She nods, then kneels down in front of the moose and starts carving them apart. It's calming, meditative. Soon enough she has a great deal of moose meat, various organs, antlers, and more bleak essence.

She stands and nods, wiping her hands off on a relatively clean and intact bit of pelt, then finishing the cleanup with the flat of a shadow cutter.

"Okay. That's that. Ready to get out of here?"

"For sure."

And she offers her hand.

Hailey takes her hand with a wry little smile and starts back toward town. "Well, that was an adventure."

"That's for sure." 

Hyacinth sighs softly and smiles at Hailey. "Thank you. You've been taking blows so I don't have to."

"Glad to. Comparative advantage and all that."

"Fair enough, I guess."

And on they walk.

They pass the leftover charcoal of the small bonfire, and make their way back through the woods.

"Pity nobody's figured out uploading, yet," Hailey comments at one point. "Be nice to be entirely digital, stop worrying about the meat suit altogether."

"You'd have to do it very carefully, to maintain continuity of conciousness, but... Yeah. I agree."

Hailey shakes her head. "Oh well. Hopefully someone solves it in our lifetime, and someone else goes first to test it."

"Honestly, if someone were to ask me..."

She taps her fingers against her arm. "I'd want good odds. Something in the high nineties. We are talking lives and minds on the line here. But... there are real surgeries with a one-in-a-hundred chance to kill you. And shaping's no joke either. For a shot at a digital lifespan...?"

She smiles. "Yeah, I think I'd take a one in a hundred chance of death or serious complication. Maybe even a one in fifty chance. If I wanted to get serious about it... my natural lifespan would be, like, another sixty years or so? And with a digitization let's say that rises to two hundred or so, because file storage is hard and data loss happens. So you've got... one hundred forty years to gain, versus sixty years to lose. So theoretically you're still breaking even on lifespan if you take a two-to-one chance of dying. 

In practice, though, if you follow the naive lifespan calculation you mostly die and sometimes are very long lived. So the overall impression is... I might even go as low as a one in ten chance of dying. Nine out of ten of me getting to live to be two hundred is worth taking a one in ten chance of dying."

Hailey nods thoughtfully. "Yeah, those sound like decent odds for us, too. Hopefully we get to see it happen. There aren't a lot of things we wouldn't do, for a shot at putting that ill-fitting meat suit behind us."

"Yeah."

Hyacinth runs a hand through her hair. "I mean, we've already got stuff that integrates with the senses neurally so well as to fool them completely, and I've heard SAIs are a thing these days... But then again, it is one of those 'it'll happen in another twenty years' for the last century kinds of things..." 

"Yeah. We're definitely closer than we were, but computer neuroscience is one of the fields we can't pick up over an intense weekend of training, so no way to tell how close until we get there."

Hyacinth nods, a little distractedly.

"...Can we stop talking about this? It's depressing to know it'll probably never happen in my lifetime."

"So agreed."

"Hmmmm. Alternative topics...", she muses. "Could embarrass the other Pirates by answering questions about their kinks~."

"Ooh. That sounds entertaining. You all have different ones, then?"

"Mhm," she hums a confirmation. "Some degree of overlap, but only partial."

"Go on then, what's Sable's?"

Hailey looks Hyacinth up and down thoughtfully for a long moment, seemingly deciding whether she seems likely to be judgmental, then grins. "Vore," she replies simply. "Cute girls are tasty, in her book, and the two different kinds of hunger go hand in hand."

She considers. 

"... oh. So that's why you..." 

She drums her fingers on her staff. "So she... um..." 

Hyacinth looks away. "Has she, uh, done that before? In VR, I mean."

"She hasn't found anyone to try it with her so far, but she's been tinkering with custom sims for it for a while. One design she's particularly proud of is for a 'candygirl' scene, where her partner gets turned into animate humanoid candy, or chocolate, or cake."

"That's..."

She blushes a little. 

"I could get into it."

Hailey cackles. "She's blushing and wiggling in mindspace right now at hearing that. Mention it when you feel like trying it and she'll probably drop everything for it."