Jay’s first instinct, the moment Sirpa said bullies, was to defend the inner circle of that group, and it held right up until Jay remembered she wasn’t the first one to call them that.

At the time, Jay hadn’t thought it was malice. Careless or thoughtless, sure, but not cruel on purpose. And Jay knew there were things Jay could have done better, maybe enough that it never had to fall apart. Some of it, though, couldn’t just be waved off as careless. The group shied away from direct confrontation (at least with anyone outside the inner circle), which made them come off as wishy-washy and opaque, evasive, passive-aggressive about anything they weren’t happy with or disagreed with. Like how Eugenia praised one of Jay’s characters early on, then never put that character on any of the tier lists or the wiki, and never did anything with that character’s backstory or whatever she had going on in her own IC posts. And then Eugenia decided the character’s dislike of her PC was really Jay coming at her personally, even though the character had been written that way from the start, and never once asked Jay if Jay was actually angry at her.

People are complex, multifaceted, so flattening a whole group of them into “bullies” didn’t feel right to Jay. But the group dynamic had been a slow poison, and Jay couldn’t deny part of them was relieved to be free of it. The hard part was articulating all of it without it coming out like the inner group were simply the bullies. Geeze, why does communicating have to be so hard?

━━━━━━ ◈ ━━━━━━

The Quiet Part

Above Jay’s shoulder, unbeknownst to them, a display had popped up in the air without any fanfare, the glowing sci-fi kind. Line by line, everything Jay wasn’t saying out loud was being written onto it, clean and legible, for everyone else to read. Privacy, as a concept, did not apply here. It was, after all, the internet.

━━━━━━ ◈ ━━━━━━

“I don’t know if I’d go as far as calling them bullies,” they said. “To be fair, the popularity-ranking stuff and the part where they said I needed to go, for their...”—although Jay suspected that their mostly meant Eugenia, and this was her sending one of the male members to deliver the message for her so she didn’t have to, like she did before—“...for their mental health happened pretty far apart.”

At some point their thumb had started rubbing at the side of their knee.

“To answer your question,” Jay said, turning toward the Moderator, “it’s kind of a mixed bag. I didn’t do much of the out-of-character stuff, something about it all just made me a little uncomfortable. Like the venting channel. You needed permission from the GM to get in, so I never saw it myself, but a friend showed me some of what got posted. And honestly, it felt like a lot of it was people talking behind the backs of whoever wasn’t in there, while the rest sipped the tea and munched popcorn.”

New displays popped up to show the screenshots, and vanished once Jay started talking again after a moment of silence.

“In general, I didn’t talk much in the server. There were so many conversations going on at once, moving so fast I couldn’t keep up, half the time I had no idea what they were even about. Not that it mattered. I always got the sense no one really cared what I did or didn’t say. And it’s not like I had anything of value to bring to the conversation anyway. So unless somebody addressed me directly, or was talking to the RP group as a whole, I assumed the conversation wasn’t for me. I did try to be active with the video gaming stuff. But eventually that died off when people stopped playing.”

For a bit, Jay glanced down at the group DM that included Eugenia and Steward, her boyfriend-turned-fiancé, who went from player to GM somewhere along the way. The last message was one about how exciting it would be to start playing a game together. It never happened. However long Jay waited.

“There’s nothing wrong with a relationship that starts and ends with the hobby, that works for plenty of people, it just wasn’t what I was hoping for. ...I guess it’s because I thought friends in that inner group wouldn’t get ignored or brushed aside. I didn’t want to be an NPC out of character too, you know? But they tossed me aside in the end anyways, because to them I was just a hassle. Not worth any effort.”

Jay looked at Sirpa. “Did you ever have a relationship like that? One where you mattered way less to them than they did to you?”

Glancing around the circle, Jay noticed Silver Blade’s face had gone slack and far-off, her eyes parked on some spot on the floor without actually seeing it. “Silver Blade? You doing okay?” they asked.

For what might've been the fifteenth time, Olo stepped through the door and found himself right back in the curio shop without a name.

"Curiouser and curiouser," the halfling thought out loud. Not that there was anyone else to hear him. Or, at least, to no one he was aware of.

He'd been perusing the labyrinth bristling with oddities—mermaid tears, a jar of teeth in too many sizes, a clock with no hands that still ticked, a phylactery with something still inside it, and so, so much more—losing track of time the way he always did in places like this. Eventually he remembered himself, and made for the exit.

That was hours ago. Maybe. If the clock with no hands had hands, he might've known for certain, but as it stood, Olo couldn't say. Either way, that was beside the point. The point was that in all that time, he hadn't encountered a single living person. No customers. No shopkeeper.

Whether it was broken, enchanted so that you had to purchase something before you could leave, or simply bad-mannered, the front door had made its position clear. So the sensible course of action, Olo decided, was to go deeper into the curio shop.

"Hello?" he called as he ventured on. "Anyone?"