When Otter woke up in the morning, she was the little spoon for Rua. Her everything was a little exhausted, muscles just absolutely drained, but in a good way. She was tempted to wake Rua up with some kind of sexy time, but what they had was a little too new for that. She was too prone to screwing things up, and she was determined not to do what she normally did.

  So, with a little regret, she slowly extricated herself from Rua’s grasp, pced a kiss on her forehead, and went to attend morning activities. The little lobster-thing had apparently tried to escape during the course of the night, having gotten down from the counter, but couldn’t find freedom with the door tched. She picked it up, pced it in the bucket, and went to the annoying task of naked undry.

  She would’ve made breakfast, as was her post-sex tradition, but in this damn game, she didn’t know how to cook anything. All the ingredients beyond a small jar of salt were foreign to her, and she had no idea how anything went with each other. She was going to need to relearn an entire life skill.

  Well, she had time.

  Rua had previously shown her the basin for clothes outside, complete with a washboard. She’d never had to use one before, but how hard could it possibly be?

  After an hour and doing a thoroughly shit job at it, Otter remembered she had her Thread of Sanctuary skill. It specifically stated she could make a garment, but the skill didn’t say how big or small it had to be. Casting it, she wove a long, white overcoat that would fasten together in the front. Her own instinctual knowledge of the skill let her know that any dirt would count as ‘damage’ to the clothes, and would fade away naturally over a short time period. She’d need to renew the casting every day, but screw it, this had to be better than pants that barely fit, and having to do naked undry every time you went out into the death swamp.

  Before spending the five will points, her resource had apparently fully regenerated at some point. There were a few message notifications waiting for her, none of them live requests. She went through them, all recorded inquiries. Sami, asking how things were. Everett, following up on Sami’s offer to cn up. Apparently they’d found a fifth, but no word on who it was. Something from ‘Pandemona’, but it was a stumbling, stuttered attempt at an expnation that she wasn’t the real Pandemona, and had only impersonated her ‘hero’ as a way of honouring her. A whole lot of requests from people wanting to know how to use magic. A lot of people wanting to know where she was, and if she could help them. Apparently a few people were stuck in the wilderness with no civilization in sight, and being gamers, had no life skills to help them survive the wilderness. There were a couple pleading for help, worried they’d die from dehydration soon after failing to locate water.

  Otter didn’t know if she could trust those. Her heart went out to them, but her position in this community was tenuous.

  When she came back inside, leaving the barely washed clothes to hang dry, Rua was waiting for her. She was wearing nothing but a shirt, which almost distracted Rua enough to not notice the pair of steaming mugs of something that smelled good. Between them was the wooden heart of the Cutting they’d killed.

  “That had better not be breakfast,” Otter muttered.

  “It’s not. But it’s better to eat it on an empty stomach. Soul crystals aren’t always… appetizing.”

  “What happens if I throw it up?”

  “You can’t. In the sense that, it dissolves as soon as it hits your stomach. If you vomit after that, you’ll just be losing everything else in your belly. It’s fine. Most people do.”

  “So, suppose I should get that morning kiss before?”

  Rua rolled her eyes, but Otter could tell it was just for show from how eagerly she reciprocated once they did. Although after, she made a noise, and pointed to a cabinet.

  “There, in the bottom drawer. Ytha root. Break off a piece and chew. Spit it out when you’re done.”

  Otter followed her instruction, and in that one drawer was a giant pile of gnarled twigs. She took a small piece off one, and bit into it. The surface was dry, but the inside was kind of soft and mushy. It tasted kind of minty.

  “Is this your dental hygiene?” she asked around the bit of root in her mouth.

  “Yes. Your kisses smell like my feet after walking in the swamp. Drink some tea with it, it works better if your mouth is wet.”

  “I wouldn’t mock my breath right now, after how much of my cum you drank st night.”

  Rua blushed faintly, and suddenly found the contents of her mug very interesting.

  “Sorry, low blow. Kind of like the one you did st night, am I right?” Otter held up her hand for a high five, and then remembered they probably didn’t have those here. “I’ll stop, I swear. I don’t mean to tease. I just… tend to talk when I’m nervous.”

  “You’re nervous?”

  “Rua, you scare the shit out of me in the best possible way. I don’t wanna fuck this up, and my mouth tends to get me into trouble.”

  “I don’t know. It kind of helped your case st night.”

  Otter had just taken a sip of tea, and nearly choked on it. “Was that banter?”

  “Eat your soul crystal before I force feed it to you.”

  Otter tried her best sulk, to which Rua was apparently immune. When she hesitated, poking the wooden heart and watching the way it rolled, Rua snatched it up, carved it in half with a knife, and handed the sliver of white gemstone within.

  “I better get a reward for this,” Otter said.

  “Power is the reward.”

  “No, I meant like, kisses.”

  “I only kiss adults. You’re being a child right now.”

  Otter sighed, grabbed the crystal, tried to suppress the memory of killing Nightmare and eating his, wasn’t able to, and then swallowed it. She nearly gagged the second it hit her tongue, definitely did the moment it hit her throat, but managed to get it down.

  Choose Stat to Enhance

  Strength / Agility / Fortune

  “My choices are Strength, Agility, and Fortune. I kind of want to pick Agility, make myself a little quicker.”

  “No. Strength. With those threads of yours, you’re going to get pulled every time you try to bind someone. I don’t think we’ll be able to get you to the point where you can win any match of brawn, but I want it so you don’t just get pulled off your feet every time your thread hits something.”

  “Fine.”

  She made the selection, and pulled up her stats.

  Strength: 12 (13)

  Agility: 11 (12)

  Tenacity: 14 (15)

  Allure: 10 (11)

  Will: 15 (16.5)

  Fortune: 11 (13)

  Awareness: 10 (11)

  It looked like she’d gotten at least two points from the Cutting, which meant it had at least 20 Strength. She read off her numbers to Rua, who nodded thoughtfully.

  “Better than average. Most people don’t have any soul power.”

  “No? I figured people would be farming livestock for these things.”

  “Livestock doesn’t drop them. Only self-aware creatures. The only reason why Cuttings have them is because they’re pieces of Ashborne.”

  “Still, you’d think someone would set up a farm somewhere for something that does.”

  “It’s been tried, by the Criobani. Why do you think they invade nds like mine?”

  “Shit, really?”

  “The Dreamers permit it. To an extent. The Criobani and the Sassians have both found out the limits. The Sassians especially. It’s why their nd is the Wastes now.”

  “What’d they do?”

  “Exactly what you said. Tried to raise people like cattle. Breeding them and killing them for soul crystals. They did it for a hundred years before the Dreamers woke up. Now everyone knows better. The Criobani test the limits, though.”

  “And the Dreamers just… let them?”

  “The Dreamers don’t care, for the most part. We don’t know why they wake up sometimes. It’s why we pray for them to sleep.”

  “And does that work?”

  Rua took a drink of her tea, and motioned Otter to the door. “Go outside. I want you to run ps around the cabin. We need to train your endurance outside your soul power. Tenacity doesn’t count for everything.”

  “Outside? Cardio? That’s it, I want a divorce.”

  “We’re not married.”

  “Yet!”

  “I’ll make breakfast while you run. Get to it.”

  “Wait, how many ps do you want me to do?”

  “Until I’m done cooking. I’ll be watching, so I’ll know if you cheat. And I’m going to ask you how many you ran when you get back in, and if you think you could’ve done better.”

  “Okay, using your lie detecting powers is not fair.”

  “I never said I was fair. Get to running. I’ll give you kisses if you do a good job.”

  “Sold!”

  For the next three days, Rua had Otter train. First it was simple cardio. Then she set up a simple agility course using old logs. It was primitive, and Otter had seen better at some children’s pygrounds, but they made do with what they had. On the st day, they moved onto actual sparring.

  Otter learned pretty quickly that using her threads to try to bind someone who was both thinking and stronger than her was a bad idea.

  Each day, she asked to visit the woman in the armour in the swamp. Each day, Rua said she had to earn it. It pushed Otter harder.

  It wasn’t all gruelling work. There were more than enough moments of tenderness in between, but Rua steadfastly refused to have sex again. Otter didn’t want to push it, but when she asked why not, she got the only answer she needed.

  “Because it’d be easy to just stay here with you.”

  Otter got the unspoken message. Just as Rua was driving Otter’s performance by not letting her go save the Vexurian, Rua was pushing herself as well by denying herself what she wanted until they got out.

  They trained from morning to sunset, only pausing for meals, basic chores, and to gather more food to repce their dwindling supplies. Otter had been right to be worried about those. Rua had already been close to living day-by-day. Now with two mouths to feed, they had to work hard to keep any kind of surplus going. Luckily, Otter had one type of skillset that Rua did not.

  She knew how to set a snare.

  She wasn’t some great hunter. She barely knew her way around a campfire. But Everett had shown her how to do it a few times, and it’d stuck. Combined with her Thread of the Scourge, it was actually surprisingly easy. It was like the thread knew what she wanted to do, and worked to accommodate the request. Her snares had to be reset three times a day – the threads didn’t st forever – and they rarely caught something, but it allowed them to stay ahead of the food game with a few captured lizards and in one case, something that looked like a cross between a rabbit and a frog.

  They’d need the surplus once they had to worry about a third mouth to feed.

  DorenWinslowe