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"Look," he begins, "not that I expect I'd find this convincing in your position, but -" and then the ground shimmers under them and half a second after that it's not there at all.
They fall.
The ground they hit instead is cold and muddy. The stars are exceptionally bright, and close overhead.
" - what?" says Ryan.
Alex doesn't answer him. Alex is looking out into the darkness, horrified.
"Useful, when you can do that." That probably sounded judgmental. Great. Paranoid and judgmental, that's what high school sophomores love.
"Yeah. I think it'd be pretty exhausting, having to deal with - everything, right now. Obviously it's not an ideal way to be, but - there're, like, things that I really need to deal with right now. And I'm gonna deal with those. But - I don't know if I can deal with everything else on top of those. So for now - the parts I can't deal with, I'm gonna let Alex and Wishbone deal with, until I can. I think they will probably be mostly responsible about this."
"Uh, if it's not a secret, why is your dog a person and why is his name Wishbone and how does he know this ritual?"
"Oh! It was a little bit of a secret back home, but at this point it's whatever. So he was actually a squire for one of the knights of the round table - I forget which, not one of the famous ones - and he got cursed to be a dog for all eternity, and apparently this had the side effect of making him immortal? So he's just been wandering around as a dog for about 1500 years now, and he's spent a bunch of it learning about demons and magic and all kinds of weird stuff in general, and - I dunno why his name is Wishbone, that was already his name when I met him."
"Okay." Wow, he's great at this conversation thing. Fantastic. He doesn't know how to build houses, either. "Do we know that curse? Some people might like being immortal dogs." And that's a very normal thing to think of, not desperately casting around for conversation topics at all.
"Nah, he doesn't know that one. And he says you have to be super powerful to cast it anyway, it's not something that just anyone can do."
"Wishbone thinks we can do it. He's keeping the details pretty close to his chest because he's very insistent that if at any point I wanna back out then nobody should be able to make it happen anyway. But he thinks we can do it."
"Well, that's good of him. - I asked the Quendi to swear to their stories. He sounds pretty terrible."
"Yeah. It's - interesting - when you're just dealing with non-magic humans you can pretty much always assume that they're not just trying to be evil, that their plan has more steps than 'be as evil as possible, forever', and so when you hear 'all he wants is to expand his torture factories across the whole world' it's a bit hard to imagine. But I guess some people are just like that, actually."
"Less hard to imagine than it would have been a year and a half ago, given that, uh, vampires. But yeah."
"Before -" he gestures vaguely at the Elf city - "my job was hanging out with the vampires. Some of them would have probably paved over the world with torture factories but I think lots of them would have stopped at one. They get bored."
"Yeah, they're not all evil-maximizers. I know one who's, like - he's killed seven thousand people and he's totally remorseless about it, but if he's not in a position to do that then he's just, like, fine? He's actually the person who helped me not get killed before I met Alex, he told me what a vampire slayer was because he figured that if we were friends then I wouldn't dust him. Which, uh, worked brilliantly, I guess. He risked his life in an attempt to save the world one time, even. Mostly we hang out at the arcade and spend too many quarters on trying to beat each other at stuff.
" - or, we used to, I guess. Man, I'm gonna miss Zeke."
"Gosh. I guess maybe they didn't need it back in paradise. I mean, I guess the real money economy is actually sort of a late invention, later than you'd think, but - it's hard to think about not having it.
" - you miss anything a lot?"
Half a laugh. "My team. My sister. My Walkman, my comfortable pair of boots, laundry machines, ironing boards, running water, my dog..."
"Yeah. Same. Except for the dog. Obviously. - I have this nephew who's like, six years old, and he lives with me and my sister, and I keep - wondering if he's still waiting for me to come home. However that even works."
"Happens to the best of us. I've already died, like, twice. Technically."
"...I have no idea. But it's not like I have a true resurrection spell in my back pocket, I just happen to have only died under circumstances that were easy to magically reset. Well, uh, the first time it was actually just CPR, but the slayer line counted it as a death, so I'm counting it too."
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