Fenrir coughs and gags, but nothing comes out.

“You’re so overdramatic, Fenny,” Oleander teases him.

“You don’t know what it’s like to have your own dog transplant crab guts into your mouth. It’s all I can smell and I can still taste it,” Fenrir explains.

“That’s because I don’t tongue my pets. I only do that to my Cor!”

“I hate everything and everybody right now.”

Rock whimpers and nuzzles against his leg.

“Except you, Rock. I could never hate you. I don’t really hate anybody else, either. I just hate that crab and Olly.”

“Hey! It’s not like I did anything wrong! I was just recording something funny for all your girlfriends to see! Look, Fenny, if you’re going to be dating three cute girls then I get to at least tease you around them so that your ego doesn’t get too inflated.”

“I appreciate your effort to keep me grounded, but if it means going through that, I would rather become an egotistical asshole.”

“Woah, Onii-chan, I had no idea you were such a perv. I’m in your head and I didn’t even know you’d want to make out with Rock and swap crab guts!” Saya teases.

“Even my virtual assistant is making fun of me now. See what you’ve started, Olly?”

“Hey, Fenny’s assistant! Don’t let him ever forget what happened today. Just send him screenshots at random times when he’s not expecting it,” Oleander says.

“Tell him I said okay!” Saya says.

“I’m not telling him that. I’m telling him you’re a brat who already teases me enough,” Fenrir tells Saya. “She’s a brat who already teases me enough,” he tells Oleander.

“I bet she’s already agreeing with my plan anyways,” Oleander replies.

“This is cruel and inhumane treatment.”

Fenrir and Oleander look at each other while Rock licks her paws.

The two men start laughing.

“It’s been a while since we’ve last had some time to play together – just the two of us,” Oleander says in his masculine, non-trap voice. “I’ve missed it, man. Between Cor, your girls, Bone and all that other drama, we’ve had no time to just hang out and chill.”

“It’s weird hearing your real voice when you look like that,” Fenrir says. “But yeah, I know what you mean. Want to grab a drink sometime soon?”

“I’ll be over by you next week, so sure. I want to meet all the girls after taking you home drunk. I bet that would be fun.”

“I already told them that exact thing is probably going to happen.”

“What’s it like, dating three girls? Or is it four now?”

“Just three, and it’s just as crazy as you probably think it is.”

While the two men sit down on the shells of dead crabs to talk, Rock runs around in the sand playing and barking at the water whenever it gets close to her paws.

“How’re you and Cor doing?”

“Really good, actually. I’m still worried things might be moving too fast, but I don’t think I have to worry about that when I look at your relationship. You’re moving faster with three girls than I am with one guy.”

“You’re right about that. You two planning on meeting up anytime soon in reality?”

“We’re talking about it, but nothing concrete yet.”

“Maybe he’ll dump you when he discovers you’re not actually a cute trap.”

“I’d probably deserve that for how many guys I’ve tricked before, but I don’t think so. He already knows all about how I look out of character.”

“That’s good. You know how he looks?”

“He pulled a Serra and made himself look the exact same.”

“Well, it’s not as bad when guys do that. We don’t get stalkers as often. Invite him to the Fiscord yet?”

Oleander stretches out and yawns. “He doesn’t like stuff like that, so we just call each other,” he explains.

“Fair enough. We’ve had people like that before in our groups,” Fenrir says then yawns himself.

“So, we need to find a landmark for the new girl, right?”

“Yeah, something that should be easy to find from that top-down map we chose from.”

“Right here might be a good spot thanks to that island out there. Just tell her to choose a spot near the beach in front of the island on… the southern tip of the place that looks like Italy.”

“I think that’s a good way of describing it. I’ll go ahead and go tell her now, be right back.”

Fenrir goes from talking to falling straight back and rolling off of the shell that he was sitting on, his face planting itself into the sand.

“You could have picked a better spot to wake from,” Oleander says before getting up to help Fenrir’s body back up.

When Fenrir gets back in-game, he opens his eyes and sees Oleander swinging his legs while sitting on his chest.

“About time, Fenny,” Oleander says, behaving and talking like his in-game self once again.

“Comfortable?” Fenrir asks before pushing Oleander off of him. “And I only took ten minutes.”

“Yeah, but ten minutes is twenty minutes here!”

“Right. Well, sorry. I had to try and find an online version of the map for her to point out where exactly she’d have to go. I just hope I pointed out the right place.”

“She’ll be fiiinnneee. Probably. We just have to hope that she doesn’t run into any trouble on the way here.”

“Yeah, exactly. You start off with nothing, so if another player found her, she might be in trouble. Serra was lucky that I wasn’t somebody else when I found her.”

“What if a tentacle monster finds her? You like that sort of stuff, right?”

Fenrir thinks about it for a few moments.

“I’d rather I get to be the tentacle monster.”

“You’re a perv, Fenny.”

“I don’t want to hear that coming from you. Speaking of tentacles,” Fenrir says and walks over to one of the shells that the crabs dug up.

Surely enough, when Fenrir places his hands in its opening and starts to pull it open, hundreds of thin, pink tentacles start writhing around and smacking at his hands. They really are basically just worms all connected to the same fleshy core in the center of the shell. Very angry worms, that is.

“You want to use those as bait, right?” Oleander asks.

“Yep,” Fenrir answers.

“We could take a whole shell back onto the ship, keep it alive, and just cut off those pink things whenever you need them, right?”

“That sounds pretty cruel, but maybe it wouldn’t feel any pain? I have no idea. I’ve heard that crabs and fish don’t feel pain, but I have no idea if that’s true or not, and it might not apply here either way.”

Some of the tentacles stick out from the shell and try to dig beneath the sand to hide itself again, but Fenrir grabs the shell and lifts it back up whenever it starts making progress.

Fenrir unsheathes his sword, which he never even uses after looting it from those guys who tried attacking him in the alleyway back in the city, and cuts a few inches off of one of the tentacles.

The tentacle that he cut doesn’t even react. It instantly closes the wound and starts to regrow instead.

“Doesn’t seem to care too much, and it doesn’t cause any lasting damage, so maybe we should take it back,” Fenrir says. “Plus, it should just be controlled by the overseer, so I won’t feel bad about keeping it. Unless it gets its own AI like Rock, which would make me feel bad and probably have to release it.”

“Oh well! Want to try out your new bait while we wait for your friend to show up?”

Fenrir answers by picking up Rod and attaching the chopped-off tentacle to the hook.

The shell proves its worth after the tentacle used as bait gets bitten only a few seconds after being cast into the water.

“Yeah, we’re keeping the shell,” Fenrir says.

After an hour of fishing, which Oleander spent gathering materials for a fire from the nearby woods, Fenrir has caught six fish of varying sizes and colors. Some are short and blue, one of them is orange and fat, and the latest one has such bulging eyes that Fenrir tossed it back into the water simply because he doesn’t want to eat anything with such an ugly face. He just feels bad for it.

“Are the others going to get on?” Oleander asks.

“They should be soon. They said they were going to unpack their stuff while we’re playing, and they had a lot of stuff between them all. I don’t know where any of it is going to fit,” Fenrir answers.

“That’s what she said.”

“Really?”

“Yep.”

Fenrir chuckles and shakes his head. “I don’t know how that’s still funny despite being so stupid and old.”

“Hey,” Oleander says, his voice serious and low as he points down the beach.

Fenrir looks at where he’s pointing and sees somebody approaching. Whoever it is, they’re wearing a full suit of leather armor and have a hood obstructing most of their face.

“Looks like some sort of edgy lone wolf type,” Fenrir says.

“I don’t suppose that could be your friend,” Oleander says.

“Not with that gear.”

“Hey!” Fenrir shouts to them once they get closer. “You hungry?”

The hooded figure stops and removes their hood from their head.

A couple of feline ears are revealed sitting atop their head as well as shoulder-length, brown hair with pink stripes through it, and he can even see some freckles across their face. Looking closer, he sees that they are a she, or he at least assumes so because of how feminine she looks. Her facial features are small and rounded, giving her a youthful appearance and… then he looks lower.

He couldn’t tell from how far away she was before, but when he looks at her now, he notices that her breasts are massive. Not just huge, but hentai huge. Those massive mounds are spilling out from the leather vest that she’s wearing. Even Cassandra's start looking small in comparison to those things.

Definitely a girl. Almost definitely a guy in real life, though.

“Hey! Are you my Ryouta?” the girl calls out.