"I..." Hyacinth looks away. 

"I care about what's real. I care that when the body in realspace dies this unaging one will cease to exist too. I care that I'm canadian, and that I'm not Patriot Church, and... all these divisions that only exist because it's taken for granted that the other reality is what counts."

She offers her hand to Hailey. "I need someone to... reassure me that this world is real too. That it's not wrong to believe in it. To decide to live your life in it."

"I think..."

She looks down at her body. 

"Some part of me is convinced, now, that it's this world that's real and the other one that's fake."

"No argument from us about that," Hailey replies, shaking her head. "We've seriously considered medical storage before, and we're not entirely sure why we're staying out of it at this point."

I'd want to see you in real life rises to her tongue and dies. 

What could she possibly learn by seeing these beautiful women's random-ass janky body with the wrong sex. 

She wouldn't want them to see her real life Earth body either. This one is real. This is her chosen self. 

"... Probably because it'd be a bureaucratic headache, yeah? And I know I wouldn't trust some random nurse to keep things running indefinitely. Better to do it yourself, even if it hurts."

She settles back on her hands on the grass and stares up at the cloudy sky. 

"Think of it like... a lich guarding their phylactery. You don't entrust that to some random person. You want someone you trust. Someone who cares, someone who's loyal."

She nods. "That's a good way to put it. I like that."

Then she looks down at her hands for a moment, then up at Hyacinth, and reaches out her left hand, palm up.

Hyacinth takes it, and squeezes. 

"... I want to celebrate. A new start. A new life. I'm tired of being a good boy. I want to do something inadvisable."

She giggles. "I would suggest getting drunk, that's traditional, but I don't actually want to annoy our tavern-keeper friend. Got any better ideas?"

"If I knew where a Pag-sympathizer bar was close by, I'd say we go start a bar fight — walk in with our horns showing and holding your hand and see how long it takes for some bigoted scum to throw down about it, then beat their asses into the ground," she replies with a laugh.

Hyacinth giggles. "I mean, it'd hardly be sporting for me to just fry 'em, now, would it? And more importantly I might burn down a perfectly innocent bar. Still, with the right loadout of enhancement spells it could still be fun."

She smiles at Hailey. "I guess for now we just... carry on. First day of the rest of your life. We have so much time. And so much to learn. It's still only my second day in Paragnosia or whatever this place is called again. I've got a lifetime of memories of another world stuck in my head and it'll take a while to properly learn my place here. Chaos does weird things to a girl."

"That it does, Sin. That it does."

Hailey looks down at their joined hands and exhales slowly. "Huh. Guess bailing on stupidworld to stay here with us bumped you up a few ranks of touch-safety real quick."

She shakes her head and squeezes Sin's hand.

"I promise I'll be gentle." Hyacinth smirks and squeezes back.

Then she levers herself to her feet with her staff and rolls her shoulders. "It shouldn't be too far to those rocks now," she says. "Let's go together?"

Hailey hops up as well and nods. "Yeah, let's go. Wanna see you sit in a bonfire for power."

Hyacinth puts her staff to use once more as a walking-stick, and it's not long before the patch of rocks comes up on their path. 

"Here we are," she says. "Let me just slot my new fire resistance, I bet it'll be necessary with a fire of this size."

She pages through the menus, locks Fire Resistance III as a single passive, and slots it over Fire Resistance II. 

Meanwhile Hailey starts building a bonfire: stacking some firewood to make a relatively flat spot to sit on, stuffing kindling and tinder into the right spots, making sure to leave room for airflow, and then she steps back with a nod.

"It's ready to light up. I've got a mundane firestarter, or you could do it the quick way with a spell."

Hyacith tilts her head. "It feels more proper not to start it with magic. I mean, it seems strange to use magic to generate magic, right? It feels better to use a mundane source, it's more of a ritual that way."

She sits cross-legged atop the pile of wood on the level pieces, checks again that her fire resistance is properly slotted, then nods to Hailey. "Go ahead," she says.

Hailey kneels down beside the bonfire, pulls out her firestarter, and sparks the tinder. She blows on the embers carefully, stoking the little flames until they can catch the kindling, slowly building more of a fire little by little.

Okay, this is... definitely a Situation... 

Hyacinth settles her palms on her knees and tries to breathe slow. It's okay. She will be fine. A mixture of fear and exhilaration pools in her stomach and hastens her hearrbeat.

Hailey keeps fanning the flame, carefully building up a blaze hot enough to be sustainable. Soon, though, the logs start to catch. and she steps back to watch. 

Her cheeks are slightly flushed — probably just from the heat of the fire, though.

It's intense. The heat wraps itself around her like a living thing. She can feel the flame trying to consume her, to make her a part of it. But she is a part of it already. 

She closes her eyes, triggers Inner Flame meditation, and falls inward. 

It's a different experience than before. Her instinctive reach for an image of a calm dark sea to lull her jars like a bruised shin. 

Inner fire. 

She envisages it. The flame begins at the base of her spine, like a fuse or a wick; from there it spreads inward, towards her abdomen and her sex, flushes of all-too-familiar heat and energy... then upward, through her heart, warm and bright (sable) and onward, nestling in her collarbone before flicking upward to root on her brow. She is a candle, burning, every part of her channeling the flame...

The intuitive interface spirals up into her as a breath of heat, a current of flame. She locks an even stronger Inner Flame meditation with it in a flash like sizzling sparks, using even more of the parts of her nature that are like flame and less of the parts of her nature that grant volume and strength, instead braiding the flame within her tighter, tighter...

The new ability slots in and disrupts her trance, but she patiently rebuilds the flame within her to its full brightness once more. It burns blue-hot within her belly and womb, fierce and sharp — but not intensely enough to break through to the next layer of potential. She will not consume all today. 

Within this forge in her heart, she remakes herself. Ability after ability weave together, each of her standard abilities - Flare, Glue, Quell Flames, and Repel - relocked with the strongest nodes her soul can bear. 

Finally she turns her attention to her other meditation. She can sense how to weave it, in this state, with the flame running through her...

[Ritual I] in the center. Around it, three will-o-wisps, circling clockwise. [Enhance I]. [Intricacy I]. [Meditation I].

It locks.

Hailey watches, enraptured, as Sin embraces the fire. She bites her lip, breathing slowly and deliberately, cheeks flushed.

"Fuck," she breathes, barely a whisper.

Slowly, Hyacinth comes back to herself. It always takes time for her to recover from such a deep trance. 

For perhaps half a minute, she has the sensation of the flame breathing with her, flaring and falling slowly, until it fades away from her body entirely and falls back to the logs beneath her. 

She opens her eyes and meets Hailey's gaze with a smile. 

"Let's be careful getting me up," she says. "I don't want to accidentally kick ash into your lap." 

Hailey steps close and reaches out a hand to help Hyacinth out of the bonfire.

"Holy shit. That was gorgeous."

Hyacinth very carefully steps out of the fire. She nods. "And, um." She looks away for a moment. "Interesting." 

She is not going to say that she is horny now to Hailey.

Hailey bites her lip and nods, cheeks still a bit flushed. "Interesting is a very good word for it. Yes. Perhaps an understatement."

She exhales sharply and grins.

"That's, um, your kind of thing...?" Hyacinth rubs the back of her head and smiles a little.

"Danger, risk, pain, fire? Both inflicting and receiving? Yes, you could say that it's my kind of thing."