In between life and death, there is nothing.

No where, no when, no who.  I don’t know how long I am there because there is no me there, and no time for that lack of me to be there regardless.

I think it is a long time this go around anyway.  Which makes it slightly bitter that I do not awake rested.

One instant, I am dead. The next, my facsimile body exists, and I am on the soft blankets of the stationary bed that is my return point.  My tail gets tangled again, but I don’t move for some  time except to pull the comforter around me loosely and to feel the fake air on false skin.

Breathing is hard.  Technically I could probably get away without doing it, but struggling to breathe is uncomfortable, so I put my mind to the task.  My chest begins to rise and fall slowly as I come to grips with existing here; the motion of the copper skin of my breasts out of the corners of my eyes a reminder that this body is dramatically different from the last one I was just in.

I raise a hand over my head, reaching up for the ceiling, and look at the back of my fingers.  Long, slender, no badly healed breaks or scars.  Different color, yes, but that’s the least of the signs that I’m back to being the form I shaped for myself.

Two things strike me instantly.  The first is utter, complete, relief .  I am, finally, after so long of struggling, no longer in pain .  The second is that I have a complete lack of guilt for my relief.  No life sucking induced emotions dragging me down, no self loathing or instinctive hatred of my own existence.  Instead, I am…

Well, I’m as fucked up as I always am.  But it’s a personal and sculpted fucked up, not one imposed on me.  I’ve still got a bad estimation of myself, and I feel more than a little like I am responsible for untold horrors enacted upon the innocent, but it’s my trauma, and at least it’s partly real.

In contrast to how my last life was, it feels like coming home to a loving embrace and a favorite meal.  Contentment overwhelms me at the sharp delineation, and I feel a wide grin stretch my mouth as I consider simply laying in the blankets for the next however many heartbeats I now have.

But then I’d miss the others.  And I should see how many heartbeats I have, at least, before I commit to a childish impulse.

[Welcome back to the between, Intercessor.  1,160,000 heartbeats remain.  Prepare yourself.]

Less.  So much less than last time.  And yet, I can hardly understand how I even made that many.  It wasn’t a good life.  Not by my flimsy semi-mortal standards anyway.

Moping can happen later.  I stand and stretch, reveling in how easy it is and swishing my tail back and forth to shake off the blanket.  Overhead, the seemingly haphazard chandelier from an old life brushes against my knuckles as I raise my arms trying to crack joints that haven’t had enough time in existence to need it.

I almost get distracted just running my hands over my own skin and scales.   Every return to the between brings with it the relief, the sudden absence of pain that can feel like a euphoria.  But there are degrees of the effect, and now I practically feel like I’m on fire.

The sigil on my door greets me, and I briefly wish that I had a way to drag my bed with me as I palm it and open the way to Bastion’s.  But not even the blankets will follow, and I regret for the twentieth time putting it in my room and not in the place that we all spend our time.  Nothing to be done for it now; and it isn’t as if meta items give you detailed information without outside intervention.  Hard to know if something will be movable once you place it.  I’ve seen dishware that fixed itself in place, while whole armoires could be returned to inventory.

Bastion’s greets me with warm yellow and orange light from the lamps illuminating the rustic wood floors.  The mismatched chairs are all pushed in at the trio of equally eclectic tables.  The metal stairs to the upstairs library sit cold and roped off on the side of the big room.  The bar is untended, the mirrored glass shelves behind it adorned with a smattering of colored bottles that mostly serve to show off how understocked we would be if we were a real bar.

No one is here.  Just me.  My bare feet resist the occasional splinter from the floor as I walk across the room.  The only sounds are the constant background click-whir of the prop engine overhead, and the light burble of the endless rinse basin behind the bar.

I’ve been the first before.  I’ve been the first a lot, actually.  For a few lives, I was the only , and the arrival of Ellin and then Six was the only thing that kept me from slipping into madness.  Thinking that you’re truly, absolutely alone in the universe is not something that people are meant to withstand.  There are artificial species out there that can cope with it, but there seems to be a kind of vulnerability to loneliness that developed alongside sophoncy, and it’s been consistent in every life where it’s been relevant.  Maybe some kind of broader philosophical law that overrides or supplements the individual physics of any given world.

Well, it’s not an issue.  The others will show up eventually.  

I don’t want to drink alone, though.  And not just because this body is only five feet tall, and I would need to drag a chair behind the bar to reach the bottle I actually want right now from the top shelf.  So instead, I… wait.  Relax.  Enjoy the quiet and the safe space.

It’s hard to explain what it’s like.  Some lives end badly, some lives end chaotically, but all lives end, and then I’m back in the between.  And it can feel truly, utterly, exhausting.  Being on a roller coaster that I never consented to and can’t get off.  I’ve met people before who trap themselves in death loops just to try to stop feeling, and I can’t say that I don’t understand .

And while a given life can be a struggle, or be full of pain, or just be regular old traumatic, it’s considered uncouth among our group to compare suffering.  After all, why try?  At its very best, you’re only going to inflict discomfort, and at the worst your actions will minimize the feelings of your companions.  So just don’t.  It’s like trying to mathematically measure the ethics of an action; the closer you look for sharp lines to divide good and evil, the blurrier those lines become.  Quantum ethics, as it were; detailed observation ruins results.

That said, there isn’t a feeling quite like leaving a life where you were born with a mental illness.  Feeling trapped in an immortal cycle where I slowly refine myself into new versions of myself is practically liberating compared to feeling trapped inside my own skin.  The perspective of lifetimes makes it continually easier to shrug off hypnosis or mentalist magics, but it does nothing against the ravages of the chemical imbalance called depression.

The simple fact that I don’t want to die anymore is the largest pain removed from me.  That, and the ache in my back.

If I hadn’t known from a previous life that the self harm urges would leave when I returned to the between, I actually would have suicided earlier.  It’s not pretty, but it’s our group’s standard defense against permanent mental effects.  The onset of dementia or the constant application of a hostile meme can, and will, change you.  We aren’t separate from our lives, we are our lived experiences.  I’m not sure what the actual process is that lets me keep all that knowledge and memory stored up, but I do know that damage to the mind when I’m alive can damage the person that I am.

One bad concussion can be enough to take out a half dozen faces of acquaintances from a hundred subjective years ago.  And dementia does far worse.  Ending the run and returning the the between ahead of schedule isn’t pleasant, but neither is having to rebuild a personality from first principles.

I realize that I’m trembling slightly, and my tail is hitting the leg of a barstool as I flick it back and forth.  So.  Perhaps being recreated here isn’t as much of a refresher as I had hoped.

Okay, nevermind.  I’m going to start drinking alone.  I grab one of the bottles of spiced wine off the bottom shelf and uncork it; technically it’s been at least thirty subjective years since this was unsealed, but the between doesn’t care about time in a conventional sense.  The flavor is almost too much; cinnamon and ginger exploding with the alcoholic bite on my tongue.  I’m not really ready for it, and it distracts me from everything else going on briefly.

The first pour lasts twenty heartbeats as this body gets its thirst quenched for the first time.  The second pour I try to savor, and find it hard to, because this actually is kind of unpleasant.  I don’t actually like the more savory or spiced drinks; fruit is my preferred flavor set.  Either way, I toy with the wooden drinking bowl I’ve filled with wine, swirling the half full pool back and forth, making light waves inside as I stare at how the color of the wood and the liquid contrast.

I’m waiting for someone to show up.  There’s a few people who I’m waiting for, who will almost certainly never arrive.  I keep my first words in reserve for them, just in case.  But as my thoughts drift, I eat up quite a few heartbeats, and pass the invisible line in the sand of time that I tend to use as a marker.  And still Bastion’s contains only myself.

I’m also waiting, in a more expected and real sense, for anyone from my group.  It would be a delight to see Six or Jules again.  Mark, too.  And it’s been lifetimes since I’ve been able to talk to Molly.  Also Ellin, I suppose; trying to put a joking spin on my own thoughts, even as secretly I yearn to see her just as badly as anyone else.

But I’m still here alone, and the place is still quiet.  Sighing and refilling my bowl halfway, I head across the rough floor and make my way to the steps up to the library.

The bookshelves are still there, and still half-filled with an assortment of scattered paperbacks and board games that we are very careful  to put back correctly.  No one wants to find out if the pieces are protected by the between, and losing a dice around here could mean subjective centuries before we can replace it.

I miss reading already.  All the books here, I know, and love.  We have a book club for a reason.  But I miss the library from my last life.  Low tech, mostly academic material, but there’s something about words on paper that sings to me in my blood and makes me yearn for a comfortable chair and a sunbeam to read in.

We don’t have most of the ingredients for that.  Some books, yes, but it’s been a long time since I’ve seen a comfortable chair in the between, and it definitely wasn’t in Bastion’s.  I don’t think there’s ever been a sun here either.

I spend three thousand heartbeats flipping through familiar pages.  It’s not actually that boring.  It’s been years since I got to read this little space adventure, and the reminder of a nested culture I have long since left behind is pleasantly nostalgic as I let the wine do its work.

But I keep looking down at the ground floor, watching for motion.  My ears perk up every time the prop engine fan makes a click I didn’t expect.  I’m tapping my toes and tail tip onto every surface they get near in nervous anticipation.

It’s hard to describe how being really, deeply alone feels.  Partly because I’m not there yet; I do still expect company.  But company hasn’t arrived, and I am left in this strange limbo state where I do not feel myself truly alone , but also have no one to talk to.  Distractions, in this state, are hard to come by.  Books I’ve read a hundred times just don’t quite do it for me, even if it is the first time this go around.

I spend some time carefully studying the bonsai terrarium that Jules brought back with him last life.  The tree seems to be doing well, which is to say, the tree doesn’t seem to have changed at all.  And when I say ‘studying’, what I mean is that I’m trying to trace all the different tiny lines in the bark, and occasionally tapping the glass with one thin finger to ‘drip’ a heartbeat or two into the tank.  It doesn’t change in a way I can see.  Maybe it would take a few more to make the leaves move in the wind.  Or maybe the artifact of a magical life doesn’t have wind  in it, though I actually find that less likely.

One of the downsides to being bored here in the between is that there is an easy relief to it.  It’s to check your notifications.  A thing that I normally shy away from, but usually, I put it off either because of a traumatic event or because I want to savor every moment with my friends and not waste it when I can fidget with my upgrades later.  Now, though?

My last life was awful, but in a very banal way.  And my friends haven’t arrived yet.

So I start poking the less interesting things.  Clearing them away, at least.  I have far fewer notifications this time, but that’s okay.  I’ll consider this a buffer life.  A… not a vacation, but a lull.  A prep period.  The downslope before the upcoming peak.  Yeah, that sounds good.  I’ll be sure to use that line of absurd falsity on Jules, he’ll appreciate it.

[You have completed 1,000 local hours of retail labor : +3 marks of labor]

The fact that I know, for a fact, that the between rewards farming more than retail, is both offensive, and… sorta checks out.  There’s a strange shape to how different awards and upgrades are… balanced is the wrong word… matched and compared?  The between is not neutral.  It has opinions.  Or at least, whatever puts us here and greets me as an intercessor every time I wake up does.

[You have achieved qualifications in (local) higher education - first stage : +15 marks of knowledge, 10% discount on next [Education] perk or trait]

Six years of my life spent doing errands for a professor.  Here’s another edge piece to the jigsaw puzzle of the between; it rewards me for the qualification , not for the study, or the learning.  This is actually something that our group knows about, but we rarely take advantage of it.  It’s usually just not worth it unless there’s an education system that lets us test out of things, or if we actually do want to get some kind of neat new trait equipped.

[You have (minorly) improved the lives of over 100 people (final count 204) : +10 marks of faith, +10 aura drops, +1 Crystallized Luck]

I… don’t remember doing that?  Is that bad to say?  A lot of that last life is a blur.  I know I tried to be a good person, and living in a city, even a low tech one with a minimal total population, puts you in contact with a lot of people.  But I didn’t think I actually… huh.

If you’d told me that while I was still alive, I think it would have made me feel worse, somehow.  That I didn’t notice would make me guilty, or that I didn’t do enough would make me despair.  That life sucked .  Now, though, it’s one of the first notifications I’ve seen in a few lives that actually just… just makes me kind of proud.

I did that.  Not killing something dangerous, or surviving something stupid, or eating enough food to bury a castle.  I just made some lives better.  That’s nice.  That feels good.  And the Crystalized Luck is an excellent trade good, I’ve found.  I don’t use them myself, I’ve got that ongoing faith in the nature of the between that I’ll end up seeing everything eventually, no luck needed to tweak my random drops.  But maybe Mark or Ellin would want it when they show up.

They still haven’t shown up.  I peer over the wood railing, peeking like a child looking down at holiday preparations, and see the ground level still empty.  

My wine is empty, and I feel the rest of myself going the same way.  Not depressed or hollow, just… bland.  I flick through notifications about tolerating jobs and classes, picking up a pittance of marks that I won’t spend myself anyway.  Even this distraction doesn’t elicit any excitement.  There are only so many ways that you can pull pride out of being given a single mark of labor for a job promotion.

I don’t even remember getting a promotion.  Is this from when they just added to my job duties and then hoped I wouldn’t notice or quit?  Did I get rewarded after my death for being shafted in life?

How utterly religious.  I hate it.

But then, there’s something that does catch my eye.  Not just that, it makes me sit up, and actually pay attention.

[You have read and understood over 250 (local) books (final count 282) : +5 marks of knowledge]

[This is the fifth life you have accomplished this : aura layer [Scroll Harvester] gifted]

Having something gifted rather than unlocked is uncommon, but pretty frequent.  It saves on the points that I don’t spend much anyway, so that’s nice.  But it’s as I read [Scroll Harvester’s]  typically muddled and obtuse description that I go from interested, to wanting to cheer.

Unless I’m going insane, it lets me save texts from each life.  Not a lot.  Maybe one, until I grow it?  But… nothing seems to indicate I can’t drop them off here.

“I’m going to build a library.”  I whisper into the empty air of Bastion’s.

It takes me almost no time at all to pull [Glutton Of Norinton] out of my aura and replace it with [Scroll Harvester] .  The pseudo-quest wasn’t really doing anything for me anyway, it was just there to fill a weirdly shaped slot, and once I rearrange how [Personal Electronic Durability Boost] is positioned, and then also make the inconsequential choice to ditch [Slap Resistance] , it slides in easily.

I neglect my aura a lot.  I mostly just shove in whatever works or fits, never advance it, and never expand the aura itself.  I only have one layer of layers.

But this?   This is something that’s actually worth it.  This matters.  Because this isn’t about me, and my personal power.  This isn’t about optimization or accumulation.  About becoming some kind of walking disaster or ultimate entity.

This is just a way to make sure that I can share my favorite books in every life with my friends.

Book club is back.  I find myself laughing.  My voice being used for the first time as I start to cackle.  Life after life after life, all of it feeling fleeting and ever colder as I grew to realize that the only thing of any permanence was here .  Here with a handful of equally scared and lonely idiots just like me.  But now, beyond just randomly dropped souvenirs from achievements and rewards, I can reliably  steal a little bit of each life, to keep here in eternity.

I’m still laughing when I hear a door shut downstairs.  Popping out of the barely padded chair and shoving it back against one of its identical siblings, I leap to grip the bannister and lean over to the main room of Bastion’s.

“Book club is revitalized!”  I yell down at whichever friend has arrived first.

I get a shout of startled panic in response, in a voice I do not understand, as an older human man flails backward and falls on his ass, taking the chair made of extinct wood from a dying world with him.  He flails on the floor, his heavy pack overbalancing him as he looks like he’s trying to mix catching his breath with swearing at me.

“Oh.  Uh, sorry!”  I yell, pulling myself over the railing to drop to the floor, ignoring the stairs in favor of the faster way down and trusting the between to preserve my knees.  “Sorry, friend, I thought you were someone else.”  I offer the man a hand, which he takes and pulls himself up, his heavy and overstuffed bag towering a few feet over his grey haired head as he does so.

I let go of his hand and he dusts himself off.  “Ahee, ahee, it is not worry, young… man?”  He looks at me, and then looks away, flushing bright red.

“Sure!”  I say, glancing down at myself.  “Oh, yeah, I just got back and don’t have any return clothing.”  Which is sort of technically true.  I’ve got some in my inventory.  Including the robe Ellin gave me last time, which isn’t that bad.  But I’m comfortable, and Bastion’s is my place, not some random stranger’s.

He seems to agree with that on some level, as the old man gives a light cough and a nod, though he does keep his eyes away from me.  “Well, well, I’ll be getting the used to it, I suppose!” He chuckles.

“Are you alright?”  I ask.  “Your voice is…”. The between normally covers a lot of language barriers, but this guy is talking in an almost broken way

“Oh, oh, yes, I learn the languages!”  He perks up.  “Long, long time in the between.  Not not so many opportunities to refresh the magics as they pertain to my speaking.  I I trade, you see.”

Ah, a merchant.  An eclectic one at that, which is really the only kind you ever get around here.  “Well, I won’t waste your heartbeats.”  I smile at him.  “What’re you in the market for?”

“Ah, no, I sell .”  He says.  “I am I am collecting the marks and the drops.   No no cysts , not at all.  You are having the proper commercial trade interface?”

I am not. I am also barely following.  I rely a lot on the between’s eclectic and yet somewhat smooth translation, and this man’s rejection of it is making my eye twitch.  Still, I can keep up at least a little bit, though meeting this person is a novel experience even for me, with all my subjective years behind me, and I’m enjoying it.

So I’m smiling when I ask, “Do you have anything to drink?  We sort of run a bar here.”

The merchant’s smile lights up, and despite my lack of any [Trade]  skills to facilitate it, he is soon pulling random things out of his backpack.  I don’t know what powers the backpack itself has, but he both can’t find anything easily, and has a lot of things to find.  It takes three hundred heartbeats for him to line up a couple bottles and a clay urn on the bar, and by then I’ve mosied around behind the counter to at least partially stop distracting him with my nudity.

I could get dressed.  But I don’t feel like it.  We’re dead, and if he’s chosen to seem old here, then he’s lived at least long enough to know that in the between, there’s no enforced social moors to bind us down.  Besides, he seems to be adapting just fine.

The bottles are some old souvenir he picked up from a person with a long and complicated story that I listen to with half an ear while I examine them.  Long necked, like standard wine bottles, but sealed with some kind of wax cap.  They’re stamped in a pictographic language with a maker’s name, and a promise of how much of the alcohol it would take to kill a yak.

I don’t know if that’s a boast, a fact, or marketing.  The merchant doesn’t either.  We stare at the bottles for a few dozen heartbeats before he starts to reach for them to take them back, and I set a hand on his wrist to stop him.

The clay urn produces a fermented grain wine, and is good for a pour every hundred heartbeats you give it.  It doesn’t have a story attached, though he does make a point of telling me that every drink from it boosts your [Presence]  skills in the next life by a half percent each.

I care little for that effect.  But I pay him in marks, and five thousand heartbeats, and that piece of luck, for all of it.  It feels bad to spend my limited time, when I haven’t even met my friends yet.  But this way, at least I’ll have a little gift for them when they arrive.

The merchant, satisfied with the trade and smiling at me, moves to set out again.  I call after him to ask for his name, and he says something back about telling me next time he comes by to trade, which… I don’t know.  People don’t typically stumble into Bastion’s twice, in my experience.

But all things are cyclical.  All things can happen within forever.  And we have quite a bit of forever here, in the between.

I stand behind the bar, flicking my nails on the new glass bottles and trying to play a loose tune with a smile on my face.  And I wait for the others to show up.

The smile slowly slips.  My fingers start to sting, even through the between’s protections.  The heartbeats stretch on.

I’ve never been good at waiting.

But I stand there anyway, leaning on my arms folded on the bar, letting my eyes close even though sleep without a bed is impossible, listening for the sound of a door.

I have one last message to address.

[You have died.

You lived the life of a student.

You lived the life of a broken victim.

You lived the life of one who did their best.

You lived the life of one who died without complaint.

Final grade : unavailable

Final true achievement : 1 (19 total)

Final reward : None

The between calls.]