Ryslig inbox

[familyproblem]

WELCOME TO YOUR PRIVATE CHANNEL, GLADION.

FOR SECURE COMMUNICATION, USE 017.23.773.95

*** silverfeather has joined 017.23.773.95
<silverfeather> If you were looking for a private inbox, you probably have the right channel.
<silverfeather> I'm not at the computer right now. Leave a message.

username: ...He keeps changing it. Changes are noted on his thread tracker. Last time this post was updated it was <silverfeather>.

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[ibalsamina]

[By the first word of his explanation, she's frozen. For a long, excruciating moment, she can only stare at him, helpless as her mind slowly processes it piece by piece, each sentence like a needle being driven into her skull. He had this; a traveler; west of Alola; amnesia... She had braced her hands and knees against the floor, and now a tremor starts in her arms.

It's impossible—isn't it? She'd searched, spent night after night poring over his research, agonized over it, gone mad with hoping...

(Distantly, if she wills herself to, she can still recall large sections of that research—notes describing how those sent through an Ultra Wormhole into another dimension carried with them a trace of its energy and arrived confused, as if out of time, and often with a loss of memory...)

She can't accept it. Something within her snaps.]

How... dare you...! [Suddenly, she draws herself up, eyes blazing and wings unfurling wide. Even with her still on her hands and knees, it makes her seem abruptly larger, multi-eyed and monstrous.] How dare you use him against me... You hateful... scheming... liar!

[familyproblem]

[After this, he won't be able to explain to himself why he didn't expect this outcome. Right now, he doesn't bother.

It's a threat display, and it freezes his blood. Gladion yanks the hand away, close to his body to guard the pendant, and lurches backwards, up against the wall of the little apartment entryway.

In the same motion, his free hand slaps at his belt - a reflex not yet abandoned, from places where Mother ought to be. There's nothing there to grab, of course.]

[ibalsamina]

[She breathes raggedly between bared teeth as she watches him, her face reflecting pure disgust—but she doesn't come after him. She's wasted enough energy on him already, and she has no more words left for him either.

Slowly, she lowers her wings, folding them across her back, and when she stands again and staggers toward the door, still reeling with fury and sickness, this time she makes it out. A few Faerie rings (circles of white poppies and mushrooms than sprout only briefly from the floorboards before disappearing again), and she's gone, evaporating into pale light.]

[familyproblem]

[And she's gone.

There are a few dizzy seconds after the ring vanishes where he's not sure that any of this actually happened. This could be a stress dream. But the longer he sits there, the more it's just...exactly what really happened.

He gets up. He wanders back to his room, and tends to the upset plants properly. He pushes the closet door open and peers in, as if there would be any...trace left behind her, of what kind he can't imagine. But there's not, and he isn't sure where exactly the cat might have left her to wait out the whole day, and the uncertainty chases him back out into the main room and to the entry. The door that doesn't need to be locked behind her, because it was never unlocked, because she left in a ring of flowers (not lilies. something else.)

He could go check the Guide to recall the details of that power. Instead, he goes to the dracaena, feeling suddenly like he should practice his own - that he's behind, that time is racing ahead and he needs to press himself to keep pace with it. He was caught unawares; it doesn't have to happen again. The little tree reaches and spreads, urged onward and onward - with this, someday, he could make a wall out of wood, he could see for miles, he could make up the difference somehow.

And then it falls over onto him.

The crown is too big for the root. It's top-heavy; the pot is too small, the soil too shallow. He can't reverse it without cutting away healthy growth. He needs to repot it (with a pot he doesn't have at the moment), or find a place to plant it (which doesn't exist here, on the cold peninsula of Ryslig).

Instead, for now, he turns it around, props it against the wall, presses his hands to the trunk for a moment in apology, and goes to shut himself in his room for a while.]