I look over Ace's back - pockmarked with arrows and frostbite - from within the relative warmth and comfort of the medical tent.

"This is gonna sting," I warn her.

Ace laughs, wincing at the pain. "Worse than being the chosen pincushion for every asshole with a bow from here to Fantasy London?" Ace laughs, wincing at the pain.

"Probably not that bad. I notice you didn't try to take out the arrowheads," I say, looking over her back. "And I see blisters on your leg."

"Frostbite from that asshole mage," she mutters. "Warmth and potions will take care of that, don't touch it more than you need to."

Given that I've never actually treated frostbite before, I appreciate the advice. "You're familiar?"

"I grew up in Canada," Ace says, voice flat. "Toronto winters won't fuck you up but skiing trips can if you don't know what you're doing."

I take a deep breath. "Okay," I say. "Time to do the hard part. Bite down on this."

---

The hard part is taking out the arrowheads; even with magic filling in for anaesthesia it's unpleasant for me and worse for Ace, but at least my healing magic stops and shuts the wounds before they can bleed. Likewise, I press into her back, manipulating energy flows to warm her leg without actually touching it.

"Stings," Ace mutters, drowsy. "Pins 'n needles."

"I'll bet," I say. "The worst is over, thankfully; no obvious wounds, bruising's gone down, leg should be fine. I'm going to do your shoulders and back, if that's okay, make sure I didn't miss anything."

"Sure," Ace says, ears and tail flicking, looking into her pillow.

I press my palms in under her shoulder blades. "So, Toronto to Oakland, huh?"

"Stupid story," she sighs. "Tried to get into a soccer team down there, and Dad got a good deal on a storefront. Seemed like it was going to work, too."

I nod, digging my thumbs on either side of her neck. "I'm sorry it didn't work out," I murmur.

"It would have if I didn't decide to be a show-off," she sighed. "I even said 'hey watch this' before the accident. And, well, if there was someone who could slap my knee and make it better the way you can here..."

"You'd have heard about it," I say, trying not to laugh. "Honestly, I'd have heard about it. So from there you do streaming and casting?"

Ace rolls her shoulders under my hands. "...if I was going to play Tetris all the time it needed to bring in an income," she says. "And like, I was lucky enough to get people donating for me to play weeb games and talk about how hot the girls were. S'not like the soccer fans would be less creepy."

I'm not sure I'd go that far, but grunt agreement before moving my hands down, pressing my palms into her lower back, right before they become her hips.

The noise Ace makes starts off low but gains a whole damn octave.

"Are you alright?" I ask.

She laughs. "You just found the inevitable fuckin' back pain."

"Ah. Feeling better?"

"Much," she says. "Did you uh, know how to do this back home?"

"Magic healing by touch? No," I say.

"Deeds." Her ears are as flat as her voice.

I start to drum with my fingertips. "Actual massage techniques, yes, as a college elective," I volunteer.

"In the hopes of finding girls with 'back pain' you could help out?" Ace says.

That is more or less exactly why I started to learn massage in my civilian life, but I'm ashamed enough of the other kinds of horny idiot I was in college that my protest dies in my throat.

Fortunately, Ace doesn't seem to have noticed - or care if she did. "I really needed this," she says. "Have someone you practice on back home, or is this just knowing things your avatar does?"

"Not unless you count helping Sekhmet with her fucked up back every once in a while," I sigh.

My brain catches up to my mouth a second too late to point out that Ace functionally just asked if I had a girlfriend. Is she flirting with me?

"... and that's just because we're roommates," I clarify, trying to sound casual about it. "I don't think anyone's asked me since college, gods."

"Mmmph," Ace replies, eloquently. "If it didn't involve assholes with swords jumping me, I could get used to this."

She is absolutely flirting with me and I have no idea what to do with this information.

"...so this probably needs more attention," I say, moving back up to her neck and trying not to sound panicked.

---

"And, uh, that's when I changed the subject," I stammer.

Sekhmet looks amused, if anything. "So, what's the problem?" they ask, sardonic.

"I mean, Ace doesn't know me, right? I don't know her, I've just been calling her by screen-name this whole time. She's only ever seen me as, like -" I gesture at my chest. "- but back IRL I'm still a fat dude who only wears video game t-shirts and jeans, yeah? And I don't know what she really looks like either."

Sekhmet sniffs, adding another log to the cookfire. "What, you're afraid that you're not girl enough for the person that cracked your shell?" they ask.

I run my hand down my face. "It's not that easy, Jules."

"Nah. But it can be that simple," Sekhmet - Jules - my roommate of the past two years says.

I gesture with my arms and hands, calling wind to feed the fire with oxygen. It crackles and rises, the rising heat a comfort.

"It's simple but it's not easy?" I echo, incredulous.

"Those have never been the same thing," Sekhmet says, stirring the embers with a long stick. "Like, way I see it, you've been going 'a girl has a crush on me' and you've been finding all sorts of excuses to tell me why that's a disaster."

"She doesn't have a crush on me, she has a crush on Deedee, and we're not the same person," I say, maybe a little louder than I intend.

Sekhmet looks at me, ears flat, face struggling not to smile. "If she knew you all that well, I wouldn't be calling it a crush," they say. "I'd be breaking out the four letter words."

"True. She doesn't know me well enough to hate me," I say, voice flat.

It was a joke, and I know it, and I know that Sekhmet knows that. Still, Sekhmet's response is growled.

"Stop kicking yourself in the nuts, that's the world's job."

I sigh. "Sorry. I - god. I meant to ask you how you were doing after everything before the thing with Ace, uh, distracted me."

"She'll do that," Sekh says, the lilting purr returning to their voice. "And I appreciate the concern but like, shit's happening. Life on Mundus is what it is, and it's not like I'm having a particularly hard time here."

"You got shot at, Jules," I point out.

Sekhmet shrugs. "Just par for the course for a murderhobo for hire - and there's a fucked up thought."

"What, that being shot at is par for the course?" I say. "It kind of is, though. And was."

"Back home I wasn't allowed to fight back," they say. "Getting to stab someone for pulling that shit is a perk of the new job."

I take a deep breath.

"You're right," I say. "That is fucked up."

They shrug. "It is what it is, and I'm gonna call it like they see it. Karen don't know about my shortswords. I can't help it if that makes me smile."

"Are you sure you're okay?" I ask, again.

"No," they say, tossing another log on the fire. "But thanks for checking."

---

"I'm worried about Juliet," Alesha tells you. By whom she means Jules, Sekhmet's player. "Please tell me I'm off-base about it."

I rub my eyes and blink at the chill. "Good morning," I say, stretching just outside my tent. "If it's morning yet, christ I think dawn isn't broken yet, it's just got a hairline crack."

"Deedee," she pleads. "Please. This is important."

I pause. Well, look at her, and stop talking; I need to keep rolling my shoulders, getting my bloodflow going.

Alesha looks genuinely scared, strangely small in just a jazzerant coat - without 55 pounds of gilded and runecarved steel protecting her. Harried by a week on the road. Harrowed by whatever she sees in Sekhmet. Who did, in fact, tell me honestly that they weren't okay.

But no one here is, and it's not like home was much better for them. Or me.

"What's going on with Jules?" I say, trudging with Alesha to last night's firepit. Doing necessary chores while I talk is quickly becoming second nature to me.

Alesha sighs, grabbing kindling from the pile, forming a mound in the middle of the stone circle we built last night.

"Don't you think Jules is taking the violence here in too much stride?" she says. "Talking about how much better it is here, where she can fight back. Was her real life that violent?"

I grimace. "Jules worked at the Tote-Em-Snax I operated out of on San Pablo, near the seawalls. We had a real problem with armed robbery."

"Jesus Christ," Alesha says, quietly. "She never told me."

"I don't think she likes to talk about having to hand over what was in the register," I say, laying a log on top of the kindling pile. "We weren't attacked nearly as often as we are here, but it was often enough that I felt safer doing deliveries from home."

"Right," she says, working with me, layering one wrist-thick log after the other, interweaving them. "I'm not sure having knives and fighting back is the improvement she thinks it is, though."

"Yeah, uh, all three of us don't think that's healthy," I say. "It is what it is. Coping with..."

I gesture to Mundus. To all of the forest path around us, the road with a milestone, carved with runic wards against monsters. The rude tents, and the cart we were hired to protect.

Alesha shakes her head. "I think it's worse than that. Keeping a trophy of the time she nearly died is one thing. But some of the things she told me while I was healing her are worse than that."

"So naturally you broke HIPPA and came to me," I say, folding my arms. "You know, like you do at Social Security."

"Come off it," Alesha says. "You're her roommate IRL and the closest thing Mundus has to a psychiatrist. I'm not the person who can help her. I thought you could."

I have no real argument against helping Sekhmet and nod, and step back. 

Alesha gestures to the kindling, gathering a mote of holy radiance to fling into the firepit. It leaps into golden flame.

"She joked about giving up on returning," Alesha says. "About how she'd be better off working a tavern here."

"Given how much we're paid, Jules isn't wrong," I mutter.

Alesha turns to me, stricken. "You're talking about leaving your bodies and real lives behind. How is that any different from -"

She shakes her head and folds her arms, turns away.

"I know what 'suicidal' looks like," I say, looking away from her. "In Jules, even. It's not that."

"And if she abandons our world to homestead this fantasy, what difference would it make to her family and friends?" she asks.  "All they'd know is that she disappeared."

I could bring up that there are people who can and should disappear from their old lives and families entirely.  But that objection dies in my throat, because I know Jules' family doesn't deserve that.

"I'll talk to her," I say.

"Please," Alesha says. "I don't think she'll listen to me. But she'll listen to you."

---

I can tell Siobhan isn't in a mood for talking, at first - she's all business, an extension of her bow as she prepares to hunt, and as she calls me to bring in her kill. A mountain goat; we'll all eat well today, after I clean it under her direction, helping me direct my knife and gather all I can. 

Waste not, want not.

It's when we move from that to the actual butchery that I feel relaxed - that she's relaxed - enough to talk to her for real.

"Rough fight," I say.

She grunts. "Didn't even have the roughest part," she says, making deft long slices with the grain of the goat's muscles. "Fucking Adventurer doing his damndest to be a sidequest himself."

"Guy Fox really pissed you off, huh." Trying to be neutral, to listen.

"All that power and he uses it to troll people," she says. "To hire bandits, encourage bandits, actively make things worse while they fall apart. Fuck that. We're having a hard enough time."

This is all true. 

It's also a weirdly personal beef, I note, even for people now forced to live that life. It occurs to me that Adventurers - all Players - are a lot more insulated from the consequences of that than most of the Mundanes.

The NPCs, you try to avoid calling them. Genuine People Personalities, Sio once called them.

I take a deep breath.

"There were probably better ways to employ those dudes than highway robbery," I say, hoping she appreciates the understatement. "Frontier quests. Scouting. Hell, planting things other than corpses."

"And irrigating with things other than blood," she says, laughing. "You know, that's a part of Erandan scripture, that exact turn of phrase? You need no longer plant corpses and irrigate them with blood; more bountiful harvests than death are possible."

"I didn't know that," I say. "But I'm kind of a shitty theologian for a priestess."

"Picking it up quicker than some, I can tell you that for free," Sio says.

I shrug. "I'm the kind of geek that learned that stuff to make better amazons and priestesses for Dungeon Crawler games."

"Amazons like me?" Sio says, grinning. "Titless wonders, great with a bow."

"Funny," I say, "mostly we use it to talk about very tall buff women. More warrior types than archers and soldiers. Even if it literally means titless."

She frowns for a moment, hand over her mouth, tapping her finger behind her eye. "Mostly knew it as a Thornite term of honor," she says. "It's possible I've been logged in too long even before the, ah, call it the Siege of Viacrux."

"You're pretty devoted to the Thornite shtick, huh," I say. "I noticed you picked up a lot of druid bullshit in that fight. Saved our asses, at that."

"Well, yeah," she says, nonplussed. "Being a Thornite ranger may have saved my life. Or at least saved me a lot of money on psych services," she adds, entirely earnestly.

"Rough life at home?" I ask.

"Had to cut contact with my dad," she says, returning her knife to her kill. "And the dipshit he wanted me to marry. Travelled across the country to get out from under his thumb."

"I'm sorry," I say. "I wish I couldn't imagine having a family like that, that you need to get away from.  Not my own," I hasten to add.  "My mother and stepfather are sweethearts.  But I've seen some shit with my friends."

She shrugs. "It's been fine. I got by, and most of my friends I met on this server. Living the dream," they say, and it's not entirely clear how sarcastic she's being.

"I wouldn't know anything about playing who I wish I was," I reply, utterly deadpan.

She laughs, a single piercing caw of recognition. "It's easy to get caught up in that, huh? The fantasy of being an Adventurer, of finally having that freedom and the power to use it. It can be the most liberating thing in the world."

"Or a trap," I say. "In the case of those griefers that hired Guy."

"You think he's not one of them?" she says, voice flat.

"I think he didn't realize who was paying him," I say. "And I'd like to think he'd be horrified to learn it was slavers - or people playing at being slavers anyway."

She snarls. "I hope so, for his sake," she hisses. "I'd hate to have to save an arrow for him."

I nod and grunt agreement, palms together under my nose, thinking, and let the conversation end there as I help her dress the goat for dinner.

I've heard enough, anyway. Now I'm absolutely sure of what I only suspected about Sio, before. Enough of her weird knowledge gaps despite being a memelord, enough of her unusual background, enough of her attitudes. I'm not going to betray her secret, of course I'm not, not unless it means the safety of my party and not before I need to confront her about it - which I can't foresee happening.

Still. I still don't know why a Mundane adventurer playing at being a Player would want to travel with my party.

But I figure Siobhan will tell us why when she's good and ready.