"Ah fuck!" She coughs up a bit of blood, but takes advantage of the proximity to rip one moose's throat out with a brutal slash, then whirls and stabs the other behind the neck.

And then she tromps out of the glue fields tiredly.

Hyacinth slots a healing bolt over Quell Flames and heals Hailey. 

"Well," she says. "That at least was straightforward." She frowns. "Not sure if I want to go hunt bandits, they might have bows and I don't have a solid defense against that right now. You okay to travel back to town?"

She huffs a bit. "Just... ugh. Need to butcher the moose before we head back, but..."

She looks down at her hands, back up at Sin, back down at her hands, then shakes her head. 

"Nothing for it."

And then she steps forward into a hug, her breath hitching sharply as she makes contact before slowly and carefully exhaling.

Hyacinth slowly moves to embrace Hailey, so she has plenty of time to see it coming and shake her head if she doesn't want it. 

"Yeah," she says softly. "That looked kind of nasty."

She breathes very slowly, carefully, as she leans into Sin's embrace. "Was a lot. Needed a hug, but hadn't gotten touch-safe all the way to hugging, skipped a few steps. S'intense."

She squeezes Sin tighter and keeps breathing carefully.

"Yeah," Hyacinth says. "I'm proud you got there."

She just holds Hailey, for as long as she needs it.

Eventually her skin stops itching from forcing the touch, and she relaxes more properly, resting her head on Sin's shoulder. "Whoof."

"Yeah. I was a little worried I'd lose you there..."

She should not kiss the touch-averse girl's shoulder no matter how much she wants to. 

"You're good."

She smiles and sighs a bit, squeezes Hyacinth a bit more, and then pulls back. "Okay. I'm okay now. Thank you."

Hyacinth nods. "It's okay. Back to town for now?"

"I'm good to butcher things, make sure we get the most of our resources and prove our kills, if you don't mind waiting."

"Alright. I'll stand watch."

She nods, then kneels down in front of the moose and starts carving them apart. It's calming, meditative. Soon enough she has a great deal of moose meat, various organs, antlers, and more bleak essence.

She stands and nods, wiping her hands off on a relatively clean and intact bit of pelt, then finishing the cleanup with the flat of a shadow cutter.

"Okay. That's that. Ready to get out of here?"

"For sure."

And she offers her hand.

Hailey takes her hand with a wry little smile and starts back toward town. "Well, that was an adventure."

"That's for sure." 

Hyacinth sighs softly and smiles at Hailey. "Thank you. You've been taking blows so I don't have to."

"Glad to. Comparative advantage and all that."

"Fair enough, I guess."

And on they walk.

They pass the leftover charcoal of the small bonfire, and make their way back through the woods.

"Pity nobody's figured out uploading, yet," Hailey comments at one point. "Be nice to be entirely digital, stop worrying about the meat suit altogether."

"You'd have to do it very carefully, to maintain continuity of conciousness, but... Yeah. I agree."

Hailey shakes her head. "Oh well. Hopefully someone solves it in our lifetime, and someone else goes first to test it."

"Honestly, if someone were to ask me..."

She taps her fingers against her arm. "I'd want good odds. Something in the high nineties. We are talking lives and minds on the line here. But... there are real surgeries with a one-in-a-hundred chance to kill you. And shaping's no joke either. For a shot at a digital lifespan...?"

She smiles. "Yeah, I think I'd take a one in a hundred chance of death or serious complication. Maybe even a one in fifty chance. If I wanted to get serious about it... my natural lifespan would be, like, another sixty years or so? And with a digitization let's say that rises to two hundred or so, because file storage is hard and data loss happens. So you've got... one hundred forty years to gain, versus sixty years to lose. So theoretically you're still breaking even on lifespan if you take a two-to-one chance of dying. 

In practice, though, if you follow the naive lifespan calculation you mostly die and sometimes are very long lived. So the overall impression is... I might even go as low as a one in ten chance of dying. Nine out of ten of me getting to live to be two hundred is worth taking a one in ten chance of dying."

Hailey nods thoughtfully. "Yeah, those sound like decent odds for us, too. Hopefully we get to see it happen. There aren't a lot of things we wouldn't do, for a shot at putting that ill-fitting meat suit behind us."