Practicing diligently, Gabriel equated the video game experience to the gunfighter jewel. Sooner or later they were going to run into one of the many dangers Sam kept bemoaning, and he was going to need to use all of the skills that the jewel contained. If he ran out of time at an inopportune moment, he’d be just as screwed as he’d been in those games if he wasn’t strong enough to defeat the dungeon nasties. And in real life there was no going back to the last save point to try again.
Holstering his pistols, Gabriel realized that Sam was watching him.
“Twenty,” she said to him, pulling her cathor closer to his.
“What?”
“Twenty,” Sam sighed, looking away from him. “It’s my age. You wanted to
know how old I am. Like I said, NVM slows aging. I really am older than I look, honest.
So, uh, you know, just so you’re not uncomfortable thinking I’m just a kid. I’m a grown woman, even if I don’t look like one quite yet.”
“What is this NVM thing people keep talking about?”
“Fine, if you wanna keep playing your from another world game. Still not funny, by the way.”
“It’s true!”
Sam’s shrug spoke volumes of disbelief and humoring him for the sake of a less painful journey together. Grabbing her tail in one hand, she shook it at him so he was sure to see. “This is Nano Voluntary Mutation. NVM. I wasn’t born like this. I used to be human like you, though I was more like seventy-six percent pure. My mother wasn’t exactly as concerned with purity in her child as I am.”
“You did that to yourself,” Gabriel asked, thinking of all the people he’d seen in several towns that had animal bits like Sam. It had to be at least a tenth of the world’s population. “But why?”
“The sun is dying,” she said, nodding to the large red orb in the sky. “The world has grown very cold, and there’s still so much radiation even after six hundred years.
Even with immunity inoculations, it still mutates and kills people.”
Gabriel felt a pang of sorrow at her bleak tone. She sounded so hopeless, like she believed it was only a matter of time before everything she knew and loved would be taken from her. When had he started caring about other people’s feelings so much? That was just so not like him.
“About eighty years ago, the Emperor’s scientists found a laboratory where some of the Old Ones had been studying a way to deal with falling temperatures and radiation before they died out,” Sam explained. “They derived the NVM procedure from the records that they found. They inject microscopic machines into your body and they rewrite your DNA, making you resistant to the cold and radiation. But as a bit of a side effect it doesn’t work without giving you animal traits. I chose a wolf because they’re just so pretty. They’re all gone now, but I saw pictures in a book once.”
“There are that many people that want to do that to themselves? Why?”
Sam looked confused. “What do you mean? Who cares if you don’t look the
same as you once did? What’s that compared to being immune to radiation and being able to go outside and stand in the sunlight without feeling the cold? It quadruples your life span too. I was lucky. Mister Mittens paid for me. Otherwise I could have worked at my job as a waitress for a thousand years and never been able to afford it.”
“If you’re immune to radiation why are you so afraid to go near the Quarantine Zone?”
“I may be completely immune, but you aren’t. Immunization shots only go so far.
Plus there’s mutants, bandits, the Children of the Chosen, and even the army all the way out here to worry about. Radiation isn’t the only thing that can kill you.”
She touched her wolflike ears and then her tail. “These are kinda like status symbols. It shows the rich that I’m one of them, and the poor that I’m better than the are, even if it’s not exactly true. Who wouldn’t want them? And they’re just so cute! Come on, admit it, you think my tail is hot.”
Gabriel eyed her tail, hanging limply over the side of her saddle. “You know
what a video game is?”
Sam nodded.
“Well, once upon a time I played this video game where all of the characters were controlled by different people all over the world. I met this girl with a tail. She was the perfect woman, liked everything I liked, didn’t think I was an idiot, and that CG body of hers was smoking hot. I finally got her to come meet me in person and, well, let’s just say that she had a little something extra between her legs.”
Sam burst out laughing so hard that she nearly fell from her saddle. Mister
Mittens had to jump from her shoulders to perch on the rump of the cathor to keep from being thrown off.
“Ever since then I’ve been wary of girls with tails. They have a nasty habit of turning out to be men.”
“I assure you,” Sam managed through her laughter. “I’m one hundred percent
penis free. Look at how tight my pants are. Where would I even hide one?”
Every time Sam’s laughter would begin to subside, she’d look over at him and
burst out into fresh gales. It took her some time to regain control of herself.
“Tell me about this world. I don’t even know what it’s called.”
“We call it Ethos. And what is the imaginary world you come from called?”
“Earth.”
“Earth? Well that’s a dumb name for a world. Might as well call it dirt.”
Gabriel shrugged. “I didn’t name it.”
Chuckling, Sam pointed up at the planet in the sky. “That’s Altima, the Celestial Mother, and that’s Teven, the Father Sun. They’re lovers that meet in the sky and turn out their light so that none can intrude while they’re getting jiggy with each other. Those are their children.”
She pointed to each of the moons in the sky in turn, giving them a name. “Eos, Sirra, Mavren, Qotail, Eamon, and Cir. Then youngest and most treasured of them all is Ethos. There used to be another moon, Lusifar, but it disappeared about the time of the Great War, and nobody knows why. In the times before the Old Ones, ancient people used to worship Father Sun and the Celestial Mother like gods. Silly, isn’t it?”
Eyeing the alien sky, Gabriel could imagine ancient tribes looking up and seeing divinity. With such a spectacular array of heavenly bodies what primitive wouldn’t worship them. Ancient civilizations on Earth had worshiped the sun, the moon, and even the stars. If they could have seen what he saw now they would have creamed their pants.
“For future reference, clean water freezes at this temperature. Only poisoned water still flows. If it’s not frozen, it will kill you unless it’s been boiled and purified.
Even then I wouldn’t trust it very far. It has to be completely frozen to be safe. Even if it’s got ice floating in it, it’ll still kill you, just slower.”
“Good to know.”
An awkward silence settled over them for a few minutes before Sam broke it
again.
“Don’t go,” she said, looking at him.
“What?”
“Don’t go. I don’t want you to leave.”
“When I get to the Spires of Infinity,” Gabriel asked, and she nodded. So that was why she’d been so upset. She didn’t want him to leave her. But they’d only just met! How could she have possibly gotten that attached to him?
“I, well, let’s just say I’m not the easiest person in the world to get along with.
You’re the first real friend I’ve ever had. Things were going so well with you. You didn’t think I was vulgar and uncultured like everyone else does. You don’t care that I spit when I feel like it, or scratch myself. You accept me. I don’t wanna lose that, even if you’re clearly insane.”