Chapter 6

  If you ever woke up with a hangover and thought to yourself 'Damn, this is the absolute worst feeling in the world.' then just imagine how it feels to wake up the morning after nearly dying from a battle with an eldritch beast. It's worse. Much much worse.

  When my eyes opened, I was immediately met with an unfamiliar ceiling. It had been my first morning after waking up in a completely different world, so it'd be expected that I wasn't familiar with too many ceilings, but the ceiling was the least of my concerns.

  While some of the events of the previous night were mostly clear in my mind, there was a massive cloud of miasmic confusion hanging over the final events. Joan and I had battled with the rat-things. I looked cool, except nobody saw. We heard a noise and followed it to its source. We confronted a Deep One in an alley just off the main road. I was hurt badly, Joan was hurt worse. I found something, what was it? I tried to save Joan. But then...

  Then what?

  How did I get here?

  "You know, I can see you staring at the ceiling like an idiot. It gets more awkward the longer you go without saying something." A familiar voice cut through the silence.

  "Joan..."

  "Did your head get damaged last night? Of course I'm Joan, who else would be here putting up with you at this time of day?"

  "How?.. Last night... How?..." I couldn't find the words, but luckily Joan bailed me out before I spent too long sputtering.

  "It's pretty embarrassing to make the damsel carry you back from the battle field. Remind me to cut down on your ramen serving today because I don't know if I'll be able to lift you if you get any fatter."

  "You carried me?" My poor body image definitely couldn't handle a conversation poking at my weight. Joking or not, I decided to gloss over it and stay on topic.

  "I found you laying on the ground with a dislocated shoulder. Although with how you're reacting this morning, I'd think that you had hit that thing with your head instead of your shoulder."

  I still hadn't moved at all, my eyes remained trained on the ceiling.

  So it had all been a dream? I'd passed out after tackling the Deep One, and I'd made Joan carry my lifeless body all the way back to the room.

  Parts of the fog from the night before had been teasing at the edges of my memory. The Deep One saying something about self defense. Trying to carry Joan back but failing. Somehow magically dragging her back even though my body didn't respond. Asking Joan if she hated me.

  Honestly I couldn't say whether my imaginary accounts of the night before were more embarrassing, or if Joan's reality of events was worse. Either way, it would be difficult to make eye contact. Last night proved that I was only holding Joan back. My display during the interview with the mayor was so cocky, but was I just making a fool of myself? Maybe it would be better if Joan just left me behind.

  I finally sat up in bed, but I kept my eyes turned away from Joan. Surprisingly my shoulder was no longer dislocated, and aside from everything in my body being sore, I didn't appear to have any actual injuries. My HP bar was also registering as full.

  "Hey Joan. Did you heal me last night after we got back?"

  "I don't have any abilities that would do that, so I wouldn't have had any way. I think we both healed overnight."

  That makes sense. I wondered if there were even any potions or healing abilities in this game, or if everything had to heal overnight, or at least over a period of time. Now that I thought about it, I didn't even know for sure if dying in the game was permanent, or if we would respawn afterwards. Knowing the way this game had been set up so far, I would bet on death being final, and unless I found out otherwise it would probably be safe to keep that assumption.

  "I really don't want to say this, but it's weird having you this quiet and serious. At least other times when you get serious, you're just talking nonstop and trying to look like you know what you're doing. You're not even going to compare this situation to a Star Wars?" Her observation made my complicated feelings grow even more complicated. It was almost as if she missed my references. But more than anything, it was really hard to keep my immense respect for her after she said the phrase 'A Star Wars'.

  "Sorry, I'm just out of sorts. Let me think," Glancing around the room, I tried to think up some sort of pop culture reference to throw into this moment, "I feel like Goku after he gets killed fighting Vegita. But he worked hard and eventually got back to where he was in top shape, so I need to follow his lead."

  "I know what some of those words are. But if this Guko guy died, how did he come back, let alone stronger. That's just sloppy writing."

  "I'll have to watch DBZ with you sometime, it'll make sense if you watch it."

  "I'd rather not. If for no other reason, that would involve spending time with you that isn't absolutely necessary." Even though I wasn't looking at her, I could sense the smile on her face. I was slowly getting used to understanding when her insults were serious and when they were playful. But to be honest, maybe I was just being delusional and every insult was completely serious.

  My eyes awkwardly shifting to everything in the room except for her caused my eyes to fall on something sitting on the night table next to my bed. It was a folded piece of paper. Suddenly interested, I swung my foot over the edge of the bed and grabbed the paper.

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  "Just asking to be thorough, but you didn't put some paper next to my bed, did you?"

  "If you're asking if I left you a love note, the answer is never in a million lifetimes. If you're asking about just a piece of random paper, the answer is also no, but less emphatically."

  "I have feelings. A simple no would have been plenty." Even if I knew she was joking, that one kind of stung.

  Having confirmed the paper didn't come from Joan, I opened it up. My eyes widened as I read what was written inside, the text was large and written with red ink.

  Be mindful of the murders.

  One sentence. Five words. And possibly the most obvious message in the history of messages. Of course I'd be mindful of the murders, what the hell did they think I had been doing. I was literally trying to solve the case of the disappearances, obviously I'm mindful of the...

  But that's not right. As far as I know, we could only list the situation as disappearances. With no bodies, we could speculate, but there was no confirmation that murders had taken place. Did the writer of this note know something that we didn't? Or did they just make an assumption. Maybe it was just sloppy writing by the GM, after all that god's storytelling ability has been lacking so far. It wouldn't be surprising to find yet another example of weak or lazy writing.

  The point that we had no evidence might not be entirely true. Thinking back to some of the blurry parts of the night before, right before I remembered tackling the Deep One...

  "Do you remember finding anything in that alley last night? Like something that looked like a skin suit, or a literal pile of skin?"

  "First, are you seriously going to sit over there reading your little note and not tell me what it says. Second, are you implying you had a dream that the Deep One was into kinky sex play?" With my head going a million different directions, it took Joan saying something to remind me how rude I had been. Obviously the note's contents were important to her to, even if the contents of the note appeared to be an example of poor writing by the most omniscient of all eldritch beings.

  "My bad. It said Be mindful of the murders. I was thinking how redundant it was, but then I remembered something from the night before. Right before I tackled that thing, when I was standing up, my hand found a pile of skin and clothes on the ground. I mean it was dark so maybe my eyes and other senses played tricks on me. And my memory isn't actually adding up to the real events of last night, so maybe I remembered wrong. Now that I think about it, did you hear it saying something about self defense?"

  After a much longer silence than normally takes place in our conversations, she finally replied, "I didn't see any piles of flesh, but if it was there that might be huge for the investigation. And as for Deep Ones saying something, they don't speak English. They just make weird croaking noises, and hearing them in real life instead of just reading descriptions of them made me realize just how much more disturbing some of this stuff is in real life."

  "I'm aware that in the source material, Deep Ones aren't capable of speaking English. But what if that's different in this game? What if they can? I mean, in my experience playing homebrewed campaigns with different GMs, it's not uncommon for the GM to make convenient changes to established rules in order to move their plot along."

  "Once again, with your description, I understood some of those words. But if I get the gist, you're talking about a person writing an adaptation but changing objective elements of the story to make it fit into the adapted product? I can't even really make fun of you for that point, it makes sense especially based off of what we've seen so far since coming here." I finally turned to Joan as she talked, finding a slight smile on her face. She didn't actually look annoyed with me, which helped my soul recover ever-so-slightly. "But what would self defense have to do with anything? Would it be saying it killed the others in self defense? Or maybe just that it attacked us in self defense? But either way, why would that matter?"

  "I have a couple of suspicions, but none of them come anywhere close to factoring self defense into the equation. Maybe it was something that just sounded like self defense. Or maybe it was part of the fever dream that I had after I passed out. My suspicions also have trouble tying a pile of skin to the disappearances. Deep Ones aren't known to eat the insides of a person and just leave their skin and clothes. I know we just mentioned that our omniscient GM might be fudging the source material a bit, but that's a pretty big jump from the source material. I feel like we're still missing some pretty important pieces."

  "Are you always this lucid in the morning, or is this a fluke? Because if so, I'm tempted to just put you to sleep every time you start to get annoying so I can talk to this version of you when you wake up. I still find you repulsive, but at least we can move forward with the case."

  "Your teasing is just starting to get straight up mean. That one actually wounded me. I think it's the shock and pain and not just being lucid when I wake up. I'm actually sorry when I start going off on my tangents, I normally have meds to help with that kind of stuff, but unless we can find a pharmacy here that can fill my prescriptions or get back to my room on the cruise ship, I'd say you're stuck with the parts of me that I've worked so hard to fix. Even with the meds though... I get that there are reasons people either avoid me or choose to deal with me in small doses."

  If Joan had really just been teasing, maybe I had taken it a little too far. While I had always been one to stand up for people with disabilities, I also understand that it doesn't help to get oversensitive about things. Sadly Read the Room only currently worked to show impending hostile intent, and not actually show me a full spectrum of emotional intentions from people. If it'd give a blue outline if the person is joking. Or a pink outline if they're flirting. Stuff like that would make life so much easier.

  The silence following my comment at least told me that Joan internalized what I'd said. I hope I hadn't made things awkward. Most of the time I hadn't minded her teasing, in fact, I enjoyed our back and forths, even if she got the upper hand every single time.

  "Don't you dare repeat this, especially back to me." Joan's eyes wandered everywhere except for meeting my own. "Your stupid jokes and pop culture references actually help sometimes. This world gets to be a lot. A lot. So, if you're also being a lot in a way that distracts me from everything else... Sometimes it helps. Very rarely. Like almost never. Maybe it only happened half of one time. But... I don't hate you."

  "That was almost sweet. No, that's mean. Thanks for saying that, it helps." The idea that Joan might actually hate me had been weighing on me for quite some time. It was good to finally hear it from her. Although why did I feel a sense of deja vu?

  "So..." I said, meeting her eyes. "Is this where we hug it out?"

  "Absolutely not. If you act like this every time I say something nice to you, you'll condition me to actively never say anything nice to you. Even at your funeral, I'd stand over your coffin and hurl insults at you."

  "You'd really come to my funeral?" My ability to sentimentally cling to only that part of her comment wasn't just a playful comeback. As sad as it was, it made me happy to think she felt going to my funeral was something so obvious that it wasn't even up for debate.

  "I'm just going to move on, or else I might make sure your funeral happen sooner than later." Annoyance creeping in, Joan diverted the conversation, "So where should we go first? We talked about going to the mayor's office again to talk to the receptionist when the mayor isn't around. And of course we should probably meet back up with Sheriff Placeholder to see if there are any updates and let him know what we found."

  "We also asked Riff to pull up some specifics on the disappearances. Names and numbers. I think at this point, we're going to find infinitely more talking to Riff first than going to meet with Zuul."

  "Zu... Seriously Clay? We beat that Ghostbusters reference to death yesterday. Her name is not Zuul. It's..." She stopped, suddenly realizing she never got the mayor's receptionist's name.

  "Until we learn her name, she will be Zuul. The fact that you knew who I was talking about shows that it's effective."

  "I'm going to call her the receptionist before I call her Zuul."

  "That's really reductive of you, Joan. That poor woman is more than just a receptionist. She's a human being."

  "You're an asshole. Also, she's not a human being, she's some sort of artificial being made for this game."

  Joan's comment made me realize something that we had both apparently assumed, but might actually not be true. "Do we know for sure they're artificial? We don't really know anything about the NPCs yet. I agree that they are probably just things that god programmed to further his campaign. But also, I can't see any way that ties back into the current investigation, so just keep it in mind. Especially when we're dealing with them, maybe we take some caution and not act all sociopath with the NPCs, just in case."

  "Now you make me feel like an asshole. You're such an asshole."

  "I accept that we're both equally assholes." An earnest smile spread across my face. My initial mood for the day seemed to have completely dissipated.

  As I stood up out of bed to get ready for the day ahead, I glanced back at the note.

  Be mindful of the murders.

  Such a stupid note. Azathoth really sucked at this whole GM thing.