Kaori’s heart beat frantically against her ribs as she sat on the faded couch in the manager's office, squeezing Erin’s hand. “You didn’t tell me you had an ex in this world.”

“It wasn’t something I hoped would ever come up,” Erin muttered. Her palm was clammy, and her knee bounced with a frantic, nervous energy.

Kaori put a steadying hand on her bouncing knee and looked deep into her icy blue eyes. “Sara has been nothing but nice to me since she found me, but we’ll leave if we have to. We can find another way home. Together.”

Erin leaned forward, pressing her forehead against Kaori’s, their eyes locked. “I never want to be away from you again. If we have to go home to stay together… we will.”

Kaori sighed, a heavy knot of guilt and relief in her stomach. “I know. Thanks for buying my ticket to Kentucky so we could be together.”

Erin smiled, brushing her lips lightly against Kaori’s, giving her a tender, lingering kiss that sent a familiar flutter deep into her chest. “Always.”

The heavy office door clicked open. Sara stood in the doorway, the massive frame of Chadwick looming silently behind her. Sara looked at Erin for a long, unreadable moment, then at Kaori, before turning back to the Minotaur.

“I need to deal with this personally,” Sara instructed. “Can you check the bridge location, make sure the team there is good, and then meet with Chino about bringing Pete Steel-Shaft and the rest of the crew over?”

Chadwick’s eyes, not harsh but deeply appraising, never left Erin. “Are you sure you don’t need support in here, boss-bro?”

Sara patted his massive, furry arm. “Thank you. Truly. But I need to talk to them alone. Oh, and Muffin needs a bunk built and some new threads secured as well.”

Chadwick nodded firmly. “Got it.”

“Thank you, Chadwick.” Sara watched him leave down the hall, then shut the heavy door until it clicked locked. She took a slow beat, drawing a deep breath, before turning around. She moved to the wooden desk chair and sat down, squaring her shoulders to face the women on the couch.

“Sara, I—” Erin started, her voice pitching up defensively.

Sara held a single hand up, cutting her off instantly. “I don’t want to come in here and tell you that the past sucked and I want you as far away from my world as possible. I don’t want to do that.”

Kaori squeezed Erin’s hand, her brow furrowing. “Please, Sara. We won’t bother you. We’ll stay out of your way.”

“I know you would,” Sara responded, her tone objective but not unkind. “But there are things we need to talk about. And I thought you might want to be here for this, Kaori.”

Kaori's heart hurt. Sara had been incredibly generous, offering her a safe haven in a terrifying world, but Kaori was madly in love with Erin. “I’ll stay only if she wants me here.”

Erin looked panicked, rocking slightly and darting her gaze between Sara and Kaori. “I… I do.”

“Okay,” Sara said, crossing her legs. “I’m just going to get to it. And I am going to be blunt.”

“Sara,” Erin cut her off, her eyes welling with sudden tears. “What happened back then… what I did to you… I’m sorry. I really didn’t know I was hurting you.”

Sara took a long, measured breath, exhaled slowly, but didn’t respond. She just let the silence hang, forcing Erin to fill it.

“I just want to forget about it and move on,” Erin pleaded, turning to look at Kaori with stars in her teary eyes. “I want to be better. For her.”

“That’s the problem,” Sara shrugged, her Voice of Management completely unshaken by the tears. “You want to be better for her. Not for you.”

“No, I do…” Erin’s face flashed with sudden, rigid frustration. “I just…”

"She's dealing with a lot right now," Kaori intervened, desperate to justify the erratic behavior of the woman she loved. “She just gets stressed out sometimes. We all do.”

Sara let out a small, tired sigh and shook her head. “Look. Something I’ve come to deeply understand in life is that you can’t force people to change. I have way too much corporate and survival shit to deal with to even want to try managing this dynamic. So, how would you two like to go home? Back to Earth?”

“Yes!” Adrenaline spiked instantly through Kaori’s chest. “Yes! I want to go home. I miss my family. I miss my friends in the market.”

Kaori’s excitement died a sudden, brutal death when she felt Erin go completely rigid. Erin stared blankly into space. “I don’t. I… I can’t.”

“Why?” Kaori’s confusion was instant. They had just promised each other they would go back together.

Erin hung her head, slowly pulling her hand out of Kaori's grasp. “I… I’ll never be able to be with you there. I’m…”

“Of course you can!” Kaori cut her off, refusing to let the panic set in. “You bought my ticket from Osaka just to see you! You can just buy one to come be with me in Japan!”

“I can’t, Kaori, I—”

“You what?” Sara coaxed, her voice turning to cold steel. “Get it out, Erin. This time, I deserve absolute honesty. And so does she.”

The humiliation was stark and ugly on Erin’s face. She refused to look at Sara, and Kaori was suddenly so deeply worried that she didn’t try to reestablish their physical connection.

“I’m broke.” Erin finally sighed, her voice barely a whisper. “I got the money for your ticket from my mom.”

“You…” Kaori shook her head, trying to process the sheer logistical impossibility of the statement. “But… you’re a doctor.”

Sara sat up straight, pushing her chair back, adjusting her glare. “Doctor Denton? You didn’t even graduate high school.”

Tears ran hot down Erin’s cheeks, her face taking on a deep, flushed red. “Sara… please don’t…”

“I’m not doing anything I don’t do for every other person in this settlement,” Sara said, folding her arms over her chest like a judge issuing a verdict. “I demand complete transparency from my best friends. I demand honesty from the Shafted laborers. And I require the truth from every returned adventurer. Without it, this place doesn’t work. Without it, people get hurt.”

“Sara—”

“People like me,” Sara cut her off, her voice cracking like a whip. “And people like Kaori.”

Kaori looked over at the girl she thought she knew so intimately, her own tears beginning to run down her cheeks. “You… you lied to me?”

Erin buried her face in her trembling hands and sobbed loudly. “I’m so sorry! I thought you wouldn’t like me if I was just a failure!”

“We’ve been together for four years, Erin.” Kaori shook her head, her reality actively shattering around her.

“Four years?” Sara’s eyes went wide. She leaned forward, a terrible realization dawning as she did the timeline math in her head. “Four years, Erin? Kaori… where exactly did you two meet?”

“We met at Bar No. 1059,” Kaori squeaked, her chest tight, barely able to think through the betrayal. “When I was there with my friends.”

The room went dead silent, except for the ragged sound of Erin hyperventilating. Her sobs intensified. She pulled entirely away from Kaori, curling into a tight, defensive ball on the far side of the couch. “Nooooo! Pleaaaaseeee! Don't!”

Sara stood up slowly, the blood draining completely from her reddish Tiefling face. She stared down at Erin in absolute disgust.

“That was our trip,” Sara whispered, her voice trembling with cold fury. “We were there together. I fell in love with Tsuruhashi, and you... you went out to a bar while I was sleeping in the hotel?”

Kaori felt physically sick. Nausea rolled in her stomach. Sara had told her earlier how much Tsuruhashi and that specific area meant to her. Erin hadn't traveled to Osaka after a breakup. She had sneaked out during a vacation with her partner specifically to pick up a local girl in Sara's favorite neighborhood.

She turned her horrified gaze to Erin. “Why?”

“I don’t know!” Erin sobbed, refusing to look up.

“I need some time.” Sara turned away, her managerial mask snapping back into place to cover the fresh wound. “Kaori, there is a portal back to Earth underneath this shop, but you’ll come out in Kentucky. I can fence some gold and get you the money for a ticket home to Japan.”

“Noooo!” Erin dropped from the couch to her knees directly in front of Kaori, grabbing at her legs. “Please, K! I’m really trying to be better!”

Kaori stood up, forcing Erin’s hands off her. She looked down at the girl, then looked at Sara. “I want to go home.”

“Kaori, wait!” Erin scrambled up, violently pushing her way between Kaori and the doorway, blocking the exit. The tears vanished, replaced instantly by cornered rage. “I was horrible to her back then! Sara and I… when we were together, I wanted to hurt her! She made friends and connections so easily, and I couldn’t stand her going out and hanging out with those losers…”

“It’s not the past,” Kaori shook her head, the tears streaming freely down her face as the final illusion broke. “It’s that you lied to me. You told me you were a pediatrician. You said you helped kids. You built an entire life with me on a lie just to spite her. I want to break up.”

“What?” Erin’s emotions shifted violently again. It was the exact same rapid, terrifying pivot she did so frequently over Discord arguments. “So, that’s it? You just want to throw four years away and go back to that dirty bunch of alleys and drunks in Tsuruhashi?”

Kaori’s heart cracked so loud she swore her Halmae probably heard it all the way back in the market. The sheer disrespect for her vibrant, loud, beautiful home was the final nail. The tears rolled freely. “Can I go home, please? I just want my life, and my mom, and my body back.”

“No,” Erin sneered, physically shoving Kaori backward. “You’re not—aaaaaahhhhhhhhh!”

Sara lunged. She grabbed Erin’s arm, twisted it sharply behind her back with Krav Maga efficiency, and hauled her forcefully toward the heavy wooden door. “No, you aren’t going anywhere near her.”

Sara kicked the door open and yelled down the hallway. “Need some help in here!”

In seconds, Chadwick and two of the massive Shafted laborers arrived. Sara released Erin, shoving her directly into the waiting arms of the Dwarves, and grabbed her clipboard from the desk. “Take her to the Void. Shardi is down there. Send her home.”

“No!” Erin shrieked, thrashing wildly against the unyielding grip of the Shafted as they dragged her down the hall toward the cavern tunnels. “I’ll die! You can't do this to me!”

Once Erin’s screams faded into the depths of the complex, Sara slowly turned back into the office, shutting the door. She looked at Kaori, her own expression exhausted and raw. “Are you okay?”

Kaori sniffled, her shoulders trembling. “No.”

Sara crossed the room and enveloped her in a warm, steady embrace. The two women held each other tightly, crying quietly together in the dimly lit office, mourning the specific, targeted pain that only that woman could inflict.

Finally, Sara pulled back, wiping her eyes and clearing her throat. “I need to tell you something before you go home. Right now, Simone and Raven are working on securing Earth clothes and supplies, but I can only send you through that portal in that body. I don’t know how to get our original Earth bodies back yet. I know you’re a human here, but if this isn’t exactly how you looked on Earth, you might have some serious trouble explaining it.”

Kaori thought about it. Her heart couldn’t take the logistics right now. “I don’t want to go back looking like this. This is my body, but there are weird, magical things… things I don’t like that changed when I got here. I can't face my mom like this.”

“You are always welcome to stay here at the base until we can figure out a way back into your own body,” Sara offered gently, the picture of a supportive friend. “But I don’t know how long we will safely have the ability to keep that portal active, so this could be your only chance.”

Kaori thought about the vibrant, bustling alleys of Tsuruhashi. She thought about the home and family she loved fiercely. But then she looked at Sara. She thought about the woman who had deceived her for four years—the exact same woman who had broken Sara. They shared a wound now that no one back on Earth would ever understand. And Sara was so strong. She had protected her without hesitation.

“I wish it was you I met that night at Sengoku's bar,” Kaori whispered, fresh tears pooling in her emerald eyes.

Sara placed a warm, calloused hand gently on her shoulder, offering a sympathetic smile. “Me, too.”

Kaori felt a rush of heat spread over her, radiating directly from Sara’s touch, sending a thrilling, dangerous spark through her shattered chest.

“Can I stay?” Kaori let the words slip from her mouth nervously, desperate to stay near the Tiefling. “Just until we find a way back for real?”

“Of course,” Sara smiled—a soft, deeply comforting smile that Kaori found utterly intoxicating. “I’ll get a bunk made for you in the barracks as soon as possible.”

Kaori flushed, wiping the last of the tears away, her heart hammering for an entirely different reason now. “Will it be near yours?”

“The only spot left right now is in my pod,” Sara said, checking her clipboard absentmindedly. “Raven, Muffin, and I share a cluster of bunks in the corner. You’ll be right there safe with us.”

Kaori barely heard the other names. She only heard that she would be sleeping near Sara. She took a deep, shuddering breath, a profound, dizzying sense of infatuation taking root in the fresh ruins of her heartbreak.

“Thank you, Sara.”

 

Character Name: Kaori

Class: Druid 13

Race: Human

Stats:

Strength: 18

Dexterity: 18

Constitution: 22

Intelligence: 18

Wisdom: 30

Charisma: 18