Here's another extra chapter for the weekend.
Jadis was not a craftswoman.
Her efforts at patching together some simple clothes had produced reasonable results when she’d used old cloth as her material, but leather was a far cry from anything she’d worked with before. In all frankness, she didn’t have much idea of what she was doing. One whole sheet of leather had been sacrificed on the altar of her ineptitude already, having been cut, slashed, punctured, and just all together twisted into a mess.
She needed armor, though, and if Jadis was anything, a quitter wasn’t it.
After returning from her exceptionally hectic morning, Jadis spent the remainder of the day trying to put together something that would provide a little cover to her more vulnerable parts. She had no illusions that she’d be making anything even remotely close to what a professional could do, but some protection was better than none. Besides, with all the leather and hide she’d managed to scavenge, she felt she had a reasonably good chance of stumbling across a working design simply through trial and error. She had no lack of material to work with anymore.
The two of Jadis’s bodies sat cross legged, side by side, backs reclining against the stone wall of the hut. While she still had no bed or comfortable chair to recline on, what she did have now was a relatively soft fur skin to sit on. The pelt was large enough it covered most of the floor of the room and would make a good bed, leaving only her feet to dangle off the edge if she fully stretched out.
While she worked on cutting and sewing the leather armor into shapes she thought might do well at protecting her own hide, Jadis talked things over with herself. There were a lot of things on her mind, but at the forefront of everything, she was concerned about what to do when she did eventually meet the natives. Non-demonic natives, anyway. She knew what she was doing when she met any of Samleos’ spawn.
“Let’s assume, for the moment, that there isn’t a skill that lets people instantly know what class or level or anything like that a person has.”
“Big assumption,” Jadis interrupted herself, acknowledging the thought had no strong basis in experience. “There could absolutely be a skill that does that and we just don’t know it.”
“True,” she continued her train of thought, “but in most RPGs I’ve played or books I’ve read, if there’s a skill that lets people identify other individuals or monsters, everyone has access to it. That, or it’s such a rare and valuable skill, hardly anyone has it and those who do aren’t just walking around everywhere.”
“The protagonist always gets identify, though. Just like that one story with the spider, yeah?”
“Yeah, the spider story. But!” Jadis held a finger in the air, “I’m not a protagonist. I’m just a person. Yes, inserted into an alternate dimension by a god, but still. If you were to call anyone a protagonist on Oros, it’d probably be whoever the hero is.”
“True…” Jadis agreed, then paused her conversation to focus on the vambrace she was trying to put together. Using all four hands for fine detail work actually felt pretty natural to her now that she’d been a double-person for a few days, but she couldn’t think heavy thoughts while trying to do something delicate with two bodies at the same time.
Eventually, she managed to get the leather into a close approximation of what she’d envisioned and she continued.
“It’s possible people out there do have a way of identifying others and it’s equally as likely there isn’t a way. For now, I assume there isn’t because it’s better to be prepared than not.”
“Right.”
“Right, so, assuming no one can tell I’m one person with two bodies, the only way they’ll know is if I tell them or if I give it away through word and action.”
“Do I care if people know?” Jadis looked up at herself, violet eyes meeting each other.
In all honesty, she wasn’t sure if she should care or not. The unknowns were so numerous it was practically overwhelming. What if people have pre-conceived notions about the Mirror Knight class? What if there was some cultural or religious taboo against it? Or, what if the opposite were true, and the class was highly revered and she damned herself as a blasphemer by taking a class that was reserved for only a specific elite?
With so many different possibilities swirling around in her heads, Jadis could do nothing but shake them both and toss the speculation out the window.
“I’m going to, for lack of better information, presume it’s safer if I don’t tell people we’re the same person. I’m the same person.”
She quirked her lips up in unison. “That means saying we should be the way we talk, from now on.”
“God, that makes me sound like a crazy person,” she sighed in bewildered exasperation. “Can I blame this bizarreness on D? I’m going to blame it on D.”
“We’re going to blame it on D,” she corrected herself. “Besides, it’ll only look crazy to me. To anyone else, it’ll look normal to see two people talking to each other like they're two people instead of the same person. Fuck that was a weird thing to say out loud.”
“Okay, fine,” Jadis pressed on. “We’re two different people. At least to the public eye. What’s our story, then?”
Jadis slid one of the somewhat finished vambraces on her arm and frowned. The bracer was kind of loose and without any buckles, she had no way of tightening it. Sighing, she started pulling the stiches apart, getting to work on starting over.
“Considering we look exactly alike? I’d say we’re identical twins. What else?”
“Cousins who happen to share a super strong family resemblance?”
She gave herself a deadpan stare. Jadis did not deign to acknowledge the stare or the stupidity of her own suggestion.
“So we’re twins. Twins that are both named Jadis?”
Jadis shook her head. Stiches now pulled apart, she moved to cut the leather a bit shorter, then had a sudden burst of inspiration. Pulling an extra piece of cloth she had from her pile of materials, Jadis laid it on the inner side of the bracer, giving it some padding and making it a tighter fit without having to cut the leather shorter. She got to work on stitching the two materials together and resumed her considerations.
“We’ll have to come up with two new names. Nothing else makes sense.”
“Okay,” she said, holding the bracer in place while the other her stitched. “Gotta be honest with myself here. I do not like the idea of calling one of me, er, one of us, Barbara or something like that.”
“Yuck,” Jadis made a face. She had always had a bit of a complex about her name coming from the villain of a popular book series, but she did have some appreciation for the fact that it was unique. At the least, it didn’t make her sound like someone’s grandmother.
“Let’s keep it simple. Two people, two syllables in my name. Ja-dis”
“That would make me… Jay?” the Jadis on the left pointed at her own chest.
“And I’d be Dis,” the Jadis on the right nodded her head.
She tilted her two heads, thinking for a moment.
“We’re spelling it D-Y-S, if anyone asks,” Dys eventually said, her furrowed brow smoothing.
“And I’m spelling my name J-A-Y. Feels like a boy’s name to me, but I guess I’m kind of half boy anyway?” Jay said with a wry smile. It would be weird calling herself by two different names, but everything about her life for the past three days had been as weird as corn-flavored lip balm. What was one more bit of bizarreness to add to the ever-expanding list?
“Well, I don’t know if I’m half per se…” she ruminated, glancing down at her crotch significantly. “But it’s certainly a big part.”
Jadis giggled at her own joke, pausing in her work to slip on the leather vambrace. The fit wasn’t perfect and the stitching was crooked, but all in all it seemed she’d managed to make something that could, if one squinted at it and held it at a distance, be seen as halfway passable armor.
“Okay! That’s one! Just three more to go,” Dys said with a bit of forced cheer. Honestly, she wasn’t particularly enjoying crafting the armor. The process was tedious and didn’t give a smidge of the thrill she felt when fighting the bone demons that haunted the valley she’d found herself temporarily living in.
“Also, we still need to come up with some kind of actual backstory. We can’t just tell people we’re from another world and were plunked down on Oros at the whim of a god,” Jay huffed. “If anything’s going to get us into trouble, it’s going to be saying anything that gives us away as being reincarnated.”
Jadis frowned with two faces. Yet again her ability to properly plan out her next steps was thwarted by a lack of knowledge of her new world. Would the idea of divinely gifted reincarnation be alien to the peoples of Oros, or was it known?
“For fuck’s sake, inter-dimensional travelers might be common for all I know,” Jay cursed.
“I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” Dys curtly cut herself off. “Thinking about D’s negligence is just going to piss me off and that’s not helping me.”
The heat that came through in Dys’ voice made it clear enough to Jadis that she was, in fact, already pissed off at D. She still did her best to put aside the anger. She had a lot to be thankful of when it came to her benefactor. D didn’t have to do anything he’d done; if it weren’t for him, she might very well still be floating about in the chaotic abyss of ‘The Between’ as he’d called it. Remembering the feeling of what that was like sent a shiver down her spine.
Still, she was growing more and more certain that her whole less than ideal situation was a purposeful machination by D. He was probably enjoying watching her struggle.
Jay cut a strip of leather with the shears and passed it to Dys. “What about our free attribute point? Where are we putting that?”
Dys shrugged, mirroring Jay’s uncertainty. “Vitality again? Every point there is putting us further and further away from an early grave.”
“Yeah,” Jay nodded, “but how about we put it in an attribute we don’t know the purpose of? Try and figure out what they do?”
Jadis found herself conflicted. She truly wanted to experiment with her stats, figure out what did what. At the same time, she was held back from putting the point anywhere aside from the two stats she was sure of because she didn’t know if doing so would be a waste.
What if the only use ‘Dexterity’ had was to boost accuracy with ranged attacks? Fat lot of good that would do her what with her exactly zero number of ranged weapons.
“Seriously, what’s the difference between Dexterity and Agility, anyway?” Dys voiced her irritated thoughts. “How the hell am I supposed to pick where to put a point when those are literally synonyms that mean the same thing?”
“They don’t literally mean exactly the same thing,” Jay said, deciding to be the voice of reason to Dys’ voice of frustration. “Otherwise they’d just be the same word. There’s some kind of linguistic difference.”
“Right, yeah, again though, how the hell am I supposed to know the difference?” Dys sneered at Jay.
“I guess we’re not supposed to know,” Jay said, sneering right back. “It’s all a great big fucking mystery perpetrated by D’s divine step-dad. Probably has some kind of monopoly in play with priests being the only ones who know all the answers. Bet that’s how he keeps everyone in line or some shit like that.”
“Exactly,” Dys said, riling herself up further. “That’s exactly what a god would do. Keep the people coming to church for answers about the system. I guarantee that’s what we’ll find out as soon as we make it to an actual town.”
As she ranted at her twin, Jadis realized she was starting to enjoy herself. Not the bad-mouthing of D’s step-father; she honestly didn’t feel that strongly about the unknown, unnamed god, one way or another. D seemed to be fussy about him, but Jadis had no quarrel. No, what she was enjoying was the impassioned conversation she was having.
Yes, the conversation was with herself. But she’d always talked to herself in the past. Voicing her thoughts this way, using two different voices, pretending to be two different people, it was kind of entertaining. Almost like she was putting on a show, only just for herself.
Both of her twin forms smiled at her unvoiced thoughts. She was growing ever more certain that she was some kind of naturally weird person, what with the ease she was taking to holding conversations with herself.
So she might be a little crazy, so what? There was no one around to judge her right now anyway.
“No one but a bunch of bone thieves,” Jay said, finishing the stiches on a second vambrace. “Not that their judgement counts for much.”
A malicious grin spread across Dys’ face as she put together the material to start their work on the third bracer. “And it’ll count for even less tomorrow when they're squashed and rotting in the woods.”
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