A Gamer's Guide 395 (Patreon)

Kitty fell through the floor. At first, Rafiloe wasn’t sure if she’d seen it correctly, but, no. Seemingly spurned entirely by her calling him by his title, he had turned ghost-white and slipped into his chair, away from view.

For a few seconds, in pure shock, she merely watched the chair, half expecting Kitty to peek out from underneath it. When he didn’t do this, she instead looked at the rest of the room’s members. Nobody had noticed. They were so caught up in their bickering that the disappearance of their god went entirely over their heads. Then again, they hadn’t noticed when he left his litter, either. Paradoxically enough, she realized, there was something about him that was entirely inconspicuous. A neon light in Las Vegas.

He was so strange that there was nothing strange about him. As she looked at the floor beneath her feet, an eerie sensation washed over her. Not even she felt particularly moved by his disappearance.

To avoid having to deal with the emotional turmoil that would come from unpacking that facet, she decided to exit the room and head downstairs. And then downstairs again, until she’d reached the ground floor. She entered the room right below where they’d been only to find it empty, save for a servant. “Um,” she said, “is there a basement below here?” The servant silently pointed her down the hall. “Thanks.” There, she found a small closet, inside which was a dirt staircase leading down further. A dank, musty smell hit her, and even though it was cold outside, the cellar was markedly warm. Her socks got soaked and muddied on the first step, and the ceiling was so low that she had to hunch, dodging stray droplets of water as she did. The cellar’s floor was nothing but stamped dirt, and with the ceiling so squat, she felt more than a little claustrophobic. Upon first setting foot in the cellar, she felt the urge to use the illumination spell, only to remember that she couldn’t. In most cases, this would have forced her to head upstairs for a lantern or similar. Thankfully, today was different.

Far into the cellar, almost at the end of the corridor made from pillars of wood and stone, coming from within one of the small rooms the cellar opened into, was an unnatural white glow. Sighing to herself, Rafiloe crept further into the cellar, knees half-bent and head low to avoid scraping her forehead against the ceiling.

There, in a small offshoot of a room, was Kitty. His arms and legs were all splayed out with his back to the cold, wet floor, like a bug splattered against a windshield. He didn’t even look up at her when she entered, only staring at the ceiling. A droplet of water formed right above his face, dropping into and through his white, translucent eye. Not even a flinch.

Since her choice was to either stand hunched over him like a surgeon or sit next to him, she took a seat close to his head, crossing her legs as she did. Putting her head in her hand, she observed him for a moment. “Why do you do that?”

“Do what?”

“The ghost thing,” she said, noticing but refusing to comment on the strangely melodic tone in his voice.

“Oh,” he said. “When I stop wanting to exist I do this because my body hates me.”

“That’s a very dramatic way to go about it,” Rafiloe said. “Most people prefer smiling and saying everything’s fine! But to each their own, I guess.”

His eyes rolled to look at her. “I sincerely hope you don’t think I want to be like this.”

“You didn’t strike me as the type, no.”

“I never wanted this,” he bemoaned. “All I wanted was to keep living and for people to stop dying around me. Friends to love and be loved by. Happiness, whatever that means.”

“Isn’t that what we all want?”

“Maybe.” Something in her gaze caught his attention and he frowned, a movement that seemed to lower the room’s temperature by several degrees. “Don’t look at me like that. I don’t deserve to be pitied.”

“That might be the most pitiable thing you could say,” she commented. “Besides, I can’t really help it. With how miserable you look, I’d have to be very cold-hearted not to pity you.”

“I don’t like it,” he muttered. “People looking at me makes me antsy. Even when it isn’t like that. Even when they’re only seeing me I hate it.”

“That makes sense,” she said, as though he’d given her the solution to a great mystery. “You don’t want to exist, so when people look at you, it confirms your existence, which is bad, because obviously nobody could benefit from your existence.”

The light emitted by his body flickered. “You are a cruel woman, Gecko. Your friend is regretting his own birth and you treat him like this?”

“Are we friends?”

He sat up a little. His glasses flickered into muted, pastel color as he turned, his floral pink eyes squinting at her. “Aren’t we?” Unable to answer, she allowed him a few moments to think it over. “Sorry,” he said, finally. “I totally forgot to send you that message. It slipped my mind.”

“I forgot too,” she said. “Even though I’ve been…” The truth brushed against her tongue, sour enough to twist her lips shut. “Yeah. We both forgot, I guess.”

His eyes trailed down to look at the stamped dirt floor. The cold white light he emitted was becoming fainter by the second, threatening to plunge them into complete darkness. “That’s a shame,” he muttered. “I kind of missed you. These past hours would have been unbearable if you hadn’t been here. So, if it isn’t too much to ask,” he chanced a smile, which was the last thing she saw before they were plunged into total darkness, “would you like to be friends again?”

There was no need to think it over. “Sure,” she said. “And I’d love to talk more, but I’m actually not too fond of total darkness. It creeps me out.”

“Oh, yeah. A shame you can’t use magic; I kind of like it down here.”

“Why did you fall down here anyways? You were doing fine before. Did the thing about the war upset you that much?”

Kitty hummed. “Not really. I was more upset at the thought that,” he flickered white, and for an instant she could see his face, apathetic yet deeply haunted, “you were mad at me.”

“Mad at you?”

“Yeah. It’s not that surprising that something like this would happen. It sucks and I wish it wouldn’t but it’s nothing new. What I hated more,” another flicker, another glimpse of his face, sunken and pallid, “was the idea that you’d be mad at me for it. Because the war didn’t make me feel much. You’re clearly unhappy about it, so to see the person who caused it not being as upset or more must make you,” flicker, face of terror, “mad.”

It occurred to her, as the bit of light faded and her mind burned in the terrified death’s head before her, that Kitty was a deeply insecure man. Which, of course, would make it all the more difficult to have a proper conversation, or—God preserve—a relationship with him.

“Duh,” she said, after some time of mental preparation. “Who wouldn’t be mad?”

He went white again, shining like a beacon of hope in a dismal and dreary place.

Ignoring it, Rafiloe continued, saying, “But that isn’t, like, a dealbreaker or whatever. I think you’re an idiot for not noticing the war and if you don’t try to do something about it I’ll consider you a yellow-bellied coward, but that doesn’t mean I won’t be your friend. I can’t imagine worshipping you, but we can talk about stuff. No need to fall through the floor over some shit like this.”

“Oh, okay,” he said, but he was still glowing and drooping like a newly-bathed, very radioactive puppy. “That makes sense. So, to clarify, you are mad at me?”

“I guess?”

He looked at her, looked down at his hands, and then back up at her, an infinitely quizzical expression on his lightbulb of a face. “What now?”

“What do you mean, what now?”

“I mean…” He flexed his fingers, grasping for words. “Usually, when people are unhappy with me, I kind of… It used to be I ran away, but then I started killing them instead, but now I don’t want to kill people over stupid stuff, and I don’t want to run away either, so…” He shook his head. “What happens now?”

Second-hand indignation bubbled up within her and she asked, angry at the mere implication, “Have you never been in a fight with anyone before?”

“What kind?”

“Verbal,” she said. “A verbal disagreement. If you’ve had siblings, you must have had a disagreement or two.”

“Oh, sure,” he said. “But we usually decided those by who could beat up the other, and in more recent years, we’ve taken to avoiding one another instead.”

A literal god with the conflict resolution skills of a toddler. She felt like screaming. “Okay, alright,” she said, taking a deep, deep breath. “Well, um…” How had her mother worded it, all those years ago when she’d kicked through a door and spooked one of her younger brothers stiff? Or when she’d fought with her sister over the Wii and ended up pulling her hair too hard, making her cry? “A good first step,” she said, recalling all those incidents, all those humiliating moments of standing next to the most infuriating person in the world, having to figure out a way to coexist with them anyways, “is to consider the other person’s perspective. If they felt hurt by what you did, then you hurt them, even if you didn’t mean to. At that point, you’ll need to fully consider and accept that you did something wrong. Only then can you properly apologize, which is its own thing.”