Walking the plank was not, generally, supposed to be a pleasant experience. The narrow beam under Pillowcase’s feet though felt as firm as a football field of solid bedrock. That was the good news. The bad news was that Sister Cayman looked to be as sturdy as solid bedrock too, and she was having just as little trouble navigating the beams over the pool.

“The rules are pretty simple,” Mother Graymourn said. “The first team to have someone set foot on the other side’s ground win. If you get knocked off into the water, try not to drown. If you get killed, try to float long enough for us to fetch your body out. And, as always, remember to have some fun. Begin!”

That was it. That was the extent of the coaching the [Sisters of Steel] offered for their sparring session. The only help beyond that was Sister Acroghast taking a spot on the easternmost of the plank, leaving the central and western planks for Pillowcase and Lost Alice to defend.

Sister Cayman was nice enough to introduce herself as she and Pillowcase stepped onto the opposite ends of the central planks, but once they were locked in battle, the time for casual banter was done.

The planks were about half as wide as Pillowcase’s shoulder. Plenty of room for her feet, but it did require that she take a fighting stance with her right foot well in front of her left and her body twisted to present the shield in her right hand forward. It was a solid defensive position but with her weapon arm shifted back, throwing viable blows with her the practice hammer they’d lent her was challenging.

Sister Cayman had either fought battles in this particular arena before, or lucked into a fortunate choice of weapons. Spears, it turned out, were ideal for situations where direct thrusts were difficult to avoid and the stepping inside the spear wielder’s reach wasn’t a particularly simple option.

“Don’t let her drive you back,” Sister Acroghast called out over the ringing blows from the two handed maul she was using.

Pillowcase had been giving ground each time Cayman doubled up on an attack. It was easy enough to block the spears initial thrust. That’s what shields were designed to do and they were good at it even in the hands of a relatively low level combatant like Pillowcase. An experienced spear user like Sister Cayman was familiar with that too, and had strategies to work around it. When her first strike missed, as it was all but guaranteed to, she was able to follow it up with a series of probing, short range, thrusts, each following a new path around the shield.

Tessa knew her armor was good enough to protect her from blows with the force Cayman was throwing. She also knew that a successful hit could not only knock her off her feet and into the pool below  but also create larger openings even in the case were the first wasn’t enough to get the job done.

So, when the spear thrusts began to overwhelm her, she’d given ground, spending distance to buy time. 

And it had worked. 

Sister Cayman was clearly higher level than Pillowcase. Tessa would have known that even if she was stuck with her regular human eyes. Being able to see the “30” for Cayman’s level made things such much simpler and Tessa once again found herself wondering if she could keep Pillowcase’s vision even after she switch back to her human body.

Contemplations like that earned her a smash to the side of the helmet. The blow tipped her center of gravity to the side, but Pillowcase’s well designed footwork was enough to keep her on the plank.

“Stop trying to not lose,” Sister Acroghast said.

Tessa wasn’t sure who that was direct at. Sister Acroghast was facing her opponent when she spoke, but the advice seemed generally applicable.

Not that it was practical advice. Or even necessarily good advice.

It had the benefit of being simple to follow – all Tessa needed to do was tumbe off the plank and she would definitely have stopped trying not to lose. Somehow though, she didn’t think that was what Sister Acroghast had in mind.

Sister Cayman took advantage of Tessa’s confusion to get in a solid shot below the shield, stabbing Pillowcase’s leg so hard, Tessa though it was going to tear off. 

It didn’t, but it did leave Pillowcase balancing on one leg for a moment while fought to regain her balance.

Lacking any better options against a vastly superior foe, Tessa tried to hurl herself forward with the thought that if she could carry Cayman off the plank with her, at least she’d be protecting their side from an attacker as best she could.

It was a good plan, a valiant one even.

It just wasn’t good enough.

Sister Cayman saw the Pillowcase coiling for the charge and chose that moment to step forward and strike with her weapon as though it were a staff. One quick high blow that connected with Pillowcase’s shield was followed by an even faster low sweep which took her legs out from under her.

And like that it was done.

Tessa felt herself splash into the cold water and heard the cheer go up from the other [Sisters of Steel] a moment later when Sister Cayman stepped off the plank.

It wasn’t embarrassing to have been knocked off her plank by a level 30 [Guardian]. The math for a matchup between almost any level 30 against almost any level 15 was clear and decisive, so there was no shame in defeat. If anything Tessa felt proud at having delayed Sister Cayman for as long as she did.

Or she would have if Lisa hadn’t still been standing on her plank when Sister Cayman helped Tessa climb out of the pool.

“Well done, well done!” Mother Mayhem said. “Evaluations? Anyone want to comment on what they saw?”

“I saw that I picked the wrong weapons for this,” Tessa said.

“Don’t blame the tools,” Sister Acroghast said.

Tessa wanted to object to that, but she considered how spectacularly ill suited a two handed maul Sister Acroghast had used was for the battle scenario before them. 

And yet Sister Acroghast had chosen it in place of a spear and a sword and shield she’d been offered.

It was a bad call, but Tessa had written it off as Sister Acroghast trying to level the playing field a bit, since she outleveled Sister Cayman and the other junior members of the [Sisters of Steel] by more than Cayman outleveled Pillowcase.

Maybe it was more than that though?

“Pillowcase’s footwork was limited. I would guess this is the first plank battle she’s fought?” Sister Cayman said. “Also from the stance she took, she is probably used to having strikers gathered behind her.”

“Bah, that’s too easy to guess,” Sister Grigrin said. “She’s an [Adventurer]. Of course she hasn’t fought like this before and, wow, how shocking that she’s used to having other people handling the striker role for her.”

“Let’s give Sister Cayman a chance to speak,” Mother Graymourn said. “What was it about her footwork that led to your conclusions Sister?”

Tessa felt both mortified and fascinated by the discussion. Listening to people pick apart her incompetency in exacting detail was pure nightmare fodder, but, the conversation was so practical and analytical that Tessa was almost able to avoid taking it personally.

“Certainly Mother,” Cayman said. “When we started she squared off in a standard defensive stance. As we began our exchange though she stayed in the same stance, only retreating to buy distance as I pressed her.”

“Isn’t that reasonable?” Mother Graymourn asked, the question existing only to be refuted. “The plank limits movement. Keeping a solid base and maintaining her focus on defense against a superior foe are sound tactics, no?”

Phrased like that Tessa’s choices seemed reasonable, but the phrasing was a trap.

“Not in this scenario,” Cayman said. “Her stance was acceptable for balance, but removed her offensive options. Retreating as she did would have bought time for strikers to do their work, but with no backup and no offense, she would have inevitably been forced off the plank.”

“One she was backed onto solid ground, wouldn’t she have been at an advantage though?” Mother Graymourn asked.

“Her position would have improved, but the same move that took her off the beam would have let me claim a spot on their side,” Cayman said.

Tessa was able to picture that all too easily. Landing on solid ground would have been less of a fall but even more embarrassing. Falling into the water had looked like Sister Cayman got in a lucky shot. Falling when Pillowcase had plenty of support under her feet would have made it crystal clear that she was unable to hold Sister Cayman back in the slightest.

“What would have been a workable strategy then?” Mother asked, a pleased expression suggesting that she found Cayman’s analysis acceptable so far.

“With a shield forward stance, she could have pressed for a grapple, moving forward and claiming space with the shield rather than surrendering it,” Cayman said. “If that didn’t work, she could have used a pivoting backstep to reset our positions and switch to an offensive stance before using the impact force of her mace to destabilize my balance.”

“That would have left her open to your strikes though,” Mother Graymourn said.

“She possesses a good enough strength to body mass ratio to make avoidance a viable technique,” Cayman said. “Alternatively, her coordination rating is high enough that she could have relied on soaking the blows with her armor and compensating for the impact with body control.”

“Soaking the blows from a level 30 [Guardian]?” Mother Graymourn asked.

“Well, I wasn’t hitting that hard,” Cayman said, looking somewhat abashed to have missed a point in her otherwise solid case.

“Well, what do think Pillowcase?” Mother Graymourn asked. “What did Sister Cayman miss?”

“Not much,” Tessa said. “She’s right that I’m not used to fighting like this. I was designed for fighting with a full squad of other soldiers. Usually with a specific objective in mind, and usually against inferior foes. Bodies like this are costly to make so we don’t get thrown away casually. Not usually at least.”

“Think you can do better next time?” Mother Graymourn asked.

“I can try,” Tessa said. Pillowcase was used to training, but Tessa’s nerves still hummed with anxious energy.

“Good,” Mother Graymourn said. “Let’s get setup again then. I want everyone to watch Pillowcase this time. Check her footwork. Check her balance. She’ll try the suggestions Sister Cayman made. But Sister Cayman knows that. Be ready to make some new ones for the next round.”

Tessa was surprised that the other nuns were okay with giving her another turn. She’d guessed that she would need to wait for all of them to have a chance to cycle through, but it seemed like they were all more than happy to watch her step up for another dunking.

“You going to be okay?” Lisa asked on their private channel.

“The only thing that holds a bruise is my ego,” Tessa said. “I mean, I shouldn’t be surprised I’m losing to a level 30, but it’d be nice not to suck quite so badly.”

“That’s what training’s for,” Lisa said.

“I’ll try to remember that as I head into the water this time,” Lisa said.

“Nope. No negative thoughts. If you get knocked off, you get knocked off. Don’t plan for losing,” Lisa said.

“Just being realistic,” Tessa said.

“Don’t be. I know the game was basically a big math puzzle, but this feels a lot more like a real competition,” Lisa said.

“What’s the difference? Aside from the obvious lack of numbers I mean.” 

“In a real competition, mind set matters. A lot,” Lisa said. “And in training it matters more. This is brand new, so processing what’s going on is hard. Hard, but not impossible. You can get a jump on it by visualize how you’re going to win. You need to reach for that and fight for it, and then, however it turns out, evaluate what happened so you be aware of what’s happening more easily next time.”

“That sounds like iterating on a section of code,” Tessa said. “I can do this!”

If Tessa had felt superhuman before, Pillowcase’s body left her feeling godlike.

“There’s literally no effort to this,” she said, lifting her chin to the makeshift pull up bar Lisa had arranged. “Can we try making this harder?”

Tessa took a half moment on hearing her own words to shake her head in wonder. It wasn’t that surprising though. If workouts had ever been this easy, she wouldn’t have hated them with the passion of a thousand burning suns. 

Or may that was just the trauma of her Phys Ed courses speaking.

Considering it honestly, she probably wouldn’t have spent a lot of time on workouts if she had a body like Pillowcase’s because what would be the point? For a person made of cloth, getting ‘ripped’ was generally a bad thing. 

Plus it wasn’t workouts that increased her strength. 

“Hmm, you’re level 15 now and probably at least three times stronger than you were as a [Void Speaker]? Maybe more since [Soul Knight’s] are a melee class?” Lisa wasn’t really speaking to either Tessa or Sister Acroghast. She was lost in an analytical trance that Tessa had seen (and experienced) several times when a programmer was working on a complicated bit of code. 

It was neat to see that physical therapists could get into a similar headspace. 

Or maybe that was just Lisa.

“Climb on,” Tessa said.

“Uh, what?” Lisa asked, shaking her head free from her thoughts.

“I want to see if this will get any harder,” Tessa said. “Climb on my shoulders and we’ll see if I can do these with both our weights. It’s that or Sister Acroghast can help me out. That platemail looks nice and heavy after all.”

Lisa rolled her eyes at the suggestion that she’d allowed the armor clad nun to glom onto her girlfriend.

“Stop if it feels at all painful,” Lisa said, putting her arms around Pillowcase’s neck. “We don’t need to pulling a muscle. Or tearing your stuffing or whatever [Clothwork] do.”

Lost Alice’s added weight was noticeable, though not enough to make Tessa feel like she needed to stop. She knew she was somewhere over two hundred pull-ups and felt like she could do another two hundred easily.

“You’ll need some proper equipment if you want to do any real training,” Sister Acroghast said. “We’ve got some that should be fine for a level 15 melee fighter, but I know most of you [Adventurers] prefer to build yourselves up following your own paths.”

“This isn’t so bad,” Tessa said, referring only in theory to the physical exercise. The fact that a loving [Vampire] lady was literally hanging on her arm was rather more central to her thoughts.

“You’re not getting tired?” Lisa asked.

“I don’t think I ever could,” Tessa said. She wasn’t great at flirting. She knew that. And it was sort of unnecessary with a girl she was already with, but that was also when she felt the most comfortable trying it.

Sadly, Lisa’s response to it was to hop off Tessa’s back, and gesture of Tessa to stop, which Tessa did somewhat grudgingly. She’d never had much physical strength before and getting to revel in it was too glorious an opportunity to pass up.

“Then I think we’ve run as much the test as we need to,” she said. “Thank you for indulging us Sister.”

“It’s been fascinating,” Sister Acroghast said. “We don’t normally see people come in and change their entire species. Not to mention that I haven’t seen any [Clothworks] up till now. She seem to be quite well made.”

“For all their faults, the Consortium does demand quality in their elite troops,” Tessa said.

“It’s surprising they tossed you away so easily?” Sister Acroghast.

“The commander of the mission wasn’t exactly talented,” Tessa said. “His replacement managed to almost overwhelm the world in about a day rather than losing spectacularly in a single great big battle where they had the element of surprise and the option of orbital bombardment to support their effort.”

“But from the reports we’ve heard, those victories seem to have been overturned as well,” Sister Acroghast said.

“We heard about that too,” Lisa said. “Apparently there’s dissension in the ranks over a change in leadership.”

“Now that you mention it, that strikes me as weird too,” Tessa said. “They had magical mind shackles on us when I fought. It was why all of us fought at all in fact. The Consortium is very aware that people do not like following their orders, and they’ve had a long time to work out measures to ensure disobedience doesn’t affect their bottom line.”

“Perhaps some of the troops they brought aren’t under magical compulsions?” Sister Acroghast asked.

“It is a lot more troops than they used the first time,” Lisa said.

“In theory that shouldn’t matter,” Tessa said. “The protocols were clear that all troops were expected to show unquestioning obedience and the only ones who weren’t subject to a magical compulsion to ensure it were the ones with a long history of willing compliance.”

“So all of their armies are magical slaves?” Sister Acroghast asked.

“Not all, but a large portion,” Tessa said. “It’s horrifying beyond words, but there’s other things they do that are so much worse the plight of their troops tends to be forgotten.”

“We’re not going to forget it,” Lisa said, her hand on Tessa’s arm easing tension Tessa hadn’t noticed she was carrying.

She thought of the other [Clothwork] soldiers she’d served with as Pillowcase. The memories were so different from the ones she held as Tessa but the longer she was in Pillowcase’s body the more vivid they were in her mind’s eyes.

“I’m hoping we don’t have to see them any time soon,” Tessa said, images of what a fully equipped squad of the Consortium’s elites could do if they were set loose in [Dragonshire] painting nightmare scene after nightmare scene across the landscape of her imagination.

“Well, if you do, you’ll want to ready for them,” Sister Acroghast said.

“It’s going to take a long time for that to be true,” Tessa said. “The Consortiums elites can go toe-to-toe with the highest level [Adventurers] out there.”

“Which is why you don’t fight them toe-to-toe,” Sister Acroghast said. “Come along to the afternoon sparring session and I’ll show you what I mean.”

“Seems like an odd place to learn how not to fight, but I’m game,” Lisa said.

Tessa shot her a quizzical expression.

“What? I’m not melee fighting class. Seeing how to win a fight without needing to stab someone myself seems like a great idea to me,” Lisa said.

Tessa had to concede the argument made sense, so she followed Sister Acroghast back down to the corridor to the [Chapel’s] central room.

The wooden poles which had simulated a dense section of forest had been cleared away. In their place three long beams of thick wood were suspended over a pool of murky grey water.

“That wasn’t there before was it?” Tessa asked. 

On the far side of the room the [Sisters of Steel] were emerging from the residence wing on the far side of the pool and collecting the practice weapons they’d left in the racks there.

Bubbles in the pool gave the water the appearance of boiling stew broth but Tessa didn’t feel any heat radiating from it.

“It’s part of the magic of the chapel,” Sister Acroghast said. “The central chamber here is built from [Malleable Space]. It can be whatever the [Master of the Keys] wishes it to be. Within reason of course.”

“There’s a monster in there.” Pillowcase’s guess was more than a passing through. Threat evaluation was one of a tank’s primary duties, and she’d been given plenty of training across a wide variety of potential battlefields to teach her what to watch out for.

“More the simulacrum of one, and not a particularly dangerous one at that,” Sister Acroghast said. “This is meant to be training after all.”

“Training for what though?” Lisa asked.

Sister Acroghast cast a quick wave to Mother Graymourn who was helping one of the other nuns put on a gorget. Mother Graymourn nodded and gathered up a box full of armor before walking blithely over the middle plank of wood. That she did so without looking down, or slowing her pace noticeably told Pillowcase all she needed to know about how familiar the senior nuns were with this practice arena. 

“What happened to the other one and who’s this?” Mother Graymourn asked, nodding towards Tessa as though she were a newcomer.

Which she supposed she was.

“We’ve met already. I’m Pillowcase, this time in Pillowcase’s body,” Tessa said. “This is what we wanted to see the [Heart Fire] about. Or one of the things.”

Mother Graymourn blinked in surprise, cocked her head to get a different look at Tessa, and then shrugged her shoulders.

“It’s good look, but can those arms hold a sword?” she asked.

“Give me one and we’ll find out,” Pillowcase said. 

Tessa wasn’t that cocky. 

Except for all the times when she was playing and she felt like she was at the top of her game.

Of course with Pillowcase’s eyes, she knew she had to be a little careful.

[Dragonshire] was a level 30 town for the most part according to Tessa’s research on the beta. There were quests and challenges which would take a character to higher levels – up to 50 if they were willing to tackle the full extent of the local dungeon and grind for a while – but most of the town’s folks were either noncombatants or topped out around level 30 so that the [Adventurers] could grow beyond them.

Sister Acroghast however was level 55, and Mother Graymourn was level 60. Not near the level cap but both eminently capable of wiping the floors, the walls, and most of the ceiling with a level 15 [Soul Knight].

Not that they would in a sparring match.

Probably.

Generally, after the first couple of expansions, [Broken Horizons] hadn’t forced the players to waste time on battles that were scripted to be unwinnable or set against impossible foes. When the storyline called for a thing like that to occur, the game would insert a cutscene instead, so the player could at least watch a nicely rendered movie of their character receiving a colossal butt kicking.

Tessa hoped she wasn’t stepping into one of those.

Pillowcase found she kind of didn’t care.

“Is that for me?” Pillowcase asked, gesturing to the box full of armor.

“Yeah, but it looks like you’ve got your own,” Mother Graymourn said. “Does that have any [Retribution] style enchantments on it?”

“Not yet,” Pillowcase said. “If there’s anyone in town who could put one of those on though, I’d love to meet them.”

The popularity among tanks of an enchantment which damage anyone who damaged you with a melee attack wasn’t hard to explain. At low levels though the availability of magic like that was extremely limited.

“Can you swim in it?” Mother Graymourn asked.

“It wouldn’t be my first choice,” Pillowcase said. “I could probably manage long enough to climb out of that pool though.”

“And you know where the [Heart Fire] is, obviously, I think that’s all we need right?” Mother Graymourn asked, glancing over to Sister Acroghast.

“We should probably fill them in on the rules for this type of sparring,” Sister Acroghast said. “And Lost Alice will need some armor as well I believe?”

“I’m good with my own stuff too,” Lisa said. “These robes have their own enchantments, and I’ll need to learn to compensate for them being weaker than the metal stuff you all wear.”

Tessa was about to protest that Lisa should be able to stand safely behind Pillowcase, but stopped herself.

They’d already seen multiple scenarios where Pillowcase wasn’t able to keep Lost Alice free from harm. Pillowcase would always want to protect Lost Alice, but Tessa didn’t need Lisa to be helpless and dependent on her. 

In her heart, Tessa wanted Lisa to be as amazing as she could be, wanted to always hold her up and never hold her back, and it was the tiny seed of faith that no matter how far Lisa went, and how little she needed Tessa, she’d still choose her, still want her for who she was right now, just as she was, that promised to bloom into the love Tessa had spent her whole life longing for.

Burning up was supposed to hurt. As the flames spread down Tessa’s arms though she felt no pain at all.

“Are you okay?” Lisa asked, catching her hand back as she instinctively reached for Tessa.

“Yeah. Wow,” Tessa found it hard to focus or form words. “I think this is good. Maybe?”

The flames had spread to her shoulders and were licking the side of her head as the spread down her body as well somehow.

That wasn’t how flames usually traveled.

Was she supposed to stop, drop, and roll? 

That was the right thing when you were on fire, right?

She gasped as the flames wrapped around her face and the world turned a brilliant white before her.

The flames weren’t white though.

Why was she seeing white?

Did she care?

No.

The flames were working. That was what was important.

But what work were they doing?

Healing her? Except she wasn’t damaged. 

Transforming her? That was what she wanted right? To go back to being Pillowcase. To be able to protect everyone.

Except that hurt.

She’d died doing that.

More than once.

And more than died.

Her thoughts started to fly apart when that idea struck them like a hammer against the anvil of her memories.

The flames were everywhere.

She wasn’t herself anymore.

She wasn’t Tessa.

She hadn’t been Tessa for a while.

Was she anything? Really?

The seems of the world were frayed and coming undone.

She could see the wounds it bore.

And beyond the rents in the fabric of time and space, she another world. It was bleeding too. Both worlds were falling apart. Being devoured.

Like she had been.

The cloth she was cut from was too frail.

It always had been.

Memories battered her as words tried to reach through the flames, but the memories were stronger. Sharper.

The failures of her past tore through her, slice the threads of sanity she clutched to veil away the truth.

She’d been convenient for Crystal for a while too, someone who could support her and didn’t ask for much. But Crystal had seen through her. Had seen that the support Tessa offered could go only so far. That Tessa couldn’t socialize like a normal person. Like a real person. All Tessa had was a few interests and a nebulous idea what she wanted out of life. 

Crystal had needed more, and Lisa would too. In time.

That was why she was running away into being Pillowcase wasn’t it?

It wasn’t about protecting the team, it wasn’t about giving anything to anyone else, it was about hiding from her own inadequacies.

Both worlds that Tessa knew were crumbling, but she was going to crumble before either one of them could manage to because, as so many people had told her, that was the kind of failure she was.

No we’re not.

A montage of memories danced past her, each armed with the blades of her failures to cut through that denial.

Who is doing this?

We’re are. I am.

Should we stop then maybe?

I don’t know. Doesn’t this look right?

The memory dancers were like windows into the past, human shaped cutouts in space through which played one painful scene after another, each on infinite repeat, none lose their edge, no matter how many times they spun past. 

Of course. We wouldn’t be afraid if these weren’t believable. It doesn’t mean they’re right though.

Aren’t we just hiding from something we don’t want to admit if we deny them though?

We don’t have to hide. This isn’t who we are. It’s what we’ve done. And what was done to us.

Then why does it feel so much more real than all the rest?

Because we don’t feel safe and we want to know why and need to believe there’s something we can do to avoid the pain we remember. So we get lost in these memories hoping to spot what we can do differently, because that lets us feel in control.

Just another sort of weakness then.

Yes. An important one.

How?

Being weak isn’t something to be ashamed of. Everyone is weak. What’s dangerous is refusing to acknowledge that. Refusing to admit what we fear. Refusing to understand what our fears are trying to tell us. 

Our fears don’t hate us. 

They want more than anything to protect us.

But it’s not their job to figure out how.

So we’re afraid of something and we need to work it out?

Yes, but more urgently, we’re on fire and probably coming apart at the seams.

We should stop that.

Yes, we should.

Is it weird that I feel better now? After talking with myself?

Yes. Very weird. Now let’s go be the kind of weirdo we’ve always wanted to be.

Tessa felt the flames drawing within her. Not burning her away but filling her up. The blazing light in her eyes cleared as blessed clarity returned.

“TESSA!” Lisa was shaking her by the shoulders.

That was probably a bad sign.

How long had she been in the transformation fugue?

“Pillowcase! Can you talk!” Lisa said, still shaking Tessa’s shoulders.

No. Pillowcase’s shoulders!

“It worked!” Tessa said.

“Oh thank god,” Lisa said, sagging in relief. “My heart doesn’t even beat and you gave me a heart attack.”

“Oh, sorry, did it look that bad?” Tessa asked.

“You were writhing and engulfed in flames. It looked unpleasant,” Sister Acroghast said.

“Were you okay?” Lisa asked. She’d stopped shaking Tessa but hadn’t let her go. 

Tessa wasn’t sure she ever wanted her to either.

“I was,” she said. “It was a little freaky, but the introspection helped I think?”

“Introspection?” Lisa asked.

“After the flames got to my, uh, eyes, I couldn’t really see anything and then it reached my brain my thoughts went a little whacky. This is sounding really bad isn’t it?”

“Do I need to answer that?” Lisa said, incredulity dripping from every syllable.

“It didn’t hurt at all though,” Tessa said. “In fact it felt kind of fantastic. But in the middle of the transformation I started getting hit with all these doubts, and weird visions. I think I was doing it to myself though. Basically I was hesitating on whether I wanted to change back into Pillowcase and I had to work that out before the transformation would complete. It’s like a checksum on certainty or something.”

“A what?” Lisa asked.

“Sorry, that’s a computer thing. When you want to make sure a bunch of data is correct you include a checksum with it, basically if the datas right when you add each bit of it together you’ll come out with the same number as the checksum. This was kind of like that. I had to be certain that changing was what I wanted, or what I needed. If I wasn’t sure, I think I would have lost the flame and been left just as I was.”

Lisa regarded her with a narrowed, calculating gaze.

“You see the world in such an interesting way,” she said and it seemed to be both a simple compliment and an observation of something far deeper.

“I like things to make sense,” Tessa said, not wanting to suggest that her clumsy metaphors were particularly insightful or meaningful.

“Perhaps you can help me understand exactly what happened here then?” Sister Acroghast said.

“It’s complicated and not something we can really prove,” Tessa said, “but the short form is; I and a lot of the other [Adventurers] are two people in one. Some weird stuff happened to me and the end result was that I wound up in my body from the other world I come from. Or at least something similar to it.”

“Other worlds are covered in the second year of the [Sisters of Steel] curriculum,” Sister Acroghast said. “We’re familiar with several dozen of them. Why one was your other self from? Or is this the self from another world?”

“It’s sort of both,” Tessa said. “The body I was wearing before comes from a world we call Earth. This body was manufactured by the [Consortium of Pain] and doesn’t really have a homeworld,” Tessa said. “Important point, I am not with the Consortium at all. They abandoned me after the first failed incursion. Without their interference I was able to break the last of the binding spells they had on me. You’ll find a bunch of [Clothwork] and [Metal Mechanoids] in the group at the [Great Hall] who have the same story. We’re all different now, but I believe we all hate the Consortium with enough fury to burn it to ash if we’re ever given the chance.”

Sister Acroghast was taken aback for moment but she’d been around the block enough times and swung her axe against the [Fallen Kingdoms] enemies for long enough that Tessa’s story barely raised one an eyebrow.

“I don’t think we’ve catalogued an ‘Earth’ yet,” she said. “Is that also where the Consortium come from? We’ve heard a bit about them from our other chapter houses.”

“No. Earth has nothing like the Consortium,” Tessa said. “No magic either. We don’t understand how any of this happened.”

“It was probably a [Wizard]. [Wizards] are trying to figure out what they ‘could’ do without bothering to ask if they ‘should’.”

“We know a few max level [Wizards],” Lisa said. “They’re all as stumped as the rest of us.”

“If I may ask, why did you wish to return to this body?” Sister Acroghast was appraising Pillowcase’s form with a look that said she had certain suspicions about Pillowcase’s capabilities.

“This body is better adapted to this world,” Tessa said, restraining her joy at having a proper heads up display again. She still planned to return to being Tessa a fair portion of the time, but for all the advantages a human body help, she knew she’d always miss having a live stream of data in her vision explaining critical things about what she was seeing.

“It looks like you might know how to fight in this one?” Sister Acroghast asked.

“I’ve swung my mace a few times,” Tessa said.

Looking down some finally noticed one of the more obvious changes she’d undergone, namely that it wasn’t just her body which had transformed. Her gear was different too!

“Though not this particular mace,” she said, drawing the weapon off the ring on her belt.

It hummed with power in hands. A [Crusher] enchantment unless she missed her guess. 

Oh, and she no longer needed to guess! 

[Meteor Mace of Crushing]. Level 15. Her level. The [Meteor] property meant it’s impact damage was matched with a flame burst of equal intensity. The [Crushing] enchantment was a later addition. It would send a portion of the impact, and the flame, through solid armor.

It was rare to see [Meteor] weapons at low levels, and almost no one bothered with enchantments on lowbie gear.

And it matched her level.

The gear she’d been using in the [High Beyond] hadn’t. It wasn’t terribly obsolete but it had been lagging by a few levels, as was typical when relying on random loot from monsters.

“Still in [Heirloom] gear,” Lisa said. “That’s interesting.”

“Sounds like you’d do well to test out your kit if it’s new to you,” Sister Acroghast said.

“That is not a bad idea,” Tessa said. “Are there any low level monsters around here that you know of?”

“Sparring would be a bit safer,” Sister Acroghast said. “We finished up our midday spar a little while ago, but the afternoon spar will be starting before too long.”

“You let outsiders join in?” Tessa asked, somewhat less than interested in being drafted into an order of militant nuns.

“Of course! We’re open to all of honor and good faith!”

“Before you do that,” Lisa said. “I’ve got the baseline data from your other body. We should really see how Pillowcase’s compares.”

Tessa looked down at her magically reinforced cloth body and sighed. Lisa had a good and valid point, but without the lure of ‘playing doctor’ the prospect of endless pushups and stomach crunches was a lot less appealing.

Playing doctor was supposed to be fun. It was also supposed to be taboo to do in a church. Which would make it ever more fun. Tessa, however, was not having any fun at all.

“Push-ups? Seriously?” she gasped out as she pushed through yet another one, trying to hurry through the test Lisa was running her through.

“They’re a nice basic exercise,” Lisa said. “We can work on some of the more complicated ones once we’re done covering your other muscle groups.”

“Other muscle groups? How many do I have?” Tessa asked, despair filling her heart as flashbacks of high school Phys Ed classes swam through her mind.

Lisa laughed at the question. It was the laughter of someone who’d heard the question often. It was laughter which offered no mercy though.

“Okay, that’s a full five minutes,” Lisa said. “You did good. Really good in fact. Roll over onto your back now and we’ll see how you do with stomach crunches.”

“You do know that I’m a cubicle potato right?” Tessa asked. “The last time I did a push up or a stomach crunch was, uh, never maybe?”

That wasn’t strictly true. She’d been forced to do a variety of unpleasant exercises in high school, or had tried a handful of times to start “getting in shape” on her own. The longest of those efforts had lasted three days though and she was sure had used up her lifetime supply of stomach crunches.

“Don’t worry, I’ll show you how to do them properly,” Lisa said.

That hadn’t been a concern in Tessa’s mind. At least not until Lisa mentioned it. The idea of messing up something as simple of a stomach crunch seemed not only likely but also fatally embarrassing in light of the suggestion that Tessa might do one wrong.

“You’re just torturing me for fun. Admit it,” Tessa said as she rolled onto her back and let Lisa align her feet and legs properly.

“I will admit to nothing,” Lisa said.

“And how is this playing doctor? I’ve had physicals. They don’t make you do this kind of stuff!”

“I’m going to guess that your regular doctor doesn’t have senses that are keyed to follow blood flow through your body,” Lisa said, the mischief in her smile still so damn tantalizing that Tessa could  scream.

“So, wait, you’re watching my blood?” she asked, folding her arms over her chest as Lisa directed her to.

“Watching. Listening. There’s a few other senses I’ve got now it seems,” Lisa said. “The others map to sight mostly though.”

“What do they show you?” Tessa asked, rising up into the first crunch.

“Health analytics,” Lisa said. “They seem to be spells, or parts of spells? Cantrips I guess. Basically, if I focus in on area of your body that’s changing somehow, I can see some graphs and statistics about how that spot if performing compared to the what your usual baseline is. Or maybe it’s what the average baseline is? Oh, I see, it’s showing me both, I just have to concentrate on it harder.”

“Both what?” Tessa asked, she was on her tenth stomach crunch? Could that be right? On her own she could do, one, maybe two?

“The graphs get more detailed the more I look at them,” Lisa said. “I’m watching your respiration now, and I can see what your normal rate is, what your current rate is, what the average rate for a human woman of your age and build is, and what the optimal level for you would be. Oh and what the max level for a human is. Wow, this is just so cool!”

“I’m glad I make for an interesting experimentation specimen,” Tessa said. 

Was that twenty stomach crunches?

No, was that twenty stomach crunches after five minutes of push ups and, if so, why wasn’t she feeling tired?

“Sorry, I just would have loved to have this in my day job at home,” Lisa said.

“You were a physical therapist right?” Tessa said, continuing on with the stomach crunches since neither was Lisa telling her to stop nor was she feeling like she had to.

“Physical therapist, personal trainer, part-time assistant coach,” Lisa said. “Its fun but the days can be pretty long sometimes.”

“Is this how you test out all your patients?” Tessa asked.

“It depends what they need,” Lisa said. “Physical therapy patients? They’ve usually got a specific need and so we focus on correcting or strengthening that. Personal training clients? It’s a question of what they’re training for, so sometimes we need a full baseline for them.“

“And me?” Tessa asked.

“You? I want to know everything about you,” Lisa said.

“So stomach crunches till I puke then?” Tessa asked.

“No! Definitely not,” Lisa said. “Are you feeling any pain? Or fatigue?”

“I should be,” Tessa said. “How many of these have I done so far?”

“That was one hundred and thirty,” Lisa said. “If you’re feeling at all sore, go ahead and stop.”

“So, here’s the weird thing,” Tessa said, as she continued crunching, “I don’t. I mean, I still look like me right? I’m not as fit as you are. But this isn’t hard. And it should be impossible. On Earth, I’d be dying I think, or at the very least in a ball on my side unable to move.”

“That fits with what I’m seeing too,” Lisa said. “Your pulse, and respiration, and oxygen levels are better than what a top end runner at rest would have.”

“Uh, what?”

“You’re not a cubicle potato,” Lisa said. “If you got up now and started running, you’d probably break some world record marathon times.”

“Seriously?” Tessa said, pausing at the top of a crunch. She knew Pillowcase was capable of superhuman feats – [Clothwork] soldiers were simply built like that – and she knew she probably wasn’t exactly an “Earth standard human” anymore either. The thought that she might get more out of becoming a [Fallen Kingdoms] [Human] than just a class and some gear was a new one.

“Yes,” Lisa said. “You are seriously amazing.”

“Does that mean I can stop doing exercises?” Tessa asked.

“I’ve gotten a pretty good look at what’s going on with your body,” Lisa said before the mischievous smile returned and she leaned in close enough for Tessa to feel Lisa’s breath on her neck, “But I’d like an even better one.”

***

Lost Alice wasn’t always cold.

***

Sister Acroghast remembered the two visitors when the midday sparring session finished up a few hours later. She found the two were still in the [Chapel], though they seemed to be analyzing the [Heart Fire] rather than praying quietly or speaking with someone who had departed.

They also looked rather disheveled which seemed odd but then they were [Adventurers] and [Adventurers] were expected to be stranger than not.

“The big thing we need to be sure of is that this won’t hurt the [Heart Fire] itself,” Tessa said.

“No, the big thing we need to be sure of is that this won’t hurt you,” Lisa said.

“If I get a little singed, you can patch me up,” Tessa said. “If the [Heart Fire] gets damaged, then maybe we get another wave of [Disjoined] followed by [Formless Hunger] round 2.”

“Excuse me,” Sister Acroghast asked. “What are you speaking of?”

“Oh! Hello Sister!” Tessa said. She hadn’t heard the nun enter the room and fought the urge to hop away from Lisa like they’d been caught at something.

“She might know,” Lisa said and turned away from the [Heart Fire] to face Sister Acroghast. “We know the [Heart Fire] can create vessels for souls to return to. Do you if they can also transform existing bodies?”

“Transform in what manner?” Sister Acroghast asked.

“If the body a soul was in was the wrong one, have you ever heard of a [Heart Fire] being able to correct that?” Tessa asked.

“That depends,” Sister Acroghast said, evaluating the two woman with more care. “Simple cosmetic changes are rarely possible. Nor are changes intended to enhance one’s physique. There’s no short cut to strength and endurance, besides putting in the hours of training. There have been people though who were unhappy with their current form, who dared touch the flames with their living hands. Not all such people can catch the fires. I don’t know what quality they possess or lack but for those people, the flames are no more than pretty lights. For the others however, the ones the flames of change lit upon? They burn, but in burning become something wholly new.”

“And do any of them just burn?” Lisa asked. “Does the [Heart Fire] ever hurt the people it touches?”

“And is the [Heart Fire[ itself ever harmed by that?” Tessa asked.

Sister Acroghast looked them over for a moment before answering.

“No, [Heart Fires] are eternal. They cannot be damaged by anything in this world. As for the people? I have never heard of anyone being harmed by a [Heart Fire] though the transformation itself has been reported differently by different people. And, I suppose, bringing someone back to life on a battlefield is an indirect sort of harm. But no, there too, the [Heart Fires] essence is renewal. They do not cause harm. Not in the immediate sense.”

“That’s good to hear,” Tessa said, relaxing visibly at the news.

“Except that we’ve seen that [Heart Fires] aren’t eternal,” Lisa said.

“What do you mean?” Sister Acroghast said. “They are divine. Only one of the creators could extinguish them.”

Tessa and Lisa shared a silent look before Tessa spoke.

“We’ve seen a [Heart Fire] that was destroyed,” Tessa said. “It was in the [High Beyond]. When the Consortium forces attacked.”

“But they’ve been attacking here and there aren’t any reports of the [Heart Fire] shrines being destroyed?” Sister Acroghast said.

“They used different weapons and different troops in the [High Beyond],” Lisa said.

“And there were something else there too,” Tessa said. “It was nameless when it broke through, but it’s become more real since then. The last time we saw it, the creature had become a multitude of [Hungry Shadows].”

“One became many? And what are these [Disjoined] that you mentioned?” Sister Acroghast asked.

“Another problem that we’re hoping the [Heart Fires] can help with,” Tessa said.

“They are the ones who are in the wrong bodies?” Sister Acroghast asked.

“Them too,” Tessa said.

“There’ve been reports of the [Disjoined] here on the surface, so we know they’re not limited to the [High Beyond] like the [Hungry Shadow] is.”

“What sort of creature are they? Can a good axe slay them?” Sister Acroghast asked.

“The ones we fought weren’t particularly tough,” Tessa said. “But we don’t want to destroy them if we don’t have to.”

“They have no treasure? Or don’t provide any experience?” Sister Acroghast, correctly naming the two most likely reasons [Adventurers] wouldn’t be interested in killing a hostile monster.

“They’re people,” Tessa said. “Or the mixed up fragments of people.”

“Many monsters are,” Sister Acroghast said.

“I think these ones we might be able to help. Or I might be able to help,” Tessa said.

“The [Sisters of Steel] will always stand with those who seek to bring mercy and healing to the world,” Sister Acroghast said. “If these [Disjoined] are hostile though, it may be that destroying them is the only option we will have to keep you and the others in this town safe.”

“Oh, we don’t need you to keep us safe,” Tessa said. “That’s the bigger part of why we’re here.”

“If you seek a transformation which will guard you from an enemy, I’m afraid you’re heading for a disappointment,” Sister Acroghast. “Attempts to become a mighty [Wizard] or powerful [Warrior] have universally failed.”

Tessa and Lisa shared another silent gaze before Tessa spoke once more.

“I think this situation might be just a little different,” she said and turned to reach her hand into the [Heart Fire].

When she pulled it back out a wreath of fire was playing down from her finger tips which were already starting to change.

[Dragonshire’s] main chapel looked like the perfect model of a center of worship, sitting on one of the highest hills in the town, with a roof elevated far above any of its neighbors. The clanging that came from within though was somewhat out of place.

“That sounds like a battle doesn’t it?” Tessa asked.

“I don’t know. Battle’s usually have less swearing,” Lisa said.

Tessa looked back to see that Lisa had called her staff to her hands and looked to be readying a spell. That was a fairly natural reaction for a healer and was likely thanks to Lost Alice’s influence. Tessa wondered if Pillowcase was to blame for her instinctive reaction of stepping in front of Lisa in order to be able to act as a shield for her.

“That would work better if we actually had a shield I suppose,” Pillowcase said internally.

“Bodies can act like shields, right?” Tessa said, chastising herself for forgetting once again that she wasn’t a tank. At least not at the moment. 

“If we get ourselves killed, Lisa’s going to murder us,” Pillowcase said, and Tessa was amused at the thought that in the [Fallen Kingdoms] that was a perfectly viable threat to make.

“Should we go in?” Tessa asked aloud.

“Probably not, but we’re going to anyways right?” Lisa said.

“True,” Tessa said and took the handle to the door with a steadying breath.

Inside the chapel, she found a scene that was about as far removed from a conventional prayer service as she could have imagined.

[Knights], or at least fighters clad in a battleship’s worth of plate armor, were gathered in the central chamber. In place of any sort of seating however, the main worship area was decorated with tall wooden stands as thick as Tessa’s outstretched hand was wide. In and among the forest of tree-stand-ins, the [Warriors] scurried for position, the larger group of them trying to flank what appeared to be a trio of defenders who were holding them off from a wooden post which was wrapped in colorful ribbons.

The steady stream of profanities were coming from the aggressors who, to Pillowcase’s trained eye, were having a beastly time reaching their quarry.

One subgroup of two tried to push in from the side of the rightmost defender. The defender was smaller than either of the combatants, but the axe she bore potentially outmassed all three of them. It was the sort of weapon which medieval scholars on Earth would have laughed themselves silly over if they saw it depicted in a game since even basic physics should have disallowed it from being used as a weapon. The trail of lightning that followed the axe as the defender swung it though suggested rather strongly that it was enchanted to the point where it could make basic physics go sit in a corner for a timeout should anything like mass and leverage try to object to the axe’s usefulness.

More profanity erupted as the lightning wreathed axe slammed into both of the attackers in its wide swing and sent them crashing like pinballs through the fake forest.

Tessa’s Fight-or-Flight reflex remained at rest despite the cacophony of blows and swears and after a moment she noticed why.

Rather than inciting the other attackers into a rage, the ‘tragic’ fate of the two who’d been blasted away by the axe provoked a round of good natured laughter at their expense. The tragedy of the terrible blows done to them was lessened as well by the fact that both of the attackers were on their feet a moment after they landed with no noticeable damage done to their armor or persons. 

“Training exercise?” Lisa asked on the private channel.

“Yep. And I’m going to guess these are all [Clerics] right?” Tessa asked.

“They seem to be,” Tessa said. “Pretty serious melee kits for a bunch of [Clerics] though.”

“I’m guessing that’s what the beta testers meant when they said the clergy for [Dragonshire] were a ‘militant order of nuns’. I figured they meant ‘the [Clerics] will join in battles that occur in the town’ though, not that the nuns were probably going to be the battle happening in the town most days!”

“Don’t look now, but I think we might be joining the battle,” Lisa said.

From across the room, a bellowing voice rang out over the din of the fray shouting “Hold Sisters! It looks like we have new visitors joining us today!”

With crisp precision, each of the platemail clad [Clerics] returned their weapons to a guarding position and held up a free hand to indicate that they’d heard the order to hold and were complying with it.

Tessa felt an all too familiar stab of social panic at the eyes of every steelclad woman in the room turned on her. 

So Pillowcase took the reins for a moment.

“Hail and well met,” Pillowcase said, feeling almost at home among a troop of martial combatants in the middle of their daily drills. “We’re sorry to interrupt. Please go on, if we’re not intruding.”

The words came easily to Pillowcase where they’d clogged up on one another in Tessa’s throat, and from her slightly displaced vantage point Tessa could see why. What had been a new and totally unfamiliar situation for a programmer from Earth was a scenario Pillowcase had encountered often enough that it held few surprises. Walking on familiar ground required far less courage or creativity and so provided the illusion that Pillowcase was the more confident and self assured of the two personas she could wear.

But Pillowcase had been almost completely silent during her heartfelt discussions with Lisa, and feeling back into those memories, Tessa could see how terrified and out of her element Pillowcase had been for the whole conversation. It was like she was back confessing her feelings to a girl for the first time when she saw how Pillowcase had viewed those moments. Moments when Tessa was unsure as well, but at least had the benefit of knowing a few of the steps of the dance she and Lisa were joining together in.

Self congratulatory or not, she still gave Pillowcase a mental fist bump at how much stronger they were together.

“Nonsense!” the tallest of the nuns said. “We get to practice all the time. New visitors are always a treat. Especially if you’re hear to join the fray?”

The last question was phrased so hopefully that Pillowcase felt terrible to disappoint the nun.

“At the moment, I’m a bit under-dressed I’m afraid,” Pillowcase said. Her words weren’t as stiff and formal as her former Consortium masters would have demanded – probably because she was able to draw from Tessa’s language skills too – and Pillowcase was glad for that. 

The farther she could distance herself from the Consortium the better. The last thing she wanted was people to make the mistake of thinking she wanted anything to do with her former tormenters other than to burn the whole organization to the ground.

“Ah, that’s not a problem,” the tall nun said. “We’ve got plenty of loaner gear. But I’ve been remiss. I’m supposed to welcome you to the [Chapel of Unbreakable Devotion], home of the [Sisters of Steel]. I’m Mother Graymourn and these are the [Sisters of Steel], at your service for all your spiritual needs.”

Mother Graymourn removed her helmet as she spoke and Pillowcase saw she had a head of close cropped gray hair to match her name. She was older as well though the glint of mischief in her eyes and the ease with which she swung the apparently unenchanted mace in her hands suggested she was as hale and hearty as a woman half her age.

“Lost Alice here and I are [Adventurers],” Pillowcase said. “We got in to [Dragonshire] last night along with a few others. You can call me Pillowcase.”

“And what brings you to the [Sisters of Steel], Lost Alice and Pillowcase?” Mother Graymourn asked. “Come to see if we have any quests for you to tackle?”

“It was your [Heart Fire] that brought us here, but if you’ve got any quests you could use a hand with, we’d be delighted to hear about those too,” Pillowcase said, her [Adventurer’s] heart quickening at the thought.

“The [Heart Fire]? Did someone die?” another nun asked. She took of her helm and placed it on the one of the shorter wooden poles, revealing her to be a woman of a similar age to Mother Graymourn, though with close cropped red hair rather than gray.

“Please say no,” Mother Graymourn said. “If someone has then I’ll owe Sister Acroghast here a dozen gold.”

“You’ve heard [Adventurers] arrived already I take it?” Pillowcase asked. “What are the odds that none of us need to use the [Heart Fire] before tomorrow morning?”

“I think Sister Hellgaze was offering one thousand to one odds on that,” Siser Acroghast said.

“I’m guessing no one took her up on that?” Lisa asked.

“You could be the first!” Mother Graymourn said.

“No thanks. I’ve met [Adventurers],” Lisa said. “I’m frankly surprised the bets still standing.”

“I am too,” Mother Graymourn said. “I lost the first round already!”

“I told you they’d last longer than ten minutes,” Sister Acroghast said.

Pillowcase could hold back the chuckle that escaped her lips.

“I see you’ve met [Adventurers] before too,” she said. “As far as we know, no one’s died yet, though to be fair, they might have respawned in the [Great Hall] if they did.”

“Well since I haven’t lost my money yet, I’ll take that as good news,” Mother Graymourn said. “But it does leave me puzzled why you’d want to see our [Heart Fire]. Not that I’m opposed you understand. The [Heart Fire] is only ours in the sense that we’ve taken responsibility for the [Chapel] here. It will always be a free resource to any who are brave enough to live here. Make sure you’re friends know that okay?”

“We will,” Pillowcase said. It was impractical at best to try to charge [Adventurers] for the use of a [Heart Fire] since there wasn’t a practical method of restricting access to it and general custom had them as freely available for people whose luck was poor enough to need one. Leaving the [Heart Fire] freely available to the community as a whole though was an encouraging sign, if not an entirely unexpected one in a place like [Dragonshire] which needed to be as welcoming as possible to promote the town’s regrowth.

“Let me show them where it is,” Sister Acroghast said. “You can get back to thrashing the rest of them in the mock battle.”

“Hey, this is all instructional,” Mother Graymourn said.

“Yes, we’re learning just how much of a sadist you can be,” Sister Acroghast said.

“You see the kind of respect I get?” Mother Graymourn  said, turning to Pillowcase. “Is it any wonder that it takes a few whacks with the old mace to maintain discipline?”

From Sister Acroghast’s eye roll, Pillowcase could see that none of the teasing between the two had a shred of seriousness behind it. She’d seen instructors who led the Consortium’s troops common troops and relief on a physical punishments to enforce discipline. They were universally less effective than the ones who could achieve the same results through pure force of personality, and under her cheerful demeanor, Mother Graymourn had the same unflappable calm the best of the Consortium’s instructors possessed. 

With a nod, and a cuff on Sister Acroghast’s shoulder, Mother Graymourn turned back to her troops and left her second in command to direct their guests into a corridor on the side of the room which ran parallel to the central room until it reach a small side room where the air grew strangely quite and serene, despite the battle that had resumed in the central chamber.

“We keep this area quiet for the sake of those who wish to use it for reflection, or who chose to speak with the departed,” Sister Acroghast said. “If we need anything, feel free to come back to the main room.”

“There is one thing,” Lisa said. “Do you have any private rooms nearby?”

“Yes, there are some prayer chambers on the other side of this room,” Sister Acroghast said. “They’re silenced as well, we suspect so that mourners could weep and wail without disturbing each other.”

“Thank you,” Lisa said.

“Why do we need that?” Tessa asked on their private line.

“Before you try to completely transform your body, I was thinking it would be a good idea to make sure you’re not suffering from any conditions that I can help you with. It turns out being a healer here is more than just having a few wound recovery spells.”

Tessa nodded in appreciation. Everything in this version of the [Fallen Kingdoms] seemed to be richer and more real, so it made sense that the skills the different classes had would be more comprehensive as well.

“So, what do you say, do you want to play doctor with me?” Lisa asked with mischief alight in her eyes.

Tessa felt like she was tap dancing around the edge of an endless abyss. The shock of seeing a dialog appear in her normal vision, or more accurately, the shock of seeing proof that she was far from normal anymore, hadn’t been enough to send her tumbling over the edge into madness. 

On it’s own it wouldn’t have even come close.

But Tessa had been through a rather intense couple of days. 

She could forgive herself for being pretty wobbly.

Heck even if everything else had been unremarkable, hearing someone she liked say they liked her back would have left her spinning and off balance for a while.

Rip’s question wasn’t in that league. It wasn’t even intrinsically concerning or surprising. The simple answer to ‘can a monster join a guild’ was ‘no’. Monsters weren’t people. They weren’t even individually distinct. Most were generic copies of the same critter type like “Sand Crab] or [Hell Raptor]. The few named, and theoretically individual ones, like [Lashferelle the Forge Lord] still weren’t singular entities, since a dungeon party who fought to the center of the [The Forge of Sorrows] would encounter their own version of Lashferelle regardless of how many other parties were fighting their own versions of the final battle.

But that was what was true in the game.

“Who would like to join the guild?” Tessa asked, a suspicion rising from her bones that the answer would be different for the prospects Rip had found.

“You remember Baelgritz, right?” Rip said. “We ran into him and Illuthiz and Hermeziz.”

“And they want to join an [Adventurers] guild?” Lisa asked.

“They were curious if it was possible,” Matt said.

“Normally no,” Lady Midnight said. “Or at least it wasn’t in the game. Guilds were for players only.”

“I have a feeling things will work a little differently here,” Tessa said.

“I don’t know,” Lisa said. “I tried typing in Baelgritz name and nothing came up on the invite screen.”

“Try again, but do it from the search window,” Tessa said. “Don’t search for him directly though, just do an area search for ‘all’. That should show [Adventurers] and any other creatures we’ve encountered and know about.”

“Six years you haven’t played with this interface and you still remember that?” Lisa asked.

“Our tanks never wanted to make parties, so I always had to send out the invites and then promote the tank to leader once everyone was assembled,” Tessa said.

“I’m not complaining, I’m just impressed,” Lisa said. “Oh, and it worked. I can see him and invite him. If we want.”

“Why did you have to do it like that?” Matt asked.

“I’m guessing his name isn’t ‘Baelgritz’, not exactly,” Tessa said. “That’s probably close but it’s like ‘Olaf’ and ‘Ölaf’. We simplify the one with the umlaut when we type on American keyboards but the game client could be picky about the difference sometimes. I know we don’t have keyboards here, but I figured something similar might be happening.”

“I am glad you understood how to correct for that,” Starchild said. “It does leave us with the question of if we want them to be in the guild though?”

“We’ve talked a bit about adding crafters, this would be a big step beyond non-leveling [Adventurers] though, so we should put some thought into it,” Lisa said.

“I think the first question is whether anyone is definitely opposed to the idea,” Tessa said. Sheknew that trying to have a reasonable discussion when someone had already definitively made up their mind was an exercise in futility. 

Fortunately, that didn’t seem to be the case.

“I’m okay with it,” Rip said.

“Me too,” Matt said. “They’re nicer than they look. And they’re Science Nerds, which, you know, is cool.”

“If they would ally with us, I would welcome them,” Starchild said.

Tessa wondered how Pete felt about the situation. It had been a while since he’d spoken through Starchild. He wasn’t the next to speak though.

“I have a concern, but it’s not about them joining us,” Lady Midnight said.

“What’s that?” Rip asked.

“I take it you ran into them while you were out exploring?” Lady Midnight asked.

“We’re still in town,” Obby said, “But we’re poking around the outskirts. They had the same thought as us in terms of finding trouble before trouble decided to sneak up on us.”

“They’re not particularly high level though, right?” Lady Midnight asked.

“No. They were doing their best to manage in the starter dungeon we found them in,” Obby said.

“Do they know how dangerous that is for them?” Lady Midnight asked.

“They do, but Illuthiz and Baelgritz think there’s a lot here that they can study,” Matt said.

“And Hermeziz just seems to be crabby because he’s worried about them,” Rip said.

“He’s worried about them?” Matt asked.

“Yeah, can’t you tell?” Rip asked.

“Uh no?” Matt said.

“Look at them. Bael and Illu are both like an inch away from that plant and what’s Herm doing?”

“He’s been complaining at them non-stop since they started,” Matt said.

“Yeah, but look how close he is and how he’s keeping an eye out on everything they can’t see,” Rip said.

“So he’s just scared to be out here?” Matt said. “I mean I can’t blame him.”

“He’s not scared,” Rip said. “He doesn’t have his weapon drawn, and he’s not bothering to check the angle the other two can see. He trusts them. He just doesn’t trust what the world might do to them.”

“That’s a good enough argument for me,” Obby said. “These three might look like demons, but they’re good people.”

“Were you worried that they might need our protection?” Lisa asked.

“Not that specifically,” Lady Midnight said. “I don’t think any of us would mind watching over people who were in danger. I was more concerned that they might want to join us so they could follow us into places they really shouldn’t be going.”

“We might be able to protect them in a dungeon, but that’s a lot to hang a ‘might’ on. They don’t get second chances if we’re wrong about that,” Tessa said.

“We could leave that to them, and to Yawlorna,” Rip said.

“With how excited they are by a funky looking weed, there’s probably a good chance they’d wind up trying a dungeon on their own too,” Matt said.

“Or, we could bring them back samples to work with,” Lisa said. “So they wouldn’t have to go into the kind of crazy danger [Adventurers] can handle.”

“I could see that being appealing to them. Or at least to their boss,” Lady Midnight said.

“So does that affect your feelings on them joining the guild?” Lisa asked.

“Oh, I don’t have any problems with that,” Lady Midnight said. “I just wanted to make sure they weren’t getting into something that’d be dangerously over their heads.”

“Which means we only need one more vote,” Lisa said.

“Whose?” Tessa asked.

“Uh,” Lisa said and poked Tessa in the chest. “You get a vote too.”

“Oh, right, sorry, I’m used to being the one collecting the votes. I’m okay with them joining, but I think we’ll want to run it by Yawlorna first. I don’t want her to think we’re poaching her team away from her.”

“Probably good to have that as a group discussion with all of them present,” Lisa said. “Nothing secret, no hurt feelings, everything on the table in terms of what we can and can’t do.”

“We may want to include the crafters we have in mind to ask to join too,” Starchild said. “I gather what we are constructing will not be a very typical guild. People should have a chance to know what they’re signing up for.”

“Should we do that soon so other people don’t snap up all the good crafters before we can?” Rip asked.

Tessa’s pulse quickened at the idea. Competition for resources was something games had differing stances on. Some made it a foundational aspect of play, pitting players against each other for everything from gathering herbs to accessing housing. Others took a different approach and made the game’s resources accessible only through cooperation. 

[Broken Horizons] lived in the middle ground between those extremes but there was one resource no game could make freely available – other players.

“No,” Tessa said. “We can talk to the people who look like a good fit and let them know they’re welcome to join us. If there’s someone who’s really dedicated and they want to team up with another group though, that’s fine. We brought a lot of people through the gate from the [High Beyond] but we’re still a small community here. I’m sure there’ll be drama between the groups that form, but the friendlier we try to keep things, the happier everyone’s going to be.”

“It’s not uncommon for people to switch guilds a few times when they’re starting out too,” Lisa said. “If we want someone, we’ll do a lot better letting them know that and then respecting their choice rather than trying to pressure them to join us when they’ll be unhappy to be in the guild.”

“We talked about having a celebration tonight, didn’t we?” Rip asked. “Should we ask them all then?”

“That would give us a chance to see how well the people we have in mind seem to get along with each other?” Tessa said.

“We’ll want to plan for a reasonably short run into the fields then,” Lisa said. “If we spend too long hunting the [Cursed Walkers] everyone will be asleep when we get back.”

“There’s also the [Blood Fire] if we wanted to try that still,” Tessa said.

“We probably should,” Lisa said. “Assuming our injured people don’t turn into zombies before the party’s over.”

“Are we pushing things too far there?” Rip asked.

“Glimmerglass thinks we have some time,” Lady Midnight said. “I wouldn’t say the subjects are exactly stable, or that we have a good understanding of the pathology but based on how our healing spells seem to be interacting with their infections, it appears that we’re holding them where they are.”

“I suspect that will change if the main body of the [Hungry Shadow] manages to get through the gate,” Tessa said. “In that case though, we’ll probably have a lot more to worry about than people being zombified.”

“If they’re infected can the infection spread?” Matt asked.

“It hasn’t shown signs of spreading yet,” Lady Midnight said.

“We’ve got a theory that it’s a long term status effect,” Lisa said. “If that’s true, it may be that only a [Hungry Shadow] can inflict it.”

“Of course if the end goal of the status effect is to turn the victim into a [Hungry Shadow] then the problem can become exponential as quickly as it can convert people,” Tessa said.

“If the Shadows are offshoots from the main creature, that they’re not getting worse might be a sign that the [Hungry Shadow]  is too busy to try to possess them at the moment.” Obby said.

“We’ll have to hope that it stays that busy for a while then,” Tessa said. “I doubt our first trip to the [Blood Fires] is going to give us a [True Panacea] or anything like that.”

“With how the last few days have been going?” Lisa asked. “I’d believe anything at this point.”

“With how the last few days have gone, I’m thinking we’re more likely to come back with a whole new and exciting [Plague] of our own,” Tessa said. 

She was joking. 

Mostly.

“Is it okay to invite Bael, Illum and Herme to the party at least?” Rip asked. “Cause I kind of already did.”

“Nope,” Lisa said. “Now you’re going to have to break their hearts and tell them they can’t come.”

“What!?” Rip said.

“God you’re gullible,” Lisa said. “Yes, of course invite them. That’s what we should all be doing. If you’ve run into anyone who seems like they’d be a good fit with the rest of us, tell them to swing by.”

“We’ll have free loot and prizes to give out too!” Obby said.

Tessa could see the snowball starting to build and clung to the hope that it would roll up a bunch of good memories rather than rolling over them all and flattening them like disaster pancakes.

It was a small thing, the dialog hanging in the air in front of her, just a tiny aberration from her expectations of how the world worked. In the face of the other thing she’d seen and been through, one little square of light with a simple question should have barely even registered as a blip of strangeness, shouldn’t have evoked even an awareness of being unusual, much less left Tessa frozen in wonder and disorientation.

“What is it?” Lisa asked, seeing Tessa’s bone deep confusion.

“I don’t know,” Tessa managed after a moment.

Her hand was frozen halfway to the dialog, an unconscious reflex to click the ‘Ok’ button having carried it that far before her mind fully grasped what she was seeing.

“That’s something I would see,” Pillowcase said, her voice purely internal as Tessa scrambled to make sense of what was in front of her. “But…”

“But I don’t have your eyes,” Tessa said, answering herself and added on the party chat line for Lisa’s benefit. “I got the Guild invite.”

“It popped up in front of you?” Lisa asked, her eyes narrowing immediately in understanding.

“It’s still hovering there,” Tessa said, her hand unfreezing enough to gesture at the little scale of light.

“Isn’t that what it should have done that though?” Rip asked.

“It doesn’t sound like it,” Matt said.

“Not if she’s still an Earthling,” Lady Midnight said. “How are you feeling Tessa?”

“Good. Fine,” Tessa said. Existential dread wasn’t an unreasonable thing to be feeling, right? She didn’t voice that part but she didn’t need to Lisa read it in her expression.

“You leveled up,” Lisa said, putting a comforting hand on Tessa’s shoulder. “I wonder if that includes a passive ability that lets you see what would have been system messages?”

It made enough sense that it gave Tessa the lifeline to cling to that she needed. She hadn’t [Fractured] from reality again. There was a plausible reason that her silly human eyes were seeing things no silly human eyes should be able to.

Tessa wasn’t sure if the reassurance allowed her heart to start beating again, or if it allowed her heart to slow down to the point where should could tell that it was still beating.

“I really wish I could see my stats,” she said, shaking her head. A glance over at Lisa showed not to the reassuring expression she’d expected but a ghost of concern. “I’m okay though, really. I’ve been thinking I’m probably not exactly an Earth-standard human anymore for a while now. It was just a bit surprising to have it confirmed like that. I guess my Denial passive ability is stronger than I thought.”

She forced a grin onto her lips, which was made a touch easier by the pleasant lack of any special effect around ‘denial’. The last thing Tessa wanted was a supernatural ability based on that.

Lisa nodded but the ghost was still haunting her eyes.

“What’s wrong?” Tessa asked, switching to their private channel.

“You sure you’re feeling okay now?” Lisa asked. “Any time you need to fall apart, I’m here to catch you okay? That’s part of the deal, right?”

“Yeah. And the same for you too, okay? I think we’re both due about a dozen freak outs each, and that’s just for the stuff we’ve run into since we woke up,” Tessa said.

“Good. So. How are you feeling?”

Tessa was about to say ‘Fine’ again but she stopped herself. ‘Fine’ was a rote response. It was what she was expected to say when people asked about her. Don’t trouble anyone with your problems. Don’t be a bother. Keep all the turmoil and mess that was in her head safely locked away from everyone else, because no one had time for her problems. Not when she was supposed to be helping them with theirs.

“I could be better, I think,” she said, each word more terrifying than the last, each one potentially too much of a demand, too ugly for Lisa to continue loving her.

“Even that much of an understatement is that frightening to admit?” Pillowcase asked, and from her perspective, Tessa felt vaguely ridiculous at her own worry and fear.

Lisa wasn’t going to hate her if Tessa told her the truth. Sure, spiraling around the same problem constantly could get tiresome but there was a wide gulf between that and letting Lisa see what was really going on when she was outright asking to know.

“I know I broke something, or lost something when I became a [Void Speaker],” she said, still on the private channel. The others wouldn’t condemn her for her feelings either, but sharing with Lisa was about as far as she could force herself to extend her trust in that. “I don’t regret it. Or at least I’m happy that I’m back here, and I still feel like ‘me’, like the ‘Tessa’ I’m familiar with being. And having a class? That’s really cool. And a new, special class? I mean, that seems awesome right? It’s supposed to be amazing. I’m all special and stuff and I shouldn’t complain.”

“But it’s scary isn’t it?” Lisa asked. She took Tessa’s other hand in her own, lacing their fingers together and holding it up to Tessa’s heart.

“Yeah,” Tessa admitted. “Very.”

“That probably shows that you’re more yourself than you’re feeling at the moment,” Lisa said. “Picture if you were totally gungho and couldn’t see anything wrong with become a god-tier [Void Speaker] as soon as possible. If you didn’t have any thoughts like the ones you’re having, would that be you or just someone who was, I don’t know, ‘inspired by’ you I guess?”

A real smile crept onto Tessa’s face. On the one hand, being defined by her fears and weaknesses didn’t sound terribly great, but on the other, that her fears had a purpose, were a sign that she was fighting to be herself? That made them a lot cooler than she’d given them, no, given herself credit for.

“Thank you,” she said. “You…that was what I needed to hear. Or needed to remember. Being afraid is okay, isn’t it?”

“Being you is okay,” Lisa said. “Afraid, excited, sad, whatever it is, if it’s you, it’s all good.”

“Even if I become some weird, otherworldly thing from beyond time and space?” Tessa’s relief let her switch to teasing-mode, but listening to herself she saw she wasn’t just being silly. She remembered the [Formless Hunger] and knew that the trauma of dealing with it was still something she was processing. 

“I’m a blood drinking fiend of the night,” Lisa said. “I kinda can’t picture anything you’d become that I wouldn’t want to hang onto.”

“I’m going to try not to become too much else,” Tessa said. “Being Pillowcase and Tessa is enough for now I think. I mean, I barely had a handle on being ‘Tessa’ and I had 26 years as her to work on that. I probably need put some more work into who I am now before I try to change class to [Cosmic Horror].”

Both she and Lisa heard the sound effect around [Cosmic Horror] and blinked.

“Really?” Tessa said, wrinkling her nose in irritation. “That’s a thing here too?”

“I think we can file that under ‘Not Our Problem’,” Lisa said. “At least not till we’re at the level cap, and maybe not even then. We’re still going to need a ton of the high tier raid gear before we’re really competitive there.”

“Ugh, that’s right,” Tessa said, memories of the raids she’d fought as Glimmerglass flooding back into her mind. “That’s going to take forever to get through, if it’s even possible with actually living in the world like this.”

It wasn’t uncommon for the mechanics of the raids to require add-ons to manage, things that could warn the player when special attacks were coming, or help coordinate a small army of 64 [Adventurers] better than voice chat could manage.

“It not only would need to be possible, we’d also have to find a group to run it with who’s willing to take us along,” Lisa said. “Most of the raid zones are locked off but Cease All said AoL probably wouldn’t be running them anyways, even if the Consortium wasn’t an issue. No one wants to try anything that hard when getting dipped in lava or melted by acid actually hurts and can kill you.”

“Uh, so is Tessa going to join the guild?” Rip asked on the party channel.

Tessa blinked and noticed that the dialog was still hanging in the air in front of her. Lisa had moved in close enough that the window was hovering in front her chest.

“Definitely,” Tessa said and tapping the ‘Ok’ button right over Lisa’s heart without extracting her hand from Lisa’s.

Guild: Second Stars Formed!

Status: Guild Founder Achieved!

Rank: Guild Master (Shared)

Guild Management interface enabled.

Tessa suppressed a squeak of surprise. She’d heard those words in what she knew in her bones was the voice of the system. 

“So we can talk on this channel now too?” Rip asked, and Tessa felt a subtle distinction to the sound of the words in her head. 

Intuition really shouldn’t have been able to identify that as ‘guild chat’ but she knew it was anyways. 

“Apparently so,” Lisa said. “Once we get some more people invited, this will be handy for keeping us all in the loop on what’s happening and for just chatting in general.”

“It looks like we can mute it if we need too,” Lady Midnight said.

“I guess that’s good if some of us want to talk all night and other people want to sleep, right?” Matt asked.

“Organization level channels are also good to silence when you’re working on a task that demands more focus,” Starchild said. “Exploring a dungeon for example.”

“Or if the guild goes off on a tangent you’re not interested in,” Lady Midnight said.

“How will we know if something important comes up though?” Rip asked.

“It looks like there’s a Guild Master channel,” Lisa said. “THIS PROBABLY GOES OUT TO EVERYONE.”

Her telepathic voice wasn’t louder, not precisely, but it did demand attention the same as a loud shout would.

“Okay, not going to use that one again unless we need to,” Lisa said.

“It’s definitely an attention getter,” Obby said. “I’m guessing you have controls to mute us too?”

“Yeah, either individually or globally,” Lisa said. “In AoL, we’ve usually used that during guild meetings. If you’re muted by an officer or a [Guild Master] you can signal us to remove the mute effect. It’s like raising your hand, though for big guild that’s still a pain since you can have five hundred people listening and fifty of them put their hand up every time a question comes up.”

“Hopefully we’ll have that problem someday,” Obby said.

“Aside from the Cooks we talked about earlier, were you planning to go on an invite spree?” Lady Midnight asked.

“Not a spree really,” Lisa said. “I thought we’d invite Kamie and her group since they seem pretty cool.”

“No arguments here,” Obby said.

“Beyond that though, I was thinking we’d be selective,” Lisa said. “I know Lady Midnight and Starchild’s first party didn’t work out so well and it seemed like some of the folks there were a bit toxic? If that’s fair?”

“Quite fair,” Starchild said. 

“Toxic and a couple of them were just bad players,” Lady Midnight said.

“I’m okay with growing slowly too,” Obby said. “We don’t need to be friends with everyone in the guild, but everyone should be able to respect everyone else.”

“Having similar goals and interests, or at least one’s that don’t conflict, is probably worth focusing on too,” Tessa said. “The Cooks may not be into leveling up or dungeon crawling, which means we don’t have room for people who think everyone needs to help them level up and run dungeons with them.”

“Yeah, if people have that mindset, they can setup their own guilds and we can coalition with them, assuming they’re not jerks otherwise,” Lisa said.

“What if we find a monster that wants to join us?” Rip asked.

It sounded like a perfectly innocent question, except for the part where Tessa knew it absolutely wasn’t hypothetical.

“Second Stars?” Rip asked. “Is that a reference to something.”

Tessa’s brilliant idea for a name for their fledgling guild hadn’t been the wild hit she’d imagined it would be. Or hope it would be. Or something. In truth she’d just been struck by the name as a spur of the moment though and had been delighted when it turned to be available.

“Peter Pan, right?” Lady Midnight said.

Tessa and Lisa were still wandering through the east side of [Dragonshire], getting the lay of the land, and enjoying each other’s company on what was a startlingly pleasant day. 

The shock and jangled nerves of their fight with the Misery Worm had faded away in the sunlight far quicker than Tessa had assumed it would, in part probably because they had a new idea to latch onto and, in part, because Pillowcase and Lost Alice brought a form of mental tenacity that Tessa and Lisa had never had the need to develop in their more mundane lives.

“Yeah,” Tessa said. “It’s a play on ‘second star on the right and straight on till morning’, which if my memory serves are the directions to Neverland.”

“Aren’t we kind of in Neverland already though?” Rip asked.

The party was still spread out, the others investigating their own corners of [Dragonshire]. It shocked Tessa to her core that none of them had yet managed to pick a fight with anything or cause any mayhem. Neither Lisa nor herself had mentioned the Misery Worm yet, and she wasn’t sure if admitting that they’d managed to stumble into trouble first was a good idea. The others already seemed to think she was a magnet for bad ideas, maybe it was best to keep the confirmation of that theory as limited as possible?

“What can lead you somewhere can also lead you back though,” Lisa said.

“Assuming we want to go back,” Rip said.

That was concerning, but hardly something Tessa wasn’t already aware of. Since a group chat wasn’t the best place to pry into Rip and Matt’s personal lives, Tessa tabled her questions about what their home life was like and listened to what they were willing to talk about.

“I kind of like it,” Matt said. “I mean we are sort of the ‘Second Stars’ of the show right? The headliners are all those people at the level cap who are out there liberating cities and things like that. We’re the second stringers, and that’s okay. It’s a lot less pressure, isn’t it?”

“It definitely is,” Obby said. “I’m not saying we can sit back and let the high levels take care of everything, but it is nice not to be the only ones who could with the problems that were piling up on us in the [High Beyond].”

“Speaking of that,” Lisa said. “Any sign of the [Hungry Shadows] following us yet?”

“Not yet, but it is still day time,” Starchild said. “It seems more likely we’ll have an issue with them tonight if they made it through when we did.”

“Why would they wait that long to attack us?” Rip asked. “Wouldn’t they have struck last night?”

“They pulled back from fighting us,” Tessa said. “They’ve definitely got some kind of plan in mind. The trick will be figuring out what that is based on the moves they make.”

“If there are any here at all,” Lady Midnight said. “We’ll want to be careful about jumping at…well, shadow, too much. Paranoia is a common traumatic stress response, and it’s okay, but leaning into it’s not going to help us in the long run.”

“That’s a good point,” Tessa said. “I don’t know how the rest of you are doing, but I know Pillowcase has helped the Tessa part of me a lot in processing what we’ve been through. If this all starts feeling like too much, that’s an entirely sane response, and I’d like everyone to feel free to call for a break. I’ve got no problem huddling up and hiding out for safety and recuperation.”

“Same from me,” Lisa said. “There’s a lot of things we can do that we’re skipping now because levels are so handy to get, but things like crafting, and item refining, and reputation questing can all be done in complete safety and really help out, even at max level.”

“Those are things a Guild will make easier as well,” Starchild said.

“That’s true, we’ll unlock a lot of extra possibilities and options as a guild,” Lisa said.

“But it’s okay if we want to keep leveling, right?” Rip asked.

“Oh yeah,” Obby said. “We’re already spread out a bit in levels, and most of the significant fights in this area will have a level cap on them anyways, so having more gaps won’t really slow us down.”

“How long do [Tabbywiles] usually live?” Rip asked.

Tessa was puzzled by the change of topic, but the Lore Nerd in her rose to the challenge anyways.

“They reach adulthood a little later than humans, at 20 rather than 18, and tend to live a little longer too, around 95 years rather than 90 for humans,” she said, her mind a wonderful repository for information that she’d thought would never do her any real good.

“I think someone on the dev team was a cat lover and wanted a world were the kitties would live really long lives, but not be lonely,” Lisa said. 

“What about [Metal Mechanoids]?” Matt asked.

“They’rew new to the [Fallen Kingdoms] so none have died of old age yet,” Tessa said. “The Consortium ones tend to be ‘decommissioned’ after a new model is developed, so every five to ten years, but a [Metal Mechanoid] body is designed to last for centuries, especially if given proper care. [Clothworks], like Pillowcase, are a similar story but their design life time is shorter, just a bit over a century.”

“What brought on those questions?” Obby asked.

“Just thinking how much time we have to worth with,” Rip said. “I guess if we wanted the long term package being an [Elf] would have been the best choice?”

“Yes and no?” Tessa said, “Elves sort of live forever, but their life cycle is weird. They basically ‘die’ once a year on their birthday but then wake up the next day as themselves, but with a new perspective on the previous year, like they’d spent a separate whole year reflecting on it. There’s bigger cycles and personality shifts that happen every decade and every century.”

“Then you’ve got [Adventurers] who are functionally immortal,” Lisa said. “I mean as a [Vampire] I’m not exactly going to grow old and grey, but given that we can recreate our bodies from scratch it’s probably not surprising that none of us really age.”

“If you follow the in game clock and the accelerated day/night cycle, I think Glimmerglass is close to 300 years old now,” Tessa said.

“Wait, what?” Rip asked. “We’re immortal?”

“Uh, you’ve died before,” Matt said. “We all have. Why is that surprising?”

“I thought that didn’t count or something,” Rip said.

“It was never an issue, or really highlighted in the game,” Tessa said. “And, I guess we don’t know how that translates to here yet?”

“Can’t we just ask Glimmerglass?” Matt said.

“Or any other high level character,” Lady Midnight said.

“I guess?” Tessa said, feeling silly for not remembering that they had a ready source for answers to questions like that.

The answer turned out to be ‘yes’, Glimmerglass was, 288, which was a bit old for an [Adventurer] of her level but not unusually so. Tessa felt a pang of guilt at abandoning her for all those years. By all rights, Glimmerglass should have been max level long ago and kitted out in at least the 2nd or 3rd tier of end game raiding gear. That Glimmerglass didn’t hold that against Tessa did nothing to alleviate the guilt pangs.

“You know, I think I’m starting to come around on Second Stars,” Rip said. “If we’re immortal then that makes us like the Peter Pan. Neverland is our home and the stars are guides that we use to go where we want.”

“That was basically my idea,” Tessa said. “And we can be the stars to help bring other people who are Lost to someplace better.”

“Have you read the original Peter Pan?” Lady Midnight asked. “Neverland’s kind of scary and Peter’s sort of a monster.”

“Not to point out the obvious, but this place is kind of scary, and, some of us are sort of monsters too,” Lisa said.

“Eh, works for me then,” Lady Midnight said.

“We should have a meeting tonight, or maybe before we head out to go over the general guild mechanics stuff and the bylaws and expectations,” Tessa said. “For now though we can probably just go with a flat structure where everyone’s basically equal.”

“Nope!” Lady Midnight said. “This idea was yours and Lost Alice’s. You two get to the guild leaders. I have tried to run a guild before and I am bad at it.”

“Rip Shot and I are new here too,” Matt said.

“Anyone want to have a vote for who should be the guild leaders?” Obby said. “I nominate the two who came up with it. All in favor?”

“They’ve got my vote,” Rip said, sounding inordinately pleased with herself.

“Mine as well,” Starchild said and then amended herself to say, “Ours as well.”

“I’m obviously in favor of that,” Lady Midnight said.

“Then it looks like we’re unanimous,” Obby said. “Congratulations to our new guild leaders.”

“But we didn’t get to vote,” Lisa said.

“Were you planning to leave Tessa to run the guild by herself?” Obby asked.

“No, of course not,” Lisa said.

“And it’s a safe bet that you weren’t going to leave her going solo on it either right?” Obby said, directing the comment to Tessa.

“Yeah, okay,” Tess said, shaking her head with a mirthful smile and a roll of her eyes that she shared with Lisa. “Thank you then, all of you.”

“I think we should be thanking you,” Lady Midnight said. “When Starchild and I first met you, our party with in the midst of disintegrating and it looked like we’d be going it alone from then on.”

“I grew up in a [Druid’s Circle],” Starchild said. “I have to confess, I’m used to there being people around who supported each other, but after my early partying experience with outsiders I was worried that wasn’t how [Adventurers] worked. I’m glad that you’ve proved that idea wrong.”

“We should do something to celebrate!” Rip said. “Can we have a party tonight? Oh, yeah, when we get back from hunting those ghost things. We can divvy up the loot and trade the junky bits for some of the food the [Cooks] are working on!”

“Usually you’d sell the junk equipment to someone like Mr. Pendant, or use it for your own crafting and then take the money you get and just buy food,” Tessa said. “But I like your idea better. Just because they’re focusing on crafting rather than battle, doesn’t mean the other [Adventurers] should have as good a set of gear as we can get for them.”

“You know you say trade the loot for food,” Lisa said. “But I’m thinking bribe some of them to join the guild directly. That gets us great food all the time.”

“And that is exactly why we want the two of you as our [Guild Masters],” Obby said.

“Yeah, you listen to us and then make our ideas better,” Rip said.

“Many brains are better than one,” Tessa said. 

She’d seen that in her professional life but only very rarely. Most of the managers who preferred that style of teamwork tended to be able to find better jobs than the thankless work her company demanded of its employees. Getting to manage a team the way she’d always wanted to be treated was a like a dream come true in that sense.

“So all we need to do now is make this guild real,” Lisa said.

“What do we need to do for that?” Rip asked.

“I’m about to submit the request,” Lisa said. “All your names will be on it as [Founders], all you need to do is click ‘Ok’ on the confirmation message that pops up and as soon as we have five signatures we’ll be officially recognized.”

Tessa knew they’d have six acknowledgements as fast as her party could click to confirm them.

What she hadn’t expected was that a screen would appear in front of her.

Sometimes an idea is terrible. Sometimes it’s preposterous. But sometimes it demands to be considered despite all that..

“You’re not going to try [Fracturing] yourself again are you?” Lisa asked, turning to regard Tessa with a wary gaze.

“No, no, no! Nothing like that,” Tessa assured her.

“Do you have another god soul in your inventory somewhere?” Lisa asked.

“Sadly fresh out of the those too,” Tessa said.

“Let’s hear this idea then,” Lisa said. She looked like she was ready to tackle Tessa on the chance that Tessa was planning to do something profoundly unwise.

It wasn’t an entirely unreasonable reaction. When she considered her idea, Tessa had to admit that there was more than a little risk in it.

“We already know how we can rebuild our bodies,” Tessa said. “When we got killed by the chain monster in the [High Beyond] we had to rebuild ourselves completely at the [Heart Fire].”

“We were ghosts then,” Lisa said. “And our bodies had been pretty much obliterated.”

“Yes, and allow me to say I have no interest in repeating that,” Tessa said. “What we also know though is that bits of the [Heart Fire] can be carried back to a body to restore it from the fatal damage it took.”

“Oh yeah, that’s right, the first time we died during the [Wraithwing] attack you ran back to your body instead of respawning at the [Heart Fire],” Lisa said.

“Not the wisest or safest thing I’ve ever done, but it did give us some good info,” Tessa said. “In this case, that the [Heart Fires] can not only build a new body from scratch, they can also modify existing bodies too.”

“To be fair, in both cases all that we know is that they can do that with dead bodies,” Lisa said.

She stood up and offered a hand to Tessa. They’d each caught their breath and if they lingered in the cellar for too long it was entirely possible that the Misery Worm would respawn and they’d have yet another fight to deal with.

“Fundamentally, dead bodies are pretty similar to live ones,” Tessa said, as they wandered over to the loot pile that [Miser Wyrm] had left behind.

“I am fully aware of the irony of a [Vampire] saying this, but I think living bodies have some fairly crucial differences from dead ones,” Lisa said. She accepted the staff from the loot pile that Tessa handed over to her but passed on the necklace since it wasn’t enchanted with any stats relevant for a caster.

“I can’t argue with that, though I will note that according to [Broken Horizon] lore, [Vampiric Undeath] is a trait which is entirely separate from [Death]. If anything, you’re more alive than I am now since you’re cells aren’t dying quite like a baseline [Humans] are.”

“That’s not helping your case very much though, is it?” Lisa said.

“There’s really only one thing that’s going to prove the theory out,” Tessa said.

“You’re going to jam your hand into the [Heart Fire] and see what happens, right?” Lisa said.

“Ah, yeah, my hand, that’s definitely what I should do,” Tessa said. “Cause lighting myself entirely on fire would be overkill and kind of silly.”

“You really want Pillowcase’s body back that much?” Lisa asked, a faint puzzled look in her eyes.

“I mean, there are definitely perks to being in this body,” Tessa said, running her fingers down the outside of Lost Alice’s arms. “But I want to have the choice to be whichever ‘me’ I need to for whatever situation I’m in.”

“Well, we could try to avoid situations like this one,” Lisa said. “I’m not unhappy with the idea of keeping you out of danger.”

“I wouldn’t be either, if I thought it was a viable option,” Tessa said.

“And that’s where I can’t argue can I?” Lisa said. “I mean, we can avoid doing stuff like taking on old random monsters we find – and we probably should – but this world isn’t built for safety.”

“Is it a bad sign that I’m happier to be in peril with you, than I can remember being at any time in the last year that I lived in safety?” Tessa said. “And that’s not just taking into account my Earthly life. Looking back at how Pillowcase spent the last year, I think being here with you is a hundred times better than what she had too.”

Lisa let a brief chuckle escape her lips.

“I can’t picture how that could be true. I believe you. Really. I just can’t…”

She turned and held her hand out, offering Tessa the last of the loot, a pair of matching gold rings, each enchanted to boost the wearer’s base magic rating.

“They’re a matched set,” Tessa said. She couldn’t see their stats directly, but the runes etched inside the bands were simple enough to parse.

“Yeah. I think they’re the rare drop from this encounter,” Lisa said.

“One for me and one for you then?” Tessa said.

“You’d be stronger with both,” Lisa said.

“No, I think this is the strongest choice I can make,” Tessa said, and slid one of the rings onto Lisa’s ring finger. “We tackle things together, right?”

“You and me, till the last boss falls,” Lisa said, replicating Tessa’s gesture.

“And then we do it all over again,” Tessa said, kissing Lisa lightly on the tip of her nose. Before Lisa could disagree, Tessa pulled her back up the stairs and into the bright, midday sun.

“We know there are two [Heart Fires] in town,” Lisa said. “Which one were you thinking of using?”

“You’re onboard with me trying?” Tessa asked.

“I have some reservations, but it is an interesting idea, and you’ve probably got the best chance of any of us of pulling it off,” Lisa said. “It might even level you up in [Void Speaker].”

“Huh, I hadn’t thought of that,” Tessa said. “Can you see what level I’m at now? I thought I heard the level up announcement message when I [Fractured] the Worm but we were still kind busy so I missed the rest of what it said.”

“From what I can see, you’re a level 9 [Void Speaker] now,” Lisa said. “Which is pretty amazing because you were level 7 when we went in there.”

“That seems odd,” Tessa said. “I didn’t put the numbers together before, but the level gap between me and the [Miser Wyrm] should have meant that my [Minor Death Bolts] did basically nothing to it. What level are you up to now?”

“I’m level 15 now,” Lisa said. “Close to 16 in fact. Around 15.9 or so. Up from the beginning of 14 before that fight.”

“We were definitely too low to handle that,” Tessa said. “Weren’t we?”

“Apparently not,” Lisa said. “Your attacks took it down fair and square. There didn’t seem to be any special mechanics there. Apart from what you did with the [Fracture], but you attacked before you [Fractured] it and those attacks hit as hard as your later ones.”

“Are my [Void Speaker] levels stacking with my [Soul Knight] ones?” Tessa asked.

“I don’t think so,” Lisa said. “Your health total is right for a 9th level caster.”

“Maybe the level disparity is calculated off the highest level I have?” Tessa said, though it was more Pillowcase’s observation.

“Pillowcase is level 13, right?” Lisa asked.

“The last I could see her stats, yeah,” Tessa said. “Could [Soul Knight] be leveling up too?”

“That would sort of explain things,” Lisa said. “You hit that thing with about two dozen attacks. A level 22 tank would have taken less than half that to take the Worm down and that’s with a tank’s weak dps. Adjust that for a 9 level difference from 22 to 13, add in that most jobs do more damage than tanks, so [Void Speaker] probably hits harder than [Soul Knight] and maybe you were hitting at Pillowcase’s level but my gut feeling is that few levels beyond 13 would be more believable.”

“That’s good news if so,” Tessa said. “It still wouldn’t put me in Obby’s league, but if we run with a full team of eight, having Obby as main tank, and me as the off-tank won’t be a bad setup.”

“That’s assuming you can pull off this whole magical girl transformation thing,” Lisa said. “And I notice you’re not leading us back to the [Great Hall]?”

“It occurred to me that messing with a [Heart Fire] might have some odd side effects,” Tessa said. “Since our fellow [Adventurers] are all out getting in their own piles of trouble at the moment, something tells me the [Heart Fire] at the [Great Hall] may be seeing some use today.”

“I wish that wasn’t so horribly predictable,” Lisa said.

“As terrible as this sounds, this probably isn’t a bad time for people to die off by the bushel,” Tessa said. 

“Sadly true,” Lisa said. “We’re getting settled in here still. Any trouble that people run into that kills someone will be taken more seriously by everyone else.”

“And there hasn’t been a lot of dying here lately, and there has been a lot of fighting basically everywhere else, so hopefully that means the [Hounds of Fate] are all busy out there somewhere and people can learn the routes for their death runs now rather than figuring it out if and when the Consortium shows up and we have bodies stacking up like cordwood.”

“I take it you’ve been watching for the quickest paths back to the [Great Hall] for our inevitable death runs?” Lisa asked.

“Yep. Same as you, right?”

“I’ve been trying to scope out when it’ll be faster to go to the chapel on this side of the river too,” Lisa said.

“It is so nice doing this with someone who’s got a clue,” Tessa said. “Seriously I would have paid buckets of gold to bribe you into our guild back in the day.”

“That’s a really interesting idea,” Lisa said, slowing to a stop in the middle of the road as she mulled over whatever it was that had occurred to her.

“You’re still worth the buckets of gold, but I have to admit that even Glimmerglass isn’t that loaded these days,” Tessa said. “Or at least I think she isn’t? I was pretty tapped out when I stopped playing. Maybe she’s been doing side projects on her own since then though?”

“What? No. I don’t want you to pay me,” Lisa said. “I meant the guild.”

“Glimmerglass should still be an officer in my old guild but from what BT said, she’s probably the only one still in it. And you’ve already got a guild don’t you? With Cease All and those folks?”

“That’s on my other alts,” Lisa said. “I never got a guild invite for Lost Alice. Which means I’m perfectly free to start a new guild. Here. With you.”

“You would want to do that?” Tessa asked, barely able to parse the idea.

When she’d last played her guild had meant everything to her. They’d been the support she hadn’t had anywhere else. When that guild had fallen apart, the loss had broken something in her. Part of her wanted more than anything to forge a replacement for what she’d had, but was terrified to try.

“I would, if you would?” Lisa asked. “I mean, we don’t have to. We won’t have a guild bank or anything here, and running a guild can be a huge hassle, and…”

“And I would love to be part of one with you,” Tessa said, her doubts pushed aside by certainty that together she and Lisa could do better than recreate Glimmerglass’s old guild.

“We’ll have to decide a lot of things before we officially register,” Lisa said. “Like who we’ll allow in, and what we’ll kick them out for.”

“And a name,” Tessa said.

“That’s always the hard part. So many of the good ones are already taken.”

“Can you check to see if something’s taken before we try to register it?” Tessa asked.

“Sure.”

“Then how about…”

It’s funny how grudges can live on. Objectively, Tessa knew that being angry about something that had happened to her almost twelve years ago was just silly. If anything, she wasn’t even the one who should have been upset. The right plan would have been to call Glimmerglass over so she could have the revenge she’d been so long denied.

But Glimmerglass was Tessa. It was harder to remember that when they were walking around in separate bodies with, at least temporarily, independent memories. Tessa had been there as much as Glimmerglass had though through the years of monster encounters and dungeon raids. They’d been through all the ups and downs, and it had been one persona, one set of intentions that had pushed them through the challenges they’d overcome. 

Tessa had never been fully wed to either a first or third person viewpoint when talking about Glimmerglass. She’d been as likely to say “I picked up an incredible new staff in the dungeon that me and the guild beat last night” as she was to say “Yeah, Glimmerglass wants to get some revenge on those Dire Wraiths that wrecked her armor.”

“You know, I should probably be scared of taking this things on,” she said as she and Lisa marched back to the storm cellar door. “I should be, but I‘m not.”

“Same here,” Lisa said. “I don’t think Misery Worms even have blood and I’m still getting this borderline bloodlust at the idea of ripping one apart.”

“Pillowcase and Lost Alice are up for a throw down I guess?” Tessa said. She hadn’t meant it as a serious explanation but it raised serious questions nonetheless.

“Yeah. That could be.” Lisa seemed to be pondering the idea with the same gravity Tessa was.

Tessa still thought of herself primarily as Tessa. But ‘Tessa’ had been a cubicle dwelling, wage slave, with a messy apartment, and an aversion of socializing outside of silly elf games.

Hadn’t she?

If someone had made the claim a week earlier, she would have been forced to agree with them. She would have too easily admitted that the description more or less captured the sum total of who she was.

Except it didn’t. Certainly not anymore, and, the more she looked at it, not then either.

The facts of her life were like a candle trying to illuminate an entire theater. They not only showed just a single side of her, they couldn’t even reveal very much about that.

“I was stitched for confidence,” Pillowcase said. “I was trained with a purpose, and when I was abandoned, that purpose wasn’t lost. I found it again by choosing it for myself.”

“That doesn’t sound like something I could have done on Earth though,” Tessa continued to herself.

“Maybe not,” Pillowcase said. “Not with the support you hadn’t been given. But what you’ve done doesn’t define all that you can do. Our lives led us to build different strengths, but the capacity to be you is just as much in me as the other way round.”

“And now that we’re together?” Tessa asked, feeling a space open inside her. 

She wasn’t the woman she knew herself to be. Not anymore. She wasn’t ‘Tessa’ as she’d understood ‘Tessa’ to be. But then she never really had been. The ‘Tessa’ she’d known was always an incomplete sketch of herself because she’d never had a wide enough the perspective to view all that she could be.

And she still didn’t. Two candles showed her more of the theater of her mind, but she could see from their light how much vaster the space was. How much more she could be. If she needed to be. If she chose to be.

“Let’s do this,” she said, a familiar resolve rising her heart.

“You and me and her and the other one?” Lisa said, apparently having had a similar conversation within herself.

“All of us,” Tessa said.

“I like being crazy with you,” Lisa said.

Tessa didn’t fight her urge. She threw an arm around Lisa’s waist and pulled her in close for a quick kiss.

“Time to have some fun,” she said.

In theory they should have had a plan. They could have laid clever traps. They could have used a variety of ruses to get the [Miser Wyrm] to leave the safety of its lair. They could have simply had a sensible marching order.

Instead Tessa hit the cellar door with both feet after a running long jump and smashed through the rotten wood.

“[Counter Death],” Lisa called, wrapping Tessa in a shell of protective magic.

Tessa’s human eyes were no match for Pillowcase’s nightsight adapted magical optics, but with the cellar door in a ruined heap at her feet there was plenty of daylight shining into the basement for Tessa to catch a glimpse of an undulating shape squirming along the far well.

“[Minor Death Bolt],” she said, though the invocation wasn’t strictly necessary.

A beam of purple twisting light flashed from the tip of her wand to the far wall, drinking in all of the light it passed by.

In the darkness, the shape writhed and screamed only to come bursting forth without warning or preamble.

The [Miser Wyrm] bore no resemblance to a dragon. There were no scales on its body, and it had no serpent or lizard-like features at all. It really was more properly named a Misery Worm, with a body that resembled an earth worm with a rather horrible fungus infection. A ten foot long earth worm, it was worth noting, with a maw that was filled with  serrated gold teeth which somehow lacked gold’s signature quality of being soft and malleable.

“Die! Death bolt!” Tessa screamed as the creature lunged at her. Her wand fired another stream of purple light but she made no assumption that it would stop the thing’s charge.

Before she could be slammed into the wall by the Misery Worm’s bulk or torn apart by its fangs, Lisa was there, diving through into the cellar, through Tessa and carrying them both out of the Worm’s path.

Misery Worms had strength and power but grace and dexterity were not exactly standard issue in their tool kit. Fighting in a confined space came with some challenges for it as a result, the first being that without a body to smash into a wall, it only had its own face to break its momentum with. 

“[Minor Death Bolt],” Tessa said, rolling with Lisa’s tackle and bringing them both back to their feet.

The purple bolts were having an effect on the Worm, Tessa could see smoke rising from it and splatters of gore on the floor where it had passed. What she couldn’t see though was it’s health bar, so unlike when she was graced with Pillowcase’s vision, she had no idea how effective the bolts were.

Smashing itself into a wall had stunned the Worm for a moment but it’s misery wasn’t the kind that ended easily. It’s next charge was slower and more controlled. Tessa blasted it again, punishing it for its caution, but the creature only roared in anger and surged forward to close the distance.

“[Fracture],” Tessa said, meeting the [Miser Wyrm] with her free hand.

What she’d pictured was breaking the Worm into separate piles of its component organs. 

What she got was something different.

The ten foot long body of the Worm smashed her into the ground, it’s fangs burying themselves into her armor but failing to puncture her.

That was entirely thanks to the quality of the defensive spells woven into the fabric, something Tessa had forgotten she could rely on.

The [Fracture] wasn’t without effect though. From the back of the [Miser Wyrm] an unformed blob of protoplasm splattered outward and began screaming.

“mine! Mine! MINE!” It’s wails were an approximation of human speech more than words but the meaning was crystal clear. It was mad to drink a cocktail of all of the wealth it could gather and all the lives it could steal. That was what kept it tethered to the world, and was both its power and its punishment.

Unfortunately for Tessa, acting on that was impractical since the body of the Misery Worm was still intent on tearing her to pieces. It’s thrashing and chomping was mindless but, when it’s prey was pinned beneath it, great tactical genius wasn’t required to land devastating attacks.

Tessa felt something go very wrong in her shoulder and her ribs begin to do things which held the promise of fatal results if the force on her continued.

Lisa had other ideas about that though. 

“Get off her!” Lost Alice growled and punted the Worm’s body a good ten feet away before beginning her spell. “[Casting spell: Lesser Blood Channel]”

“MIIIiinNNnEEE,” the protoplasm screamed, focusing on the two women in front of it and shooting ghostly tendrils at them.

“[Minor Death Bolt],” Tessa gasped out sending the purple blast towards the Worm’s ghost essence.

Normal ghosts are formed from necrotic energy, so Tessa wasn’t sure  the bolt would do anything, but was pleasantly surprised to see it blossom into a small explosion on contact with the protoplasm, blasting the monster back and evaporating the tentacles it had manifested.

The healing spell banished Tessa’s pain quickly enough that she was able to rise and throw out another bolt at the protoplasm before the monster lit up with an unearthly crimson light and belched fire at the two of them.

“[Knight’s Devotion],” Tessa said, letting Pillowcase channel one her skills.

It wasn’t the most pleasant of experiences to burn in (admittedly weak) hellfire while being healed, but it did give her exactly what she needed, filling the well [Knight’s Devotion] drew from so she could stop trying to dodge the flames..

Surrounded by a shield stronger than plate steel, she stepped into the continuous gout of fire, rammed her wand into the mouth the [Demonic Spirit] had formed and unleashed a volley of bolts as fast as she could fire.

The Spirit didn’t try to retreat, it only extended even more pseudopods which grasped at her, striving against the explosions to tear away the coins it sensed her carrying.

Tessa didn’t care about her gold though. Her entire focus became killing the damned thing in front of her. 

In the end, when it died, so too did the Worm body, both sizzling away in green fire as they were dragged, for a time, back to the nether realm they’d crawled out of. They’d be back – killing [Demonic Spirits] permanently was incredibly difficult, but that was a problem for some future [Adventurers].

In the wake of the battle, Tessa swayed on her feet and the flopped down onto her butt.

“Okay. That could have gone worse I guess,” she said, waiting to catch her breath.

“Next time, we should probably not try to surprise the monster that’s clearly waiting to ambush us,” Lisa said, collapsing beside her.

“What level was that thing by the way?” Tessa asked.

“Twenty two,” Lisa said.

“Wait, seriously? That’s a lot higher than we should have tangled with!”

“I will admit I was a little worried when I saw how strong it was,” Lisa said. “I think it was probably designed for a solo encounter though, so with two of us we had a better time of it. Also whatever your [Fracture] did seemed to work out really well.”

“Wasn’t what I’d planned, but we got the win, and that’s just fantastic in my book at the moment,” Tessa said, her heart slowing down to where it was pushing the blood through her system as something less than super sonic speeds.

“We got some treasure over there,” Lisa said, gesturing to a small pile that had been left behind in the ashes of the Worm’s body.

“Want to bet we can’t equip it yet?” Tessa said.

“No bet. It’s probably level 22 stuff like the Worm was.”

Despite the lure of the treasure, they sat there together for a long minute, gathering their senses as they quietly enjoyed the reassurance of the other’s presence.

“This is who we are now, isn’t it?” Tessa asked, not unhappy with the concept, but rather turning it over in her mind to regard it from all the angles she could find.

“It’s a part of us,” Lisa said. “For now. I’ve given up trying to guess what the future’s going to throw at us.”

“That seems smart,” Tessa said. “But I’m willing to bet we run into this kind of thing again. Not another Misery Worm, but more fights for sure, and probably more with just the two of us.”

“You’re probably right,” Lisa said. “We still need to get stronger, and I don’t think either of us wants to drag the kids into the worst things this world has to offer.”

“Definitely not,” Tessa said. “But I do want to be able to be what you need.”

She felt the softest of kisses on her neck, followed by a peck on her earlobe as Lisa whispered, “You already are. Believe me.”

Tessa couldn’t help but chuckle nervously. Accepting compliments was hard.

“Thank you,” she said. “But I was thinking in a more mechanical sense.”

“Mechanical?” Lisa asked.

“As in game mechanics,” Tessa said. “I want to be a real tank for you again.”

“How?” Lisa asked.

“I think I can get Pillowcase back.”