From halfway up the cobbled-stone steps leading to the temple’s entrance, two young women addressed the crowd. Donavan could only stare at them in utter bafflement.

Honestly… what else had he been expecting. This entire world was the creation of a horny twenty-something year old fantasy geek. It had to be, because in no other world would a religious organization ever choose to dress their members in outfits like the ones these women were wearing now.

Put simply, they were dressed like nuns; that is if you cut off the bottom forty-five percent of the traditional nun outfit, and the rest was so tight, and form fitting it looked like it had to be vacuum sealed to their bodies.

Due to that missing forty-five percent, Donavan could see that each of the women wore matching white, thigh-high stockings fastened by garter belt straps that disappeared up under skirts so short, a slight bend at the hip threatened to reveal what underwear they were wearing. That wasn’t even mentioning the wicked high heels, or the heart shaped cut-out in the chest that boasted the considerable cleavage each of the women possessed.

Yep, just your classic, everyday, run-of-the-mill, hooker nuns. Besides those few ‘minor’ alterations, the only other difference was the outfit was a forest green color instead of black.

Seriously, how did Erwin even come up with this stuff? It was so juvenile, did he seriously think his audience was gonna be titillated by the way the straps of the garterbelt drew attention to that wonderful, little gap of exposed thigh between the end of the skirt, and the start of the stockings? Or the way the heels pronounced the arch in their lower backs, and made their assess pop? Or how soft that valley of flesh peeking through the window on their chests looked? Or maybe how the…

“Are you drooling?” Caspiera asked, staring up at him looking a little disgusted.

“What? No! Of course not.” Donavan fumbled, quickly turning to rub his mouth on his shoulder just in case.

Alright fine, as nonsensical as the outfits were, he had to give it to Erwin, they did exactly what he’d intended them to. But it’d be a cold day in hell before he ever admitted it.

“Let's just get this over with.” he said, breaking through to the clearing at the center of the crowd.

One of the women saw him approaching and stepped down to block his path

“Sir, we know many were wounded in the attack, but we’ll have to ask you to wait, we are at max capacity at the moment, and...” Her gaze then fell on the wounded woman in his arms, and her eyes lit up. “Captain Caspiera, you survived!”

“Only barely.” She answered. “I need to be back on my feet before the village meeting.”

“Yes, we can do that, follow me.” She said excitedly, turning towards the entrance. Donavan tried to ignore the fact that her walk up the stairs informed him of exactly what type of underwear she was wearing, if you can really call something with only a strings worth of fabric underwear in the first place.

Stepping through the large double doorway behind the priestess, his vision took a second to adjust to the dimmer interior light before he could survey his new surroundings.

The temple seemed to consist of only one large chamber. Above him, a rib cage of thick wooden beams supported the high, arched ceiling with the assistance of a few dozen pillars spaced throughout. Though the building had several windows, the stained glass murals muted the natural sunlight so much, the only real sources of light came from the crackling stone fireplaces set into the walls on each side of the grand hall. Large and sporadically overlapping area rugs, along with masses of plush cushions completely blanketed the entirety of the floor. With the soft, flickering firelight, and faint hint of incense, the place was almost downright cozy. So cozy he wasn’t sure if it was supposed to be a church, or some kind of lavish, leisure chamber.

However; the place’s soothing atmosphere was somewhat blunted by the mass of moaning and wounded men and women scattered throughout. Some on cots, some on piles of cushions, and some propped up against the walls and pillars.

Other women dressed like the one who’d led him in, ran back and forth between groups of wounded villagers carrying tinctures, bandages, and platters of bloodied medical instruments. The more he looked, the more he realized that not every one of the priestesses tasks seemed to be entirely medical in nature.

In one corner, a pair of the priestesses were massaging oils onto the back of a bandaged man. They had stripped off their dresses, probably in an effort to avoid staining them. This left them completely topless, the oil coating their supple skin glistened in the firelight.

In another corner, what looked to be a large cuddle puddle had formed around a shivering woman in front of one of the fireplaces. He had to look away after a slip of the blankets revealed the mass of intertwined bare bodies underneath.

No matter where he looked, he found something that made him feel as if he was peeping in on something he shouldn't be.

“Wait here while I go get the Headmistress.” said the priestess he’d followed in, she had left him standing smack dab in the middle of the room.

It was then that Donavan decided to take a particularly intense interest in the ceiling. This also seemed like a great time to practice his whistling. He’d never been good at it before, but hey, no time like the present right?

“What’s your problem now?” Caspiera asked.

“Nothing.” he said with a cough. “Just… are you seriously not bothered by any of this?”

“What do you mean by ‘this’?”

“Y’know... the priestesses, their outfits, their… unique, approach to medicine.”

“No.” Caspiera said, looking at him with a confused frown. “Why would I be?”

“You don’t think any of it is a bit… gratuitous, maybe even a little degrading?”

“Degrading?” She said the word as if he'd just used it to describe a sunset, or maybe a particularly small puppy “What about saving lives is degrading?”

“Nothing. It's just, is there a particular reason that they have to do it half naked? Or that it seems like its only young, attractive, and well… shapely women in the priesthood.”

Caspiera blinked, opened her mouth to say something, stopped, blinked again, shook her head and closed her eyes as if he had just said something so utterly bewildering she needed a moment to process it.

“You do know who Jeiya is right?”

“No…” he said hesitantly. It probably wasn’t smart to reveal how ignorant he was of this world, but he saw no way to fake his way out of this.

Caspiera went through that same little spasm of bafflement before anger started to etch her features.

“Jeiya is the goddess of health, fertility, and beauty. Her priestesses- the Sisters of Jeiya, are chosen from among her many worshipers because they best embody the values of their goddess, so of course they're all young beautiful women. They spend years training in the healing arts, learning how to suture wounds, abate fevers, and combat plagues. They are some of the most respected and revered people in the world. Being one is an honor many covet, and their uniforms are made specifically to showcase their beauty and fertility, they wear them proudly. You speak as if they should be ashamed of their bodies and seek to hide them. So let me ask you, is there a particular reason they cannot both do their job and be attractive at the same time?”

“No, it's just…”

“Just what?”

Donavan quickly realised this to be an unwinnable battle. Without the context of knowing this entire world and most everything in it was designed by a pervy shut-in relying on the trashiest of tropes to provide entertainment, Caspiera, or anyone for that matter, wouldn’t be able to understand where he was coming from. To them, it all made perfect sense because Erwin wrote it that way. Honestly, If the guy had put half as much effort into his plot as he did into his justifications for fanservice, he’d be on the New York Times best seller list already.

“Besides.” Caspiera said looking him up and down. “Your the last person in this room that should be judging what others are wearing.”

Touché.

Maybe she had a point though. He was judging their whimsical, fantasy world culture against his boring, pragmatic earth culture. Did it really matter if something didn’t quite make sense? couldn’t it just be there for fun? Afterall, wasn’t that the beauty of fantasy, that it allowed you to indulge in a world full of magic, adventure, and well… slutty nuns?

“You’re right.” Donavan conceded with a nod. “I apologise, that was offensive of me to suggest.”

Caspiera narrowed her blue eyes at him, but he just met her suspicious gaze with his own kindly and apologetic one.

None of this was real, he had to remember that. It was all just a campy fantasy story concocted by Erwin and simulated by his weird typewriter, it was never meant to be taken seriously.

It wasn’t real.

But…

But if that were true, why had he even bothered to save Caspiera in the first place?

The odd thought made Donavan frown. Though he had only skimmed Erwin’s first draft, he was fairly certain that Caspiera was never meant to be a major character. Her continued existence wasn’t essential to the plot. She was just like a minor NPC in game, there to flesh out the world and be apart of the background for the people who really mattered.

In fact, spending the time to come here and get her healed was actively detrimental to his mission of ensuring the safety of the main characters. So why had he done it?

He’d seen someone in need and wanted to help, at the time it had been as simple as that. Wasn’t that the right thing to do?

But she wasn’t really a person was she, at least not one that mattered. If this world truly operated on some form of destiny, a plan or a ‘plot’ so to speak, and some people had a role to play, while others were just kind of there, inconsequential to the grand scheme of things, hadn’t he wasted his time with this detour?

He didn’t think so.

That’s when something else occurred to Donavan.

He had a role to play as well. He was suppose to be the villain, he was only looking for the main characters so he could get close and learn how best to manipulate them for the plot later. This ‘Don of Navan’, as Caspiera put it, was only a facade. His real role was that of the antagonist, the bad guy.

As the bad guy, he was going to have to hurt people, possibly a lot of people. Could he really do that? Sure, he’d already killed some goblins, but they were monsters, and they were actively hurting people, that made it easy to think of them as nothing more than obstacles in the way, no more deserving of sympathy than a locked door. Just something that needed to be dealt with and moved on from.

Could he think of Caspiera like that? Could he think of any of the people he’d seen so far like that? Not as a people, but as pieces on a board to manipulate and dispose of when necessary in order to advance the plot in the name of entertainment?

He would have to if he ever wanted to go home.

But he wouldn’t be able to do that if he thought of them as living, breathing, thinking people. It had to be like a video game, or a movie, or a book. They were just characters. They had to be.

What was it that Shakespeare said? he was a publishing agent afterall, why not draw inspiration from one of the world's greatest writers?

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts.

In his case it was especially true.

So yes, he needed to remember, for the sake of his own sanity.

None of it was real.