I rushed to get cleaned up while Dawn washed her hands, both of us giggling wildly as we did so. God, I loved my girlfriend so much. We were such a perfect fit for each other.

It didn’t take me long to clean up, and I hopped back down the stairs in a rush. I was excited to meet Kimberly and finally see the girl behind the character I had met ingame. I really hoped she wasn’t involved with Kristina’s disappearance though. As much as I disliked her, my ex didn’t deserve to get kidnapped or killed or anything.

Honestly, what she deserved was to realise just how shitty she had been, and just how shitty her entire church was. That was what all awful people deserved, to realise the error of their ways and live with the guilt. Sadly, I doubted she would ever have that realisation.

On a whim, I decided to take a one minute shower. I knew she was probably waiting anxiously outside, but I was covered in sweat and my own wetness. Once I was clean and dressed once again, I bolted out of the bathroom and down the stairs.

I came to an abrupt halt halfway down when I got a look at the girl standing awkwardly in our living room. She was tall and willowy, with short blonde hair and a somewhat boyish look about her. She looked like the type of girl who played soccer at a regional level, but was too anxious to really commit to her skills. If that makes any sense.

She saw me coming down and gave me the most shy, tentative smile I’d ever seen on a human being before. “Hey.”

Her eyes were a bright blue, unsettlingly so, and I found myself staring at them for a hairsbreadth too long. “Hey! Are you the mysterious Kimberly?”

“A-ah, yeah,” she nodded, her eyes bouncing all over the place but at me. She looked so scared and shy!

“Sorry about not being there when Dawn let you in,” I said, moving down the stairs towards her. “Had to wash up. You know how we are.”

She nodded, then blinked as though she had only just processed what I meant. Her cheeks flamed up with understanding, highlighting a scattering of freckles across her cheekbones and nose. She was so heart-achingly cute. The epitome of adorabutch. Which was an interesting juxtaposition with her very feminine appearance ingame.

Her embarrassment gave me time to reach her, and I didn’t hesitate at all to wrap her up into a close, familiar hug. Girl obviously needed it, considering how awkward and anxious she looked.

“Relax, Kimmy,” I murmured, resting my head on her shoulder. She was taller than me by half a foot, which was not something I had expected. “We’re friends, you’re allowed to be here. More than allowed, we’re happy to see you.”

She was stiff and unyielding for a few seconds, then slowly she began to unravel, until she was clutching at me like a baby animal. “Thank you. It’s been a really stressful week.”

Dawn walked back into the room from the downstairs bathroom at that moment, so I let Kimberly go and flopped myself down onto the sofa. My girlfriend joined me with a smile, and we both motioned for our guest to do the same.

“Yeah,” I said, picking the conversation back up. “Do we get to know what you’ve been up to, now?”

“Uh… escaping,” she mumbled, hugging one of our throw pillows to her chest. “From my parents, my family… everyone I’ve ever known. Well, except everyone in our party, I guess.”

I opened my mouth to say that we’d looked her up, but Dawn quietly squeezed my arm, silencing me.

“Your religious church parents?” I asked instead. That’s what she’d told us earlier, after all.

Kimberly blew out a long, even breath. “Yes. God, where do I begin?”

Her hands were shaking, I noticed, and she swallowed air while she tried to order her thoughts. She frowned, almost like she was having an argument with herself, then pursed her lips and looked up.

“I was… part of an enclave of church fanatics within Canada,” she said slowly. “Originally, we were just a tiny rural town in the middle of nowhere. Then the war happened and… we lost. I mean, they lost. America and the church. The borders closed and we got stuck on this side of it.”

“Right,” Dawn nodded beside me, fingernails digging into my arm now. Yeah, I know, girl. It sounds weird, considering what we know. Just let her talk.

“There was a lot of anti-church hate at that time, for obvious reasons. So we had to disguise ourselves,” our mysterious friend continued. “The Naturalists were an easy target to imitate, they had conclaves all over the area anyway. We just pretended to be a sect that didn’t get along very well with the others. That was obviously way before I was born.”

“Wait, really?” my girlfriend blurted, looking surprised. Me too, babe, me too.

Kimberly nodded, looking almost ashamed. “Yeah. I always had reservations about the whole… the whole thing. I used to go on supply runs with my um, my parents, and I’d see things, you know? We had the FTLN too, a hidden node. Did you know that anyone can access it, so long as you have some of that material that makes it work? There’s protocols in place on the server side across the whole world, firewalls and such, but the actual connection itself is… there’s only one FTLN.”

“I think May mentioned it once,” I said, trying to remember what my little sister had said while she was babbling one time while I made dinner.

“Anyway, I could see the rest of the world beyond our compound. I knew it wasn’t the raging hellscape that our bible tells us,” she said with a shrug. “Meeting you, Tami, that was the final nail in the coffin of my belief. I couldn’t do it anymore. You and everyone else, you were so good, so happy. If god existed and he believed you were living lives of sin, why were you so happy. Why is the republic locked up, a nation of prisoners? I mean, I could go on and on about how little sense the church’s dogma makes, but you probably already know.”

“Oh yeah, we’re aware,” Dawn grumbled. Her hand wasn’t crushing my arm anymore. She was starting to believe what Kimmy was saying. I know I did, but I knew I was too trusting for my own good.

“Then there was the part where the republic was using us as a staging area to do some pretty nasty shit in UN-aligned nations,” she said with a shudder. Her gaze gained a few thousand yards as she turned to stare out across the inside of the arcology. “Really nasty shit. I even helped with some of it, in a minor sense.”

I wanted to hug her again. This was the real cost of conflicts like the UN-AR war. Entire living minds ground to a pulp, sacrificed upon the altar of whatever cause everyone was fighting over. Kimberly would be living with the damage it had done to her psyche for the rest of her existence. She could move on, learn, grow, and be happy, but there would always be the memories.

“We had May look you up,” I said quietly, rather than getting up to hug her. “We were worried about you. She followed some info and we… yeah, we thought you were a real Naturalist.”

Her eyes snapped back to meet mine, wide with fright. “You did?”

“Yeah,” I sighed, hoping it was the right thing to tell her. “You were so cagey about it all.”

She swallowed hard and nodded. “I think I understand. You couldn’t trust me. I mean, you met me because I tried to steal that egg from you.”

Dawn and I immediately shared a look. “Why did you want the egg?”

“I don’t know,” Kimberly said sadly, eyes downcast. “I think my mother realised I wasn’t so… zealous anymore. I’ve been kept out of the loop for a long time, they didn’t trust me either. I couldn’t commit to being who they wanted me to be, and I couldn’t commit to leaving either. Until now. Until after I had already hurt people, until after they had already used me for a stupid… a stupid test of loyalty. I—”

“We had May look into your identity because we were worried,” I said, cutting her off. She’d been getting more and more upset as she explained things, and I could see she was having trouble saying all of this out loud.

My tone was soft and soothing as I continued, “Trust isn’t a clear cut binary, either. You can trust someone to heal you in a virtual game, but not with your whole life. You can trust someone to love you unconditionally, but also not trust them to pay you back when they ask to borrow money. I can trust Dawn to love me from the bottom of her heart, but I can’t trust her to make a good moist chicken roast. We’re your friends, we were worried, and we didn’t trust you not to do something stupid and get hurt.”

Her gaze flicked back up to meet mine with surprise. “Y-you were worried?”

Kimberly looked so small right then, despite being pretty tall. She was cringed in on herself, fighting her tears with her arms curled tight about her waist. My heart ached, compassion welling up within me as I realised just how much this girl needed us, needed our friendship. She’d abandoned everything she ever knew on the off chance that we’d accept her, because she knew she was being used for evil. God, what a shitty fucking deal life had given her.

“Of course we were worried,” I murmured gently, and this time I did get up. I made my way around the coffee table and sat next to her, pulling the silently crying girl into my arms. “We’re your friends.”

“But we’ve only known each other for like… a few weeks,” she said, voice rasping through her pain.

“So?” Dawn snorted from back on the other sofa. “Anyone who measures a friendship in purely objective time is a fucking moron.”

“I don’t deserve your friendship. I haven’t even told you about what I did, what I—” she sobbed, and there she finally broke, crying freely in my arms. Dawn and I shared a look over her head, one that held so many different emotions it would have been impossible to describe it. We both felt for Kimberly. We’d lost a friend to the very same cult that she had just escaped, after all.

Stroking her hair, I told her with the utmost kindness, “Kimmy, please tell your brain to shut the fuck up and take the love we’re offering, okay? We’re your friends, we get to decide if we think you are worthy of our friendship. Especially when you are so obviously bad at judging yourself. We also don’t need to know about every shitty little thing you’ve done. We can see that you’re a good person now, and that’s what matters. I’ve done some pretty stupid and nasty shit in my time, we all have. It’s chill.”

I could hear her getting ready to protest again, so I kept talking over the top of her. “Plus, I’ve done some shit that is on the embarrassing side too. It’s just the past. I don’t care about it, neither does Dawn or any of the others. We like you, the person you are now. Shit, five years ago I was a brick headed fuckboy who thought that making fart noises whenever the teacher bent over to help someone was fun. I can pretty much guarantee Dawn wouldn’t have been into me back then.”

“You’re still that kind of person now, you’re just a fuckgirl instead,” Dawn commented wryly. “And I’m definitely into you now.”

Kimberly’s sobbing was interrupted by a sweet little giggle, and she cuddled closer against me, breathing in deeply. She seemed to be calming down, although I really hoped I could help her with whatever was eating at her later. Not now though, now she needed to look forward. She was free, and we needed to put a big ol’ full stop down in the story of her life so she could get moving into the next chapter.

Dawn got up off the sofa with a sudden burst of speed and declared, “You know what we need? Really fucking good food. I’m going to order pizza. Then maybe we can watch a movie about the church getting railed or something, for cathartic purposes.”

“Railed how, exactly?” I asked, wiggling my eyebrows.

That got a reaction from Kimberly, who coughed and snorted out a surprised laugh. “Jesus, you two.”

“Ay, she’s using the fancy cross boy’s name in vain!” Dawn said, clapping her hands excitedly. “The rehabilitation is going well!”

“I’m pretty sure I’m still sort of christian,” Kimberly mumbled, looking almost ashamed by the admission.

“Oh, I wasn’t talking about religion, I was talking about the pole that is ritually shoved up the ass of every church believer,” Dawn called from the kitchen. “It takes a lot of healing to get used to freedom of bowel movement again.”

“Oh my goodness,” Kimberly muttered, blushing up a storm again. I hugged her tight to my side and laughed. Then, spontaneously, I pressed a little kiss to her cheek. She went even redder. “Tami!”

“Yes?” I asked mischievously. “What’s wrong?”

Her adorable, freckled face went all pouty as she said, “You know what!”

I laughed again and ruffled her hair. “It’s a special occasion, you escaped the crazy cult. I’d like to hear more, but I think you’ve explained enough about everything for now. More questions can come when you feel like giving answers. For now, I’d like to show you what life is like out here in the normal world.”

Life out in the normal world apparently meaning, being fucked quick, hot, and dirty by your girlfriend, then immediately jumping into the task of soothing your traumatized friend. Life was wild like that, I guess. I could definitely use a break from it, maybe punch some dudes to let off steam. Yeah, definitely punch some dudes.

QuietValerie

So, I'm going to attempt a new release cadence. One chapter of trouble every four days. Let's see how this goes.