Karen did not want to move. Every attempt was painful.

You don’t sleep? Karen made no move to get the fuck up. She actually made no move to do anything as even being very still was enough to bring the aches up to ‘dull punishment.’ Anything more than that cranked it to ‘give me the codes and we’ll stop beating you.’ Sleeping on some dumb hammock mattress hybrid was not recommended by nine out of ten somnologists.

Karen didn’t need to be mad about something else because she was already mad the little candle wouldn’t let her suffer in silence. It was even present when she closed her eyes.

Do you have a name? You never gave me one.

Karen didn’t care to pick a name. She also wasn’t introspective enough to see what going an entire day with a constant companion and not asking what they’re called meant about the kind of person she was. After much insistence, and nearly equal protest, Karen was finally persuaded to painfully pull herself up and leave the cell. It had gotten humid in the room overnight and the handle was cold and slick as she pulled the door.

A different gorgeous elf than the woman she’d worked with the previous night was serving as the morning attendant, but he kindly directed her toward two places she could get a meal. One was the inn, where best case she’d get spit in her food and more likely get another gap in her smile. The other was a bakery-cum-butcher-cum-tanner that almost exclusively sold to the local lumberjacks. Chopping trees and serving people who chopped trees was seemingly the only purpose the little village had after springing up to monitor the swirly reality gate.

Finding the place was not difficult, and selecting from the menu was even easier. Karen was given the choice of ‘pease pudding with bread’ or ‘fuck all.’ She kindly asked for the former and paid. The owner collected through direct transfer of source, much to the very vocal disgust of her spirit, and she found the meal satisfying. It certainly wasn’t made with peas and the bread wasn’t from any grain she could name but the end result was quite good. That was fortunate because her belly was positively grinding from the unusually high amount of exertion and even more unusually low amount of intake the day prior.

After her adventures in breakfast, the source tank was reaching record lows. The spirit did not seem to be concerned.

The spirit frequently and enthusiastically complained the entire meal and through the return trip.

The board in the COPWAPTDT had a few open requests for herbs which the spirit seemed to be extremely satisfied with, following it up by telling her not to try undercutting the adventurer’s guild on the citizen request jobs. That would, according to it, lead to a lot of time spent being ‘homeless and helpless in this worthless bumpkin backwater before going somewhere far less appealing.’

Elf craigslist was alive and well, with brown page after brown page listing mundane requests. Brown because, according to the lightbulb, undyed paper was cheapest. Cheapness was a theme with some of the jobs. The inn owners listed some work painting the interior of the rooms that was to be paid in free meals only on the day the work was done, the fuckers. But, with direction, she focused on a very specific kind of work.

Karen marched, under instruction, out of town and into the wilderness. She hiked for a time, not entirely certain of what she was looking for. It didn’t take long for the spirit to find what it wanted, and it instructed her to look closely at a plant growing in a dense clump around a tree.

Simple enough instructions. With difficulty, the brown root was freed from the ground. Mostly a single thick taproot, but its fibrous little hairs were very keen on staying unyanked.

She pulled a few of them up, comparing the different variations. Some of them the spirit insisted she replant, saying they were worthless now but would be valuable later. The entire endeavor took place over the course of the morning with little direction unless she had made an inexcusable error. Once she had socked away several imperial mouthfuls, Karen made her way back to town with hands dirty and back aching.

The person who posted the job was harder to find than the plants were, particularly because her spirit insisted she ‘learn to navigate a two road village on your own, idiot.’ After many fuckwords were exchanged, Karen did the impossible and began reading the signs inconveniently posted above doors of every business. ‘magically manipulated plant and animal ingredients with multitudinous effects’ was the ticket. A picture of the very thing she’d spent the morning digging up was colorfully painted smack in the middle of the sign, giving some credence to the idea and the very helpful spirit cackled at her as she made her way in.

That cackle, combined with seeing the owner was a pict, threatened to derail the negotiations before they’d even started. They did get started though, and immediately went smooth like ice across glass. The pict man, whose name Karen didn’t bother to learn, gushed at the quality of the roots. She happily left six hundred stones richer, even after losing a quarter to insisting on source stones.

They were different than the pair of tiny ones she had filled with her own source the previous day. Most of it was in a larger cube, dyed a rich blue like the open sky and about the size of her first two fingers if she flexed them to be roughly cube shaped. The rest was all in strips the same length as the cube but forest green instead of blue. With only a touch each stone returned an instinctive feeling for how much each one held, and all were meticulously checked before being stashed.

Not a single second of time was wasted in wasting the rest of the day’s time, and Karen fell asleep nearly the same moment her hair touched the ropes. This was a bare few seconds after reporting her success to the good people of the cop whap dot club, and a bare few minutes after making her way there from the MMPAAIWME. As successful a day as she could have hoped.

---

“What is that smell?” Karen woke well before the sun was up. Not a hard task when you fall asleep well before the sun goes down, even when you’re not woken by marinating in the scent of hot dumpster water.

“Am I dying? It smells like a corpse.” She was not exaggerating. The one and only time she’d had the misfortune of coming across a corpse it had smelled similar enough that it was strongly triggering the memory. Pulling the scoop of her shirt up to shield her nose had the opposite effect from what she wanted and instantly confirmed the source.

“Oh good LORD.” A full body ache-a-thon was no impediment for a rush to the bath, and during that rush skipping dinner was suddenly a blessing for her deeply unsettled tum-tum.

What little it actually had to empty was swept into the long, grated French drain that ran neatly through all the stalls and off to wherever waste water went in beautyelf mountain towns. She sat there for a long minute with one arm lifted onto the quartz set in the wall. The shocking cold of it felt cleansing and comfortable.

She knew that little floating butthole was going to ruin the moment. She had known it so strongly she’d almost ruined it herself by anticipating how much it was going to piss her off. The diatribe she’d been crafting came to a crashing halt as a burst of laughter sounded from far off in the building’s main room. Though she wasn’t familiar with the exact rules of the bath she was fairly certain they were coed, and sharing it with a group of supermodels or weirdo mantis men were both unappealing options.

With her anger now compressed into a grudge she intended to hold close to her heart, Karen got to work on the washing. By the time she was finished she was still alone in the dimly lit bath. Physically alone at least. In her head the spirit had taken to humming to stave off the boredom, and when Karen had asked if it wouldn’t mind kindly shutting the fuck up it replied ‘yuh, I don’t care’ before immediately continuing.

Now washed, dressed, cold, dripping, and ready to carpe the fuck out of some diem, Karen sorely shuffled through the dim hallway and out into the funhouse lobby. A pair of insectoid people were chatting with an elf in front of the board. One of the pair eyed Karen as she emerged. At least, she thought it did. The bulbous black orbs were tough to read, but the double set of crossed arms didn’t make it look approachable enough to ask. Following her own ugly orb’s instruction, she passed the group and made her way out into the predawn gloom.

Her breakfast spot had more people than she’d seen at one time on this new planet, and it didn’t take much detective work to figure out why. ‘Way too fucking early’ seemed to be what burly elf lumberjacks set their alarm clocks to. The upside was that their only menu item was fresh and in hearty portions.

I know you said ‘training,’ but what specifically is that? Is it like a Rocky montage or something? I was thinking we could skip that and go directly to training my mind, you know, for the mystical powers I’ll be getting. Also, I’m tired of throwing up all the time. Before I met you I hadn’t thrown up in years and now it feels like a daily thing.

That did sound pretty good, actually. The pizza, not the softball. Probably wasn’t much in the way of labor or food preparation regulation here and there definitely wouldn’t be any direct competition. If taxes were loose enough, she could make an absolute killing. Of course, saying that much would be saying ‘you’re right,’ which was not on the table, so she responded to the second most important thing.

Don’t call me kid.

Karen didn’t actually know how long humans had been around, but she suspected it was a long ass time. For him to be doing spirit bondage or whatever for a longer ass time was way out of her realm of expectation.

What is your home like? Whatever planet spirits come from has to be pretty different, right?

The casual blasphemy was off-putting. Karen had been raised strictly catholic, and she would be the first to tell you she attended church every week. She’d be lying, to herself as much as to anyone else, because easter and Christmas were the only time she’d ever make it into the building.

You are allowed to stay there? That isn’t where you’re from originally? The spirit didn’t respond right away. A strange reaction, because talking about anything and everything was its bread and butter.

Just curious. Not trying to pull information from you. She was trying to. This follow up after the awkward pause was another attempt at doing the thing she was explicitly saying she was not doing.

It paused a moment as if considering where to start.

Do you remember when I told you about the source unravelling and what would happen if it did? About how physical realities slow down that kind of destruction?>

Karen replied in the affirmative. She’d never forget. That particular description had caught in her craw. The entirety of reality unravelling into nothing had staying power.

Empathy is a very easy product to manufacture when you had been through a very similar experience only days prior. She could potentially go home, sure, but not safely. It was a similar enough experience, but to remove even the possibility of return might be too much to bear.

How did you, uh, survive?

This is good. It’s good for you to know what’s at stake. Cosmically powerful people don’t come together to do the things they’re doing to our universes simply because it’s a good time, or to allow some peons to loot new and interesting places. It is to save anything and everyone living inside everything.>

Karen had been doing her utmost to distract herself and prevent any type of reflection on what had happened. This well practiced method of coping was one that had served her very well in the past. It was starting to show cracks after listening to the spirit’s story.

I… I’m sorry. For what you’ve lost. Not speaking aloud has its advantages, and not being able to get choked up while talking is a good one.

When Otisred saved me, what was left was more of a lake. Still I knew a change was gonna come. When I felt that first soul resonance, I sent a little part of me out to investigate. What came back wasn’t me. Not anymore. That was when I, as an individual, was born. Part of myself had change and I left the next time I felt a soul reach out into the void.

My first bond died a long, long time after, and when I came back everything had changed. The lake is still there, but now each drop knows it is part of the lake. Otisred floats through the middle of it like a massive dock that we all lap against. And that poor, selfless, beautiful creature has it the worst of all of us. He still gets to experience things in some vicarious way through the memories we bring back, but mostly he is sitting on that dock wasting time.>

Karen had nothing more to say about the topic. She was too close to it, and it all felt too real and too raw. She’d long ago finished breakfast, and she wished she had cigarettes and coffee to help her in mulling it all over. The only thing she had at hand was companionable silence, so that was what the duo shared. They did so until the burly elves had all gone and the gloom began to lift in the predawn light.