honestly i never thought the phrase “i want that twink obliterated” was like a sexual thing. like when i read the phrase i imagine “a meteor like the one that killed the dinosaurs is summoned from the heavens and hits the twink in question” type situation
to be clear you SHOULD buy that cast iron pan and you SHOULD buy that knife set and you SHOULD buy that fancy rice cooker and you SHOULD buy that novelty mug. high quality kitchenware is always worth it you’re literally gonna be using that almost every day
Blurb: Anon you handed me the most fun premise and I ran with it at full speed. What if two people were the galaxy's number one ship and had absolutely no idea? i took some (A LOT) creative liberties with the story so please be gentle with me. Hope y'all love our reader and Biscuit as much as i do 🥰 Mwah.
I feel like I kinda set myself up for a part two... who knows...
Set in Books 1 and 2.
She never took for granted the slow, sleepy mornings of her college town.
Except for this one, maybe.
It was January, and the freezing wind was changing her opinions about it. She was standing on a sidewalk outside of her apartment complex in pajamas while her dog sniffed a blade of grass for the fourth time. Biscuit did not care that it was five in the morning.
She reminded herself that no matter how cold or tired she was, this was her life and she had chosen it.
She was dressed in an oversized blue UNC crewneck, her favorite red plaid pajama pants, and the fluffy moccasin slippers she kept by the door specifically for early morning potty runs. Biscuit himself was two years old, a golden retriever still operating under the assumption that everything outside was worth exploring. He sniffed each blade of grass with the gravity of a detective at a crime scene, occasionally lifted his leg, reconsidered, sniffed again, and then led her further down the sidewalk with enormous confidence.
She held his leash in one hand and her Kindle in the other. The latest romantasy was most of the way through her, or she was most of the way through it—at this hour it was hard to tell. She had just turned twenty-four that weekend, and the hangover still hadn't totally left her. Her best friends in the program had taken her out for celebratory drinks and cake, because her birthday and the New Year fell close enough together that they'd made one night of both. She was in her second year of a philosophy doctorate, always buried in Descartes and teaching responsibilities and the particular exhaustion of someone who had chosen this path completely voluntarily and was only sometimes sure why. These early mornings always made her reconsider why she’d done this to herself.
Books were the consolation prize she gave herself regularly to help drown out everything else. She grinned at the thought at the number of books she had reviewed on Goodreads last year—204. Let’s keep that up, she thought.
She was mid-yawn when the apocalypse happened. In the space between one breath and the next, the apartments, the parked cars, the quiet street, were all gone. Biscuit barked once, seemingly unaware of what had just happened.
Approximately a hundred feet away, an illuminated stairwell waited. She looked at Biscuit. Biscuit looked at her. His tail was wagging. She looked down at her Kindle. 67% battery. No time to go back for a charger. This was probably fine.
Biscuit tugged at the leash toward the warmth radiating from the hole in the ground. She followed him.
— ♡ —
You have been designated Crawler Number 1,098,233. You have been assigned the Crawler Name "Unc." You are assigned the race of Human. You are currently level 1. You may choose a new race and class as soon as you descend to the third floor. Your stat points have been assigned based on your current physical and mental profile. See the stat menu for more details.
When she entered the dungeon, the AI had taken full creative liberty and named her after her sweater. After much complaining, she filed this away as information about the kind of entity she was dealing with. No way in hell she was staying as Unc. Chronically online as she was, she was not about to spend an indeterminate amount of time in a death dungeon tagged as Unc.
Floor 1 was a blur. She survived mostly on stubbornness and the fact that Biscuit, even mid-level, thought this was a game. In a way, he wasn't exactly wrong. She fed him the Enhanced Pet Biscuit she'd gotten in a loot box for being the first crawler to enter with a golden retriever. She'd done it in the tutorial guild with the help of the attendant, who was a small creature that looked remarkably like an Ewok. They introduced themselves as Calix, level 50, and seemed genuinely delighted to meet them both. Whatever the biscuit did to Biscuit, it worked immediately.
"We're in a DUNGEON! This is wild! Are you okay?! I think we're okay! I love you, MOM!"
She hadn't expected the southern drawl, or the unwavering enthusiasm. She wasn't sure where either trait came from. She had decided, however, that somehow he was even more perfect now.
— ♡ —
Somewhere across the galaxy, a universe-wide book club received a new edition of their weekly newsletter. Tune in, it said. One of ours just entered the dungeon.
They called themselves the Marginalia. A fangirl's book club, technically, though they had long since expanded to accept any creature in the galaxy who met their standards, and their standards were not low. For galactic numbers, there weren't many of them. They were, however, terrifyingly organized. Weekly newsletters, moderated forums, three separate group chats sorted by time zone, a blog that had never missed a posting schedule in eleven cycles, and a rating system for dungeon crawlers that was more rigorous than most academic peer reviews.
At their core, they were professional fangirls. They met frequently to exchange ideas, introduce different fandoms to one another, and dissect the things they loved with the kind of focused intensity that made non-members slightly nervous. They called these gatherings meetings of the mind. It was essential to what the purpose of this club was: a dedicated, hard-won space to nerd out without apology.
The Marginalia read everything. Romance, horror, biographies—but also the dense literary fiction of a dozen dead civilizations, the galactic treatises that were the founding documents of this empire, and genres that had no Earth equivalent, like threadsong, a form of storytelling that existed in four dimensions simultaneously and required a specialized implant to experience properly. Most Marginalia members had the implant. It was essentially a prerequisite.
The Kindle she had brought into the dungeon was the reason they found her. It had awoken two skills that stopped the evening crawl-watchers mid-scroll: Critical Textual Analysis at Level 7, and more impressively, Bookworm at Level 11. That second number sent someone into the group chat immediately. The math was done on the rest of her starting skill sheet and the alert went out club-wide before she'd even reached the first safe room. To the Marginalia, skills like those meant only one thing: someone who had read, deeply and devotedly, for most of her life. They followed her for that. But they stayed for a multitude of reasons: because of Biscuit, because of the way she read between fights in safe rooms while he ate his Bopca-created kibble beside her with tremendous enthusiasm, and, most importantly, because she was, improbably and stubbornly, still entirely herself.
That Bookworm skill made them absolutely feral. A true book girl, the newsletters declared. The first one in many cycles.
When she wasn't reading, she would retell stories to Biscuit from life up on the surface. Book series about vampires, fae, warrior queens. He was, it turned out, an excellent audience. His tail would slow to a gentle wag as she talked, and by the end of most tellings he was asleep with his chin on her knee. The Marginalia loved this almost as much as they loved her arguments.
By the second floor, she had developed a habit that would later have its own dedicated section in the Marginalia's fan wiki: she liked to argue with the AI out loud. The AI, to its credit or discredit, argued back. She was, or at least she’d like to think, well-versed in rhetoric. But how useful was this ability in the dungeon? Her arguments with the AI usually centered on the ethics of the system itself, or the misclassification of items. Most famously, her Kindle.
ITEM: Kindle Paperwhite.
Classification: Primitive Information Device.
Combat Value: Zero.
On the third day of Floor 1, she finally noticed the item's description. She set the Kindle down on the safe room table with great care. Slinky, the Bopca protector of the safe room, was belly-rubbing Biscuit after feeding him kibble. Neither of them paid her any attention.
"The classification of accumulated human knowledge as having zero combat value," she said, to the ceiling, to the System, to anyone listening, "fundamentally misunderstands what value is. Aristotle would like a word. Hobbes would like a word. I would like a word and I'm having it right now—"
She stopped mid-sentence because she had received a notification. The classification was updated.
ITEM: Kindle Paperwhite.
Classification: Sub-Primitive Information Device.
Combat Value: Negative infinity.
"Are you kidding me," she said.
Slinky paused mid-belly-rub to look up at her in puzzlement. Biscuit, who had been listening with the focused attention of a very good thesis committee member, wagged his tail in solidarity. "I think you made real good points! You’re the winner in my heart!"
The Kindle was at 43% by the end of Floor 2. She looked at the battery bar the way someone looks at a beloved elderly pet and tried not to think about it.
Across the galaxy, in a video call that spanned four star systems, Minx, President of the Marginalia, a female Naga who moderated their forums with an iron fist, delivered her weekly address. "This is our girl." The virtual audience cheered.
A club-member scholar on a distant planet had already written a thesis on her argumentation style. Someone had made fan art of Biscuit in different art styles. There was even some talk of a sponsorship fundraiser. These things and more were all set in motion by Minx’s announcement, and so began Crawler Unc's journey toward dungeon recognition.
— ♡ —
On Floor 3, Calix tried to help her and Biscuit through race and class selection. Her options were limited. The System AI had given her one choice: Elysian. Calix, in all their cycles, had never encountered this race. She had no choice but to accept.
She didn't feel different. Didn't look different. That was the thing about being Elysian, she pondered. There had been no dramatic transformation, no flash of light, no sudden awareness of cosmic significance. She looked and felt exactly the same. The only thing that worried her was a weak sensation that pulsed behind her eyes. She relayed this to Calix, who listened carefully and then gazed at her with undisguised pity.
The System AI had been characteristically unhelpful about it. Something about reaching forward. Something about what humanity could become. She had read the description multiple times and gotten progressively less enlightened each time.
There was only one class to accompany an Elysian race choice: Reluctant Curator, which felt extremely on the nose when she read its description. A cataloguer, essentially. She would preserve things in the dungeon, stabilize situations, absorb and retain the details of every fight, every room, every face she passed with perfect clarity, whether she wanted to or not. She read it twice, looking for the opt-out. There wasn't one.
She tried to take it as a compliment that this was an Intelligence based class.
You will remember everything. From now on, the past, present, and future are all at your fingertips. You will be a human library.
She already had a very good memory. She had never once considered that this might be a problem.
The throbbing worsened some hours after selection. Not a headache, exactly, but a pressure that bloomed from behind her eyes to the back of her skull, as if something enormous was settling its weight against the inside of her head and making itself comfortable. She pressed her fingers to her temples and held them there.
She hadn't asked for any of this. Sometimes she let her mind wander to who she had been right before the apocalypse. She was a philosophy PhD student from North Carolina who had been outside in her pajamas because her dog needed to use the bathroom.
This feels like a curse, she said to the air around her.
The System AI did not respond, which she was learning was its version of a shrug.
When she explained all of this to Biscuit, he wagged his tail. "You'll get used to it! You're strong and smart. How freaking cool is that? Like a librarian of all knowledge, ever!"
"I'm not sure how intelligence is supposed to keep us alive without physical strength," she told him, and then quietly added, "I'm scared, Biscuit. Have you gotten used to it? Having to fight just to survive?"
He looked at her seriously for a moment, an expression she'd never seen on her dog before the dungeon. "No ma'am! I quite miss my doggy bed sometimes. But I'm staying really optimistic about this whole thing!"
Biscuit chose to remain a golden retriever. The class the system assigned him was, appropriately, Designated Retriever. It gave him the ability to retrieve anything he set his mind to, and to boost the morale of any crawler within a certain radius, whether they wanted him to or not. "I get to fetch things AND make people feel better?! This is the best day of my life!"
The next several days were difficult. Her brain was filling steadily with millennia of accumulated information: the history of her planet, the architecture of the System, the topology of the dungeon stretching in all directions at once. She rested more frequently. She was afraid she was hindering Biscuit's progress.
"Biscuit," she said, one evening in a safe room, "I think you should go on ahead. Get more experience. I'll catch up."
"And leave you by yourself in pain? Mom, I’m never going to leave you."
His tail never stopped wagging. When she could feel an attack coming on, she would lay down on the floor or the ground or whatever they could find and Biscuit would put his head on her chest, anchoring her to him. "Good boy," she would whisper, before another crippling headache took over and the world would go black.
The Marginalia kept track of all of this. Several viewers noted in the comments, and in the newsletters, and in the dedicated sub-forum threads, that they couldn't wait to see what color her eyes were up close when her internal metamorphosis was complete.
— ♡ —
The real catalyst came when Minx was watching Odette's show.
She watched it every week with a cup of a warm drink the Naga liked and her own collection of annotated books stacked beside her. Odette was mid-segment, doing her thing, but when she began referencing Carl and Donut the thought hit Minx's cobra-head like a galactic freight ship.
The clip was of Carl, walking through an Over City village, with Donut on his shoulder.
She put her cup down.
Primal, she thought. And Elysian.
Then, half a second later, a cat named Donut. A dog named Biscuit.
But the first thought was the one she kept turning over. She opened one of her Encyclopedia’s on the different dungeon races. She realized that the complementary abilities weren't a coincidence. No, no. They were the System's idea of poetry. Primal was a blank slate: no history, no form, no known origin. The boogiemen of the cosmos, Carl's Game Guide Mordecai had once called them, who spread across the galaxy and simply vanished. A race that could become anything, that trained every skill to its ceiling, that had given up its own identity to become limitless. Carl’s class, Compensated Anarchist, layered onto that a kind of beautiful contradiction. Make the bombs and plead for peace, throw the Molotov and step in front of the camera, tear things down with your hands and walk away with more charisma than you arrived with. Destruction as a form of social engineering. Chaos with a media strategy.
And then there was her. Elysian. Reluctant Curator. She would preserve what he demolished, remember what he unmade, hold the shape of things while he remade the world around it. The past, present, and future at her fingertips, versus a race that had erased its own past entirely. The library and the bomb-maker. The one who remembered everything and the one who had chosen to start from nothing.
It was the most romantic thing she had ever seen, dungeon or otherwise. Star-crossed lovers, or dungeon-crossed, she supposed, given the circumstances. Either way the System AI had clearly made its intentions known.
Holy shit, Minx thought. She opened a new tab.
She was logged on to a forum and uploaded her thoughts to it in under a minute. The idea spread quickly. Carl and this crawler, platonically, romantically, as the ultimate pairing of the rarest abilities in the dungeon. It stirred something in all of them: awe, happiness, and in several dedicated subforum threads, something considerably less proper.
The best part of running an intergalactic book club, Minx had learned, was that fangirls, given a cause, got straight to work. Someone made gifs. Someone made video edits. Someone wrote a thread. Someone did the math on their complementary abilities and posted it in a twelve-page document with footnotes and a bibliography.
And just like that, the shipping between the two crawlers began entirely without either’s knowledge. These two were too busy fighting for their lives in the dungeon.
Within the week, the Marginalia had a dedicated sub-forum to both crawlers. Within two weeks, they had artists creating commissioned art to print on merchandise. Someone had released an exclusive line of pins and stickers.
By the third week, votes were held for ship names. Carunc? Uncarl? They settled on Cunc. Eh, Minx thought when she read the poll results. It would do for now.
— ♡ —
She had a corner table, a whiskey she was nursing without urgency, and her Kindle propped against the glass. The battery was at 31% and she was trying not to look at it. She had switched to airplane mode at the beginning of the dungeon, but it wasn’t slowing down the battery drain. Biscuit was under the table, his chin on her foot, making that low-grumbly sound he made when he was perfectly happy.
"Mom," he had told her while settling down, "I like being here with you."
"Good. Stay right there."
The classification argument had resumed ten minutes into her sitting down. It always did.
"I'm not asking you to reclassify it as a weapon," she said, at a volume that the other tavern patrons had learned to accept. "I'm asking you to engage with the rational framework here. Knowledge has instrumental value. Instrumental value is—yes, it is relevant, I don't know why you keep insisting that—"
She didn't notice the man and the cat in the tavern doorway.
Carl had not expected this. He and Donut had come in for a quest lead (something about a contact in the back of the tavern) and instead he had stopped dead a couple of steps through the door because of the scene in front of him. There was a young woman in plaid pajama pants seemingly debating the air while a golden retriever offered moral support from underneath the table. This was bizarre, even for his standards.
"OH HI!" The dog had spotted them. He was already on his feet, tail wagging, heading their direction with the type of confidence only dogs seemed to have. "You're real tall! And you smell interesting! Do you need friends?! You should be our friends!"
Crawler # 1,098,234. “Biscuit”. Level 17.
Class: Dog. Race: Designated Retriever.
"Hi buddy," Carl chuckled at Biscuit's enthusiasm, charmed by the dog's southern drawl.
He remarked to Donut, jokingly, that she wasn’t the only talking animal in the room anymore. Donut hissed at the comment. Carl crouched down automatically, one hand out. The dog put his whole nose into it. Carl scratched his ears without thinking, because that was what you did when a dog looked at you like that, and it felt like something he'd been missing for a long time.
The woman never looked up from the spot in the ceiling she was arguing with.
He examined her.
Crawler # 1,098,233. “Unc”. Level 15.
Class: Elysian. Race: Reluctant Curator.
They left after Carl was done petting the dog. He kept turning her race and classification over in his mind on the way out. He'd have to ask Mordecai about that.
— ♡ —
Later that day, Carl and Donut were teleported out of the dungeon, materializing in front of Zev, who was prepping them for an interview appearance.
"Oh, by the way," Zev said later, in the tone she reserved for information she found amusing and knew Carl would not. "You and another crawler have been the top ship in a niche fandom for three weeks. Odette's going to bring it up. Be ready."
Donut perked up immediately. "Wow, Zev! That's great for our views. A romantic subplot. Why hadn't I thought of that?"
"Ship?" Carl said. He had genuinely no idea what they were talking about.
"Seriously, Carl." Donut fixed him with the particular look she reserved for his densest moments. "Like Blaire and Chuck. It's two characters that viewers want to see get together. To do it, you know?" Zev nodded in agreement with Donut.
Carl stared at Donut with his jaw open. Donut stared back, already bored.
— ♡ —
Carl was never truly comfortable on the blue crushed-velvet couch, but part of him had developed a familiarity with it. Right now he was wishing he were anywhere else.
Odette gave the recap with evident delight. The Kindle arguments. Biscuit. The complementary abilities thread, which she let him read twice. The gifsets, the fan art, the Snick compilations, the thousands of fanfictions. She scrolled through them at a pace that suggested she'd watched his face carefully during each one. She read snippets of the smuttier contributions with professional enthusiasm. The crowd loved all of it.
She even had the gall to lay out across her desk a collection of official fan-club merch: a hat, a mug, and something that looked oddly like a TV remote. The designs mainly featured collages of Carl’s and the crawler’s face surrounded by red hearts.
Then, to add insult to injury, she played the clip of him in the tavern doorway. Just standing there. Just looking at her.
Something in Carl's chest did something he chose to suppress. He gripped the arm of the couch until he heard the wood support begin to creak.
Donut, sensing the attention drifting from her, made sure she got to the microphone before he could.
"Odette, darling, you must be completely out of your mind if you think Carl and I would willingly associate with a dog owner. Biscuit, was it? And besides," she glanced at Carl with theatrical concern, "Carl is absolutely hopeless in the romantic department. It would not go well. Isn't that right, Carl?"
Carl said nothing.
"Well," Donut settled herself. "I'll put it this way. It's practically Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth. One is all brooding severity and the other reads, doesn't she? That's essentially the same thing. Except she has a dog. Yuck."
The audience laughed. Carl said nothing, and went on saying nothing, as he and Donut reappeared in the production trailer.
"Carl." Donut's voice had shifted, just slightly. "What was that? You went completely mute."
"It's like when the leading man goes all slow-motion on the—OH MY GOODNESS CARL NO." She launched herself upright. "You cannot have the hots for her! CARL."
Carl sat down on the couch and stared at the floor between his legs. He had nothing to say back to the cat.
— ♡ —
He found her three days later, in a different tavern.
Biscuit found Carl first, bounding over before he had even cleared the doorway, nose and tail both going, completely ignoring the cat on Carl's shoulder who was making her feelings known at volume.
She was at the bar. Whiskey. Kindle face-up beside it. 29% battery, some part of her registered, with the specific dread of someone watching the last of something they love run out. She didn't look up.
He walked over. He wasn't entirely sure why. His feet seemed to have made the decision without consulting the rest of him.
"Hi," he said. "I'm Carl."
She picked her head up and looked at him.
Her dark hair was pulled back in a ponytail that draped over her sweatshirt, and he found himself actually looking at her, really looking, in a way he hadn't let himself do on Odette's show. She had a soft, round face, the kind that looked younger than she probably was, with a delicate freckled-nose and subtle lips. It was the kind of face that made him want to keep looking at her without knowing why.
But what unsettled him most were her wide-set eyes. They were green, or close to it. Like the color of river water with the sun behind it, almost clear, almost nothing.
Mordecai had mentioned something about Elysians, that their eyes tended to be striking. He hadn't thought much of it at the time.
Something in him went very quiet, because he thinking quite a lot about it now.
"My goodness, Carl." Donut could sense this interaction was going terribly. "I see why Beatrice had other options. You are truly terrible at this."
Carl soured at the mention of Beatrice. He could already tell this woman was nothing like her. For one, Bea would not have been caught dead in public in pajama pants.
Biscuit had returned to her side. She took a sip of her whiskey. "A talking cat," she said. "I've seen you both on the recaps." She introduced herself by her preferred name and not the one the dungeon had decided for her. Carl decided he really liked the sound and feel of her name.
This introduction was short, and a little awkward on his end. He ended up retreating to a corner table without entirely meaning to and sat there, trying to remember how to be a normal person. Donut perched on the table and tilted her head in confusion at Carl. The cat had never seen him act like this.
"I like him! Do you like him?! I think we like him!" She watched Carl across the tavern as he was rubbing his face with both hands. From here she could see Donut beginning to pace a small circle on the table surface while obviously chastising him.
"I think," she said to Biscuit, "he knows something I don't."
She picked up her Kindle. 25%. She groaned and tried not to think about it.
— ♡ —
"Goddammit, Carl." Carl muttered to himself as he pressed his palms over his face.
"That was the most pathetic display of courtship I have ever witnessed." Donut’s voice was laced with pity.
"She's the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen." The words left his mouth before he realized what he had said. Too late. Donut's ears perked up.
"Oh no," Donut said. "Oh, absolutely not."
Carl was already on his feet, already moving toward the door, Donut leaping after him.
"Where are we going?! What about the quest?!"
"Forget about it. We'll come back later."
He cast one last look back at the bar. She had her Kindle open again. She wasn't looking at him. Somewhere across the galaxy, the Marginalia were going absolutely feral at Carl’s confession.
Zev sent a notification as soon as she figured out why #cunc was trending on every galaxy-wide social media interface.
Zev: Carl, good news! Your mentions across galactic socials are popping off! Odette wants you back on the show stat!
Oh fuck, Carl thought. All he could see were her eyes. That pale almost-green, like river water with the sun behind it.
He'd be thinking about them for a while.
Zev: Carl and Princess Donut, please prepare to transfer to Odette’s show within the next couple of minutes. She wants to do an emergency segment with you four.
Carl: Wait, what do you mean by "you four"?
— ♡ —
The couch was the same. The velvet was the same. The cameras were the same, and the crowd noise was the same, and Odette's smile as she watched Carl settle in had exactly the same quality it always did when she knew something he didn't.
What was different was the crawler sitting on the other end of the couch, on the far side of Odette. Carl and Donut were brought on set after Odette had finished grilling her and Biscuit.
She had Biscuit on her lap, which was truly a challenge, given his size, but she looked like she was managing it. She hadn't looked at Carl yet. She was looking at Odette with the calm, direct attention of someone very comfortable in front of a camera. Internally, she was losing her mind. This was her and Biscuit's first media appearance. Ever. Odette had asked her to show the audience her Kindle, which now was propped face-up on the cushion beside her. Carl could see that the battery was at 15%.
Donut, who had taken up residence on the far armrest and was grooming herself with pointed disinterest, chose this exact moment to look up and discover Biscuit.
Biscuit had already discovered Donut.
"HI! Hi, I remember you! You made that noise at me! I've thought about you a lot since then, I hope that's okay."
"I will END you, filthy mutt," Donut cut him off with a hiss.
The audience loved this chaos. They had never seen this side of Princess Donut. Odette let it run for a couple of seconds before she leaned forward.
"So," Odette said. To both of them. "The galaxy's been doing a lot of talking about you two. I thought we should finally introduce you properly." She smiled. "How are you both feeling?"
"Fine," she said, without hesitation, before she let the nerves get the best of her.
Carl opened his mouth. Carl closed his mouth.
She turned to look at him then for the first time since the production team had sat them down, and something about the angle, the lights, whatever it was, her eyes were doing that thing again. River water. Almost clear. He had zero brain cells at this moment.
"He knows," she said, to Odette, conversationally, "something I don't. I've been trying to figure out what it is."
Carl realized in that moment that Odette must have failed to mention to her anything to do with #Cunc.
It occurred to him, in that moment, that Odette had failed to mention anything about #Cunc to her. He wondered why. The crawler and her dog seemed entirely unbothered. There was no embarrassment, no surprise, nothing on either of their faces that suggested they knew.
The audience made a sound. Donut made a sound. Biscuit made a sound that was simply "MOM!!!" and had to be gently shushed.
Carl said nothing. He was staring at her. She was looking at him with that calm, direct expression, waiting, unhurried, with what seemed like all the patience in the world.
"Your clothes have changed," he blurted out.
They had. Her hair was french-braided back, neat and practical, and she'd traded the pajama pants and oversized sweater for something that looked almost functional: a fitted long-sleeve and loose legging-like trousers. Her slippers had been replaced with a pair of white sneakers with little red hearts that had absolutely no business being as clean as they were, given the dungeon.
"Loot boxes," she said. "I think the AI and the viewers got tired of the pajamas." Or this is the AI’s sick version of matching couple shirts, he thought while glancing at the shoes, and then his underwear.
She glanced down, briefly, at his bare feet. Her expression didn't change, but something in her eyes softened.
"Doesn't seem like anyone has shared that kindness with you," she said.
Somewhere across the galaxy, Minx closed her laptop, pressed her multitude of hands to her face, and breathed in very slowly through her serpentine nose. Her two favorites were in the same room. This was an ultimate fangirl emergency, and she had to act fast. The Marginalia's #Cunc subforum refreshed 4,000 times in the span of seconds while Minx scrambled to update the members who had no access to Odette's show on what was happening in real time.
Odette smiled. In this moment, she knew to let the cameras do the work.
The Kindle, on the cushion between them, ticked down to 7%.
— ♡ —
The sharing of their chats happened because of Odette. The host, in the way she was able to find the pressure point of any conversation, asked about their strategies in the dungeon.
Without hesitation, they answered at the same time. "It’s just like Frogger."
The same reference and sarcastic delivery caused the audience to erupt. Odette sat back in her chair with satisfaction etched on her face. Even Donut, from her end of the couch, went quiet.
That answer probably meant nothing to anyone else in the galaxy but everything to the two of them. She turned to look at him. He was already looking at her. And then he laughed, a real one, unguarded, the kind that didn't have a camera in mind, and without thinking, without meaning to, she brought her fist up.
Without thinking, without meaning to, he met it.
It lasted half a second. The crowd lost their minds at the touch. Neither of them had noticed what the fist-bump triggered, because their dungeon interfaces didn’t work on these shows.
Later, when the show had ended, and all four had been teleported back to the same tavern, the two of them noticed the notification from the interface as they caught up with what they had missed.
New connection established. Crawler Carl has been added to your dungeon chat.
She stared at it for a moment. Then she looked up at him.
He was already reading it. She watched him read the notification carefully, like it meant something.
He looked up at her.
"Huh," he said. "Is that okay with you?"
"Yeah," she said.
Later that day, when they had parted ways with simple goodbyes, a new message finally came through.
Check out inspiration here : https://www.wikiart.org/en/alphonse-mucha/cropped-print-of-four-panels-each-depicting-one-of-the-four-seasons-personified-by-a-woman
I truly believe being a tumblr user for longer then 5+ years gives you the resilience of a 1000 suns compared to other social media websites while also turning you into some kind of cave dwelling gremlin creature collecting their favorite treasures through reblogs.
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