes in worry as he takes in the ongoing sounds that are staring to become the kind of gasping laughs you get when the joke only gets funnier the more you react to it.

“Did I come at a bad time?”  He asks during a pause.

It’s the funniest thing anyone has ever said to me.  I think it is for the others as well.  We laugh until we cry, before we’re even close to able to greet our new newly old young friend.