Ash studied her.

 “I thought you’d trust me if I got you the card you wanted, and anyway once I read the card description I knew I wanted to see what it melded into. You’re a Bard, so I guess you guys go from town to town playing music and putting on a show, right? That sounds like good fun. I could get on board with playing instruments, busking with a hat, talking you up.”

Ash wasn’t sure whether he should tell her the truth or just let her live with her delusion. She really seemed to enjoy talking.

He took the card and considered it. He could keep it and add it to his deck, to get an extra chance to paralyze someone with just a word, though he was genuinely curious about seeing the new and improved effect. An area effect on the paralysis would be incredibly powerful, or an extended duration. Plus, the passive effect could also improve, and right now the passive effect was really fun for the sexy times.

He had just spent all his free xp. There was no way he would be able to handle the requirements for a hyper rare card with zero to spend on upgrading the requirements. He had balanced out his character sheet and that, as it turned out, had been a mistake. What he should’ve done was sunk levels into Charming and Hearts… although he hadn’t spent his attribute levels because he didn’t want to increase the Random Encounter difficulty. If Tinniel was indeed coming with them on this journey, he wouldn’t need to worry about Random Encounters, because she was an NPC.

Going back into his character sheet, he dumped two of his levels into Charming and the other into Lucky. He also wanted Harem Laird to have a chance whenever he got another copy of that.

“I can’t equip a hyper rare version of this right now, but I will put it in my deck.” Two chances to stop someone from acting for several rounds was powerful indeed. Thinking back, he was harsh to criticize the Bard abilities, because he’d stayed out of combat, and out of snap decision mode, which allowed him to use whichever card he’d wanted again and again, before his opponents caught on to what he was doing.

“But we need to go, like, right now,” Tinniel began. “When Mr. Figglesworth finds out—”

He held up a hand. “I’ll have Evie here collect up Rachel and send her my way, and we’ll head to the ship right now.”

Evie looked like he’d just stuck something much larger than a butt plug in her ass. “What? I go through all the trouble of getting this thing up my, um… I mean I can’t even get…” She then blushed fiercely at the thought of finishing either of those sentences, glancing at Tinniel. “I’ll go

 We’ll be out of here in under an hour, all right?”

She looked skeptical at first.

“I’ve… just made a terrible mistake, haven’t I?”

“Nonsense,” Ash said. “You made a choice and you have to live with it.”

“But… you’re just a, a player. A playboy. Like a Hugh Hefner. What the hell is a Hugh Hefner?” Her eyes went wide. “I don’t know who that is. But I can see him in my mind. What is happening?”

Ash had taken out the spork, and had palmed it.

“You said you had a car… before,” he said. “What color?”

“It was blue, like a wonderful cobalt blue. With these strange pink blob decals on them. A Ford Escort coupe. Wait. What? I don’t know what a car is, and I definitely don’t know what a Ford Escort coupe means…”

“It’s been a while since you remembered the world before, hasn’t it?” He asked.

“How are you doing that?” she demanded.

“If you stick around, I can make sure you keep yourself.”

“My name… used to be Tina,” she muttered. “What a strange name I used to have.” She stared at her hands for a long time, standing there with her huge moth wings slowly opening and closing, opening and closing. She was literally having her life flash before her eyes, only it was a life that the apocalypse had taken from her.

This went on for some minutes. She’d come into the tavern room full of things to say but had been rendered speechless. When she finally looked at him again, she had tears in her eyes.

“I can keep it all?” she asked.

“That’s right,” he said. “But, you know, you have to keep everything. All the dumb things I did, all the embarrassing things I said, they’re all with me too. You don’t get to select what stays and what goes.”

After some pondering, she gave this a nod of assent. “Okay.”

“Then we have to get moving.”

She nodded once more. “Figglesworth is going to be really upset.”

“I have a history with pissing off shopkeepers, so this isn’t really all that different. Once Rachel gets to the ship we’ll be off.”

He hated to think the only reason he had the felinian on this mission’s crew was because she’d had sex with him, and that boosted his auras using Harem Laird. It wasn’t, obviously. She was good at her job as Rogue (though chances were good he was better in almost every single respect, given how much xp he’d gotten and how much he’d funneled into his skills and attributes). She also had this wonderful tendency to do basically anything he asked, regardless of how humiliating or embarrassing it might be, and that was someone he wanted to have on his team.

He also hated to think he’d invited this fey girl on this expedition because she was an NPC and would help them avoid Random Encounters on their way out toward his parents and the Lucy and Jez solution. But he didn’t hate to think it very much. Instead, a swelling of hope welled up within him that Tinniel's appearance was on account of his wildly high Diamonds and Lucky stats. He was a Master in Diamonds, after all. Although he had never seen the fruits of lucky described by the user interface, he still believed Lady Luck was working in his favor. He’d made a dumb decision or two, made a mistake or three, and so far he’d come out of it remarkably unscathed.

Ash had no trouble using Improved Telekinesis to get him up into the ship when they reached it, and Tinniel could simply fly the whole way, on her gorgeous purple and orange and brown moth wings. She stayed near him though, chattering about a whole lot of her old life. Did you know her social studies teacher from middle school had been called Mr. Huff and he liked to get high on marijuana all the time? So his name, Huff, was funny in a way, because that was what he did. And the boy she’d sat next to in that class once was playing around with her, and tickled the underside of her thigh, and she’d totally gotten all quiet when he did that, and it excited her, but she never told him.

They reached the ship after a good twenty minutes of Tinsel’s inner monologue running at full speed out of her mouth. Ash had chuckled and listened in attentively to the first few anecdotes, but afterwords began to tune her out. He was privately relieved to reach the ship; she’d just gotten to her tenth birthday party, and the games her mom had set up at the time. This was right on the heels of getting so drunk her friend Valerie had held her hair so she could spend something like a full hour puking her guts out in the tub of a bathroom she just did not know.

Waffles met him on the deck of the ship, barking excitedly and pleased to receive pets from him, and then from Tinniel. She was delighted to give them, and then to scratch at his belly. Ash headed straight for the aft castle, which Lucifer and Jezebel had used liberally most of the night.

“You and Jez packed and ready?” He asked.

Lucy nodded. “You’re sure about this?”

“Sure about what? My promise to get you two situated?”

Lucy nodded.

“Of course.” There was no taking back a sacred vow to help your best friend sort out his life, and Lucy should’ve known that. This situation with the baby really changed things in a way Ash should’ve foreseen, and simply couldn’t have.

“This means a lot to Jezebel,” he said. “And me, of course. This world is… you know. It’s different. Dangerous. We just want a safe place for the spawn of my loins.”

“Please always call him the spawn of your loins and never change that.”

Lucy gave him a familiar smile Ash had been missing for too long, and the moment of old best friend familiarity broke his heart a little.

“We’re going to need to get places with the kiddo. But I understand the girls are sticking with the ship?” Lucy asked. When Ash replied that yes, Ashley needed to purge the world of a demonic taint spreading across the land, he lost the understanding expression. “Then… how are we going to be traveling?”

Ash held up what looked like a backpack. “Since all of our supplies fit in the inventory, we just strap on these wings, and—”

“Hold up, hold up. My son isn’t inventory. And you have a dog who I’m pretty sure doesn’t fly.”

“Sure. The baby is strapped to you, Jez, or I guess me. If—”

“We don’t know how to fly these things,” Lucy protested.

Ash bit his tongue. The old Lucy had no trouble driving an absolute clunker of a car across the desert at night to deliver Ash back to his college dorm and later his shitty little apartment. Sure this had been six or eight years ago, before he and Jezebel had been married and of course before Damien, but they’d done it. They called the car the Ass Clown, literally, and the Ass Clown could’ve given out at any moment back in the day. Still, Lucy drove that bad boy with skill and style. It stalled out when he had to slow down on the freeway, and got it going again doing over a hundred kilometers an hour. That fucking thing was a rolling death trap; and he was now afraid of magically powered wings.

“Look, the fey girl can fly also. We’re going to be flying. It’ll be fine.”

Before Lucy could protest, he threw on the wings, clipped the chest buckle and the waist buckle on, and activated them by funneling in a little mana. In a flash the runes lit up all over the backpack in orange against the blue gray of the backpack itself, and the wings popped out. These were like dragonfly wings, and quickly whirred to life. At the base of the wings and the wing tips, little vials of magical liquid glowed to life, green and orange.

In under ten seconds, Ash had lifted off the deck of the ship, pointed his feet out and his head up, and shot into the sky. Had it been initially terrifying to fly these things? Sure. Had he gotten the hang of it long before crashing into the ground? Not exactly. Was he now a consummate professional at the backpack not an hour later? Mostly.

He then nudged his whole body to one side and swooped around in a loop, and tried to make the hardest part look easy. The landing had been tricky, and had required him to ask Ashley for healing several times in a row, but he had almost got it the last four times. Lucy needed reassurance that this would work, and so when he jerked his head up, spread his arms and legs out, and stalled the backpack, he was over the ship’s decking again. Just for safety’s sake, he readied Improved Telekinesis so if necessary he could at least lie convincingly and show Lucy that it was all good, all safe.

For the first time, he was not forced to use his telekinesis spell to land. Still, it wasn’t pretty.

This convinced Lucifer, who accepted the wings and listened to Ash’s short safety demonstration. After a short few minutes he had the wings going and was ready to step off the ship and into the open air. Soon enough he was swooping around, delighted and whooping.

“Awesome, right?”

“Dude, this is so cool! Did you ever imagine in a million years we’d be flying around with magic dragonfly wings strapped to our backs?”

Ash grinned, and didn’t let it falter when the pang of regret and disappointment struck. A few years earlier and the apocalypse would’ve been truly perfect.

When it came time for Lucy to land, he had much the same trouble Ash had knowing when to cut the power to the wings, because they didn’t stop whirring immediately. He was forced to dive down and grab Lucy by one wrist so he didn’t end up plummeting three stories toward a traumatic need for healing.

Another few minutes later and they had Jezebel out in the open air as well. They went through the same rigamarole with the safety speech, how to operate the machine, how to steer, gain and lose altitude, and then the troubles with landing.

Jezebel had trouble, though she too whistled and cheered loudly at the freedom of the whole thing. And while she didn’t end up with a ten point landing, she got the idea of it much better with Lucy’s warnings about cutting the power at the right time. What she did instead was put the wings in hover mode, which Ash hadn’t figured out before then. The wings could indeed beat at a certain speed to allow you to hover, and then she simply cut the power about six feet above the ship’s deck.

The resulting landing did require a little healing; she’d turned her ankle on the landing.

Rachel hated, hated the wings, but she turned out to be a natural. She still despised being up in the air, which was a felinian racial trait Ash found both funny and endearing. She was so skillful, but still wore this adorable scowl the whole time she was flying, and rolling on one shoulder in a painless and perfect landing. Waffles bounded over to where she was crouched, and immediately licked her entire face.

“Tinniel?” He asked.

“I can fly,” she responded simply, adding a nonchalant shrug. She then turned and flapped them slowly as if he couldn’t see them extending far over her head.

“Pretty sure you’ll want a wingpack,” he said. When she refused, he rolled his eyes, shrugged and put the extra pack in his inventory.

“So now,” Ash said, “all we do now is head out with Damien.”

“Wait, what?” Jez asked.

“We strap your kiddo to one of us, and we fly.”

“Um… ship?”

“The girls need the ship in order to do the ritual several more times. There’s a demonic infestation that needs a good scrubbing.”

“They can use these wing thingies,” Jez said, suddenly speaking to him as if he hadn’t considered this.

“I wish they could, but Evie needs to use her artificer abilities to create a mechanism to draw a precisely-sized diagram the size of an entire town and can only do that from a high vantage point.”

Jez didn’t have anything to say about this, and looked ready to tell him that ‘absolutely not, she would never under any circumstances have her tiny baby hanging unharnessed hundreds of feet in the air’ so when he produced the harness Evie had designed, she took a look at Lucy. He already had his hands raised in defeat; he wasn’t going to fight this.

Ash didn’t need to resort to the threat of not fulfilling their quest, thankfully. She watched as Lucy strapped the baby on, then deployed the wings to fly around the town for a short time.

Finally, sighing, she proclaimed that it would be fine. But Ash definitely noticed that he’d just lost 3 Relationship points with Jezebel right then.

Oh well. It was time to head out, and find a proper spot to put an end to their friendship forever.