Sublife Crisis - Chapter 28 (Patreon)

There’s an odd feeling when it comes to making new friends in the between.

Though realistically, there’s an odd feeling with making new friends while we’re alive, too.  I’m thousands of subjective years old, I’ve had dozens of childhood, hundreds of parents, the histories of unknown civilizations float in the part of the mind reserved for loosely keeping hold on things learned in forward school and then never used.  It’s a bit hard to make a ‘friend my age’ when I’m alive on a world, and not feel like I’m being weird.  I’ve seen things no one else could have, and likely never will, much as I hate the word.  I’ve walked on enough streets of alien cities to pave whole worlds.  It’s really, really hard to meet someone as a peer.

In the between, all those things are still true, but everyone else has not only done the same thing, they’ve also gotten slightly used to it.  Not bored, we do our best to not get bored.  And while I certainly feel tired, worn, weary, exhausted, drained, numb, empty, helpless, breaking, broken, and listless from time to time, I don’t think this endless life has ever made me bored.

Out here, wherever here isn’t, we’ve all lived and died at least a few times.  We’re experienced mortalitists.  There’s a connection that forms pretty quickly, enough to cross over a span of a lot of lived days.

It’s not a contest.  You might be relative to a baby in true age, compared to me, but it doesn’t really work that way.  We grow to a certain point, and then we keep growing, but it becomes a matter of detail.  Little changes, almost tiny changes.  Not huge leaps that make us unrecognizable to others.

I know all this.  It’s not just something I know, it’s something that’s personal to me.  Everyone who walks into Bastion’s and peacefully sits down to have a drink and share a story is a potential friend, a potential wandering khara in search of a roost.

But I’m still trying not to burst out into giggles at the novice enthusiasm that Shavoy tells his story with.

“…and there was this big mural there!  Like, across the whole wall!  I’d never seen anything quite like it.  The guide that… my… family was with said something about how the paint for it was the reason for the city’s trade position.  The… my sister kept clamoring to go back and watch it every day we were there.  And the whole city was like that!  Color everywhere.  Everything.  I thought…” he trails off in his recollection of a simple family vacation.  “I… I had thought…”

And all of a sudden, the rest of us around the young immortal watch something we all have to get used to.  An entire life catching up.  The weight of time suddenly making itself known.  Like carrying a backpack and not realizing how many rocks you stuffed in it until you are oh so tired.  Behind the bar, Mark and I stop polishing the glasses to the true clean state that the between doesn’t ever get them to and share a look that we’ve built up over moments between lifetimes together.

“You had thought you’d seen it all.”  Jules says in an almost nostalgic buzz.  One tentacle wraps around Shavoy’s shoulders gently, and the young man leans into the touch.  “You had thought that you were past being surprised.”

“I did.”  Shavoy suddenly sounds very old.  “I know my first time was cut short.  But I lived a whole life.  I thought I’d been well traveled, thought I’d tried it all.  And it took just three hauka of a new life to show me something I’d never seen.”

“Okay, I don’t wanna be that jerk.”  Molly starts, about to be that jerk.  “But can you convert that to years?”

Shavoy looks down at the kobold who’s flopped on her belly on the bar in front of Jules.  “What’s a year?”

That gets me to laugh.  “Years are the most common timekeeping macro chunk.”  I tell him as I pour him a glass of water from our infinite spout.  “The most common cycle chunk is a day, followed by a jump, and both of them are about a hundred thousand heartbeats.  A year is three to four hundred of those.”

The boy stares at me, and I see in his whiskers and amber eyes some of the true childish wonder mixed with fear that sparkled there when he first came to us.  “Girl, are you telling me I have to do math to have this conversation?”

Four people reach into their storage and in unison pull out [Intelligence] or [Basic Calculation] meta items and toss them onto the bar in front of Shavoy.

“It is easy to forget that most people have inadequate math skills.”  Six says, instead of actually helping.

I stick my tongue out at him, flicking the forked appendage as I scrunch up my face and he gives the closest thing to a smug smile that Six ever gives back.  “Don’t listen to him.”  I order before correcting to “Alright, don’t listen to him in this case.  Six likes math.  But the between offers a lot of workarounds.  I like this one!”  I tap a [Basic Calculation] skill splinter.

By the time Shavoy has been taught how to implant a skill splinter, and then how to back it with an inbound characteristic like [Intelligence], the group has turned to idle chatter.  He informs us that a hauka is about three years, so he was nine years old when his conception of himself was turned upside down, which sounds about right to me.  That’s when I tend to get that feeling in most of my lives too.

Molly is telling Jules about how she had to be a fish last life, and he’s petting her back lightly while Mark tries to figure out how to politely shove her carcass off the bar.  Ellin is flipping through her notifications looking for the one that’ll bring back a tiny plant.  Apparently her [Harvester] talent actually is weird enough that it brings back a small version of whatever plant she uses it on.  I find this hilarious, and imagine if my own ability to bring back one random book did the same thing.  Just the smallest possible little tomes.  Finger length textbooks.  Text you’d need to get Jules to read to you with his razor sharp eyes.

I’m giggling when another form sits down on a stool in front of me, and I look up, my own bright amethyst eyes meeting the living green of an elf who’s been here more times than I can count.

“Hello.”  I say with a smile, glad to see our old new friend again.  If Shavoy is young enough to have still not cleared a few key moments in our immortal existences, then the elf is… well, she also probably hasn’t.  But her first life was a long one.  She’s too old, not used to adapting to life after life, not born for it like someone who started as a human or orc would.  It’ll take her some time.

But then she surprises me.  Meeting my eyes and slowly letting a smile creep in.  “Hello.”  She whispers, a voice like the wind through the branches on a dry winter day.  “Are you real?”

I have a lot of thoughts about that question, but I choose to simplify for the moment.  “Yep.”  I answer as I duck under the counter, banking on her having developed object permanence by now, and try to find one of those jars of herbal lemonade we had a few lives ago.  I know there’s at least one, and I find the last one behind the bottle of suspicious poison.  “Here!  If you still like it.”  The others shift without needing to be asked, opening up a little space.  Even Shavoy, though Mark does offer the new kid a quick explanation for why they’re putting an extra barstool between our conversation.

We try not to spook people who might be too fragile.

“Oh.”  The elf says as she looks down at the drink, ears like lances pointing upward as she tilts her head.  She reaches out a scarred arm, only pausing briefly to consider the pattern of marks on her skin before she wraps it around the bottle.  “Am I real?”  She asks with a waver.

“Also yes.”  I say.  “Are you having an easier time thinking since we last met?”  I speak quietly but firmly.

“I am.  I almost feel… no, I don’t know.  But I am.”  It’s the longest sentence she’s ever said to me directly.

I nod and pour myself a cup of something that smells lethally alcoholic from a small clay urn.  “You died.  A long time ago, most likely.  And then you were reborn, and died again, and again.  At least a few times.”

“…dreams…” She whispers.

“Not dreams.”  I correct.  “They would seem that way to you, and not remembering them is no sin.  Your first life was long, compared to most mortal lifetimes, wasn’t it?”

“We… the people of the… the… I can’t remember.  Why can’t I remember?  We lived for an epoch.  Each of us expiring only when our tethered species extincted.”

“You can’t remember because you just lived several lives not meant to contain the knowledge of an immortal.  Your head is going to feel fuzzy, you’ll find thinking to be too fast, like you’re on a runaway sled, and you won’t know things that you feel in your heart should be obvious.”  I tell her as compassionately as I can.  “You’re going to lose a lot of the details.  It’s painful, but there’s no way around it.  Lives as long as yours are rare, and you’ll spend more and more time pressed into whatever you are reborn as.  It should get easier now that you’re waking up though.”

She holds the jar of lemonade like a talisman.  “Why?”  She asks.

“We don’t know.”

“When does it stop?”

“We don’t know.”

“Did I do something wrong?”  She says, and her willowy voice cracks.  Shattering into a sob as she asks the question that too many people have asked me over the endless years.

“No.”  I possibly lie, reaching out to wrap my own hand around hers.  She almost flinches back from the contact, but lets me settle my skin to hers; she is cool and rough, like the bark of an ancient tree, and her pale complexion is a contrast against my own bronze coloration.  “This isn’t a punishment or a reward.  It’s not for a reason.  It is neither natural, nor unnatural.  It simply is.  It’s just the between.  It’s just how we live now.”

And something in that sentence reaches her, and her eyes meet mine again, and she nods as if she understands.  And maybe she does; a life of tens of thousands of years tied to an ecosystem, she must have a lot of experience with things that “just are”.

Her gaze stays far away.  Not unfocused, not unaware, but like she is looking into next week from a hundred miles away.  But when she does eventually speak, it’s like she’s broken through something that was holding her back.  “I could be the elf of the between.”  She states.

It’s as good a life goal as anything else.  If anything, it seems like she’s accomplished something that I’m still working on.  Which doesn’t make me jealous at all.

“Heeeeeey.”  Mark’s word ends in an abrupt spike in his voice that coincides with him finishing his slide up against my naked flank.  A warm hand engulfs my shoulder, and I reflexively lean back into him before realizing that might not be something he’d welcome after his outpouring about his last life.  But if it bothers him, he doesn’t comment on it, instead just smiling toothily at our new elf guest.  “We’re moving over to the big table.  Gonna play random notification storytime with Shavoy, try to teach by example.  Want to come join us?”

I do.  And after making a passionate attempt to explain what it is about storytelling that resonates in me, the elf agrees to join us.  I think I didn’t have to explain anything, and I might have sapped some of the magic from it by trying.  But either way, she settles in at the table next to me, claiming the chair of living wood and stone that we always avoid because it’s a little too alive sometimes.

“Cups!”  Molly demands as soon as Mark and I are sitting, and getting exasperated groans from both of us as we push back out of the chairs we’ve been left in unison.  “Hey, this is only my second or third time back, and we’ve only been here for ten thousand heartbeats or something!  I wanna do the thing, and the thing requires our cups!”

“I know, I just didn’t want to stand up.”  I complain.  As designated bartender for this time around, it’s my job.  And Mark helps, because he’s Mark.  I could have made Molly do it, but she’s curled up on the sand pillows half buried under Jules’ tentacles and she looks too comfortable to disturb.

An old goblet for me.  A kiln fired clay mug with a steel straw for Molly.  A coconut shell with a much more loopy and less metal straw for Mark.  Etched ceremonial basin for Six.  Glass stein for Jules.  And of course, a frosted blue glass dinner glass for Ellin.

I love how Ellin’s special cup is one that was almost certainly mass produced.

“Do I get a cup?”  Shavoy asks, his whiskers flicking as he looks around the table.

“Of course of course, but it’s a boring cup.”  Jules’ buzzing laugh draws a smile from the young immortal, even as I am adding a perfectly boring thick glass tumbler to his spot at the table and filling it with whatever is in the bottle Mark gave me.  “For each of us, our personal vessel is something utterly meaningless.”

“Really?”

“No.”  Jules annihilates the poor question that walked into his obvious trap.  “They are hardly artifacts of deep memory, but they are all mementos.  Sometimes not even our own.  Nothing special, and yet…”

I finally make it back to my seat, cool metal rapidly warmed by bare skin as I pour my own glass.  “It’s also just something silly we do.”  I say, sipping from my goblet like I’m a Prince of Decadence.  Something I haven’t been for a long, long time.  “But that is neither here or where!  It’s storytime!  Ellin, go!”

Ellin shoots to her feet, the white wrappings around her arms trailing like an afterimage as she snaps upright and flicks open her list of waiting demands for attention from the between.  Running fingers over the display with her eyes closed like a musician, she stabs outward and selects something, before cracking one eye and then reading whatever she’s just hit.

“Oh!”  She says, and then her shoulders droop slightly and she cocks her head to the side.  “Oh.  Hoy.  How’s am I supposed to…” I recognize the expression of someone in this game of ours who’s just gotten a trickle of marks of labor for having spent too much time weeding rows of crops.  “Alright, fine.”  Ellin huffs.  “Spent apparently too much of that life as an apprentice to an apothecary.  Which the between calls being a ‘junior pharmacist’, and in’t that weird?”

“No?”  Mark raises his hand like he’s in a particularly badly designed school.  “That’s what that is.  That’s like whenever you do enough bricklaying and it calls you a mason.  The between is lazy.”

Shavoy’s head snaps around the table, his long whiskers bobbing in the air.  “Are we allowed to say that?”  He whispers.

“The between doesn’t give a shit.”  Ellin rapidly informs him.  “Ah, whatever.  A short tale of my menial labor.”  She thinks for a second, scratching at one of her horns while she muses.  “One time a ged robbed us at blade point, and my master wouldn’t let me stab ehm, and she just handed over a bunch of doses.  And then only told me later that the only thing she gave up were laxatives, and a little of our coin.  We never saw that ged again, so I guess it worked.”

“Ellin.”  Jules slowly runs a tentacle down the part of his core where his glowing eye slits are.  “Why do all of your stories involve a certain scatalogical humor?”

“Cause I’m hilarious.”  Ellin answers.

“All of them?”  Shavoy whispers in my direction.

I nod knowingly.  “Almost all of them.  Ellin has a dedication to her horrible, wretched craft.”

“Hey!”  My friend and love tries to glare at me through a smile that lights up her face when she looks my way, and matches the one I’m wearing as I watch her.  “Whatever, that’s my story.  Six, you go next, your lives are more fun.”

The golem stands as Ellin drops back down, both of them drinking in unison, setting their glasses down at the same moment before Six flicks his own display from the between and pins something that I’m certain isn’t actually random with a finger.  “Ah, good.”  He says as he reads.  “My last life was an Information Age society by the time of my death, non-standard human, with a fairly basic warring nations geopolitical landscape.”  He folds one hand over the other as he begins talking like a professor giving a lecture.  I think I’ve mentioned it before, but I love Six’s history lessons.  “For a time, I worked as a teacher at a well regarded academy-“

“I knew it.”  I mutter.

“Luri, please.”  Six doesn’t exactly smile at me, but I can feel the faint amusement he puts off sometimes.  “My tenure as a teacher was rather long, to the point that many students began to form legends around me.  Conspiracies and shadowy rumors as to my true nature, often in direct relation to when I handed down poor assessments.  There was one student I remember, a truly exemplary young lady who would have made a fine journalist, who went to great lengths to verify or disprove the claims about myself.  She once outfitted my office with a number of geometric ritual symbols while I was on vacation, to test if any of them would have an effect.  Ambitious, really it was.”

Mark and I raise our hands at the same time, and Six points at me with all the calm gravitas I’m sure he learned in his time as a teacher.   “Sorry, hi, Luri here, for the between newssheet.  What did you say the unfounded rumors about you were?”

“I did not”  Six says, closing in on something like being smug, “use the word unfounded.”  He turns back to the table.  “I was an exceptional history teacher, especially as the academy survived for long centuries and I became the only living expert of the history that was being taught.  Of course, a select few knew of my nature, but it became something of a game for me to recommend the students who truly learned of who I was to the journalism program.”

“I like this story.”  The elf next to me whispers.  She is curled up with her knees up against her chest, one hand holding the cup we gave her balanced on a single finger, her eyes fixed on Six.

Ellin just huffs.  “Dammit, Six got to be a vampire and I got to be a doctor.  That’s not fair!”

A buzzing laugh from Jules cuts in.   “Ellin, darling, none of this is fair.  Weren’t you listening to Luri earlier?”

Her resigned “No.” is like a shot to my heart.

“Hey!”  I protest.

Six stops our antics.  “Perhaps now that we have a pair of examples, Shavoy would like to try?”  He gestures to the new kid.  Only a couple hundred years old, Shavoy is a baby compared to the rest of us.

Shavoy nods and stands awkwardly, looking for all the world like someone the teacher just called on to give a speech in front of the class.  I raise a glass to him, while Molly offers what I’m sure she thinks are reassuring words.  “Yeah!  Show off what you’ve got!”

“Dear, you’re not helping.”  Jules wraps a tentacle around her, pulling her back to the sand pillows.

Molly looks confused. “Helping?”

Something about it draws a chuckle from Shavoy, and for a tiny moment, I can see him as the old man that he grew up to be across two lives.  “Well, I may as well take my turn before I have to head out, right?  Okay.  Like this, yes?”  He taps something in the air with a claw, and then flicks his hand up and down before landing it on another glowing line of words.  “And then a story about…”

A banner of dull red and blue cloth lands on the table.  Well, the middle of it does, the other twenty feet of the narrow strip of dyed and woven cloth flops across Jules and Molly on one side, and thuds into the sandy wooden floor on the other.  Ellin, Mark and I all set our various drinking apparatus back in unison from where we’d yoinked them into the air as the memento spawned.

Shavoy stares at it like it’s a ghost.  “What…” he starts to say before picking up his simple cup and slamming back the whole drink.  I consider telling him that it won’t help; it never does when a memory follows you home.  “This is…”

The others give him some appropriate silence.  Even Molly as she claws her way out from under her new blanket.  I shoot him a comforting smile.  “This happens sometimes.”  I tell the new kid.  “Do you want to tell us about it?”

“…when we were in the city of blossoms.  That place I was talking about earlier.  My little sister wanted to see one of the murals up close.”  He’s still staring at the fabric, running a hand across it and getting his dewclaws snagged in the material.  Slowly, Shavoy draws a line around the woven image of a hawk in gold thread.  “I went along.  To keep her safe, I figured.  There were so many little things I felt… I felt too old to do, does that make sense?”

“You’ll get over that soon enough.”  Ellin tells him, for once without a trace of sarcasm in her voice.

“I don’t see how.”  Shavoy’s whiskers twitch.  “But it meant I was on the ground when she went climbing the off limits ladders and carved steps.  And it meant I got to see when she fell.”  I wince, prepared to hear a tragedy, but he’s still smiling.  “Is part of being old being paranoid?  Because I had already made a plan for what I’d do when she slipped.  I ripped a declaration in cloth out from the wall, and it didn’t work perfectly and she got tangled in it on the way down.  It wasn’t like in the movies from a whole lifetime ago.  But tangled up wasn’t hitting the stone, and my sister lived.”  He pulls a part of the banner up in a bundle, and holds it close.  “This one.  This banner.  Or is it?  How could it be?”  There are tears in the edges of his amber eyes.

“We never know.”  Mark mutters.  “If it’s a copy, or an echo, or the actual thing.  We… there might be a way, someday.  But for now, we don’t know.”

“Do you need a moment?”  Ellin asks, looking away like she doesn’t want someone’s early earnest sorrow to be a show.  “We can give you some space.”

“No, no.”  Shavoy takes a deep breath, smelling the fragrance of the cloth as he slides part of it across our table and into a pile on the floor.  “I’m… I am good.  I am.  Somehow, I think, this makes it real, doesn’t it?  Life was more than just a dream.  There was someone else there who needed me, and she got to live her whole life after this moment because of what I did.  I think that means it mattered.”

Jules offers Shavoy an orbit of triangular eyes.  “No matter what happens, our lives always matter to someone.  Even if only ourselves.  Remember that you are someone too; it can be easy to forget, especially as early in your journey as you are.”

Shavoy laughs, a wet sound that’s almost a happy sob, before he shakes his head and starts rolling up the banner of cloth.  No one tells him that he can just store it in his inventory, because this makes it more real.  It also makes us all have to move our glasses around to avoid having them slapped off the table by the very long tapestry.  “Well, that’s my story.  Who wants to go next?”  He gets the words out around the smile and the tears.  “The new… oh.”

I look next to me, at the least comfortable chair in Bastion’s, to see that the elf has gone on ahead of us.  Her cup sits perched on the arm of the chair like the living wood is cradling it.  “She’ll be back.”  I say with confidence.  “How about me, then?”  The others nod and I stand up and stretch, maybe showing off my form a little bit to an audience that long ago stopped being shocked by me.  “Okay.  Last life sucked so I’m sure this will be hilarious.”

“Oh, don’t say that, Luri!”  Molly calls at me from her bed under her lover.

Ellin nods vigorously as I swipe at my notifications and try not to peek.  “Yeah!  Your lives are always great!  Remember that time you blew up a tree and got those weird sap tattoos from it?”  I don’t have the energy at the moment to tell her that the event she is thinking of was sixteen lives ago, and was Mark.  Mark looks like he’s considering it though.

He’ll have to wait.  I’ve made my selection.

[You have survived ten years with a missing primary limb : Perk Unlocked - [Amputation Compensation], Ability Granted - [Monodexterity], +20 perk cysts, +20 marks of labor]

“Okay…” I start slowly, trying to compose this in my head before I say it out loud in a way that won’t make Ellin make fun of me, or Jules and Six give me pitying looks that are like making fun of me, or just ruin Shavoy’s opinion of me as someone who knows what they’re doing.  “So.”  The word feels like it has a note of finality to it.

“I am already so into this story.”  Molly announces.  I’m not worried about Molly judging me.  Molly is going to think it’s hilarious.

I nod her direction and make my start.  “Before I get into this, has everyone lived a life where you had to watch a workplace safety video for some kind of industrial equipment?”

Mark buries his head in his hands.  “For fuck’s sake Luri.”  He grumbles.

The words set us off, and the whole table falls into laughter before I can get any farther.  Warm and alive and companionable.  And for a moment, nothing gets into Bastion’s that isn’t the feeling of a growing family and our love for each other and the our lives.

And then I actually have to explain how I lost my arm to a machine that was like if a woodchipper had a personal vendetta against limbs.  But that can wait.  No cost in heartbeats is too high to feel this way, together.