"I don't need this," Alesha sighs.

"None of us need this shit," Sekhmet opines. "But there it is and here we are, so we better do something about it."

"Did I say we wouldn't?" Alesha says, glaring at Sekhmet from over her hand. Her bare hand; she had taken off her armor for the feast, just wearing her arming jacket. Ace had followed her lead, sensibly enough; she was rolling her arm and wincing as she tried to make sense of the situation.

All of the party had some wounds and aches from two battles in a row; all of us were tired, and it being close to night didn't really help. 

I look down at my hands on the tavern table, nursing something that seems to be mostly citrus to have the something ascorbic in me (I didn't know if this game modeled scurvy, but the Captain had treated his lime juice like it did and I didn't want to find out the hard way), trying to read the room.

Alesha is definitely more offended by the players who went pirate than by my warning, at least. Ace was more... resigned, this sort of Screaming Twenties kid's attitude of this may as well be happening than panic. Hikaru would probably get the reference if I told him he'd 'gone crystalline,' cold anger turned to zen number-crunching of his ethical calculus as he visibly cogitated over what right action and right intention even meant right now.

Sekhmet absolutely wanted to hoist the red and black and introduce some assholes to a baseball bat, but this was also Jules' attitude to fash and may-as-well-be-slavers back home, and they were never that difficult for me to read.

Cautiously, I say, "If we don't deal with these guys now, they'll rest up and hit the town again after we're gone."

"Unless the galleon from the mainland that's picking us up tomorrow deals with them," Alesha points out. "Or we tell Captain Valencia what to expect, he asks for it, and he deals with it when we're gone."

"Absolving us of responsibility?" Hikaru asks. "The question then becomes 'do we think they can handle it.'"

"Aren't adventurers stupidly powerful compared to trash mobs?" Sekhmet asks.

Ace shrugs. "How do you tell the difference here? Are players just straight up badder asses than the locals?"

"According to the class training quests, the process of investing power in an Adventurer is expensive and time consuming," Hikaru says. "Player character adventurers are the beneficiaries of this process - not the only group so empowered, but the biggest one. Miles Valencia himself is likely equivalent to a second or third level Oathsworn, a Hospitaller or an Auroran Paladin; his command assuredly is not a match for player characters."

"That's kind of fucked up," Ace mutters.  So five of us can take how many of them? Five? A dozen? Two dozen?"

"Theoretically, an Elite is worth two standard enemies of the same level," Hikaru says. "Practically, tactics and party composition can overcome tactical weakness at the same level, and if you're completely outleveled scoring a hit approaches mathematical impossibility..."

I roll my shoulders. I hate this so much. "Meaning that every time the guard here fails to stop them, the gap widens, because guards are trash mob equivalents," I say.

"The more they grind, the starker the difference gets," Alesha says, eyes closed. "Meaning we need to intervene, now.  Damn it."

"Outstanding. Definitely how I wanted to spend my evening," Sekhmet says, rolling her eyes.

Ace just sighs.

Alesha leans back and looks up in the sky.

"...we have two, maybe three hours to do this and still have daylight," she says. Auroran boons kicking in again. "Can we get anyone else?"

"No luck getting a sixth," Sekhmet says. "The stoner cat made it clear he and the pixie were a pair. They did give us some lovely parting gifts."

Sekhmet puts a couple of bandoliers of potions on the table. I stretch a little as I grab a couple, including some of the lightly glowing cyan Potions of Breath.  'Mana,' other games called it.

"I also asked the other alkycat, the one in the labcoat. She somehow wasn't surprised this was going on but was too busy having a normal one to help," Sekhmet says.

I laugh, bitterly.  "I'm not sure I can blame her for curling up into a ball and being miserable."

"The Captain has been apprised of the danger and assures us that he will consider them outliers to the conduct of the Adventurers as a whole," Alesha says, sighing deeper into her seat. "He also very helpfully provided us with a map and marked probable pirate bases, but it isn't exactly up to modern standards."

"Which is why I'll take it to an Ionian priest deeper in town.  If anyone can get us an accurate map, it's the acolytes of the God of Space." Hikaru says.

"Right," Sekhmet says. "We need to move fast and hit hard. I can do some forward scouting without being seen and report back."

"Otherwise stick to standard formations," Alesha says. "Hikaru next to me, Deedee close at hand, Ace initiating. Think you can handle it?"

"Initiating in, like, the MOBA sense?" Ace asks.

"You know it," Sekhmet replies. "Make a hole, so I can go through it."

Alesha gives a very tired thumbs-up.  "Then we should do what healing and resting we need to do and we move out as a party to find them. Meet me here in an hour and a half, we make our move then. All in favor?"

There's a chorus of subdued or sighed "ayes." She doesn't bother to count nays.

Everyone gets up and stretches: I look around at the party, try to sense which ones are carrying hurt, who's hiding it, who can't. And my eyes light on the one who's wincing and whose body language is the most constrained...

"Ace," I say, quietly. "How hurt are you?"

"Bad enough. I took fast healing Perks so it's probably fine," she says, looking up at me.

Those eyes are really, really wide and purple and I shiver.

But I'm the healer; I ought to offer.

"If you want some more assurance I can lay on hands," I say, opening my palms to her, face up, at my waist.

"Is that a - you did it for Hikaru, of course it's a thing." She rolls her shoulders, winces, then her neck, and I hear the crack and wince with her. "I could probably use the healing. Although..."

"Although?"

"In literally any other time and place I'd wonder if you were hitting on me," she says.

I can't read her expression or judge her tone and frankly my turning bright red, and my breath catching, isn't helping.

I feel a weight on my shoulder, and turn.

To see an elbow resting on it.

I follow the arm up to its owner's grinning feline face.

"Deeds, this is the part where you go 'only if you want me to be,'" they say.  "Fingerguns optional."

I bury my face in my hands, and hear Ace's cawed laughter, and wonder if I'll wake up at the cathedral in the middle of Costa Dulce when I next open my eyes because I'm pretty sure I'm dying.