This adventurer knows the good times aren't going to last.
…
Okay so I know as a fact something is happening, but the precise nature of what has escaped my tiny little brain, and I’m starting to have to mentally retrace my steps. Have you ever gotten lost in the woods around dusk? The shadows get long and things get really dark, the air seemingly freezes as soon as the sun is just over the ridge; it’s still fleetingly light out enough that you can navigate by trying to pin where West is, but without a Compass you’ll be in trouble very quickly.
Huh. A compass. Sorry, let me first establish what the fuck I’m on about and then I’ll try to circle back to my compass. So I think, I’m not entirely certain, but I think I’ve spent the last… uh, I don’t know ‘entries’ in this miserable catalogue of my mortal failures as a post-human rat-being having gone back and forth in time. But not like, time in the sense of it being grandfather paradox-able, but more like uh, Quick Saving and Quick Loading in a Computer RPG like one of the old Bethesda games. Imagine you play out a save file in Fallout New Vegas, and you use a pen pad to jot down which files are at what parts of the game; like “Save 02 is before picking a Legion playthrough”, or “Save 03 before blowing Mr. House’s head off”. You can take those save points right, which are in a part of timeline or progression that has set events that can happen established by someone beforehand, and then load back and try out something different if you didn’t like what happens in the story. That’s what my Journal let me do. I think.
It was always easier going backwards, the Quicksave/Quickload was more unstable if I tried to go forwards. Every time I hopped somewhere should have just been like a back-step, me trying to unfuck mistakes (many). I don’t know, exactly, how long I’ve been doing this. I have little flashes, inklings of times I’ve tried stuff, sometimes huge memories of entire misadventures that feel weird because I’m not the same me that is the me that is here right now! Maybe?
In short: I remember more of each quick save/ quick load. Uh. Clear as mud huh?
Yeah don’t worry about it. So I know a few things happen at a few specific times, and somewhere around the point that the communist dwarves get cleaned out and their government is replaced by the Ludendorf royalty, me and a bunch of rats along with the bird sisters and their Redcoat mercenaries get ambushed. It’s bad, I mean really bad. Lots of people die, and normally I get fucked up seriously or lose a lot of guns off a cliff or something. The ambush happens under different circumstances, but it’s always an attack lead by Captain Morgan Seeker. I think the first time this happened, it’s like, act 1 of my story and I get sprung out by my not-quite-my-ex-husband look-alike Huey. We hit it off, and I did that run through until he died in my arms somewhere in the Ludendorf keep four or five months later.
He's died in my arms like… three times? I can’t take it anymore, I load back as soon as the situation happens again. I was starting to get paranoid, I can barely talk to people, I’m sad and I’m lonely and I’m fucking horrified. I like. I kill people. I kill a lot of people. I kill so many I start losing count, I kill so readily that I’m not even sure if I’m the one pulling the trigger. Dwarves, Elves, Humans, Gnolls, Kobolds, Ravat like myself, even once the elder Vultchen Sister we call Beakface. I’m not allowed to die either, I don’t think. Every time I think I’ve bought it I wake up at whatever Quicksave I’d loaded last. It’s like, I don’t know, my life is some fucking game. But worse than one of those usual I woke up in a videogame as a level 1 sewer rat Isekai stories.
I can’t imagine you’d be listening if you didn’t know what Isekai is, but okay if you are gonna ask, it’s a genre of story telling where someone crosses a threshold into another world and they have to learn to survive and thrive in it, usually it’s pretty shameless author-inserts, I guess that makes me guilty of it too. Normally they’re pretty unsatisfied with their shitty life in the real world and die or otherwise are transported by happenstance, the justifications are pretty flimsy and I think even with what counts as ‘lore’ for this universe I’m in, your best excuse is always a shitty one that exists just to push things forward. Anyway so that’s me, I’m a loser, I died a fucking loser, I woke up a fucking loser, and right now as I sit naked wrapped in a blanket I stole sitting on a bale of hay in the middle of a military fortress, I remain a fucking loser.
This last time, I lost. I didn’t even know it was a game to begin with. I don’t know why things went so differently, it’s like there’s something else in here with me, and it’s not you or the other person I notice sometimes in the back of my mind, it’s something else entirely and it’s…
It’s right. Rude beyond fucking reason, but right.
I’m a shitty character. I didn’t want to exist, I just kind of happened, anyone in life can be a character in someone else’s story and if you’re a powerless chump like me who can’t even keep the person they… love? I’m scared to say I love Huey that just paints a target on his back. But I’ve spent over a year of my life with them and we get at most six months before I have to start over. I can’t keep him safe, I keep trying, it never works out.
The pages moisten, curling. Unsteady hands grasp at their folds and fail to straighten the wrinkles. The ink runs, long black lines streak across a multitude of pages at their fringes. The outer boundaries now connected by a common brand.
Who… am I? Like am I me? Am I the person I said I was? How much of the me who is here now is the me that started this whole mess? I just- God these fucking horseflies. Sorry, the world keeps trying to pull me away but I have the floor and you’re the only one here and the bad thing isn’t here, and I just.
I need you to help me.
I don’t know how, I think I’m venting into a web page because sometimes I hear weird comments from you. Help me out here, okay? I don’t know where to start again.
Place and time.
Huh. You’re right.
I think the Imperial Calendar should have this as Year 1200ish, Beakface and her Redcoats have been battling some kind of ancient unknowable evil under the surface of the Earth, sorry, the planet’s crust, for several decades. I think the total struggle if you combine alternate universes is like, 200 years or more, Beakface said the tree has too many branches to know for certain. Most of the battles take place in little slices of time, like what’s happening to me, and it pits the mortal heroes and their demi-god allies against some kind of unknowable evil that motivates bad things to happen. It’s fucking Freudian, sorry Jungian, but I get it. Imagine if like, the “Shadow” (that thing Jung made to explain sociopathy, psychopathy, empathy deficits, and impulsive disorders that result in violence) instead of being just a psychology buzzword meant to convince people in the 20’s they just needed more cocaine was instead a tangible presence lingering within the very fabric of reality.
It’s not Jung’s Shadow, exactly, but it’s kind of like it. Are you a Warhammer 40k nerd? God I hope you are, I’m gonna name drop the Dark Gods of Chaos and the Warp, and hope you know how that works. Basically, enough shitty people exist in reality and their shittiness manifests as cosmic entities with unknowable agendas and so-on and so-forth.
The problem is like, these entities the real heroes are up against aren’t really decided so you can’t anticipate what they’re like until they attack; like imagine you have the bench of skinny kids at a football game and when you pick one to sub-in, they become super buff or athletic or really strategic all of the sudden. That’s what seems to happen, says Beakface, because these entities get anchored by chance to reality, and then their existing traits are amplified, or something. They also sometimes snag other ‘identities’ and sling them into the causality formula, and that’s how little miss Me was “born”.
This body isn’t mine, like. It’s on loan.
I think.
I’m in some badass’ ratgirl’s body and she was infinitely cooler than me and had magic spells and cool powers, she had all this special magical gear and even had her own mercenaries-turned-revolutionaries, the Rosventians, and they were gonna totally save the world. I think.
I’m dumping lore sorry, I just.
GOD THESE FUCKING FLIES. No wait.
OH MY GOD THAT’S THE BIGGEST FUCKING WASP I HAVE EVER SEEN IN MY GODDAMN LIFE AND IT JUST LANDED ON MY LAP LIKE SOME KIND OF HELLISH INTERPRETATION OF A HOUSE CAT
“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!”
“OH! Terribly sorry! Please don’t run that way! There’s armed men!”, Esther grimaces, watching me eat shit face-first into the huge tracks of mud that carriages and wagons have steadily worn into miniature embattlements.
You ever land on your nose so hard your ears burn and you can taste pain? That’s me. Also I tumbled into old horse manure. I’m fucking naked and now literally matted with mud and horseshit.
My nose is bleeding. My eyes are watering, and I’m having a bad time. Be right back.
Let me catch my breath, now that I’ve cry-limped my way out of the like, impromptu military base I was apparently in. Ugh. The big thing that landed in my lap is not a wasp, it’s a fucking Faerie. At least they offered to guide me out while using its magic to make us pass without trace. I wish I had spells. I awkwardly bathed myself in the coldest, most miserable stream I’ve ever skinny dipped in, it was barely past my ankles and honey I barely clear three feet tall these days, so you know. Cool. I picked that miserable little stream because it’s glacier water from the mountains, the Faerie says it’s spring, so I have a reasonably good chance of having washed myself in mostly clean water and not concentrated instant-death sewage from the big town nearby called Harper’s Plains.
Anyway.
FAERIES ARE GODDAMN GIGANTIC BUGS!?
I was not expecting that shit ok? It’s easily the size of your normal Calico and freaky as shit with little hands and feeties, like not quite a cute bug but not a totally anatomically correct one either, this one kind of has a rack almost. They also have compound eyes but like, slit pupils somehow that slide around underneath the scales it’s really weird. It’s mostly purple, iridescent and shiny, with like a gold trim.
This one’s name is I think Esther? Apparently it’s a representative of some kind of sex god. Sorry. “God of love and mercy”. That means it’s from the same church that my other girlfriend was from, no not the Kobold girl, the older Elven maiden I started this whole thing with. She also wrote in the Journal that one time by channeling like, her entire life force into it. That one flung me pretty far. I think maybe that stunt got the bad thing’s attention.
Hang on where the fuck was I?
I was lore dumping. This is a boring one I know I’m so fucking sorry. We’re like, so deep into this thing and I have questions about like everything and the thoughts are just kinda flowing right now, let me cook.
I promise I’m going… somewhere. We’re just wandering in the woods past noon, remember how I said getting lost in the woods is scary? Yeah I’m like, literally naked and following a bug out into the woods and the more we walk, the more I’m starting to wonder if Faeries eat people.
Esther let me know that they were sent to me by Ms. Withers, which is too specific to not be either mind reading or actually true. I’m not allowed to use her real name in conversation so I didn’t learn it, but she’s apparently an exiled nobility of some kind. It’s actually sort of dumb. All of my harem members are nobility! Well, okay the lil kobold girl isn’t exactly a noble but she’s close.
We’re just kinda walking along this winding trail, under trees and across streams, whimsical.
While I try not to eat the insides of my cheeks from being anxious and hungry, let’s start with this world’s beef against Huey. Huey’s a human from the territory of the very originally named “Imperial Alliance”, which is a nation that basically formed out of a bunch of big feudal lords going ‘hey let’s make a government’. Then Parliament and the House of Lords all died, or rather, the ones that didn’t die fled. Huey was from the House of Lords, he’s a bastard and dad’s the tyrannical king who cleaned house. Captain Seeker I think is from Parliament, too important to kill and he leads the army, there’s a whole text document squatting on some asshole’s desktop about this.
I hope.
God wouldn’t it be funny if whoever made this universe didn’t have a plan for this? LMAO.
Okay so there’s people loyal to the Tyrant who help him make like RR Martin and Red Wedding the shit out of like hundreds of wealthy people leaving just a few dozen to act as his Oligarchy/Technocracy circle. The Tyrant is some kind of religious extremist, worships this human god named Yaveh, the religion was a fringe one held by country yokels and racists because it is full of racist shit.
Did you know in this world, “humanity” is an umbrella term used by ethno-nationalists and eugenicists!? Like, if I go “I’m a Secular Humanist” people would stone me for being a nazi, because you have to be really high on your own farts to not even hide behind myth or religion to be a Human Supremacist. Humanism here means “Humans are at the top of the foodchain”, and disgusting little rodents like me are part of the “beast races”. Like. God I’ve seen some Maus tier shit, Ravat and Kobolds especially get it hard because if you’re not some crazy fucknugget like me you just get enslaved or genocided like you’re Jewish and live on the way to the holy land during one of the Crusades.
Anyway so Yaveh and his religion, Yavehnism (really, why the N in the middle!? IT’S SILENT APPARENTLY!!!!) basically have this creation myth where the Do Not Steal OC who isn’t the Grim Reaper is their patron saint, some guy named “Mikael the Harvester”. He’s like, grimdark Jesus, he’s here to kill sinners.
Who’s sinning?
Oh you can’t, you can’t see. I’m pointing at myself. I guess my wasp friend too, I’d tell them to say hi but I’m like 3 shots shy of permanent whiskey dick and do not want to fucking bother. We’re now at little camp with a familiar looking lockbox… OH! It’s that one! This is where I must’ve put my stuff! Wait, did I put my stuff here or is this the save state and I teleported in naked? Did I walk away from my camp naked for sex? When did this happen… it’s Spring. Oh my god it’s SPRING. Okay I think I’m like, 2 months tops from when I woke up as a rat girl in a stone coffin.
Dude this sucks, I hate this part. Like, lowest of the low, God. It’s coming back to me, this is not a great time for me to be in and I always skip it. Maybe that’s why Huey kept getting murdered, this is a scary time for me. Like, I was so drunk and disorderly that I let some soldier guys pay me for sex last night so I could get hooch. Oh. I fucking left without their coin. That means I’m flat broke! AGAIN! GODDAMNIT.
Oh my god, this is when I took that bounty. Huey and I met like, two weeks ago tops.
RIGHT, about Huey! I’m gonna finish up explaining the theocratic implications of the Tyrant’s cult while I figure out if anything’s missing, if I have any food, if like, I’m even able to start a fire tonight God why the fuck did I have to go HERE!? REALLY! Haven’t I fucking danced the misery jig enough for one goddamn lifetime!?
Ugh. Huey’s Dad planned to cross him off, but he’s a court leech, gentleman thief, bisexual, and a freak who’d rather fuck “beast races” than other human-ish people. He’s like, 20, dude is too old to still be doing his rebellious teenager routine, he should have syphilis and 3 dead kids by now. Since Huey’s dad has no other surviving children, Huey being a little shit has made him technically the one with the keys to the kingdom when his dad dies. Problem is, his dad might not die.
His dad is probably a necromancer, maybe even a lich? Royal secret, dude signed a blood pact to some dark powers and can command the bodies of anything under the ‘humanity’ umbrella (this includes Elves and Dwarves by the by), apparently by choosing to be so specific he has more power that way. He’s on a mission to ‘unite the realm’ and has seized the treasury and rallied several armies together to do an Imperialism, and he’s winning. His allies and vassals are basically all drinking wine and cashing checks like nobody’s business, one of them is the Elven kingdom I was supposed to steal paintings from, I think to blackmail some Dwarves?
It's behind me. Or, ahead of me. IDK if that’ll happen again. The big bad empire is going to try to kill me and everyone I love because specifically me somehow is the key to all of this guy’s plans. Like, apparently the stone tablet the prophecy was etched on bears a striking resemblance, which is why Huey recognized me when we first met. God. I’m really here aren’t I? Back at square 1. This is before my first run-in with my Kobold GF; I don’t know if I wanna stick my dick in that particular box of thumbtacks right now, but I think we’re a thing by Summer after I take up contract killing because one gangbang for a bottle of booze is a shit deal for me. So we meet and kill together, then drunkenly get off together the first time and I barely remember it but she’s weirdly clingy the morning after like I gave her a pep talk. Context clues during my hangover let me piece together I did crisis counseling in my fucking sleep apparently. God. I was so fucking low and she took advantage of me, and I took advantage of her, and then we got co dependent and-
Sorry.
My past life ex-husband’s doppleganger Huey saved my ass when I fucking SUCKED. Like we’re talking, I couldn’t speedload my shotgun levels of suck, my ass was barely Level 1 and he shows up like a Level 60 in WoW Classic and is all:
Aren’t I so nice and hot and mysterious and sexy and cool and dangerous, don’t you wanna be like me? I even have a soft side and I’m not even just putting on an act for you because something deep within my soul yearns for a connection. Don’t cry, I’m gonna hold you and gently pet you like you’re a goddamn dog and you’re gonna have a weird amount of vibe with it. Then later you’ll get drunk in the woods after running away from me and I’ll pull your foot out of a bear trap and then we’ll bone after I treat your wounds because you’re so incompetent you fell down a cliff trying to get away from me for no reason other than your own crippling inability to reconcile with your past mistakes. Then you’ll wake up, regret the entire thing and try to cut it off and spend the next month running away from yourself and attempt to an-hero like the sad sack of shit who couldn’t even find the ‘get stupid’ switch they put at the bottom of every Whiskey bottle.
Fucking asshole.
God I’m shivering. It’s getting late and Esther and I have been going through all my things together, it’s talking about something it needs to do but I’m just not available for whatever sidequest it has. Where in the FUCK is my Journal??? I’m mentally uncorking a lot of bad shit I buried deep, deep down in my previously undisclosed backstory trying to find this fucking book, and it’s not coming to me. I’m not in danger, so I can’t find it because I don’t need it; but I totally fucking need it right now so I can go back to the start and unfuck the disaster that is my life. This is NOT where I need to be right now, I need to go back, I need to see him the first time, and I need to tell him to stay away until I can figure this out, but I can’t fucking do that without the goddamn Journal because I’m not special I just have special things!
FUCK! FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKINGFUCK!
FLKJAPWIAJPOIAHPSIOHAPIJWPMDPAFAHPOAWPOAGHGNAKWPIOZBNPWOIAIOWPOIFHPOIAWA
AUGH.
I’m so fucking weak.
Esther’s been nice about it, but I’m a wreck. I’ve been crying since the day started and it’s flown by me like a montage, I can’t find the journal.
I CAN’T.
FIND.
THE JOURNAL!
THAT SHIT IS JUST FUCKING GONE!?
It’s not FUCKING FAIR. You can’t just give me Quick Save and Quick Load and then take it away because I don’t let myself watch my husband die! You don’t make the rules! I’m SUPPOSED to be the one who decides where the story goes, it’s MY story! No it’s not your fault it’s the other guy’s fault. Other girl’s, FUCK.
I can’t even respect the unknowable cosmic entity’s gender it constantly insists it somehow has, but it’s got the most “we’re just dude’s being guys” voice I’ve ever fucking heard out of a fellow tranny and I bet they’re as much of a fuck up as I am and can’t even work up the effort to shave their face so they don’t look like a goddamn monster.
Piece of shit.
GO. FUCK. YOURSELF.
Apparently you’re unemployed, great job shit for brains!
No not, you, please stop looking at me like that, I know you’re just along for the ride. Yes, I asked for your help, and, if you could yell at this piece of shit to stop yanking me around like I’m a worm on a string, that’d be the least you could do!
SORRY! Sorry. I’m just so fucking freaked out. This thing probably doesn’t have feelings, it’s not like you and it are on a first name basis or something, it’s probably just some screenname on the internet with a silly icon, like the kids I used to frag in Fortnite because the salty wails of the digitally damned were like the only fucking thing keeping me sane before I died from liver failure. Or was it cancer? Nevermind.
To the fucking unknowable eldritch monster pulling my puppet strings:
Please. I need my Journal. Just give it back. I don’t want to be stranded here. I know what I’ll do if I go into town like this, and I don’t have food, or money… all I have is a big mutated bug. No, scratch that. They’re… gone?
Figures. I’d have left too.
That’s a lie, I’d have stayed. I hate watching people cry, but I hate leaving them alone to it more.
No one deserves it.
To be this scared.
To be this alone.
To be abandoned in the dark with no one but themselves to blame.
…what if this is it?
I’ve used up my extra lives and the arcade cabinet that is my life has a jammed slot where the Quarters should go.
I fucked up so royally that I’m doomed to repeat the cycles of guilt like that weird French game that “wasn’t” 40k themed.
I’m not ready to die again, God my mouth is so dry and I just need a fucking drink. You know DT’s are fatal, right? This could be it for me. I could be having a tonic-clonic seizure, shitting and pissing myself before my heart stops, right here in my shitty little tent with holes I can’t even fucking patch because I never learned how to sew. FUCK.
Fuck you. I just started really fucking trying to fix my new life and you’ve taken away the keys. I’m good to drive, okay!?
I know it’s rich coming from someone who died with a DUI and a permanently suspended license, please. Trust me to do the right thing. I just need to not be right here in this particular shithole right now. Anywhere but here.
…YOU ARE THERE, AREN’T YOU!? Mother fucker I have a bone to-
NO! WAIT.
Please! Don’t go!
I need him. The least you can do is stay until I get to him!
I know I need him! He was right on the next page, you took him away! Or the thing that wasn’t you did, whatever is going on just fucking sort it out and get me back to the start so I can fix my mistakes! I need to go back, all the way back, before I fucked everything up and got attached and made myself the world’s problem!
Please. One more chance.
I just need one more chance.
Fuck.
Z curls into a tight ball, shivering in the only clothing she owns aside from her armor. The fluttering, ragged sides of her ruined cloth tent offer little shelter as she lies ontop of the small trunk buried in the mud. Her soiled cloak barely covers her miserable form as she vainly tries not to cover herself in mud. The mist settling across the valley carries a spring shower that defeats the badly neglected fire she left burning without adequate fuel, extinguishing all but the faintest of sputtering embers, which in turn burn out with the inevitability of death. She can’t even find the words for herself, a formless, pitiable thing, resigned to its fate as powers grander than herself swirl around her, nipping at one-another and snarling with hunger. The end is delayed not by the mercy of the gods, but by their infighting over who deserves to feed first from her carcass. For now, they growl and gnash at each-other’s hides, the hunger to at last claim fresh meat driving them to a maddening contest of feral instinct. Carnal desires, long neglected, are not so easily sated by mere scraps.
She hangs in the balance, spinning in place and wobbling as centrifugal force wanes, the decahedron’s score undecided as it wanders from the edge of a spiral notebook onto the uneven grain of a grossly marred wooden table, finding purchase in the deep wounds of childish mistakes immortalized in its surface. The blur of painted numerals becomes more distinct, 0, 8, 6, 4, 2; perhaps it will resolve within this groove, becoming cocked like the last roll, it fails to comprehend the gravity of its action as the die slows. At long last, the unsteady wobbles overtake the die and it skips from the groove, tumbles end-over-end, and lands on the table. It resolves on a 0.
A mechanical pencil marks notes in a numerical language its author will barely recognize next week.
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