New World, Old Problems 9 – She could (not) help

Reysha left the house when night had long come. Her senses were sharpened from a recent meal, the spongy head of some fungus monster. The texture had been anything but pleasant, but the sweet taste had made it alright. It hadn’t been enough to fill her stomach for the entire day, so she had to rely on some awful tasting wild berries and plain water to get through the remainder of the day.

‘I wonder if I can still drink alcohol,’ the thought suddenly surfaced in her mind, as she waved goodbye to Aclysia and Apexus. The two would make their nightly inspection and then retreat for the evening. They wouldn’t go to sleep, they could never quite relax when the tiger girl was out on her own, but they were thankful to have some time to just sit and flirt. The slime’s need for sleep increased the more complicated his body got, but it still wasn’t at the level of a human. A short night’s rest would suffice.

Reysha turned and stepped into the treeline. Once she had passed a traditionally problematic bit of brushwork, she started to jog. The leather armour sat well, not as well as her old bodysuit, but well enough. Of her weaponry, she had only taken two daggers with her. One sheath, placed for quick access with her left hand, was placed on the right side of her hips and further strapped onto her leg to prevent any sort of dangling. The second one, used for replacement or dual wield situations, was secured on her lower back, running horizontally.

Both were designed to get in the way of things as little as possible, but it was still best to move around with at least that weight. It was something to get used to and, no matter how optimized the equipment was, there was no guarantee that an unskilled move by her didn’t cause a handle to get stuck on something. If the equipment was the most important thing about battles and movement, then the person wielding them wouldn’t have mattered.

‘I like to think I matter…’ it blipped in Reysha’s mind and she could imagine Apexus slapping her for doubting herself like that. Her beloved slimeball would have never actually hit her in any hurtful fashion, but imagining she was getting berated helped the redhead a little bit. While she wasn’t quite sure if she could convince herself that she was worth something, she knew there were two people that would insist she was. That was a good start.

As was the fact that she didn’t enter a mindless self-deprecation spiral. Given how the day had started, that was a very real possibility. Over and over again, her thoughts would jumble. A chaotic knot of threats would form and she would desperately try to pull at it, to isolate the paranoia, the fear, the guilt, and all the other maddening emotions inside it. A single grasp in her focus, she could try to see what was the actual cause of it, ask herself what she could do to fix it. The moment she would start to figure things out, the knot reformed with magnetic might. With it would come a rush of tears and confusion, so much confusion. Her shattered mind was a puzzle that undid itself every time she moved.

That was how she felt on bad days.

It was splendid progress that she could reset that feeling over the course of the day. Normally only sleep allowed her a chance at reforming her mind. Today it had happened over the course of being awake. Very little of that had been because of her active efforts. She hadn’t yet found the state of mind that actually allowed her to untie that knot.

Instead, she looped back to the question of the alcohol. ‘It would seriously suck if I couldn’t have any liquor anymore. Well, I could still drink that shit, but it would taste like actual liquid shit and I don’t know if that’s worth it for getting drunk… maybe if I spike it with monster blood…? Could work. Wouldn’t look all that welcoming though. Maybe someone out there just brews stuff with magical herbs in the mix? That would definitely fix it.’

She arrived at the outskirts of the city and looked for any movements in the wide streets. The two large cities on the Summer Rest island were roughly equivalent in structure. Both had three layers to them. The outskirts, which were single houses along the roads leading up to the cities, the outer city, where structures stood densely packed around the walls, and the inner city, basically everything within the walls. The city to the south had, beyond that, a dockyard and port district.

Reysha usually sneaked her way around the border of the outskirts and outer city. She had gotten into the inner city on some previous nights, but quickly realized that the guards had her in their sight half the time. They were retired adventurers, people that had reached a higher level than she currently was and had then decided that they would rather deal with drunken peasants than ever-stronger monsters and tests by the gods.

A couple of months back, the tiger girl would have called them weak-minded morons, but nowadays she got why someone may want to throw all of the adventuring life down and just enjoy peace and quiet. ‘Just because I get it doesn’t mean I want to end up like that though,’ she thought and found herself a route past the houses that should leave her unseen.

The inner city was off limits. Getting caught wasn’t the fear, the guards seemed content to just follow her and know that they could catch her whenever she did break into somewhere. That her looks would stick with someone, however, was a genuine worry and she didn’t want to be the reason that Aclysia’s paranoia got justified. That aside, sneaking around knowing she was being seen all the time wasn’t satisfying.

Instead she kept to the outer layers. The buildings close to the wall were almost as dense, albeit of lesser construction, and the guards weren’t all that attentive. There was a clear divide that was taller than the basic stone wall between those inside and outside. Not an issue for Reysha, at least not one she concerned herself with. There were the haves and the have-nots, that was just the nature of every gathering of people. She didn’t have the ability to solve societal problems before she sorted her own ones out.

‘Not that it can even be that bad,’ the tiger girl thought, as she engaged in her favourite way to traverse the city. With a few quick grabs and pulls, she scaled up a brick wall, walked its narrow top towards a shed and silently jumped on the roof. Her tail gleefully curved in the air as she looked around. ‘Aside from me, nobody ever seems to be around at night.’

The feline part of her made her love standing on a tall vantage point. Scanning over the roofs, she looked out for any sources of light. Not many people chose to stay up beyond nightfall. It was an eternal summer, days were long and warm, giving ample opportunity for the people to exhaust themselves. Regardless, a few of the windows, many of them actual glass, showed illumination behind them.

The local population of elves had tamed some sort of large firefly to live inside lanterns, which was a lot more effective when it came to things and was also beautiful when those same insects were let out of their homes to seek a partner to breed with. Reysha called those days Light Festivals. The official one was Day of Luminescence. Regardless of the name, today was just a normal night and the fireflies stayed in their shelters.

Reysha jumped off the shed and back on the wall, following it towards another roof and then getting on it instead. Anyone she would pass on the streets below would be able to see her quite easily, houses around here were rarely taller than the base floor, but there was basically nobody out and so the most thrilling game she could play when it came down to it was this dance over the rooftops. Not only did she get to satisfy that feline tingle, but there was a surprising amount of difficulty coming along with this modus of movement.

Most roofs she moved over were wooden or tiled (there were also those covered in thatch, but she avoided those because of instability). The obvious complication was the noise. All of the people not on the streets were in their houses and very few people reacted to loud footsteps on their roofs with anything less than immediate confusion and mild anger. There were also those deserted houses who might break away under her. She could run for it, if she ever disturbed someone, but the true art of sneaking was to never get noticed in the first place.

If there was one thing she was still good at, it really was sneaking. She knew how to fall correctly, let the impact be distributed through her entire body, and where to land optimally. While on the roof, she tried to move around the outskirts of it. Stepping along the underlying wall created significantly less noise than the hollow rest. If there was the need, she knew how to intertwine the correct way of walking with some magic to get across regardless, but Reysha preferred to pose a challenge to herself.

She smiled. She hadn’t even noticed when she started to do so, but the tiger girl was happy to feel that she was good at something. To do something only she could and that she didn’t need any help for. Her movements were fluid, her eyes moving along and her ears…

…her ears picked up a few words. The words weren’t quite clear yet, but the tone didn’t betray anything pleasant. Some sort of argument. Intrigued and feeling some sort of strange obligation, Reysha jumped off the roof she was currently on, landed in a patch of grass, and started to follow the voices.

She identified three. One was pleading, one aggressive and one annoyed. An explosive mixture, especially since the latter two seemed to agree that the former had done something wrong. Reysha soon found the speakers.

All she got was a glimpse at their outlines. Two men, one bulky, the other lean, both tall, stood opposite of a more average sized male. Reysha had to press herself against the corner of a nearby house to stay hidden. The spot had been well chosen for the goal of being uninterrupted. Four semi-decayed houses, none of them lived in, surrounded a small plaza with a well in the middle. Fences and the proximity of the walls made it difficult to approach the trio by any other means than a long alley.

With unseen spying near impossible, Reysha opted to just concentrate on listening.

“…Please, I told you, I don’t have it,” the pleading voice said, belonging to the smallest of the three men.

A crack of knuckles and growling by the angry voice preceded the answer of the third person involved.

“Yes, we got that, and that’s a problem for you,” the annoyed voice groaned. “We get it that you fell on ill fortunes and had you stayed put, we might have been able to find other ways for you to repay us. Now that you’ve demonstrated that you’re a rat willing to run at the first sign of danger, however, we will get what is owed to us by whatever means adequate.”

Reysha was frozen. ‘Are they going to kill him?’ the question surfaced in her mind. ‘Should I stop them? No… no, how the fuck would I even do that? I’m weak, I can’t even kill an animal on my own, much less a human.’

“W-what do you mean by that?” the pleading voice stammered. The answer given was a gesture and all Reysha heard was the dull sound of someone getting punched in the face.

‘Even if I could do that, should I? I have no fucking idea what’s going on with me and I have no fucking idea what’s going on here! Last time I swooped in to just stab my way out of problems…’ the tiger girl’s whole body was taken by a sudden shiver and she had to muster her entire willpower to starve off a sudden scream, as unwanted images surfaced.

All the while, sounds of pain echoed, a second punch sent the person to the ground, then there were a few well-aimed kicks. The groan, gasps and shouts of desperation added oil to the fire of Reysha’s turmoil. All of her was torn. There was no such thing as a part of her that wanted to run in and help, a part of her that wanted to just stay out of it or a part of her that wanted to run away as quick and as fast as she could. All of her wanted to do all three things at once. Atonement, uncertainty and simple, mindless flight.

By technicality, the middle option won, as the unsolvable knot in her mind made her stay where she was and passively listen. The violence eventually ended, underlined by a final slap. “You’ll get the money ready, as much as you can, or you’ll get a repeat of this next time,” the annoyed voice announced.

“And don’t even try to get away again, you little shitboot,” the angry voice growled. “We’ll do you worse if you try to.”

Dirt grinded audibly under their soles when they turned towards the alley. Just barely, Reysha managed to gather enough of her self-control to change position to somewhere else. Any previous elegance in her craft as a Rogue was forgotten, she just dived behind the next corner. As luck would have it, the duo’s continued conversation was louder than the noise she made doing so and the direction they turned to didn’t bring them past her. She was safe and had time to slowly calm down.

‘I need to leave, this isn’t my problem,’ she finally came to a decision and started walking. No sneaking this time, just steps as quick as she could make them, back towards where Apexus and Aclysia were waiting for her. To safety, certainty and a bed in which she could cry about her memories. ‘This isn’t my issue. I have my own problems. I shouldn’t get involved. I can’t help anybody before I sort myself out. Absolutely no one, I-‘

She stopped in the middle of the street. It seemingly stretched endless before her, like a long dark tunnel. Confused, she blinked, all of her thoughts were quiet. A sense of guilt she couldn’t quite explain drowned out all of her justifications for staying away. In that silence, another voice whispered. A memory of Aclysia, about something she had said quite often these days.

‘Weak women can still atone, one step at a time.’