Sharing Stories

“A learning game? What are you, five?” Shady commented from above my head.

“I’m not asking you to learn the alphabet, bruh. ‘S a ‘learning about each other’ game!” the fox added. “Like Alcoholics Anonymous, except more magically revealing! N’ways, everyone at this table must share a unique thing about themselves!”

“What kind of a unique thing?” Nexxali asked.

“A thing that… makes you stand out!” Sage declared. “A swank secret, maybe? From what I’m peering in the Astral, everyone gathered here has a flavor of abandonment issues and is emotionally needy in some way. Butt ‘das just general surface you! So, tell the new friends gathered here about what makes you unique from the others at this table! Let’s start with our Princess and then go left. Shades, tell everyone how you’re not a cardboard cutout average Wendigo-bun. How are you different from other Frontenachii royalty and Fleet Commanders?”

“Pffff,” Shady made a dismissive noise above me. “I’m plenty unique. Next question.”

“Nuh-uh,” Sage wagged a finger. “No shallowery! Elaborate, dig deep. Show your belly, deer-princess-wolfie.”

“Wendigos do not show bellies.”

“Metaphorical belly, Shadi-o.”

Shady’s grip on me tightened fractionally. I felt her chest expand with a long, slow breath, pressing against my back like two pillows. The booth creaked.

“Whyever would I tell MY personal things to a prad dog I just met?” she asked, presumably glaring at Laika.

“You’ve already been chatting about some personal things. ‘Dis is a max-trust building exercise,” Sage said, “Laika can smell deception in the Astral and I’ve set this Yesterweave locale for maximum honesty-ness revelation n’ confirmation to reinforce that! We are building trust with her so that when she inevitably wakes up, she will know whom to trust… Her current masters most likely share absolutely nothing with her. In comparison, our lovely pack’s gonn’ be extra sharing!”

Shady let out a mildly bothered noise.

“Come on, babe,” Nexxali elbowed Shady. “Is for the greater good of your peace with Ashy. It’s within our overall interests to get the doggo to trust us as much as possible.”

“Mmmmrgh, fine,” Shady stated. “I’m lazier than the other Frontenachii crown Highborns.”

“Lazier?” Galateya repeated.

“Way lazier,” Shady confirmed, stirring her charcoal boba with a long claw. “My cousins spent their childhoods training to command warships, memorizing lineage charts, practicing their scary faces in mirrors. I spent mine chilling in Omnithornia with my dad and also stealing memes from the thoughts of nearby kobolds and then humans during the summers I spent on Earth.”

“You stole memes from people’s heads?” Laika asked.

“Thoughts are free real estate if you’re a Wendigo,” Shady shrugged. “The kobold chefs of my father’s mansion had the BEST internal monologues. One of them, Bhakkus, used to mentally narrate his entire cooking process like he was hosting a competition show. ‘And now Bhakkus adds the salt! Will it be enough? The crowd holds its breath!’ Meanwhile, he’s alone in a kitchen making soup for my father’s stupid dinner party.”

Nexxali snorted into her Mega Supreme.

“Most Frontenachii princesses don’t lurk in kitchen staff minds for entertainment?” I asked.

“The other princesses are lame,” Shady said. “My half-sister Variyanne collects severed heads. My cousin Drathrania memorized the entire Imperial Legal Code for fun. Fun! Who does such a thing?”

“And what else did you do as a kid?” Sage asked.

“Sneaked around,” Shady said. “Found a Deep-diving artifact in my fam’s hoard. Got down to kobold quarters, sat with them invisibly half submerged in the Deep, listened to their stories and tried to understand their lives.”

“And did you learn important lessons from that?” the fox asked.

“Pfff, nah,” Shady said. “I usually leapt out of the Deep to terrorise the piss outta them at the most funny moment. Anyways, eventually I got bored of that and found my Aunt. Then I met Ashy. And since then, I mainly wanted to hang out with my bestie like we used to.”

She poked my cheek.

“This darn nerd never let me win at checkers after I split his mind,” she added.

“Yep,” I laughed, recalling Shady’s struggle at defeating me.

“I respected you for it,” Shady petted me. “And also wanted to throw the board at your head. Both feelings coexisted peacefully.”

“They absolutely did not coexist peacefully,” I said. “You flipped the board at least three times in a day.”

“Passion for the game, Ashy,” she stated.

Sage rested her chin on her palms wiggling, big, orange-red fluffy ears. “So your unique thing is being a competitive couch potato princess?”

“My unique thing,” Shady said, “is I left the most powerful family, abandoned a mountain of gold and artifacts because ruling was tedious. Soul-crushingly dull boredom, like… Meetings about tariffs. Reports about colony yield percentages, delving parties and dungeon manifestations. Diplomatic dinners where everyone smiled and plotted murder behind their soup spoons and Ambrosia wine glasses. Plus, I could HEAR their murder plots, which made the soup taste worse.”

“What kind of soup?” Nexxali asked.

“Irrelevant.”

“It’s never irrelevant. Soup context matters!”

Shady ignored the feline foodie. “I hated it all and wanted to build forts, watch Alien versus Predator movies while crunching on chips, run wild in Darkfall and body-slam my best friend into a pile of leaves. The Frontenachii Empire offered me a Dreadnought and a division of devoted pradavarian kobolds to boss around. I fucked off to Earth instead.”

Laika was staring at Shady with mildly confused awe.

“You left… everything?” the dog asked. “Power, wealth, a mountain of gold and magic, an empire… for chips and movies?”

“For this idiot.” Shady squeezed me. “Who makes the chips and movies enjoyable. And… I wouldn’t change a thing. Okay, maybe I’d change the part where I died a hundred and thirteen times yesterday. That was annoying as fuck. There, happy?”

Sage drummed colorful nails on the table. “Aight, aight. Good start, Princess Couch Tater. Very humanizing. Ash, you’re up! Share with the class!”

I took a sip of my green apple tea, chewing on a boba.

“There’s nothing unique about me.” I tried to avoid the attention of five pairs of eyes locked onto me.

“Liar,” Shady said from above my skull. “You’re the weirdest human I’ve ever met.”

“How many humans have you even met and got to know personally?” I asked her.

“Enough to know that you’re the weirdest.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“Welcome.” She mussed up my hair.

“I’m an engineering graduate who could barely afford ramen. I play too many video games. I have a sleep schedule a doctor would weep at. I’m the most average dude on this planet.”

“Average dudes,” Nexxali drawled, tail swatting my thigh, “don’t acquire four girlfriends from different dimensions in the span of a single week or take down invader alien fleets.”

“Come on, A-man,” Sage encouraged. “Dig. Something from before me and T-buns. Who were you before all of us landed on your head?”

I chewed on a tapioca, contemplating what to say for a minute.

“I was a lonely kid,” I sighed. “My parents put me on anti-psychotics when I was nine because I kept talking about Shady. The meds worked, in the sense they made me stop thinking about her. They also made me stop thinking about a lot of things. I got quiet. I got good at being invisible. In high school I was the kid who sat in the back corner and never raised his hand.”

“Aww,” Sage said softly.

“Overall, things did get a bit better at eighteen,” I said. “I found engineering, met Dax, tapered off the heavier meds. Dax became my rock at college. When we weren’t hanging out IRL, we played games together every night, had voice calls going for hours. I was meh at most classes, except for circuit building. Turns out my brain is really, really good at systems… probably because I thought in parallel processing without realizing it. Circuits, logic gates, signals. I could look at a schematic and see the whole thing at once, all the pathways, all the failure points. My professors called it intuitive. I called it the only thing I was more than mediocre at.”

“Shush. You’re good at other things,” Shady murmured into my hair.

“Like what?”

“Like making people want to protect you,” she said. “It’s infuriating. Look at all these sexy sharks circling you to offer you their protection!”

“Rawr.” Sage made an anime-shark-noise, showing off her foxy Skinwalker canines.

“Pretty sure that’s not how sharks work,” I fired back at Shady.

“What? The shark in Jaws was obviously in love with Chief Brody,” Shady insisted, tapping a claw against my chest for emphasis. “Think about it! The shark followed him everywhere! She isolated him from his pack. She destroyed the boat named Orca to remove the physical barrier between them. That wasn’t an attack, Ashy.”

“What was it then?” I wondered.

“An aggressive courtship display!”

“The shark ate Quint,” I pointed out.

“Quint was a third wheel!” Shady threw her hands up, nicking the low-hanging lamp with one of her blade-claws. “He was blocking the romance! The shark removed the competition. And then she leaped onto the sinking deck? A hearty glomp! She obviously wanted a hug! A classic enemies-to-lovers tale, where the smool, dum humans are too fragile to understand the love language of an apex predator. Tragedy. Absolute tragedy.”

The table went silent and then Sage burst into laughter. I chortled too.

“Oh my god,” the fox gasped, wiping her eyes. “I will never watch that movie the same way again. ‘Senpai Shark noticed me!’”

“See?” Shady looked vindicated. “The skinnie fox gets it,” she squeezed me, “Appreciate the effort the monster puts in.”

“Right,” I said. “Note to self: never let you plan our Valentine’s Day.”

“Okay, A-man, let’s not get derailed by movie-trivia,” Sage said. “You were a lonely kid, you found engineering, blah blah blah. What’s the unique thing?”

“I guess…” I stated. “My unique thing is that I’m stupid enough to say ‘no’ to the end of the world. Everyone else… All the governments, the armies, they all got paralyzed by the moon-droppery. They’ve all accepted the script. Like Laika said, the ending is written. But I looked at the schematic, and I didn’t see a finished board. I saw a faulty circuit. And I just… refused to let it burn out.”

I looked up at Laika.

“I’m stubborn,” I told her. “That’s my thing. I will break the laws of physics, magic, and common sense just to keep my friends safe. That’s what makes me unique… I guess.”

Laika stared back at me, head tilted as she processed my words, tail giving a slow, thoughtful thump against the booth. “Stubbornness… as a weapon?”

“Exactly,” Nexxali purred. “My turn, yes?”

“Go for it, kitty,” Sage said.

“Mmmm… mmm… Where do I even begin,” the serval mused, licking boba residue off a fang. “I suppose my unique trait is… I don’t know which of my own emotions are real.”

“Why?” Laika wondered.

“I used my voice on myself for decades.” Nexxali swirled the boba straw in lazy circles in her glass. “Edited myself endlessly with Riffweld. I sang myself into being brave when I was terrified. Sang myself into being confident when I wanted to curl up and die. Sang away jealousy, sang away grief, sang loyalty to commanders I hated. Sang while I read shit in the Librarium archives…”

She sighed.

“After twenty-something years of self-editing, you start to wonder… Do I actually like the color orange, or did I sing myself into liking it because my commanding officer wore orange and I needed to find her tolerable, to make her trust me?”

She stole and popped a stray boba into her mouth from Teya’s plate.

“Also… The thing I love most about this lovely planet,” she added with a warmer tone, “is the surprises. The human-only, linear civilization and its many wonders. Every new thing I encounter here… is extra fantastic ‘cus I know I haven’t pre-programmed myself to enjoy it. And the Frontenachii wish to destroy this wonder, to change the local humanity with eugenics and to plant gargantuan terraforming trees all over the place to pump mana into the air. Well, I ain’t gon’ let them! This planet stays weird and wonderful and full of food I haven’t sampled yet!”