laser-targeted (out of focus)
Chapter 01: in the morning mist
Chapter 02: escape boat camping
Chapter 03: forest of the nopon
Chapter 04: sun-dappled glade
Chapter 05: a place in the sun
Chapter 06: in the forest
Chapter 07: jump towards the morning sun
Minoth was a large, scruffy coon of a cat, and as she watched him restlessly roll over from one basking angle to the next, until he finally fell asleep stretched out on his back with the fur on his belly glistening in the late afternoon sunlight, Core dully agleam as ever, Flora realized that she'd never had the same apprehension about approaching Minoth the human(oid).
While she wasn't a specifically touchy person foremost, like Addam was and like Minoth wasn't unless in very closely settled company, her first thought upon seeing a cat in someone's home was always, or least usually, to ask if she could pick the little dear up; if they would appreciate that, if they would be amenable to it, if she could hold their precious paws.
But Minoth...well, now, Flora had no one to ask about it but the faint fond memory of her tall, handsome Flesh Eater recently departed from verbal communication, and she couldn't quite conjure what she thought he'd say.
(Even if she usually always, always, always could read him nearly as well as she read Addam, by now. Even if he was just so dearly hers.)
She decided she'd carefully coast flat fingertips along the least sensitive, most protrusive tuft of hair on his underside, and then gradually let her palm drift down. Gentle, telegraphed pressure never spooked anyone, she reasoned. It certainly worked well enough with children, when in need of a calming hand on their shoulder.
Sure enough, Minoth didn't startle, didn't tense. Flora pet him absentmindedly, but wonderingly; as casually and adoringly as she might run her fingers through his hair when found asleep in the den, except that she probably (or at least not usually) wouldn't do that. So both sides had their advantages.
And on that topic, in Flora's experience, Minoth didn't snore; feline Minoth instead made the faintest hum of a purr in time with his soft breaths, Flora discovered. Whether that spell of contentment was caused by her presence or whether she simply hadn't been close enough to recognize it, she couldn't say.
Flora would have lain down next to him and laid her head on his chest, but as it was now she made do with resting her head on the cushion covering the base of the bay window, eyes sidelong roving Minoth's stripes and scars.
Maybe later she'd pick him up. Surely he'd allow it.
Fan la Norne is Mòrag's guest as much as she is Indol's envoy, while Pandoria can do no more than pose along as an unaffiliated onlooker whose own status of Indoline envoy is best kept unstated. Sounds like fun? Sure it does, but that's an awfully unemployed way of looking at things.
So Pandy unofficially assigns herself to be the Goddess's private detachment, tending to her misgivings and including her as much as she seems to want to be included, which is not much.
Maybe she'd have the same faraway look in her eyes if her Driver, sharing half her Core, were not constantly so close by. Pandoria tries not to take it personally. Instead, she takes it personally on Fan's behalf; that serenity...it can't be joy, can it?
Shopping would be gauche in such wartime straits, and there's nothing to be bought at the only sort-of-civilized location on all of Temperantia, anyway. However, since the rest of the group is busy offloading the uniformly oversize beasts that roam the Central Plain and seems to have little use for Tantalese clumsiness as they do so (read: the three kids and their playtime pals are being supervised by Mòrag and ignoring Zeke wholesale at Nia's behest), the Goddess and her trusty defender in sparkly pantaloons have naught else to do but pretend to forage about.
So politely, do they pretend, hands on staves and eyes most keen. But who are they kidding? There's nothing useful, edible, beautiful, or even shiny to be found here.
Except for this bizarre little clump of lignin that catches Pandoria's eyes with a flash even through her colossal, clunky lenses. Its edges are rippled with the trademark spontaneous burn of a lightning strike drilled right through it - split more efficiently than even a master lumberjack with sharpest axe could manage.
She runs her thumb over the jagged deckle, trying to think of something interesting to say about short-stumped shrapnel compost and trying very much not to peek over, gauging Fan's reaction; to just...look at her and the way she walks ghostlike, phantom-stepped among endless swirls of stilled wind, through the world.
"Funny stuff, huh? Even the dead plants are subject to targeted violence around here!" Hmm. "Think you could tell how old it is?"
Fan smiles for just the briefest flicker of a second, then frowns, shaking her head. "No, I'm something of an...novice with such things."
"Wildflowers...not a very practical use of our limited resources, is it, Fiona?"
But Irma makes this admonition with a wry smile, as if she wishes to aid and abet such foolishness, with abandon. Fiona grins back, dirt-covered hands far preferable to a dark stain upon her prim naval-white gloves. The Consul will know, and has approved, exactly how many packets of perennial seeds they've been rationed.
Of course it's alright for Fiona to do this job - not so much as perform this task. No, the innocent industriousness is key.
Fiona is young, and wildflowers are useless; have no effect whatsoever on the mobility of the colony. The soldiers they memorialize...already gone. The impact made upon wobbling chins, irreparable. Fiona's pretty smile is enough, in itself.
And Irma has no guilt, only calculates with inert guile. She is protecting Fiona, indeed, reveling in the gift that the current term brings.
It's all for naught, but Irma won't let herself know so. The scheme of her manipulation has kneed many an earnest and hopeful soldier, and she does fear for the day when it will be the downfall of dear Fiona.
Proud Fiona. Noble Fiona. Wiser than any blithe and simple Fifi.
The age Fiona is now is one that has tempered the trepidation latent in her memory of a fallen comrade but not yet given way to abject, jaded despair.
Irma cannot have that - cannot have Mu becoming a colony of cagehearts who won't scrap for their supper and stay nimble as they do it, louder and more eager than any junior squadron anywhere else in Aionios would ever be. Certainly not like Keves's, F's, Colony 0, which is as dull-eyed as they come across the board.
How dull it would be for Mu to become just like all the rest, renowned for nothing and not worth the effort it takes to sustain it. The Consuls that have multiple colonies because they can't do anything of interest with just the one...no, I is not that way. I keeps sharp.
Fiona will be worth the effort for as long as it is that she manages to survive - for as long as she can manage to help the others survive, with physical and emotional strength. Irma will overlook her exceptional institutional advantages in favor of her exceptional individual advantage to her Consul, personally.
Bright as a Carnomile, she is, Fiona, and feverishly, tragically kind.
"Always so prim and proper, Alvis..."
"Am I?"
"An' prickly, too! I swear."
Is he still holding out about that blasted button? Yeah, yeah, be more careful, Reyn's so clumsy, what a lunkhead. But maybe takin' the long way's not so bad, all the time, yeah? More opportunity to spend with Alvis's sparkling personality...
Sparkling as in an ether crystal, or fizzy water (which made Reyn dizzy). Sort of...vapid? Not vapid. Vaporized.
Reyn can't help but connect the dots that after so many years of watching out for a frail, fragile Shulk (real, and flesh-earthy, and deathly pale), Alvis's form of formlessness is absolutely doggone mystifying.
Like a fiberglass version of Gumby, only Reyn doesn't know what either of those things are. Like the air itself frozen and hammered into an impossibly thin plane that comes so impossibly wide it wraps around you in a Homs-shaped panopticon.
It's not that Reyn's not smart enough to reach out and push Alvis's buttons, to see how he'll push back. It's that he really doesn't want to.
He wants to see what Alvis'll decide to do without prompting, without input from a certain sock-eyed someone.
(Ignoring the fact that Alvis is tied to Shulk like a bungee, springing in spirals around each other.)
When Alvis gave that asinine two-word response, for instance, his chin stayed perfectly level as his jaw swiveled around, two blinks, an invisible cock of head that didn't, actually, occur, but didn't it? Wouldn't it?
Malice? Amusement?
A miniature Quadwing alone in the woods, clutched in a tree, watching the Feris bumble beneath. It could fly away, but where would be the fun in that? The bird is learning from the beast, all the time. The bird is curious about the beast's lowly struggle, vain to the pastime of observing motivations.
"Didn't you know I would press the button, Alvis? Seems like somethin' you would...I dunno, know."
There it is again - the smile that flickers, phantom wry, but wasn't there, isn't there, not possibly extant for anyone else but Reyn's eyes and mind only.
Reyn's logic here was that Alvis wouldn't be annoyed, if he had known, and even if he hadn't known, he would know that he could have, and so, he wasn't really annoyed, was he?
As if Reyn were the only perfect, immutable being, predictable to the touch in every gorgeous grin-beared way.
"Maybe it's trite," Lora acknowledges with a quirk of her brows, "but I feel so at ease around you, Vanea."
Vanea easily quenches a flush threatening to rise in her cheeks, just the fraction of connection engaging circuits in her chest. "Trite because? Do you not usually?"
"In the company of important people like you? Never!"
Vanea supposes, if she stops and imagines, she could see a sort of nervousness, in Lora; a jumpy muscles-tensed pre-akimbo to her step and knees. As it is, Lora is a very motional being, always clapping or rocking or swaying or stretching - and quite often, multiple of these in one moment.
Machina, meanwhile, are remarkably still.
Lora, stanced with springing knees and flaring skirt. Vanea, staunch in spindle-strong heels and stick-straight swathes of hair.
It's no small marvel that the two of them have even met, and become acquainted. Not by whips and chains but by the threads of fate, and infinite will that perseveres.
Are all Homs this way, then? Their closeness to the Bionis and its blessings, in that there were some things that Zanza made that do manage to be beautiful, even still?
And not all are the things that he and Meyneth had in common and in mind when first they began to create.
Vanea reaches out a hand, perilously anxious to see what Lora will do with it. Lora looks, darts her eyes around, up and to the side - Vanea doesn't know if she should feel guilty at the thought of Lora somewhat like a wild animal, like an M53 unit set off its regular patrol course and rounded an unfamiliar corner.
Here, now, is Lora's hand lifted aloft as well. Vanea takes it, smiles, and interlaces their fingers neatly, slotting her digits around the comfortable creases in Lora's gauntlet palm that define where each knuckle has crested, curled, cracked.
"There's my promise of goodwill," she says, clear and crisp but still warm as can be to help calm Lora's thrumming hummingbird heart, so loud even at her wrist where it brushes the base of Vanea's.
"You're lovely," replies Lora in non-rejoinder, querulous, as if it were a surprise to her despite all what she'd just professed. A revelation made firm. An affirmation revealed.
"I am no more than you are. And you are vast as the stars, my Lora."
Not to say that no more is any less; that we've done any less than exceed every earthbound expectation.
"Drinkin' to forget, huh?"
"Drinking to make it a night to remember, more like! C'mon, Yelv, you gotta loosen up, man!"
Frye's really one-note, isn't he? Yelv being anything like buttoned-up is a bit of a stretch, but the bar seems to have been lowered mightily, like so many scattered inhibitions. Yelv tries not to begrudge the other BLADEs their adrenaline-junkie habits, seeing as how he's the one with a stubborn, seismic fixation on the lost body of another and can't hardly comprehend what it is to relax at even the best of times.
He tries. But not hard.
Maybe he should be more like Frye. Maybe he should let it all wash over him like so many tasteless beers. Maybe he should--
As if. No way. Like hell.
"So what if I do? There's gotta be something keepin' you up at night, Frye - or do you drink on every day that ends in a Y?"
"Not like I can see a reason not to."
Yelv turns his head, and there Frye is, staring straight at the back of the bar, right through a bottle of Jameson. It's Johnnie in his glass, Yelv is sure, and it's nothing like country culture that keeps the Killer Ostrich on it. Obviously not, in the neon-and-neoprene land-out-of-time that makes Repenta a fluorescent obelisk in the struts of industry. It's like its own spaceship, going nowhere except that it's the only thing going, so in that way it damn sure gets the job done.
Weekends mean nothing to them. Yelv can't really remember a time when that wasn't true, of course. Rather, time is a cold concept, slippery and straight-sided in his hands.
It's something about regret, and something about disagreements, and something about family.
At his age? Yelv's got nothing of the sort to speak of. His spats with Eleonora don't half count.
The punk of all trades, partner of none, buttoned-up? Yeah. Yeah, his anger burns a lot closer to the surface, actually. The most unsatisfying, sourceless simmer around.
"Hey, take it easy, bud," Yelv says, pinkie positioned to just about nudge Frye's where it's languid on the table apart from the decanter but letting the space lie, unrested. "Don't let me go steppin' on your coping mechanism."
"It's more than that," Frye mumbles. "Means somethin' to me."
Yeah. Sure. Like all of them do, to each other. Like anything does, when it's gone too far.
While Iona is pleased to be meeting someone half so interested and books and stories and history as she (given that most Urayan children are most concerned with sports and not paying attention in school), she will readily admit to at least a little intimidation at the thought of talking with someone who's read all the books in Theosoir, which means all the books in Tantal!
(Well, except for the nasty books that Grandpa refuses to acknowledge. But it's because he refuses so that she even knows about them.)
And Astelle wants to know if she's well-traveled - my goodness! When Mr. Zeke asked if she could stay at the playhouse for a playdate (very proud of that assonance, he was, which Iona knew because Grandpa proceeded to remark snidely about a different part of him, as such), Iona never thought it would be so stressful as all that.
"So what do you do, mostly?" Astelle asks, lain on her stomach atop Iona's mattress and kicking her legs idly. "Have you read everything here?"
"Of course not!" Iona's hands fly up to clasp together in an instant, the loose threads of Cole's sheets she'd been fidgeting with coiling away unnoticed. She's about to proselytize on age-appropriate reading material, whether measured by content or complexity, and the restrictions necessitated thereby, when a more compelling argument strikes her: "Grandpa writes so much, I could never keep track! It's not like in Theosoir, where everything is ancient history."
Astelle doesn't so much as blink at this unintentional snub. "So it's all fiction? Cool! Which one is your favorite adventure story? I want to see how he writes the battle scenes." Once she finishes this declaration of interest, Astelle gets up and ambles over to the nearest shelf, propping hands to hips and cocking her head side to side.
It is fiction, right? Historical fiction? It is...loosely based? What if not?!
"I can't decide right now," decides Iona. "Can we play with my hamster instead?"
Astelle looks unconvinced - rather, unmotivated.
"Mr. Zeke and Miss Pandoria got him for me!" Iona exclaims, running to the kitchen to fetch Diddums's cage. Luckily, Astelle has the presence of mind, if not simply the bare piqued curiosity, to follow her, and thereby incidentally prevent any potential accidents; Diddums merely perches a little closer to the portent of doom than they might usually like, the newspaper underfoot obscuring this encroaching fate from view.