I had a beautiful, quiet moment to relax for once. And by relax, I mean that I got to garden in peace. Everybody was busy with something, though I did invite Honey so that we could spend some more time together.

But I was rejected for somebody else.

As it turned out, Vala’s love for all things video games really did extend to almost all video games. That included those romance games that Honey was obsessed with where either one woman had a harem of men who loved her, or she played as a man with several other men fighting for her—him.

They weren’t Vala’s favorite type of game, but they were fun enough for her. And Honey wasn’t about to choose gardening with me over gaming with Vala.

They even ordered pizza. I wasn’t sure how said pizza was going to be delivered since they ordered it from some place back on my home world instead of just spawning it into existence since, supposedly, it wouldn’t taste the same, but I wasn’t going to worry about that.

Vala and Honey aside, Clawdia returned to her cat village where she could give the cats another speech and still feel like she was royalty, the dog sisters decided to play with Luca some more, and Window let me know that her “Drake Battery” was full which meant that she needed to let it drain a little before she could handle any more of me.

Then there was Lake who could be seen sitting on her personal dock fishing in the lake. There were times where I felt like I should invite her to hang out with us, but she genuinely seemed perfectly content with life just… fishing.

She was supposed to teach us new skills and all that stuff, but I figured that could be saved for another time. Again. For the time being, she could fish and I could garden.

But, admittedly, I didn’t want to be left completely alone. I got used to always being with others and learned to prefer it over solitude. Before being brought to this personal universe by Vala, sure, I was fine alone. I didn’t care if the only human interaction came in the form of small talk with cashiers at stores once a week or the occasional conversation or team communication in games. I was happy.

But now, being alone for even a few minutes felt like it was for too long, somehow. I always wanted to be around them.

That was why I went over to the only other free person around. Well, she wasn’t really a person. Or was she? I wasn’t sure how all that stuff worked. Regardless, I decided to garden near Valkyria. She already had a ring of flowers growing around her, so I figured I could add to that with the new seeds I got.

Valkyria was happy to accept my company. I could tell that much by feeling her emotions whenever I was near her. Originally, I could only feel them when I was touching her. But all I had to do was be near her and I could feel her emotions and get a sense of what she was thinking. Those feelings were still pretty vague, though. If she wanted to ask me something like what my favorite color was, I would only be able to tell that she was curious about color. Nothing more specific than that. So, I had to play a bit of a guessing game with her in our talks.

“Green,” I answered as I pulled out the new pouch of seeds. “Maybe the reason is obvious, but it’s the color of nature. You can’t find a more stereotypical color for nature than green. Even the most colorful of plants still have green involved.”

Valkyria nodded her barrel and gave me the feeling that she understood.

As for the seeds, I pulled a single one out from the pouch and looked it over. It was one of the “bone seeds” received as an exploration reward, and it… well, it literally just looked like a very tiny bone. Kind of like a chicken drumstick in shape, but all bone and no meat. And it was smaller than a fingernail.

“Going by the name of these things… I guess they’re just going to grow into bones? I wonder if they’d still have green. Or if they’d even count as plants. I’m not going to be surprised if they end up being literal bones sticking up out of the ground. But, if it can be planted, I’m going to plant it.”

I looked at Valkyria.

She frantically waved her barrel from side to side.

“But what if I can grow you into a tank flower? And what if you drop tank seeds that grow into more tank flowers?”

That frantic movement was replaced by a feeling of… jealousy?

“What, don’t want there to be any other tanks around?”

She hesitated for a moment before slowly nodding her barrel up and down.

“Don’t worry. You’re the only tank in this universe, and you can keep being the only tank.”

Her barrel drooped low like somebody slouching their shoulders while sighing. Then I felt that she was curious about something again, but she was just curious in general rather than about any specific thing.

“You can ask me anything you want,” I told her while making some small holes in the dirt for the bone seeds. “I wonder what would happen if you gave bone meal to bone seeds…”

It took Valkyria a few moments to think of a topic she wanted to ask me about. When she did finally think of something, though, it made me pause for a moment.

“You want to know about my family?”

She nodded her barrel while giving me a feeling that let me know I didn’t have to if I wasn’t comfortable talking about them.

“It’s fine. Where should I begin?”

Valkyria’s curiosity wanted me to tell her everything from the beginning.

“Alright, then I’ll start from the start. Thinking about it… nobody but Vala knows about my family. I told her all about my life back when we played games together. So, congrats. You’re going to be the second ever person, and the first ever tank, who gets to know about my life.”

I could feel the pride and excitement radiating off of her.

“So, let’s see. I guess you could say my life was pretty normal. I was just some kid who had a mom and dad. Used to live next door to my grandparents who would babysit me every now and then. Our holidays were always spent together as a big, happy family. Uh… it’s kind of hard to talk about this sort of thing in general. Not because I’m uncomfortable, but because I just don’t know what to talk about.”

Fortunately, Valkyria gave me the feeling to expand on my parents.

“Alright. My dad was a programmer. Worked at home for some major tech company and only ever had to go into work a few times a month for special meetings, so he was almost always home. He made enough money to support us on his own, so my mom stayed home with him and spent all her time in the garden. I always loved helping her. Though, sometimes I felt like she loved that garden more than me or my dad. She was the kindest, sweetest, most caring woman you could ever meet… until it came to her plants. Some kids kicked a ball into our backyard once and it ruined some of her flowers. She was about to beat the crap out of them until me and my dad did our best to hold her back. Never hear somebody shout so many profanities and threaten death to kids before as much as she did. Then there was one day where we found a squirrel in the garden. She brought home a shotgun an hour later. Don’t even get me started on the amount of poison traps she had set up around the place. I’m pretty sure she would have surrounded our yard with landmines if it wasn’t, you know, extremely illegal.”

The landmines comment must have triggered something within Valkyria since she shook her barrel from side to side again while giving me the feeling that they were bad.

“Don’t worry, there were no landmines and I’ll make sure we never place any here.”

I felt relief from her. Given that she served in an actual war before, I couldn’t even begin to imagine what sort of experiences she had with those sorts of things. Part of me was curious and wanted to ask, but I wasn’t about to ask a veteran to relive any potential PTSD for me. So, instead, I moved on.

“My dad was a huge nerd, by the way. He played video games ever since he was a child and we had a room full of all his systems. He kept every console, computer, controller, and game he ever owned in his entire life. That room was like a museum of video game history. Unfortunately, it burned down and he lost it all. Went to plug in one of his old consoles, it started a fire, and it turned out that our fire extinguisher was expired. Thankfully, the firefighters got there to put the fire out before it burned down our entire house, but not before it could destroy everything in the room. We learned to always make sure our fire extinguishers weren’t expired after that.”

Valkyria sent me an apologetic feeling.

“It’s fine. Anyways… this is where it gets depressing. That was kind of the beginning of a downward spiral.”

Valkyria let me know that I could stop, but I could tell that she was curious still.

“It’s fine. I honestly don’t mind talking about it. Everything that happened is in the past. So, if you want to know, I promise I don’t mind telling you about it.”

While she figured out what she wanted, I finished planting the bone seeds. There was a couple dozen of them that I tried to evenly spread out in a circle around Valkyria, creating a new ring of flowers that would surround the previous rings.

The first few rings of flowers were all pretty generic. Red, blue, yellow—just various different flowers that were always in bloom. Then there were some unique flowers around those. First were the rainbow flowers, then the chocolate marshmallow flowers, then there was a ring of death flowers that were still in the process of growing, and now there were the bone seeds planted around those. Basically, I was growing all the different seeds I received from explorations in rings around her.

The chocolate marshmallow flowers were especially popular with the bees.

Finally, Valkyria gave in to her curiosity and let me know that she wanted me to continue, so I did.

“Alright,” I said. “Then let’s just jump straight into the depressing stuff by saying that my mom died. Turned out that she had a tumor growing in her brain that couldn’t be safely removed. It completely changed how she acted. Made her tear up her garden, she got violent toward my dad, kept on forgetting who I was… all it took was a single tumor to completely change her. But that only lasted for a couple of months. The tumor grew to the point where she couldn’t function on her own anymore and needed hospitalized. Wasn’t long after that we had to make a decision to either let her die or perform a surgery to try and remove her tumor, that would most likely leave her damaged for life and would probably never return to her normal self. I wanted them to do the surgery… but my dad and grandparents agreed that they could see it in her eyes. She couldn’t say it, but they told me that her eyes made it obvious she wanted to die. So, we let her die. My grandma followed a few months later. She already had poor health and my mom dying stressed her out enough to do her in. Then, like a chain reaction, my grandpa followed. My dad told me that he died from heartbreak.”

What I felt from Valkyria after that was a combination of panicked apologies and wanting to know what happened to my dad, hoping that he was alright.

“It all broke him. I guess, in a way, you could say that we stopped caring about each other. Most people usually assume that once you go through something like that together, you’ll be even closer and have an even tighter bond. Instead, it just… drove us apart. He wanted to cling to what he used to have and used work to distract him from reality. I wanted to move on and pick up after those we lost. We coped in different ways and stopped spending any time together. When he joined me on the couch one night, he let me know that he was going to leave, and I wasn’t surprised. Didn’t feel bad, either. I expected that. He let me know that he would make sure I was taken care of by sending me money and that, if I ever needed anything, I could always go to him for help. I was fourteen at the time. Kind of messed up in retrospect, but I didn’t think there was anything wrong with it. Anyways, I only took his money until I turned eighteen and then I decided to finish the job by severing ties with him. Got a job, my own phone plan, a new place—I became independent and neither of us knew how to contact the other anymore. So, there you go. That’s everything there is to know about my family.”

I looked over at Luca in the distance being carried on Lavi’s shoulders while they chased Delphi and Cami.

“I didn’t think there was anything wrong with my dad wanting to leave, but ever since Luca… I’ve realized that my dad was kind of an asshole. I look at Luca and can’t imagine ever abandoning her no matter what. There’s no way that I would ever be alright with just leaving her life and sending her money to make sure she does the bare minimum of surviving. How does somebody just… leave their kid like that?”

Valkyria did something she never did before.

She made a demand of me.

She demanded that I come closer.

So, I did. “What’s up?” I asked her.

Then she demanded that I climb on top of her front, so I did. When she ordered me to sit down with my back against the front of her turret next to her barrel, I did. I was curious about where she was going with all of that.

And then, once I was sitting next to her barrel against her turret, she brought her barrel down against me to tuck me between it and her turret as best she could.

It was already obvious what she was trying to do before she gave me a feeling to explain it.

She wanted to hug me.

She wanted to comfort me.

I placed one hand on top of her barrel to rub it and said, “Thanks, but I told you that it’s alright. The past is the past. I don’t feel anything when I talk about that stuff anymore, though I think I cried a few times back in the day talking to Vala about it. Except it was over text, so she never knew I was crying.”

Valkyria let me know that I could cry.

But I shook my head. “I know I could around any of you, but I don’t have anything to cry about. Why would I waste my emotions on the past when I’ve got all of you to spend my emotions on in the present? My mom is dead. My grandparents are dead. They’re never coming back and I already cried over that before. My dad is off being a selfish asshole somewhere who only wanted to send me money to not have a guilty conscious. Instead of feeling bad about any of that, I’d rather focus on the positive things I’ve got going on. I’ve got a bunch of girlfriends, a daughter, and a private universe where I don’t have to worry about anything other than having a fun time together with everybody. Plus I feel like it’d be an insult to feel upset over the past when I could be enjoying the present with you instead. Why feel bad over people who aren’t even around anymore when I can feel happy with the ones who are still around? You included.”

Valkyria might have been the one telling me that it was alright to cry, but she was the one who ended up crying instead. Or at least, it felt like she was crying.

“Never met a tank who’s a crybaby before. I guess emotional stuff gets to you?”

She nodded her barrel before tucking it back against me even harder than before.

“Also, I’ve got to be honest. I was trying to hold back… but, if you’re comfortable, I’d like to hear about your past sometime. But seriously, if it makes you even slightly uncomfortable, you don’t have to say anything. I know you’ve probably been through a lot, so I don’t want to bring up any negative emotions or anything that might be buried.”

I thought she might at least feel hesitant about it, but no. Rather, I felt pride from her. Her emotions felt as if she wanted to talk about her past—like she wanted to proudly tell the stories from her youth.

“I guess you’ll have to tell me then when we get you an actual voice. I figure that you’re probably going to turn into a cute girl as soon as we have your body fully restored. That kind of seems to be the theme around here. Dogs turning into girls. Honey badgers turning into girls. The bees, cows, and giant slime are probably going to turn into girls. Cats turning into girls—well, Clawdia was already a girl before I met her, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she started off as a cat. Oh, and informational status windows being turned into girls. Yeah, I think it’s safe to assume that you’re going to turn into a girl. Then I’ll get to treat you like a proper girlfriend since it’s kind of hard to do anything romantic with you right now.”

I felt panic from her.

“What? You’re surprised I’m already counting you as a girlfriend?”

She nodded her barrel.

“I mean, everybody basically is. Except Lake. Unless you don’t want me to think of you as a girlfriend.”

She shook her barrel from side to side so quickly that she almost whacked me in the head with it.

“Careful there. I’ll keep counting you as my girlfriend as long as you don’t give me any brain injuries.” I grabbed onto her barrel and pulled it back down against me, keeping my arms wrapped around it. “You might be a bit too big for a normal hug, but at least I can hug this part of you.”

I got the feeling that she was crying again.

“You really are a crybaby, aren’t you?”

She slightly nodded her barrel, making sure not to nod it too much so that I could keep hugging it.