Pull up your pants and get moving

For a while, you wonder if the trial will impose some kind of barrier to stop you from leaving the thread behind. After about twenty minutes of walking along the sand bar, that doesn’t seem to be the case. I guess I’m allowed to stray from “the path,” then, you think, conscious of the glowing, golden thread that you left lodged in the sand back at the spawn point. Why give us a literal path to follow this time, though? None of the other trials have been this straightforward. That thought only makes you more interested in what you might find over here. You keep walking.

Ten more minutes go by before something interesting happens. As you continue walking down the strip of sand, something begins to come into view: an island, suspiciously similar to the one you left behind at the spawn point. As you get closer, it seems more and more identical, from its size, to its shape, to the distance between it and the thin sand bar you’re strolling down. Then you spot something else: a glimmer of golden light, flickering on the horizon. The glimmer becomes steadier as you approach, until it becomes clear that you’ve once again found “the path.” A line of golden thread travels from the beach, over the waves, and disappears behind the tree line of the island. You look back in the direction you came from, and sure enough, the island and thread you left behind have vanished. At some point, you must have hit an invisible wall and looped back on yourself.

Or, at least that would be the theory, if not for Lia. As you approach the golden thread, you find your catkin companion sitting at its base, hugging her knees and staring out at the ocean. Her cat-like ears perk up as you draw close, but she doesn’t otherwise react to your presence.

“Hey, are you alright?” you ask. She gives no response. “Lia,” you say, while waving a hand in front of her face.

“What? Oh…” She blinks a few times and looks around, then looks you up and down as if to acknowledge your existence, but ultimately returns her eyes to the sea. “I’m fine. Where’s your gear?”

“I don’t know.” You take a seat on the sand next to the catkin and join her in sea gazing. “It might not have teleported with me.” A quick glance at her waist reveals that Lia’s knife is missing from its sleeve. The last time you saw it, you’d just stabbed it into a fish man’s abdomen. So that didn’t come with her either. It must be that only the stuff we have on us at the time comes with us, then, you think.

But Neró was touching me when the teleport happened, and she didn’t come with. So it doesn’t apply to living things? Or maybe just not the NPCs. Maybe it’s more specific, and only certain things are allowed to transfer over, like equipment and supplies. For fuck’s sake, what are the rules of this place? We’ve been in these “trials” for almost a month now, and we still don’t know basic shit like that. Fucking wizard… Explain your goddamn game better. I wouldn’t have made Neró kiss my dick if I knew it’d end the… well, maybe I still would have, but I would have grabbed all my shit first! My bag had all my Earth stuff in it, so is that just fucking gone now? I mean, I guess there wasn’t much point in holding onto…

Okay, hold on, you think. That’s enough with the rambling negativity. You blink and look around, making sure that everything around you is still the same as you left it before your brain went on a ranting adventure. Sure enough, you’re still sitting next to Lia, watching the glowing, golden thread sway in the wind as it points incessantly over the rolling waves towards the island in the distance. You take a deep breath, letting your negative thoughts slip away as you exhale.

“Why am I different?” Lia asks, breaking the silence that had dragged on for who knows how long.

“Different?” you say, not really understanding her question. She looks the same to me, you think. Did something happen?

“You don’t treat me like you do other women,” she says. Her eyes remain fixed on the island out at sea, refusing to give you any insight beyond what her words can provide. “With me, aside from that time you blackmailed me into showing you around town, you’ve been nice. More than nice, actually. When I stole your stuff, you could have taken everything I had as payback and no one would have stood up for me, but you only took back your own things. You even left me some of the money you got by selling your own clothes. It wasn’t much, but for someone like me… that amount could have really turned my life around.

“With other women, you… corrupt them. Reduce them to your toys and order them to do things.” She pauses, as if she expects you to interject. When you don’t, she says, “Blythe, for example. I know she dresses lewdly because you make her do it. I saw it… back in Hes, when you made her walk, naked, through the hall that morning.”

You think back to the morning in question, over two weeks of grueling ship travel ago. It was a simpler time: the night before, you’d actually used a functioning toilet and taken a warm bath. When you woke up, there was a naked, busty elf lying in bed beside you, and she’d purposefully left all of her clothes in her own suite across the hall. So Lia was watching us back then, you think. At the time, you were so focused on other things that you must not have noticed Lia’s door cracked open. I wonder if Blythe knew. It probably would have made it more exciting for her.

“Then you go and whip your… thing… out in front of that possessed bitch,” says Lia. “Blythe and I saw it. The ice trapping us inside suddenly melted, right before the white fire appeared, and we both saw what you were doing. Why would you…” Lia’s whole head turns bright red as she recalls the scene of Neró kissing your erect cock. She presses her face into her legs, muffling her next words so that you barely hear her say, “She was trying to kill you… and then… You must have done something to her…”

Lia goes quiet.