Both their wounds close up and get well on their way toward healing fully.

"Ooh. That feels much better. Cute, handy with a firebolt, and able to heal? Quite a handy combo." She grins playfully. "So what's your name, and would you like to keep teaming up even after we head back to town and collect our bounty?"

<Go on,> Hailey teases internally, <you've only known her for five minutes.>

<Is anything I said wrong?>, Sable fires back with an internal smirk.

She opens her mouth, pauses. 

"Hyacinth," she says after a second. "Though I will admit I didn't really think about how it'd abbreviate. Sin and Sable, the purple sisters. Kind of cute." She tugs at a strand of her own lavender hair. "You were really cool fighting those wolves by the way."

"Pretty name, Hyacinth. I do like the ring of Sin and Sable, too. Not sure about sisters, though," she grins warmly as she replies, arching her eyebrows a bit at the end. “And thanks. This game really rewards external skill, and the opportunity to practice in private VR combines really dangerously with having nothing to do. The result is being surprisingly good with a sword."

Not sure about sisters, huh? Well she'll file that away for a bit.

Hyacinth plants her staff firmly. It's a casual motion. 

"Yeah," she says. "I'm just coming from Realms of Dragons so I'm a mixture of a complete newbie and an actually good player. The sharpness of wounds in this one really surprised me."

She nods. "It's kind of a lot. Feels... grounding, for me, though. I suppose that's why I made a melee build." She hums a bit. "I haven't played Realms of Dragons. Wasn't a flexible enough magic system for me, honestly, and I wanted something eighteen-plus. No worries about not knowing CORA, though. I think that was level level two for both of us. I just know swords and guns for my own special interest reasons, is all, and picked the former for my build."

<I'm a special interest? Awwww!>, teases Ruby, hugging Sable mentally.

She rubs her thigh where the wound was. It still aches, but kind of in a nice way.

Sheeeeeeeeeeelving that thought.

"Yeah, I wanted to... move on a bit. I moved out recently and I wanted a new game my family wasn't also playing. CORA's been big lately so I decided to try it out."

"Makes sense!" She offers the shorter girl her arm. "Shall we return to town?"

Yeah she will totally take some support on her way back towards town. Getting to cling to the pretty girl a bit is just a bonus. 

"Please, let's, I think I'm close to empty on mana."

And so Sable will escort Hyacinth, arm in arm, back to the small Parcosian village that issued this bounty. The woods are mostly quiet, with birds chirping occasionally. When they're most of the way back to town, Sable pauses for a moment, her wings, horns, and tail shimmering and vanishing.

Hyacinth pauses. "Um, should I be hiding my ears?"

She paws at one of them, and is rewarded with an alien but very pleasant burst of sensory feedback. 

She frowns and shakes her head. "No. You're fine. Darklings sometimes get a bit of unpleasantness, but no one gives artifisuki or any other nonhumans any trouble unless they've spent too much time listening to Pagutum's bullshit."

It appears Sable has mistaken Hyacinth for a non-fae foxgirl.

Being mistaken for artifisuki suits her just fine. 

She tilts her head. "Who's this Pagutum character then?"

"Big country full of assholes across the sea to the east, lots of propaganda against nonhumans, some homophobic and transphobic propaganda more recently too. They invaded Joret, which was supposed to be one of the newbie starter nations."

Oh. 

Of course. 

She sighs. "Do you ever get the feeling that CORA's devs made the game a little too realistic?"

She giggles a bit and nods. "I do wonder sometimes. I think this was outside action, though, at least if the rumors I'm hearing about the Patriot Church being involved have any truth to them."

"Ugh. Them. America loses one war against the Commonwealth..." 

She sighs and futzes with her hair a little. 

"Can we focus on questing a bit? I don't play games to do politics." 

She pauses, tilts her head. "Actually that's a lie, I'm pretty damn good at Mafia. But that's for fun. It's different when real world shit gets involved."

"Good idea, Sin," she says with a laugh and a grin, "I'm trying to avoid those assholes myself. So we're going to get enough money from this to afford an inn for tonight, along with some very basic supplies you're going to need — waterskin, some food, bedroll, a personal tent, maybe some little warding stakes to go around it. If you're sticking with me longer we can share my stakes, but I still want you to have a pair of your own. After that we can see about upgrades to your gear."

She hums thoughtfully. "I don't have explicit plans about next quests yet. I guess we'll see what's available when we get there."

"Yeah, I think I'll stick around. You seem interesting." 

She ducks her head. "Sorry about the swearing by the way, the guilds back in Realms of Dragons were... very male-dominated and I found that swearing got me taken a bit more seriously. I can knock it off if it makes you uncomfortable."

Sable giggles and grins, shaking her head. "Unless you start quoting Patriot Church doctrine at me and suggesting I should be purged or calling me 'young man'," she makes an eloquently disgusted face for a moment, before returning to her easy grin, "it'll take a lot more than some cursing to make me uncomfortable."

"Why on earth would I call you "young man" when you're obviously a girl?" 

Wait, hold on a second - 

"It's funny how a group that talks so much about 'souls' spends so much time insisting the circumstances of your body at birth dictate identity more than who you know you are inside, don't you think?"

"Yeah, it really is." 

She ducks her head.