LTSV - Harbingers of Change - 40 (Patreon)

Mira sat perched on one of the concrete barricades arranged in front of the Ruined Borough Gate and goblins died in waves before her as her chain lightning spells tore through them one after another. Penny hovered around her in the event that a goblin somehow made it through to her. It hadn't happened yet, but she was lingering nearby.

Adra was lurking in her shadow, which stretched out unnaturally long in front of her in defiance of the actual position of the sun. His body was off somewhere pretending to be interested in a video call. He was on mute and nodding whenever it seemed like Syrith needed him to, but otherwise she was arguing with the Mayor about permanent fortifications around the Ruined Borough. He seemed to think the tourists were going to come back and didn't want to commit to any plan where they didn't. Syrith and other Triumvirate representatives were trying to argue him around.

"Are you ready to talk about it?" Adra asked when the flow of goblins began to peter out.

She'd arrived just in time for a wave and wordlessly taken over, but the difference between this gate and one that had 'broken' was that the flow of monsters was intermittent and somewhat predictable. A 'broken' gate spewed out monsters in a single escalating stream and, according to the demons, there was a chance the gate would rise in difficulty. Sometimes people would deliberately let the gates break under controlled circumstances in order to 'upgrade' their local dungeon and, by extension, their dungeon products.

This world was nowhere near being able to consider such a thing, obviously. They were barely managing their dungeons as it was.

"You were listening, I assume?" she said through gritted teeth.

"Off and on while you were discussing the lawsuit and leasing the Ruined Borough since you seemed to have the matter well in hand," he admitted. "I was paying closer attention once Soneares revealed that she'd traced your maternal family. It sounds like your mother is safe and happy."

It said something that he didn't even bother asking if she was upset about the real estate. He knew her too well.

"She is," Mira admitted. "Her husband is handsome, talented, and kind. Her other children are adorable. There are no gates near them and the ones in Qasira were contained almost as fast as the ones here. They apparently have a mandatory military service, so most citizens have some training in how to handle themselves in a conflict and the worst dungeon they have is a level C."

"Something is bothering you," Adra observed.

"The boundaries are starting to blur," she said quietly and shot the head off another goblin. "I am a long way from when it felt like I'd been forced to colonize someone's recently abandoned corpse like a morbid hermit crab. It was something of relief to learn I was wearing my own bodies, but the memories of my life prior to awakening in the hospital still felt—separate from me, like Samira was someone else. This was more manageable when I lived as Violet. My pre-awakening memories were so scattered that I never really absorbed them as my own, but now…" she trailed off and let the sentence hang.

A trio of goblins slipped through the gates and she fried them with an errant wave of her hand while staring straight ahead with eyes that barely saw them. The demons standing by edged a little closer as they sensed her attention start to waver.

"All I could think, while Soneares told me about what she'd found out, was 'how dare he take that away from me.' Me, not her." Mira shook her head. "When I think back to that story you told me about being the cat laying on Samira's knee in rehab, I can remember how nice it felt. I can remember thinking that I must not need the pills as much as it had felt like I did, if a cuddly cat was so much more effective against my pain. Everything that happened no longer feels like a sad story that I just happened to inherit. It feels like Virgil took my mother away from me and never even told me she existed."

Mira couldn't remember the last time she'd had a mother she liked. Bertram's stories of Lady Altmandine were about as close as she could ever remember getting. Her character setting rarely even permitted a living mother, much less a sympathetic one. Fathers were what she remembered having and they were all like Virgil, with the rare exception of Bertram.

Shadowy tendrils slid up from the ground and wrapped around her legs. "Come inside now. You're getting too distracted to be this close to the gate."

She sniffed and nodded. Her eyes had started to blur and burn. That was a fatal combination.

The demons on standby stepped smoothly into the space she left behind as she rotated in her seat and kicked her legs over the barricade to drop down on the other side. Someone offered her a hand and helped her down.

"Feeling better, ma'am?"

She looked up and realized that Misters Green and White had followed her outside and had been standing behind her the entire time. "Thank you for keeping an eye on me," she told them. "I'm sorry I didn't realize you'd come along."

"Lady Soneares warned us you were upset," Mister Green said as they fell into step on either side of her. "It must be hard, living as you do."

He glanced down her way and she could see some of the change in him as age increased his IQ and EQ. There'd been a time when he would have just asked if he wanted him to find her a better fight so she could finish blowing off steam. Now he was trying to understand her feelings to get at the underlying problem.

Mira thought about that. It could be hard and she had been lonely for a long time. "It's been less hard, recently," she confessed. "This was just an unexpected blow."

"Unexpected or not, I have never known you to be angrier than necessary," Mister White added as they passed into the lobby. "If this is as angry as you feel, then perhaps that is as angry as you should be—perhaps even a little angrier. You should never rob a man of the opportunity to experience the consequences of his mistakes."

Once, long ago in a life she barely remembered otherwise, Mira had read an article that she only remembered a single, shattering line of; "if we want the rewards of being loved, we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known."

That line had been on her mind a lot lately, but never so much as now. Did she have a habit of minimizing her anger? It felt more like she tended to set it aside until she could do something with it, but maybe that was the same thing.

She was saved from having to say anything back because Cece was waiting for them in the lobby. She had gotten iced coffees from somewhere, possibly the espresso machine in one of the coworking spaces that no one (including Mira) had been able to work so far. It looked like she was in the process of heading out.

"There you are," Cece said and something about her demeanor told Mira that she'd been coming out to try and lure Mira away from her goblin murder crusade. It would explain the coffees. She picked one up and held it out. "I was coming out to check on you. We, uh, heard the booms. Miss Syrith said there was no emergency, but… there were a LOT of booms."

Mira looked around the lobby. That 'we' sounded significant. "Where are the boys?"

"Hiding upstairs like cowards," Cece replied with a fond, but exasperated eye roll. "Really, are you okay?"

Mira accepted the coffee. It was vanilla flavored and mildly sweet, exactly how she liked it, and that was another reminder that she had been Samira the entire time because she hadn't had an opportunity to get coffee with Cece as 'Mira.' The Gate Crisis had come hard on the heels of her awakening before she could do anything other than blindly stumble into her parents' stupid humiliation ritual. That meant that Mira had had the same preferences before and Cece had had time to notice.

"I found out some things my father hid from me," she admitted, almost sullenly. "There's a lot. It's bad, but also good in a way that is absolutely infuriating. I had to go kill goblins about it until I ran low on mana."

That was a lie. Her mana regeneration had kept her topped up, but she'd gotten down to about a quarter of her reservoir.

"Worse than the things we already knew about?" Cece gasped, looking up at Misters Green and White who both gave her a somber nod. She winced. "Okay, so I have some mana potions in my inventory from skill practice and I could stand to work on my new buffs. I will go back out there with you if you're not done yet."

"I think I'm fine for now," Mira reassured her. She sipped her coffee and started walking towards the elevator again. "Thank you for this. Where did you get it from?"

"Mister Crowe got the espresso machine to work," Cece explained as she fell into step next to her. "Apparently he used to work in an independent coffee house before his acting career took off and he taught me how to use it. Apparently the people in the coworking space never used it so all the inside bits needed to be cleaned and oiled."

'All Gods bless that man,' Mira thought as they loaded into the elevator carriage.

"We're all ready to listen if you want to talk," Cece said in the quiet that followed as they waited to reach the penthouse level. "If you don't, Alan's uncle brought over all his gaming equipment plus some new controllers and we could blow stuff up on a screen instead?"

Mira surprised even herself with a laugh. "Where did he set up the consoles?" she asked.

Cece winced. "I think you already know."

Five minutes later, Mira stared at the row of gleaming machines lined up below Mason's enormous television. "Do we even have enough ports for these?" she asked Alan, who was laying on his back behind the entertainment center doing something with cables.

"That's what the switch box is for," Will explained with excitement even though he wasn't the one one she'd asked. He sounded excited. Apparently, he never had video games of his own when growing up because he and his grandfather were on a budget, so he was looking forward to having access to Alan's collection of the newest consoles and games, plus his extensive catalog of the greatest hits of game design over the past fifteen years.

Bryn was in the kitchen making popcorn and little mini calzones with goat cheese and figs in them. Mira had tried one. They conferred a bonus to reflexes. Meanwhile, Randall was off to the side organizing the game library first by game studio and then by their date of release. So far, he seemed to be doing this entirely from memory.

Mira carefully sat down on the sofa as their presence wrapped around her like a muffling blanket and rounded off the corners of her impotent and relentless grief.

Alan tossed her a controller. The screen in front of her lit up with the console's loading screen, which rapidly transitioned into the title card for a fighting game. She recognized it as a classic fighting game from several of her past lives. In this world it was called 'Bloodsport' and even the music sounded familiar as the playable fighters appeared on screen.

She looked down at the controller, noting that the buttons were more or less the same as what she remembered, and back at Alan as he eagerly took up the other spot on the couch. "Alright, but you'll have to promise to be patient."

He chuckled. "This is about having fun, ok? Alright, so since this is your first time Raito or Liang Kang are the best characters to start with. Their combos aren't hard to memorize and their move lists are fairly straightforward—alright, I guess Lan Chi isn't too bad either. I'll pick Sonia Blake, in that case. Now, to begin with you're gonna want to learn how to set up a combo…"

Mira settled in and flexed her fingers. Time to see how much she'd retained about this game.

Ten minutes later, Alan watched as Mira's fighter beat his character to death with her own leg while the words BRUTALITY dripped down the screen in blood. He turned and gave Mira a flat look.

"You've played before, I take it?" he asked in a tone that said he already knew the answer, he just wanted to make her say it.

Mira tried to channel an innocent expression, but didn't fully manage it just going by the look on his face. "It's been a while."

He sighed. "Just for that, you're joining my Summoned for Action PVP server. I think you're gonna fit in just fine." He turned to address the room. "Ok, who wants the next turn?"

Mira realized that she felt better as she handed her controller to Will, who was matched up against Cece. She scooted over on the sofa to make room for them and watched as they both flailed their ways through a far less decisive match than the one she'd just had with Alan.

'Yeah,' she thought fondly. 'Things are much easier now than they used to be.'

Note:

Summoned for Action - Call of Duty

For the youths among us, the quote "If we want the rewards of being loved, we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known," is from the 2013 New York Times article 'I Know What You Think of Me' By Tim Kreider