Fu Tu re

6: Riel

Forti sighed. "Not really alright. A lot better than the past couple of days, though."

They walked mindlessly through their dreamscape into a blank white space, too focused on their conversation to change the environment drastically. Forti talked about the past week like a child frustrated by a jigsaw puzzle, on the brink of tears. Yet once her friend arrived, all her sorrows floated off her small shoulders and she was determined to fit the pieces again. All he had to do was watch, listen, and he learned all she had been through, the picture complete.

Riel gave her another hug.

"You've been through so much," he finally said. She nodded in his shoulder, then looked at him with wet eyes.

"How about you? What have you been up to?"

There had been a breakthrough in Riel's world: the end of infinity. The dumbfounded shock on Forti's face made him beam.

"Isn't that impossible?"

"Nothing is, but that includes impossibility, and that paradox is the solution. I'm oversimplifying it, unfortunately. I don't understand it all that much myself."

Forti was ecstatic for Riel, as she always was whenever he let her have a glimpse into his universe. However, he had only moderate enthusiasm about the news.

"The discoverer was a young scholar recently assigned to Muisyle," he said with a mirthless smile. "Everyone treats him like he did all the hard work and research when all he discovered was the mathematician who actually solved the hypothesis. But luck is a skill, too, right? He was allocated to a quality world and found the right person to leech off of, how lucky."

From years of gathering whatever pieces Riel dropped, Forti understood his world could watch other worlds, and because of that power, his world strived to be perfect. Learning from its neighbors, they had precautions for disasters, extinctions, even apocalypses, and relentlessly consumed innovations, theories, and ideas.

Riel was embittered by it all.

"We copy other worlds. We have no originality. We don't put in our own efforts and struggles. We take and take, but we can't give back. We're like useless parasites."

This wasn't the first time Riel wallowed over his world's exploitative nature, and she rubbed his back. She knew nothing she could say would offer any meaningful consolation. It was enough to sit side by side and hear each other's complaints

"It's cool that your world found the end of infinity," she mused. "If my world was as advanced in mathematics as yours or Muisyle, I wonder how many problems we could have already solved."

"I don't know if your world would be ready for it."

Forti felt a pang in her chest, and shot Riel a fiery look, to which he immediately hung his head in regret at his blunder, realizing once the remark flew out his mouth.

When they were younger, she shared in that mutual bitterness over the state of their respective worlds. She'd agree that her's was the lesser of the two, although neither said it outloud. Instead, it was admitted when she would accept Riel's prescriptions over what her world was capable of, and what it was not, though it felt like slamming her elbow wrong and striking the funny bone. How could their worlds even compare?

Now, Forti punched back with an exaggerated, almost comedic, expression of disappointment. Brows deeply furrowed. Mouth pinched into a thin line. To complete it, arms crossed, and Riel was remorseful as a sinner prostrating to a saint.

Ever since she realized how much that unintentional hubris of his hurt her and told him, he had been making steady effort to uproot it, filtering how he talked, learning to be humble. Yet, it still occasionally sprouted out like a slap to the face.