“Jun. Something happened to your sword.” I said carefully and pushed myself to my feet.

She cocked her head to the side and reached down, her hand wrapping around the sword’s grip before I could get another word in. “What? Did it rust more… wow.”

Her hands shifted to grab the sword by its blade, making a disgusted noise in her throat at the moss inside the handle. “This looks a whole lot like the blade-arms we cut off of all those lichenthropes. But, uh, prettier.”

I was expecting a more intense reaction, and a far more negative one at that, but I’d severely underestimated Jun’s level-headedness. She shot a glance at the sword on my leg, then down at the leaf-pool that was very slightly mossy, and nodded as if she’d made the correct assumption without me saying anything at all.

“Why did un-rusting the sword make its stat bonuses go down?” Jun asked, running her fingers along the copper etchings while taking extra care to avoid the handle. “It’s only giving me +3 in power and speed, but it has a mastery level now? Is that normal?”

I chuckled and shook my head. “Nothing’s normal in hazards. But if it’s got a mastery level, then it should be able to become stronger, and that’s probably why the bonuses dropped. I’m going to go see if the same thing happens to my sword in the water-tree.”

Jun hopped up in one swift motion, then stumbled over her own feet. “Stupid speed difference. I’m coming with you.”

The waxy leaves made walking a chore, my feet constantly threatening to slip out from under me while I made the short trek over to the water-tree. The thunderous raindrops didn’t help either, slamming down and shaking the leaves under my feet while not having the decency to cleanse my sword. I shielded my eyes against the coppery sunlight, watching as the massive tree spouted water further than my eyes could see. It truly was the heart of this anomaly, even if it wasn’t the way to get out of here.

“How are we going to get down from here?” Jun muttered to herself, kneeling down just before the water-tree and peering down at the tightly-knit canopy of leaves. “Just… climb down? That feels anticlimactic for what we just did, but I guess it’ll work.”

I unlatched my sword while Jun kept muttering, holding it with the blade down and gently inserting it into the water-tree. The effects were near immediate; patina sheared off the blade in massive flakes, leaving behind a slightly-greened copper blade with the same rune-symbol-tree pattern as Jun’s. Imperfections were filled in with new copper, and the second I felt the handle squirm under my grip I pulled back and focused on the blade while pulling up my interface for analysis.

//ANALYZING NEW ACQUISITION: COPPERBOUND MOSSBLADE.

//ANALYSIS COMPLETE; SEE INVENTORY FOR FULL DETAILS.

//WARNING: TOUCHING THE ACQUISITION TO MOSS-INFESTED WATERS WILL REVERT IT TO A FRAGILE STATE.

The blade certainly was more majestic than before, and I dismissed the analysis messages to see if the sword now showed up in my inventory. A quick scan told me that it hadn’t, but a blinking notification at the bottom of my equipment drew my eye. I reached out to tap it, and instead of a text box, a diagram of the mossblade opened.

It showed the exact sword I had, without any of the runes or symbols glowing. I swiped my hand across it and spun the sword to its other side, barely catching that one of the symbols I’d touched began glowing forest green like the mossy eyes inside the lichenthropes. A command written in symbols that looked to be a combination of harsh, one-line strokes and crescent slashes popped up at the bottom of the weapon diagram’s pommel.

The copper handle began squirming under my grip, and my eyes were drawn to something that had appeared on my actual sword. A small pencil eraser-sized bump jutted out from the pommel, a hint of black showing through the green and copper. I jockeyed the sword until I had a good enough grip on it to reach out and take the little bump between my thumb and forefinger, then pulled with all my might.

A small glass tube slowly slipped free of the handle, revealing an almost black mass of moss inside that didn’t glow whatsoever. I popped it out with a wet squelch, dismissing the sword instinctively and not even processing the fact that it went into my inventory without a hitch. I gently tapped the glass tube with my finger and frowned at the extremely weak glow that shot through it, barely noticeable inside of the mostly black mass.

“How’d you get that out?” Jun asked, leering over my shoulder at the glass tube. “And why’s that moss look dead? My sword seems alive and well.”

I stared at the tube for a second before answering. “I’m not really sure. I analyzed the sword with my interface and tapped a symbol on the projection that came up. This has to be the reason we were sent to the tree. But it wouldn’t be obvious because of the language barrier.”

I shook my head and sighed, then tapped the glass tube once more. “Maybe we’re supposed to decipher the glyphs with things we find around here. Each lichenthrope could hold a piece of the cipher, and we just missed it on the ones we already killed.”

“The copperbound mossblade has been drained of its power, corrupted by the lichenthrope that wielded it.” Jun read, and I snapped my head around to look at her. It looked like she was reading verbatim from her interface. “Revealed to you is a single sample of the original moss, which holds the key to completing the hazard. Revive the moss and find the way to the true heart of the Rusted Floodforest.”

Jun hummed and flicked her hand through open air while I stared in disbelief. “It says here that these weapons aren’t ‘static in form’ until we take them out of the anomaly, and that they can mimic any shape we analyze a lichenthrope in. Even armor. Is that a good idea, or should we stick with weapons?”

She looked straight at me, and I didn’t have an answer. Why could she read those runes when I couldn’t? I knew what her core function was, and she wasn’t wearing any trinkets. I opened my mouth to speak, then shut it as I formed the quickest and quite possibly pettiest plan I’d ever thought of.

“Jun, can you bend down and scratch your name into the leaf?” I asked, keeping my voice as neutral as possible. There was a good chance I was overreacting, but on the off chance that I wasn’t, I needed to get ahead of this. There weren’t any other intelligent species in the new world last time, but that didn’t mean they didn’t exist.

Jun hesitated for a second before crouching down, never taking her eyes off me, and scratching her name into the leaf. There were three symbols and I couldn’t read any of them.

“That’s really bad.” I muttered, crouching down and running my hand over the shallow cuts in the leaf. “I can’t read this, Jun.”

“What?” She laughed, slapping my hand away and underlining one symbol with her finger. “Ju-Ni-Per.” She repeated, moving to a new symbol with each syllable. “If you can read your interface, then why can’t you read my name?”

I briefly considered hiding what I knew from Jun, but decided against it as I gently grabbed her hand and began spelling out my own name. She watched with curiosity as I scratched English letters into the leaf, her arm growing stiff as I assumed she came to the same conclusion I had.

“I can’t read your name.” She whispered, completely focused on the scratching in the leaf. Her helmet zipped up to look at me, and her voice was filled with wonder. “What are you? Wait, are you an alien? Did one or both of us get sent here accidentally and now this is the first contact between two completely unrelated species!?”

This felt like the most I’d learned of Jun’s personality so far, and as she leaned in closer to me as if I was a research specimen, I knew I could work with her. So many people flinch away in the face of the unknown–God knows I did last time–and finding someone sane who didn’t flinch away was a rarity. And Jun seemed sane enough so far.

“We can talk about that later.” I said, brushing off my knees and standing up. “Your interface told you to ‘revive the moss’, so that’s what we should focus on. I’m guessing it either has something to do with the water-tree, the moss inside these leaves, or the lichenthropes on the ground. Three things to test, and we can do two of them right now.”

“A real alien.” Jun murmured, removing her own tube of dead moss from her sword’s handle. “I’m standing next to a real live alien. Do you have a mouth like I do? Ears? A nose? Ooh, do you see through your eyes or do you use echolocation or something to see? No, no, you have a written language, so that wouldn’t make sense.”

“As I said, we can talk once we’re back on solid ground.” I repeated with a sigh, gripping my tube of moss rightly and immersing it into the water-tree. It didn’t change whatsoever, and I turned to see that Jun had touched her own to my carved name. The moss couldn’t even cling to the tube, and she shook her head when she saw me looking. “Neither, then. I’ll dunk it in a leaf pool just to be sure, then we need to start climbing down. Maybe we can camp out on a particularly large branch we find on the way down.”

After finding a gap through the leaves that let us climb down safely, we searched around for the biggest branch we could find and set up camp for the approaching night. Jun had timed the day cycle to take exactly 45 hours here, with 30 hours of light followed by 15 hours of darkness. We chatted about nothing while we searched, mostly spitballing ideas that went nowhere or snowballed into other ideas we tucked away for later.

Once the sunlight no longer streamed through the gaps in the leaves, and the only sounds to be heard were the thunderous raindrops smashing to the leaves above, I found myself bathed in green firelight while I tried to make sense of my thoughts. Now that I looked at Jun as someone from another species, I started noticing little things in the way she talked. From the way she referred to the sky in the same way I’d refer to heaven to how she talked about water as if it was a sacred resource, she didn’t feel like someone from earth. Or at least anyone I’d met on earth or the new world.

And from the way she looked at me, I knew she was thinking the exact same thing.

“I have so many questions.” Jun sighed, drumming on her sword with two fingers while she leaned on her other wrist. “But I guess they don’t matter if we can’t make it out of here, do they?”

I nodded in agreement and threw another splintered piece of soft wood on the fire. It cracked and melted into a slurry that burned hot and slow. “Nothing matters if we don’t make it out of here.”

Jun grumbled something to herself, her swiping at empty air making it obvious she was fiddling with her interface. “I need to know how to use everything here. I don’t have a tutorial like you do, and maybe nobody else out there does.” She turned to me and tapped the sword on her lap once more. “Will you teach me?”