Edge Cases

Over the course of cooking an entire three-course-meal with her mother, Misa managed to learn a few crucial things about [Endless Echoes]. She refused to call it [Misa's Endless Echoes], for all that that was the 'proper name' given by the system. Something about that struck her as too... egotistical.

Though she was relatively certain the others would tease her about it a bit. Vex, perhaps, might be more interested in how she'd had a skill named after her at all — she'd only seen that sort of thing happen with spells, though she didn't know the exact mechanics behind how the system named skills. Something to ask him about later.

Back to what she'd learned, though.

[Endless Echoes], as she understood it, was a skill that allowed her to... not summon a copy of herself, exactly. It allowed her to communicate across herselves in a limited fashion, by giving her control over the variations of herself she wanted to manifest.

In the context of cooking, for example, she'd accidentally added bloodberries into the hauvre instead of the more traditional five-point fruit; a quick use of [Endless Echoes] as she tasted the result told her that the bloodberry variant was much, much tastier. The five-point fruit was just a little too sour, having gotten overly ripe since Charise had picked it on the way here.

Her mother had insisted that that shouldn't have been possible, despite her intuition skill telling her otherwise, and had continued insisting it all the way until she'd tasted the five-point fruit and spat it out, making a face.

Misa laughed at her, of course, and her mother grinned back at her. She didn't miss the way her mother's eyes twinkled, or the way her father guffawed in his corner of the tent, where he was chopping up the meats; she didn't miss the way the tension in her father's shoulders flowed out, either.

Misa was learning that her mother was much better at using that intuition skill than she'd ever let on.

Bloodberries, on the other hand, tasted like chocolate with just a hint of sweetness. It was the perfect complement to the rest of the hauvre, which was a cheesy, savory dessert.

Further testing had shown Misa that she could pick out variants of herself that made decisions at different times, too. There was a limit to how far she could stretch the skill out when she did this; she couldn't, for example, try to reach a version of herself that had finished cooking everything a day before, and learn from all the mistakes that version of herself had made.

She could pick a version of herself that had started on everything an hour earlier, which was how she knew not to mix the bloodberry juice with cymmanom. That surprised her mother, who stared at her keenly; apparently, she'd been expecting her to do exactly that.

So it was good to know that her skill seemed to have some precedence over other information-gathering skills. Cymmanom and bloodberry juice resulted in a violent but ultimately harmless reaction, something to do with the mana aspects naturally present in both ingredients. That she knew because her mother had explained it to that other version of her, and Charise's face when she repeated that information to her had been priceless.

Cooking, it turned out, had been a great way to practice using the skill on the fly.

Max was a guest in their home — or tent, Misa supposed — and so hadn't been required to cook, as much as she insisted on helping. Misa had eventually sent her running around for various ingredients that they'd forgotten, sometimes before even Charise realized that they'd forgotten them at all.

"Whatever your new skill is, it's cheating," Charise informed her at one point, and Misa had laughed in return, seeing the proud twinkle in her mother's eyes.

"It was already cheating," Misa replied with a smirk. "It's just more cheating, now."

With all the help, it hadn't been long before dinner was finished. There would be a celebration later in the night, Charise told her, in part to celebrate the village's return and in part simply because the villagers needed it after the stress of everything that had happened. She'd seen more than a couple of people shaking slightly when they thought no one was looking. An attack like that — the memories of being killed that they still had — that wasn't something that would fade easily.

So... a celebration. Something to distract them while they tried to come to terms with their new lives.

The dinner was to introduce her parents to all her friends first, of course. Max had been invited, too, but she'd politely excused herself — she was only there to help Misa with sparring, and she'd spent her break helping them cook. Misa felt a little guilty for that, and offered her a small portion of food that Max had happily taken with her.

They'd timed it well — it was almost eight by the time they were done cooking, and the rest of her team began arriving. Derivan, for instance, poked his head into the tent as Misa put the finishing touches on a dish of cooked wyrm-meat.

"You're early!" Misa waved him over. "Mom, dad, this is Derivan."

Derivan pushed his way into the tent as he was prompted, revealing that he was carrying Vex, who had his face buried in his hands.

"Misa," Vex said. "Help. He won't put me down."

"You said you were tired," Derivan said sternly.

"I didn't mean I wanted you to carry me into the tent," Vex moaned, his voice still muffled by his hands. "We're meeting her parents! I mean, we've seen them before, but we're doing it properly! You were supposed to put me down!"

"We're right here, by the way," Charise said, sounding amused, and Vex let out what sounded very much like a squeak.

"And that's Vex, our wizard," Misa said with a grin, very pointedly not telling Derivan to put Vex down. It took a moment before the armor did it anyway, seeming rather satisfied with himself, and Vex did his best to gather himself into a more presentable state.

"Wizard?" Charise asked curiously, and Vex took the opportunity to sweep himself forward in a bow.

"I dress as a rogue to throw people off, but I am a wizard," he said proudly.

"Has that ever come in useful?" Orkas spoke, amused, and Vex paused awkwardly.

"...Mostly when I was solo," he admitted. "People don't mess with rogues as much as they do wizards. They know wizards need cast time and all. It's harder to surprise a rogue. And I did train myself in some basic knife skills, so I can defend myself in close combat."

"Good," Orkas said approvingly.

Their introductions sorted, Vex and Derivan quickly found themselves seats, though Vex needed to [Enlarge] Derivan's. The stools they had in the tent didn't quite fit the armor, and even standing up, his head threatened to brush against the ceiling. He was tall.

Sev was the last to arrive — he brushed open the flaps of the tent with his staff and then paused awkwardly, like he was trying to figure out how to knock on fabric. A muffled voice came through a moment later. "Um. Hello? Can I come in? I didn't want to be rude."

"Come in, you doofus," Misa called out with a laugh, and Sev sheepishly walked in through the tent.

"You're the priest that healed me," Orkas observed.

"Cleric," Sev corrected. He offered a smile. "It's good to see you doing well."

"Do you not like being called a priest?" Orkas raised an eyebrow at him.

"It's a bit too religious for me?" Sev phrased his answer like a question, his brows furrowing. "I have a strange relationship with my god. Don't worry about it."

Orkas blinked once at him, and then looked at Misa, who immediately gestured that no, it was not what he was thinking. Orkas nodded back at her, in a way that was far too suggestive to make her think he understood what she meant, and she immediately glared at him.

Sev just stared at the both of them in bemusement.

"Just... get a seat, Sev," Misa grumbled with a sigh, giving up at convincing her father of anything. He'd either made up his mind or was just teasing her, and from the way her mother was smirking, she was suspecting it was the latter.

It wasn't long before all six of them were seated around the table. It was cramped, of course; a tent was not, by nature, intended for a large dinner party by any means. It was awkward, because half the people in the tent didn't quite know how to react to the other half, and one of them couldn't eat any food to begin with. It was quiet, because none of them knew what to talk about, or even what was appropriate.

And yet, as cramped and awkward and quiet as it was, it was perfect.

Misa felt an odd lump in her throat, looking at them all.

It wasn't a stretch to say that Sev, Derivan, and Vex had become something like family to her. They never replaced what she'd lost, of course — they couldn't. But they'd brought color back into her life in the way that friends often did, and she'd never imagined that they'd get the chance to meet her parents.

Sometimes she dreamed about it. She dreamed about telling her parents all about how she'd become a real adventurer, just like she wanted. She dreamed about telling her mother about how Vex liked presenting himself as a roguish rogue, but was in actuality a scholar that could ramble for hours on the smallest of minutiae. She dreamed about telling her mother about Sev's strange approach to clerics and priesthood, about his uncanny ability to heal nearly anything and the scathing wit he sometimes wielded. She dreamed about...

Well, when it came to Derivan, she mostly dreamed about telling her mother how cool he was. That was before she'd known he was a literal set of animated armor, of course, which only increased the coolness level, in her estimation.

But that was just in her dreams. Derivan was kind, and determined, and protective of his friends, and perhaps most strikingly he was endlessly curious in a way that wasn't dissimilar to Vex. He'd been afraid to show it before, but now he was expressing it a little more, asking questions, learning about the world that had been built.

The point was that seeing all of them together, in a way that she'd thought was impossible...

It felt like home.

So Misa smiled, and broke the silence. "Let's eat already. I'm fucking starving."

And, almost as one, everyone began to talk — like that was all that was really needed. Even Derivan, who wasn't eating at all and instead watched the rest of them in fascination. Her mother drew him into conversation several times, asking him about this and that, about what drew his curiosity the most; he spoke of magic, and of a developing interest in culture, in seeing how the different kingdoms handled their people. Orkas drew Sev into a conversation about his god, apparently trying to pry out details about Onyx, and when that failed he turned his attention to Vex and tried to ask the lizardkin about whether he had any romantic interests (at which point Vex sputtered and began aggressively stuffing dessert into his mouth, much to Misa's amusement).

It was an almost perfect night. The only reason it wasn't perfect was because it hadn't ended yet.

There was still the celebration, after all.