Everyone has different things that they find themselves gravitating toward when they have free time in the between.  Technically, all of our time is free time here; that’s one of the true blessings and curses of immortality.  There is no structure to it, it’s devoid of real enforceable responsibility, and it’s all ours.  But there’s a difference between the heartbeats we share with each other, and the ones that pass by when we’re alone.

In the past, I’ve spent long portions of my time here cognitively impaired in some way, but that wasn’t working out for me.  For one thing, if you have no regenerating meta-items to supply you, then you’ll run out of drinks and powders and contained warped mana long before you run out of heartbeats.  If you lived a life with any kind of effort, you might be here for subjective months, and with the false bodies we wear here repelling any serious efforts to stay drunk, you need a lot of supplies to work with if you plan on suppressing your emotions.

And since draining Bastion’s dry felt like a really rude thing to, especially after other people started showing up and contributing to it, I tried pulling myself out of my oblivion seeking in more ways than one, and getting a hobby.

Six likes making things.  Made things don’t really last in the between, but the golem is good with his hands, and part of the fun for him is that the process will always leave him with something else to do.  I’ve spent a lot of lives as a maker, in some way.  Collected a fair few perks for it too.  But it’s not something that I find fun, no matter how good I get or how useful it can be.  I always find myself holding my breath when I’m working, like I need to finish a project before I’m allowed to let my lungs work again.  I suppose it’s encouragement to work faster, but that’s not really the point of a hobby .

Mark likes… well, Mark likes a lot of things.  But many of the hobbies he chases in real life, like botany and ferroany, just don’t translate to the between and it’s sterile hallways and endless old spaces.  He says he sings, when he’s here.

Ellin practices moving.  I call it dancing.  She calls it haptic adaptation training.  She spends a lot of her points subtly tweaking how her body responds, so she can mentally prepare herself for a new life, and a new form, outside of her control.  It’s not really a hobby, but she smiles when she’s doing it, and I think she finds a kind of deep personal satisfaction in the process itself.

Jules remakes himself.  Which is its own form of art, and one that I find beautiful when it lets him manifest as he wants to.  When Molly is around, the two of them also indulge in a lot of sex.  Not to say the rest of us don’t sometimes, but for them it’s something with a lot more intent put into it.  Intimacy turned into expertly fine tuned performance art, rather than a private moment.  Though that’s not exactly something either of them can do alone .

Me, I read a lot.

And once I get my emotions under a thin layer of falsified control, I start doing a lot of it.  I could be doing a lot of things, like exploring the between, or… well, that’s it, I suppose.  Another problem of being dead is that there isn’t much to do here.  That makes things like the terrarium that Jules earned as a souvenir something potentially quite useful to someone who doesn’t have a library; if I had wanted to simply go on ahead, I could deposit my remaining heartbeats into it, and set out early.

Books are comforting though.  Partly because of how repeat readings change the nature of art, partly because of how they simply give me something easy to do that I know I can let my focus latch onto, and partly because each of them acts as a reminder of an old life.

Next time around, I’ll have another one, at least.  I wonder - and worry - that having too many books will make the ones we’ve collected less special.  Maybe that worry is stupid.  I have all the time in reality to learn every fold and mark of every page.  Fretting that it will be too much is me letting my mind be ruled by fear.  And I’ve been trying to do less of that here, even if it doesn’t work too well.

The chairs upstairs aren’t very comfortable on their own, but when I push four of them together into a long bench, they become even less comfortable, and so I end up once again sitting on the floor and paging through old favorites.  I could sit downstairs, no one is here to tell me otherwise, but I wrote the library’s few rules, and so I feel a moral obligation to adhere to them.

Rise Of The Third Extension is a historic retelling of the events that led to a world-spanning tyrannical empire, and their eventual end at the hand of a terrorist organization that cracked teleportation technology first and promptly launched a series of decapitation strikes.  It’s from one of my own lives, where I grew up in the shadow of that empire and the birth of a new form of nation in the ashes of the old, and it was hugely important to me as a kid there.  Now, reading it for the fifteenth time, I can see how the embellishments and storytelling it uses can’t possibly line up with history; it’s too clean, too simplified.  But none of it is exactly a lie , and that is what makes the propaganda powerful.

It takes me nineteen thousand heartbeats to read, and grants to my next life a two percent advantage over anyone rated below a negative eight on the axis of governance ethic.  We don’t have a reference for that, but I think it’s safe to assume.

Old Threads is a romance epic in the Tuung style, telling the story of two lovers through the empty spaces in the narrative.  At no point in the book do the characters, who are in the process of falling in love with each other, getting clan bound, and raising a family, ever speak to each other.  I don’t read this one often; it’s also from one of my lives, but an early one.  Before I had the power to fight back against a lot of things, or the mindset to do so effectively, and I felt locked into decades of an arranged marriage.  The idea of a relationship without the other person gave me comfort, and the book came with me to the between.

It takes me eight thousand heartbeats to read, because I skim the conversations between the children, finding them too authentic to be enjoyable.  It gives me a bonus use of any [Charisma]  power.  I find this to miss the point of the work, every time I read it.

A Functionalist’s Guide To Boat Theft, Third Edition, is from one of Ellin’s lives, but I absolutely love it.  It’s part ramblings about the philosophy of piracy, part ramblings about the philosophy of functionalism, and part actual guide to stealing boats .  There are a number of in depth discussions of how a single person can effectively take over a ship, though most of it relies on combustion engines being a relevant technology. But all of it is written with a kind of wry humor that makes me imagine the original author was an impossibly smug old corsair who was simultaneously perpetually drunk and utterly unkillable.  I’ve never stolen a boat, but every time I read this, I get a new desire to try to wedge it into my next life somewhere.

It takes me six thousand heartbeats to read, cover to cover, and a good chunk of that is me laughing at jokes I’d forgotten.  It gives a three percent boost to alteration collection.  Ellin says that world didn’t have any magic like that, and none of us have ever found another that does.

Travel Times, Bina’s Book, is the third book in the second quartet series about a school for young wizards.  It is written for someone younger than I was the first time I died, and so many lives under my belt has not made my reading level any lower, but it’s still a pleasant read.  This one is from a world Jules lived on, that had just industrialized printing.  There was almost a war fought over whether or not fiction should be ‘allowed’, and he described it once as being a fight to ensure that no one had a soul, betraying how bitter he felt about the whole affair.  The story itself was from an author who had found their first story suddenly mass produced, and been offered an astounding amount of money to be a figurehead for the fictionist movement by writing more.  It’s amateurish, doesn’t understand how plot threads work, and overly foreshadows events I’ll never get to read.  But it’s fun , in a way that clearly shows someone working from the heart, and championing the nature of storytelling itself.

It takes me under four thousand heartbeats to read, and gives me a two percent bonus to machinery resistance.

The Book of Pity is the fourth in a series of five of what I think are meant to be moral fictions called the Sins Cycle.  The dust jacket informs me that the first three are Regret, Curiosity, and Routine, with no mention of the one to come, only that it is book four of five.  It tells the story of a single man and his unending slide into ruin due to his inability to look past his desire to help others.  I don’t actually know if it’s meant to be religious in any way, but it certainly is depressing.  It also comes from one of my lives, though why I got this as a souvenir I will never know.  I read it anyway, because there is an amount of novelty in it, and because I have a detached enjoyment of the feeling of ire that stirs in my chest every time part of the story mistakes compassion for pity and condemns it as a moral failing.

It takes me twelve thousand heartbeats to read, both because it is long, and because I take a break to try to find something alcoholic to make the process more bearable.  I don’t think I’ve ever read the back half of this book sober, but the notification as I finish is the same familiar one percent boost to social conflicts regarding failure.

Flowers of North Argal is a guidebook.  Informative manuals are strange to read, especially when they are meant to be purely informative.  I never lived on this world; this book is from… I want to say it was Tee-kon, who got it from a life as a teacher.  I remember very little about the world that was described so many lifetimes ago, but every picture of a flower, every description of where it can be found, what kind of soil or which sun it likes, it all brings up memories of old conversations here .  I’ve never been to North Argal, I never will be, and while some of these plants look similar to ones I’ve seen before, assuming similarities across worlds is a losing proposition.  But this book is tied to real memories of shared moments anyway.  It doesn’t hurt that the art on display is a fascinating mix of sketches, color photographs, and chemical models.

It’s a short read, only a few thousand heartbeats, but it leaves me with a feeling of melancholy more than the book that wants you to feel bad for having empathy; there’s a sense of a missing friend in its pages.  It reduces the time for any flower I put serious work into to bloom by one local day.

Sometimes, the rewards the books give annoy me.  They feel intrusive, or perhaps a little condescending.  As if I wouldn’t bother to experience art without a pat on the head and a tail massage afterward.  But the more I read, and immerse myself in a series of twinned other worlds of fiction and memory, the less I mind.

Still, I pick my tomes at random, so that I don’t have to care or worry about the layer of upgrade results.  It does mean that, if I’m even going to get to it this life, it will be a while before I get to read my actual go-to comfort story about the dashing space captain and his himbo alien boyfriend.  But that’s okay.  It isn’t like I won’t be back later.

The thought gives me pause as I’m sliding the plant manual back onto the shelf into the perfectly suited slot for it.  I will be back, of course.  I’ve long since given up having any kind of concern for the what-if of actual death.  But… the library will be different next time.

Not just randomly shifting slightly as we add a new board game or book or something to the shelves.  But different in function.  Different in structure.

One new book every life.  Such a small thing.  But there simply aren’t that many books here .  It won’t be long, from my rather absurd subjective viewpoint, before the library is more new books than familiar titles.  And time wears away a lot of rough edges, but it doesn’t stop there with its erosion.  How long, I wonder, before I am the sort of person who doesn’t want to read about a dashing space captain and his himbo alien boyfriend?

I try to phrase it lightly, to let the humor of it insulate me from the fear.  But it doesn’t make the problem go away.  The problem will never really go away, because never and forever aren’t things for me, or for any of us.

Maybe I should rearrange my aura again.  Not tell anyone about this layer, and let the library sit as it is.  I’m sure it will still grow, but slower.  More organically.  Does that matter?  Is there some ethical superiority to our new books being accidents, arbitrary awards from the between for things it thinks are important to us, rather than the books I  could choose simply for being what I think of as good?

I’ve done it before.  Ditched an upgrade just to keep it from complicating things.

And then regretted it, of course.

The fun thing about living forever is that you have quite a lot of time to get past regrets, though.  Things to do will  pile up, and eventually, whatever paths were left untaken simply provide texture to the person that you see yourself as, for as long as it is until you find them again at least.  So I know that if I get rid of this layer now , it will bother me for one or two, or maybe ten, lives.  But then… it won’t.  One of us will find something else to focus on, or we’ll write our own books, or something  else.  Maybe we’ll run into a loremaster and buy a new library from whole cloth in exchange for free drinks.

There would be no consequence to simply throwing it away, and letting myself remain sheltered and cozy with the small library we have, for a time.

But then…

But then, but then, but then.  What if, what if, what if.  My thoughts chase themselves in circles, looping over and over as I stand there with one slim finger resting on the corner of a book about plants from a world I’ll never see.  I am not so much thinking as I am along for the ride while my thoughts fail to cohere into anything useful.  I am in disagreement with myself as to the nature of myself, and the method by which I wish to live.  Common enough for people to experience, but harder to cope with when you are dead, wearing the body of a fake replica of someone you never were, and alone.

I think I might cry or scream at some point.  It is hard to tell, and quite easy to lose track of time in the between if you aren’t staring at your heartbeat counter.  The truly sad part is that the protections that are in place to keep these borrowed bodies from becoming badly injured also prevent me from dissociating fully.  And so I get to experience the mental cycles like a kind of roller coaster of thought, where I am strapped in and put on an endless string of loops.

A hand on my shoulder makes me jerk like I’ve been stabbed, the bookshelf rocking slightly as its eternally preserved unstable base tilts a little when I pull back.  And I spin around, not having heard any doors opening, or anyone speaking.

Ellin’s face looks down at me, the flash of a grin that she was wearing at having snuck up on me vanishing into a mask of worry as she gets a look at my face.  “Oh, oy, Luri… you aren’t looking so good.”  My friend says, the normal boisterous energy of her voice gone as she says hello for the first time in a lifetime.

“Oh.”  I say, my first word to a friend since I’ve gotten here a simple stumbling of speech.

If Ellin cares, she doesn’t show it.  Instead, the imposing woman wraps me in an engulfing hug.  Her curved horns brush against the top of my head as her arms fold around me, the cloth of her nomad wraps rough against my bare skin.  I don’t care though; I melt into the feeling, sagging against her as if one small bit of physical contact can magically fix everything that is wrong with the rampant dissonance in my thoughts.

And yet, in some ways, it does.  Our minds are impressively easy to short circuit, and no matter how long I have lived, there has always been a kind of comfort in the illusion  that someone else can take the pain away and leave you whole again.

“Bad life, eh?”  Ellin asks sympathetically.

I blink away tears that are clouding my vision, leaning against her and draining warmth from my friend as she tries to maneuver away from letting me wrap my tail around one of her legs.  “No, it was fine.  Just… panicking.”  I tell her, looking around the library and the chairs I’ve left scattered away from their tables from my ill-conceived attempt to make a bench.  “I got an aura layer to harvest books from worlds.”  I opt for honesty.

Ellin gets an indignant look on her face.  “Last time you and Mark were drinking before me, now you’re cracking notifications!  I’m gonna be left out of everything if I don’t die faster, huh?”  She says it with humor, but also a halfway question of if she’s actually being excluded.

“This time you beat Mark here.”  I inform her

At the comment, Ellin looks around the upstairs, before leaning slightly and shifting me in her arms so she can peer over into the downstairs.  But Bastion’s is still, except for the slowly rotating shadows from the hanging propeller.  “Offset, yeh?  Who went on ahead?”

“No one.”  I extricate my arms and wipe at my eyes.  “I’m the first one here.”

“Aw, Luri!”  She renews her crushing hug with fresh force that leaves me gasping and grateful that the between won’t let my ribs snap in half quite so easily.  “You’ve been alone here?  How long!”

“Not totally alone.”  I recover a bit more, talking to her helping me fake at playing it off as nothing.  “The elf girl came back.  And there was… a very dedicated merchant.  Two merchants actually, but one was insane.”  I flick my amethyst eyes up at the overhead rafters of Bastion’s.  “Well, one was more insane.”  Had there been someone else?  I don’t think so.

“How long.”  Ellin glares at me for dodging the question.

Something halfway between a grimace and a smile tugs at the edge of my mouth.  “Nine hundred thousand, so far.”  I say.  “Subjective, maybe… five days?  Ten?  It’s hard to tell.”  That’s not much of a surprise.

“How long are you here for?”  Ellin cuts through to the primary question.  I love that she’s blunt, and the insistent and uncompromising look in her eyes tells me that she won’t care much for any attempts at deflection.

So I don’t bother.  “Under two hundred thousand beats.”  I say.  “My last life… wasn’t bad.  But it wasn’t impressive.  At least as far as the between seems to think.”

Ellin sucks in a breath through bared teeth.  “This place .”  She grumbles.  “That’s not enough time.”

“Never enough time in forever.”  I offer her wry humor.  “Want a drink as an apology? Maybe the others will be here soon, now.”

“Bah.  Bah!  Fine!  Ply me with liquor, will you.”  Her protests seem somewhat lacking in actual backing.

So I do.  I take the stairs, just to feel the cool metal and the sharp texture of the holes meant to keep people from slipping on my feet.  Ellin throws herself over the railing and almost breaks a chair when she lands.  I know better than to ask her to stop doing that, but I also know the chairs won’t really break anyway.

I pour Ellin something familiar to us, that’s not very good, and also not very alcoholic either, but it doesn’t really matter.  The point is to share a drink together.

“So, I don’t want to talk about the bet,” she says, and I remember that we had one of those, “but… I’m glad we’re the first ones here.”  I don’t see how the things correlate, and instead of asking, I just refill Ellin’s shot glass and let her continue.  We aren’t using our personal cups for this; it feels weird without everyone else around.  “I got some advice from… you know, I’m scores of lives in at this point, and it always feels weird to say ‘from my father’?  He wasn’t, not really.  He didn’t raise me, and wasn’t really responsible for me, but… oy… there was something…”

“I don’t remember my actual father.”  My words come out conversationally.  “I’ve forgotten a lot, really.  Side effects of lives with pseudo-immortality, and brain damage.  Sometimes…” Sometimes there’s an impression of a face, and of a twisted fear in my gut.  But that’s all.  “Was your not-dad good?”

“He was.  Great guy, oh, really  a great guy.”  Ellin nods.  “Everything you’d want in a dad.  I say he didn’t raise me, but he taught me how to play hallball, and rode with me to community games, and… I guess I’m letting you know that being honest went okay for me, but it didn’t make it feel less real .”

“I’m glad.”  I smile at her over the edge of my fingers as I toy with my glass.  “Really am.  It sounds like you got lucky.”

“Well, he told me something.”  Ellin says.  We’re both sitting on barstools; I didn’t bother going around to pour our drinks, just leaned over and used my tail to balance myself while I grabbed stuff.  And now, she leans sideways, almost awkwardly, to press against my side.  “I asked him, early  I asked him, why he was okay with everything.  He said, life was too short to not enjoy it.”

My smile this time is more genuine.  “You know, I think every ‘good’ world I’ve landed on has had a thought like that?  It’s not what makes anything function, or the reason  for things being good, but it’s… maybe a cultural by-product would be a good way to say it.  Something that spins off as a result of the process that makes a place good to be living it.”

Ellin throws her head back and lets out a laugh halfway between a delighted hyena and a failing jet engine.  “Yes!  This!  This is why I love you!  You can’t just have a conversation, you have to have analysis !”  She wraps an arm around my shoulders, tugging me against her in a motion that I admit I don’t put any real effort into resisting.  “It’s like you want to pick apart the brain of reality itself, just to see where the thoughts come from.”

“I wouldn’t say no to knowing…” I blink, setting my shot glass on the bar and turning my eyes up to Ellin’s.  “Wait, you love me?  You never say that.  I know we all love each other, but you don’t say it-“

I am muffled in my protests and attempt to analyze my friend by her lips against mine.  The kiss is abrupt, forceful, and tastes of dull alcohol, which works as a fine metaphor for Ellin herself.  And despite the fact that Ellin and I have been intimate before, I don’t know that she’s ever kissed me.  Or me, her.

It takes me three heartbeats to realize what is happening, and then lean into it.  And then another fifty to a hundred heartbeats as I close my eyes and melt into the sensation.

Life, as she said, is too short to not enjoy it.

This time, I hear the sound of a door opening and closing.  But I utterly fail to pull myself away from Ellin before a set of heavy footsteps approach the bar.  I think she holds me in place largely for her own amusement, as I can feel her cocky grin against my own mouth.

“Hello Ellin.  Luri.”  Six’s monotone is returned by a muffled utterance from the two of us.  “Have I come at a bad time?  I seem to be interrupting.”

I try to wave a cry for help at him, but Ellin just redoubles her attempts to make things as weird as possible for all of us.  I don’t think she cares that it probably won’t work on Six, and really, it doesn’t work that much on me either.  But we let her have her fun.

I am, sadly, lower on heartbeats than I typically am when my friends begin to arrive.  Very little time left, to actually share stories, trade tips and items, talk philosophy, and enjoy our freedom from mortality.

But they’re starting to be here now.  No more waiting.  And for whatever time I have left in the between, I know, I will be okay.