(Rewritten) Ch. 136 – Press F To Pay Respects

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***

There it was again, that microsecond that revealed the Nerd samurai's insecure awkwardness. And, as she'd done before, she deflected with another Nerdism. I saw it coming. Her face smoothed into something between geniality and teasing, and then, obviously acting out yet another reference that I didn't recognize and had absolutely zero clue about, she went again.

"The Knights Who Say Ni demand…a sacrifice!"

Leah sighed next to me. It drifted across my antenna. It smelled of toothpaste and sweet Vanguard juice and made the fluffy wriggler shiver. It felt like a mini-sneeze, and had a similar function. Dust particles got dislodged and left me with a sense of lightness after a sneeze.

"Monty Python?"

Monty who?

"You sure dug deep for that one, didn't you?" she continued. "Hey, I'm Leah."

Leah held out a hand with a potted plant in her palm. It was a little shrubbery thing. It looked nice enough with a few pretty flowers blooming on it and it did have an amazing scent. And since our point counter had gone down by only one point, it wasn't too expensive either. Even with the tiny white picket fence glued to the pot's rim.

Dolores stared at the shrubbery for a second, and took a breath with a wide grin. But before she could speak, Leah interrupted her.

"Don't make me get another, please. We've had a rather…long trip. I'd be hella chuffed if we could simmer down a bit. Seriously."

I took Leah's hand and squeezed it. Threw her a smile when she glanced at me, and let my support shine through. Warm happiness bubbled away in my tummy when I saw her shoulders relax a smidge.

My eyes flicked to the woman again, who finally did away with the theatrics. She tossed an apologetic smile my way as she reached for the plant, and I could immediately tell that she'd turned off whatever tools controlled her expression. Her body language shifted and she turned into a much less exuberant, lonelier, and certainly far more genuine person.

There she was, the probable guardian who'd make a statue of herself and stand vigil in the wind and rain, day and night.

She wandered over to one of the tombstones circling the glade and placed the plant at its foot, before playing a hand across its top in a motion that looked worn to familiarity in its repetition.

I took a closer look at the memorial, hoping that I might perhaps glean a family name, but all I saw was a single line.

<Press F to Pay Respects>

I snorted. Even I recognized that one.

Local guardian pseudo-deity, enshrined as a memorial or not, she was still a Nerd through and through.

A vibration hummed through the air, high to low. It peaked my antennae for a moment and I winced as I felt a migraine barreling towards me on discordant gallon drums for wheels. But the sound quickly passed through that painful spectrum, and the truck-driving headache took a left and spared me.

As the buzz settled into a low register, the dirt beneath the stranger's hands began jumping like popcorn on a speaker. It traveled outward in a ring and a hole dug itself, just large enough for the gifted plant, which the woman took out of the pot and placed in the earth.

After patting everything down and summoning some water from nowhere, she finally got up and turned towards us. She seemed to have a very quiet body language as she approached, but from the way her eyes made contact with ours only to instantly flit away again, I figured I'd be shifting and wriggling nervously if I were in her shoes. I wondered if she'd always been a still kind of person, or if having a robot for a body did that?

"I'm Dolores. My friends call me Dervish."

Leah shot a glance my way, along with an encouraging smile.

I felt a bit silly about how my heart suddenly beat faster and sweat trickled down my armpits. Strangely enough, I would've had an easier time as Aden. Something about being a girl tore down the veil of distancing apathy that I used to wear all the time. Like Dolores's reactions would matter to Tinea, where Aden wouldn't have been particularly bothered regardless of the outcome.

Or perhaps, I wouldn't have expected a favorable outcome by default?

That was the moment that I realized that my entire set of expectations for the world around me had changed as much as I had—and that I was going to have to learn how to deal with things and people maybe not meeting them.

But, be that as it may, I'd made a promise to keep moving forward.

Fine. I took a breath and gathered myself. Guess I shouldn't slack off, huh?

I bumped shoulders with Leah (or to be exact, I bumped shoulder with rib) and met Dolores halfway.

"Hi. We wanted to, um, ask if we'd be okay to rest here for the day? Antithesis are coming from the north, loads of them. They'll be here tonight."

There. Hopefully that was, uh, something enough. Polite enough? Unpushy enough?

"Yep, already have 'em on my sensors. Did you come here to fight 'em?"

I blinked. She did not sound local. Or maybe we didn't? Well, I sure didn't. My English still had that German tinge. Dolores was a Nerd, I supposed. She sounded terminally online, really, which made sense if she lived in mostly-seclusion in this shrine.

Nodding, I replied, "Yup. Took a detour when we realized that this village would need protection. Didn't know there already was a samurai here until we got close enough to see the trees."

Which, come to think of it, was strange. The Family samurai app tracked active samurai everywhere. I booted it up again, gave it a quick peek.

We were being tracked, pins displaying our position. Dolores, or Dervish, wasn't. Did they just not know about her? Was she having her AI block the app?

I didn't get any nefarious vibes from Dolores…even with the empty village. She looked like she belonged here, not like somebody who'd taken over. I decided to just ask.

"When we got here, we didn't see any people. Did they already evacuate?"

Dolores grinned at me. "Nope. Why don'tya try'n smell 'em?"

Ah. My antennae snapped upright. I didn't actually smell the village at all, much less any people living there. I hadn't twigged to it earlier, probably because I wasn't used to noticing the odors of settlements in the first place—they were a constant anyways. But, yes, I should have caught the village's scent the moment I'd exited Daddy-Long-Legs.

An energy field bloomed from Dolores and reached hundreds of meters around us. It felt like…inverted antennae. Where my fluffies combed the air and parsed scents and other compounds from it, these fields were like ethereal fingers that parsed scents into the air and modified them. Dolores was…uncloaking the village, as best as I could tell.

The tang of acid that had been a steady background since the moment I woke up as Tinea and had come to represent the dying state of the world to me, it disappeared from the glade entirely. A new wave of intense, dizzying, flowery scents washed across my sensilla instead. It dwarfed the previous deluge and I swayed on my feet, breathing heavily for several seconds. It took a few moments for my brain to start picking everything apart.

And just like that, I could smell them. Five or six hundred individuals a kilometer away, and a number of scent trails connecting the village and the graves. People who visited regularly and reinforced the tracks they left.

Leah saw my big eyes and tickled my tail with tactile question marks, but I was way too distracted to react. My antennae were furiously tasting the air, swishing this way and that way. It was kind of dizzying.

Cracking concrete and tarmac, wooden beams covered with dust. Mold in the walls, metal joints lubricated with synthetic oils.

Baby cream, a dozen flavors of toothpaste and shampoo, bleach and other cleaners, and a staggeringly massive amount of moist earth, loam, mushrooms, vegetables…some kind of fertilizer stuffed with minerals and nutrients.

I could eat that stuff and be fine for a day, nevermind plants.

Heh, eat dirt.

More than a third of the locals were children. A lot of children, like, hundreds of children. I could smell thirty pregnant women.

"Oh wow, all natural births? That's rare!" I whisper-yelled at Dolores.

She blinked, then her eyes wandered up to my energetically questing antennae. "Praise Joko, them feather-brushers are more smelly than I thought. Might'a employed some of my most powerful sense-yoink, but I'm astonished I obscured Comeau that well. And here I thought I was buying overkill against the piddly Antithesis."

I self-consciously grabbed my sniffly puppies two-thirds along their length, in a useless attempt to calm them down. Dolores giggled when she saw the tips wiggle as happily as ever.

"And you?" she asked, directing her focus towards Leah, with another grin. "By what achievement did ya claim Nerdity?"

Hanging her head, Leah mumbled something about sweet liberty and managed democracy.

I felt my brows crinkle in confusion again. I could get behind liberty being sweet and all, but how the fuck did democracy gain managed as an adjective?

To my surprise, Dolores was equally confused. It showed in how she became even stiller. She really looked like a statue again.

"How's that work? Helldivers's one of 'em biggest IPs around. 'S like twelve percent of all Meshians play it. Ain't anything Nerdy about it."

Leah groaned, rubbed her face, and sighed as she gave in. "Heard of Blind Eyes? About ten years ago? During the Helldiver's Mettle Remaster?"

"Oooh…" Dolores breathed. My eyes were playing ping-pong between the two. I felt a little left out, but I was also discovering a secret side to Leah. Something like a cringey emoweeb phase, from the way she was acting. It was exciting.

Yay! An adventure!

"Yes," Leah said.

"What?" I asked, unable to keep my curiosity to myself. And maybe also getting a little fed up with being left out.

Dolores turned to me with a cheshire grin. I had a feeling she attached a lot of her self-worth to Nerdy stuff—she instantly regained a massive amount of confidence as soon as the topic shifted that way.

"Your girlfriend there's one of the most famous Nerds alive."

I blushed. Hot, heavy, happy embarrassment flooded my cheeks at having somebody call our relationship out like that, and my hormonal seesaw saw fit to yee-haw my hormones all the way to the moon. It was a lot and I couldn't hold still and I jumped Leah, buried my face in the soft dip of her shoulder.

She kissed my hair, smiled against the top of my head, and my heart slowly returned to Earth again as her scent filled my airways.

"Y'all okay there?" Dolores inquired. I could hear the humor in her voice, but also…tolerance? Understanding? I wasn't sure if I should be glad she wasn't judging, or if I should feel matronized.

The remainder of our interactions will probably tell me, hmm?

My wildly spinning and vine-swinging, tarzan-yodeling hormone glands had me wondering what it was going to be like to have people acknowledge our relationship publicly publicly, though. Like, with more than one person around.

Turns out my life is a real adventure now.

Trust issues or not, Tynea might just be the best thing that ever happened to me.

***