Gamer Girl Isekai

The ride back to Tepetlmoseua was uneventful, as far as desperate flights for survival went. Aexilica said no more than usual as the sledge carried them down the mountainside and, unlike before, Emma felt no inclination to fill the silence. She was exhausted, in more than one way. Her shoulder throbbed, her body felt like someone had squeezed the energy right out of it. It was all she could do to keep herself focused on maintaining the Force effect that left their vehicle shooting off so fast.

If there was a single positive to be acknowledged, other than the bare minimum of their having succeeded, it was that they were also making better time now than before. Emma still didn't have a speedometer, but she was able to do some basic estimation from a few familiar landmarks. As far as she could tell they were closing in on thirty miles per hour.

Pretty underwhelming, but then the real world had conditioned Emma to grow accustomed to petrol-driven travel. Within an hour they were back at Tepetlmoseua. Aexilica got off the sledge with a deep breath, relief flooding her features even as she glanced over her shoulder.

Emma glanced too. The fear of being pursued even now was probably not rational, but it was definitely unshakeable. Almost being cut in half would, it seemed, do that to a person.

"What are the odds of us being believed?" She asked suddenly. Aexilica eyed her sidelong. Emma felt her cheeks burn, face flushing. She felt embarrassed, to be looked at by her own hallucination. That realisation, the self-awareness- turned her embarrassment quickly into anger.

This isn't fucking real.

"High." Aexilica said at last. "Why?"

"I don't want to go through that again." Emma snapped. "My shoulder hurts still."

"It's not broken." Aexilica let her know, helpfully. "Don't strain it and it should heal fine, give it a week or two and you won't even feel it."

A week or two, god.

Up the stairs they went, and into the temple. Emma was too overwhelmed by the thousand other things her body was screaming about to take any relief in the cool interior this time. There were a good deal more guards within, and yet passage came easily as they took a single look at the foreigner clearly strewn over Aexilica's shoulder and stepped aside. Only a brief wait was demanded of them, minutes long at most, and then they were ushered through to see the Priest.

He looked different, more tired. It was, Emma realised, the middle of the night. He'd probably been asleep. She didn't like that. It bothered her. She couldn't say why. Some strange, ephemeral niggling in her gut, a sense of wrongness.

But then she'd been feeling those everywhere, lately. Maybe it was her brain finally shutting down.

Maybe it's my brain finally waking up.

She shivered as Aexilica spoke.

"Forgive my unannounced return, Honoured One, but I have brought evidence of our previous claims." At that, Aexilica tossed the Sculd forwards. He'd been quiet, despite waking up quite some time ago. A big man who probably weighed close to double what Emma did, even with most of his armour torn off. He landed hard, groaned in a heap for a moment and looked up dazed. The terror on his face was deeper than any Emma had ever seen before. Deeper than the cyclops', even. She felt a stab of disquiet at seeing it demonstrated so starkly.

The Priest just stared at him.

"What is your name?" He asked. The Sculd didn't raise his head before answering.

"Gretter." He replied, eyes low.

"And what is your business in our lands?"

The questioning was brief, and devastating. The Sculd surprised Emma by answering more or less honestly- either too stupid to lie or…Perhaps betraying the existence of some means people had to catch lies as they were told. Whatever the cause, it meant that just about everything Aexilica had initially said ended up getting corroborated.

Her shoulder didn't hurt less at that, but the pain did seem a much smaller concern. Emma's task had been accomplished, and by the look of things she wouldn't need to repeat the endeavour.

The Priest gestured for silence after a while, finally looking up at Aexilica.

"It seems you did well." He declared, voice now loud and clear enough that it was obvious he meant to address the room at large. "You obeyed my instructions to the letter, and have brought us the proof we need to forewarn the rest of Aethiq about this incoming Scurlgan invasion. Well done."

The invasion had been something even Emma was only just growing certain of. She'd half-suspected that they really were dealing with smaller raiding parties, somehow. Confirmation was another shot of courage that she'd much needed.

Aexilica, on the other hand, had never lacked certainty. That meant she had all the room to feel the frustration and bitterness Emma saw swimming behind her gaze. She could empathise, it probably sucked to have all the credit for her initiative taken in one word.

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Then again, the way she'd heard it told, if Aexilica had been credited for initiative, she'd have been punished for going against instructions. It was almost as if there wasn't any winning in a society where certain people considered themselves entitled to unrequited respect and service from you just because of social status. Shocker.

"Thank you, Honoured One." Aexilica demonstrated an impressive force of will, by not screaming and hurling a brick at the man. Emma reminded herself to be impressed later.

"You may go now." The Priest told them, and they went. As usual, it was only when they were well beyond earshot of the temple that Aexilica spoke.

"What you did was stupid." Her voice was harsh, as Emma might have expected. But more than that. Wavery, it seemed to snag on her throat as she used it. "Stupid." Aexilica repeated, making her tone all the less stable. "I don't want you to ever do something like that again."

Emma smirked, and said something flippant and clever.

"I'm sorry." She replied instead, while her face scrunched up into a trembling half-sob rather than a cocky grin. That wasn't right at all. Why was all her stupid meat disobeying her?

Aexilica seemed surprised too, but she, at least, had the mastery needed to hide it after a brief moment.

"Not good enough. If this happens again, ever, we're done. I'm not putting up with someone who's this desperate to get herself killed. I don't get to decide whether you live with me, the Priest saw to that, but I won't hunt with you, and I won't take it upon myself to look out for you anymore."

Emma bristled. She'd have liked to do more, but even she had limits to her self-absorption. Pretending, for a moment, that all this was real, that the tugging in her gut were more than just anthropomorphisation of a trauma-induced delirium, Aexilica…Had a point.

"Alright." Emma mumbled, not quite able to bring herself to meet Aexilica's eye. There probably wasn't a word for the cocktail of emotions she felt. Anyone who'd been in the position to feel it- guilty over her own hallucination, worried of processing that given the intangibility of it all- was more than likely too busy drooling into a coma ward's pillow to share the term with anyone.

Larry was in a foul mood when they returned. That was actually quite reassuring, Larry was always in a foul mood and the touch of normalcy lifted Emma's spirits ever so slightly. She needed a bit of consistency in her life at the moment.

"You look grumpy!" He laughed, as Emma lifted him from his usual hiding spot. "Let me guess, you lost a fight."

She couldn't even be bothered to torment him in retaliation this time, somehow the thought just didn't appeal Emma dumped him on the table and took her own seat. All the bottled up emotions she might have felt hours before came rushing back at once. It hurt.

Emma had lost. She'd fought someone fair and square, with all her powers and plenty of time to prepare clever and exciting ways to use them, and she'd lost. It wasn't fair. She'd done everything right–- mostly–- and even with the added edge of Aexilica's help it had been too little.

The encounter was unbalanced.

Seen in that way, it all made sense. Except that didn't soothe her. If one encounter could be unbalanced, why not another? Why not most? Why, in this world of totally fallible reality, could she not be killed by some random "glitch"? That would make for one hell of a tombstone. Here lies Emma, vaporized when she walked slightly too fast into a rock.

But she wouldn't get a tombstone here, would she? She was alone. She would always be alone.

None of it was real.

"Emma, are you…Alright?"

Larry's voice was low, touched with concern. It snapped her out of the moping instantaneously.

"Never better." She shot back. "Shoulder hurts but, you know, it's still attached to my head."

His momentary spasm of tenderness frosted over instantly. Perfect, she would not be pitied by a fucking hallucination. Not now.

"I see, pardon me then. Anything else I can help you with, sweetheart, or are you too busy flicking off and not washing your clothes?"

"Arm." Emma grunted. "Hurt arm, how do I fix it?"

Larry paused at that, sighed.

"I don't suppose you've gotten a lot better at using Matter, have you?"

Emma scowled. She hadn't, really. The long hours of practice needed for it hadn't been something she could spare time for since her last bout of training. She'd sharpened up a little, she thought, but not enough to be reflected statistically.

"A pity." Larry sighed again. "I've known Untethered to use a combination of Energy and Matter to alter biological tissue. Strengthen it, speed up processes…Like healing. That sort of thing."

"It would've been nice to know that sooner, fuck-wad." She growled.

Larry seemed to drink her infuriation up.

"You weren't hurt before. Anyway, there are other options for you. In the Crafts."

Emma slammed a fist down, discharging her frustration as best she could. It succeeded in turning the emotion into pain, which she found rather less pleasant.

"Ugh, fine, fuck. What do I do?"

"You need to brew a potion."

"Fuck off." Emma told him. Larry rolled his eyes— he did that a lot, probably as much as anybody with as many bodily rolling options as him would— and continued with a manner of deliberate, patronising patience.

"So, just to be clear," Larry began, "You can shoot beams of energy and make flechettes with willpower alone, but brewing potions is too much."

Emma paused. Why was it too much?

No, wrong question. Why were impossible things suddenly too much? She knew the answer to that, the obvious one, and it tasted sour. Because I'm starting to think this all might be real. I'm starting to believe there's some governing logic to the world around me.

"How do I make it?" She pressed on, shoving the thoughts aside.

Larry hesitated. "That…Depends on the potion, and the creator, and…The world."

Emma punched the table again, and for the second time that day lost to it in a contest of pain tolerance.

"You're useless." She grumbled.

"You want to heal right?" Larry huffed, he actually sounded legitimately annoyed. "Then you want to start with something related to healing. As a base I mean. The liquid you're gonna mix everything in."

Emma thought about that.

"So, like, a bowl of morphine?"

"Yes, genius. Just go around the Aztec town and ask for some morphine."

Prick. Emma thought about it more. "...Boiling water." She said at last. "Heat sterilises things, right?"

"Good pick." Larry tried to nod. "Boiling water. Then you need some of the ingredients, one solid and another liquid at a bare minimum. Other than that every new, related thing you can think to add will strengthen it. Don't stretch things though, bad picks are worse than no picks."

Soon enough, Emma was engrossed in the apparently delicate art of picking well.