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Being dead wasn't so bad. Dave could relax, and not worry about appearing to be cool. Who was going to see him, after all? So the first thing he did was to try and shut up the stupid bird part of his brain. The game code kept running, giving him updates, but he blocked it out and just concentrated on making himself comfortable.
Unfortunately, the feathery asshole part of his brain said that 'comfortable' meant making a nest out of shitty swords and lining it with smuppets. At the highest possible point of his apartment in LOHAC. He settled in to the damn thing and tried to make himself comfortable with all the jutting, impudent asses and phallic proboscises and goddamn shitty swords.
At least the swords were dull.
Dave rolled over onto his back, spreading his wings out wide and staring up into the dark sky. There was nothing out there, just... the horrorterrors. He suppressed a shudder and tried to ignore the pain of a memory insisting he was short one wing and bleeding glowing apple juice from his gut. He was whole. He was just
fucking
fine.
Time moved strangely in the Outer Ring, and no amount of trying to turn off parts of his brain could keep him from feeling it. He attributed it to being not only a Time-aspected player but also part game construct. It was a double-whammy of information overload that only made him want to bury himself in shitty nest materials even more. He'd tried it once already, and if it had worked he'd do it again in a heartbeat.
Time shifted, and he'd say suddenly but he was learning that shit like that happened all the time. But there was something else going on, too. A little red speck way up in his sky. Dave felt the feathers on his neck bristle up and puff out, and he sat up. On the one hand, he wanted to investigate the strange occurrence. On the other hand, his stupid bird brain was all but screaming at him not to abandon the nest in case whatever it was wanted his lousy goddamn shinies swords.
Fine. He wouldn't leave the shitty nest. But that didn't mean he had to meet whatever was coming while lying down. Dave floated up a little way, spreading his wings out and puffing up the feathers around his neck even further. He wanted to look as intimidating as possible.
The little red speck got bigger, and after a few minutes (or was it hours? Or maybe it was even days. So hard to tell), Dave saw that it was just a troll. In a red god-tier outfit with stunning red fairy wings. She looked like a giant delicious bug SHUT UP BIRD BRAIN.
But she was pretty, in a weird exotic sort of way. It was more than a little startling that she seemed to recognize him on sight, though. "Oh! Hi Dave!"
The game code chatter in the back of his mind popped up like that goddamn Clippy with all sorts of "helpful" information. The cut of her tunic and hood meant that her title was Maid, and the color and gear emblem said that she was a fellow Time player. The bird chatter still thought she looked appetizing. "Huh. How do you know my name?"
She smiled and showed off surprisingly flat, normal looking teeth. Not something that'd eat him, at least. "I've met a lot of Daves! But none of them were a sprite." She laughed and danced back a little to look him over. "Oh my god, your feathers are all puffed out! That's so adorable."
"I am not fucking adorable, got it? I am a badass motherfucker and I will--" Dave stopped himself before he allowed the bird part of his brain to say 'peck your eyes out' instead of something actually threatening.
The troll girl smiled again and patted at the feathers on his neck ruff. "It's hard to keep the instincts down sometimes, isn't it?"
Dave raised his eyebrow, crossing his arms and staring at her. "How the fuck would you know?"
His visitor laughed, seeming not at all impressed by his posturing. "I had to self-prototype, too! But I didn't prototype a cawbeast. I had to prototype a frog from some ruins to make sure we'd be able to successfully exile our session's Black Queen."
She was sounding more appetizing by the second SHUT THE FUCK UP BIRD BRAIN. "Not gonna lie, the feathery asshole inside my head just wants to eat you. You look like a bug with those wings and thinking about frogs is making my stomach growl."
Evidently, trolls thought cannibalism (wait, did it count as cannibalism when one party was an alien and another party was a dead bird-game-thing?) was hilarious, because she just giggled. "That seems pretty normal. I kept trying to eat small flying things. The key for you, though, is to just remember that you're not required to eat anymore! Or, if it helps, think very hard about what you'd like to eat, and the bubble should provide it for you."
Her yellow-marble eyes slid closed, and she held out one hand palm-up. A few seconds later, the air around her hand blurred; suddenly empty space was filled by a giant plump, delicious, juicy grub-looking thing. She opened her eyes and held it out like a peace offering. "See? This is grubloaf like my lusus used to prepare for me. I think you will like it, it was always one of my favorites."
Dave managed to stomp down the insane urge to lunge forward and stuff the grubloaf in his mouth whole, but only barely. Doing his best to keep his expression neutral, he plucked the offered food from her hand and sniffed it. "Smells like the meatloaf the old broads across the hall made sometimes," he declared. "Down the hatch, I guess." He took a huge bite out of the middle of the so-called grubloaf with maybe a little more vigor than he'd intended and started chewing.
When the meat hit his tongue (and it was definitely meat, though not from any Earth animal), he had to practically wrestle the bird parts of his brain away from his motor control centers. It tasted like heaven and Christmas and all the best animes rolled into one bug-shaped meatloaf dish, and all his bird brain wanted to do was coo contentedly and offer her a shiny sword. And he didn't even know her fucking name yet.
He swallowed the first bite and took two more before making a production of shrugging. "Yup. It tastes like meatloaf but looks like a goddamn bug. Congrats, you've managed to shut up the bird chatter that wants to eat you." Instead, he just wanted to offer something ridiculously shiny and puff up his feathers.
Resisting the urge to give her a sword was easy. But he puffed up his feathers and started picking through them with his fingers to straighten them out and make sure they looked all right. "So what's your name anyway?"
The girl laughed and patted at the feathery ruff around his neck, where he was currently concentrating his grooming efforts. "I'm Aradia! And oh my gosh, you look adorable, trying to preen like that."
"M'not preening," Dave protested, even as he tossed a broken feather away. "Preening is for chumps and birds and I am the exact opposite of a bird-chump."
"You are too preening! It's cute." Aradia pulled back her hood, revealing a mess of hair, some of it held out of her face by something glimmering and metal. Dave's gaze was locked on it immediately. It was so shiny, he had to steal it from her and go hide it in his nest. It looked like a piece of junk. That didn't stop him from staring at it and plotting ways to take it trying to figure out what it was from. "Anyway, now that we're introduced, I want to make sure that you're settling in okay. Some Daves have had a hard time adjusting to being dead!"
"Babe, I have had four months and some change to get used to the fact that I was doomed. Finally getting it over with and not being doomed anymore? Kinda a relief." As he said the words, the not-game-or-bird part of him realized the real truth in them. He didn't have to worry about when his doom was going to catch up with him anymore. He was already dead. What was the worst that could happen now?
He let the memory fade a bit, allowing his appearance as he died to take over. It hurt to flex the stub of his left wing, and not having a sword stabbing him in the gut anymore hurt more than having it in there to begin with. Aradia reached out, as if to touch him, but changed her mind at the last second. "I'm sorry. All the dead people I've seen so far died quickly. It must have hurt, to bleed out like that."
Dave shrugged, altering the memory of himself to go back to being a whole sprite. Of course it had hurt to bleed out. It was a slow, agonizing death, and he couldn't just let himself sit there and die. There had been things to do. "I did what I had to do. Not that big a deal."
For a moment, it looked like Aradia wanted to argue, but she shook her head. "Oh! Hey, is that your nest?"
He wanted to puff up again GOD DAMMIT BIRD BRAIN, NO!
He nodded once, the slight movement of his chin, and shifted to the side so he no longer floated between her and his handiwork. "Yeah, it's all right. Didn't have much to work with, seeing as how I didn't know how to make shit appear out of thin air. But I think I did all right." There, that didn't sound too horrible.
Aradia flew down towards the nest, settling into the pile of smuppets and laying down. "Oh wow, Dave, this is the most comfortable pile of stuff I've ever seen!"
What passed for his game-construct heart skipped a few beats. Holy fuck she liked his shitty smuppet-sword nest. Seriously, unironically liked! Somehow, he managed to drift casually toward his nest and settle down beside her, carefully curling his tail away from her to not seem too forward. He had to play this cool.
"Hey, uh, Aradia..." He reached through the layer of smuppets and dug around while trying to keep the troll girl's attention on his face. "I was thinking... you know, about... stuff... and shit. Uh..." No. God dammit, no. His fingers quested fervently, trying to find a specific thing he knew he'd buried in that part of the nest. Shit, now Aradia was giggling at him.
"You're very sweet. Don't feel intimidated by me, just say what's on your mind!"
"Lady, the last thing I am is fucking intimidated by you." Aha, there it was. "I just... wanted to give this to you." The extra tsuba he tossed her wasn't extremely shiny, unless you counted the shitty faux-gold leaf decoration on it. But it had to be at least a little interesting if she didn't know anything about human culture or history.
She turned it over in her hands twice, scrutinizing every detail. "This is fascinating! What are these designs here?"
Dave held out his hand so he could get a closer look. "I think it's a lotus pattern. Was never big on symbology, so I can't tell you what it means."
"Well, it's certainly pretty to look at if nothing else. Thanks Dave!" She untied a cord holding back her hair and looped it and the tsuba around her neck. He felt a strangely satisfied rush, though he couldn't quite figure out why, and he let out the breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding.
"Here, I'll tie that for you," he offered. When she did not object, he gently plucked the cord from her hands and swept her hair away from her neck. With fingers which he refused to let tremble, he knotted the cord at the nape of her neck, then settled her hair back over it. It had about the texture he expected: coarse and untamed, and it looked as though it might not have seen a comb since she first tied it up in her goofy god-hood.
Even though the cord was tied, Dave kept running his fingers through her hair, carefully untangling it as best as he could before moving on to another section. She stayed still for it, seemingly content to let him work in silence.
Or... maybe it wasn't totally silent. Dave eventually noticed that he was making something similar to a goddamn cooing noise. He mentally cursed the bird brain and shut up. Like hell he was going to be caught doing something so stupid.
"Aww, that was cute, why'd you stop?" She turned around and pouted a little.
"I am not gonna fucking coo like the birdbrained chump in my head thinks I should at the remote possibility of getting a little action."
"But Dave, there's no action around here!" Aradia looked around, presumably trying to spot where Dave's prototyped instincts thought it might find something to fight.
"Dude. Girl, no. Not what I meant. Here, why don't you run off and go find some trolls to talk to. Lemme fight with myself in peace."
She frowned, then leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. "All right, but I'll be back! There's so much we can talk about together! You'll have to tell me all about your timeline, okay?" Dave just stared at her as she fluttered her wings and flew off towards the edge of his dream bubble.
Maybe his bird brain was right, and that possibility of getting some action wasn't so remote after all.