Sublife Crisis - Chapter 29 (Patreon)

I dream of an old life, when I was a deep sea diver.

I don’t remember how long ago it was, and I think most of the lessons of dipping into the oceans of liquid noctogen on a distant moon would be relevant to most of my activities.  Even if they were, the skills are old and rusted, and I think I sold the [Expertise] style skills slivers for them a long time ago.  But that doesn’t matter.

What matters is I remember the feeling.  I remember finding something unique down there on the midnight ocean floor.  I remember having to run the calculations on if the shift in pressure and lumen would allow it to survive if retrieved to the surface.  I remember tagging certain sites to be left as undisturbed, only to be visited by the brave and the foolish, and I remember retrieving certain things.

Pulling what might have once been a piece of unwanted junk up to the home ship.  Carefully ascending with an object in my thickly gloved hands, laying it back out on a prepared and padded spot.  Examining, cleaning, gently turning and mapping every inch of it, studying, preparing it for display in a planetside museum.

And then the moment, sometimes whole turns later, when it would be unveiled.  Often as part of a collection of similar artifacts.  And something truly magical would happen.

An old bowl, a pitted navigation instrument, a line of preserved sailcloth, a broken storage cask, a handful of coins so smoothed down their origin is lost forever.

Junk.

And when the cloths come up and the exhibit is displayed and the knowledge and study and labor we’ve put in is out there, something happens.  And a small child presses up to the security barrier and peers at a piece of a ship that was lost at sea before our society was dreaming of fire, and the junk is no longer junk, and instead a cherished treasure.  An ancient relic cursed and blessed in equal parts with the spell to cause a deep and painful longing for something so distant it is almost utterly forgotten.

I wake up, laying in a woven hammock that is oddly comfortable.  Normally the ropes pull on my skin and we have no blankets here for some reason.  But this time I feel safe and warm, to go along with the pure rest that comes from sleeping in the between.

I look down, and see that I am laying on Ellin.  She’s still asleep, and stays that way as I roll off of her, the off-white cloth wraps she wears providing just enough of an anchor point on my bare skin that I can get away with not having to peel our bodies apart.

The dream that’s really more of a memory starts to fade as I plant my feet and tail on the thin layer of omnipresent sand that coats the wooden boards of Bastion’s floor.  But the feeling lingers in my beating heart and sparking blood.  Because Bastion’s is absolutely full of the mundane turned mystical, and every single piece of it has a story behind it.

Overhead, the prop engine that we use as a fan turns, and I remember Jules talking about the final run of his warcraft during what might have been the last days of a world under siege.  In the center of our good table, dim lightbugs flap luminescent wings, a reminder from Molly of the life she spent chasing them with someone she loved, however briefly.  The jar they’re in hides a tiny succulent in a tinier pot, something that Ellin brought back from a world where she spent a year subsisting on just the goo inside the flat and waxy leaves.  A flicker of neon from over the bar makes me screw up my face in annoyance, because someone has set the stupid anatomically correct drake lung aglow, but even that is a record of a life lived as a monster butcher and a happy time learning the secret places to get drunk in a city on the cusp of greatness.

Upstairs is a dozen books, including my favorite, which is different than it was a thousand years ago.  Each of them comes from worlds past, lives lived, places seen.  And now every time I add to them, I know I don’t diminish them but instead shelve another part of another life in there with the beloved moments.  Even the horrid ones, I would never want to leave behind.

The walls are adorned with portraits and landscapes, framed photographs and aluminum or bone crafts, and one towering colorful cloth banner that I’m not sure how my fool friends got up there without access to a ladder.  All of them are hung in the same way; pinned to the wood with Ellin’s mostly endless box of nails, earned from a life of toil as a blacksmith where she hardly needed to stab anyone at all, much to her disappointment.  The holes are temporary, the between will heal them when the nails come out.  The display may also be temporary; we’ve already taken down Molly’s druid meditation loop because it was hypnotizing our guests and while her life spent learning how to turn into a peacock was almost certainly a highlight for her, that doesn’t mean we want strangers falling into a trance in our main hall.

And some things aren’t from us, but are part of our lives.  The hallway that leads to a summer evening and a garden of roses, blank slots in the rough adobe wall that go nowhere yet, wrought iron lanterns unlit under a dusky sky, that hallway didn’t come from any of us.  It was from a passing traveler and lover of art.  To him, it might have been a memory of something painful or beautiful.  For us, it’s a reminder of that time a boisterous orc shared a drink at our bar, and got into a lengthy debate about aesthetics with Jules before leaving with a proud laugh.  And both memories are real, and both are valid, and here sits the treasure to display the echo of them.  You can sit in one of the wrought iron chairs and sip at our dwindling supply of lemonade and muse on the history, if you choose.  Or you could simply enjoy the dusk, and make a new memory.

I am in a museum of Us, surrounded by treasures.

“Morning Luri.”  Mark breaks me out of my rite, the sculpted demigod of a man giving me a quiet smile from behind the black stone counter of the bar that we tethered half the hammock to.  “You slept pretty well.”

“Mmmyyyamhph.”  I reply, a mumble turning into a yawn as I stretch all five of my limbs out.  “Yes.”  I settle on, after I feel more like I’m in my own body.  Mark just laughs at me as I steal a barstool and spin a single loop in it.  “It’s so weird that it works, but…” I shrug.

He nods, a smile that’s only a tiny bit sad touching his lips.  “It’s refreshing.  All the old memories are there, all the hurts are still real, but it’s just a little bit farther away.”  He looks away from me, rubbing at the back of his arm.  Without hesitating, I reach out and clasp my own fingers around his larger hand, giving him a reassuring squeeze.  Reassuring of what, I have no idea.  That it’ll all be alright?  I haven’t believed that for a long time.  Or maybe it’s simply become background noise.  But I want to reassure him of something.  “Thanks.”  Mark whispers, reassured to the extent of my ability.

I leave my hand there as I look around Bastion’s for a more lively form of treasure.  “Where’s everyone else?”  I ask.

“Jules and Molly are having tea out in the garden.”  Mark points at the archway snug between a pair of shelves that leads to the attached hallway.  “I think they’re actually having tea, too, and not making love.  Six is upstairs reading.  Shavoy, well, you said goodbye before you took a nap.”  Mark sighs.  “That kid… I hope he’ll be okay.  I remember what it was like, striking out like that at first.”

“Not knowing what’s next, not knowing where you’re going or if you’ll ’make it’, yeah.  I don’t miss that so much.”  I laugh with my friend.  “But then, sometimes I do?  We were never bored when we were young, were we?”

“We’re never bored now.”  Mark says.  “And sometimes it’s a nightmare.  Why can’t we just have quiet lives?”

“The between doesn’t call us retirees, Mark.”  I remind him.  “And I know you see the same thing whenever you open your eyes here after dying.”

Mark nods.  “Intercessor.”

“Can’t intercede in a quiet life.”  I shrug.  “Maybe.  Maybe that’s just wistful thinking.  Maybe no lives are quiet, really.  But you’re right.  I hope Shavoy’s okay out there.  Living is hard sometimes.”  My friend silently turns away from me, and I can feel the pang of hurt coming from his soul as he remembers his last run through.  “Sometimes more than others.”  I mutter.  “Sorry.  Didn’t mean to…”

A sweep of a hand and clipped words meet me.  “It’s okay.”  Mark cuts me off. “It’ll be okay.  I’ll be okay.  I have… I have a long time to learn to be okay, right?  The time’s gonna pass anyway, so I might as well work on it.”  He takes a deep breath and forces a smile.  “Oh, you want a drink?”

“I just woke up.”  I roll my glittering eyes at him.  “So, yes, but water please.”  Mark makes a show of doing a fancy bartending routine, but all in service of pouring from our infinite water source into my fancy goblet, before sliding it across the bar to come to a perfect stop in front of me.  “You’re adorable, I love you so much.”  I whisper.

“Hm?”  Mark looks back at me from where he’s turned and is sorting clean cups.

I just wave at him, twisting a smirk at his puppy dog eyes as I sip my water and let the refreshing peace of perfect sleep from the between wash over me.  We should really get some beds in here.  Bastion’s is perfect as it is, and I don’t want to lean to far toward optimizer mindset, but maybe we could find a couple rooms we could attach to the newly formed slots in the hallway, and find a couple [Bed] objects to add to them.  That doesn’t seem over the line.

There’s a few hundred heartbeats of quiet spent between Mark and I, broken only by Ellin’s snores and the light flavor of conversation from out in the garden hallway.  He breaks the silence first.  “Toward the end there, of my last life, I ended up in charge of a lot of what was left of our resistance.”  I stay silent, letting him speak.  The words are personal, and probably painful, so I trust Mark is sharing them for a reason that he’ll elucidate.  “And every day, you know what thought I couldn’t escape?  That I was going to earn one of the stupid [Coins] for it.  That being in charge of a bunch of students with stolen rifles and homemade bombs was going to be rewarded.” He doesn’t meet my eyes or look my direction, instead laser focused on gently placing individual cups in rows along our thick glass bar shelves.  “I couldn’t not think it.  Every day, we’d do our thing, hanging on and trying to fight back, and at some point, I’d think… the between thinks this is worth something.”

He goes quiet.  And I ask a question.  “But was it worth it to you?”

“Absolutely.”  He says.  “It was worth it to all of us, I think.  Though the others didn’t have this waiting.  Didn’t have a reward lurking on the limbs.”  He turns and faces me, a steady neutral mask plastered on his face.  “But I couldn’t get rid of the thought.  And I feel like it makes me a bad person.  I feel like… you know, you and Jules and Six, you three talk about optimizers a lot like they’re some kind of fucking monsters, you know?  You barely make choices about your perks.  And I don’t think I got it until this life.  Not really.”

“It hurts, doesn’t it?”  I ask, swirling the water in my goblet and staring at the clear and cool liquid.  “Because it feels intrusive.  But also, you know that reward will be so nice.”

“Exactly.”  Mark says.  “I’ve been holding off on my notifications.  Because… I don’t know.  Because I’m afraid I’ll enjoy it.  And I get it now.”  He takes a deep breath.  “But I don’t want to give up the pseudo-quest, because it might be a step toward what we really want.  That thing we aren’t talking about.  A motion in the direction of waking up together, for a whole lifetime.”  Mark pours himself a splash of amber liquid in a short crystal cup, and leans on the bar across from me.  “How do you do it?”

“With the books?”  I ask, and Mark nods.  “I… I think…” I sigh and empty my goblet before offering it to Mark to refill with whatever he’s drinking.  He does so, and I sip at the fiery substance, fortifying myself to speak plainly.  “I think that there’s a place between optimizer and ignorant.”  I tell him.  “For me, it’s probably easier than you.  But I was going to read anyway, and this just lets me pluck something wonderful back to share with you all.  So here’s what I’m gonna ask you.  Would you have done it without the quest?  Led them, fought with them, died for them?  Would you have gone through it all again, without any reward at all?”

“Yes.”  Mark snaps off his answer.  “Because they needed me.”

“Then open your notification without guilt.”  I tell him flatly, flicking my tail back and forth as it sticks off the stool behind me.  “Because you earned it.  Not by the measure of the between, but by the measure of Luri.  Thinking about the truth of things doesn’t make you a bad person, Mark.  It never will.  But if you’re going to confront the truth, you need to face the good parts too, not just the bad.  You would have done it anyway.  So I’m telling you, now, that it’s okay.  It’s okay to acknowledge what’s going to happen as a result of your own personal ethics guiding you.”

Mark and I clink glasses, and drain our drinks, and then with a gasp at the burn he meets my eyes and decides to emotionally devastate me.  “So, you feel okay when you read your notifications?”  He asks me.

“Okay, rude.”  I sputter a laugh, coughing as some of the burning alcohol gets into my false lungs, which just seems rude of the between to even allow.  “And that’s different!”

“You just said you’d be reading anyway.  What else would you be doing anyway?  Do you live your lives that way?”  Mark challenges me.  And suddenly, the words I put together on a whim to make him feel better come back to me, an outside perspective suddenly striking at the fear and anxiety I’ve been holding onto for seventy three lifetimes.  He refills my goblet, pausing to brush his knuckles against my hand.  “You should feel peace too.”  Mark whispers to me.  “If I’m allowed to do it, so are you, too.”

My emotions stumble into themselves, piling up on the edge of my tongue.  It’s a thing I’ve told the others, sometimes more than once.  But I don’t actually remember anyone saying it to me.  And… is it that simple?   Thousands of years of life and what I needed was to hear a friend tell me that it would be okay?  How has it never happened before?  I’ve been reassured, comforted, held, touched, and loved by these people, over and over, across lifetimes and centuries.  Always meeting back at Bastion’s to recover ourselves, find ourselves, center ourselves before yet another life.  But never have these words been said to me.

“It’s weird that I can still be surprised.”  I chuckle as Mark refills for us, emptying the bottle and setting it to the side to be reused for something else before the between can eat it.  “Okay.  Okay!  Together, then.”  He raises an eyebrow at me, his stupid perfect muscle structure making the expression look both easy and irritatingly hot.  “Open the notifications.  And don’t feel bad about it.”

I think if anyone asked that of me, I’d have made a joke, laughed it off, and then gone off to distract myself for a few thousand heartbeats until I forgot about it.  But this is Mark.  This is someone I do really love, and also, he’s practically a baby compared to me.  And I can’t let that challenge just slip by.

So I raise my goblet while he raises his cup, and we lock arms and drink, and I flick open a notification that I somehow know is the one I’m looking for.

[Perk - Scroll Harvester has triggered : you have memorized 5,000 words of local literature : +2 perk cysts, +2 aura drops, Souvenir (Devotional Of Cal-Cohal)]

The actual literal scroll thumps into the counter alongside a cascade of clinks from the pile of [Coins] Mark dispenses.  I can’t remember what their official name is, and it’s not the important thing right now.  I’m thinking of how I had to learn read during that life; sneaking into shrines, stealing scraps of notebooks from merchants, barely having anything worth reading at all from my perspective.  Memorization is actually somewhat harder than people imagine.  We just don’t commit whole chapters of things to perfect memory, and five thousand words takes a while to add up.  But I remember the moment when, with only one arm and having not eaten for a week, I had forced open the upstairs window of a condemned library, and found myself a shelter that would last me months as I tore through the surviving volumes and scrolls.  The cold weather and hateful city kept outside as I huddled there, pulling scraps of joy out of old pages.

My last life was shit.  But even there, I found something to treasure.  And I’ve brought a piece of it back with me.

Mark and I look down at the bar together, slapping our drinking vessels to the surface with a united thunk.  Then we meet each other’s eyes and smile.

We also wake up Ellin, who tumbles out of the hammock with a barbarian yawp.  “What’s wrong?!”  She demands, springing to her feet and sliding into a fighter’s stance.  “Who do I punch?!”

“You’re in the between, love.”  I tell her, as Mark falls into a fit of laughter across from me, the pile of emotional wealth forgotten between us.

“Oy, hey, I could still pay the marks to punch someone here!”  Ellin protests, though she’s already dropping her guard.  “Sorry, sorry.  I had a weird dream.”

From upstairs, there is a creak of wood as a heavy grey form leans on the railing.  How the railing can creak when we all know damn well it’s impervious is a curiosity for later, as Six pokes his smooth head over to look down at the three of us.  “Is everything alright?”  He asks.  “I heard Ellin yelling.”

“We’re fine!”  I call back up.  “Actually, I’m… I’m pretty good.”

Six meets my cheerful smiling look, and his own expression, impervious as anything else in the between, shifts ever so slightly.  A softening of the eyes as he sees something in me that I think he always knew was there.  I know how he feels; I’ve seen something deep in him that maybe he doesn’t know about either.  Maybe that’s why we’re friends.  We keep looking for ways to draw that secret part out.  “That is good, Luri.”  He says simply.

“Hey!”  Molly’s sharp voice cuts off anything else he might be about to say.  “Ya’ll alive in here?”

She is carried in by Jules, who roils across the floor with his jet black tentacles.  “I believe what my mate means is to ask if there is something wrong.  As we are all, as it turns out, quite dead.”

“Yeah, that.”  Molly nods vigorously from where she’s tucked against Jules’ flank.

Ellin throws her hands in the air.  “You yell one thing about punching people and everyone comes running.”  She complains.

The five of us share a circular look of amusement around her.  “Yes, Ellin.”  Jules says slowly.  “That is rather how it works.  If only so that the rest of us could see the spectacle of you trying to fight something in the between, at least.”  He deposits Molly on a barstool next to me, the little kobold scrambling her claws to find a comfortable position as Jules settles himself against the counter next to her, his triangular eyes alight with amusement.

I join in the laughter, the sensation of warmth pushing through me, and not just from the alarmingly potent drink Mark and I have been sharing.  There’s no real point denying it; this is my home, and my family.  Bastion’s has become my natural environment, and the truth is… it was always going to be.  I always would have done this, whether there was a reward waiting or not.

My eyes flicker to the side to check my heartbeats.  A few subjective days.  Plenty of time to spend with the people I love.

“Hey, since you’re all here.”  I say, spinning around to lean my back against the edge of the black stone surface of the bar.  “Would anyone like to play a game?  I’ve got a few days, and I want to lose at Branches at least once before I go.”

“Mmh.  Yes!  I could go for a good complete failure right now.”  Ellin perks up.  “I have a few things I wanna do before I go explore the between, but I have subjective weeks left.”

Our resident kobold speaks up as she spins on her barstool.  “I’ve got two days left, but I’m pretty happy to hang out.”   Molly’s tongue lolls out of her mouth as she tilts her head.  “Is that a new one?”  She asks.  “I don’t remember that one!”

“Impossible, my dear. I’m sure you’ve been here since we acquired it.”  Jules says.  “But then… maybe not?  Oh, and it’s days for myself as well.  The clock runs ever downward.”  He gives a buzzing sigh.

“Guess Molly gets to be the lucky one today.”  Mark cracks his neck like he’s preparing for the utter trouncing that Six is going to give us.  “Two days, plenty of time to regret this decision.”

“I would be interested.”  Six says from upstairs, already holding the eternally faded cardboard box that contains the pieces.  I didn’t even see him move, it’s like he exploited the sliver of time between blinks to snag the game.  “If you would have me.”

“Six.”  I shake my head, holding back laughter.  “Get your featureless grey butt down here and show Molly how to lose at board games.”

“Yes Luri.”  Six says, affecting an even more bland voice than normal as he struts toward the metal steps down from the library.  “I will be certain to obey this directive to the best of my ability.”

Mark starts stacking our special cups on the bar for me to carry over to the green felt table.  “Welp.”  He says, shaking his head.  “At least it’ll be over quickly.”

A few days left.  Days can sometimes be so long, and sometimes be nothing at all.  And I don’t know what these will be, but going into them here, now, with my friends around me, they feel special.  Like they’re the first days I feel actually light for the first time in lifetimes.

Not that every burden and responsibility is left behind, not that I’m foolish enough to think that abandoning myself and attempting to start over with a blank slate and a charred landscape of the self is a good idea.  But something simpler.  Something less pure and more messy and perhaps a little wiser.

They feel like I’ve started to be better.

After all this time, I can still grow.  I can still learn.  And as I get into a brief race with Ellin for the comfiest chair that ends with the tall and powerful woman sitting across my lap and stirring the love in my heart something fierce, as I start to explain the rules of a board game to Molly that was made for a species with either different limbs or different philosophical principles of motion, as I look on in horror at the mixed drink Mark places in a pitcher on the table next to the jar of lightbugs, I think that maybe I’ve been doing that this whole time.

Even if I didn’t think of it that way, there was really no escaping it.  I was always going to change, because I was going to do it anyway, and the between didn’t need to pressure me with rewards to make it happen.  That was just who I was, and will be.  The kind of person Luri is.  Not forever and always, because those words are dumb, but here and now.

And here and now, for the first time in a long time, it doesn’t hurt as much anymore.