Chapter 29: 29: Alarm Bells

Amelia

 

Rosa took for ever to get back into the game. It was honestly the absolute worst. Was I being too clingy? My heart was just aching from her absence. We’d been living in each other’s pockets for a few weeks now and I wasn’t used to the separation, however brief.

“Stop pacing and sit down,” Bia groaned, throwing a sparkling pink butterfly at me. The tiny spell bounced off the side of my head with a puff of smoke, and for a brief second I could smell flowers.

I sat down heavily on the sofa next to her and took a deep breath. It didn’t help. It was something I’d been feeling a lot recently— wanting to breathe but feeling unable to get enough air. It was like every time I inhaled, I only got 95 percent of the air that I needed to function.

“Sorry, Bee,” I said. “Just anxious for her. She’s even more fragile than she looks.”

“She seems pretty competent and tough on the battlefield,” Sang remarked from his seat way too close to the fire. That was one bad thing about lizardfolk, actually. The cold blooded thing was very real.

Bia nodded agreement with our guild leader. “Shy and kinda small in stature, yeah, but definitely no pushover.”

Shrugging, I said, “Definitely, but… look, it’s not my story to tell, I just don’t want anyone to do mental damage to her, you know?”

Bia considered my words for a few seconds, then acquiesced with a nod. “I see your point.”

“You seem good together,” the tanky lizardman smiled, looking over in my direction. “Having someone to worry about suits you, even if you are wearing a hole in the carpet.”

The last part was said with a deep, rasping chuckle, and I ducked my head in a blush. I certainly felt good together with her. Rosa was… amazing. She was so wild and vicious with her enemies, and then so adorably shy with people she liked or didn’t know. Then there was the passion in the way she was with me.

Her dark grey eyes would all but devour me right before she kissed me, but somehow it wasn’t in a lustful possessive way. Not that those things weren’t hella fun, but this was different. It was like she saw me and understood me completely when we locked eyes. Intensity was the word, I think. Everything about her was intense and interesting. Her smiles were brilliant, her anger was apocalyptic, and her kisses were transcendent.

And as for me? Well, I was apparently channelling the spirit of some foppish 18th century noble dandy who thought he was the next hit poet. Well, except that I was self aware of it. Man, those old folks were really cringe.

Like she was arriving on golden wings to pull me out of the depths of my mind’s ramblings, Rosa carefully poked her head through the doorway. When she saw me, she bounced over to me and dropped into the sofa beside me without a word. I was too relieved to see her to speak for a moment, and contented myself with wrapping her up in my arms.

“My new airship is on its way to Canada with me aboard, I have raided a number of corporate defence manufacturers for blueprints that we require, and my SAI friend Tim is designing you a new body,” she whispered into my long, elfin ear.

“A new body?” I blinked, meeting that smokey gaze of hers.

She cleared her throat and nodded slowly. “May says that you have several options, but the one with the highest percentage chance of success is where we move your consciousness off your meat body and onto a server that’s simulating a human nervous system. If you’re okay with it, obviously. Once the transfer happens, we will hopefully be able to upload you to a new cybernetic body.”

“We can do that?” I asked, practically choking to keep my voice down. Even then, Bia and Sang gave us curious looks.

Rosa nodded eagerly. “Yes! Then you’ll be sorta like me! I even made sure that the process isn’t just copying you and killing the meat version of you. May was all technical about the explanation, but she says that your continuity of consciousness isn’t interrupted by the process.”

“That’s so cool,” I murmured, my head spinning with the revelation. I’d get to escape the open grave that was the train car, and my disgusting, hairy, too-wide body. Hell, this was the kind of thing that’d dominated my daydreams while I sat freezing my ass off in a foxhole when I was in the army.

“Would that be a yes?” my girlfriend asked, fluffy foxy ears perking up.

I laughed, then dropped back into a whisper when I saw the others staring. “Hell yes!”

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“Shouldn’t you perhaps, possibly, think about it first?” Rosa asked with a roll of her eyes. “Inquire about details, perhaps?”

I shook my head and kissed her lightly. “Nah, Smokes. I trust you to make sure the details are good.”

“You have known me for less than a month,” she pouted. “This is very irresponsible.”

“I prefer almost a whole month,” I grinned, kissing her before she could protest again. “Shh, little one. I’m fine.”

She huffed and grumbled about it, but it’s not like she was going to stop me from agreeing to the option she thought was best.

We sat cuddled up together for an hour, eventually chatting with the other two while we waited for dinner time. It was a cosy, lovely evening, which was why I was all the more pissed when the general quarters alarm began to blare from every public speaker system in the whole damn city. There was no ignoring it. Everyone who could fight was obligated to drop everything and gather their weapons, because some shit was going down that threatened the integrity of the very city itself.

Rosa, myself, and the rest of the guild all charged out of the house, some like me still buckling our gear on. The dash through the city was hectic and full of confusion from everyone. Nobody knew what was happening, and it was making the whole debacle so much worse.

While we rushed for one of the exits out onto the battlefield, I spotted someone who might actually know what’s going on.

“Guys!” I shouted, getting the attention of my guild. “Follow me!”

We pushed through the crowd pretty easily, thanks in part to our large lizardman tank leading the way once I pointed out where we needed to go.

The group of other players I’d spotted was none other than the rather infamous Elemental Angels. Tami, Aurora, Shades, and the rest of their crew. They looked formidable standing there with what looked like new armour, each set themed to their specific elemental gimmick. Tami also had a new pair of mechanical power fists, which I knew’d been broken at some point. Maybe I should offer to tune them for her, and Rosa could enchant them further like she had with Jazz.

“Tami!” I called as we arrived. “Do you have any idea what’s happening?”

The lightning angel girl had been busy speaking to her sister, but she turned when she heard her name. “Amelia, right? What’s up? Yeah we don’t really know, but word is that the Pags have tons of troops coming. I was just trying to decide if I wanted to come down on them from above or just go out and start punching.”

“The eternal dilemma of Tami the punch-drunk,” Aurora laughed, leaning over to kiss her girlfriend on the cheek.

Tami giggled and leaned into the touch. God, they were so cute. It made me want to— A touch on my hand caused me to twitch in surprise, and I glanced down to see Rosa quietly slip her hand into mine. Yeah, seeing their affection had made me want to feel the same with Rosa, my adorable little fox spotter.

The Taeru took that moment to shudder as something impacted the exterior armour, and we all remembered what we were out here for. Right, the war.

“Come on folks!” Sang called over the renewed shouting of the many adventures around the place. “You can be gay when we aren’t defending our home!”

“But I’m always gay!” Tami replied, giving our guild leader a smug little smirk.

Sang laughed his rasping lizardman laugh and made a shooing motion towards the nearest exit ramp. “Then go and kill the enemy while being gay! Guild houses are expensive to replace. Let’s move!”

 

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