Chapter 6

It was with a sinking feeling that Ellen caught the sound of voices on her way back to camp.

Dusk was approaching by the time she trudged down the mountainside, after having buried her other self. She didn’t have the tools for an actual grave, so she made a cairn instead by piling up the stones over her body. It had gotten easier after a few minutes, as she’d managed to detach herself from the identical appearance.

Her hands and arms ached from lifting rocks, and her feet ached from carrying the gear of three people down the slope. She really just wanted to wash up in the nearby stream and crawl into her tent before figuring out what to do the next morning.

She heard snippets of the discussion as she approached, but the conversation quieted when her own dragging footsteps rustled the undergrowth. By now she’d worked a minor trail from the cave to her campsite… which would have been pretty dangerous if the goblins were still alive.

Brushing a branch aside, Ellen finally came to her campsite to see two more of herself—each dressed in her spare clothes, as expected—rearranging a few things. One of the two was tying up the edges of the tent to give more floor space, though Ellen worried about how drafty that would make it in the cold night air.

The other was repacking the backpack. That made sense, when they’d clearly had to dig into it to get the necessary items to dress themselves and adjust the tent. This one also had improvised bark sandals, just like they’d made before when awakening without shoes. This was also the one who first saw her coming, and flinched.

“I see you have our gear… I guess you saw us die. How did it happen?”

And thus came the weirdest question of the day.

Ellen dropped the supplies near the tent, nodding to the one who was working there. “A second goblin got you. I guess you don’t remember? What’s the last thing you two remember?”

The one by the tent answered this time. “We already compared memories, and both of us remember killing the goblin and going further in to look for our body. Since you have the boots, I guess we found it?”

“I wonder what the trigger is? What stops us from remembering I mean? Is it an event or is it just a certain amount of time?” The Ellen by the fire scratched at her head and sighed, then eyed the boots. “I don’t suppose you’d be willing to hand over the sandals…”

Ellen grumbled, “Is this going to happen every time we die?” She paused. “That’s a morbid thought. We shouldn’t be dying at all!” She grimaced with a shiver down her spine.

“I’ve been thinking about this a lot,” said the Ellen by the tent. “First, we shouldn’t test it… maybe it only happens a certain number of times, like they say cats have nine lives. We should assume every death might be our last so let’s try to keep it at three.”

“Obviously,” Ellen replied, shuddering again. Burying herself had already made her ill, and the idea of doing it multiple times more? That was just disturbing. She frowned at her other self for even thinking of the idea.

The Ellen by the fire cleared her throat. “So um… Ellen. We’ve been talking and I think Hunter Ellen has some good ideas. Like naming ourselves.”

The Ellen by the tent—Hunter Ellen, apparently—nodded her head as she finished tying off the rope. “We were pushing our luck pretending to be twins. If we show up in the village with three of us, they’ll know something is up. So I volunteered to just… not go back.”

She gestured at the tent. “I’ll keep the tent and some of our supplies, and any weapons you want to give me. I’ll take those and see if I can’t find Onroc, the town the caravan guards mentioned. I can set up camp there and take the Hunter Class. The two of you can figure out who gets to be Village Ellen and Adventurer Ellen.”

“We can figure that out tomorrow,” the Ellen by the fire suggested, “while we’re walking back to the village. Village Ellen will stay there and try to get more spare clothes and stuff for the two of us, while Adventurer Ellen heads to Merriweather to turn in the job and get the license. Then Adventurer Ellen will swing back through here and meet up with both, so we can figure out what to do next now that there’s three of us.”

Ellen’s head swam as she dumped the gear aside and staggered toward the stream. “I’m sorry, this is… a lot to take in so suddenly. You’ve made all these plans and are already trying to work it out, and I’m still trying to grasp it.”

Hunter Ellen shrugged. “That’s true… take your time. I already… I mean, we already thought about it when we were going into the cave. We’ve been thinking about it since before we were two, figuring out how we’d handle it if it happened again. Then we spent a lot of the time talking to one another while you were busy up the mountain. Since we can’t know who the original is, we might as well all work together, right?”

It wasn’t a strange idea. It was a variation of what she and Ellen Two had come up with to avoid a confrontation. And these two were… Ellen Two. As much as she was the original Ellen. Except they were different, just based on Ellen Two, so…

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Ellen rubbed her forehead and shuffled toward the stream. This was getting a little hard to think about. Again.

She couldn’t argue that it made sense though. If there were multiple versions of her she could just explore other options. It was just a matter of who takes what option. So one could try going the Hunter route instead of Fighter and she could either remain a Laborer or swap to something else before she hit Level 11.

Ellen knelt down by the stream to wash her hands off, letting the icy cold tumble of water shock her sore and aching fingers. She’d have to warm them by the fire or they’d get numb, she was sure. Another first time notification popped up about rinsing abrasions, and she mentally waved it away. She was out of banked experience, so things had slowed down now, but the first time popups were still coming on strong.