Dreams and Reality (3)

The Barony of Havenmead was about 4 days of travel on foot from the nearest trade city, Silvercross. There, the plan was for Annabelle and I to board a stagecoach to Highcrest, in which being a county capital in the Holy Kingdom of Calice was mandated to have a Templar sect. It was in this specific sect that Annabelle was undergoing her apprenticeship in and, owing to six months of good service as a Templar Apprentice, was finally allowed to take their Initiation test that was unfortunately disrupted by the untimely assassination of Rowan the Elder.

I knew this, of course, as I had played through this section of the game multiple times, most recently as PrimotGodXXX. Initially, my reasons for running through the tutorial on multiple accounts stemmed mainly from the fact that I was poor after participating in the rugpull crypto scam known as DogeStraightSon—when I became more seasoned at the game, it was because I couldn’t help but type a little bit too much whenever I won and ended up getting banned on multiple accounts for text abuse. In the end, I had to part ways with my talent of using the in-game chat feature to lay waste to my opponents’ mentals, which inadvertently caused the info dump that Saint Alicia had so kindly laid out for me to be completely lost to the void.

Annabelle, as an apprentice, had no steed. To be honest with you, I did not know that Templars in the Quanta TCG universe were supposed to have horses at all, but this made sense. After all, they were meant to be the equivalent of fantasy knights, but I assumed that travel in the Quantaverse would involve flying around or teleporting or things like that given the shitty one turn kills combos that you could pull at the higher levels of the game. Annabelle stuck strictly to this vow of having no steed, and, despite her Life affinity which would give her a natural boost in taming wild horses and ponies (of which we saw many in the plains of Havensmead), she insisted on not doing so. She could also have summoned [Giant Frogs] or [Cockatrices] that we could have hopped around on, but those were according to her “massive creatures” and would have definitely “caused panic amongst the villagers of Havenmead”. I got the impression that she was just dogshit at summons and didn’t own the cards. At some point she offered to tame a horse for me and let me ride it while she walked alongside, but I brushed off the idea quickly as being too shameless. It wasn’t like we were in a rush, anyway.

In the end, walking was a good experience. It was the most exercise I’d gotten in a while, and the challenge of being in what was essentially half-plate added a nice weight training aspect to it. Maybe I would eventually change my mind on day 4, but for now, day one of hiking was surprisingly enjoyable. Before long, we’d reached a clearing and decided to make camp before the sun had fully set.

“Do you need help with anything?” I asked Annabelle, knowing full well that I didn’t need to.

She was busy at the moment conjuring camp supplies from her Codex—two tents, a table, stools, even a wooden bath. I didn’t yet have a good idea of what the limits of this world were in terms of magic, but if Annabelle was merely an apprentice—the equivalent of being unranked, basically—then someone at Divine tier could probably just literally create worlds. Given that most games at Divine rank were decided by playing creatures that were often explicitly stated to be gods in their flavour texts or sweaty combos, I found myself morbidly curious about the extent of power in this world.

More importantly, it was clear that in a universe where magic existed, manual labour was useless. I understood that Annabelle knew this.

“Um,” she said, considering my (performative) offer of help. “Perhaps you would like to… set the table?”

“Sure,” I said, making it apparent that I was absolutely and morbidly disgusted by this request.

“I’m sorry,” she suddenly said. “I’m sorry. Okay, how about we, uh, go forage together?”

“Su— wait, what?” How did she go from assigning me a braindead task to an actually difficult one? “No, I can set the table.”

“But you—”

You fool. Let me weaponise my incompetence in peace! “Nah, I’m alright. I can just wait while you go out and get food.”

After assigning Annabelle two spoons and myself two forks, I decided to watch her for a bit to understand what she meant by “forage”. You would think that if you were able to conjure camp supplies, that would include food—like literally summon a chicken or something and slaughter it in the worst case—so this step in the process of preparing camp surprised me. Or perhaps it was because Life-affinities in this world were tantamount to vegans, or maybe Annabelle was using this as a pretext to find stuff to get high on. After about five minutes of what I realised was her just basically digging up every plant she could find, she came back to the table and formed a magic circle around the hodgepodge of random shit that included twigs and grass and what I was certain were poisonous mushrooms. Completely inedible stuff. Maybe this girl is “special”? Still, I found myself oddly curious of what the outcome of this would be, and after pouring quanta into this circle for a bit… a pot of beef stew came out.

“What.”

“Um… do you know about forming rations?”

Forming… Rations..?

Oh… [Form Rations]. It’s a colourless 2-quanta card that turns a Plant, Fungus, or Animal into a Food token at Slow speed. It’s a useless card that never sees play in Standard, and maybe some fringe play in Challenge formats, but I guess in this universe…

“I did, but I didn’t realise things could work this way.”

Swapping one of her spoons for my fork, she ladled in a bowl of stew for me. “Try it,” she smiled. “It’s really good. I’ve been making this for years, ever since I found the token for beef.”

That immediately snapped me back to reality. Token for beef. What the fuck? Was this girl even listening to herself?

This was idiotic. There was a non-zero chance that I was sleepwalking and shoving literal dirt in my mouth.

“I’ll wait for you.”

Not that seeing her eat first would change that fact, but still… that’s just a bunch of plants which happen to look like beef? If I was going to get food poisoning either way, I’d much rather suffer with someone else than alone.

Annabelle didn’t seem upset by my proposition, however, and ladled in her own bowl without complaint. When she saw me still eyeing the bowl suspiciously, she took in a big spoonful of carrots, potatoes, and beef.

Beef.

“Uwa… Delicious…”

…Uwa? Really?

Clearly, my brain still had a lot to work on as an aspiring LARPer. For starters, a white girl in a Western fantasy context was not going to moan and say, Uwa. This very incongruent detail I picked up on is enough to wipe whatever small amount of satisfaction I’d observed by watching this world’s version of microwave meal, and so did my fear of eating the bowl of transmogrified plant waste given my newfound hope of waking up by dying. A “return by death” as some would call it. Gehehe.

“Itadakimasu!” I yelled, capitalising on the comedic potential of having my last words be weeb pandering cringe.

I took in a spoonful, and predictably—

Oh shit. This is good. This is really, really good.

She smiles at me. “I’m glad you like it.”

…God damnit. I like it.

“…Yeah. It’s very British.”

“Bri…rish..?”

Ah.

Her response dialed my mood back a little bit.

It’s sad, isn’t it? I wasn’t even trying to be sarcastic. For a brief moment in time, I forgot who Annabelle was, and where I truly belonged, and I’d talked to her how I would’ve talked to someone real.

“Just a place that exists where I’m from,” I said.

“Mm.” Her tone was solemn.

Then suddenly, it picked up again. “Nevermind that.” Her blue eyes had a sudden glint to them. “I’m curious to know more about you, Primot.”

I winced. Primot this, Primot that…

Should I just give up and ask her to call me like, I don’t know—Kazuma? Rudeus? Louis Vuitton? How the fuck did I even type Primot in?

…Oh, whatever. The way she unironically called out my made up name had a nice feeling to it, anyway.

“In what way?” I replied, not missing a beat.

“In every way,” she said, between mouthfuls of magical beef stew. “Like where you’re from… or what your deal is.”

“Maybe it might make sense to just briefly exchange life stories.”

“Yeah! That’s a good idea,” she beamed. “Do you want to go first?”

“Um… sure. My name’s… not Primot, but you can call me that anyway. I think I’m 23 or 24. It’s one of those two… probably. I was studying to be a doctor when I was in university, but—”

“Sorry, question… What’s a ‘doctor’?”

“...Like a healer, I suppose.”

“Were you a magician?”

“No,” I smiled. “Magic doesn’t exist where I’m from. Instead, you’ve got to memorise books and books of information and practice physical surgery to heal people.”

Then for some reason, I added, “It was the most fulfilling thing in my life.”

“Mhm,” she nodded thoughtfully. “But… you didn’t become one in the end?”

“...No.”

“Why not?”

“...”

There’s a brief memory of a loud sound going off, and then the cabin slowly getting hotter and hotter. Screaming, then the smell of… smell of…

Hold on.

What exactly have I been eating this whole time?

I put the bowl of beef stew down.

There’s a beating in my ears that I can suddenly hear. Then there’s a loud noise, and it feels like I am sinking… A loud crash, and then… the smell of barbequed pork.

“I think I might—”

My insides explode from within me—a hot, acidic geyser tears up through my throat, and vomit jets out in thick, chunky waves of half eaten meat. But it doesn’t stop. The bile keeps going, long after it expelled the tiny spoonful of beef I’d eaten, and it feels like my insides are pouring out. The taste is rancid, metallic, it’s clinging to my fucking mouth like poison, and it’s still going, it’s still going. It’s all over the floor of this world, this dream, this hallucination, and still, I won’t wake up. I don’t know what Yui is saying. I don’t know what’s going on. She’s standing near me, mouthing something, I think it’s “are you okay” or something like that but I can’t hear her, the only thing I can hear is the sound of bile leaving me, of my body leaving me, of the insides of my body being melted. Melting. Or have they always been liquid this entire time? Blood is everywhere. I’m spewing blood out now. I am going to die. There is a green light, some strange green light, and I need to get up, I need to get out of my seat and walk before the plane explodes and—

***

“Detoxify!” Annabelle snapped.

I woke up, and suddenly, I found myself staring at a scene you’d expect from a paramedic horror story on social media. There was blood and vomit everywhere, a horrified nurse with a frantic expression, and I had a vague idea that I’d just spent the better part of the last minute shitting my insides out of my mouth. I felt relatively undamaged, but I wish I could say the same for the many things I had irreversibly tainted… including the bowl of beef stew Anna had prepared for me.

“Are you okay?!” she asked, heaving. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t know—”

“It’s fine,” I said, wiping the corners of my mouth with my hand. “It’s not your fault.”

“I’m sorry, it’s just that since you’re human, I assumed you could eat meat…”

“No, it’s okay. I forgot for a moment too. I’m just… allergic. Sometimes.”

“...I’m sorry,” she said.

No, Anna. If anything, keep apologising, and I’m going to feel guilty that I had the window seat again.

For the next forty minutes or so, Annabelle cleaned up the table using magic—conjuring away and reconjuring her furniture, using spells like [Cycle of Life] to decompose my refuse away quickly and turn it into what I’d normally describe as pretty flowers had they not been remnants of my mental illness—and then “foraged” by herself for a new chock full of miscellaneous plant matter. She then presented us with a plate of cinnamon rolls and various desserts, the only “tokens” in her Codex that didn’t contain meat.

And then I ate in silence. She’d lost her appetite, obviously.