ill-gotten righteousness

The slate. All of Hilda's disconcerted, disreputed, discombobulated river-tumbling thoughts begin with, end with, swirl about and revolve around the slate. Pick up the slate. Find directions on the slate. Bash monsters with the slate. Take notes on the slate.

Take notes about people, and places, and names and faces and masks and the tastiest varieties of fruits.

Activate red-to-green flashing-silver emblems within arcane shrines and towers that oddly seem to resemble rain shelters, in all their most opaque measure of facility, with the slate.

The slate is enormously powerful, and so unfairly so. To think of what absurdly capacious pockets one would have to have to replicate its ability to store nigh infinite quantities of information, goods, supplies and snacks...

Without it, one would have to be much more judicious about the items they choose to carry. They'd have to become quite comfortable with passing things up; with giving things up, all the time. With letting go.

Letting go starts with self-sufficience, Hilda supposes. Knowing that you have all you need, or else trusting that you'll find it all along your path, meant as it was and is to be. Even if that finder's keeper was the sacred art of stealing.

Whatever one could keep at home in a cave, never quite knowing when you'd return or what would be left of it when you did...that was all you could count upon, along with your own ten fingers and toes. Ten of each, that is. But, then, who knows, maybe Thief Girl is missing a few of each. Hilda was pretty sure she'd counted her own, cursorily, before shucking on the moccasin-like shoes.

Waking up in a basin of mysterious undamp mauvey fluid and being handed your name by an unseen caller who had no hesitation about deeming you a princess meant that you either had somewhere to go back to, or you were here in place of someone else, wicked body wrong. You had an identity, even if it wasn't yours.

Hilda's the type not to worry about that too much, pragmatically. Whatever task must be accomplished, whatever problem must be solved, whatever rift must be crossed, if it's her that's been thrust here to deal with it, then deal with it she will.

Never mind the fact that Thief Girl addresses her with the most calm reverence of all when revealing that she is, indeed, the princess, lost to a calamity and awaited by a loyal, fervent royal scientist.

Lorule, strange and beautiful land, rife with monsters and mushrooms and the sun-thinned veneer of a flat blue sky. This place. She's meant to be the princess of this place, under a goddess that gave this vast (must be, must be) and forsaken (can't be, can't be) land her holy name.

(The world hasn't ended, not truly. It's just...moved on.)

The goddess must have prepared her for this fate, all-seeing as she seems to be even with her ever-lidded marble eyes. Even if this land isn't the mythical utopia of Hyrule.

But the memory of that bizarre basin, gently resting her for this apparent long-delivered trial ahead, in that smooth red cloister complete with clothes and the ultimate of all armaments, does nothing to unperturb what the atmosphere in Temple of Time had dislodged in Hilda's mind.

The fluid is, was, the same color as Thief Girl's hair. The same sort of indistinct, yet audacious, noncommital vagary of service, begging no favors but beguiling in the way that it lazily entertains the thought of giving any, or hints, never mind making promises...

Bah. Just hasty romanticization, daydreams. Daydreams unbidden by the faceless, friendly voice.

Yes, obviously, you know her whole life story, since she's only a mysterious girl who lived in a cave for who knows how long.

They're not really so much the same, then, are they? Or are they actually not all that different?

Hilda doesn't mind Thief Girl's rudeness, because she can be sharp and impertinent herself, when she wants to. She can feel her wit bubbling just under the surface, an undercurrent of confidence that almost sparks a smile now and then. She's enough of a stranger in a strange land right now, however, that Thief Girl's jabs roll right off of her; Hilda's curled her spines under her own belly, and she's fine with keeping it that way.

Was it spite that had Thief Girl snapping sardonic quips at her, when Hilda began to gnaw at the soft-launch realization that there was more to this than just vagrancy and veiled threats of roadside attack to ransack for that slate? Spite that Hilda should even need a mask at all, while the inherently disguised nobody-rabbit plays fast and loose with the dry thrill of random encounters?

She could have corrected her entry in the slate. Could have amended it. Could have added a bonus, somewhere long down the list, that didn't give her away, but only sort of half did - Hilda doesn't know anyone else here, after all. Could have deleted it, if she were truly so unearthly offended, deeper and lower than the chasm in which they currently sit. Could have done something other than huff and puff, false-muster bluster.

Thief Girl certainly is an awful lot of bluster, of clustered airs as inscrutable as the dirt beneath her feet; her assumed efficiency, espousing the assignment of prices to everything visible and tangible in Lorule, falls away when one considers that thick lock of hair hanging densely across her left eye, too short to be tamed into the rest of the ponytail.

Those green eyes, so tired and sunken, so very unwretched, so devoid of their host's otherwise abundant careless grace.

She's been like this a long time, hasn't she? Maybe she'd even observed the Calamity, the sinking of the sea.

But not always. She came from somewhere, and now she's cataclysmically unmoored.

Hilda begins to wonder if perhaps her name is the only truly precious thing Thief Girl has (besides Sheerow, and Sheerow could always fly away). If, regardless of its status as precious or not, it's the only thing she can truly call hers.

Indeed, she has nothing to her name. A borrowed bird. A few bundles of herbs. A mask that doesn't suit her.

A secret to everybody, indeed. A secret so deep she's even hidden it from herself.

Well, then, of course she wouldn't want to share it. Of course she would be justly defensive. And of course Hilda wants to know it all the more.