Chapter 21: Interlude: Afterlife, Pt. 3

  Three months earlier, in Afterlife

  “Morning, Nana.”

  The young Remnants greeted the ancient female shopkeeper with wide smiles.

  “Morning? At this hour? Pfft, young folk,” she complained, yet still smiled nearly as wide as they did.

  “It’s nine! I think…” Erik complained right back. “So, what have you got to sell us today?” He looked at the old lady with an expectant look. He wasn’t expecting her to have much.

  “What do you need, kid?” she asked back, wiggling her eyebrows knowingly.

  “That depends on what you have!” he countered.

  “I have everything you need! Just name it.”

  “I’d like a…n ice cream, please!”

  “In your freezer,” the lady said, her grin growing wider.

  “Fuck. You?”

  “Still nothing.” She sounded disappointed in herself.

  “What do you sell, woman?” Erik asked, his voice deep and boisterous.

  Jessie chuckled. “Oh gods, is that your hero voice?”

  “Quite,” he said in the same manner, his gaze locked on Nana.

  Nana sighed and laughed a bit herself. “I have only what you need, I promise. The fact that you don’t require anything is why I don’t have anything.”

  “A-ha! Ye olde shoppe of requirements! Your secret is out at last, I say!”

  “What are you even supposed to be, a freaky mediaeval knight crossed with 60s Superman?” Jessie groaned.

  “Quite, I say! Indubitably or… some-such.”

  “Stop it.”

  “I refuse,” Erik said, still with the voice.

  “Stop it.”

  “I say nay!”

  “Stop it, or I’ll firebolt your ass to ‘ye olde’ kingdom come!”

  “Fireball, surely.”

  “Firebolt.”

  Nana, at this point, had long since started ignoring the pair. From deeper inside her shop, which only looked like a stall from the front, she could see that the young woman called Jessie was enjoying herself, despite her acting annoyed. The old woman chuckled to herself and shook her head as she carried on with her own business.

  It had already been a few days since the two Remnants first arrived, and she had to admit things were always a bit brighter when those two were there with her. Considering the rest of Afterlife was nothing but basic Peons, that didn’t necessarily mean much, but they had somehow managed to burrow their way into her heart either way. They had also been quick to find companionship in each other, a boon for their future to be sure.

  The pair soon shuffled away without saying goodbye to the old woman, as they were still in the middle of teasing one another.

  “Certainly, a ball maketh more sense!” he said.

  “No, it’s a bolt, you dolt.”

  The pair returned not five minutes later, and were still on this, though Erik’s voice had returned to normal.

  “I mean, where do you even get ‘bolt’ from? Frost bolt?”

  “It’s called ‘fire bolt’ everywhere! Also flame bolt, some places, but mainly fire bolt!”

  “Nowhere is it even called that! You’re confusing it with Frost bolt! Unless you’re confusing it with Thunder bolt. Oh, hey Nana,” Erik said, genuinely a bit fired up in their conversation now. He greeted Nana normally, though.

  “You just left,” Nana said, their quick return confusing her.

  “Yeah, I wanted ice cream. Don’t know about her though,” he said, licking his ice cream while turning to look at Jessie.

  “I just wanted some peace and quiet from you,” she said, then licked her own ice cream.

  The two Remnants did what they could to learn as much as possible about magic and Remnants. They did this while helping Nana out in her shop. This, it turned out, meant they did absolutely nothing. Unlike Nana, who might’ve done this for millennia, they were awful at faking work. Nana made it seem natural.

  Besides this, they looked around Afterlife some more. They never attempted going the way they came from, but they went most everywhere else. They had found a pool in a room illuminated with sunlight.

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  The air was pleasant, and a light wind provided a welcome coolness. They had spent a few afternoons in this room, being waited upon by Peons. What had previously been a modern luxury apartment complex was now a full on resort. The pool even had a beach. The sun made Jessie feel good as she rested as she sunbathed on the hot sand, whilst Erik felt more comfortable in a deck chair.

  “Do you think this tan will carry over to Earth when we leave?” Jessie asked after wondering about something for about a minute.

  “Probably?” Erik answered in a high-pitched voice.

  “I mean, I’m surprised I even got a tan. Our bodies are supposedly practically frozen in time, right? How am I getting a tan?”

  “Ah. Good old-fashioned temporal displacement and quantum entangled dark matter particle technology. That’s always the answer,” Erik answered—almost professionally.

  “Do you know any other big words or just ‘quantum’?

  “Of course! I did mention temporal displacement, right?” he teased.

  “If you had only stopped there.”

  “Hey, I don’t need to know what big words mean, I just need to know I know the words, pup!”

  “Pup?”

  “I said that, didn’t I?”

  “You did.”

  Another few days later the two Remnants spotted something entirely out of context for them, something so surprising they’d never have guessed it. This was after the fact that they found a room containing a sunny beach and even a hellishly cold winter wonderland where the pair had ‘gone skiing’, as Erik had called it.

  When Jessie realised what ‘skiing’ meant for the Norwegian, she felt the sudden urge to kick his ass back down the snow-filled mountainside. She’d gone through the trouble of finding skis and winter wear, finding a use for Nana’s shop at last. It turned out she had skis. When she entered the cabin, the promised meeting place, Erik was leaning back with a hot cup of cocoa, laughing his ass off as Jessie entered, geared to the gills, and prepared to take on the snowy hills.

  ‘Going skiing’, for the Norwegian people, meant cuddling up in the cabin with something nice until it was time for drinks. That said, Jessie had a hell of a blast that entire day, something she’d never admit to Erik.

  What blew their minds was no simple room, though. It was perfection. Pure and simple.

  “Is that…?” Jessie asked.

  Erik took a look in the direction Jessie was looking and somehow did a genuine double-take. “I think it is.”

  The newly arrived Remnant—a petite, ashen-blonde woman looking like she was in her mid-twenties—had her hair neatly braided in one thick braid which seemed to flow over her right shoulder like a river and down along her body. She wore a green tunic and black shorts of some kind of leather. Green thigh-highs led straight into a pair of brown leather boots.

  The entire outfit resembled a classic Ranger costume in some games. Her hair did nothing to hide the woman’s most defining feature; her ears…which were pointy. They weren’t human-pointy, they were pointy-pointy. Elf-pointy.

  Not only was this the first other Remnant the two had ever seen besides each other, but it was a real, genuine elf. While the elf didn’t seem to notice the staring pair, she started walking in their general direction. Her walk was immensely graceful. It was like the elves of Tolkien’s works brought to life. Well, Afterlife.

  The pair, who sat a small distance from Nana’s shop taking a break from work, didn’t seem to catch the elf’s interest at all as she lusciously moved to the front of Nana’s stall. Being greeted by Nana, the elf smiled, showing a beautiful set of white teeth surrounded by soft, thick, pink lips. What came next was the real shocker, however.

  As the elven lady greeted Nana, a wave of cacophony and hellish sounds reached both Erik’s and Jessie’s ears, and they both covered their ears in pain in complete sync. It was like a stampede in their heads, rattling their brains.

  The immense headache following this was one of the worst things Erik had ever experienced. Besides burning to death, obviously. Jessie looked to feel the same. Nana stood resolute as ever and even responded to the green-clad girl.

  Unsure what was happening, a fresh wave came unto them once more when the elf spoke again. While being sort of prepared that time, it was just as bad as the first time.

  Nana pointed over towards the doors to the apartments, and the elf smiled a gentle smile. Suddenly, she noticed the pair sitting to the side, hands covering their ears in pain. She seemed to understand what had happened to them, as she apologetically bowed, smiled and went on her way.

  Curious, the pair rushed over to Nana’s.

  “What the hell was that?” Erik asked, his head still spinning and throbbing.

  “Oh, that one? She’s an elf, dear. I would recommend staying away from her, at least for now. You two and her aren’t quite…” Nana started, trying to find the right word for whatever it was. “Compatible yet,” she finished.

  “You got that right. A bulldozer just ran over my brain,” Erik winced.

  “What do you mean ‘yet’?” Jessie asked, curiously looking towards the elf now entering the hallways with their apartments.

  She had a gleam in her eye that Erik didn’t know what meant. The elf looked back just then, smiling at them.

  “You aren’t magical beings yet, and languages from other dimensional realms can be… hard on your bodies. That woman will feel the same pain you just felt if you speak to her. You should wait to talk to her once your Crests are more developed. The things you can learn from each other. That’s genuine beauty,” Nana said as if her mind was somewhere else.

  “I think you’re right,” Jessie said, also somewhere else, still looking towards the doors the elf had entered, which were now shut.

  Back in Jessie’s room for the evening, the pair couldn’t help but gush about the real-life elf walking amongst their very halls.

  “You didn’t hear anything Nana said?” Jessie sighed.

  “Elves are a thing, Jess. Why would I listen to an old woman when elves are real?” he asked, gesturing enthusiastically with his arms.

  “Because she explained it? The elf is from a whole other world, maybe even another dimension as far as we’re concerned. If magic is what took us here, that means magic took her here as well. I don’t think the magic of Afterlife bothers with translating everything. You can understand me just fine, right? No headaches when we talk,” she argued.

  “Well. Not as much, maybe.” His teeth flashed as the Witch stuck her tongue out.

  “Because we’re from the same place. And when I say place, I don’t necessarily mean Earth, I mean… that elf could be from a whole different universe.”

  “Universe?”

  “We don’t know the limits of Afterlife. It might be… interversal? Is that a thing?”

  “Superversal! Afterlife just keeps on surprising you, doesn’t it?”

  “Superversal is not a word.”

  “It is now. Jessie, this is no longer science. We’re ass deep in liquid magiscience here. We can call it whatever we like!”

  “Magiscience isn’t a word, either. Nana said our Crests needed to develop more for us to interact with the elf. Maybe that means our magic might be the solution, not Afterlife’s magic. You’re a Titan now, I’m a Witch. We’re technically not human, especially not when we get our Crests.”

  “So, you and I, from Universe A, can’t tolerate the elf because she’s from Universe B, but human us could have understood a Vampire had he been from Universe A? Is that your theory?”

  “Maybe. So I’m thinking it’s more the actual language. Like a song where the sound file isn’t supported by your phone, only instead of refusing to play it or give an error message, it just tries it anyway and just screeches instead of playing the song.”

  “We’re simply just… incompatible?”

  “Well, we can look at her just fine. Had she understood our alphabet, I’m sure we could communicate. Even body language might be hard, since we have no idea what kind of culture she’s from. Have you ever seen anyone bow before? Like, for real?”

  “Never. So, until we get our Crests, the only thing we can do is stare—I mean, admire—err, I mean, stay away from her?” Erik asked, intentionally fumbling his words.

  Jessie laughed. “Yep. For her sake, too.”