24: Payment Plans

As soon as Paisley saw me return to the tree, she threw herself bodily into my arms. Her eyeliner was a mess, and the inky black tears stained her cheeks.

"It didn't go well?" I asked, knowing full well how it had gone.

She shook her head and quivered in my arms, not saying a word. Poor Pay. Poor me, too. The embrace helped, though, and I breathed a deep sigh. I’d keep it together, for now.

Holding her, I scanned the treeline and wondered if anything nasty could hear us.

Squeezing her, I inquired, "How long will the tree stay docile?"

"I don't know," she sniffled. "A day, maybe more."

"Okay, I'm going to Escape Stone, and take you with me, is that okay?" She wasn't in any state to be working out complex enchantments, and her current mood was my responsibility, so the least I could do was take her somewhere safe.

When she nodded agreement, I pulled my Escape Stone from my inventory and focused on it, activating the teleport. We appeared in the coat room, and I pulled out of her embrace so I could lead her down the hall and onto a sofa. Elena was nowhere in sight, but that was probably for the best right now.

Paisley had always been a reasonably physical person, but I wasn't prepared for the way she cuddled up to me on that sofa. She was so soft, so warm, and for a moment, I let go of my inhibitions. My friend needed someone who'd really hold her, make her feel safe and wanted, so that's what I did.

Her soft fluffy hair was warm against my cheek where I leaned my head on hers. Her heart was so big, so accepting, and so very bruisable. It was pretty strange, actually. Previously, we’d been bound by the rules of female and male interactions, but now that we were both women… well, we were cuddling.

“I want to expose his lies, make him pay for all the nasty things he’s done,” she told me quietly, her voice wavering with fear, heartache, and determined conviction. “It’s not fair.”

“Uh… who is him, exactly?” I asked, just to make sure we were talking about Marlon and not Rosco.

“Marlon,” she whispered vehemently. “He lied about everything that happened, he kicked my best friend out of the guild to cover his own shitty infidelity. We were supposed to all be friends, like a little family, and he threw it all away! I’m going to… I’m going to ruin him.”

“Explain what happened,” I urged her gently. “I’m out of the loop here.”

She went on to go through the events as she knew them, which was enlightening in some respects. For example, a good chunk of the guild had been blindsided by the kick. Marlon usually put it to a vote, like I’d thought, except in cases where someone had done something very awful.

Ethan in particular had argued with his boyfriend over the action, which had resulted in a rift between them that lasted for weeks. It was nice to know that they hadn’t accepted everything at face value. Only problem was, Ethan loved Marlon, and Paisley was much too anxious to start any real trouble. I didn’t blame her, honestly. It just wasn’t in her nature, or at least it wasn’t until now.

“Thank you so much for listening to me vent,” she sniffled, once she was finished. “We barely know each other and yet you got me somewhere safe and now you’re comforting me. You’re a really good person.”

I shook my head. “Not really, Paisley. I have an ulterior motive.”

“What ulterior motive?” she asked, suddenly worried. Wiggling out of our embrace, she stared at me with those massive eyes of hers.

Grinning, I reached out and poked her flushed cheeks. “I need you to do enchanting for me, of course.”

Her anxious expression morphed into one of outraged amusement, and she bonked my slim shoulder with her tiny fist. “Damn it, Keiko,” she giggled. “You made me worried!”

“But then I made you laugh,” I responded with a smile, reaching over to wipe some of the tears from her cheeks.

“I mean it,” she said, leaning into the touch. “You’re really sweet.”

“Yes, well…” I coughed, snatching my hand back. “What did you want to do about this whole mess?”

“I want to… I want to catch Marlon in his lies and I want to get Ethan out of his toxic relationship,” she said slowly, as if she was forming the plan as she spoke. She probably was. “I want to prove to Rascal that I’m still worth trusting, that I’m still his friend.”

I pursed my lips and watched her as thoughts rushed through my head. Should I tell her? Should I explain the crazy situation we were in, and how technically… we were still friends?

Then, I wondered what she’d think of me for playing as this petite fairy character, and I cringed. Would she think I was gross? Probably not, if I was honest, but there were plenty of other things she could get upset about.

The real reason I didn’t want to tell her, though, was that Rosco the Ranger… he wasn’t me anymore. It was more than just a character swap, too. After Elena had kissed me back on our journey to Ardgour, and her idea that since I couldn’t go back to reality yet, this world was my reality. I was Keiko now, in a lot of odd, deep, fundamental ways that didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.

I came to a decision before I even fully realized it, and I opened my game menu with a mental command. Paisley watched in confusion, unable to see what I was doing, but I pushed her to the back of my mind for now. A few quick menu selections, and a biometric confirmation later, and my old character was scheduled for deletion. It’d take a week for it to happen, but I didn’t plan to reverse the process. Some sort of red warning popped up, but I brushed it away. I was done with that life, I was done with that guild, and I was done with that character.

I wasn’t done with Paisley, though, and if the opportunity came to befriend Ethan again, I wouldn’t be done with him either. I liked them as people, after all. Yeah, it sucked that they hadn’t stuck up for me at the time, but at the end of the day, they were only human. It was a scary thing, to confront a person like Marlon, who was so confident and powerful in his personality. Plus, as much as they had been my friends, they were also Marlon’s friends.

Eventually, I met her gaze again. "Okay. What do you need me to do?"

"Nothing," she blurted, inching back over towards me. "I don't want to get you caught up in my drama. Just… don't push me away again? I want to be friends, and I need to… to trust that friendship."

"That, I can do," I said, meeting her earnest beseechment with a smile.

Trees are a lot easier to cut down when you can just slice through them with a blade made of burning pink energy. It was late in the afternoon now, and we were probably going to have to work into the night.

Paisley didn’t seem fazed by this, but she was a gamer. Our sleep schedules were as twisted and undead as the tree she was keeping in check.

With my recently truncated tree, I would have normally had to wait until it was dry, which would have taken months. Thankfully, my wisp could help out.

“Hey wispy,” I cooed, talking to my cleavage. “Can you go and spookify that log for me, pretty please? I’ll make a nice fire for you in it once you’re done.”

“You named your wisp, Wispy?” Paisley chuckled, stepping up beside me.

Wispy, for their part, flew out of my boobs and down into the tree stump. Immediately, it began to wither and dry out. The sap went hard and sour inside the wood, and the bark began to peel off in flakes.

Leaning down to get a better look, my friend murmured, “Oh, that’s cool.”

Beneath the stump, the soil began to boil and froth like soup. Without any warning, it erupted, spraying our legs with dirt as my little wisp went above and beyond the call of duty. It’d cleared the area beneath the stump, ready for me to light the fire.

Kneeling down, I pulled all the various fire materials out of my inventory and began to build the fire up. Soon, the stump was a raging inferno, thanks to my lighter, some oil, and my little wisp. Next came the crucible, which I filled with the iron ore and shoved under the stump. This type of smelting was old and extremely crude, at least out in the real world, but in the game my little spirit friend would make it all work.

While we waited, Paisley and I sat cross-legged in front of the fire and chatted about anything and everything. She told me about the latest superhero show she was watching, to which I couldn’t help but giggle. She was a sucker for that type of hopeful, light hearted story.

The iron was almost done when Paisley frowned and pulled up a chat window. Her eyes skimmed the text that I couldn't understand due to the privacy filter, and her expression grew troubled.

"What's wrong?" I asked, nudging her knee with mine.

Worrying at her bottom lip with a slightly elongated fang her race gave her, she shrugged. "Nothing. I got tagged into an argument between guild members. A guy called Harvest and a guy called Kezier are arguing over builds. I'm one of the best single target damage dealers in the guild, so they tried to rope me in."

Her adorable little snaggletooth was distracting as all hell, so the response that came out of my mouth was default as fuck. "Sounds fun."

She rolled her eyes. "They're always arguing. The officers of the guild keep intervening but it never sticks."

"I do not miss guild drama," I said, by way of answer.

"It's pretty lame," she agreed. "It's worse when you're in a hyper competitive guild like this though."

"I can imagine," I lied, because I knew full well how much those two she mentioned argued. What she hadn't said was that the reprimands never lasted because each was best friends with an officer, which inevitably led to the two officers arguing too.

The fire gave a pop, throwing sparks everywhere, and I hauled myself to my feet. "The iron should be done."

Pouring the iron out into a mold was a messy process, because I’d never done it before, and at one point I splashed some on myself. It hurt like fuck, but after a healthy little dance and a potion from Pay, I was right as rain.

Forming the little bars into flat spikes was actually a lot easier than the pouring had been. The anvil went into another stump, hammered in there by my tiny fairy self using a wooden mallet. The tree stump forge had cooled down a little, but it was still putting out more than enough heat to soften up my new shitty little ingots.

I didn’t need my tiny pixie form to bash the spikes into a vaguely useful shape, since I’d grown a lot in strength since my first forging attempts. These were Novice level items, too—The most simple you could do, really, but it was nice to know my setup worked.

“Here we go,” I said, turning to Paisley with the three newly cooled Crude Spiritforged Iron Spike. I'd even unlocked a Pattern for them.

“Awesome,” she said, taking them from me with keen interest. “Oh, wow! They have pretty good enchantability for shitty little lumps of metal.”

I laughed at her description of my work. “Hey! I put my heart and soul into those!”

“It says crude on it, Keiko,” she snorted, wiggling one of the spikes at me. “Now, let me scribble my equally shitty runes on it with acid, okay?”

“Fine, fine,” I smiled, sitting down on the ground to enjoy the fire. It was a cold night, after all, and I had good company to share it with.