AUDIENCE FOR: sip juicing and percy koalaski

[saturations]

Comments

[countermeasures]

[you can always choose to try to be the reason something good happens.

something about that resonates, almost, and jiuqing finds herself smiling gently. shale is truly wise - they really ought to listen to them more. they could probably all benefit from it.

she just hopes their words will help percy.]

...I agree. Your friends were very lucky to have you there, Percy, and so was that boy. Your help made a huge difference.

[decisions]

I...

[ percy doesn't really know what to say to this, his gaze finally turned back towards the both of them. if he lies, he's going to find himself on fire again and that? not ideal. opening yourself to the possibility sticks will him. you can always choose to try to be the reason something good happens. ]

I just did what I could. But... I am glad my offering was enough. [ a faint smile finds its way to his mouth. ] That I could help... Pike is cleric, part of our group, she's always doing whatever she can and I... I wanted to make certain whatever she set out to do was able to be done.

[saturations]

[they nod.]

Seems like you helped.

[and ok so i hope this doesn't cause timey shenans for you percy but also you two deserve a memshare:

You step not so much into a memory but into a place, but a place so deeply filled with love and memory that every stone and leaf of it bubbles with familiarity. A feeling of peace, of home, of nature. You are outside to it, and you tend to it. You walk through what is both a verdant garden and an ancient graveyard, caring for the plants that grow here, checking the growth of plants on the plots surrounding you. Harvesting, gardening, thinking.

Here is what you see:

Behind you is what may at first look to be a stone cottage, but it is something older, something that comes to a steeple at the top. It’s a temple, made of stone, old and ancient. Vines crawl across its exterior, grow out of the cracks, and a layer of moss and lichen colors the stone a deep green. The open windows of the temple are overgrown with vines as well, and the wide wooden door at the front looks cracked and warped with its own layer of green and pink moss. Surrounding the temple are rows and rows of gravestones. Most are so old that no names can be read on the stone, though others are newer, fresher. The graveyard looks well tended, but not manicured. There are plants growing everywhere, wild, from the earth of the graves. Vegetables, fruits, lush vegetation and flowers, mushrooms and fungi. All well cared for, springing from the gravesoil.

Aside from the ring of gravestones, this “garden” is more swamp like. It’s temperate and bordering on humid, lush with vegetation. Flowers of many different varieties and meant for many different climates grow freely here, almost as though protected by some magic. It is dark here, due to the many, many overgrown trees that surround this place, the canopy overhead projecting shadows interspersed with sunlight. There are a few crystal clear pools of water, one steaming with heat and another welling up from a spring, deep blue and cold looking. There are smaller pools, as well, and bits of bog where the soft greens and browns of compost fall into green, thick, algae covered water.

But outside this immediate area of lush, beautiful vegetation, about a dozen yards away, rings of iron fencing surround the grove. There are about three concentric rings of fencing, the furthest one about fifty yards from the stone temple. It is immediately clear why these rings exist, because past the fencing, dark and twisted bramble and razor like gray-purple thorn vines are encroaching, overtaking the grove. The outermost fence has been entirely covered in these vines, overtaken, now part of a twisted forest that exudes the energy of death and decay. The middle fence has been partially overtaken as well, purple vines wrapped around it in places, bringing down parts of the fence, gnarled branches reaching over from dying trees. The innermost fence is still largely pristine, but the sprawl of the dark, dark forest is clearly creeping closer and closer towards it. The innermost fence especially looks hastily constructed, piecemeal.

When you look upon this forest, you feel a deep sense of despair, fear, and revulsion at the dead forest. You love nature, you even love the decay that rots and dissolves what is old and dead and from that rot grows something new. But what’s happening to the forest beyond the fence is not that type of decay. It is a death that exists outside the natural order of death, death from which nothing will recover or grow, the feeling of curse and blight, magic that warps. It feels wrong, and it is growing closer and closer each season, overtaking this grove that you love.

You put up the fence twenty seasons ago now, give or take. You started that one with your sister, working hand in hand, arguing when the work got hard and you had to wind it across stone, but laughing, too. The time you forgot about the family of rabbits in their burrough and they emerged spitting mad at you for nearly taking it out with an errant post, the time you crept up behind her and blared the sound of frog croaks so loud that she tripped and fell straight through the bogsoil, the time you both got caught in a storm and had to hide out in one of the old trees. You finished the fence on your own. It was hard, it tore the skin of your hands and wore you down. All the time thinking, how long had it been now? How long since you'd built the second ring, and four other pairs of hands joined along with you? The grief you feel towards the parts of the grove you lost to the forest mingle with the grief at the thought of her laughter. Or of your older sister's stubbornness, how mad your brother always made you. Your aunt's wise advice, dad's cooking, the sound of mom's voice...

Twenty seasons and enough time that you might need to start a new fence soon. But there's so little room. Some of the older graves might have to be left out of that protective ring. That, too, is heartbreaking.

"Come on," you say, staring down into the depths of the crystal spring, because these days, sometimes you talk to yourself. It's weird, you're fine with it, it's just something that you do now. "I need to know what to do. I know I should but patient, but I..."

It's no use. She doesn't speak to you anymore. You grew up in a world of visions and dreams. If not yours, someone else's. Always a maternal sense of guidance, a suggestion of what to do, of your proper place.

"It's been so long since I've heard from you, and I really need...I want to know what you need from me."

You know your place. It's here. You're the one who is supposed to stay and tend to all of this, because someone has to. Even if it means staying behind when everyone leaves to find the answers, one by one or two by two. Even if it means lonely season after lonely season, interrupted only by the occasional passing mourning party here for a burial, every few seasons or so. Even if the forest keeps getting worse and you're afraid it will get worse until everything is dead and there aren't any solutions or answers, not here.

"I'm just not so sure anymore," you admit, "whether I'm meant to stay or if you need me to go." This silence, it's disconcerting. And the forest around the grove, it grows worse and worse. And nothing changes and gets better and you wait, and you wait, but no one comes back, either. No one comes back for long enough that you start to think that they must all be...

Your thoughts sort of trail off, meeting something they don't want to think on. But you're lonely and you want someone to talk to, some advice, something, even if it's not...how these things are supposed to go.

Your eyes fall on one of the clusters of graves near the temple, the really old ones, the ones that belong to members of your family from generations and generations back, back into the old days, the days you know only from stories. The really old graves are so worn even their gravestones are just stone now, eroded and misshapen and become part of the garden. And on some of those graves, lilies grow. That's how your aunt would tell it, that these were some of the first flowers to grow here. On bad days, when you're feeling really desperate, sometimes you eat their petals, and you dream strange dreams, though you're never sure if those dreams really mean anything or whether you just want them to.

Today is a bad day, so you pick them and you eat their petals. Your mouth grows numb and tingles unpleasantly and your stomach turns and your vision blurs, but nothing else happens. Except that night, when you enter the portion of the stone temple where your family has built a comfortable little cottage and you find your bed that's alone at the top of the stairs and you fall asleep, dizzy and uncomfortable, you dream.

In your dream, you see a river of dark water, the bottom of which could not be seen. The water moved through the valleys and emptied into the ocean. You see the forest, a mighty forest all around you, and the trees of the forest all have eyes. You look into the sky, and the sky has eyes. And you see the spring has eyes in the depths of it, peering back at you. When you see these eyes you feel a sense of dread and revulsion the way you feel when you look at the encroaching blighted forest. And then you turn to your family grave again, terrified of what you'll see, but you only see the gravestones and the flowers that bloom there, and on those flowers you see nine butterflies, drinking their nectar, and you feel relief.

You wake up in your bed that morning. On the one hand, you feel like that one was...it was clearer. It felt like she was speaking to you, that time. You're nearly certain there was meaning there meant for you to find. Nine butterflies, what are you supposed to do with nine butterflies? "I'm not sure I understand," you say, helplessly, apologetic. "I don't get it. I don't know what you want me to do. I'll leave if you want me to, or I'll stay, but I need to know if..."

You stop yourself That outburst was a little embarrassing, kind of dramatic, and isn't helping anything. And you have gardening, and work to do, cooking and tidying and tending.

That afternoon, as you're tidying inside the temple, you spot five strangers climbing the inner fence. You open the door to the temple. In this memory, they're muted somehow, still. You see a woman, a little more distinct, tall with a soft animal-like nose, fur, and long droopy ears. She seems delighted that you're like her, you look like her. And another woman, small and angry, a dwarf. The other three are harder to make out. You just get an impression - green streaked with amber gone dark, a rusty color streaked with deep, dark marine, a blue color streaked through with stubborn scarlet.

You look back and forth at the four of them. "Huh," you say. "I think I've only got three more cups."

You make tea. The conversation that follows is indistinct, goes in and out (though if you wish to watch it, it's here from 55:21 to 1:10:03). The strangers aren't exactly sure why they've come to you, they've been sent here but aren't quite clear what they're looking for. But it's evident to you the strangers are here for the same reason every stranger you meet makes their way to the grove. They've lost someone. They've lost a few someones, but only one is gone for good. They ask you for a miracle, wonder if you can bring back the one who died, but that isn't something you can or will do. Instead, they wonder if you can help recover the others who are lost, but lost somewhere on this side of the veil between life and death, separated only by the existence of a few cruel people who, it seems, may soon be in need of burial services.

That's the type of miracle you're a little more comfortable with. Besides, something they say stands out to you. Nine butterflies, and they introduce themselves as the Mighty Nein. There's only four of them, but...something feels right about it anyway.

"Okay," you agree. "I'm already packed. I'll go get my things."

shock! twist! neither of you saw it coming!]

[countermeasures]

[jiuqing was not expecting that.

somehow, it really had not occurred to her that the residents might also be subject to having their memories be put on display like this - perhaps because of their insistence that there was no before the prism.

but she hadn't really believed that when they'd said it, then, and she certainly doesn't now.

when the memory fades out, she looks between shale and percy. should... they do the polite thing here and pretend they didn't see it? they're doing that with her. but this also feels pretty significant... it doesn't seem like something that should pass without a word.]

...Shale?