Fenrir encounters a problem after the group is done eating their crab and fish.

What do they do with the trash?

It’s just a game, and if corpses deteriorate into being skeletons within forty-eight in-game hours, then it should be okay to leave trash around on the beach, right? Fenrir would feel guilty about that given what he has heard of how humans treated beaches in the earlier part of the century, but now he may be doing the exact same thing as them.

He’s never even littered in real life before. But, it’s not like there are trash cans around or anything, and they can’t just load up The Shoebill with endless amounts of trash until they eventually find a way to dispose of it all.

Everybody else has tossed their legs of crab and fish bones off to the side. Well, except for Nyaiko. In true cat fashion, she has one fish skeleton that she’s using like a toothpick and is hanging out of her mouth.

Reluctantly, Fenrir tosses his scraps onto the sand and just hopes that they despawn soon. He never thought that he’d be worried about being environmentally conscious inside of a video game, but with just how realistic Fantasy Tales Online is, the idea of littering makes him feel just as guilty in-game as it does in real life.

Even so, he still ends up looking down at what he tossed away with guilty eyes.

“Why are you staring at that?” Cassiel asks him. “You’ve been looking at those scraps as much as you look at us, you bastard. Don’t tell me that bones turn you on now.”

“I – I just feel bad about littering,” Fenrir explains.

Everybody looks at him. Whereas Cassiel and Oleander are looking at him in disbelief that he would be concerned about something like that inside of this game, the rest are trying not to audibly “aww” from his words. However, just because they are silent does not mean that Fenrir can’t feel the “awws” coming from their eyes which causes him to feel flustered.

He knows that he’s being pretty silly, but it’s still how he honestly feels.

“That’s what happens when you look like a dog. You get all worked up over bones,” Cassiel teases.

“Shu-shut up. You’re the one who likes bones, Cass Cass,” Fenrir says back to her, immediately causing her to blush and start calling him a bastard.

After their short exchange ends, everybody gets up and gathers their things.

“Think we should put the fire out?” Fenrir asks.

“I don’t think it matters, Fenny,” Oleander says.

“Well, as long as it doesn’t spread or anything like that.”

“Fenny, it’s on a beach with water on one side, a bunch of wet grass on the other side, and nothing flammable around it. Where’s it going to spread to?”

“You – you never know.”

“You’re really worried about this sort of stuff, aren’t you?”

“I mean, it could always get windy and blow some embers or something onto the grass over there.”

“Fenny.”

“What?”

“You worry too much.”

“It’s taken you this long to notice?”

“I just forgot. It’s been a while. I still remember that one time you wanted to go and kill some guy for emptying all of his inventory all over a road.”

“In my defense, we were in a city, literally the entire path was full of random, worthless items, and the guy was acting super annoying in the chat.”

“And then we hunted him down and killed him over and over until he ragequit!”

“The good old days.”

While Fenrir and Oleander reminisce over their golden days of causing trouble in video games, the girls just sort of stand around and listen with varying levels of interest. They are all interested since they get to learn more about Fenrir, imagining him doing the things that they’ve heard about only in stories, but Cassiel tries to act like she’s not paying too much attention.

“What about that time when somebody tried hunting us down to get revenge, and we led him into a trap? That was hilarious. He was so pissed off at us,” Fenrir says.

“He got what he deserved for thinking that he could actually ambush us,” Oleander says.

“You’re making me want to hop onto one of our older games to go and screw around with people. You know, I bet we’d make the news if anybody found out that any of our old accounts were reactivated. Can you imagine how people would react?”

“They’d probably be excited and try to meme us or something. People hated us back then, but now everybody would just want to join us because they want to be dicks to everybody with us.”

“Yeah, that kind of takes the fun out of it.”

“Oh! You should tell the story about that one time with the kid who tried joining us.”

“I completely forgot about him until now!” Fenrir says with a laugh. “Alright, I have to share this story with you,” he says, looking back at the girls while walking off of the beach.

When he turns back around to look forward, Oleander whispers to Serra and puts their plan into motion.

“Alright, so there was this one kid who joined us. We had an eighteen or older rule for one of our guilds after we got popular, but this kid who was only like eleven managed to get in somehow. We didn’t realize it until we heard his voice and he kept on squeaking and cracking. First, he tried to say that he was a girl, but this one guy in our guild kept asking him questions about how girls’ bodies work and the kid couldn’t answer anything. He answered one question saying that girls pee the same way that boys do. So, we should have kicked this kid out from the guild, but he was too hilarious and a bunch of the older guys loved to tease him. He was just a great stress reliever since his responses to everything were naively hilarious.”

Fenrir is already laughing at his own tale.

“There was another time when he learned there were some girls in our guild, and he’d sexually harass the hell out of them. They didn’t mind it though since he was hilarious about it and just a kid. Like, he tried telling this one chick who was married and in her 30s that he wanted to drink her ‘booby milk.’ He’d always try sending them private messages too, and when they wouldn’t respond or if they said something he didn’t understand, he’d call them out while in group chats with everybody. A couple of the older guys would also pretend to flirt with him… which sounds creepy when I say it since he was eleven and they were in their twenties, but it was hilarious since the kid would yell at people about how he’s not gay and is only into boobs. He even tried claiming that he’s been to a ‘titty bar’ before where he had strippers rub their boobs all over him, and he’d always say that he loves motorboating girls.”

“He sounds like quite the promiscuous little rascal, my hero! I do not know how I would deal with such a boy’s behavior,” Nell says.

“Yeah, he could be a bit much at times, but the kind of people who were playing with us were the kind of people who found that sort of thing hilarious. He was actually pretty good at the game, too. We probably would have kicked him from the guild if he was only funny, but since he was actually a legit player – a way better healer than most people twice his age, we decided to let him stay. He even saved my life a few times with clutch heals. There was even a time when he went broke in-game, so one of the guys offered to buy him everything he needed until he made more money. However, if he wanted to take him up on the offer, he’d have to sing some girly pop song into the microphone. I wouldn’t be surprised if he got turned gay from us, or at least, turned into a pervert.”

“How long ago was this, my hero?”

“About… three years ago? It’s been a while.”

“What ever happened to him?”

“Last we heard from him was when we were in the middle of ambushing some guild doing a world boss, we wiped them after they were fighting it for over an hour, stole the kill, and then we heard his mom yelling at him in the background about not doing the dishes and getting bad grades in school. Never heard from him again. He logged back in a few months after that, but he immediately left the guild and ignored us when we tried checking up on him. I think he was too embarrassed to say anything to us or be around us anymore.”

“Aww, poor little thing. I hope that he has matured at least a small amount since you two last spoke!”

“I doubt it. He’d only be… fourteen now, and fourteen-year-olds are usually less mature than eleven-year-olds,” Fenrir says, sighing now that his tale is over.

He’s surprised that nobody else has said anything about it. Not even Cassiel is calling the boy in the story a pervert.

Fenrir looks behind him.

The only one behind him is Nell.

Nell looks around and notices it as well.

“A-ah! I – I was so engrossed in listening to your story that I did not notice the others leave… did we get lost?” Nell asks.

“There’s no way we accidentally got lost. They must have left us alone together for some reason,” Fenrir says.

“I – I suppose that makes more sense. Why did they leave us alone together?”

“No idea. Maybe they got bored of the story,” Fenrir says with a shrug.