The Questions I'm Saving Up

I have a face I make maybe twice a decade. Kael knows it. He clocked it just now across the cave and I watched him clock it and neither of us said anything, because there's a monster problem to deal with first and the face isn't for now. The face is for after. The face says: we finish this, and then you and I are going to have a very long talk.

I'm keeping the questions in a stack. It's the only way I can stand here and not start shouting them, so I'm stacking them like plates, and I'm going to carry the whole stack out of here and set it down in front of him the second we're clear.

Here's the top of the stack.

The exit sealed behind us. I put my shoulder into it — real shoulder, I felt the stone, I felt it not move — and it didn't budge, and it flickered while I pushed, stone to static to something that looked absurdly like an office shelf, and then back. I don't have a category for a wall that can't decide what it's made of. I've spent my whole life knowing where the exits are. I checked them tonight, same as always, before we ever loaded in. And the exits are gone now, and I don't understand how a thing I checked can stop existing.

Marcus screamed. That's the one that put me here, honestly. Not the wall. The scream. Marcus took his glove off — I saw him take it off, the glove's on the office floor, I could see it in the corner of my real eye — and he kept hurting anyway. The pain's supposed to stop. That's the rule. That's the one rule I actually understood when they explained the tech, because it's the rule that let me say yes to putting my friends inside a machine: it stops when you take the glove off. Marcus took the glove off. It didn't stop. So either I didn't understand the rule, or the rule is broken, and I don't know which of those is worse.

Angela's healing failed. Angela. I have watched that woman fix things her entire life — scraped knees, broken hearts, me, once, at three in the morning after the worst night of my life. Her whole self is I will patch you up. And she knelt down to patch Marcus and the spell just — didn't. Fizzled out. Her face when it failed. I'm going to be seeing her face when it failed for a while.

So here's where I am. Something in here is wrong on a level I can't name, and my people are inside it with me, and the thing I'm for — the standing in front, the big body between them and the bad thing — I'm not sure it's enough this time. You can't shoulder-check a wall that isn't really there. You can't tank a monster that laughs in your friend's voice. My whole job is being the thing that's between them and harm, and I'm starting to understand that the harm is coming from a direction I can't stand in front of.

But I can still finish the fight. There's one more of them out there in the dark — I can hear it walking, and it walks wrong, it walks like it's thinking — and I can put myself between that and everyone else, and I can do that much even if I can't do the rest.

So I'm going first. Into the tunnel. Kael said "after you" in the joke voice, and I heard the joke voice crack, and I filed that on the stack too. I'm going first because that's what I'm for and because if I go first I don't have to watch the others be scared. I only have to be scared myself, which I can do quietly, which I've had practice at.

The questions are stacked and waiting. Finish this. Get them out. Then talk.

If you want to know what it costs to be the one who stands in front — and to feel that job slipping the moment it matters most — you have to go back to the night the game turned real.

This is the world of Overlayed Echoes — a near-future LitRPG about found family, the masks we wear for the people we love, and the weight of being the one who holds the story together. Progression fantasy with a beating heart and a knife behind its back.