Prophecy Approved Companion

Qube wasn’t yet ready to completely let go of the whole “murdered for tradition” thing. Even though she knew full well that the Devs hadn’t viewed her and the villagers as real people, that they’d viewed them as a simulation, like the echoes of a spell, that didn’t even begin to touch the pain losing them had caused her.

In a way, she was glad that the Chosen One hadn’t been stupid enough to try and explain that the Devs hadn’t seen her village as “real”. If he’d tried to shield the Devs from criticism just by pointing out that they’d been promised the beings they’d created weren’t sentient, she would have been tempted to … well, she didn’t know what she would have been tempted to do. But it wouldn’t have been pretty, if he’d attempted to invalidate her pain with a handwave.

Fortunately, he was smart enough, and compassionate enough, to know that reiterating her lack of personhood in the eyes of the beings that made her would only have served to hurt.

It didn’t matter that the Devs hadn’t thought of the people they killed as real.

What mattered was that they were.

What mattered was that they had shaped this world to please their own narrative, and this world now had to live with the consequences. If they’d done it knowing they were real people, they would have been irredeemable monsters. As it was, they were just people she was very displeased with.

“How many other things have they done to people, just because it’s tradition?” she asked, the amount of venom in her voice surprising even her.

They might not have meant it, but the impact was still painful. And she wanted to know exactly what parts of them were organic, and what parts were a narrative that all Devs seemed to know.

“Uh,” the Hero darted a glance at Sexy Screamy Spider Briar.

Qube gasped. “They turned her into a giant spider just for tradition?!” she asked.

“No!” the Chosen One exclaimed. “No, that’s definitely not the traditional part. More the whole… sexy elf thing. It’s traditional for female elf companions to be super sexy.”

“But I’m a female half-elf companion,” Qube pointed out. “And I’m nowhere near as sensual as Sexy Screamy Spider Briar.”

What were the familiar threads from the Devs’ realm, and what were their limits?

“Ah! While I knew you were naturally alluring, I had no idea it was ordained by the Devs themselves,” Sencha Bard interrupted, a small smile playing on his lips as he put a hand over his heart.

“The Bard attempting to seduce everyone is also a cliché,” the Chosen One pointed out.

Sencha Bard stopped smiling.

“Well, while I can’t pretend to be thrilled at the discovery that my sensual nature is cliché, we already knew that my attraction to you was heavily influenced by the Devs,” Sexy Screamy Spider Briar said in a low thrum. The children’s faces stitched onto her distorted slightly as she shrugged. “It just gives me another reason to fight against my compulsions, and seek out my own path.”

“I can only assume that the reason you first suspected my… mixed loyalties… was because of a similar tradition,” Definitely Bad Guy said, taking out his habitual book and flipping through it. “Given you immediately named me as a non-Good person.”

The Chosen One looked at Definitely Bad Guy. The Mage continued idly flipping through his book. The deep v-cut robes brushed against the twisted blue and red tattoos that travelled up his chest, before flaring around his originally blood-red eyes.

“My dude, we found you in a tower full of creatures you were experimenting on,” he said bluntly. “No duh you were bad.”

“That was for my research,” Definitely Bad Guy muttered. “There is nothing inherently Evil in studying.”

“One dude had no skin,” the Hero said. “And he was still alive.”

“That was a life preservation spell!” the Mage rebutted. “Which is very important for healing!”

“Look, all I’m saying is, tower full of sentient test subjects, owner’s a baddie,” the Chosen One said.

“What about a box full of sentient test subjects?” Sencha Bard asked meaningfully.

There was a pause, as everyone except Qube turned and looked at the Bard, then back at the Chosen One.

“Verdict’s still out on that one,” the Hero admitted.

“But why aren’t I sensual?” Qube, who’d been following her own logic chain during this discussion, asked in a bewildered tone. “Is it because I’m only half-elf? Shouldn’t I be half as sensual then?”

Finding out that all her nearest and dearest were clichés was one thing. A strange, unsettling thing, yes, but the puzzle solver in her needed to know why she, a half-elf childhood companion, wasn’t as sexy as Sexy Screamy Spider Briar. If they were all going to embody stereotypes, then it needed to be done correctly.

“Uh…” the Chosen One avoided eye contact with her and started shuffling closer to the grand staircase.

“Chosen One,” she said warningly. “No more secrets. We agreed.”

“Yeah…” the Hero trailed off, still trying to sneakily get closer to the stairs. “Well, uh, so, the point of the whole… village thing… was to introduce me to the world, and make me want to save it, right? Hence the whole ‘killing everyone is supposed to motivate me’ deal. Cuz I bonded. With the villagers.”

“And your childhood companion would be the one you bonded to the most. Making her death the pièce de résistance of the slaughter,” Sencha Bard said grimly.

“But I could have been a sexy childhood companion!” Qube protested.

…Was the reason Quinton, childhood companion of Ruth the Rogue, had been such an annoying flirt that he was following the Devs’ tradition? But he hadn’t even been half-elf! He’d been fully human!

Wait, why was she arguing to be sexy? It wasn’t that she wanted to be sexy, she decided. She just wanted things to be consistent.

Which, in this world, was a forlorn hope, but one she still clung to.

“And you can’t say that childhood companions aren’t allowed to be sexy, because Quinton was sexy,” she declared.

“Who?” the Chosen One asked. She stared at him for a beat. Everything within her was screaming to tell him exactly who Quinton was, but she categorically refused to.

It turned out her job had never been to guide him. Only to die for him.

“Oh! One of the other guys,” the Chosen One said, solving the riddle on his own. Admittedly, it had been a very easy riddle, especially because he’d faced the ghost of Quinton not long ago, but it helped solidify in Qube’s mind that the Chosen One was perfectly capable of figuring things out on his own, without her help.

Well, maybe not perfectly capable. Capable. Eventually.

The Chosen One licked his lips as he thought.

“It’s not so much you’re not allowed to be sexy,” he said slowly. “I’m sure you could be sexy if you wanted to.”

Qube wasn’t sure who in the party looked the most uncomfortable about this conversation. The Chosen One was desperately staring off into space as he spoke, Sexy Screamy Spider Briar was looking at the ceiling with both her and her children’s eyes, Definitely Bad Guy had turned several shades of red, and even Sencha Bard was looking mildly horrified by the direction this discussion had turned.

“It’s just not the normal cliché,” the Hero finished quickly. “It’s more like a friendship vibe. Y’know, friends and family killed, off to adventure where there’s new and exotic people, that sort of thing.”

“But what about Quinton?” Qube asked. “Why was he so flirty then?”

“Ah, he was attached to the female Rogue, right?” the Chosen One asked. “Was he flirty to her, flirty in general, or just flirty to you?”

“...Oh,” Qube said in a tiny voice.

Quinton had never flirted with Ruth. Or anyone else. Partly that might have been because the Potentials and their Companions were the only people their age in the village, but he’d never even flattered some of the older people, like Mrs. Smith or Alderman.

“Well, I suppose I was chosen to be your friend,” she said thoughtfully. “So that must mean that the tradition of childhood friendship is stronger than the tradition of elf sexiness.”

If she hadn’t been rigorously trained to be the Chosen One’s friend practically from birth, Qube might have been disturbed to find out that her friendliness was merely the result of a cliché moulding her into a pleasing shape. Instead, it was interesting in much the same way discovering their world was run on tech, rather than magic: it was just a reframing of a truth she’d already accepted.

Now it was something to explore, to find the seams which stitched together her reality and discern the inner rules. If she’d been a full-blooded elf, but still a childhood companion, would that have made her a sexy childhood companion? Or would the tradition of the village being a place of only friendship have trumped even that?

The Chosen One, however, looked very uncomfortable at this reminder that she was, in fact, a prophecy approved companion and had been drilled her entire life to be a good (albeit apparently very brief) guiding light.

He was funny like that. Even though they were best friends, Qube still never quite knew what he would react to.

“Does that mean the reason Squiggles is so adorable is because she was destined to be our team mascot?” Sexy Screamy Spider Briar asked, picking up the sharktopus and giving her a squeeze. Like Qube, the Hunter had easily accepted that her personality had been predetermined by the Devs.

“Yeah, no,” the Chosen One said, looking at the Temple creature they’d rescued so long ago. “That, I have no idea what’s going on. The best bet we can come up with is she somehow merged with that otter thing from the Water Temple. Or took over part of his script, or something. Squiggles is one of the mysteries of this universe.”

Squiggles, pleased with the attention, started writhing around in Sexy Screamy Spider Briar’s grip, some of her tentacles wrapping around the Hunter, with the others reaching for Qube and the Chosen One. Qube, never able to resist the cuteness of those flat, black eyes, allowed herself to get caught and violently yanked closer to her beloved pet’s gaping maw.

“Squiggles, gentle,” she said, the metal from the various crowns adorning Squiggles’s tentacles pressing sharply against her. “We don’t grab.”

Squiggles drooled cheekily at her, before grabbing the Chosen One’s extended arm and yanking him into her rough embrace.

There was a small crunch sound as the Chosen One’s shoulder popped weirdly. The Hero made a small, strangled sound of pain, his arm going limp.

“Heal please,” he whimpered.

“[Lesser Heal],” Qube instantly cast. With a dull thud the Chosen One’s shoulder shifted back into place. She frowned at her pet. “Young lady, stop ripping the Chosen One’s arms out of his sockets! I’ve warned you before!”

“Lady Squiggles hurts only because she loves too fiercely,” Sencha Bard said calmly, stepping into Squiggles’s hugging range before he could be pulled. “It takes not an imposed tradition of appreciating the feminine to be enthralled by her passion.”

“I find this insistence that having an interest in research means one is tradition-bound for Evilness to be highly anti-intellectual,” Definitely Bad Guy muttered to himself from outside the ring of Squiggles.

It seemed the Bard and the Mage hadn’t taken the news that their core personality traits were clichés quite as well as the Healer and the Hunter.

“But then, I suppose I must thank the Devs for giving me this affinity,” Sencha Bard said thoughtfully from where he was being (somewhat gently) cuddled by two of Squiggles’s tentacles. “While I cannot think well of them for forcing me down the path of a mediocre Rogue, by attuning me to the wonders of love, I have seen much beauty, and experienced both the highs and lows of great emotion.”

Having reached this conclusion, Sencha Bard relaxed into Squiggles’s embrace.

“I find the fact that the Devs are conducting an experiment but narratively condemn those within their experiment who also experiment to be hypocritical,” Definitely Bad Guy wasn’t nearly as forgiving as Sencha Bard. Standing just outside grabbing range of Squiggles, he brooded.

Qube had to admit, Definitely Bad Guy did brooding very well. She didn’t know if that was because he was created to brood, or if it was something he’d developed on his own, but it was very effective.

Squiggles narrowed her eyes at the Mage. Perhaps sensing her gaze, Definitely Bad Guy broke away from his brooding and looked at the team pet.

Slowly, Squiggles reached out a tentacle towards her former enemy. She reached the very limit of her range, almost but not quite able to brush against the Mage’s robes. She wriggled her tentacle back and forth, flicking at him.

“What?” Definitely Bad Guy asked her, slightly belligerent. “What do you want?”

She wriggled harder.

The entire party held their breath as, with a long suffering sigh, the Mage took one step closer to the mass of tentacled hugs.

Quick as lightning, Squiggles lashed out, her tentacle gripping the edge of the Mage’s robe and violently yanking him towards her. Before he could even start to cast anything, she’d wrapped him in two tentacles, pinning him inside the group hug.

“What — release me!” Definitely Bad Guy demanded, struggling.

“Hush,” the Chosen One, who was much happier now someone else was suffering the full brunt of Squiggles’s grip. “Don’t struggle. That’ll only make it worse. Just accept her love. Her painful, painful love.”

“Gentle,” Qube absentmindedly reminded the sharktopus that was currently cuddling them all. This one of a kind, baffling even to the Devs, adorable pet had finally accepted them all. She felt her heart, which had suffered so much battering lately, swell with love at this perfect moment of companionship and company.

“Family,” Squiggles said in a small, childish voice.

Everyone froze.

“[By the words][fiddling] [snacks] Squiggles can talk?”