A Gamer's Guide 423 (Patreon)

Oh, shoot, right, the sending-a-message skill! Man, how could I forget about—

The door slides open and I damn near jump out of my skin, but it’s only Gecko, poking her head inside, and then jimmying in the rest of her body, which is easier said than done, since she’s carrying a tray. A tray full of food and drink. 

…What’s she carrying a tray for? 

“Bow before your allholy king,” Gecko says, putting the tray on a nearby chair before closing the door, putting the iron bar in place just in case. Then, with that done, she picks it back up, and turns to me. Face expectant. Luckily for us both, I know exactly what I’m supposed to do. I really do thrive on clear communication.

“Yes, oh holy one,” I say, bowing down my upper body and folding my arms, performing a perfect dogeza for her delight. Peeking an eye open, I get a good look at the way her face lights up in a feline grin, and she quickly sets off, striding across the room with all the swagger of a model on a catwalk. “Pray tell,” I say, raising my head slightly, “if your allholiness would be so magnanimous as to listen to the words of humble servant…”

“Speak, silvertongue. And raise your head—I want to see that stupid face of yours.” Doing as she commands, I get a good look at how she places the tray in front of me, right atop the bed. 

Breakfast in bed, what a treat! Except, well… How to word this like a snivelling sycophant…?

“Why has food been brought to a creature who eats not?” 

She blinks down at me. “Well, um… You do need lunch, don’t you?”

Is it that late already? Huh. Weird. “Of course, I do appreciate it, absolutely, and I’m very grateful that you took the time to come all the way here, but…”

“If this is about the whole famine thing, you really don’t have to worry. The stuff in the bowl is rat stew, and the mug has cheap ale in it, nothing fancy, so…”

“No, no, that isn’t it,” I say. “What I’m trying to say is… I’m not hungry? Like, at all. Which is weird, I know, but frankly, right now, the thought of eating anything at all vaguely disgusts me. Sorry.”

“Huh. Really?” I nod at her. She hums. “Interesting. Alright, then.” Turning around, she walks five steps over to the nearest wall, grabs the stupidly ornate chair there, and drags it over to my bed, parking it right next to me. Then, leaning over, she grabs the tray, and sits down with it on her lap. She’s just about to stuff a spoonful of stew into her open mouth when she notices my looking at her. “What is it?”

“No, sorry, I just… I was expecting you to disagree?”

“Disagree with what? If you say you’re full, you’re full. I’m not forcing you to eat. You didn’t eat anything last night, either. Do you think it might be an effect of the whole divine-new-body thing?” Giving me space to answer, she stuffs the spoon in her mouth, barely chewing before swallowing and shovelling in another spoon.

“That’s my theory, at least,” I say, watching as she eats the stew with startling vigor. Basically throwing it in there. “Were you, uh, very hungry?”

“Oh, yeah,” she says, only pausing her stew-swallowing to chow down on a piece of bread she’d brought, dry little crumbles spilling down the front of her deep purple robe. “The second I left the room they all swarmed me. Total sharks. No idea how I survived, but,” she takes a long swig of her mug, “you were totally right. They instantly believed me when I said you’d chosen me as your apostle. Might’ve been the whole…” She gestures at her hair and eyes. “Yeah.”

“Seems reasonable to me,” I say, watching as she tears into what looks like pickled whole sardines or something. No, wait, the scales look a bit too long… Are those feathers? I don’t really have time to make sense of it before she swallows them all down whole. With bones. With eyes. With organs. “Are you perhaps a seagull, or maybe a vulture?”

“No,” she says, with mysterious certainty. How can she know? This bears further investigation. As I stare holes through her skull, she slowly sets the bowl back down, her eyes fastening themselves on the door. For what feels like minutes, she doesn’t say anything. Or eat anything. Very worrying. But I can’t find the strength to ask her what’s wrong. This is something she needs to think through. Finally, eyes still on the door, face neutral, she asks, words measured, “Do you think I’ll change once I’m your apostle?”

“Change, how?”

“Garath turned back into a dragon, except with both four wings and arms. Your body is totally wacky.” Finally, she turns to me, her gaze as hard as granite. “Do you think I’ll get claws and sharp teeth?”

Carefully, as carefully as I have ever done anything, I fold my hands atop my lap. “I can’t promise anything.” I can feel it. Even though she hasn’t moved an inch, internally, she’s despairing. “But…” Reaching out, I take hold of her hand. “Maybe, if we both hope for it, then…” I smile. “Anything’s possible.”

Tears well up in her eyes, and she presses my hand against her heart. “Thank God. Thank… Thank you. It’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

I chuckle lightly. “To be honest, I have no idea what’ll happen to you. It’s inevitable that you’ll get some kind of powers, but there’s just no way of knowing what they’ll be until they’re already here. They might prove to be inconvenient.” A little warning. 

“It’s worth it,” she says, and in her heart, in her very soul, I can hear her deeper self, echoing back, for claws and fangs, any risk is worth it. I nod. We truly are alike. “Even if… Even if there are worse effects.” Something else. Something stirring the surface of her heart’s lake. Not the prophetic vision thing. Nothing so simple. No, there’s something else. A little memory I wasn’t there to see, even if it was in this room. A memory of this room with a hazy absence in it. An absence that seemed to suck the passion from the world, taking her emotions and stuffing them all in a little box full of cotton. Away but not gone. 

Weird. I can feel the memory, but I can’t feel the emotions connected to it. Strange, considering that Gecko’s memories are usually very emotional ordeals. Actually, now that I think about it, anytime I get a sledgehammer of a memory from people, it seems like they feel things really really strongly. Like they really feel them. Odd. Why not with this memory? Curious. 

I’m not sure how to formulate that as a question though, so instead, I give her a sympathetic look. “Thank you, Gecko. Seriously. Doing this for me… It means a lot.” Since we’re two peas in a pod (an unusually small amount of peas for a single pod), she can’t figure out a good response to me either, so she just nods to me. I smile. Dang, we really are similar, huh? “Once we’ve done this, I’ll be able to ordain a priest, too!”

“Whoa, seriously? Nice! Who’d you have in mind?”

“Who else? It’s gotta be Lett.”

“You’re too right. Can’t be anyone else.” Especially not with the way he looked at me when I announced the whole apostle thing, she thinks. Ah. So he felt that way…? “How do we tell him? You can’t exactly tell him in person.”

“I was thinking about writing a letter,” I say. “Either that, or you’ll have to say it in my place. Which would be a shame, but… Hey, that’s just how it goes, sometimes.” I shrug. “By the way, do you want to try ascending now, or are you busy?”

She briefly pauses her gluttenous rampage. “I’m… actually not sure. To be honest, I’m kind of just glad to be in here and not out there with them.”

“How so? What’s wrong with them?”

A whole-body shiver courses through her, from toes to fingertips. “For some damn reason, they’ve gotten it into their heads that I know what I’m doing. And by they, I mean Leion and his cronies and Maggie and Prop. Oh, and your buddies have been bugging me too, because they’re worried about you, which is totally to be expected, but when literally everyone I meet seems to have something to say to me, well… It’s a bit much!” She takes a sip of the stew. “At least in here nobody can bother me.”

“On the contrary, my dear,” I say in a silly accent. 

The joke brings a smile to her lips. Score! “Oh, yeah, forgot about that one. No offence.” 

“None taken. Though, if it’s okay, could I say something kind of blunt?”

“Hit me.”

“Well, um…” I draw my legs close to me. How to best say this…? “I’m not sure how much you know about what happened in Oran. It’s been a while since then, and there aren’t many witnesses, so this might come as a surprise to you, but… For a brief period, a few months at most, I was in charge of the whole city.” Keeping her silence, she continues eating, brows furrowed in concentration. “It’s a lot of work. The sheer logistics was such a hell to navigate that I ended up, um, doing a lot of… bad stuff.”

I feel a little ping, and for a brief moment, I can see my memories overlapping through her head, synchronizing, her face scrunching up, freezing mid bite. She squints at the empty room. “What the fuck?” Putting down her spoon, she turns to face me fully. “What the fuck, dude? Why the hell did you—”

I hold up my hands in surrender. “I know, I know, genuinely horrible stuff, but… I did it because I was stressed, okay? A whole city’s management on one guy. It was too much for me. And… And it was too much for my friend, too.” His name pulses across the back of my skull like a painless migraine. I can’t bear to think any more about him. “Now, I’m not saying the people here will offload everything on you like they did on us, but… If you choose to become my apostle—which you can still change your mind about, just so you know—then it’s only obvious that they’ll look to you for guidance.”

Her eyes fall to her lap. “Yeah. I suppose so.”

“I won’t expect anything from you in that way, but if you get caught up in their expectations, then…” The words slip my mind. How do I tell her I’m scared she’ll shatter? I just don’t want her to get hurt because of me. It’s such a childish wish, but… I can’t help it. “Please, don’t let this be the reason you break.”

She chuckles. “Okay, okay. I hear you.” I think the smile she’s giving me is trying to be reassuring, but I can’t really tell. “Listen, I appreciate what you’re trying to say, but… Today was especially bad. Hangover, hijinks, and people bugging me? That’s too much. Frankly, that’d be too much for anyone. But if I’m well-rested and happy, then people bugging me will be fine. Besides, if I get tired of being bugged, I can just go Sorry, I need to ask His Divine Hopeship about that and then I can fuck off and they can’t stop me.” Reaching out, she gives me a hearty pat on the arm. “I’ll be fine! Now, if you’ll just let me finish my lunch, I’d love to finalize this whole apostle-thing. Hopefully before I realize just how ridiculous this all is.”

Maybe I’d be more worried if I hadn’t been able to peek into her heart. Without that, I might have thought she was only trying to relax my worried little mind, and that she was actually hiding an equal amount of uncertainty. But that isn’t it. I’m not sure what it says about the people I’ve been hanging out with lately, but to see a heart so clear of intent feels almost alien.

She really means it. She does want to become my apostle. Even though she has her uncertainties and her worries, she’s willing to take the plunge. 

I smile back at her. Damn, I’m a lucky god. 

“Yeah. That sounds good, Gecko.”