Chapter 7
The day had been too long. The hillside, the burned camp, Taylor’s voice telling us what the madness was made of. I sat on the edge of the mattress with my elbows on my knees and tried to find the words.
Joy sat cross-legged beside me, her back straight against the wall, her hands folded in her lap.
The lantern on the crate threw amber light across the room, catching the scuffs on the floorboards and the salt-frosted glass of the harbor-facing window.
Outside, the channel ran black beneath a moonless sky.
The mainland ridgeline was a pale smudge in the distance, barely there.
“Taylor filled me in on the hillside,” I said. “About the camp. About the Trazzor. About all of us.” I looked at Joy. “It needs to stay between us for now. Until we know what to do with it.”
Joy’s eyes were steady. She nodded once, her hair shifting with the movement.
“I’m listening,” she said.
I opened my mouth.
Knock knock knock.
Three quick raps, firm but not loud. Joy glanced at me, then swung her legs off the mattress and crossed to the door. She opened it.
A woman stood in the hallway. Tall, maybe five-foot-nine, platinum blonde hair falling past her shoulders in fine, straight strands that caught the corridor light.
She wore a deep-green velvet dress that hugged her frame, the hem hitting mid-thigh.
Her feet were bare. Her eyes were deep blue, unblinking, and they found mine across the room before they found Joy’s.
Joy stared. A full second passed. Her hand stayed on the doorframe.
“Autumn?” she said.
Autumn Lovelytail smiled, and it was the same smile, every tooth exactly where it had always been, just scaled up to fit a face that was no longer small enough to hold in a palm.
“Hello, Joy,” she said. Her voice was the same too, clear and warm, with the same slight formality tucked into the edges. “I made myself bigger. With the dust. The special kind.”
Joy’s eyes filled. She didn’t make a sound. She pulled Autumn into a hard, immediate hug, her arms wrapping tight around the fairy’s shoulders, her face pressing into Autumn’s platinum hair. Autumn hugged her back, her hands patting Joy’s spine in quick, gentle strokes.
“You used the gold,” Joy whispered. “You used the fairy dust. Oh, Autumn.”
“I did,” Autumn said. She pulled back enough to look at Joy’s face, her own expression open and bright. “I wanted to try. And it worked! Look at me. I’m humanz-sized now.”
Joy laughed, a wet sound that caught in her throat. She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand.
“I can see that,” she said.
I stood up. The room felt smaller with Autumn in it at full height. She filled the doorway, then the space between the door and the mattress, moving with the same loose-limbed energy she’d always had, only now her strides covered ground.
Joy closed the door. The latch clicked.
Autumn started pacing. Her bare feet crossed the worn floorboards, heel-to-toe, heel-to-toe, leaving faint prints in the dust. Her fingers worked at the hem of the velvet dress, rolling the fabric between thumb and forefinger, then letting it go, then grabbing it again.
“I need to talk about what Taylor said,” she said.
“On the hillside. About the game. The Mega Space thing. I’ve been thinking about it all the way back, and I can’t stop.
My head keeps going.” She looked at me, her pace quickening.
“My humanz, she said I’m from a game. Teva, Gascha, and the others.
A game people played. A game somebody wrote. Is that true? Really true?”
I sat back down on the mattress. “That’s exactly what I was about to tell Joy.”
Autumn stopped. Her hands dropped to her sides. “Tell her. Tell us both. Right now.”
So I did. I laid it out the way Taylor had laid it out for me: the Mega Space RPG, the Trazzor as a playable race, the Horizon as a ship from a game mod, the Kana as a minor race that never made it into the video game.
The Awenasa. Taylor’s own origin in the Mega Apocalypse RPG.The portal storms. All of it is part of the same Mega RPG family, built to be compatible across different settings.
A universe made of paper and dice and somebody’s imagination, pulled into the real world by the Blue Wave or whatever came after.
Joy listened without moving. Her eyes stayed on mine through the whole thing, and when I finished, she didn’t blink. She looked at Autumn. Then at me. Then at Autumn again.
The silence in the room had weight. The lantern hissed. The channel wind pushed at the cracked window, and the glass rattled in its frame.
Autumn stood in the center of the room, her platinum hair floating slightly in the draft. Her chest rose and fell with quick, shallow breaths.
“Am I real?” she asked. Her voice was small, smaller than it had any right to be coming from a body that size.
“Is any of this real? Does it mean I was just… written? Like a character in a book? Somebody made me up, and then I got pulled here, and now I’m standing in this room asking if I’m real, and I don’t know the answer? ”
I stood up. Crossed to her in two steps. Took her face in my hands. Her skin was warm, exactly as warm as it had always been when she was small enough to sit on my shoulder.
“You are real,” I said. “What you feel is real. The rest is the shape of the world we were all dropped into. None of us chose it. Not you, not me, not Joy, not Taylor. It doesn’t matter what world you came from, or how that world came to exist; we’re all in the same boat, and the boat is real.”
I remembered how Autumn said the blue glow in the sky was magic.
The wave that brought her was magic. Magic was like soda in a can, shaken, then opened and sprayed out all over everything.
“That’s how magic returned to Earth,” she had told me.
So maybe that’s how Autumn and the others, even the ship, had come to be.
But that didn’t change who she was. That she was right here, right now, and as real and alive as I am.
Autumn’s eyes filled. She didn’t cry. She stood there, her face in my hands, breathing.
Joy reached out from where she sat on the mattress. She took Autumn’s hand and squeezed it once, hard.
“You’re real,” she said. Her voice was quiet and sure. “I can feel your hand. I can see you breathing. Whatever else is true, that part doesn’t change.”
Autumn looked down at their joined hands. Her fingers curled around Joy’s.
The three of us stayed like that for a long moment. The lantern flickered. The wind pressed. Somewhere downstairs, a door closed, and the sound traveled up through the floorboards like a distant heartbeat.
Autumn took a deep breath. Then another. Her chest expanded, held, released. The restlessness in her body settled. It wasn’t gone but transformed, channeled into steadier focus. She looked up at me, her deep blue eyes holding mine without wavering.
I felt it before she said it. The shift in the air. The weight of what was coming.
Her mouth opened.
Her mouth opened, and this time there was no giggle or softening of the truth.
“I want you to fuck me, my humanz.” She paused, blinked, then tried again, even slower.
“I want you to take me, like a human woman. I want to feel it everywhere, with no magic, tricks, or shrinking. All of me, all of you.” The air around her shimmered a little, like the world wanted to agree.
She turned to Joy. “I want you here too, please. Stay with us.” The words were gentler, but the force behind them didn’t fade.
Joy looked at me, then back at Autumn, and nodded. “Of course,” she said. Her eyes were bright with curiosity, but underneath that was an emotion I knew as hunger.
Autumn crossed to me in a single step. She was nearly my height, maybe a few inches less, but the way she stood erased the difference.
She reached up, grabbed the collar of my shirt, and yanked in for a kiss.
Her mouth was hot and tasted sweet, but bigger, fuller, real in a way that no tongue or wish could fake.
She kissed me like she meant to bite, teeth on my lower lip, then her hands slipped under my shirt and found the bare skin of my chest. Her palms pressed flat, then her fingers dug in. She ran them over my ribs, along my abs, mapping the territory.
Joy sat on the mattress, legs slightly parted. She watched, breath catching once, then again. Her hand slid down her thigh and stayed there, squeezing just above the knee before slipping between her thighs.
Autumn peeled the shirt from my back. She knelt to open my pants, her face level with my waist. She inhaled, breathing deeply. “You smell like the sea. And you. And a little bit like me,” she said, and when she looked up, the blue of her eyes was dark as the channel.
She took me in her hand, stroked the length, and squeezed. Her thumb ran up the shaft and circled the head. I watched her memorize the motion, the look of concentration so intense I wanted to laugh. I didn’t.
She leaned in and licked the head of my cock with a quick flick of the tongue. She smiled, satisfied, then stood. “Now you,” she said. Her fingers slid over the green velvet of her dress, found the seam at her hip, and pulled it up and over her head.
Her body was longer than before, but the features were all the same.
Perky breasts, high and tight, with pale pink nipples hardening in the air.
A flat stomach, navel a perfect oval, the faint lines of muscle above the curve of her hips.
Her skin glowed faintly in the lantern light, almost translucent at the wrists and ankles.
The patch of platinum hair between her thighs was soft, fine, and damp with her scent.
She reached down and slid her hand between her legs. The movement was shameless. She stroked her pussy once, then held her fingers up for me to see. Wet and shining, her own nectar. She sucked them into her mouth, eyes glued to mine.
“I want to feel it,” she said again, voice low. “I want to know what a human woman knows.”