Chương 31: Purple Duck and Urgh. I Can’t Pronounce This Shit. French Street Name or Whatever

I Can't Pronounce This Shit. French Street Name or Whatever She stood so fast her chair went over and grabbed Maddy in a full hug, both arms, face in her shoulder, crying instantly and completely. She smelled like lavender. Obviously.

"I'm sorry, I'm hugging you, I don't know you, I'm sorry," she said into Maddy's collarbone.

"You have shoes from Nike from—""Hi. You're okay." Maddy righted the chair and got her back in it.

"Uh. What's your name?"

"Alice." She scrubbed her wrist across her face and immediately started leaking again.

"Sorry. I don't cry. I'm not a crier. I've just been—" she gestured at the dragon, the blue fire, the green guys.

"—you know."

"I'm Maddy. That's Ben."

"Hi Ben."

"Hey."

"Are those Costco shoes?"

"…yeah."

"I knew it." Both hands flat on the table.

"My brother has the same ones. Well. Had. But, he probably still has them you know, just…not here. On Earth. How long have you guys been here?"

"Couple days-ish. Time's fucked."

"Time is SO fucked, nobody can tell me what day it is, I asked a guard, I think it was a guard, well he was dressed like one, and he said the ninth day of the crimson moon and I said no like is it a Tuesday and he stared at me." Her voice cracked.

"Like I was the broken one."

"They kinda do that."

"They're really nice though? Mostly? But they're so dumb, Maddy, I keep waiting for one to be a regular person and they just go the harvest was poor this season and walk into a fence." Ben snorted into his drink.

"Okay back up," Maddy said.

"How'd you even get here. Like the actual…uhm…how'd you die." Alice took a breath, and the hose let go.

"Okay so I'm crossing Sainte-Catherine, right, uhm, I don't know if you know Sainte-Catherine, it's a street in Montreal, I've got my Stanley Cup with matcha in it, from Starbucks, but you know, I never take Starbucks's plastic cups cause it's bad for the environment so, I've got my AirPods, and out of NOWHERE this giant stupid metal triangle just—" Ben sat straight up.

"A Cybertruck."

"OH MY GOD YES. A CYBERTRUCK HIT ME. I HATE THOSE CARS. I hate them so much, they look like a kid drew a car—""I got cybertrucked too," Ben said. Alice's jaw dropped." You got cybertrucked?"

"Yeah. Lights out."

"Sainte-Catherine?"

"No dude I live in New York."

"Oh. Okay." They stared at each other in a kind of awe. Maddy looked between them.

"Okay that's actually deranged," she said.

"Is the afterlife just a Cybertruck recall? Did Elon Musk build an isekai? Are there gonna be a thousand of us in here all going I hate those cars?"

"There might be a support group," Alice said wetly.

"So then I wake up in a field," she went on, fully launched now, "two suns, fine, whatever, and there's this little screen, and it's purple, and it's got these tiny glowing flowers all around the edge, like a little garden border, and it goes welcome Alice—""A sparkle," Maddy said. Alice blinked.

"…no? Flowers. Little glowing purple flowers."

"Ours is blue and pink. And they've got like, sparkles and shit. An actual sparkle emoji floating in the text. Fucking dumb piece of shit."

"Oh, that's mean." Alice frowned, like the system had feelings she was protecting.

"Mine's kind of cute, though? I mean it's stupid. It's so stupid. But it's like, I guess it's trying. It said good morning Alice one time and put a little sun." Maddy and Ben looked at her.

"I want to murder mine," Maddy said.

"I know. I get it. I just think mine's doing its best."

"It's the exact same system, Alice. Yours just got the cute skin, flowers, a little sun. Same clanker underneath."

"Maybe." Alice was unconvinced and already sliding off the thought, like she could not hold one for longer than a goldfish. She did fit the whole…Stanley cup Lululemons aesthetic.

"Anyway, so I'm in the field, and there's a village, and they're so nice, they give me soup, and then like an hour later this thing comes out of the trees, this slime, the size of a… I don't know, it was big, and it smelled like a, like… those blue portable toilets thing, but like in July, when it's hot and disgusting, and I scream and throw the only thing in my hand, which is—" Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site. She set her hand on the Stanley cup, gently, an introduction.

The lid opened with a tiny hiss and a sphere of water rose out and hung over the table, turning slow, catching the blue light. Ben leaned back. Maddy did not.

"—it power-washed the slime. It popped. And then a screen, with flowers, told me I have a water staff." She let the water drop back in.

"I cast water now. With my TikTok girl cup. It grows when I use it."

"Maddy's spear is a dildo," Ben said.

"It's a retractable spear-knife."

"Nine inches of medical-grade silicone—""Retractable. Spear. Knife."

"Wait, what's yours?" Alice said to Ben.

"A wax-pen. Knife now." Alice clapped a hand over her mouth, delighted, the crying briefly suspended.

"It took our embarrassing things. The system reached into everyone's pockets and grabbed the single worst object."

"Yep."

"That's evil. Mine's a cup I bought because an algorithm told me to. It's pretty though. A bit heavy but. Yeah." She slid back the other way fast, the way she kept doing.

"And then this old guy in the city, big white beard, little velvet bag, did a whole—""Valdren," Ben said.

"You know him?"

"Uh. The elf girl told us he runs the speech on everyone. Said You're like the fourth relic this week." Her mouth fell open.

"I sat through two hours. He told me my necklace was a relic of the Pale Years and I had to guard it with my life—" she yanked it out, the ugly glowing gem "—it makes me stronger and I walk like I'm in pudding, and I cried, Maddy, because I thought I was special."

"You're so not special," Maddy said, gently. Alice exhaled, shoulders dropping off her ears.

"Oh thank god. There's other normal people and I'm just normal."

"You're aggressively normal."

"I'm aggressively normal." She wiped her face.

"I only did the dungeon because I'm broke. You know what the village told me my options were? They sat me down, super kind, and said a girl with no family and no trade has two paths." One finger.

"Whore." Second finger.

"Or adventurer." Ben choked for real this time.

"I'm sure there was a wider spectrum," Maddy said.

"THEY SAID THOSE ARE THE TWO. Like a guidance counselor. Like they were doing me a favor."

"And you went dungeon."

"I went dungeon," Alice said, " And I did it. It wasn't hard. There were like… little slimes and stuff.

And then someone told me they were more dungeons near Silvermarch, I didn't know what Silvermarch was, but I followed a few merchants and their little vans, well, I didn't follow them, I sat and slept in one, they we're kind actually, gave me food and stuff, and I don't know, I arrived in Silvermarch and then the merchant told me—the merchant that I was sleeping in his caravan, told me to go see the Adventurers Guild so I went, and now I got out and I cried alone in a dragon bar eating purple duck for the past three hours.

So. Welcome to my life."

"…right," Ben said.

"We had, uh…yeah. We did pretty similar stuff."

"Yeah," Maddy said.

"…yeah."

"You guys, like, wanna eat or something?" Alice asked.

"It's pretty good." Maddy and Ben looked at each other for approximatively one second. Ben flagged a server, got two ducks and two of the blue things. He sipped his and it looked like it hit like a truck. Like…a…cy…. NO. A panel slid in for him that Maddy caught. [Caution, Ben! Mild poisoning detected!] [Effect: Intoxicated.] [Sparkle]"It thinks this drink is poison."

"Shut your bitch ass up," Maddy told it, and took a pull of hers, got the same chime, and flicked it into the void. A softer chime went off near Alice, a little ripple of purple, a flower unfurling at the corner of her vision. She smiled at it.

"Mine just goes please drink water too, Alice." She patted the Stanley cup.

"I've got water."

"You're being groomed by a clanker," Maddy said.

"It's polite!" The duck, against all reason, was incredible. Rich, sweet, purple. Alice came up maybe forty percent now that she had humans to aim words at, the crying tapering into talking, the talking tapering into nothing.

"Wait, where are you even from," Alice asked Maddy.

"Originally."

"New York. Like Ben. Well, not like-like Ben but yeah. Same place." Alice recoiled on pure civic reflex.

"Ew. New York."

"…okay."

"No offense. I just…last time I went they were like…too much rats. I hate rats."

"Don't go in Brian's cellar."

"What?"

"Nothing."

"But I don't even live in New York anymore. I'm at MIT so I live there."

"Ohhh, you're an MIT girl." Alice nodded slowly.

"That tracks. That tracks so hard."

"What does that mean."

"Nothing. It's a vibe. It means nothing." She was lit up, waving it off.

"What'd you do up here," Maddy said.

"Before. In Montreal."

"Psychology. Third year, I had a year left." Alice said it half into the Stanley cup.

"I wanted to do kids. I'm really good at the people part." She brightened, then dimmed on the same breath.

"Bad at the not judging part. Like. All these stupid parents. Urgh. But yeah, I like working with those kids. The one that didn't really get the best go in life. So." Something turned over in Maddy's head. Water magic. A support cup. A girl who read people for a living. They'd come in hunting a chad. They were leaving with the only one of them with any EQ. She filed it under keep and said nothing yet.

"What's your major," Alice said to Ben, like she was remembering a loose thread.

"…literature. NYU."

"Cool. Yeah. Literature. Nice." Alice said it with great tenderness. Great psychologist tenderness. Like telling great drawing about a kid who smeared poop all over your walls. Alice looked at Maddy. Maddy looked at Alice. Something passed between them, total and instant, the founding document of a friendship.

"He writes," Maddy said.

"He has a character. Cayenne. Talks about her vibrator a lot. It's, uh, " interiority"."

"It IS interiority—""Lit majors," Alice said, shaking her head.

"It's nice."

"To never finishing anything they start," Maddy said, and clinked her smoky blue glass against Alice's Stanley cup.

"I'm right here."

"We know, Ben. I still like you. A little. Tolerate you."

"…thanks. I guess." By the second drink, the two of them had drafted a contingency plan, and the plan was Ben. If the dungeon turned, if something in there got hungry, they would feed it Ben. Throw Ben, use Ben for distance. They worked the logistics with care, Alice keeps distance, Maddy covers Alice and supports Ben—and Ben close combat everything.

"Are you guys serious."

"No," said Maddy.

"A little," said Alice, who had walked in able to read every room on Earth and had apparently allocated none of that toward loyalty to Ben. Somewhere in there it had stopped being a recruitment.

"Hey," Maddy said.

"Do the dungeon with us. For real. D-rank. It's like, half a day out." Alice didn't even pause.

"Yes."

"It might be kind of bad, we genuinely don't know what's—""I don't care. Yes. Please."

"You don't want the rank break—""I don't wanna be alone," Alice said, plain, and her eyes filled again, and Maddy reached across the dead duck and caught her wrist before either of them could kick it off in front of the whole bar. They closed out and walked back to the Bronze Lantern, the three of them, Alice in the middle with her cup, narrating the entire walk, pointing at buildings, cataloguing which NPCs had eaten a wall in front of her this week.

She said it twice more on the way, and both times she seemed embarrassed about it. I just don't want to be alone. So when they got up to the room with the two beds, nobody discussed it.

Alice set her Stanley cup on the nightstand beside Maddy's Monster Tube, two cylinders of dumb Earth plastic standing side by side like a dumb ass show called Girls Who Died —and climbed into Maddy's bed, and Maddy got in after her, and Ben took the other one and lay in the dark listening to the two of them whisper-roast him until he started snoring, and then the whispers slowed and spaced out and quit. Alice was gone inside two minutes. Slept like someone who hadn't, in a while. Maddy did too.