Shimmer, Glimmer, & Gleam - A Quest of Loss & Gain

It's another three days in that bed before a Doctor Wheelwright, whom you also immediately identify as 'a grandma', reluctantly gives you a cane. She has strict orders about your diet and the limits on your physical - and, after Jill's prompting, oneiromantic - activities, stressing repeatedly that you nearly died and if you die while you're her patient she will bring you back to life so that she can kill you herself. She repeats this to Jill, threatens Jill's life too, and the first thing Jill does is find Sasha and Jack, repeat it to them, and threaten their lives. Your cheeks burn at all the attention.

You emerge into a much-changed home. All these hands have rearranged the insides, creating 'rooms' out of shelving and tents, clearing out and reorganizing the inventory, setting up additional pots of the Eternal Soup. Bayview had guns, evidently; outside, behind cover made from cars that have been pushed with tractor and forklift and sometimes just main force, sentries watch the freeway entrance like hawks. Half-glass dogs impaled on stakes an awful lot like Asset Protection used form a warning...

...No, not just a warning, you realize. They're range markers, telling the people with hunting rifles and shotguns where an enemy is. Clever.

Nor is the Eternal Soup the only form of cooking that fills your nostrils with a distinct sense of comfort and security. Dirty Dick's has been thoroughly colonized by a mixture of folks who dress sorta like Jill dresses, grandmas, and one quite fat person in a white coat who seems to be in charge. When you wander past the large person waves you in, expounding in a booming and enthusiastic voice about all the preserved food that's been made so far and all the preserved food that is to be made. Quick thinking on the part of Jill and this 'chef' on the way out of Bayview had packed the various meats and seafoods in ice before either could freeze, and sheer numbers did what you hadn't expected: it saved a lot of the perishables, which has meant in turn that salted meat, jerked meat, pickled meat, meat in the form of frozen soup, meat in general was the project while you were in uh, a fucking coma, and now they're moving on to laying in hardtack and stiff breads and other things to turn flour into before vermin can get to it. You experimentally nibble a bit of hardtack, hate it immediately, and try it with jam as the chef suggests. This makes you hate it a bit less.

All these people...

And every single one seems to want to talk to you. They run up and thank you; they call you things you don't feel, like 'brave' and 'heroic' and 'our savior'. Jill at least keeps the children (nearly a dozen, which Marie has turned into some kind of roving pack of helping hands that hangs on her every word) from hitting you with flying hugs, but everywhere you go there are questions. Should we do this thing, or that one, do you think this project is a good idea, excuse me miss ("Orchid," Jill corrects every time, "prefers it/its, right now.") can you look at -

Who died and made you the leader of these people? That seems like an even worse idea than being a hero, especially when you jump out of your skin and nearly shoot someone that used to be Asset Protection. There's nine of those, with long lances of glass that sprout from their backs, reminding you uncannily of the man (when did you figure out his gender? No...that memory...) from Threshold, except they're not bleeding. One shyly demonstrates the utility of them by easily pulling one out of its body and hurling it nearly eighty yards with pinpoint accuracy.

"Don't got many shots, takes two days or so to regrow one," it explains, looking bashfully at its feet. "...You woke me up, when you smacked me with Corporate. So. Thank you. For. For that."

After four more days of this, you ask Jill up onto the roof one night, wearing new clothes that Andrea and Charles helped lead the design of. They have easy slits for your wings, and lots of pockets, lots and lots of pockets, filled up with the snacks that Doctor Wheelwright insisted you eat lots of. The two of you sit on the roof with your legs dangling over, and for a little while you turn a telescope onto the landscape around the city. The first thing you look for is Threshold Innovations, and you find it easily; the eight-story office structure outside of town has become a collage of glass and concrete and steel, and sits oddly still, with no sign of movement. But the first floor lights are on, and sometimes one of them will turn off, and sometimes it will turn back on again. Out in the farmlands that lay outside of town, you see signs of hasty replanting, fields of soy or wheat or grapes hastily pulled back up by the roots and new rows re-plowed.

You even spot your first cow, out near the mountains. Well. Your first fifty cows. Even the females with the udders seem to have long horns of glass now, but all they're doing is sitting around asleep and being so fucking cute that your heart hurts.

All this to avoid thinking about the bit where the back of your new coat has a flaming dollar bill emblazoned on it, just over the words Fuck Corporate.

"...Jill, why do people think I'm in charge?" you murmur, as you lower the telescope.

She sighs, and opens an arm, so you lean into her and bury your face against the side of her chest. "Sorry to say flower, you are. If people say you're in charge, you're in charge. You can try to say you're not, but...well, that doesn't always work out great."

...

You sob, a little, and Jill strokes your hair. "Orchid," she murmurs. "Is this about the fight?"

"...Yeah..." Jill's breast muffles your voice, and some absurd part of you wants to laugh at that. "Why aren't you scared of me? I'm. I'm scared of me, Jill. That was scary...I'm..."

"Flower," Jill chides, softly. "...Give yourself some credit. Even deep inta that, you protected people. I don't think you noticed from insidea your own head, but think back on it. There were statues in the aisles, there was that Asset Protection guy, Jim or whatever, there was me, and what'd you do? You herded that fuckin' thing away from us. You dueled it like some knight out of a movie and you saved people. I know a bit about how people get when shit gets real. I was aimin' at the national lacrosse teams when the fuckin' world ended, that is not a gentle godsdamned sport, y'know."

You let out a shuddering breath. "That thing...it's...there's more. And if we leave them to fester, they might just take over the city. They're gonna evolve."

"You wanna go to war, flower?"

You think about that. You think about a night in the rain. You think about someone putting a rifle in your hands and telling you to go to a strange place to kill people that look different from you, for reasons you knew were bullshit...why did you do that...

You shake your head. "I want the world to be a good world."

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