A bed, surprisingly.

Your head is killing you. Which is weird in a way. Your head can't kill you if you're already dead. You are dead, right? You were very much bleeding out ba- Wait, you've been through this before.
Does that mean you've cheated **** yet again?
You can't even imagine the sheer glee The Grim Reaper will feel once he reaps you with his bony finger.

Thinking about it, you're lying in something rather soft. You can also hear shoes marching on wood.
You decide to open your eyes. You're inside a house. You don't recognize the room you're in.
Standing right in front of your vision as soon as your eyes open, is a small little frog girl slowly walking towards you.
Considering the conversation the gargoyle had with the kobold goons, you're fairly confident you know who this girl is.
She is holding a tray. On it is a glass of water, and a bowl with some porridge-like slob.
As soon as she sees that your eyes are open, she panics a bit. She hurriedly puts the tray down on the floor right next to you and storms out of the room.
You groan as you let your right arm flop down the edge of the bed. You grab the water. You try to sit upright, but give up halfway through. Instead you just carefully pour the water into your mouth. You savor the taste of the water. Either the water encompasses a great deal of iron, or your mouth is bleeding. Both are realistic choices.

"How are you feeling?" you hear from a corner of the room. It's Emily.

"Well, I know you told me not to overdo things, but..." you trail off.

Emily chuckles. That's the first time you've seen her smile. It's a pretty one too.

"How's the stomach?" she asks gently.

"Pretty shit to be honest. At least I can rest a little now." you shrug.

She nods.

"How long have I been out?" you ask.

"About half a day. The sun is already starting to set." she answers carefully.

Half a day is a long fucking time to sleep. You're still really tired though.

"You're pretty brave." she compliments you.

"Nah," you shrug it off: "I just do what I need to do to survive. If I get a good reason to shoot up this town myself, I'll probably do it."

Emily looks at you with a piercing stare. She is not horrified at what you just said. She just doesn't seem to believe you.
You stare back, trying to win back some of that intimidation that you had before. You remember her cowering before you when she saw you at the rock in the desert. That fear is gone, and part of you wants it back. Another part, however...
Your thoughts are interrupted when you hear a knock on the door.

"Come in." Emily greets cheerily without consulting you.

In steps the frog girl once again. Her green hair flows just a bit beneath her shoulders. Her skin is almost as green as yours, but have a more teal tinge to it. Her big eyes are a calming shade of gray. She is young. She can't be much more than eighteen.

"Hey, Claire, how are you holding up?" Emily asks empathetically.

Claire starts to sniffle. She has just learned first hand, how harsh life in the desert is. There might be a silver lining here that she will grow to toughen up and find a way to survive out here.
Emily embraces the crying girl. You just watch silently, with no clear expression on your beaten up face.
You grab the porridge from the floor and start eating it. It's cooled down a bit to a perfect temperature. It's not an especially tasty dish, but having not eaten in a long time, you savor every moment of it... for the short time you spend on eating it. You wolf down the entirety in a couple of minutes.

"Hungry, huh?" Emily ask.

"Yeah. Thanks girl." you nod at Claire.

"I... it's nothing." she blushes: "You did catch the bandits that killed my parents."

"I didn't do it to avenge them." you state flatly.

"I know." she nods solemnly: "But I'm glad you did it anyways."

You eye the nightstand. On it is a small leather pouch filled with coins. You recognize it from the bar. The gargoyle Trisha had it with her. She wanted to give it to Claire.

"Oh, those are some money the sheriff confiscated from the bandits." Emily explains not knowing that you are already privy to this information: "The sheriff said that you can have it, as thanks for taking out the bandits."

You look at it. There has to be at least a 150 dollars in coins in there. That could settle you for a long time. You would be able to travel far away from these desert lands. You could leave all of this shit behind, and start anew somewhere. And yet...

"Hey, girlie." you address Claire: "Take the bag and store it somewhere safe. You're going to need the money if you are to survive out here alone."

Claire's already big eyes widen even further. Emily furrows her brows and put her hand in front of her mouth, as if she is thinking hard about something.

"I c-couldn't possibly take this." Claire stammers: "It's your reward for doing the right thing."

Something about the phrase 'doing the right thing' rubs you the wrong way.

"No. You are without your parents now. This will cover your expenses until you're ready to move on." you say in a tone that's very hard to place.

"I-i can get by, you r-really don't ha-"

"Just take the goddamn bag!" you snap.

"Y-y-yes. Thank you miss." she hurriedly reply as she takes the bag and for the second time runs out panicked.

You feel Emily's eyes on you once again. She has smug smirk plastered across her face.

"'Just doing what you need to do to survive', huh?" she rhetorically ask.

"If I get in good with the citizens here, I can use that trust to get me further. They're just stepping stones."

"Getting good with a 19 year old orphan in a small outpost in the middle of nowhere is certainly worth a bag of money that could buy you a ranch." she sarcastically quips.

"Maybe I have bigger plans for this place, or maybe I just plan on stealing the pouch back." you shrug. She rolls her eyes.

"Yeah, whatever makes you sleep at night, Jess." she laughs it off.

A calming silence washes over you as you realize that for the first time in two days, you don't have to struggle to survive. A feeling of relief slithers into your nerves and severs the tension. You relax knowing that, at least for now, it's over.

"How do you do it?" Emily asks interrupting your thought stream.

"Do what?" you ask back.

"How do you not get scared?" Emily has a slightly sad and downtrodden expression on her face: "When you were fighting the scorpion, when you took out the goons in the sheriff's office, when you knocked out the gargoyle at bar. How come you weren't scared?"

You think about it for a bit, not entirely certain that you even know the answer. You look into her beautiful brown eyes.

"Where are you from?" you ask.

"I'm from Dijana." she replies. You've heard of Dijana. It's the biggest city of the desert lands. It's right at the border, before getting into coastal territory. You've heard many fantastical stories about it. It's culturally dense, and has big buildings, theaters, city halls, and casinos. Emily is probably not used to the spots on the world map people use to place their coffee mugs.

"Well, when you grow up in the wastes like I do, you learn not to be scared from birth. Orcs are tough fuckers. They don't care about things like compassion and heroism. Why would they? Every time they show something like that in this godforsaken place, the desert chews it up, craps it out, and fling the shit back into their faces. Heroism doesn't matter to the dying. Corpses don't care about compassion. If you can't focus on anything but survival, then why bother?"

"But isn't that also true in reverse?" she asks, mulling over what you just said.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, if you can't be bothered about anything, then why survive? If to live life means to only embrace survival, why do you still reject ****? If you care about nothing, and you don't find joy in anything, and life is just a string of struggles and suffering, then why do you keep going?"

You don't reply, because you don't have an answer.

Emily looks at you, her expression a weird mixture of concern and sternness. She looks calm, but challenging. Gentle, but unyielding.

She opens her mouth again.

"Are you scared?" she ask.

"Get the fuck out of here." you command monotonously.

"W-what?" she stutters.

"I said. GET! OUT!" you yell as you pick up the empty bowl, and throw it against the wall. It breaks into three big pieces which scatters the back wall. The spoon that was in the bowl flies back towards you and hits the end of the bed.
Emily runs out, scared and furious.
It's better this way. That is how you feel. Getting close to someone just makes them a liability. It's better to be alone.

You decide to sleep a bit more.