Last Bastion

by Rachel Aaron

  But as much as she didn't like it, Zen's watchful gaze was an annoying reminder that Tina had officers to appease now. After years of running her own show, that was going to take some getting used to. At least she could make them work for her this time.

  "I'm going to talk with the officers, and we're going to figure out a plan together," Tina corrected. "But we're not going to do it out here. It stinks, and it's too exposed. For now, let's all go back inside the Sanctum--where it's safe--while we figure out our strategy."

  To her relief, no one flinched at that order, and Zen unfolded her arms at last. Catching her eye, Tina made a tiny "Over here" gesture. Zen nodded and made her way over, threading silently through the Roughnecks who were filing past on their way back down into the Sanctum.

  "Zen," Tina whispered when the Ranger reached her. "Did I do something wrong just now? Everyone's as jumpy as shit. I know the city is bad, but--"

  "It's not the city."

  Tina jerked back, but the elf just raised her hand and waited until the last of the Roughnecks--everyone except SB, who was still waiting stubbornly for Tina in the doorway--had gone inside.

  "There's no nice way to say this, Roxxy," Zen said when they were finally alone. "So I'll just give it to you straight: people are afraid of you."

  "What?" Tina said. "Why? I'm the one who got us here safely!"

  "Yeah, by terrifying everyone into following you." Zen shook her head, bright-green curls swishing in the smoky air. "You yelled, bullied, and beat us down that road for three days straight. Lots of people had planned on leaving the guild once we made it to Bastion. Now we're trapped again, so it's only natural people are upset. They were looking forward to getting away and not having to deal with you anymore, but everyone knows we can't fight anything serious without you, so they're stuck. It's hard to cope with."

  Each word that left Zen's mouth hit Tina like a shard of ice in her chest. She knew the Ranger wasn't just saying this to hurt her. First, the former nurse was above that sort of pettiness, and second, she'd seen the truth herself in the others' eyes. End-game raiders who shouldn't be afraid of anything had flinched at her gestures like abuse victims, and that made Tina sick to her stomach in a way the stench of the decimated city surrounding them hadn't.

  "I'm sorry," Zen said quietly. "I know it's tough to hear, but--"

  "No," Tina said, running a hand through her copper dreadlocks. "Don't apologize, Zen. I asked, and you were brave enough to tell me the truth to my face. Thanks for being so stand up. Um, can you post guards and gather up the officers for a meeting, please? I... I need a few minutes alone before we get to business."

  Zen patted the plate armor on her shoulder. "I'll take care of it. See you inside."

  The Ranger had barely started down the hallway after the rest of the guild when SilentBlayde appeared in the space where she'd been.

  "Tina," he whispered, his voice deep with concern. "Are you okay?"

  She couldn't even meet his eyes. "You're an officer too, SB," she said, looking down. "Please go with Zen."

  When he didn't move immediately, Tina was afraid he was going to push. But then the Assassin turned and started down the hallway. He paused only once to look over his shoulder. When she didn't call him back, his whole body slumped, and he walked inside, vanishing down the hall that led to the Sanctum's portal chamber.

  Finally alone, Tina sank to the ashy ground, plunking down on the bloody step to put her face in her hands. This was her fault. All through the Deadlands, she'd told herself that playing the monster was the only way to make these idiots save themselves. To their eyes, though, she hadn't been playing. She'd actually been their monster, the thing worse than Grel, who kept them moving. As she thought back on the last few days, the memory of all the abuse she'd heaped on her raiders in the name of saving them made her insides twist. No wonder they were more horrified at being stuck with her than facing a city full of dangers. Those threats were as yet still hypothetical. She was the devil they knew, the necessary evil they were forced to put up with to survive.

  Tina let out her breath with a curse. She wanted to say she didn't know which hurt more, the shame or the guilt, but she did. A better person would have regretted the pain she'd caused, the hurt. For Tina, though, it was the 'stuck with her' part that stabbed the deepest. The last thing she ever wanted was to be someone's baggage, and it hurt all the worse because she knew she'd earned it.

  Raising her head, she looked bleary-eyed out at they bloody, burning city. The blackened, vacant windows of what had been Bastion's most luxurious shops stared back at her, their lovely limestone facades scarred with slashes and blast marks. Shapes scurried about in the darkness of the empty, looted rooms--more scavengers if they were lucky, who-knew-what if they weren't. It wasn't the sort of place any of them could be alone, which meant Zen was right. They were still stuck together, which meant no one could run. Not even her.

  That sucked in the context of her current pity party, but it was also a relief, because it meant she still had a job to do--a job people needed her for so badly, they'd put up with her despite the way she'd behaved. She could never say no to that kind of need, even when all she wanted was to run away and hide in shame. There was nothing for it but to step up, and maybe if she did so well enough, this time, she could fix things.

  Wiping her stone eyes, Tina braced her stone muscles and rose to her feet. Her magical armor scraped as she moved, the glowing, rune-covered plates of sacred sun-metal grinding together like old bones. When she was standing again, she tucked the charter Commander Garrond had given her carefully back into her bag. She wasn't sure if it was legally binding--who knew what the laws of this world were now--but it was the only thing she had that said they were a guild. So long as everyone kept buying into that idea, she had a chance, which meant there was still a shot at making this right.

  It was a thin thread of optimism, but Tina clung to it like a rope as she marched back inside the Portal Keeper's Sanctum. As she clanked back down the main corridor to the Room of Arrivals, Tina realized that the floor here wasn't the same pinkish red as the rest of the building. It was much darker, more red than pink. Her stonekin senses told her that it was the same rock as the rest of the building, though, which meant the discoloration had come from something else, and a lot of it.

  Back inside the cavernous Room of Arrivals, Tina was relieved to see that Zen had organized things even better than requested. A Knight in armor with glowing green runes, two Rangers, and a Cleric with a Sunlight Staff stood guard by the main entrance. There were guards on both of the narrow side halls as well, while the rest of the guild had circled in the middle of the large, open area that had once held all the portals back when the portals had been open.

  They all gave her scared looks when she passed by. Tina tried to answer their unspoken concerns with confidence, though now that Zen had told her what to look for, she could see the damage running deep in the raid, which made confidence a challenge. It didn't seem possible that she'd messed this up so badly, but she remembered every choice that had gotten her to this position. It didn't matter how good her intentions had been at the time, this was still the fallout, and it made her want to run harder than ever. The only reason she didn't was because running would shatter the group. As ironic as it was, right now, "stuck with Roxxy" was the only thing holding everyone together, so she sucked it up and kept going, marching over to the circle of her officers with her chin held high. Or as high as she could manage.

  As always, SilentBlayde was the first to look up at her, and the first to smile. "What's the plan, Roxxy?" he asked confidently.

  "That's a good question," Tina said, leaning on his support as hard as she could. "I think it's time we had the talk we didn't have time for in the Deadlands."

  "Which is?" Anders, the ichthyian Cleric officer whose beating had been the first of Tina's many bad decisions, asked.

  "We need to discuss how we're getting home," Tina said. "There weren't--" She stopped when she re
alized the whole Room of Arrivals had gone silent. Silently cursing all the cat- and elf-eared players with amazing hearing, Tina stepped a bit closer to her officers and continued as quietly as she could.

  "There was nowhere to go except forward while we were running from Grel'Darm," she continued, hoping Zen wouldn't bring up the swamp. "But that's not the case anymore. I don't know what's up here in Bastion, but we're strong enough to make it to the South Gates. From there, it's just a starter zone, but really, it's the whole world. We're all max-level players. Other than the Deadlands, we out-level and out-gear everything out there. Wherever we need or want to go to in order to find our way back home, we can. We just have to figure out where that is."

  The nervous shifting vanished as she mentioned "home." It was as if they'd all forgotten that getting back was a goal they could have. Now that Tina had put it back on the table, though, everyone snapped to attention. Killbox stopped wringing his hands on his massive ax, and KatanaFatale, the Sorcerer officer, ceased gnawing on his fingernails.

  "Home would be really nice," NekoBaby said wistfully, crossing her arms over her prodigious bosom as if she were trying to shove it down. "I want my real body back, dammit."

  "But how do we get back?" Zen asked pointedly. "We don't even know what brought us here in the first place."

  That was a lore question. Tina wasn't the best at those, but she knew people who were. All it took was a glance over her shoulder to find her brother and his pet NPC hovering nearby.

  "James," she said, waving at him. "Can you join us?"

  James jumped at her question and glanced at his angry cat-warrior guy whose name Tina had already forgotten. That was awkward considering the NPC was supposed to be James's brother now or some bullshit, but honestly, she couldn't bring herself to care. She was just happy James was safe and close enough for her to keep him that way.

  That thought was enough to make her grin as James and his cat-bro came over. But then her brother waved his staff at her happily while making a strange series of whooshes and clicks as he walked up. When Tina frowned, James turned to his NPC and made a different set of whistling, clicking noises. She was wondering what new madness she was facing--and what she'd have to do to stop it--when SB came in with the save.

  "James," the Assassin said gently, "not all of us can speak of Wind and Grass."

  James blinked his slitted cat eyes in surprise, and then his ears went back in embarrassment.

  "Oops, sorry. I'm not used to being multilingual yet. Switching back and forth is surprisingly hard. Is Central okay? I'm pretty sure we all use that regardless of race or nationality."

  "Central?" Tina asked, confused. "Central what?"

  "You mean you didn't know?" James asked, tilting his head sideways in a catlike motion. "You've been speaking English since we got here, but we all have our racial languages and Bastion's Central Tongue as well now."

  "What?" Killbox said excitedly. "No way!"

  "Try saying 'the merchant's way' or 'king's blessing,'" James said. The words came off his tongue strangely, and Tina jerked in surprise when she realized he'd said them in Central, and not only could she recognize that now, but she understood what he was saying. She mouthed the words to herself next, in English and Central, marveling at the difference in the sounds her tongue made even though her brain translated both the same.

  She wasn't the only one. The entire room exploded in noise as the whole guild started trying out all the different words they now knew, especially the dirty ones. NekoBaby in particular was happily cursing up a linguistic storm, much to Angry Cat's stern disapproval. To her amazement, Tina was able to pick out the meanings of most things, even from languages she didn't think her character technically knew. For the most part, though, the chatter was a cacophony of whistling, bubbling, and yowling. She was trying to filter it out when she noticed SB watching the chaos with a smug smile.

  "You knew, didn't you?" she asked, leaning closer to him.

  "Sort of," he replied in Elven. "I knew that I could read."

  Tina's eyes went wide. "Hey, I can speak elf!" She grinned and switched to Elven as well. "This is so cool! But wait, why do I speak Central and Elven?"

  SB shrugged. "The FFO Wiki suggested that the stonekin's creators--the Bedrock Kings--were once fallen Celestial Elves. I bet that's why you know it. It was their language first."

  "Yeah!" James chimed in. "Wasn't there an ichthyian scholar who referred to Old Elven as the Unbounded Language?"

  "As in the Unbounded Sky? I'd forgotten that quest!" SB said, getting excited as well. "If all Elves originally spoke a central language, that would make sense why Old Elven is on so many old magical items."

  "It's on my bow," Zen said, holding up her beautifully carved weapon. "I'd noticed I could read it back in the Deadlands, but I thought that was because it was bound to me."

  "Yeah, yeah, cool, cool," Neko said, pushing her way back over now that she'd finished cursing Angry Cat into an apoplexy. "But let's get back to the important stuff, like how we're getting home." She turned on James and SB. "You guys are no-life nerds who've basically memorized the wiki, right? Is there any mumbo-jumbo in there that explains what the fuck brought us here?"

  Frank, already on edge from all the cursing, winced again. "That ain't how you ask for help, young lady." Neko waved his admonition away and honed in on James, who was looking decidedly uncomfortable with all the attention.

  "I've actually been pondering that a lot recently," James said, his tail lashing self-consciously. "FFO's lore has a lot to say about other dimensions, mostly as a way of backsplaining all the alternate timeline quests, but there's nothing specifically about our world that I can remember. The only official entry that even acknowledges Earth's existence was that Japanese cereal commercial that claimed the power of the Once King was pouring into your bowl. It's hardly credible."

  Tina rolled her eyes, but SilentBlayde started to bounce on his heels. "I have something!" he said eagerly. "The Origin Poem says, 'The Unbounded Sky is infinite. It reaches all worlds, and all worlds lie within it.' If that's true, then maybe FFO touches our world somehow. Or maybe our world is inside the Unbounded Sky, kinda like how the nine worlds of Norse mythology all fit inside of Yggdrasil."

  Tina and James both looked at the Assassin in awe. "Dude, how the hell do you know the Origin Poem that well?" Tina asked. "It's only shown once during character creation."

  "I don't remember the whole thing," SB said. "I just know that particular saying because the portal keepers quote it as part of their default interaction dialog."

  Tina gaped at him. "You actually listened to that?"

  "I couldn't ignore it," he said with a shrug. "I did every single one of the 'Ages Relived' events for four years running. You can only listen to the same dialog so many millions of time before it gets drilled into your head."

  "It is a beast of a grind," James agreed. "I only made it half way before I gave up." He scowled at SB. "I'm still jealous of your Unfallen Cloud pet, by the way."

  SilentBlayde flexed his arms in a show of gamer superiority, and Tina felt something inside her soften. Current disaster notwithstanding, it was nice to talk like this again. Things between her and her brother had always been tense, but FFO was the one place where Tina got to see the James she actually liked--the one who was clever and knowledgeable and wasn't messing up her life.

  It was the only way she'd gotten through that horrible summer. James wouldn't even look at her after he came home from college unexpectedly. He'd tromped around the house like a zombie, barely coming out of his room even to eat. Inside FFO, though, he'd been a different person, always volunteering to help her through instances and quests even though he was already at max level. He and SB were the reason she'd been able to level Roxxy up to eighty in less than two months despite never hitting the level cap on any other character. With her tanking, James as healer, and SB as their DPS, there'd been nothing they couldn't do. Things had slowly fallen apart again after she disco
vered raiding, but for a few golden months, the three of them had been inseparable.

  It had been so long, she'd almost forgotten all about it. Now, though, listening to her brother and SB nerd out over lore and their collections was painfully nostalgic. It made her homesick for a time when things hadn't been so serious, when she'd just been able to log out and go to sleep after a bad night and try again the next day. But this wasn't that world anymore, and if Tina ever wanted to get back to it, she needed to keep them on track. Her brother and SilentBlayde were already off on a tangent about where in this world they might be able to get a full copy of the since no one could make new characters anymore when Tina stepped in to steer them back to the matter at hand.

  "However the connection happened," she said sternly, "what I still don't understand is why it happened through Forever Fantasy Online. You're talking about magically connecting worlds. This was just a game."

  "I don't think where we are now was ever a game," James said quietly. "I think this world touched our reality somehow, and the game was just how we interpreted it." As he said this, all the playing-with-languages conversations behind them suddenly died out.

  Her brother blinked nervously at the new attention.

  "I can't prove it," he said quickly. "It's just a feeling I have. But if this world wasn't real before the Nightmare, how do you explain everything that's going on? The languages are a great example. I know thirty different words for wind, and not lazy, made-up words like whind, wynd, and winda, either. Of Wind and Grass is a fully functional, non-Romance language with its own unique grammar and alphabet, and it's not the only one. Even Central, which would have been the easiest to skimp on since it's basically the human common tongue, has zero conventions stolen from Latin, English, German, or any other language I'm familiar with."

  "There's no hints of Japanese, either," SilentBlayde added. "Or Chinese or Korean, though I'm not as good at those."

  "Exactly," James said, nodding rapidly. "FFO isn't Lord of the Rings. The game developers didn't sit down and invent multiple brand-new, completely functional languages just for the sake of world building. The only logical explanation is that these languages were already there before the game. And they're not the only ones. There's also the matter of all the extra land, people, and buildings that popped up. I played in FFO's early beta. I know they didn't make millions of square miles of world design and then chuck it all right before launch. This is all stuff that had to have been here before the Nightmare, er, FFO started."