Strawberry's Descent

The unveiling happened in Tabula Rosa's central plaza, right beside the permanent monument credited to every contributor of the railway, exactly where Nettle had promised a full statue's worth of space nearly two months earlier.

Bram arrived expecting, reasonably, a statue of himself, heroic pose, maybe, armor gleaming, tower shield held aloft in whatever dramatic stance Nettle's design team had settled on.

What stood beneath the ceremonial cloth, once Arista pulled it away with a flourish, was not that.

It was a crash test dummy.

Precisely, meticulously rendered, segmented limb joints, the distinctive blank, featureless head, the exact, unsettling proportions of the real-world safety-testing figures Arista had apparently researched with the same obsessive thoroughness she gave everything else, cast permanently in dull grey stone instead of any heroic material whatsoever.

Bram stared at it for a long, silent moment.

"...That doesn't look anything like me."

"That's the point," Arista said, entirely too pleased with herself.

Beneath the statue, a simple brass plaque read:

BRAMMaster Blacksmith's ApprenticeTactical Respawn Asset

"I would like it noted that I am beginning to suspect this entire friendship is built on you finding new and creative ways to almost kill me."

Bram read the quote twice, then looked back at the statue, segmented, featureless, unmistakably a testing dummy rather than any recognizable likeness of an actual person, and let out a long, slow breath that was somewhere between a laugh and genuine, wounded offense.

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"...You immortalized me as test equipment."

"You immortalized yourself, honestly," Nettle said, arriving just in time to catch the reveal, thoroughly delighted with her own contribution to the design. "We just picked the medium that fit the actual historical record. Catapult tests. Wingsuit tests. Glider crash. Cockpit failure. Bait duty for an artillery strike." She counted them off on her fingers, visibly enjoying herself. "You are, statistically, the single most tested piece of safety equipment this entire project ever produced. We felt honesty mattered more than flattery."

"I am a person."

"You are a person who agreed to every single one of those tests," Arista pointed out, gently. "Voluntarily. Repeatedly. With, admittedly, an increasing amount of resigned sighing each time, but you never actually said no."

Bram opened his mouth to argue, found he genuinely didn't have a rebuttal to that specific, accurate point, and closed it again.

"...The quote is accurate, at least," he admitted finally, grudging. "I did say that."

"Word for word," Nettle confirmed. "We have it on video."

"Everything about me in this game is apparently on video."

"That's what happens when you become a beloved recurring character in someone else's chaos," Arista said, grinning. "You get immortalized. Sometimes as a crash test dummy. Sometimes as a title. Once, memorably, as respawn-notification-adjacent tactical infrastructure."

Bram studied the statue a while longer, the initial offense slowly, visibly giving way to something more like reluctant, genuine fondness for the absurdity of it all.

"...People are actually going to see this," he said finally. "Every single person who passes through this plaza is going to read that I'm a 'Tactical Respawn Asset.'"

"They're going to love it," Nettle promised. "I already have three separate guild members asking if they can commission miniature versions."

"...Of the statue."

"Merch," Arista said, grinning. "Nettle's already drafting the design."

Bram closed his eyes, drew a long, familiar, resigned breath, and, for what felt like the hundredth time over the past two years, simply, finally, gave up arguing.

"...I hate that I'm a little bit proud of this too."

"That's the spirit," Arista said, patting the crash test dummy's featureless grey shoulder affectionately. "Welcome to permanent, slightly humiliating legend status, Bram. You've earned it."

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