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Our hero Gyrus is hidden away in the Teleprompter Realm with his allies Maria, Hinju (now called Serdse,) and Knox! After finding out that he can retain his memories without resetting to another voyage using an ability called the Black Box, he attempts to test this for the first time by dying for real this time - with a Boss Sword - and seeing if he can bring himself back.
Knox finishes saying this aloud. Gyrus stares at him, irritated, remembering that he used to be a teleprompter bot before being rescued by Maria. He rolls his eyes and prepares to draw the Boss Sword, thinking at least he can make that quick.
“Wait,” Maria says.
Gyrus’s hand flinches away from the handle.
“What if…” She trails off, looking uncomfortable. Hinju looks at her. “I mean, you don’t have to do this, if. If you don’t want to.”
I don’t have to do this?
It’s a statement that is so left field coming from Maria out of all people. Gyrus is sure it shows all over his face. He laughs a little, and it comes out sounding like a breathless exhale. “What?” All this planning and you’re saying this now, with a Boss Sword in my hand?
He looks to his left at Hinju to convey, Can you believe this? But Hinju is nodding. “Yeah,” he says, gaining steam. “We wouldn’t think any less of you.”
Gyrus feels thrown off-kilter. He laughs a little again, but it comes out sounding choked. But both of his friends are stone-faced. “We did all of the preparations. The Black Box is real. I’m certain of it, and I thought you were too. Now suddenly, you don’t trust me?”
“It just feels so…” Hinju trails off. “Final.”
“It is final.” At their alarmed looks, he says, “I mean, it isn’t final. The Black Box will bring me back, as you both know. We are testing a scientific theorem.” He readies the Boss Sword once again, blade over his neck.
“I mean…” says Hinju timidly, looking distinctly uncomfortable. “Does he have to stab himself with the boss sword? We could use euthanasia instead.”
“Euthanasia?” Gyrus asks him incredulously. They're talking about him in third person. It’s such an odd thing to say that he lets the sword swing back to his side. “In the Room of Swords?”
“Yeah, you’re right, the realms are designed to kill us, there’s no way the Room of Swords has euthanasia,” Hinju says in a rush, looking kind of relieved. Maria says simultaneously: “Or he can drink machine oil.”
They stare at each other and Maria says, “You know, until he dies.”
Gyrus says, “I’m not drinking machine oil until I choke.”
Hinju says, “Yeah, there’s no syringes here even if we wanted to euthanize him. Even if there were, we don’t have the time or resources to collect monster parts to put through…” He trails off timidly. “...drug testing.”
“What, you don’t have chakra manipulation euthanasia?” Maria asks him.
Hinju frowns haughtily. “That’s not – no – nothing for instant death,” he responds.
Gyrus rolls his eyes at them and says “I don’t need to instantly die. I just need to die,” but they’re back to talking over him.
“You can snap his neck,” Maria tells Hinju.
Hinju looks queasy. “Or you could have Knox laser him down if we’re going for quick and painless.”
“What, you don’t want to do the dirty work yourself?” Maria says cuttingly.
“Can both of you stop it!” Gyrus yells, and they finally focus back on him. He regroups in the blissful silence and thinks, from listening to them, that he finally knows what their problem is. “I’ve stabbed myself to enter new voyages hundreds of times. As have you both. Why do you suddenly have a problem with it?”
Maria curses and glares at him. “Forgive me for wanting my friend to not suffer,” she says.
So I was right. Gyrus straightens up to his true height. “We’ll all die if Don gets his way. By exploiting my ability to regain my memories even as a rookie, we are uncovering our true secret weapon in beating the Cockroach King–”
“Oh my god, no one asked you for a hero monologue,” Maria bursts out angrily. “It’s just that–”
The three of them are all silent.
Gyrus, irritated at his hero monologue being interrupted, raises a silent expectant eyebrow at her. Go on, he tries conveying. If you don’t want me to talk, you should talk.
“We never have a choice about how we die,” Maria says. “We always have to choose the most painful way out. I just thought – since we’re here, maybe it could be different.”
Gyrus, even though his will has been undermined this entire conversation, feels oddly touched. “So you wanted me to die less painfully?”
“Exactly,” she says.
“You’re being ridiculous.” He readies the boss sword again.
“Stop it!” Maria yells. “Did you not hear a word we said?”
“You’re undermining my authority,” Gyrus is starting to panic. “You trust me to make the decisions, but now it sounds a lot like you aren’t trusting me.” He feels… a little betrayed, as if all the control of the situation is slipping out of his fingers. He’d been prepared to die quickly. Not for this.
As Hinju fixes him with a matching glare, Gyrus, feeling confused and outmatched, says “We kill ourselves with Boss Swords all the time. All of us are used to the pain. What is your fucking problem?”
Knox chooses this moment to waddle back up to them, from where he clearly had been doing something indoors. “I have made all the necessary preparations for Gyrus to wake up,” he says. “I have made the room look as much like his cabin on the spaceship as possible, as collected from his journal entries. The space is 84 percent accurate.” He looks at Gyrus.
Maria relaxes infinitesmally at his voice. “He’ll wake up like Captain America,” she mutters.
Gyrus frowns. “I’ll wake up like who?”
Maria looks at him for the first time. “Like this old war hero movie. He gets frozen and time travels to the future, and they make his hospital room look like it’s from the 1940s –” At Gyrus’s look of incomprehension, Maria says “Never mind. It’s an old movie from like, only seventy years after color television.” She grins at him. “You baby.”
Gyrus unwillingly grins slightly back. It feels a little more like them, like this is solid ground. “Oldhead.” It’s an old joke between them.
Maria’s smile fades. “You better remember that joke when you get back. I don’t want to have to explain it to you again.”
When I get back. So they do trust me to go through with this. Gyrus lets charisma set back on his face a little more easily. “Okay, Unc.”
“I should never have taught you that one. That one, and Uno Reverse.” Maria reaches behind her and uncorks a thermos sip her coffee that Gyrus knows is spiked with realm moonshine.
“We’ve all died before.” Gyrus gives Maria a look in case she wants to interrupt again. “We’re all going to die in the future.
“I’m going to die right now, in the way I choose, which is with a Boss Sword. If all of us have to reset ourselves using Boss Swords, I’m going to use one when I die for real, because I am no better than any of you.
“If – and if – this goes wrong, I trust you all to explain the situation to my rookie self. Regardless, there are no two people I trust more with the task.”
“And if this goes right–” Hinju says.
“If this goes right,” Gyrus says with a grin, “we’re in business. And if the hair doesn’t grow back, I’ll explain that I had my midlife crisis to Kodya.”
Maria rolls her eyes. “The famous Kodya,” she says under her breath, at a volume she probably doesn’t think Gyrus can hear. “Okay, hero monologue,” she says. “Get to stabbing.”
Dying always hurts the same amount. It doesn’t really matter how many times he goes through with it. His skin alternates between feeling warm and cold, and throbbing with so much pain that he can almost barely feel it through the lightheadedness. His blood is warm. It’s not so bad, though, Gyrus thinks to himself as he blissfully, thankfully loses consciousness. He’ll come back. It’s not really like sleep, but he gaslights himself into thinking so. The last sensations he feels are Maria holding one of his hands and Hinju holding the other.