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"À la claire fontaine m'en allai promener (I went for a walk to the clear blue fountain today)

J'ai trouvé l'eau si belle que je m'y suis baignée (The water was so pretty I had to take a dip)

Tu as le coeur à rire, moi, je l'ai à pleurer (Your heart feels like laughing but my heart feels like crying)

J'ai perdu mon ami sans l'avoir mérité (I lost my friend even though I didn't deserve it)

Il y a longtemps que je t'aime (I've loved you for so long)

Jamais je ne t'oublierai..." (I'll never forget you...)

(À la claire fontaine)

This time was going to be it, Fran had told herself that time. The morning mists had seemed so thick in front of her as to appear well-nigh impenetrable, yet they'd parted before her like butter, almost welcoming her through. Maybe all obstacles hadn't been as hard to get through as she'd assumed, she'd thought - but not in a good way. This time, the jackal hadn't had her mom, her best friend, her roommate, her pets, or an apartment or a job that hadn't both triggered her constantly from morning to night every day. She'd had nothing holding her back, no buoy holding her afloat for her to cling to. So she'd climbed up on the railing, looked down, and saw the eerie, inviting beauty of the water's surface staring back at her like the Abyss did...

***

To a casual observer, the way Jackie held her knitting needles and carving knife in three of her four hands may have made it look as if they'd been just about to fall between her fingers. "Well, Pangaea..." From experience, she'd been confident enough that she could secure her grip on them in any split-second she had to that she could afford to sacrifice solidity for flexibility for now. "Looks like you're gonna see me juggle after all." She reflexively defaulted to kind of an in-between stance, just as carefully ready to melt away or harden forward at a moment's notice.

"Aren't you gonna lecture me like your friend did?" Pangaea chuckled, her bamboo staff aimed right at the roach's head like a sniper rifle.

"You shouldn't have killed Dex." Lightning bolts striking down at the wide, open, windswept grasslands around them in the distance seemed to punctuate her words.

"Won't you tell me to fix our chambers?" It was clear from what she did next that she had no intention of doing that. "To make peace with the Commission?" The panda parried Jackie's first three swings in a row. "To let you lead the Free Radicals?" The roach parried Pangaea's following swing with all three weapons that she'd just attacked with. "To give myself up, while I have the chance?" But Jackie seemed somewhat less idealistic than her friend had been so far.

"You." The roach's triple defense unfolded into a triple offense. "Shouldn't." The panda dodged it, but not easily. "Have." Pangaea tried to regain the advantage, but Jackie kept turning every defense into another attack, never giving her the chance to step back and regroup long enough to establish a real pattern of attack. "Killed." The roach really was juggling, throwing one or two of her three weapons in the air as she'd spin around only to catch them again or passing them from one hand to another behind her back, always just in time to intercept or perform yet another attack. "DEX!" The panda tried to block Jackie's axe kick from the ground but, instead, the roach's axe kick actually broke her bamboo staff in half in her hands right over her head.

***

"Nothing with needles, no," Fran's best friend had shaken her head, "never anything like that." The jackal had never been the type to try drugs so far, but she'd been curious about her best friend's experience, in a non-judgmental sort of way. "I mean, to have too much weed, you'd have to have like, more weed than it's possible for a person to have," Fran's best friend had gone on. "Hash is basically the same thing, only moreso." This hadn't been the kind of thing they'd taught in school. "Pills, read up on, know what you're getting into," she'd explained. "Shrooms are a trip, good odds but get a sitter, just in case," she'd added. "Any of that white shit you snort up, any of that needle shit though? Stay away from that shit. That'll fuck you up."

***

The powdery white snow covered the sandy dunes around them like frosting on a cake. "But why, though?" Fran had never seen a snow-covered desert firsthand, but she did remember reading about them back on Earth a long, long time ago. "Why give them the means to destroy themselves like that?" The desert didn't care if it was very hot or very cold, after all, it went through both every day and every night. "What do you get out of it?" It just got out of the way to let the temperature be the hottest or the coldest it could be, regardless of which one it was.

"Because they're contemptible," Meteor scoffed. "You're from Earth." Was it a hot spot on the ice planet, or a cold spot on the desert planet? "You getit, don't you?" Did it matter?

"What's there to get?" The jackal looked the ermine up and down. "What's contemptible about them?" Meteor looked like a white re-rendered version of Fran's black character sprite, like someone tried to save money making an old video game somewhere.

"When I lived on Earth, I worked in cryonics." Something about the way the ermine said that made the jackal wonder how Meteor could've ever liked it enough to make a career out of it. "My clients were the most contemptible people in the world." The ermine's voice dripped with scorn as she spoke. "They didn't care if the poor died, as long as the rich lived." Meteor had clearly dealt with one of those clients too many. "They didn't care if everyone theyknew died, as long as they lived." It'd driven her off the deep end. "They were so used to having everything handed to them, they expected to be handed eternal life. They were so used to the rules not applying to them, they thought death would make an exception for them too," the ermine spat.

"What does that have to do with the System, though?" Fran asked. "Everyone gets brought back here no matter what." It could be so easy to superimpose the values you'd come to from your perspective on contexts they didn't apply to at all. "It's perma-death that's the exception here, why make that exception?" On some level the jackal was genuinely trying to understand.

"No one should get to live forever," Meteor snapped. "No one, don't you see that?"

Fran looked back at her evenly. "Not really, no."

The ermine became even more exasperated. "No one values anything until they lose it."

The jackal stopped, and thought about it. "No, I'm pretty sure I valued most of what I had before I lost it, too." She was really trying Meteor's patience by then.

"It's moral cowardice," the ermine sputtered. "It's just not done." How could anyone from Earth not understand that? "If you're too weak to accept death, you don't deserve to live."

Fran thought about every way in which death had hurt her back on Earth, about how painfully she missed everyone she'd lost over the course of her life. "Actually, no." She carefully asked herself how polite she should try to stay. "Fuck that noise." Meteor looked at her askance. "You don't get to barge in here, shit all over these people's way of life, act superior, and wipe them out of existence because they happen to offend your own particular moral sensibilities," the jackal said with a calm in her voice that belied the directness of her words. "You just don't."

"And why the hell not?" the ermine grinned toothily.

"Because I won't let you." As simple as that.

A look of grim satisfaction appeared on Meteor's face. "I was hoping you'd say that."

Both Earthlings descended into their respective fighting stances, eyeing each other warily. It didn't take long for them to jump right at each other's throat. They exchanged short serieses of punches and parries you could hardly tell apart. They grabbed and threw each other around on the sand and snow, throwing and kicking sand and snow in each other's faces trying to blind each other with them. They fought like animals, clawing and biting each other savagely, without holding anything back. They pulled off acrobatics that would take your breath away and joint locks that would make you cringe. They slammed each other's face in the ground, broke out of each other's grips, and stepped back from each other after some spectacular jump kicks.

With that, Meteor, panting, screamed, and sprouted Tilly's stolen needles all over, not just on her back, but all over her body like a great big urchin. It was like the ermine had known Fran's greatest fear and had ripped the hedgehog's needles out to have them put into her body for that exact purpose. Meteor could extrude and retract them at will and, from the look on her face, whether or not she knew how much of an advantage it gave her, she clearly knew it gave her a significant one, and relished it with everything she had. The jackal paused and, for a moment, the ermine assumed fear held her back. Fran was scared, to be fair, but that wasn't the reason she'd paused. She'd paused while waiting for Meteor's needles to retract on their own.

"WHAT? NO!"

The jackal ran at the ermine, slammed into her, and they both sank into quicksand.

***

"I used to know this girl, used to be a commie, just like me," Fran's roommate had told her one time. "Poor as dirt, poorer than me." That had really been saying something. "I even lived with her for a while, so she wouldn't have to pay rent until she'd get back on her feet," she'd gone on. "Months became years. I still had my job back then, of course."

"What happened to her?" the jackal had asked.

"I don't know, she got rich, she hasn't talked to me in years," her roommate had shrugged. "She's a libertarian now."

***

Without missing a beat, Pangaea switched to wielding both halves of her broken bamboo staff like two individual bamboo swords. Jackie went under a double swing and triple blocked a double arc down, her fourth, live hand getting through to knock the panda back. The roach got right back up to go back on the offensive, taking the fight to Pangaea herself, pecking away at her defenses, relentless. All of Jackie's weapons were shorter range than the panda's, but she did have an extra weapon and an extra arm than Pangaea did, so she made the most of it. The roach swung her carving knife at one of the bamboo swords so hard it got stuck halfway into it, yanking it out of the panda's grip in a way that Jackie hoped looked intentional.

Forced to use her carving knife hand to block a counter-attack faster than she'd meant to, the roach grunted when the bamboo sword, not designed to have half of it take that kind of pressure over a sharp metal fulcrum, broke in her hand like a cheap toy outright. Maneuvering around another one of Pangaea's swings with her remaining bamboo sword, Jackie managed to get ahold of the panda's arms to twist it right out of her grip and break it in half by bringing it down on the roach's knee. Pangaea grabbed Jackie's wrist with one hand as the roach's knitting needle pierced the panda's other arm, throwing Jackie away with one hand then pulling off her own pierced skin with it. The roach gasped.

Pangaea removed all her skin. The flesh suit that had made her look like a panda fell in tatters around her, misshapen and ripped, as Jackie saw a four-armed jellyfish emerge from it like a discarded cocoon. She was the immortal kind of jellyfish, the kind that would have still come back on her own even if everyone in the System had died at the same time - the kind that didn't need to care what happened to any of them, really. Before the roach could react, Pangaea had already grabbed all four halves of her broken bamboo swords in all four of her hands to start wielding them as four shorter bamboo sticks. She sure knew how broken implements could still be put to use after all, you had to give her that.

Fighting someone with four hands and four weapons in them proved considerably more difficult. The roach had to work overtime keeping track of where all of the jellyfish's arms and weapons were at all times just to keep from being overwhelmed. She had to reach deep within herself to deploy the treasures of resourcefulness that it took to make up for the extra arm and extra weapon that she'd just been able to take for granted as her own advantage a moment before it. Pangaea's expression went back from her momentary dismay to her earlier display of confidence, certain now that it was only a matter of time before Jackie's insurrection would be a thing of the past.

With time, all three of the roach's weapons got stuck in three of the jellyfish's bamboo sticks, forcing them both to discard them all leaving Jackie empty-handed and Pangaea with one single bamboo stick to speak of. "Hey, Pangaea!" The jellyfish gave the roach a puzzled expression as Jackie reached into her cloak to pull Fran's wallet out of it. "Catch!" Without thinking, Pangaea dropped her last remaining bamboo stick to catch the jackal's wallet with two of her four hands when the roach threw it at her. She'd never seen anything like it in her life.

"What's that?"

Jackie remembered her training with Dex well. She especially remembered when she'd tried to headbutt Dex, only to end up flailing upside-down over her with her head in Dex's lamprey maw and her feet kicking up in the air. This time, in a smooth, well-practiced motion, the roach leapt so she'd end up upside-down over the jellyfish's head intentionally. Jackie wrapped a yarn string around Pangaea's neck with two hands as she went, supported herself on the jellyfish's shoulders with her other two hands for a second, and stuck both of her electrified antennae on Pangaea's head at the same time, electrocuting her. It was a move that the roach had developed based on that same mistake she'd made with Dex, all that time ago.

Wonderful things happened by mistake sometimes.

***

"Don't get me wrong," Fran's mom had told her, "if I could've been as tech-savvy as you at your age, I would've been," she'd admitted. "But you kids start so young!" She'd chuckled. "Sometimes I swear you came out of the womb with a controller in your hands."

***

"Mo-o-om, I don't wanna get up," Fran protested weakly as Jackie's head popped up, looking down in the Revival chamber at her, "I'm tired." This was new. "I'll get up later, okay?" She did have a lot to be tired about, to be fair.

"Welcome back," the roach smiled. "Good to have you back, partner."

The jackal blinked herself awake. "What?" She poked her head out of the Revival chamber like a prairie dog. "Huh?" She wasn't in her room on Earth and Jackie wasn't her mom.

"So," the roach tilted her head, "how'd you get her, anyway?"

Fran had always been vaguely freaked out at the thought of what it must've been like to carry a child. "I had Beaker put Glitchhop in my belly." A sentient sea slug who played video games wasn't a child, though. "She hacked the killer's needles while I kept her busy." Not that it's the sort of thing she'd have done under ordinary circumstances either, but it'd been for a good cause, at that. "Sawtooth took care of the quicksand pit." If there was anything antlions were good for, it was digging quicksand pits to trap prey. "You know, I don't think Sawtooth liked her very much." Freezing someone solid and leaving them for dead on the ice planet had a way of doing that to people. "We're always stronger together than alone, right?" the jackal smiled.

"You really are getting the hang of this, aren't you?" Jackie smiled back.

"You know, I guess I am." Fran wasn't bragging, but there was no use in denying it.

"That's good," the roach acknowledged. "The Commission was pretty glad I took down Pangaea, for what it's worth." They'd better have been, she couldn't help but think.

"Oh?" the jackal tilted her head.

"They gave me the quantum translocator back." Had she heard that right?

"WHAT?"

Jackie's tone didn't change. "Did you notice anything different this time, by the way?"

Fran furrowed her brow, without addressing the rest of it just yet. "Like what?"

The roach gestured toward the Revival chamber that the jackal had just crawled out of. "You didn't throw up."

***

There had been a twisted sense of freedom in the free fall, at least at first. For the first time, she'd understood what those people who did things like skydiving and bungee jumping had been after on some level - although they'd been planning to live, mind you. She'd never really gotten it before as such. The jackal realized that she'd never have to work at a job she'd hated again. She'd never have to get a panic attack on mass transit again. She'd never have to read the news and hate the world again. Fran would never wake up in the middle of the night crying knowing that she'd never have anyone who cared to turn to ever again. Like a ghost whose soul would be allowed to move on to the afterlife, she'd finally be able to rest.

It had been about halfway down that she'd started thinking about all the things she'd liked that she'd never get to do again either. The jackal would never play another video game. She'd never make another wisecrack, and feel good about herself when it'd make someone else laugh. She'd never read another book and talk about it with someone who'd read it. Fran would never watch another movie or TV show. She'd never message a picture to a friend on her phone of a cute animal she'd wished she could hold in her arms. She'd never go for another walk in the rain or shovel another driveway or drink another cup of coffee. The jackal had been almost angry at herself. Had such small things really been what she'd been living for for all this time?

She'd wanted to LIVE! Fran hadn't cared why, she'd just wanted to LIVE! She'd known it already hadn't been possible anymore by that point, she'd remembered how badly she'd wanted to die just a moment ago, but at that point she'd still wanted to go on living with all her heart somehow. The body lived and breathed, sought pleasure and feared pain like every living thing. Just then, she'd seen the colors start shifting in weird ways in the air over the water under her, weird in ways unlike anything else she'd ever seen in her life...