Word got around quickly. As the three walked down the streets, people gave them berth. It was a weird feeling, one Otter found herself not particurly enjoying. The look of apprehension, if not outright fear, people gave them. It didn’t sit right with her.

  She was used to commanding a certain level of respect in the gaming sphere. People would talk a good game against her, question her skills just by virtue of her being female, but when the time came to fight, they learned respect fast. Especially when she’d deviate from a meta strategy and shit on them with memes.

  This was a little different. She enjoyed silencing trash talkers in a virtual space, of making them learn civility, if not necessarily manners. No, this was what a conquering warlord probably experienced over territory conquered, or at least threatened. And it wasn’t something that felt good.

  She tried to look at the positive. The riotous colours of the buildings, all of which were built on stilts. Where most weren’t built from what passed for coral in this world, they had all been painted to look like it, giving the city a unique look. Many of the houses were adjoined by wood and rope bridges so you could travel between them without having to descend to ground level.

  Otter wondered what would happen between feuding neighbours, and as soon as the thought occurred to her, she saw signs of bridges that had been cut look between houses, axes still buried in posts.

  Underneath each house was a small beached canoe, or raft in some of the poorer cases, all neatly tied to one of the house stilts. When Otter asked about them, Rua expined that they were for the event of a storm, so the house’s occupants could still travel about. Apparently the sea level could rise in a moment’s notice, threatening to sweep the isnd clean, but it always retreated.

  There was a smell to the air. Not just the garbage smell, which Otter was thankful for, but of smoked meats and sharp spices, and the reason why became apparent. Ri Oa had many street vendors cooking food for passersby, each stall also functioning as a boat. Food was traded hands, usually in the form of some kind of wrap – some kind of tortil or ftbread, and seaweed both seemed popur – and those that took their food would sit in the shade of some house or another as buskers pyed music seemingly at every street corner.

  The musicians all pyed one kind of instrument or another, many of which Otter had never seen before. One woman spun a series of wooden balls on a string, and as she did they emitted a whistling along with a rattling percussion. Another pyed on a set of drums, but on each surface a rune was inscribed, and when struck emitted a sharp cp, louder and harder than any normal drum could produce. There was even a man with nk blond hair pying what looked like a fiddle, lost in his own cadence and not paying attention to his listeners.

  “Is the whole city like this?” Otter asked.

  “Most of it,” Rua answered. “Where we’re going is where the really good musicians py.”

  She said it with such a note of pride, a kind of smugness that Otter wasn’t accustomed to from Rua. It was kind of like she was showing off.

  “You don’t need to impress me, you already got into my pants.”

  “We both know that’s not a hard accomplishment. The real prize in that exchange was you getting into mine.”

  Otter snorted. “Sure thing. We both know you’re easy. How many days was it until I had my cock all up in your– Oh, hey, Sunny, I forgot you were there.”

  “I’m not eavesdropping,” she said defensively. “You can’t punish me for listening in when you’re talking dirty right in front of me.”

  “I’m not some tyrant,” Rua said.

  “I know, mama.”

  “But maybe don’t call me that in public. It’s… going to raise questions.”

  “Is it because you don’t like me?” Sunny’s voice was small and pitched high, and she sniffed at the end as if she were holding back tears. It’d almost be tragic if it weren’t so overdone.

  Rua’s eyes widened, her mouth opening as if to stammer out a defense, before realizing what was happening. She locked an arm around Sunny’s neck, before running her knuckles over the top of her head in a noogie.

  “Don’t make me spank you,” Rua grumbled as she released her.

  “Wait, spanking’s on the table?” Otter asked.

  “One is desperate for any type of affection, and the other can’t think of anything but sex. Can’t I have a single normal person in my life?”

  Sunny leaned into Rua. “Nope, you’re stuck with us, mama.”

  As they walked, the houses inevitably grew bigger and more colourful. Faded and worn paint gave way to structures made from what Rua called coral, but didn’t look porous enough in Otter’s experience. The houses took on an otherworldly quality. Straight walls gave way to curves and waves, right angles to rounded edges. Even the windows were circur, where they followed any traditional shape at all.

  Ri Oa was beautiful, there was no denying that. It was also very weird, and Otter couldn’t quite put her finger down on whether it was good weird, or bad weird. It was different, in a way that both excited and unsettled her. And ahead was the worst building of them all, a monstrous pace that was a veritable ode to chaos, with wings in different colours, and with stilts that didn’t look so much built to support the structure, but grown from the ground itself and the rest of the building had blossomed from there.

  Otter was about to make a joke about it, when she realized that was exactly where they were headed. Panic hit her. It was the biggest building she’d seen thus far, a mansion at worst, but probably more in the neighbourhood of a pace. It had adjoining buildings that were attached via bridges that looked to be part of the same complex that were rger than some of the neighbouring houses.

  “That… that isn’t your pce, is it?” she asked.

  “It is,” Rua answered tersely. She sounded grim to see her own home, and not happy like most would be.

  Too te, Otter realized the reason why. There was a small crowd gathered at the base of a staircase leading to the main structure. One woman in a long red skirt and white top, flowers decorating her head in a crown, stood with her arms outstretched, barring access to the stairs. She looked angry, but composed.

  Before her was a small contingent of soldiers in leather armor, not unlike the one Otter and Sunny had beaten silly at the gate. And at their head were two women, dressed in fine clothes. One was in a floral dress and had a dreamy, bnk expression, as if she weren’t fully paying attention to what was going on around her. The second woman, who was rail-thin and had the curves of a stick, had decided at some point in the day it was a good idea to wear a pair of pants so tight they qualified themselves to be a second yer of skin. Otter had worn leggings to yoga less revealing than them.

  The woman leaned against a spear pnted firmly in the ground, and had a hook nose and an angry demeanour. Someone who wasn’t used to hearing the word ‘no,’ and was currently being told it repeatedly.

  There was a whole lot of yelling going on, and Otter didn’t like the way the one woman held that spear of hers. She looked entirely too willing to use it. The thing was very ornamented and over-designed, the steel haft covered in flowing symbols, the bde at the end a full foot long. It looked like the kind of weapon you’d see in a video game, a funny thing considering that this whole pce started off as a game in her head, and turned out to be reality.

  “What are they doing here?” Rua growled.

  “Sisters?” Otter ventured.

  “Jua and Leilynn. One of them’s welcome here.”

  “Is this going to be a fight?”

  “Probably, but not the kind where we’ll be trading blows. Jua has no idea what peace is. Don’t make it worse.”

  “I told you my rule, drop bear of my life. She throws anything I construe as racism towards you, she is going to catch my hands with her face. That nose looks like it was made for breaking.”

  “Please?” Rua asked. “Just… just this once. For me. It’s my first day back. I’ve already resigned myself to the fact that you’re a walking disaster. And it’s even attractive. But… limit yourself.”

  “Fine, but I’m keeping a tally. I might not punt her in the dy bits today, but if she gives me reason, she’s getting it ter with interest.”

  Rua gave her that look as if she got when she was using her Pact to verify the veracity of her cim, and satisfied, she walked towards whatever confrontation was happening. Those raised voices were only getting louder by the second.

  “You’d think she’d learn to make us both promise these things by now,” Otter whispered to Sunny.

  “If Jua gets uppity, I’ll rip her non-existent tits off for you.”

  “That’s my girl,” Otter said, giving Sunny’s curly mop of hair a good ruffle.

  DorenWinslowe