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Your name is Jade Harley, and it's been two years since you and your friends saved the world. You used to be a goddess with dog ears, but everything's been reset, and now you're just a freshman in college, majoring in Physics.
You don't particularly miss being a goddess, or part-dog, or much about the game. The only remnants of it are the occasional nightmares of being swallowed by the green sun and your three best friends, who live just down the hall and hold you if the nightmares get too bad.
You're happy.
Your name is Jade Harley, and you like a lot of things.
You like to sit outside with your bass and just play, and smile at people who walk by. You like getting back from lab, your hair an absolute mess, and daydreaming about the day you'll get to run experiments of your own. You like eating steaks as rare as they come, tearing into them with your fork and knife.
You like picking out new clothes with Rose. You like making jokes with John. You like playing Frisbee with Dave, even when he jokingly calls it “fetch.”
You like running around, and you like shooting rifles, and sometimes you like howling at the moon, just for the fun of it.
You’re happy.
It’s John who says it.
You’re gathered in his room, all four of you, as he serves his latest foray into the kitchen. It’s so good you’re licking the plate clean, table manners abandoned in light of the company of your three favorite people.
John laughs. “Geez, Jade. Maybe there’s still some Bec left in you after all!”
You nearly crack the plate.
Your name is Jade Harley. You’re sure on that. Your name has always been Jade Harley, from the moment your Grandpa found you on that meteor.
Everything else is more unclear.
There are things about you that are too dog to be you. You’re sure – very sure – that you used to be on the other side of playing fetch. You’re also sure you didn’t start “woofing” until you were brought back from the dream bubbles as a sprite hit god tier.
It’s an obvious fix. Those things are Bec things, not Jade things. And you’re Jade Harley.
You cut them out, but it still doesn’t feel like enough.
You start cataloguing things – the things that you liked before the game, when you were all human and all mortal.
“Rose, did I like Squiddles? Like, before Sburb?”
“Of course, Jade – that’s partially the reason we became friends. Why?”
“No reason!”
“I was always bugging you about how cool physics was, right John? Even before the game?”
“Yeah, Jade! And you had to be all super annoying and exact about things.”
“Thanks, John!”
“Huh? OK, you’re welcome, I guess!”
“Hey, Dave?”
“Yeah?”
“Remember that one picture you drew for me of Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff? With the ears and whiskers and stuff?”
“Of course. Best birthday present I ever drew anyone, hands down. Furry art done by the coolest artist you knew, what could be better?”
“Hehe. I guess you’re right. I was pretty into furries before, wasn’t I?”
“Yeah. Never understood it, but you were all over that trend like a cheap fur suit. All, ‘wouldn’t it be great to run through the trees and howl at the moon and sniff people’s butts’? Kinda nice to see you grow out of it. Literally.”
“Hm.”
You throw yourself into your studies, because it smacks of Jade, and only Jade. You start watching Squiddle Movies again, even though you feel like you’ve outgrown them. You don’t know how to handle the furries. You set them aside for further contemplation.
Food becomes your next concern.
You are sure that Bec liked steak – you have memories of feeding him steak, and when you reflect on it, you’re horrified to realize you retain memories of Jade feeding you steak.
You don’t remember if Jade liked steak. You’re honestly hard-pressed to remember what pre-Bec Jade ate. You remember a garden with fruits and go with that.
“Going vegetarian, Harley?” Dave jokes when you start eating nothing but fruit salads. You shrug and let him think what he will.
You carefully, surgically remove all that was Bec from your life and fill it in with pieces of Jade that you’d forgotten. You push down countless years of memories of being a four-legged animal, because they simply aren’t relevant to you anymore.
Yet something feels wrong. Some part of you that isn’t you, crawling beneath your skin.
You wake up some mornings with scratches up and down your arms, because in your dreams, you try to rip it out.
“Jade?”
Rose gently squeezes your shoulder as you curl up next to her, doing some of your homework on optics, pencil flying rapidly across the page. You don’t look up at her when you respond.
“Hm?”
“I admit I am a little- concerned by your behavior as of late.”
You frown and have to set your pencil down, sliding it inside the spiral portion of your notebook. “What do you mean, Rose?”
Rose lets out one of those sighs that lets you know she has been thinking very long and hard about whatever it is she’s about to say, and that she expects you to listen. “You’ve stopped doing some of the things you love,” she tells you. “I’ve seen you turn down steak on more than one occasion, and Dave has expressed his disappointment to me that your games of fetch have stopped.”
You bite your lip. “Is it so bad to go vegetarian?”
“Perhaps not. But I doubt these two things are unrelated. Am I wrong?”
You don’t respond.
“Jade, please talk to me. You haven’t seemed like yourself lately. Is something wrong?”
“I’m working on that!” you tell her. “The being myself.”
“How do you mean?”
“There’s still some Bec left in me,” you tell her, reporting it as you might a set of data. “I’m just trying to get rid of it, so I can be me again.”
“I’m not sure that’s necessary, Jade,” she says softly. “You seem unhappy.”
“I know,” you say. “I’m just not done figuring it out yet.”
It hits you.
Of course. Your dream self. Jadesprite.
She was never really Jade – she was a lesser-than version of Jade, who prototyped sprites with dead birds. Whose sole accomplishment, really, was saving John’s dream self.
You have memories of talking to Jadesprite as Jade, and talking to Jade as Jadesprite. You remember the searing pain of suddenly having a piece of the green sun lodged in your headspace, but you push that memory down. You’re Jade, not the weepy, dream version of Jade, and so that’s what you focus on.
You remember her shouting at Jadesprite, because Jadesprite is weak and cries Jade is strong and helps her friends.
Shouting, then, must be OK. Shouting is part of you.
Crying is not.
You stop playing bass too. Your dream self was always better at it than you were, anyways.
Your name is Jade Harley. You know that for sure. You like science and physics and Squiddles, even if the latter reminds you of the writhing tentacles from the Furthest Ring.
Your- Your name is Jade Harley.
Dave tells you that the four of you are going out for dinner. “Bet the vegan police’ll even let you have a steak,” he tells you, and you just know he talked to Rose. “C’mon, you earned it.”
You shoot him down.
“I have work to do.”
Your name-
Your name is Jade Harley.
John tries to make a joke while you’re studying for a test. You’re so stressed, so unhappy, but you can’t cry, so you shout at him instead. He holds his hands up as a sign of surrender and backs away.
He stops trying to joke with you.
Your name-
Your name is-
Your name is Jade Harley. Your homework is done, but you’re triple-checking every equation for perfection, because it’s what you can do.
Rose pokes her head into your room. “Jade?” she asks softly.
You don’t know how long she stands there, waiting for a response you don’t plan on giving, but finally, eventually, she leaves you to your work, too.
You wake up from a nightmare where the green sun eats you whole and doesn’t spit you out again. You sit straight up in bed, scratches running down your arms, shaking.
Your-
Your name is-
Your name is-