Chapter Text
Prospitian Royal Navy Ship Basilica. Yellow Yard, F.W.§ date 13 April, 2009
You are Jade Harley. Fifteen minutes ago, you became one of the most powerful beings that ever has or will exist. And twenty-five minutes ago, you and your friends won the game for which you have spent most of your life preparing. Well, not really, but almost. At the moment, it's more as though you've pressed the biggest pause button of all time. You have two of your best friends with you (your best best friend having become inseparably ingrained into your DNA), five planets to explore at your leisure, and what feels like all the time in the world. There are a lot of words you could use to describe how you feel in this moment. Among them would be “excited,” “accomplished,” “tired,” and “downright terrified.”
The first thing that occurs to you is how strange it is to have more than one warm, breathing, alive human talking to you at once. Okay, two of them are arguably undead and have bodies that disappear halfway down into semi-solid ghost tails. And yes, you did get to talk to one living human in the past few hours. But this is overkill. Your new dog ears swivel every which way, picking up snippets of a hundred conversations buzzing simultaneously. You scarcely register a single word.
Inside the battleship corridors, a river of pushing, shoving bodies is making its way around its new home. Prospit was never this claustrophobic – pedestrian traffic was mild at most, allowing you to nod and smile at just about everyone you drifted past. This must be what they call “high foot traffic.” The clacking of hard carapaced feet and the wet pitter-pattering of amphibian toes thunks and echoes on the steel floors of the ship. You flinch at every shoulder that brushes past, and each consort that dashes under your feet elicits a sound from you comparable to a puppy having its paw stepped on. It isn't until your anxiety reaches a fever pitch that you realize your brother has been talking to you for the past couple minutes. He yanks on a loose curl of hair that spirals out of your godhood to get your attention, and you start to snarl. Focusing on John's face, the din fades in your four ears.
“Hell-o. Have you been listening?”
You blink. “Sorry. What were we talking about?”
He sighs. Perhaps his title as the Heir of Breath makes the exhale more dramatic; you could almost swear you see a cartoonish puff of air leave his mouth.
“I thought not.”
“Man, I told you already that she was checked out for the day,” says a voice behind you. His speech is rough, birdlike in its rasp and eerily similar to the voice of another you heard earlier today. A taloned finger flicks the back of your head.
You whip your head around and stick your tongue out at Davesprite, whose expression is all but indiscernible behind his sunglasses. The smile tugging one corner of his mouth upward is so small that you wonder if you're imagining it.
“Anyway,” John continues, shooting a glare behind you. “I was trying to say that we should zap some furniture from our houses onto the ship. It would be neat to have some sort of living room going on. Like revamping the ship into one big house.”
You clap your hands together. “Oh! Yes, of course.” A billion different angles of your three houses flash behind your eyelids. Scanning your own home, you feel your Bec-ears flatten. “Ah, but I suppose I don't have that much to contribute now that someone launched almost all of my foyer into space.” A faint vertigo settles over you when you open your eyes – a side effect of semipotence.
John snorts. “I don't take responsibility for shenanigans that happen when I sleep.”
“Do you take responsibility for wrecking my atrium, then?”
“Jade, sacrifices must be made sometimes for the greater good. Besides, I'm not sure any of us want you to put mummies with deer heads in a room that is supposed to make you feel relaxed.”
“What,” Davesprite mutters behind you.
“Jade's got some wacky stuff in her house,” explains John. “Or, she did.”
“Well shit, didn't that go without saying.”
“Right?”
“You two are getting no living room at all if you keep this up! Geez, and it's only been a few minutes.” But you get the feeling he's already tuned you out.
“Just let me scope out a good room to use....”
John floats up and drifts ahead of the crowd, gliding just above dozens of heads with his bright blue windsock trailing behind him. Davesprite works his way into the space John leaves. A stout Dersite bumps into the back of his wing and falls back with a loud “Oof!”
You glance around him at his injured wing, or lack thereof. The feathers are frayed at the end, crusted and clumped up with half-dried blood. He looks unfazed, and maybe he is, but it still looks nasty.
“Don't let me forget to patch that wing up later,” you chide. Davesprite looks surprised.
“You don't have to. I'm not completely organic anymore. It'll just regenerate.”
“And how long will that take?”
Davesprite rubs his arms. “It's not like I have an internal countdown. But it –”
“No buts! That wing's getting proper medical attention!” You punch your palm with enthusiasm. “Oh, and that too,” you add, pointing at the loose bandages around his stomach.
“If you say so.”
The two of you follow John in silence. Your mind begins to wander until Davesprite starts again.
“That was some stunt you pulled back there,” he ventures. His words are low and halting, as though each was evaluated carefully before saying them aloud. It takes a moment for you to even comprehend what he means. When you glance down at his hands you can see that he's flexing them, fingers disappearing and reappearing at an even, agitated pace.
“If dying in an explosion and being dumped onto a quest bed post mortem by a homicidal chess dog can be considered a stunt, then yes, it was,” you tease. Davesprite doesn't smile. He doesn't even look at you. You shiver.
“I'm sorry that I left so suddenly. Time was running short.” Your eyes lower, watching your ruby slippers follow the path that John carves ahead.
“Yeah, I kind of expected more than a 'be right back,' but that's just how the cookie crumbles, I guess.”
“Are you angry with me?”
Davesprite's mouth opens slightly, and the whites of his wide eyes are just barely visible through his shades. “What? No, I... fuck. Sorry. You probably don't want to talk to me right now, I'm kinda....” he trails off, grasping at an elusive last word with a trembling hand.
“Why would I not want to talk to you?”
It's an innocent question, but it only irritates him further. The feathers of his good wing fluff up a bit, and at first it appears that he won't answer at all. The hallway you turn into is less populated, and John continues to drift ahead of you, poking open doors and peering inside.
“Do you remember?” he asks suddenly. A hurried question, like spitting out a bad taste.
“Remember what?”
A muscle twitches in Davesprite's clamped jaw, and you feel clumsy. It seems that your every response is somehow a disappointment to him. This isn't how a regular conversation between friends sounded in your head.
“Nevermind.”
“No, what is it?”
He looks up and turns slightly, as though the direct sight of you will burn his eyes. “Do you remember being her?” The missing name hangs between you. Oh. Your brow furrows, and as you continue to look at him, a memory broils within something that feels separate from your own consciousness. A cheek itching with dried tears, a broken sword, an impossibly bright and burning sun, a chessboard stained with golden blood–
“Hey, what about this room?”
You're lurched into the present by John, who sets his feet back on the ground and points at a door in the middle of the hall.
“Hold on!” You quicken your pace, leaving Davesprite and his memories behind you.
John is already inside by the time you catch up. The room is dim, lit only by the green that filters in from two porthole windows. You fiddle with the box of switches installed next to the steel paneling. Two of them cause nothing but a concerning clunk and a spark, but after a moment you line them up correctly and the lights flicker on. You both blink in the sudden barrage of bright yellow. The fluorescents hiss.
“It's not that big, but it looks like nobody was using it before. We'll just have to get rid of... whatever that shit is,” says John, motioning at what looks like a few overturned crates of grain. White Prospitian shipping labels peel off of the sides.
“I'll trust your judgment, since I apparently have no idea what a normal living room should look like,” you reply, placing your hands on your hips. Something churns at the heart of the hull, and the floor vibrates with mechanical whirring.
“What the fuck is that?” asks Davesprite from the doorway. You yelp and clutch the front of your godhood. He flinches at your reaction. “Sorry. I guess I'm in permanent stealth mode,” he adds, pointing a claw at his tail.
“...It's fine. And that is the sound of the boiler room. It just means that the battleship is starting back up.”
“Is that normal? I mean, it was crashed, wasn't it.”
You amble across the room and run your finger along a bronze portal frame. Streaks of rust fall from some of the bolts. “Not exactly. The crew just abandoned it. It's filled to the brim with carapacians now, so they're turning a bunch of functions back on. I don't think they understand that we don't need all the mechanical bits intact to maintain flight.”
John cocks his head. “What is a carapacian? Are those what the little chess people are called?”
“Yup! The scientific name, that is.”
“How did you find that out,” asks Davesprite. He asks his questions in a near monotone, more like statements than anything.
“You learn a lot of things when you wake up early. Maybe if you had decided to wake up before the game started, you would know too.” You wink, and Davesprite looks away.
John folds his arms. “If you're done grilling us for not knowing chess alien trivia, I'd like to start setting some furniture in here.”
You answer him with jazz hands, fingers glowing with energy courtesy of the Green Sun. “Ready when you are!”
Your evening consists of questionable decisions in interior design. The living room that your team whips up consists of a fridge, two couches of wildly different style, a number of strange posters by Davesprite's request that you only grudgingly accepted, and the few world globes that you could stand to move from their positions in your grandpa's office. The affair takes almost an hour, drawn out by several bickering sessions between John and Davesprite and the need that you feel to poke fun at each others increasingly random furniture demands.
The only thing you keep your mouth shut about is the harlequin figure John asks for, which you warp onto a side table. For a moment he seems to forget that you and Davesprite are there. He turns the figure slowly in his hand, and his face is less sad than it is simply confused about how he ended up here, as if he expects to wake up somewhere else at any moment. The grief that you've willed yourself to bury resurfaces. You feel ill.
A knock comes from the open door, and the three of you start. Nannasprite floats in the doorway. Or just “Nanna,” you suppose – it isn't as if there's another version of her that requires a suffix for differentiation. John exhales and sets the harlequin next to a lamp. His fingers shake slightly when he pulls his hand away.
Nanna's disembodied hand is balled into a fist that rests on her hip. She's a comical sight, but you think she makes the undead clown look seem charming. “Who wants to be the first to tell me when the last time they've eaten was?”
“Uh....” You count hours backwards in your head. When did you eat last? This morning? Last night? You can't even remember when you entered the session. The computers in your inventory disagree on whether it is 10:20, 10:22, or 10:17 P.M.
Nanna points an accusatory finger at John. “I know it's been at least several hours for you, young man.”
John adopts a look that resembles a man waiting for the jury's sentence. “Really, Nanna, it's been a long day. You don't have to –”
“What? Make sure my children don't starve?” Nanna glances at Davesprite over the rims of her glasses. “You too, dear.”
“Thanks.”
A glance into the ships kitchen tells you that Nanna has already made it her domain. Boxes and bowls of ingredients conquer the counters, and several plates of food are waiting on a table lined with stools. A group of crestfallen Prospitians peer into the window on the kitchen door, which Nanna has evidently locked behind her.
“How did you manage to make so much already?” you ask. “This ship has very limited rations!”
Nanna winks at you with her slashed eye, hooting with conspiratory laughter. “I have my ways.” She snaps her fingers and turns to leave. “Well, you kids had better follow me! Dinner won't stay hot forever.”
When she disappears, John takes a deep breath. “If there is even a single cake in that kitchen, I will lose my fucking mind.”
You thought that you'd consumed enough media to understand how most families eat dinner together. The reality is much more chaotic than you could have ever imagined, but you suppose that this isn't a normal family dinner after all.
It starts when you tell Nanna that you're vegan.
“You're what, dear?” Nanna asks with a tight smile. She hasn't registered your words yet.
“I mean, not by choice or anything! But it's very hard to keep animal products on my island. Or, um... it was. It took a long time for mail to reach me, so it was impractical to have food that was so perishable.” You find yourself babbling, hyperaware of the three sets of confused eyes on you. “I pretty much only ate fruits and vegetables. Oh, and I know how to make bread! So there's that, too.”
Nanna inhales slowly. She pauses over the sink across from the table, ghost hand trembling.
“...Nanna? Are you okay?” John asks.
Davesprite leans over from his spot a couple stools over. “You really dropped the bomb on her,” he whispers. “You gotta be the one to call Life Alert when she has a stroke now.” Your ears swivel back, confused.
“It's not even that big of a deal. Also, why are we whispering?” you whisper.
Nanna whips around and slams her hand on the table. Your utensils bounce. “How can you even lift a fork?” she cries. She looks genuinely distressed, one eye twitching. You scramble to hold up your fork as evidence that you are not on the brink of collapse.
“I'm fine! Really, I didn't mean anything by it, it just occurred to me that I haven't –“
Nanna scoops your plate out from under you and returns to the counter. Now you're really disappointed – a side effect of your ascension means that you have a new craving for meat. When you first sat down it took everything in you not to hold your head back and shovel the whole chicken leg into your mouth. You slouch forward and rest your cheek in your hand.
“I can't believe this,” Nanna mutters to herself from across the kitchen. “I cannot be-lieve this at all.” She scoops what seems like triple the food you already had onto your plate.
You elbow John in the ribs. “Can you please call her off?”
“Nope,” he replies. As Nanna continues her rant under her breath, John and Davesprite have ignored your plight and started eating. “She's relentless with this sort of thing. You should have seen my kitchen. Full of cookies. I don't even know how she made so many. The imps ate them all, though.”
“Ugh. I'm pretty sure I've gone longer than you without eating today."
“The last thing I ate was the end piece of bread that I found under my kitchen sink two days ago,” says Davesprite from the end of the table. “Well, from my perspective,” he adds.
“Dude, shut up. I'm pretty sure you don't even need to eat now.”
“Just sayin'.”
What Nanna pushes in front of you can only be described as an obscene amount of food. A mound of mashed potatoes rises five inches off the plate. “No one can tell me that I don't feed my kids,” Nanna declares, puffing her chest out.
“No one was saying that before, Nanna. We know,” John says.
Nanna wags a blue finger at him. “That is fresh coming from someone who didn't live on grass their whole life!”
“I didn't... eat grass....”
“You haven’t got all day!" Nanna barks, whipping her head back toward you. “There's years of damage to reverse!” She doesn't turn her threatening eye away until you've made a show of eating faster than is recommended.
Satisfied, Nanna drifts off to unlock the door and let in a flurry of carapacians who have been pining in the hall. The first to dash in is Jaspers. He creeps along the floor, stomach low like a cat who who has forgotten he's as big as a human.
“Oh man, did we have to let the fucking cat in here,” Davesprite complains. He rises out of his stool and perches on the tabletop. Jaspers glides underneath the table, snaking between the poles of your seats. His purrs echo loudly underneath the metal. You recoil and pull your feet up when one of his tentacle arms brushes your ankle.
“Purr purr purr. What's all this?” Jaspers pokes his head up beside John and paws at the edge of the plate. His princess hat bobbles. “Can I have some?”
“Argh! No, kitty!” John lifts his plate above his head and gives you a look. “Doesn't Rose's house have cat food in it or something?”
You sweep the Lalonde's house. A closet off the side of the kitchen contains nothing but a few half-empty bottles of bleach, a vacuum, and a martini glass lying on its side. “Doesn't seem like it. We'll have to alchemize some later.”
“I could have told you that!” Jaspers purrs. “I have been dead for a very long time after all! Purr purr purr.” His voice is like a toddler's, all squeaks and poor enunciation. His eldritch whiskers twitch.
“Well, go get Nanna and she'll give you something to eat,” John says, shooing Jaspers away. “And stop saying 'purr' out loud. We get it, you're a cat.” Across the kitchen, Nanna doles out food to a growing crowd of chess people. On the floor beside her, two pink turtles nip at the residue inside a mixing bowl.
“Oh, there's too many people John! I didn't spend time with very many people when I was an alive cat. It makes me feel nervous,” Jaspers meows. He leaps onto the table and curls his sprite tail into a spiral. Davesprite squawks and dodges under the table. Your ears flatten, and a rumble starts in your throat.
“What's the matter with you?” John asks. It's louder in here now, and you have to raise your voices to be heard. You don't know how to tell him that something about Jaspers is suddenly so infuriating. Jaspers seems to sense it. He looks up from washing his ears and hisses loudly in your face. Davesprite bumps his head under the table and curses. You bare your teeth in response, growls rumbling in both of your throats.
“Jaspers!” John scolds. He stands up and claps his hands at the oversized house cat. Jaspers flinches and spits, swiveling his ears back. “Very rude! Go on, get – you're going to shed on the food.”
“Hissss.” Jaspers jumps onto the floor between you and John, and a few cat hairs fly off of him. One of them lands on your lips, and you swat it away.
Davesprite still has his back to you underneath the table. He looks frantically in both directions. “Is he gone?” he asks.
Jaspers paws past his hiding spot and sniffs the ends of his severed wing. The graze of his nose tips Davesprite off, and he bashes his head against the bottom of the table again. “Fuck!”
You growl and kick one leg out. It catches Jaspers in the shoulder, which sends him flying off with another guttural spit. Davesprite pokes his head out and scrabbles back into his seat. A single feather drifts from his hair when he runs his hand through it. “So I'm just gonna pretend that never happened.”
“I don't know how I'm gonna survive for three years with you furries,” John says.
“Don't blame us! Jaspers is the instigator.”
“Yeah, cats are assholes,” Davesprite mumbles. “Ain't our fault he wants to be a homewrecker.”
“Yeah, yeah, blame an innocent creature for your own weird behavior,” John replies. He picks up his empty plate and starts to stand.
“I'll get the whole dog thing under control eventually,” you sniff.
“There's nothing to get 'under control' for me, I'm the fucking prey animal here,” Davesprite groans. “Someone needs to put kitty in the kennel. I can't live like this, I have at least one sliver of dignity left to maintain.”
Your eyes flash. “I could banish him to LOLAR.”
“You could lock him in Cetus' swamp. Make him be her feline man-servant,” agrees Davesprite. He rubs his hands together.
“It's only been a couple of hours and you're plotting an animal's demise. Do you hear yourselves?” sighs John. “I'm sure Rose would love that you're trying to re-murder her cat.”
“She doesn't have to know,” Davesprite whispers from behind steepled fingers. You bite back a laugh. “Cat? What cat. I'm one hundred percent certain you never had a dear departed pet brought back as a princess ghost. In fact, you never had a sprite at all. Nothing happened to him, nope, definitely not.”
“All right, well, I'm out for the night.” John yawns. “Anyone else want to stake out the bedrooms?”
A wing of the battleship is filled with bunkers, designed for two to three soldiers each. Half of the quarters are wholly unused – the crew of this ship was sparse. Perhaps, you theorize, this is why they were so eager to flee when the tide of the war fell to Derse.
“I think I'll wait until tomorrow to go home,” John sighs, looking over his claimed bedroom. You've helped him split up the bunk beds, and he's pushed them together for himself, spreading a single yellow bed sheet over them both. The thin fabric had made a stiff, starchy sound when they were unfolded. “Most of my house is covered in oil. I'll just try to salvage whatever I can from my room, and then this place will look less like a jail cell.”
Intuition tells you that he'll probably only spend a fraction of his time at home cleaning up old possessions. Despite his jokes and his teasing tonight, a tired grief continues to flicker in his face that you recognize from his years of troubled dreams. You make a mental note not to watch him when he goes to LOWAS – you won't bother him until he's ready to leave.
“Just message me whenever you wake up, and I'll send you to LOWAS,” you promise, stretching your arms behind your head.
“If you're awake, that is.”
“I have a feeling I won't be sleeping as often now that Prospit is....”
“...Yeah.”
A quiet nestles itself between you, and John's gaze wanders to the porthole window across the hall. Sadness creeps back up on you, latching onto your shoulders and holding you down.
“Do you think playing the game was worth it?” John asks.
You don't know what to say.
“I mean, we all got to meet. Well, most of us met most of us. That was pretty awesome. And I guess we got some cool powers out of it.” He turns his hand over, forming a tiny tornado in his palm that he squashes with his fingers. “But was it worth everything else?”
You look down at your shoes and exhale through your nostrils. Your loss feels a different breed than John's – your guardian is long gone, and he knows it. You lost a nice ocean view, sure, and you can tell you're going to miss Bec unbearably sooner or later. But at least he's part of you, lending you an incredible power that is currently allowing you and your friends to live through to the next session. Prospit's destruction feels like your greatest loss. You won't ever regain the freedom you felt on that golden moon – the unshakable certainty that somehow you knew all that would come to pass. Now you don't know anything. Your future is invisible to the oracle clouds. But how do you compare that to the death of a father?
“I'm never going to see him again, am I,” John murmurs. “He won't even appear in the bubbles.”
You swallow the lump in your throat. “No. I'm sorry.”
“I didn't think so.” He shifts his weight and looks at you. It's as though he's seeing you clearly for the first time. “Jade?”
“Yes, John?”
“I was thinking this earlier, but you know, we really look alike.”
A smile tugs at your mouth. “Do you think so?” You think it would ruin the moment if you mentioned how many times you've been to his dream tower when you were younger, comparing his face to yours. When you were seven, you pried one of his eyelids open to see if the color was the same as yours. You were terribly disappointed when they turned out to be a dark, vivid blue.
“Yeah. Not that we're identical, but....”
You laugh. “I think we're identical only in timing. The rest is just random rearranging of genes.”
John brightens. “Man, we are total freaks of nature.”
“Totally! Weirdo slime babies.”
He laughs openly, and it lifts some of the weight off of you. “That's another good thing about the game, I guess. I got to find out I have a cool sister.”
Affection washes over you. The words evade you – how amazing it is for him to know that he is your brother, that Skaia has bound you together so. “And I'm glad I have a complete dork of a brother,” you retort, softly shoving his shoulder.
Someday you will figure out how to tell him how much this means to you, but it is only the first night and you are so, so tired. Teasing him will do for now.
A salamander in tiny black robes patters around the corner. Its striped purple and pink scarf whispers along the floor. You vaguely recognize it from... where? Your Spectagoggles? John recognizes the consort immediately.
“Casey! I was wondering where you ran off to,” he coos, scooping the salamander into his arms. It rests its webbed yellow hands on his godhood and pops a bubble in his face.
“Did you adopt a consort?” you ask, covering your smile with one hand.
“Hell yes I did. This is Casey. She is my beautiful and talented daughter.”
“I'm not sure you're supposed to remove the consorts from their villages. Doesn't she have salamander parents?”
“Jade, please. I will stand to hear no criticism of my family. We are non-nuclear but we make it work.”
“I believe you, John.”
“Isn't that right, Casey?”
Casey makes a throaty noise resembling a glub.
“Casey says 'yes.'”
You yawn. “All right, Casey. I hate to bail on you two so quickly, but I would like to get back to my own room now.”
Casey scrambles out of John's arms and readjusts herself on his shoulder.
“I think she forgives you, but that is just my loose translation,” John says. “Goodnight, Jade.”
“Goodnight, John.”
Your eyes burn with exhaustion, and yet you still can't fall asleep for the life of you. You've already teleported what remains of your room into this bunker – tiny potted succulents line the porthole frame, and a number of spoils from your alchemization session are sticking out of your meager closet. In the dark you can start to discern the designs on the few posters you've had the energy to hang. And above your head, the five planets of your session revolve in silence. Their denizens sleep within, coiled up and whispering in their dreams.
Occasionally there is the sound of someone walking past the door, but otherwise the battleship is silent. You start to close your eyes, but then your phone pings beside your head.
It takes you a moment to pick it up. You squint at the new message, fuzzy without your glasses until you hold it away from your face.
-- ectoBiologist [EB] began pestering gardenGnostic [GG] at 23:55 --
EB: oh!
EB: also, jade, i forgot to say something before.
GG: what?
EB: thanks for saving our asses from the scratch.
EB: even if it is going to take three years. :P
GG: :)
GG: youre welcome
GG: goodnight!!! <3
EB: goodnight.
-- gardenGnostic [GG] ceased pestering ectoBiologist [EB] at 23:58 –-
You turn up your phone volume to its loudest setting in case John pesters you again in the morning. Then you click the screen off and roll over, burrowing your face into your pillow. Something deep inside of you continues to whir despite your heavy eyelids, and you feel it keeping the ship adrift. The pillowcase smells like ocean spray, salty and clean. You will yourself to sleep.