Sleep seemed to be another problem Kaldalis wasn’t solving tonight.

He tried to tell himself a million reasons why he couldn’t stay asleep for more than fifteen minutes at a time. Tossing and turning, he told himself he was feeling guilty for ducking Heluna. He felt like a real heel for not at least tracking her down to let her know he was back in town. The worst he could do to her was turn her down if she tried to schedule a date. Avoiding her altogether was so much worse, wasn’t it?

The next time he found himself fully awake, untangling the sheets from around his legs and tail, he told himself it was the bed. He just wasn’t used to it yet. It was big and soft and comfortable, which was so unlike the sleeping arrangements he’d become accustomed to since entering this world. In his sleep, he must have been searching for the edge, or trying to curl up tight for a too-small blanket for his height, and instead he was finding bed as far as his arms could reach, and more blanket than he knew what to do with.

Twenty minutes after telling himself that, he found himself carefully negotiating the liberation of one of his horns from a pillowcase. Tossing and turning as a Vathon had additional pitfalls to consider. And as he wrestled with it, he told himself that he was worried about how his friends were coping. They’d all seemed so uncomfortable with talking about the idea for over a week on the boat. At least Ess had wanted to chat with him about it, but the others? He didn’t know. It was possible that Balrim and Myrin had hashed it out between the two of them, but Reno had seemed almost physically upset about it. She was probably waiting for the other shoe to drop when everyone pointed fingers at the one person who worked on Project Rundas.

Two hours, and six more awakenings later, Kaldalis had to acknowledge that he felt unwelcome. He couldn’t sleep because a part of his brain told him - very clearly and confidently - that he was a monster, and that he didn’t belong in this world. He was an invader. The first wave of a heartless corporations attempts to wring cash from another universe. He shouldn’t think about the inhabitants of this world as friends. He was an oppressor, complicit in the attack against their world that had wiped out an entire civilization and imposed an unwanted and unhelpful change upon the world.

He actually slept better once he admitted it to himself. Not much better, but when he woke up and saw the stream reward notification, they had all been sitting there for at least an hour. It was still dark out, and a part of him wanted to leave it for the morning, so that those who were watching him could see him go through them. But he couldn’t get back to sleep with it undone, and so he started the process of chipping through them.

Most of them were accompanied by a message. A surprising amount of them were about Onirioago. People wanted to put their two cents in on her betrayal, capture, Hannibal Lecter impression, escape, and mortal recapture. Naturally a huge chunk of people called absolute bullshit when she recovered from that. While a bunch of people were happy to see her go to trial for her crimes, there seemed to be a nontrivial number of people who implied that she did nothing wrong, which made Kaldalis extremely concerned about what kind of community was building up around this streaming service. But there were a bunch more that said some variation of “step on me” and so Kaldalis told himself that it was just people on the internet being weirdly horny and not an actual call for a drug-induced dictatorship.

There were a number of other messages, though, unrelated to his largest concern.

A couple made him smile.

Three different people had nearly simultaneously all-caps keysmashed about him kissing Heluna. But there were also some that Kaldalis chose to ignore gave him some less-than-wholesome advice about her, or offered outright disgusting opinions about Ara. Someone had gone out of their way to give every member of the Panbu council an unflattering nickname, and then subsequently apologized for catching Big Mike in the crossfire, since he turned out to be “a true bro.” There was someone who sent several consecutive messages providing a blow-by-blow guide for the Panbu dungeon after watching Voker run it. A bunch of people complained about Baimer - which Kaldalis couldn’t argue with - until…

The stream messages were presented to him in chronological order.

Of the last dozen, ten of them had their messages redacted.

One of the most recent was someone commenting to say “fuck yeah more fishing” presumably while he was on the boat, and another closer to the beginning - presumably right after the trial - was asking if Kaldalis had blanked the stream out because he was finally “getting some” and remarking that it was “about damn time.”.

He found himself staring at those redacted messages. What were they?

Monsoon had blanked his stream before Onirioago had said anything, and Kaldalis hadn’t turned it back on until he was on the boat.

Had something gotten though?

Were people asking questions about what happened, and Monsoon intervened, fearing he might answer? Or had they actually guessed at what Onirioago had said from context clues, and Monsoon didn’t want those messages being read aloud on stream when Kaldalis got them?

He had to ignore them. The best case scenario was that staring at them was a waste of time. In the worst case, drawing attention to them at all was going to put him in hot water with Monsoon. It made him glad he was going through them at about two in the morning. He still had to open the redacted messages to get the attached gifts, and it was possible that it would minimize the fuss if a much smaller portion of his audience was seeing it.

“Redacting this shit,” he grumbled to himself, “but leaving all the gross shit for me to see. Great fucking moderation, Monsoon.”

After raiding the notification list for everything he was suddenly flush with cash. His subscriber payout last month had been just over five hundred crescents, and he made over a thousand this time. He’d gotten a bunch of potions as well, including some new ones. Naturally, he’d gotten some Lesser Healing Potions and Minor Ire Potions, but he also had some unfamiliar additions to his inventory.

Healing salve was a recovery item with no associated hit point recovery. It took Kaldalis a minute to realize what it was for. It was for recovery from PvP combat. Examining it revealed it wouldn’t be useful in the heat of combat: it took 15 seconds to apply, and the healing would take place over 2 minutes. Without hit points being involved, he couldn’t gauge whether or not it’d be that helpful. He’d naturally recovered within a few hours from the grievous wounds his high Vigor stat allowed him to endure.

He also got a half-dozen of Potions Of Silence. They would reduce all sounds he made to a whisper for fifteen minutes. This would make conversation and communication nearly impossible for the long duration, but it would make him much sneakier. Three of them were sent by people remarking on him chasing down Onirioago in the jungle. The other three came from people trying to help him navigate the hazards of Baimer. Either way, he could definitely make use of them if he was in that sort of situation again.

There were a handful of others that boosted various stats. There were a few Minor Steelskin Potions that would dramatically increase his Defense stat for 10 seconds. That was potentially very useful for burst damage, but not so much for general use. Someone who had kept saying inappropriate things about Onirioago had, over the course of their thirst-posting, given him a number of potions that would boost a specific one of his Affinities for one minute. They had apparently just selected them at random, making Kaldalis wonder if there was some exploit to send cheaper messages if they sent something that nobody else had sent yet, and boosting a single Affinity seemed useless enough that it might have been a cheaper option already. Some of them seemed potentially useful just the same. Particularly the debuff Affinities, since he knew how deadly things like Slow and Seal could be.

He wasn’t sure how to respond. It was two in the morning, so it was unlikely that these specific people were watching. And at the same time, he didn’t want to thank the people who were being gross or crass in his inbox. But he didn’t want to be ungrateful. If he was right, these potions might save his life - or someone else’s - and the last thing he wanted was for them to stop sending things.

“Thank you all for the support,” he said at last, though still bleary-eyed from sleep. “I’ll make sure to put these items to good use. And in the morning, I’ll take all these crescents and get a proper weapon. As soon as Sivima is awake and working.”

No one had sent him a weapon, so he assumed it was impossible. But that meant that he needed to push to get the weapons at the crack of dawn. He had to get together with his friends to head to Kayore nice and early, but he needed to be ready for anything when he got there. It was possible that the new town would be higher level, and using a low-level weapon could be a death sentence.

As he lay back down, he realized that this was exactly what he needed. There was no better way to find deep, uninterrupted sleep than having something to do in the morning.

Of course, that’s what he told himself.