28: Concerns
Bailey waggled a few fingers with a smile at Eris as the redhead- now dressed- sheepishly left the room with a small and shy smile. When the door clicked closed to leave her alone, Bailey let her lips curl down into a frown. Several moments of silence passed in the room while she contemplated.
”It’s just so frustrating. She’s so much better at this than me, so why do I have to be the whore?”
That’s what Eris said, and that awkward fumble when Bailey called her out solidified that something else was going on under the surface. Bailey sighed.
“Fuck.”
The blonde waltzed over to her closet and started getting dressed. Relationships and what people did in them were none of her business, nor did she make a point to judge people, but something felt… off here. She fully believed that Eris enjoyed the sexy parts of life and wanted to be more comfortable with it, but she was clearly and obviously being pushed to take leaps when she hadn’t even learned to walk. With something like this, going fast was a very good way to end up with some deep cuts. That could still be managed… probably… but not if Eris wasn’t even the one making the decisions. Bailey pursed her lips and rifled through her desk before grabbing an unmarked vial filled with a milky vapour, slid it into her pocket, then walked out the door.
Only a handful of minutes after Eris left on her solo challenge to find someone to sleep with, Bailey was waltzing through the courtyard, into one of the other dorms, up a few flights of stairs, and knocking on the door to room 1347. A few moments passed along with the sounds of some ruffling sheets, but eventually the door opened.
“Bailey?”
“Hey Becky, is Jaxie here?”
The black-haired girl in pajamas twisted out of the way to let Bailey see into the dim room and make eye contact with a Berserker sitting up in her bed. She was wearing a tank top and a very confused expression. “What’s up?”
“Get up and get dressed. We’re going for a walk.”
Jaxie cocked an eyebrow with a smirk. “Oh? Do I get to try the princess now?”
At any other point, Bailey would have laughed and made some remark along the lines of ’If you want to stop on the way back, sure!’ Instead, she kept her face flat and her voice even more so.
“No, you don’t. We need to talk about Eris.”
There was a twinge in Jaxie’s eyes- was that fear? Perhaps, but at the very least some form of anxiety and concern. It didn’t take long for the panty-clad Jaxie to pull on a pair of jeans and her shoes, and it took even less time to walk outside. Bailey took note of the way that Jaxie was following her in silence, obviously wary of what this conversation would entail. Anyone else would be asking questions- it seemed like Jaxie already had some assumption in her mind and was staying quiet out of fear.
Very interesting, and certainly unexpected.
Regardless, when Bailey led Jaxie in the cramped alley between dorms twelve and thirteen, she turned on the Berserker.
“Why are you pressuring Eris so much into becoming a whore?”
Jaxie blinked a few times. “Huh?”
“Setting her up with Alex, using a pussy-eating lesson as an excuse to get us to hook up, and sending your party mates to our dorm to have sex with her and I? After ensuring during your screening process that your party members would be lesbians and therefore eligible for a sexual relationship with Eris, of course. Why are you going to such extremes to make Eris have sex with so many people?”
Oddly enough, Jaxie’s expression seemed to shift from tempered anxiety, to confusion, and then to a bit of relief. Why was she relieved? Was she afraid that this conversation was going to be about something else?
What else could she have been so afraid of Bailey talking to her about?
“Because we both agreed that we wanted an open relationship, and I’m her wingwoman. Gotta give her some support, you know?” Jaxie smirked. Bailey frowned.
“There’s a difference between being her wingwoman and being her pimp. You aren’t supporting anything- you’re whoring her out like a cheap hooker.”
That made Jaxie’s eye twitch. “Excuse me?”
“I couldn’t care less how you want to shape your relationship, or how many people you want to bring into it, but you can’t be forcing it onto Eris. After you sent your party members up to our room for some get-to-know-you sex- which didn’t happen, by the way, Eris was almost crying.”
“...What?” Jaxie had a visible pause. Bailey reached up and pressed a finger into Jaxie’s chest, hard enough to make the Berserker step back and bump into the wall.
“She met those two for the very first time today, and you sent them to our room to have sex with her? As far as I know, she made no inclinations or invitations for you to do so, nor did she probably express any interest in having that sort of engagement with them. You-” Bailey poked harder. “- forced that decision onto her, with no regard to her own concerns or wants.”
“Hey- I saw the way she was looking at them this morning. She was absolutely checking them out.”
“That may be so, but you had no right to do what you did. If you see that there is some interest, a proper wingwoman will gently nudge them in the same direction to help and see if they mesh well. You didn’t nudge- you shoved them together over nothing more than a couple of looks.”
Jaxie’s eyes narrowed, a clear sign of annoyance. “Eris was never going to build up the nerve on her own. She needs the shove.”
Bailey scoffed. “Did you even imagine if the three of them wouldn’t fall for your grand scheme and fuck each other? Did you ever stop to think about how awkward that would make their involvement in your party for the future? No. You didn’t. You only saw the outcome where more people join your ‘Everyone-fucks-Eris’ club, with no consequences on how your actions might affect her.”
Jaxie stepped forward this time, forcing Bailey against the wall while looking down at her. Still, Bailey didn’t let her expression waver despite the tall girl staring with no small level of anger in her eyes.
“You’re the whore with a body count so high you could fill a town with everyone you’ve fucked. What makes you get to tell me that helping Eris get some ass is such a bad thing?”
“Because it was my own choice,” Bailey said. “I chose to be a whore and pursued it of my own volition. You aren’t giving Eris that choice. She was so upset by what you did, because she’s tired of you doing everything for her. Not only does it make her feel awful and inadequate in her own ability to ‘get some ass’, but It’s putting so much pressure and stress on her that she’s close to a breaking point- I can tell. You aren’t helping her at all. You’re turning her into your bitch.”
A large hand slammed against the brick wall beside Bailey’s head, making her blink instinctively. Jaxie looked downright pissed. Furthermore, Bailey could see the influence of Berserker power in her anger. They may have gotten an artificial form of the emotion in combat, but the real deal was just as effective of a power boost. Jaxie’s eyes were starting to go bloodshot, with shrunken irises and even smaller pupils. Out of the corner of Bailey’s eye, she could see goosebumps forming on Jaxie’s arm from the magical power and she was trembling under a more intense form of anger than any non-Berserker could ever experience in a lifetime. Good. Bailey let her own hand move ever-so-slowly towards her pocket while Jaxie growled.
“If you ever call Eris a bitch again, I’ll shove my foot so far up your ass I can clean my toenails with your toothpaste, you got it?”
“Yeah, I do,” Bailey said. “But I first wanted to say that I’m sorry for this.”
“Sorry for- aghh!”
Jaxie was cut off and stumbled away with a coughing choke as Bailey shoved the vial that had been hidden in her pocket right up into Jaxie’s face, popping open the stopper with her thumb. She turned her own face away, closed her eyes and exhaled sharply to help ensure that as little of the milky vapour hissing out from the vial got into her own system. Jaxie might have had fast reactions from being so amped-up in her anger, but she couldn’t have been expecting this and she got all of it right in her face.
The cloud that poofed out of the vial dissipated into the air in a matter of seconds, but that meant nothing for Jaxie who fell back into the wall, retching the magical smoke that refused to leave her lungs. Bailey stepped forward.
“I’m also sorry for provoking you, but I needed to get you angry. It makes your blood flow faster, makes your breathing heavier, all that stuff. It makes toxins work a lot more effectively.”
Jaxie’s eyes went wide, but she was too occupied with her coughing to speak. Bailey slowly stepped forward. “Don’t worry, I didn’t poison you. Well, technically I did, but it’s not a dangerous one. That was called Infallible Fog, and all it’s going to do is make you a lot more suggestible for the next few minutes.”
Already, pretty much every hint of Jaxie’s anger had vanished and she was starting to look dazed. Bailey softened her voice. “Why don’t you sit down, okay? I don’t want you falling over and hurting yourself.”
Jaxie gave a slow, almost drunken nod and sort of slumped down onto the cobblestones with her back against the wall. Bailey nodded and followed suit. That was a fast reaction, a lot more than Bailey expected.
“There we go, that’s better. First and foremost, I just want you to be perfectly clear that I bear no ill will towards you, I chose to do this purely out of concern for Eris’s well-being, okay?”
Another slow nod.
“Alright. It’s fine if Eris wants to be a whore, but pushing her into it so forcefully is really hurting her self-esteem and putting a lot of pressure on her. When I talked to her about it, she was upset that you were so much better at all of this than her, and she asked why she had to be the whore. Hey- hey, look at me.”
Jaxie’s eyes started to drift to the wall behind Bailey, so the blonde leaned forward and snapped her fingers. Immediately, Jaxie’s extremely-dilated eyes went back to the Alchemist, who’s own narrowed in concern. Bailey had grabbed a low-powered version of the concoction because she knew that Jaxie was still only first level. Even so, this kind of reaction was… intense. It made people loopy, maybe a bit giggly, a lot looser in their personalities, and extremely suggestible. It wouldn’t make them this distant unless she took one scaled up for a higher-level individual. The only time otherwise that someone would have such an intense reaction to a concoction was-
Oh, Bailey thought. Right. Berserker.
Getting Jaxie angry had been part of the plan to let the vapour seep into her bloodstream faster and enter her brain, since it would increase her heart rate, her heaviness in breathing, everything. The more worked up the body gets, the faster a toxin functions since it can spread through the body quicker.
Berserkers relied on their anger- artificial or otherwise- to make them more powerful. The more amped up they became, the harder their bodies worked until it reached points far beyond what anyone else could withstand. Body temperatures reaching almost a hundred and ten degrees? Heart rates exceeding two hundred beats per minute? Those kinds of things would kill anyone else, but for a Berserker it was a sign of how much power their bodies were giving them.
Of course, having a heart pound four times a second meant that pretty much any toxin would hit them extremely fast and extremely hard. The only upside was that they shook off the effects faster than pretty much anyone, but that was a hard upside to see when Jaxie looked like she was barely conscious.
“Jaxie, what does Eris mean to you?”
Despite the lack of motor control, Jaxie gave a soft smile as her eyes drifted blankly.
“She’s everything. I can’t even say… I can’t say how much I love her ‘cause I don’t know what I wouldn’t do for her. She’s like- like a part of me, you know? I’m just a couple pieces of bread, but Ell’s the peanut butter and jelly on the inside. Oh, do you have any peanut butter jelly sandwiches? I kinda want some peanut-butter-fuckin’-jelly-”
“Jaxie!” Bailey snapped her fingers again, causing the loopy brunette to focus on her once more. Well, at least Jaxie loved Eris, so that means the tension between them wasn’t anything too untoward. Probably. Jaxie wouldn’t knowingly and willingly put Eris under such stress if she loved her as much as she said she did- and Bailey had yet to meet anyone that could manage to purposefully lie through Infallible Fog. She sighed.
“Why are you trying to put so much effort into making Eris a whore? I know she wants to, so it’s fine in the long term, but you’re making it happen way too quickly. Something like this needs time to get into it properly or Eris could get hurt by it. Why are you trying to rush her into this so much, and so soon?”
“Because…” The brunette began, trailed off, then started again. “Beeee- because… ‘cus she needs to get stronger.”
Bailey’s brow furrowed in confusion. “Because she needs to get stronger? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Yeah it does. She- she needs to become a slut in order to save the world.”
Bailey blinked several times. “I’m sorry, what?”
Jaxie leaned her head back against the wall and yawned.
“Is- it’s because… Ell’s an Artificer- an Arty-Ar-Army… Artifisher of Lust and-” She giggled through a drunken grin while lowering her voice. “-and fuckin’ makes her stronger.”
What?
Bailey leaned back against the wall with wide eyes, trying to comprehend that tidbit of information. Given her loopiness, Jaxie could have been spouting nonsense, but that wouldn’t have been possible. Under the effects of Infallible Fog, even in the state that Jaxie was, a person wouldn’t even be able to comprehend saying anything other than the complete truth when asked a question. In fact, Jaxie seemed to completely ignore that Bailey’s gaze had grown distant and kept mumbling sentences that barely made sense, but still conveyed the point.
“Yeah, and it’s not just fuckin’... fuck- it’s… it’s fuckin’ not one person fuck is ‘cause the cooldown, right? She can’t just fuck a lot, she needs to- she- she… fuck a people lot. More people, more fuck, more people- I mean… more power. More moth. Moth- mooothhhh…”
Bailey was only idly aware of Jaxie staring cross-eyed at an insect that had landed on her nose. Eris was an Artificer? Wow, that was not what she expected to learn out of this conversation.
She was expecting some kind of domineering, where Jaxie got pleasure out of being Eris’s pimp and setting her up with anyone she chose. Something that would be relatively innocent (though certainly kinky) in the open relationship that Eris and Jaxie were obviously forming, but could be harmful when pushed too hard and too quickly on someone so timid like Eris.
The last thing she expected was to learn that Eris was one of the Mythic classes from before the Sundering, and that she apparently needed to have sex to become more powerful. Did this have something to do with the Gifting not working anymore? Probably, especially since Eris revealed after her little visit to the Dean’s office that she’d been called there because she was apparently the last person to be Gifted. Originally, Bailey thought that it was just because the magic or whatever finally gave out, and Eris happened to be the last person it serviced. Now, it was obvious that it ended because Eris became a Mythic class.
A faint buzzing noise caught Bailey’s attention, who refocused her gaze back on Jaxie. Her eyes were closed, mouth was slightly open, and the moth was still clinging onto her nose as the Berserker softly snored. Bailey leaned forward and shooed the insect before Jaxie accidentally inhaled it and settled back against the wall. At least this gave her a few minutes to think things over while the toxin worked its way out of Jaxie’s system.
Then, she could wake up a sober Jaxie and they could have a real conversation.