“I don’t think they’re optimizers. Not the way you an it, Luri.” Mark sighs as the five of us relax in the empty-again space of Bastion’s. We’re not anywhere in particular, or doing anything special, just lounging around and talking.
Rushing to try to compact as much ti together as possible into our heartbeats just makes us resent it. We’ve tried before. It’s not worth it to us. We’ll feel like drunkenly sharing songs, or playing more cards later. Right now, it’s a casual conversation, while Jules naps and snores with an odd whine of a vibration that is… more pleasant to experience than it should be.
“I do love how I keep getting surprised.” I admit to Mark. “I an, we’ve all t other people here in the between. This is just the first ti we’ve t the sa person twice at the sa ti.”
“They aren’t really the sa person.” Ellin mutters into her cup of wine. I don’t know where she found it under the bar, but she doesn’t seem to be enjoying it at all, which makes wonder why she’s drinking it at all. “They’re just faking it.”
I shrug, pulling my tail up to hold it in my lap and scratch at an itch where one of the plates ets the scales. “Does it matter? They’ve got forever to get it right. Sooner or later they’ll find their unity.”
“Their unity is unsettling.” Six monotones, sniffing his portion of the wine Ellin offered to share with him and carefully setting it back on the counter. “Why children?”
Mark perks up. “Oh, I did ask that! They said it was taphorical of our place in the cosmic… thing. That we’re all children taking our first steps, in the grand sche of affairs.”
“Ah, yes, a perfectly normal claim that we have an easy way to verify.” Six monotones.
I just roll my eyes. I’ve heard all this before in half the real lives I’ve lived. It seems like the common language of religion persists here in the between.
Not that I’m surprised; it’s certainly comfortable. Having an abstract goal that you can aim for that will give you a perfect final reward, and making that reward sothing intentionally unspecified and outside your understanding so you never have to think about it, is just… it sounds nice?
I’m not even trying to be sarcastic or dismissive. It really does just sound pleasant. If I thought that I could manage to do it myself, and not have so kind of emotional breakdown after a few lives, I might even try it. But I don’t actually believe it, and I think forcing myself to change how I think would have worse long term damage when I start questioning it later.
I’ve done it before. Not for a faith, but still. It wasn’t great. While I hold no belief that people are immutable, I didn’t really change my core self, and it was like there were two versions of constantly having a fight in my thoughts.
But that’s not what we’re here for. “No theological snark!” I chastise Six. “We should get a plaque that says that.”
“We don’t even have a bed in this place that is, ostensibly, so kind of rest stop.” Ellin comnts.
“Yeah, we only just got barrels. Which we can’t sleep on.” Mark comnts as he rinses out our cups and stacks them behind the bar. “Thanks for handling the vendor, by the way. Those things freak out.”
“Really? That freaks you out?” Ellin doesn’t sound chastising so much as she’s confused. Like it hadn’t occurred to her that soone might be unsettled by a thing made of floating folded wrought iron and ancient street lamps. “More than the weird twins?”
Mark shakes his head, and speaks with that voice that says that he’s worried about being too vulnerable, before he makes a decision to do it anyway. “They make feel small.” He admits. “Not that, you know, it’s unearned.” A hand motions around Bastion’s, but I know what he’s really pointing at is the between beyond the false wood of the walls, and the endless number of worlds we’ve lived on beyond that, and the utter vastness of all things that we can’t even glimpse the outline of. “It’s not even how they look, it’s that they sell a million things.”
“This one had one point eight million, rounded for convenience.” Six states. I love how Six is willing to round the number, but then uses so of the breath he saved doing it to explain that he rounded the number. It’s just a quirk of my golem friend that makes smile when he does it.
“Yeah, see, that’s what gets to . Not the kids trying to make themself the perfect person.” Mark says with a glib humor that belies his unease. “Also the fact that they barely have a search index. It makes it feel like you’re supposed to get lost in there. Or that half of what we buy for ourselves is just random luck.”
Ellin raises her glass in a toast to him. “Oy, yes! I’m with you there, sexy man! How many secrets are buried in the miscellaneous section of the vendors?!” She slams her glass down and starts pouring more bitter wine into it. “We’ll never know.”
“Don’t say never.” I reply on reflex.
“Also stop getting drunk and calling ‘sexy man’. I have a na.” Mark gripes.
Six gives him what I think is ant to be a reassuring pat on the arm. “You do. You chose it when you chose to sculpt your body.”
“Six, no, don’t encourage her.” Mark looks like he wants to hide under the bar.
“Okay, this is hilarious.” I speak in agreent with, but also past, Ellin’s lively laughter. “But Mark, go back to the start. What do you an you don’t think they’re optimizers?”
He latches onto the conversational floatation device I’ve thrown him. “Okay, so, you say ‘optimize’ and you an… at least I think you an… the people who turn themselves into achievent machines, right?”
“Fuckers.” Ellin elocutes.
I nod like an excited dog. “What she said.”
“Right. Well, they’re just not doing that. They’re trying to achieve their idea of perfection, but they’re basically doing it… the sa way we do?” Mark shrugs and flicks the towel he’s been drying cups with over his shoulder, the perfect image of a disgruntled bartender. We all smile at the small action. “They want to live forever as the best person, so they’re trying to build the best person. Calling that optimizing isn’t right, because they aren’t actually doing what the between incentivizes. They’ve set their own unrelated goal, and they’re working for it on their terms. It would be like saying that we’re optimizers because we sotis talk about what copy of [Strike] we’re going to run, or if we want to intentionally seek out a specific profession to try. You all just bought that one perk that can spawn plants here, as an example, and we need to figure out who should take it. That’s not optimizing as a philosophy, it’s just… you know…”
“Playing the ga.” Six says. An almost alien gentleness to his voice.
“Six?” I cock an eyebrow at him.
He makes a small hand motion, his round eyes still focused on our group. Six doesn’t fidget as much as I do. “When we sit down to share a ga, we agree to engage with the ga’s rules. Because even though there is no aning to them outside the ga, it makes the ti we spend more pleasant to do so.”
“I hear ya!” Ellin slaps the bar. “It’s fun to go into lives with upgrades, as long as we’re treating the lives as mattering!”
Six nods at her. “Yes. Seeking to live good lives - or to win a board ga - neither of them have stakes. Not in a way that matters to us. But that does not an it is flawed to engage with the ga.”
Mark hums as he rolls the thought over in his head. It’s one that I’ve grappled with for a while, though I rarely have people to talk it out with. “Wait, so, what are optimizers then, in this ga analogy? Card counters?”
“Not cheaters, exactly. But… imagine if we sat to play Leaves and Branches, and it was possible for Ellin to secure victory six turns ago, but it has been thirty thousand heartbeats and the ga is still continuing, because she is infuriating and wishes to drag it out for her own amusent.” Six suggests. Ellin has the good grace to look a little embarrassed at the comnt, and I get the distinct impression this has happened before, perhaps while I was asleep.
I don’t rember it happening, but I’m really bad at Leaves and Branches, and so if a player could have won and didn’t, I might just not notice.
“Is now a bad ti to tell everyone that I’ve spent at least one life with [Card Counting] [Gambler] [Falseluck] [Trick Card] [Marked Deck] and [Terror Of The Rivian Dice Hall] all slotted in so permutation or another?” Mark asks sheepishly.
“That is… no, Mark, I am using a taphor.” I don’t think I’ve ever heard Six do a verbal double take before. This is great.
Though I do have a question. “Why did you want to be a gambler so bad?” I question Mark.
“Oh, I didn’t. This was my third and or fourth life, before we t. And I was a very good gambler in my second life, because I thought I was in so kind of purgatory, so I didn’t care if I lost. And then I had a bunch of gambling related upgrades.” He shrugs wide shoulders in a gesture that feels a lot less confident than I’m used to people who look like Mark being. That’s part of why I love him, though. It’s rare to find real open vulnerability, even here in the between where it’s harder to exploit. “I traded half the perks from that for a door a long ti ago, though.”
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“Well, I don’t think you’re a problem.” I tell him reassuringly, half throwing myself over the bar to look up at his face from a different angle. “Six is right though. Or is helping crystalize a thought, at least. I should be more careful with words. It’s not bad to plan, or to play the ga of lives. It’s just bad to forget that what’s a ga to us isn’t to everyone else.”
“Also to get bored.” Ellin points out. “Your career aversion thing, Luri. You’ve got that because you’re afraid of getting foxholed. You don’t want to feel locked into anything, right?”
I blink at Ellin as she rubs at one of her curved horns. “I wanna know where that word ca from for you.” I tell her. “But later. Yeah, I don’t want to get funneled.”
Ellin gives a shrug, rolling her neck around as she does so. “I think it’s fine, though. What’s wrong with a life lived figuring out what you don’t want to do? Rember that ti I was a blacksmith? I didn’t need upgrades to figure out I hated it!”
“But you… you did that for three lives. Every ti you complained about making nails!” Mark stares at her with a baffled look on his face. “You could have stopped whenever you wanted!”
“Yes, but now I have a [Box Of Nails]!” Ellin declares. “And I don’t have to do it again if I don’t want to.”
I chuckle. But on a deeper level, Ellin’s words make uncomfortable.
Intellectually, I know she’s right. What we do isn’t who we are, and we do have lifetis to figure ourselves out. To learn what we do and don’t like. But I’m still terrified of getting wrapped up in a single path so much that I forget to actually live. I’m glad for my friend and her ability to do sothing she hates for subjective decades, then casually trade away the rewards for it, shrug, and move on.
But I don’t actually know if I could do the sa. And that scares .
“Well, whatever.” Mark snaps out of it. “I’m still getting used to the idea of living with upgrades anyway. Even if I do start really planning, it’ll be a long ti before I can do it in a aningful way. Most of my plans are coming up with bold ideas, then never doing them for so reason.”
“Yes.” Six shakes his head sadly. “I had planned to learn to fish.” The cryptic words have the rest of us looking at him with expectant stares. He barely turns his head down to et my eyes from where I’m still laying on the bar. “Yes?” He asks.
“…And?” I try to prompt him.
“And I did not.” Six states. “Circumstances made it nonviable.”
“Six, I love you, but sotis you’re infuriating.” Mark comnts, leaning on the bar over .
Six nods. “Luri tells I add variety. You are welco.”
“You made him like this?!” Ellin gasps at . “Monster!”
“Technically I didn’t make him, that’s soone else’s responsibility.” I defend myself. “Also hey! Six is perfect! Just like you, you bully!” Ellin sputters at my words, the woman never having had an easy ti accepting complints. I’m waiting for her to co back from one of her lives with self esteem, but I kinda worry that she doesn’t seem to be doing that. Her worlds and lives are often violent, and while she has a confidence and a decorum that I know I can’t match, she always has this strangely durable sense that she isn’t valuable herself.
So I take opportunities to remind her that she matters to us. And then she’ll act like she hates it, but secretly feel good on the inside, and I’ll be satisfied for a bit while Ellin performatively blusters.
I know I’m a ssed up person, but you stick enough years under anyone’s na, and they’ll learn a few tricks.
The conversation drifts for a little bit as we all try to pry Six’s story of failing to learn to fish out of him. I have an impression from how he described his last world that he just didn’t have access to a lot of bodies of water, but no one is sure, and he’s the best of us at being stoic. Jules wakes up halfway through the endeavor and joins our side.
Eventually, after multiple attempts at both rhetoric and bribery, we manage to extract the truth. Which is simply that Six got distracted, and his singleminded nature had him continually putting fishing at a lower priority than the things that caught his attention. It’s deeply anticlimactic, and by the ti he answers I had been expecting to hear that the entire world he’d been on had lost all its rivers in so kind of orbital impact or sothing dramatic.
The process is still fun, though.
Ti and heartbeats pass by in a warm flow. Not a blur, really; every mont of my ti here is clear to . I know the little conversations we’re having, and the shared touches, and even the occasional ti when I work up the stomach to check another notification. I rember all of them, and it’s not like I’m not paying attention.
But there’s a rhythm to it that I’ve missed. My last life was lonely. More than simply the sorrow of knowing that you’d be leaving people behind; because everyone knows that, even if they aren’t joining us here. Instead it was just devoid of people, for most of it. And being back here, with people I’m familiar with, and growing more familiar with by the day, it’s not even that I’m falling into a routine.
It’s that, if there is to be a routine, it’s one that we’re constantly building and expanding on. And the process of constructing sothing together, even if it’s just this abstract, is emotionally satisfying.
I’m reading a book thousands of heartbeats later, one of our newer ones so it’s only for the third ti, and trying to force myself comfortable in the chair I’ve taken downstairs, when Jules says sothing that makes look up.
“I think this life, I am going to tell my parents.” His voice stills the room, all of us looking at him, the only sound the almost imperceptible buzz of the lamps, and the clicking of the overhead prop engine.
No one wants to tell him that never goes well. We don’t really talk about it most of the ti, but we’ve all tried it. And it’s always made things worse.
“Are you sure?” Ellin, for once, doesn’t sound particularly prickly with her words. “Because I don’t wanna co back in a hundred years to see you all glum again.” Ah, nevermind. There it is.
“It would be dependent on the world, I admit.” Jules rearranges his eyes like he’s staring up at the ceiling in thought. “But it would be… oh, what is the word to describe it? I don’t wish to call it relaxing, as no life ever is in whole. But wouldn’t it be grand to have soone to not hide from?”
“Well yeah, that’s why I tell anyone I date for more than a year.” I offer to him. “But not parents. Especially you, Jules. What’re you going to tell them? ‘Ah, yes, I have lived many lives, and my true form is a very sexy squid thing. Now, may I assist with dinner, dearest parents? Also how much do tentacles costs in this world?’ You know how that ends.”
Jules flushes a strange blend of orange and grey at my imitation of his accent. “My good Luri, I do not sound like… Mark I can hear you laughing! Six, no, not you too!” Jules tries to wrap his face in his tentacles, but I can see his eyes peeking out. “Well. Hmph. Regardless, I wasn’t planning to reveal… all of myself. Simply to tell them I was an old soul in so way. Assuming there was no reason not to. I don’t fancy being executed a heretic again.”
I wince. We’ve all been there at so point. Those executions are never fun.
“It just seems like a great way to ss them up.” Mark idly sits surrounded by the translucent panes of information from the between, still trying to organize his aura, and still not actually putting that much ntal energy into it. “Like, imagine if you had a kid, and as soon as they could talk, they told you they weren’t your kid. That’d fuck anyone up, I think.”
“And lying is sohow more moral?” Six asks.
“I do not know what the moral choice is.” Jules cuts in. “I do not think there is one. Though we lack the choice to be born, but we do not lack the choice in how we approach it. While there is no right answer, I would like, at least, to give my next parents the choice.”
“What if they’re assholes?” Ellin asks.
“Oh. Well in that case, I will assu I am so form of cosmic punishnt.” Jules states, eyes shaped in cheerful diamonds.
Ellin cocks an eyebrow at him. “Really?”
“No.”
“Didn’t think so.”
I don’t add anything to the short exchange. Mostly because I don’t want to worry anyone by admitting that sotis I do wonder if I, personally, am supposed to be so kind of universal answer to injustice. In so worlds, things like karma are more literal than others, but what if there is a thod to where we’re put? What if trying to live a quiet life as a farr is actually denying the role of righting wrongs that I was put there for?
Of course, that’s about as easy to prove as saying that I was stuck on a world to cause wrongs in the first place. And just like that, those thoughts loop back into circular logic and an utter lack of understanding about our own existences.
“You know what?” I say, surprising even myself as I co to a conclusion. “If Jules is gonna do it, I think I will too.” The others look at , and I shrug, tugging on the sleeves of the bathrobe. “It’s been a while since I’ve tried. And I kinda get where he’s coming from. So maybe it’ll go better this ti. I’m smarter than last ti, at least!”
“Hell, why not. I’m in.” Mark adds. I give him a raised eyebrow look, and he grins at . “What? Why not, like you said! It’s a thing to try, right? I might slot a [Charisma] stacker ability though, just to help. Actually, does anyone have anything that confirms a truth? I feel like I saw one once, but I can’t find it in my inventory.”
“Oh, are we doing a group thing? Is this a bonding mont, eh?” Ellin adds a laugh, pounding once on the table with a fist. “We could make a bet on how it goes!”
“Absolutely not. You just heard Mark tell us how many ways he has to cheat.” Six reminds her. “But I am not averse to the attempt. I will join you all. Now, if that is settled, how many heartbeats do you all have remaining? I do not wish to rush us, but I believe if we begin now, we can comfortably enjoy another round of Encounter.”
My heart jumps and my eyes sparkle, and I see similar reactions from the others. It is just a ga, after all, but it’s one we’re all sharing. Maybe if we can’t live our lives together, then experiencing a story on the sa team is a close enough emulation that we can all be fairly easily convinced to try.
I help set up, while the others talk about different [Charisma] tied upgrades that might help us. I’m still not into the period of ti here in the between when I will almost begrudgingly read the remainder of my notifications and hastily assemble my soul for the next life. But I listen in anyway, and consider what they’re saying.
Part of is still terrified of losing myself to the conditioning that the between seems to be pushing. But…
It’s been forty lives. Forty one now, I think, unless I lost count. And maybe Six is right. Maybe what matters more is that we play the ga, and throw ourselves into it. I hope my next parents won’t mind too much, but I am going to try my best, whatever that entails. And if they do mind, I’ll bla Jules and Six. I’m sure they’ll understand.
Halfway through covering our largest table in rcifully immortal cardboard and chits and decks of cards, I rember how setup of Encounter always goes, and escape to see if there’s sothing alcoholic enough to make dizzy while Mark and Ellin restart their argunt on including the module for advanced diplomacy rules.
We are building a familiarity, and a family. Right down to the increasingly stupid lines in the sand.
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