The café where Becca met with Becky was small enough to be called quaint, but large enough to do very good business. Becca and Becky sat in a corner booth– to minimize the number of people that might overhear private information. Becca set up a small tape recorder with Becky’s permission and asked her to elaborate on her friendship with Joanna.
“Well, like most girls, we played pretend a lot. But unlike most girls, we didn’t just play at being princesses, the damsels in distress who required knights in shining armor to rescue them. We did our own rescuing. We were princesses sometimes, but we were also Robin Hood-esque brigands and pirates and tribal savages and everything we could think of. There were times when Emery would join in, as a soldier or a knight or a nobleman; he never liked playing princes or kings– too boring.
“But it wasn’t just one adventure and then a completely different one next time. Our games were all connected. They could have written a history of their world based on the adventures they had, one after another. The world was the same, with the same places, kingdoms, and all that. Our characters got older, got married, had children…
“Now, when you think of an imaginary character having a child, say… one of my brigands having a daughter… I think most girls would make that daughter, grown up of course, her next character to pretend to be. Not us. We didn’t want to be people from the same family, the same part of our world. We wanted to branch out, to create other families, other pasts that would change who we were when we played. But we didn’t want to just start from scratch with new characters, either. We wanted to be able to remember what we had done in the past, let the villains we made up come back more than once.
“It was Jo’s idea. She had learned about the idea of reincarnation from… somewhere… and she ran with it. Our new characters were our old characters reborn. They were, as we came to term them, ‘rebirths’. A rebirth could remember everything her past lives had done, back for centuries as our games went on.”
Becca thought the whole concept was interesting, but it didn’t really shed any light on her patients’ behavior… or did it. “Does the word Sawnseddor mean anything to you? Or Tyrfing?”
“Sonsedhor?! Oh my God, I haven’t heard that name in a long time! Sonsedhor was Emery’s sword! The sword all his characters used. In all the games he joined in on, it tied his characters together. Since he didn’t always play, his men sort of became legends in our world. Sonsedhor was a legend, too, since no one but Emery’s characters could use it.”
“Was it ever cursed?” Becca asked, thinking of the information she had managed to look up about Tyrfing. A cursed sword from Norse myth, it had forced its wielder to do murder every time it was unsheathed. When Ryan had spoken of it, he had used its name interchangeably with Sonsedhor.
“Cursed? Sonsedhor? Never! It was a great sword, a tool of good. Never evil.”
“So what happened to your friendship. You said Emery and Joanna dated in high school?”
“Mm-hmm. For almost a year. Then, not long before Emery graduated, they got into some big fight, but I don’t know what it was about. A few weeks later, Emery was off to college and Jo and I had fallen apart by then. Everything was just…… over. But our games… what we had… you can’t forget a friendship like that.”
“Do you know if Emery and Joanna kept in contact?”
“I doubt it. Emery pretty much abandoned the family while he was still in college. I can’t see him keeping in touch with Jo after what happened. I think their fight was the last time they saw each other.”
“Until they came to Ighosia Falls.”
Becky nodded.
Becca wanted to burst. Finally, some answers!
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