Hey all, I've been sitting on this message since I started writing my last work of the version because I felt I needed to keep in touch with what was going on, both in terms of receiving feedback on my work and providing input into endgame as it happened. Now that all that's over, I feel like I at l...

Some part of her expected the request to be turned down. After all she’d done, it would’ve made sense to leave her here to bleed out and rot. To see easing her pain as a privilege, one she had lost. That it wasn’t, said everything she needed or wanted to know about who the two of them both really we...

It seemed a little absurd to be worried about how she seemed, right now. Still, Erika couldn’t hide her unease as she attempted to explain herself. “Never told you, but a lot of my earliest memories were hiding from people. I was a quiet, scared little boy.” “Sorry. That’s shitty.” Garnet cut in, so...

“Look…” Erika pulled away, wiping tears from her eyes with the back of her hand. She paused for a moment, trying to recall what she’d heard on the way here. Her memory of even walking this far was sporadic, incomplete. There was at least another explosion, and some scattered gunfire, before everythi...

“You didn’t.” She replied to Garnet, bluntly. The irony of the situation wasn’t lost on Erika. The last time they’d been in this position, Erika had been testing a theory, thinking she’d give Garnet a chance to end all of this if her doing so made the world meaningful and sensible again, even for a ...

Erika raised her hand, the joint still smouldering between two fingers, as if she was clasping a chalice. She replied in the voice of her character, the erudite yet absent-minded elf, who so often played the straight man to Garnet’s gregarious barbarian. “I remember - I remember my dude’s toast. It ...

“Th-thanks dude. I was saving this for… well, my last day here.” Garnet held the lighter steady, the charred end of the joint quickly lighting back up as Erika inhaled. Her friend held the lighter alight almost a bit too long, a reminder that it was probably the first time she’d done something like ...

It was a weird question to think about. She wanted to not die. It was hard to see anything else she wanted, anything that she could do that would feel right. Everything she’d done so far had been to avoid this - No, to avoid how she felt about it. Those inclinations had to be thrown away, discarded....

what have you done? “I’m…” dying. She cradled her arm close to her chest, shivering. you always were. there’s just no denying it, now. nothing you can do to make it seem like you’re not, nowhere to lash out. if it was all leading here, what did you even do it for? did rationalizing it over and over...

Erika kept trying to raise the pistol, as Garnet spoke. A few times she got close to something like aiming. It hurt to hear her speak, to hear her use this time to keep making the same mistake over and over. Garnet needed to accept it, or go down fighting. She should have known better. She was going...

“Hmph. Yeah, I guess it like - I guess it comes with the territory.” Erika exhaled sharply from her nose. The preamble to a cynical laugh she quickly suppressed. Expressions like that hurt too much now, and she couldn’t give Garnet an opening. No more chances to grow a spine, and steal everything aw...

Her right thumb turned a paler white as she pressed down hard on the bullet, which dipped slightly past the feed lips of the magazine, but not far enough for it to stay there. Erika stared down at it, hoping that the look of consternation and hatred might somehow provide enough pressure to press it ...

From high up on the cliffs, the sound of the ocean was a persistent white noise that rose and fell in intensity with the waves. It was a relaxing, pleasant refrain; the air on the rest of the island was altogether too humid, too thick with the stench of death, too alive with the buzzing of insects a...