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Lilian Rook     A nearly week-long journey into space was already pushing the margins for anyone with a life and a schedule; which includes, improbably, at least two of the four Blooms. Some agreement to pause and reconvene, ambiguously defined, was always going to be in the cards, but it's especially necessary after Arthur literally died on the way back. The unhappy cloud of his terminal condition hangs over the end of the otherwise exciting journey, eclosing it on both sides with Lilian's (alleged, by Dictum) at the beginning.

    A few days is also enough time for what Sakura calls 'an abundance of caution'. It's understandable that she'd be unlike her usual self on this, given that everything to do with Kepler has never before been involved with any of her past lives. The Relief was taken outside of the Dragon's Garden after your landing, security provided by Ash whilst Nika thoroghly 'interrogated its germs', according to her. The samples that Lilian brought with her, after some convincing, have been left in Sakura's care, who reverses them back to their original condition every day, after Lilian has verified it doesn't cause her any pain (or much of anything) to do so.

    The last detail to be taken care of, ominously pseudo-translated as 'the New Fruit', has been taken care of in a different sense. Despite Ash reluctantly relinquishing it to Petra at the time, the anomalous object didn't leave the Dragon's Garden, much less go to school. The steps that were taken to delay the decision of what to do with it involve Sakura retrieving a particularly patterned saya from the storage shed, being rowed out on a boat by Ash to nearly the edge of the ocean visible before the fog, and returning with two things instead of one:

    Ash is holding 'the New Fruit' itself, kept to one hand, stained with the faint cousin to ultraviolet light between their hand and the luridly artificial green-blue skin of the orb.
    Sakura is holding the patterned saya only with support from her lap, now weighing considerably more for the sword sheathed in it, retrieved from out at sea.

    For the time being, Nika is in the midst of a second check of the Relief, shortly to be returned if no Antegent phenomena has befallen it out in the fog, though Sakura suggests she will be "--eager to return." and then finds some considerable humour in "After all, the boat belongs to her. No fisherman in the village would be so irreverent as to allow his own to be host to such an unknown thing. Most are so traditional that I think they might politely bow and wait for me to leave before having it purified for the presence of a woman out at sea."

    What Ash takes away from this is "You bought Nika a boat?"
    "How else is Nika going to fish?"
    "Coulda just rowed my houseboat out there."
    "If you want her to fish from your front step, you can just say so."
    "--Wait that'd be so sick."

    There is a leery sort of energy between Ash and Lilian after the latter's attempt to ask the former about 'what was that?' on Kepler turned into frosty distance aboard the relief. Arthur being treated with a kind of cancer patient-like awkward delicacy by the both of them seems to draw it closer rather than further.
Angela Roland and Tiphereth don't exactly feel they were really needed on this mission but that's okay because if Roland was needed, that meant something went really wrong, and if Tiphereth was needed then something 'really'' went wrong. But as it stands, it was an interesting trip, certainly, even if they feel out of their depth. But they understand there was new meetings and the Blooms and everyone are on their way back and if they added to the pleasant company rather than detracted from it they'll call it a win.

Roland has been struggling with the 'leery energy'. He didn't think he was particularly close to Ash, even if he liked their energy, and he felt like it wasn't something he should intrude on--but while the trip forward was largely pleasant and chill, the trip back is downright frosty and he thinks it would be pretty great if tensions eased up a bit so everyone could focus on what to do with the New Thing that they had because in his experience, not knowing what to do with The New Thing that has been harvested causes problems.

"So uh." Roland says. "That could've gone a lot worse. We weren't blasted out of space for starters." HE thinks for a moment and adds, "So uh. Everyone had a long time to think about it, what do you want to do with the Fruit?" He figures someone has to be the idiot who asks and that idiot might as well be him.

"Is this something we should even be asking about?" Tiphereth asks Roland.

"I'd rather talk about that than more dead Arthurs at least." Roland grumbles. "Miss Angela didn't exactly give us instructions once the job was done. Do we ... just go back now?"

There is some awkward uncertainty between them.
Tamamo     Tamamo would have liked more time without an overhanging pallor. To even think of needing a vacation from a vacation -- and the trip, if not the destination, she purposefully regards as such -- is terrible. She does her best, then, to help at least Lilian feel something of that without bringing up Arthur's condition, asking her about the game she was playing on the way there with the swords, and Nika's talk of how they would make something together -- which, surely, they would, but whether that 'something' was a game...

    It's nothing important to be speaking of, and that's the point. Nothing inherently important. Importance is a trait that can be assigned by caring, and the freedom to assign one's caring is important to relaxation.

    . . .

    She has her own methods of purification and warding against misfortune, which she works through upon arrival, excepting one item in particular. It is its own business, and she cannot naysay Ash and Sakura on first taking some step toward handling it. Tamamo does, however, ask, "And what is that?"

    She's rather more concerned than most in just what something like that could do. She has to be. She has to practice all the caution she knows Lilian won't, and do it where she won't see.

    There are other things she wants to ask, but Sakura had already said 'later.'

    'Coulda just rowed my houseboat out there.'

    "Would that not be rather heavy?" Compared to a boat just for fishing. To someone who isn't Ash.
Xion After the long (for working people) journey, Xion hadn't immediately left the Garden. Not a working person herself per-se, her professional mercenary questant gig was able to slide for a while. She didn't really need money, except to pay her own way through things - a small point of self-sufficient pride. She didn't like to 'graze on charity', despite knowing often she had earned more than enough recompense to justify it.

She had lingered, popping in and out of the Garden in her way to check on things and stay on-hand if anything happened. There had been almost a hovering quality to her, an unprogressed conversation about what had happened, but nobody was really talking about things. Maybe they didn't want to?

Maybe she didn't want to? Was that what this feeling was? She had gone back, as she said she did, and remained with her friends, even if that was like attending a deathbed that still walked and smiled and cracked jokes, and spun the feelings of other people around her hand with medallion-chain.

Having heard that today's goal was 'fishing', Xion is once again wearing a black swimsuit with vertical magenta stripe under shorts and an open dark red button-down worn for drape and to keep sun off her neck, lingering around outside with her right wrist wrapped in a black chain ending in a red-swirling glass bead - the keychain form of her Antegent-based weapon.

"Oh, sure." She asides to Roland, twirling keychain through fingers to spin and tighten the charm to hand like any other sussurating stimming object. "We could've all been shipwrecked or blown up or got called stupid idiots by aliens and then forced to do boss fights until we made it out of there. But I think that'd be a different sort of... heavy? This feels like it hit about as hard as it could have." Xion goes on to admit, shrugging.

"...Do with it?" She asks, hand twirling to a stop to pinch primordial ball in thumb and forefinger. "I don't even know what it does, really. Plant a world-ending tree? Wasn't one already planted on this Earth?"

Sakura returning with a sword-ladened saya makes Xion perk right up though, over the discussions of fishing. "Did you... Make a key-weapon connection? I mean, sword connection, with the fruit?" She asks, obviously... expecting such to be possible.
Petra Soroka     Petra does, in fact, have a pretty busy schedule that demands a lot of her. A week away from everything is a big ask, between her various projects sowing good or evil in different worlds, to school, to the Library, to whatever other bullshit needs her attention. There's mitigating factors to this, of course, like how she actually had *more* time than usual to read and write while on the voyage so she didn't fall all that behind in classwork, but they're not really all that relevant to how she feels about it.

    Because it was a week long trip with the *Blooms*! She doesn't need time to 'recuperate'-- if anything, the days between are to recuperate from *her*. So, in flagrant disregard to the efficiency of catching up with her work, Petra spends the days after Kepler weaning herself off of a Bloom high by cycling between Lilian and the Dragon's Garden whenever she's allowed, which puts her in a great position to do the manual labor necessary for checking on and containing the things retrieved from Kepler.

"No fisherman in the village would be so irreverent as to allow his own to be host to such an unknown thing."

    "Cowards that they are. My ship's always got room for hosting unknown things," Petra says, about a girl and a mech that can only fit one other person inside it at a tight squeeze. "That's good, though. That means there's no need to ask for permission anymore." For the fishing and underwater adventures, of course.

"If you want her to fish from your front step, you can just say so."

    Absent of all the thoughts and images that led up to this phrase, Petra just announces, "Rocking chair...."

    Now that she's back in her home environment of being surrounded by people she cares about, Petra's right back to being the most attentive student to all of the Bloom nonsense. Sitting down with her knees tucked to her chest, she falls into the lagrange point approximately in the middle of the three Blooms present, and raises up her hand just to say all of her questions in a row.

    "So, like, what's the plan? You used, er, one of those swords on the Fruit, right? To stop it from fucking with anything before we know what's up? I mean, it was given to us as a gift, so I feel like we're basically invited to snoop into it however we can."

    As an aside, she adds, "I'm still, um, feeling pretty alright about how all that went. I feel like I've got a pretty decent grasp on all that, which is pretty good for something that had a good chance of being ungraspable."
Arthur Lowell > Arthur: How're you doing, buddy?

    Oddly enough, Arthur is *physically* fine. He's explained that he probably has another few months before his brain 'hits that shitty EUREKA CRITICALITY again', and it seems to come all at once like any revelation. So he placates some, but doesn't... push. Better to leave it less-spoken.

> Arthur: Hang out with the people though!!

    Arthur doesn't mind leaving his lounging spot. He was helping Nika, turning the boat around and giving her better angles at key things while relaxing on a deck-chair (even when it was upside down). Gating over to chat is no trouble now.

    "ALWAYS ON ABOUT THAT DAMN HOUSEBOAT." Arthur rambles as he swaggers into the social situation. "I mean, it's cool to have a HOUSEBOAT. Don't gotta always make me JEALOUS OF YA though."

> Arthur: What about the fruit?

    Arthur scratches a cheek and tilts his head at Petra. "Not sure we're gonna get that kind of WILD WEIRDNESS all SPONTANEOUS-STYLE either way. It's FRUIT. Like, ECOLOGICALLY it's gonna wait to DO ITS THING until it gives us the BENEFIT, right? We got a little dense on the BRACKETED TEXT so I kinda lost track, but I'm feelin' real SOLID on the word 'FRUIT' still mostly meaning 'PACKAGE OF WHAT YOU NEED, PLUS SOME SEEDS FOR THE FUTURE TO SPREAD' or whatev'."

    He looks out to the shore and the horizon, through the fog, absently. "Not sure if we got TOO MANY TREES or TOO FEW right now. We got the wrong TREE NUMBER. Guess some SEEDS are GOOD."
James Bond      Avoiding the people that make him uncomfortable has always been easy for Bond because the Multiverse is so hopelessly large. There's always another world to go to, and a conversation need not necessarily involve him. Absence isn't conspicuous, but arguably expected, especially on the broadband frequency. This is different.

     Every moment spent avoiding Arthur feels like an accusation. His smiles look convincing, his laughter, too--but the cost to force them weighs on him as surely as his efforts not to be near him. To assure him that 'you'll beat this thing' feels selfish and ugly. It isn't done to comfort Arthur, but himself--to try and impose some kind of sense on something that seems wholly senseless.

     Keeping his mind off of it in hopes that something will fall into place requires effort. Today, the shape of that effort is speaking with Ash.

    His outfit is a pair of sky-blue swim shorts (they stop considerably short of the knee) and a loose-fitting eggshell short-sleeve button-up that leaves just as little to the imagination. He carries a navy duffel bag in one hand.

     "I understand at the moment the focus is on that," he says, nodding towards the seed. "But there is something that I wanted to ask you about what one of our hosts said. What would they have meant by 'the infinite devil machine?'" It's been on his mind since then--'splitting rent' with it.
Lilian Rook     All things considered, despite the frigidly worried energy on the way back, the three here don't seem too bothered by it. Given the distance of a few days after, they've each been able to fit the more chilling events into a constructive context, and remember most of it 'for what it was'.

    Lilian has told Tamamo all about her new calming VR hobby involving obsessively detailed 'sword maintenance simulation', Ash spends time bragging about how they got electricity on a houseboat without a generator, and Sakura has spent her free time discussing the particulars of Nika's 'private server' project; meaning Ash has continued to pull so much weight in the Himorogikage that Sakura continues to not be a burnt-out drug-infused shell of a person by afternoon every day. The meeting is almost casual. The air is oddly tense, yet still relievingly conversational. It goes:

    'That could've gone a lot worse. We weren't blasted out of space for starters.'
    'We could've all been shipwrecked or blown up or got called stupid idiots by aliens and then forced to do boss fights until we made it out of there.'

    "Okay I kinda feel like we got called stupid idiots by aliens anyways though. Like sure Nika kinda made the boss fight not happen but that definitely still happened in the middle." Ash says. Lilian wears an uneasy expression. "It was almost too easy. I mean, it should have been, given we spent weeks preparing for everything, but it still sort of feels as if we had . . . 'beginner's luck'? I suppose? I admit, I'm worried about Xion's 'diver'."

    'Did you... Make a key-weapon connection? I mean, sword connection, with the fruit?'

    Sakura glances down at the weapon cradled in both arms, as if she'd forgotten it was there despite visibly compensating to carry its weight. A thin smile spreads across her lips, and she says "I'm afraid that it is very much the opposite thing, Xion." Laying fingers too delicate for the hilt, she withdraws the blade by few inches, revealing that the reflection of the viewer and their surroundings in the steel is bafflingly right-way-around. "This would be the Muramasa of 'Distortions'. One of the six that our Multiversal aid has accomplished in rejoining to the fifteen that we have recovered ourselves." She looks back out to sea again, reminiscing.

    'So, like, what's the plan? You used, er, one of those swords on the Fruit, right? To stop it from fucking with anything before we know what's up?'

    "Tht is so. It was found here, if I recall. I merely made use of it in a similar way to its original wielder, in sealing our 'Fruit' where no harm could come of it." "I'm holding it because I'm invincible by the way." "Of course."

    'Cowards that they are. My ship's always got room for hosting unknown things'

    Sakura seems to find this funny enough to laugh. "It has always been the way in this country. You may not know it, but the people of this village were brought here by Lady Tamamo before I visited it myself. They were once 'tribute' to those who live in Fuji. The excess and unwanted of the Urban Centers besides Yamato. It's only natural that they would come to respect the old ways much more than the new, under these circumstances. And it suits me not to dissuade them, given . . ." "Running the Himorogikage." "Ah? Not 'a cult' this time?" "You deserve a cult. That's fine."

    'Rocking chair....'

    Ash's eyes widen. All that verbally escapes them is "Yo." but they're visibly plotting.
Lilian Rook     'Would that not be rather heavy?'

    "Well yeah. That's why I'd do it." Ash says. Oddly, they fall to adjusting their clothes; not to fit better or rest more comfortably, but just to be Different, somehow. More intentionally paced. "But then you can go inside and grab a drink or take a nap or whatever. You haven't seen the inside yet but I got it looking pretty good in there. Way comfier than a boat. It's a house too. A houseboat."

    'ALWAYS ON ABOUT THAT DAMN HOUSEBOAT.'

    "Mannn fuck yourself nerd alert. You have a fucking spaceship and you made sure it was dogshit before you got us on it to show off."

    'And what is that?'
    'I mean, it was given to us as a gift, so I feel like we're basically invited to snoop into it however we can.'

    But that's the real question. All three of the Blooms can only resist the changing of the collective energy for a little while. As pleasantly 'familiar' as it'd become over the voyage into space, this is Earth, and Earth is where all their problems are.

    'We got a little dense on the BRACKETED TEXT so I kinda lost track, but I'm feelin' real SOLID on the word 'FRUIT' still mostly meaning 'PACKAGE OF WHAT YOU NEED, PLUS SOME SEEDS FOR THE FUTURE TO SPREAD' or whatev'.'

    "While I would like Nika to express her opinions on such, I have no real reason to entertain doubt." Sakura says, cautiously.

    'I don't even know what it does, really. Plant a world-ending tree? Wasn't one already planted on this Earth?'

    "There are four, though we've only called them trees arbitrarily." says Lilian. "The one you 'unlocked' with your keyblade was in London. We encountered one nearly buried in ice near the exclusion zone surrounding the final Mat' Prizrakov operation, which Nika referred to as her 'pen pal', despite being miles down the Urals. The third was, at some point, in Peru, and relocated to . . . ?" "Arizona." "Not Nevada?" "Nah. They didn't like that I already emptied it out." "And you didn't go back to it?" "Why bother? Taught me everything I needed to know." ". . . I suppose." "And the last?"

    Lilian pauses at Sakura being the one to ask. "I'm intending to have the Laplace people take a crack at it." she says. "The Golden Record recovered from the Voyager probe shows that Dictum was aware of them and attempted to warn us of their orbital trajectories, but all four of them are off-target; likely due to the desynchronization of Earth's orbit because of . . ." "It hardly matters. Their warning was much too late all the same. I would change nothing." "Alright then. Obviously it's somewhere in Japan now, somewhere at least vaguely near where you've lived."

    Not really knowing what to make of Sakura's unusually sober expression and avoidant gaze after, Lilian says, "It's very likely there were three involved in Kepler's annihilation. I've no reason to believe that the pattern should change. And more importantly, the only thing similar to this is what Xion extracted from the Divine Tree in London, which certainly didn't plant a new one."
Lilian Rook     'Not sure if we got TOO MANY TREES or TOO FEW right now. We got the wrong TREE NUMBER. Guess some SEEDS are GOOD.'

    "The right number would be enough for everyone who deserves one." Ash says, weirdly confident, pseudo-defiant. "Lilian's the one with the whole theory about how that works though." "Please. I hadn't mentioned it because it's nonsense." "Yeah? You're always talking about that Sapient Heuristics causality science shit. Why not?"

    'I'm still, um, feeling pretty alright about how all that went. I feel like I've got a pretty decent grasp on all that, which is pretty good for something that had a good chance of being ungraspable.'

    "Is that so? Then as the one closest to Dictum, would you care to share your perspective with us?" says Sakura. A tiny bit testy, perhaps, but not ungenuine at all.

    'But there is something that I wanted to ask you about what one of our hosts said. What would they have meant by 'the infinite devil machine?'"'

    "Oh thank fuck we're gonna talk abou that. I was gonna go apeshit."

    Lilian turns to Ash, staring in a mixture of surprise and annoyance. "So are we 'talking' in general, now? Or is there a proper order?" she says. "Get off my ass. How the fuck does Infinite Devil Machine not have you curious?" "A great number of things do. Like why you keep turning your body inside out and acting like it's nothing in particular." "Nobody else acts like it's a big deal either."

    Sakura clears her throat, and ends up talking past both of them. "I've sent for Nika." she says, and from the back of her sash, withdraws and wiggles a pink plastic flip-phone while still cradling the sheathed sword. "But if I had to make my own estimates, based on the premise of 'something that humanity has offended', which in, in some way, on 'equal terms', and is in some way involved with the extinction of intelligent life as it is known, then I can only imagine some link between 'the Pandemic Threat', in Dictum's terms, or 'the Antegent' in hours, and the eventual fate of those 'Blooms', 'Moons', 'Sparks', however named, who are born afterwards."

    Sakura doesn't even pause. She says it as if it's nothing in particular at all. "I no longer believe that it is any of us which triggers the end of the world around this time."
Angela ''But it still sort of feels as if we had . . . 'beginner's luck'?''

Roland grimaces sympathetically. "Well ... Those people up there, it felt like they pretty much knew exactly what they wanted to do and how to do it. I know it sounds crazy from a Cityfolk, but it's possible that the real, uh, challenge isn't winning a fight. Winning fights hasn't been something you'n'Lilian ever had trouble with. I don't know the others well enough to say about them, but--doesn't it make sense that the challenge here isn't a matter of who can beat up who--it sounds like you all have had enough for that for one life time, maybe those others back there too--maybe the challenge is in the question there." He points to the New Fruit. "'How will you use a miracle'? That sort of thing. Much tougher than any fight in my experiences."

He scowls a little at himself, but then seems to realize how that might be construed. "I mean I trust whatever you all want to do, for sure, but ... This whole trip hasn't really been about competition, you know?"

Lilian indicates she intends to have Laplace look into it. He doesn't really know much about Laplace so he looks to Tiphereth, who shrugs, and then he looks back to Lilian. He thinks about his last conversation with Xion.

Big Tree, he thinks grimly.

"I think Infinite Devil Machines are just above my paygrade." Roland admits. "That sounds pretty spooky. Normally I'm accustomed to finite devils, ahah..."

''I no longer believe that it is any of us which triggers the end of the world this time.''

"Oh! That's great. Glad we got there." Roland is immediately more chipper.

"Ehhnn.... I'd trust their end of the world over something else's." Tiphereth complains. "Now who knows is destroying the world? Nobody I know. Might not even be friendly."
James Bond Nobody else acts like it's a big deal either.

    "I did," Bond says. "But that was before Nika was able to translate." He'd thought it was something that they were doing to Ash, not something that Ash was doing themselves.

    "If it's something that humanity offended," says Bond, "...If it can be offended in the first place, then maybe there's the possibility amends can be made. Do you think that's what they meant, by 'splitting rent?'"

I think Infinite Devil Machines are just above my paygrade.

    "First time?" asks Bond. He can still manage sarcastic quips, and that balms his flagging morale. "The work is in front of you whether it's in your job description or not. It helps if you understand that you don't have to do all of it yourself. And it also helps to remember that there are still quite a lot of things that a dependable man in the right place and time can do. Even if it is something like an Infinite Devil Machine."

    He thinks a little further on it with a frown, nodding towards Sakura. "The more I look at it in that way, Sakura, the more questions I have. What could we do, to 'split the rent?' What would that look like?"
Tamamo     'Do we ... just go back now?'

    "As you would like. You are not unwelcome, here."

    'This feels like it hit about as hard as it could have.'

    Tamamo's silence to this is noticeable -- the '...' in the dialogue box alongside a shifted expression, not unlike that of one hit hard.

    'Okay I kinda feel like we got called stupid idiots by aliens anyways though.'

    "That is mostly true."

    'It was almost too easy. I mean, it should have been, given we spent weeks preparing for everything, but...'

    "It was much as I expected it would be, in terms of difficulty. Had we not the advantages we do enjoy, it would have been impossible. Instead, it was largely smooth in our sailing, except where it was not... though it was said to us that things would have been different, had we met others." Tamamo thinks about this. "A more 'hostile' personality would be far less likely to remain at the site of their once imprisonment, I think. In that case, one need not thank luck."

    'My ship's always got room for hosting unknown things.'

    "Your ship...? 'Unknown things'... You cannot count yourself, you know."

    'This would be the Muramasa of 'Distortions'.'

    "Ahh, I see," Tamamo nods.

    'You deserve a cult. That's fine.'

    Tamamo hides a giggle, but not the way her eyes crinkle.

    'Way comfier than a boat. It's a house too. A houseboat.'

    "I suppose I will need to see." Because of reasons.

    'Alright then. Obviously it's somewhere in Japan now, somewhere at least vaguely near where you've lived.'

    "'Somewhere,' is it." Looking toward Sakura, Tamamo is about to say something more, but thinks better of it. It's obvious enough already what she finds surprising about that.

    'What would they have meant by 'the infinite devil machine?''
    'How the fuck does Infinite Devil Machine not have you curious?'

    "The infinite what, now? I do not recall it hearing it that way."

    'Like why you keep turning your body inside out and acting like it's nothing in particular.'
    'Nobody else acts like it's a big deal either.'

    "I have seen it once before, or it might have been more surprising. Should I have said something about it?" Tamamo tilts her head, cheek resting on her fingers.
Xion "If the beings we met floated around us and actually called us stupid, I think it would have been, would have *felt*," Words that held meaning for Xion. "... Different?" She can't put a finger on it, face scrunched up a little. "Do you really think it was... 'definite'? Between you and the Beauty and Lilian and..." Her, but it's hard to take the same credit. "If they saw all of that and the words they were conveying were 'gosh, you're so stupid, being like that', well."

Xion looks to Ash, frowning faintly, trying to think past the blockage on impulse and genuine gumption. Will-based thinking was all stubbornly keeping on noodling until you got it, at its core.

"Plus," A little humor. "If it was being translated into 'our language', if you got called a stupid loser idiot who should kill themself wouldn't that be them trying to make friends in your dialect?" Xion asks Ash, almost needling before the complete honesty of the question.

With a casual swing up, the keychain around wrist transmutes in frames and bending motes of energy into a black twist of bladelength that settles on shoulder, accessory to her shrug. "If we needed to fight, we would have fought. But, being honest, I thought I was prepared to 'fight' things before I fought you, and no amount of preparation fixed that gap. So as far as luck goes: maybe it's a master's luck," Another question for the monk to wonder on. "Because we avoided a fight we couldn't win."

Hearing 'diver' and lowering arm, Xion gives Ash a look particularly. "I didn't think you were so water-typed, but you'd fit right in at the Destiny Islands. Do you surf, too?" Xion asks faintly, though what she means is more comprehensive. "Seeing you moving through that space made it look like you were meant there." She adds, and wonders if Ash was just like that because of their interaction with water.

Sakura saying that she was 'afraid' it was different gets Xion to dismiss her blade back to chain bracelet as she rests palm to hip and looks down at the sword when it's indicated. "Like... That Pylon the Oda clan off-set into nowhere, and we had to help with?" It had been so long ago, and...

"Wait, invincible? Ash, I thought you gave it to Petra before? Is it really that harsh to hold? Mine,..." She looks down at her wrist as she brings the hand up, then frowns a little. "Well, it's not the same. That's pure, a 'fresh fruit', and mine's a photograph of one, and, um."

Xion looks to Petra. "Did you get space irradiated? More? When you were carrying it?"

'the only thing similar to this is what Xion extracted from the Divine Tree in London, which certainly didn't plant a new one.'

Xion's still messing with it in her idle animations, twirling it when she's not talking or moving her hands, looking more alert when her name's said. "It might have changed context too much, becoming one of my medallions and keychains. Maybe it couldn't 'grow' in me, or, ... anything else, really."

'The right number would be enough for everyone who deserves one.'

"Wouldn't it be better if they could be held, rested against?" Xion asks Ash, balancing the bar of the pylon-key behind her shoulders.

'Nobody else acts like it's a big deal either.'

"Sometimes people have dramatic transformations?" Xion adds, vaguely falling on Ash's side on this one. "I turned into a car accident styled robot and even a mouse detective and people just sort of go 'oh that makes sense', so I just always thought it made sense! It's normal, because it's normal for me to have a mysterious masked armor with soul-bared sword." She states, as if this will sort out the feeling for Lilian. It was normal! Wasn't it?

"I don't think I caught infinite devil machine, there was a lot going on." Xion admits, after a humbletoned moment.
Arthur Lowell > Arthur: Back to Japan?

    "Christ. Gonna take our trip there? Back to MAIN JAPAN, I mean." Arthur mutters. "I didn't leave MAINLAND JAY-PEE on super GREAT TERMS, so that's-- I mean, it's not a BIG ASK, but, shit, when was I last there? When I had a HUGE FIGHT with NOBUKO and then got my ass THRASHED by FIGHTING PYLOGON TEAM? Man." He shakes his head and makes some dismissing gestures. Xion has a *much* better explanation of it when she offers hers. "WHATEV', not like I let a FUCKUP mess with me BACK WHEN."

> Arthur: What about Infinite Devil Machines?

    "Shit, that's good on *MY* PAY GRADE." He looks excited about that. "I hope it's one'a those NEW KINDS where I can SELECT MY UPGRADES AND RETRY A LOT. C'mon, any math problem with INFINITY in it is way easier than something with BIG NUMBERS. INFINITY makes you SCALE right, gives you the HANDHOLDS you need. Shit, I'm RELIEVED hearing we're dealing with INFINITY."

> Arthur: Something that humanity has offended...

    Arthur's grin falters a little. "EQUAL TERMS..." He thinks for a moment. Antegent? No. None of those are *organized* per se. They have hierarchies, but only in an ecosystem sense. They have leaders, but only among a specific 'species'. What is on equal terms? "Those fucking... pylogon people. That's the only time I've seen something like 'equal terms'. Getting my ass thrashed by those guys felt like getting a stern talking-to from a judge in a court about as much as it felt like getting my shit rocked physical-ways."

    He crosses his arms. "Tough to imagine any of you wanting to end the world right now. *Especially* now, all together. And you get what you want, shit, maybe too much. So if it's not Blooms kicking off the apocalypse, what is it? You got ideas, or we waving our shit around blind?" He looks back to the shore again. "If we're back on the Mainland for tree-spotting, we gotta track down more about those fuckin' Pylogons while we do." He doesn't have a better word for them, so he's just adding that to his lexicon fully now.
Petra Soroka "Okay I kinda feel like we got called stupid idiots by aliens anyways though."

    "I mean, sure. I guess that just doesn't bother me much because I kind of go into things with the expectation of being called an idiot by everyone," says Petra, setting up her own dunk.

    "If anything though, I feel like it was more like 'stupid babies'? Which is sort of a, um, philosophical stance that I'm pretty sure we've all already come to a gradient of disagreement about even before we went there. I mean, like, let's not kid ourselves, we definitely know way more than they did when they were at this point in 'stage four metamorphosis', anyways."

"It was almost too easy."

    Petra has a four for four record of uniquely pissing off every single Bloom she met on first contact before Kepler. "Maybe we've just got that charisma."

    In order to not undercut Lilian's opinion too much by joking around, Petra has to pause and reconsider to end this particular thought with a more constructive point. "Er... like, I know we're all kind of feeling a little dubious about it, so I really am searching to try and figure out what actual specific thing might be bad or dangerous about it, but I can't really come up with much that we didn't already expect. With Underived Conviction's attitude towards us, I really couldn't have expected better considering that the two of them have nearly a millennium of post-human coexistence on us. We did kind of..."

    Petra fumbles around to try and express the sentiment, before falling back on, "¶ask FAQs in #general¶."

"I'm holding it because I'm invincible by the way."

    "Go five minutes without talking about how you're invincible challenge: IMPOSSIBLE." Somehow the tone of this is entirely positive, though impenetrable.

"Well yeah. That's why I'd do it."

    "Go five minutes without talking about how strong you are challenge: IMPOSSIBLE (gone wrong) (gone sexual?!)." Still said as if this is a normal sentence structure to come out of a person's mouth. Breaking out of that trance, Petra continues, "Wait, are we invited to see the houseboat? Am I invited to see the houseboat? Can I?"
Petra Soroka "It's only natural that they would come to respect the old ways much more than the new, under these circumstances."

    "Oh, okay. That does make sense." Petra reflects on the nature of the old ways for some time, inputting the output of her previous thought back into the machine of her mind until the end result has been distorted by what lies within. "Someone should be feeding you grapes."

"You have a fucking spaceship and you made sure it was dogshit before you got us on it to show off."

    "If he was serious about designing it, then he'd have to show something serious. His vibe's more like--" Petra stops and swerves before saying something about how Arthur's irony poisoning makes him act like a shambling corpse, because she senses that this would not go over well. "I can't believe you got to skip all the puzzles still."

"Nah. They didn't like that I already emptied it out."

    Petra raises her hand again from where she's sitting on the ground. "I know this might not be the time, but I *so* do wanna hear about that, because that's such simple words you're using, about emptying the Tree, and the rest of that. I mean, I wasn't even around for London, and I didn't have a fully formed brain in the Urals."

"Obviously it's somewhere in Japan now, somewhere at least vaguely near where you've lived."

    Petra starts to say something about that, but whatever thought she had in mind gets wiped out briefly when Sakura's expression elicits a completely different one. She'd clearly been operating on the assumption that her Tree was somewhere vaguely near, on account of wandering out into no-man's-land across several lifetimes, presumably making no progress, dying early, and then suffering through the apocalyptic deaths and rebirths of several hundred million people as a result of having done so in a way short of reaching the Tree.

    She, also, can't separate that thought from Sakura's offhanded mention that if she was helped to get to her Tree then she would immediately fuck off with all three of the others to the extent of her abilities. This is not something Petra wants to happen, but she also can't accept not *helping*. So, to manifest Ash's worst fears, Petra attempts to synthesize the most immediately relevant proposition she has that will add more reasons for Sakura to stay with Earth and humanity, by fulfilling rather than denying desires.

    "I wonder if it'd be too difficult to get you out to Laplace when the day comes? I mean, you've kind of got the most perspective on that of anyone, for at least three reasons." A tiny pause before saying the real reason as if it's an afterthought, "And then you could see where Lilian works too."

"Please. I hadn't mentioned it because it's nonsense."

    Petra swivels and alerts towards Lilian, not even saying a word. She just stares attentively, like there's a big exclamation mark that popped up over her head, for hearing about a Lilian-theory.
Petra Soroka "Then as the one closest to Dictum, would you care to share your perspective with us?"

    "Yup, yes ma'am. I mean, I'll have more perspective that I'll share after talking with them again about this all-- I just figured I'd probably clear that there's no reason to not mention going to Kepler to them or anything, before, you know, telling them."

    Petra chews on the inside of her cheek, trying to formulate her thoughts in a way that sounds intelligent for being prompted in such a way, but her most prominent feeling about it is so simple that she can't help blurting it out as is. "I mean, the biggest thing is that-- we were kinda worried that, to the perspective of 'humans', it'd be sorta a bit like death, right? And now we know for sure it's not. Those guys were super alive, and super interactable as we are, and I bet if we spent a year chatting with them, it'd get easier instead of harder, because of both of us being able to learn to adapt to the other in comprehensible ways. That kinda feels like such a big win, for now at least. Instead of being like dying or becoming some cosmic horror thing or whatever, it's just sort of rebirth and growth again."

    After another minute of silence, Petra pops up another question that baked in her mind. "Would it be good timing for me to try and warm them up to the idea of talking with you?"

"How the fuck does Infinite Devil Machine not have you curious?"

    "Oh my god. *Yeah*-- er, I feel like, the implication was..." Again, Petra struggles to find a word that feels acceptable, but this concept is so far beyond her grasp that she can't even distill it into a compact sentiment to communicate as a package.

    "'Not-humanity'? I mean, it was what Underived Conviction asked us to come to terms with, in order to, um, shed the spiritual taint of being human, in order to have a more sustained relationship with them. Right now we're kind of ¶reeking/carrier agents/dumb and embarrassing¶, if I had to guess, which makes putting up with us annoying. The source of the Existential Threat?"

"I no longer believe that it is any of us which triggers the end of the world around this time."

    "Oh, okay." Petra matches Sakura's tone unthinkingly, treating that as a sentence that's just casually reassuring as to the state of things. "What?"

    A moment later, "Wait, what? What does, do you think? Er--" Petra's attention slides to the Fruit in Ash's hands. "... One of them getting impatient, or something, you mean?"
Angela ''Shit, that's good on *MY* PAY GRADE.''

"I will continue to hit the devil machines with sticks when directed to and not a moment before." Roland says, which might be an indication that he has an ability to, if nothing else, follow directions and not engage in activity he wasn't explicitely pointed into doing. This may indicate his pay grade is actually a little higher than he represents.

But he does take Bond's quip in good humor. Bond is a guy who wears a nice suit and Roland's old partner was a guy who wears nice suits, so he finds himself readily sliding into a kind of casual repartee with the super spy with a strange amount of comfortability.

"Yeah, sometimes you decide it's a job for someone else and you get the hell outta there." He jokes(?). "I try to at least be a reliable swordhand." He turns to look Bond full-on. "You're old pals with The Dame Commander, yeah? Guesing you've found a knack of being in the right place and time."

Tiphereth says, "Sometimes, Roland even puts the books on the right shelves."

''I turned into a car accident styled robot and even a mouse detective--''

"Huh?"
"Huh??"
"it wasn't just a normal mouse?"
"Do you mean like the Decepticons or is this some other sort of car robot?"
Petra Soroka "A more 'hostile' personality would be far less likely to remain at the site of their once imprisonment, I think."

    "Maybe...? I feel like they wouldn't have those associations with the place that was Kepler before, considering how they were rebuilding stuff right there, but-- maybe that's another point to not being all that hostile on the scale of hostility. They did have a fourth friend who had to be from somewhere else, too."

"Your ship...? 'Unknown things'..."

    "S-spaceship! It's similar enough for the joke! And-- I'm the known thing."

"If they saw all of that and the words they were conveying were 'gosh, you're so stupid, being like that', well."

    Nodding along, Petra internally slots Xion's interaction with Underived Conviction as being in a slightly different box than Petra's, but in a way that emphasizes Xion's point rather than undermines it. "Yeah, I mean, we were straight up getting back and forths. It was pretty clear that, like, the whole information gradient was super slanted towards them knowing way more than us, but it's not like we were *annoying*."

"Did you get space irradiated? More? When you were carrying it?"

    "I'm immune to cancer actually," Petra very helpfully explains to Xion, then more relevantly adds, "Oh, but *super* vulnerable to Bloom-beams. I didn't really feel anything in particular-- er, I could 'reach out', but I'd kind of expect that to kill me instantly."

"Maybe it couldn't 'grow' in me, or, ... anything else, really."

    Bouncing off of Xion's metaphor to conceptualize it to herself more clearly, Petra decides on, "I'm less like soil and more like, uh, one of those grasshoppers that gets hollowed out by those long worm parasites. Er-- sorry, that's gross. I could be soil if I try but I don't think I should, probably."
Lilian Rook     'I know it sounds crazy from a Cityfolk, but it's possible that the real, uh, challenge isn't winning a fight.'

    "Well yeah. Never lost one."
    "Is that so?"
    "Name a time."
    "The last time."
    "That was card games."
    "And fighting."
    "Which you lost a ton of times."
    "Only by the card game rules."
    "What?"
    "And I didn't even go all out either."
    "Oh my god you're insufferable."
    "You just can't handle someone stronger than you."
    "I'll know if that's true if I meet them."
    "Yeah? That a challenge?"
    "It's a notice that I'll bury you if you keep this up."
    "Oh-ho! Yeah?!"

    'I mean I trust whatever you all want to do, for sure, but ... This whole trip hasn't really been about competition, you know?'

    Sakura giggles, which distracts both Lilian and Ash. "However we use the miracle is 'how we would use a miracle', no?" she says. "But it was useful all the same. It always takes . . ." Her eyes briefly grow distant. "Certain, vivid reminders, to recall certain information, from times past. And I am certain from seeing them. Neither of those we met were 'there, before us'. They had become something that could only know of that which spoke to their truths. It is Nika's wish to be understood by the world, and so 'the world', so new as to be unborn, understood her well, and us through her efforts."

    "They who have become stories that are places that are stars in the sky must have assembled to discuss exactly that. 'What to do now'."

    'Ehhnn.... I'd trust their end of the world over something else's.'

    "That is very much the matter worth worrying about." Sakura sighs, briefly heavy in mood. "I had spent so long attempting to chart the waters of fate that lead to such a catastrophe amongst one of our number so predictably within . . . two years before now, and, three years after. If it is not amongst the four of us, then, it can only be somewhere else, and perhaps still armed."

    'I did. But that was before Nika was able to translate.'

    Ash pauses in bickering, not really sure how to make of James Bond, the closest to the type of man they know in many ways, and the furthest in others, admitting as much. They straighten themselves out again, in that same ineffably lopsided way. "Yeah? What'd she say about me? I know you didn't show her what it was like inside Wheeler Peak. It's just the same thing. I do it to me, that's what happens. I do it to a human, that's what happens to them." The mysterious abstract art of blood-sans-bone. "I bet you something happens if I do it to Fenrir too." They must think of it as just close enough to a threat to not mention Nika instead.
Lilian Rook     '...If it can be offended in the first place, then maybe there's the possibility amends can be made. Do you think that's what they meant, by 'splitting rent?''

    "Amends would be nice. Restitution would be tolerable. What worries me is 'sharing'." Lilian says, to Bond. "As implications go. The idea that we aren't 'splitting rent' almost sounds as if we're exploiting." "You literally are every day, Queen fuckin' Elilzabeth." "Be shitty all you like, but that's a perfectly good parallel to draw, excepting the fact that you don't know anything and you're wrong." "Sure thing Bougie Spice."

    And yet,

    'That is mostly true.'

    "See!" Ash gestures at Tamamo with both arms, obviously pumped to be agreed-with.

    'A more 'hostile' personality would be far less likely to remain at the site of their once imprisonment, I think. In that case, one need not thank luck.'

    "Well, they did say as much." Lilian muses, folding arm under elbow. "That there was a third one who woud be more apathetic to our existence came up, as did the one who was so frank and helpful telling us that they were unique for retaining much of their comprehension of humanity; in whatever sense that words even means." Lilian says, grim with implication, "I only wonder if we'd get such an enthusiastic greeting, and delicate treatment, if we went a second time. You know?"

    'I suppose I will need to see.'

    "Hhuh?" Ash blanks out a second. "Oh, like, because of Nika coming over?" Nice guess. "Sure. No skin off my back."

    'I have seen it once before, or it might have been more surprising. Should I have said something about it?'

    "It'd have been nice." Lilian sighs. "Doesn't it remind you of 'back then'?" she says, wiggling her left leg to imply the obvious without stating anything identifying. This is pointless, because it draws Ash's immediate, rapt attention anyways. But before they get anywhere--

    'If it was being translated into 'our language', if you got called a stupid loser idiot who should kill themself wouldn't that be them trying to make friends in your dialect?'

    "I believe she may be correct, Ash." says Sakura, gently enough, sidelong, to get Ash to groan really really loud. "I only believe that it is natural to feel that a lack of education is being pointed out when one is already frustrated with not knowing what one wants to."

    'So as far as luck goes: maybe it's a master's luck. Because we avoided a fight we couldn't win.'

    "Oh fuck offfff you sound so cool when you put it like that." Ash groans. The followup still catches their interest, though. "That space was like they scrubbed 'natural' out of it and filled it up with 'to you'." they say, before hastening to "If that, like, makes any sense. Like they solved consensus by killing objectivity so it can't even be a real thing anyways. Being kinda water just makes sense. Because, y'know--" They realize that what they're going to say won't click for anyone before they even say it, but don't care enough to slow down. "It's Ocean."

    Sakura's response is to say "You do have a most noticeable excess of water in your personality. And lacking in earth as well . . ." Ash is thus stuck on "What? Is this, like, astrology? Or something cool instead?"
Lilian Rook     'Wait, invincible? Ash, I thought you gave it to Petra before? Is it really that harsh to hold?'

    "No idea." says Ash. "I'm just ignoring it having mass so it's not touching anything. Like, in case. Wanna try planting it?" A second later, "Wanna try eating it? I'm not gonna carry it all day. I got shit to do."

    'Sometimes people have dramatic transformations?'

    "I--" Ash glances up, looks around, and settles on Sakura, actually. "Kinda thought we all did?"

    'It's normal, because it's normal for me to have a mysterious masked armor with soul-bared sword.'

    Lilian sighs. Unfortunately, Xion is deliberately speaking to her Afflatus(tm) now, so she can't smile and play it off. "Okay, but--" she barely starts before she seems to realize something. "I just now understand that I don't even know where you learned magic from, Ash. Or fighting with a spear."

    'C'mon, any math problem with INFINITY in it is way easier than something with BIG NUMBERS. INFINITY makes you SCALE right, gives you the HANDHOLDS you need. Shit, I'm RELIEVED hearing we're dealing with INFINITY.'

    Sakura looks off, thoughtful. "Aside from the 'Beginnings' and 'Endings' which were mine, those brought to us by you have been 'Bonds', 'Distortions', 'Life', 'Infinity', 'Separation', and 'Moments'. Though, in truth, it is Lilian's junior who currently holds 'Moments', yes?" "I'd be the first to know if she stopped. She'd be begging me to help her get it back before anyone finds out." "I see. And thus I am once more intrigued by the question of what it is that 'Tamamo-no-Mae' saw, to warn the smith of."

    'Those fucking... pylogon people. That's the only time I've seen something like 'equal terms'. Getting my ass thrashed by those guys felt like getting a stern talking-to from a judge in a court about as much as it felt like getting my shit rocked physical-ways.'

    "Okay if you're gonna keep using those words you gotta explain." says Ash. "You mean like . . . What's the feel here? Antegent but people? Alien refugees from Bloomworlds? Some new Adam and Steve shit?" Lilian snickers and turns away. "Fuck, parts of, like, one of them?"

    'So if it's not Blooms kicking off the apocalypse, what is it? You got ideas, or we waving our shit around blind?'

    Sakura looks to Lilian. Lilian looks back. The decision split falls to Lilian, for first mentioning it. "What if it it's their 'diver'? The one whose goal is something like scraping the galaxy for others like them?"

    'I really am searching to try and figure out what actual specific thing might be bad or dangerous about it, but I can't really come up with much that we didn't already expect.'

    "So, what if it's possible for one of those two to 'come and check on us' too? What happens to Earth if they do? If they . . . extrude or 'manifest' something here?" "Oh fuck now I wanna find out."

    'Go five minutes without talking about how you're invincible challenge: IMPOSSIBLE.'

    "Well I can't talk about how many folding chairs I can carry at the same time. That's guys business." Ash says. They are joking at Petra, but that's Lilian's joke.

    'Wait, are we invited to see the houseboat? Am I invited to see the houseboat? Can I?'

    "Only if you admit to how strong and sexual I am first."
Tamamo     'It'd have been nice.' Lilian sighs. 'Doesn't it remind you of 'back then'?'

    "It does, of course, though I was thinking of..." She trails off, then stops fully, thinking about how strictly to keep something she had only implicitly understood as a promise. It would be improper to name names. "...a girl who showed me a similar transformation in confidence. I would not say she was 'doing well,' but the reformation was symptom, and not cause." That girl is now lost.

    'You mean like . . . What's the feel here? Antegent but people?'

    "Yes." She elaborates, after a moment, "I have said before that it seemed to me as if Antegent were creations filled with hatred for humanity, which marks them as both unlike animals and unlike weapons. The ones I expect he means were more like soldiers filled with spite and hate. This made them more like people, but not so unlike as to not appear Antegent."
Lilian Rook     'Someone should be feeding you grapes.'

    Sakura startles with her mouth open. Ash glances between the two, as if to say 'Yeah, what's the story?' but Lilian, perhaps out of familiarity with Petra, perhaps in on some 'bit', nods and says "Right? I thought we all knew it, so we weren't saying it." which makes Sakura shut her mouth again, faintly red-faced.

    'I can't believe you got to skip all the puzzles still.'

    "On account of being too strong for 'em, you see."

    'I know this might not be the time, but I *so* do wanna hear about that, because that's such simple words you're using, about emptying the Tree, and the rest of that. I mean, I wasn't even around for London, and I didn't have a fully formed brain in the Urals.'

    Ash pauses. The other two are quiet. Expectant. They wait until Ash is forced to product a thoughtful "Huh." and then a more constructive "Uh . . . That's because it's not all that easy to describe I guess. There wasn't anyone else who was there. If I talk about it, it's probably just, like, vision quest shit." Which makes Lilian say "I feel as if that's exactly what we'd all like to hear, and we're all doing everyone a disservice by playing our bullshit so close to the chest. Sakura let everyone knows hers already." which makes Ash twist and crack their wrist as a fidget, delivering an awkward, displeased "Ugh. Fuck. Okay."

    'I wonder if it'd be too difficult to get you out to Laplace when the day comes?'

    "Me?" Sakura needn't even explain. She looks to Petra as someone who knows better than most how difficult it was to even go to Lilian's wedding. "Were it only so easy." she laughs, nervously.

[ansi(243,'And then you could see where Lilian works too.')]

    She instantly looks at Lilian, who is rocking her weight from heel to heel and saying "I wouldn't want to let that psycho anywhere near her, though." Sakura is already too quick for it, saying "Miss Mesmer has already been closer on two occasions." which makes Lilian squirm even more.

    'I just figured I'd probably clear that there's no reason to not mention going to Kepler to them or anything, before, you know, telling them.'

    "Ice cold, cyborg." Ash says, approvingly.

    'Those guys were super alive, and super interactable as we are'

    "I think you may be vastly overstating your case, solely for familiarity with Nika." says Lilian. "I don't . . . have a reason to disagree with 'rebirth and growth' as a positive outlook, but, I really just don't think what we experienced is something sustainable."

    'Would it be good timing for me to try and warm them up to the idea of talking with you?'

    "You can try."
Lilian Rook     'which makes putting up with us annoying.'

    "Idunno. Unvic seemed chill when I--" "Turned into shapes and eyes made of artificial reflections like a biblical fucking angel, yes; and why do you think that may be?" "You are such a bitch."

    'Wait, what? What does, do you think? Er--'

    "Because I have seen the different forms that those ends take, many times before." Sakura says. Her tone is plain, her meaning uncomplicated, but she subtly brings her hands together to wring her fingers through her sleeves. "There is variation, depending upon the life that has been lived, but having seen a hint of the breadth of expression that exists 'out there', as a means of comparison, it is clear to me now that all I remember can be explained by one of three, and that there is always one which cannot. It's . . ." She chews her lip. "'Out of theme'. And the others so clearly hew to theirs, without byproduct."

    Before she gets any further, you catch the strains of "Hi! Hiii! ¶Everyone/You guys/It's Christmas¶! I'm back! Everything's ¶good behaviour¶ so Arthur can have his gamer boat back!" coming from Nika, now attempting to power slide down the sandy hill towards you.

    Perhaps sensing that the air might change for her inclusion, in a way that they implicitly disapprove of ahead of time, Ash raises their voice on purpose. "Yeah? Okay. Let's rule it out then. Let's see what you guys turn out like so we know for sure it's some other asshole checking under the Christmas tree. Didn't kill me. Fuck, maybe we even figure out how to unkill Nerd Alert with his shit. We got a whole fruit of knowledge and shit too. This is so basic. I feel like I'm getting baited by a browser ad for a phone game."
Angela ''Well yeah. Never lost one.''

Roland takes this at face value and is relieved that he doesn't have to rely on 'cards' to fight his battles. Instead he uses 'pages' which are totally differnet and FUCK is he a card battler now?! Has he just been doing card games this whole time?! He thought that he was just being a cool mysterious fixer in a library, but he's really been relying on the pages that Angela's been giving him but they're basically just oversized CARDS he's been using CARDS to lower the LIFE POINTS of his enemies to ZERO. Shit!!

Roland looks haunted for a moment and then shakes his head quickly to clear his thoughts. "Ah, yeah, I mean. So of course it'd, uh, seem easy mode, the challenge rating has boosted to the point that it's not just about being physically invincible, it's about, like, the complex shit."

Roland nods to Sakura. "Yeah, yeah, so it's like--'show me the strength of your miracle', right? The kind of biggest difficulty challenge out there if you really think about it." He considers Nika's Wish. This is the first time that he has heard this about Nika. "That's kind of a humble and also really big ask at the same time." Roland mulls.

''I had spent so long attempting to chart the waters of fate--''

"It's probably pretty convenient for this 'somewhere else' that everything was looking at all of you instead too." Tiphereth sighs. "I'm kind of surprised you're so relaxed about it, honestly." This is despite Sakura's 'heavy mood', it seems, because when it comes to time loop people Tiphereth is going to think of Angela first who would be the last to claim she handled it gracefully. "Hopefully it isn't the sort of road we stumble upon in the attempt to avoid it."

"Maybe," Roland says. "It is inevitable and that every time a group isn't ending the world another gets the job."

"...You kind of have a dark view of things sometimes, Roland." Tiphereth frowns. #-1 FUNCTION (ANIS) NOT FOUND

They're both pretty relieved when Nika returns and shifts the genre of mood.
Arthur Lowell > Arthur: What's the feel here? Antegent but people?

    "Same direction, different type. An alien would be scared of a wolf or a fence, but *weirded out* about a human. They were using tools, and talking, and... curious? And cruel? Fuckin', uh, god, you ever been lost in an airport? You ever been mugged? This is some weird shit to explain. And it was like twenty damn years ago, I've already forgotten a bunch'a shit." Arthur rolls his eyes and does a big wavey annoyed dismissing motion.

    "Point is, before we even met Nika, we knew there was a third party on this shit. Fourth? There's hella parties and one of them is humanity-peer and not humanity-friend." Arthur says, rubbing his own shoulder a bit. "If you're telling me that some equal-terms fuckers kill the planet, I'm gonna guess that's them, and if we're headed off to mainland Japan it's gonna be the first thing I check on. Do we got a better name? I'm gonna call 'em pylogons, 'cause they're all geometric and shit and they came out of the pylon."
James Bond I know you didn't show her what it was like inside Wheeler Peak.

    "There are a lot of assignments I haven't told her about."

I bet you something happens if I do it to Fenrir too.

    "And you'd probably be right, but I don't think she'd appreciate it. She's worked very hard to decide what is and isn't Lilian."

Amends would be nice. Restitution would be tolerable. What worries me is 'sharing'.

    "Does it?"

    "All that we've ever seen of the Antegent--at least the ones capable of it--is hostility. There are some that I'd struggle to even ascribe a will to. But presumably, in the case of the ones where that's possible, that hostility is because of whatever offense we caused."

    "I do wonder what it would look like. I've been thinking about it since we left--I don't know that there's a price I wouldn't pay for a..." 'Kinder,' the relative form isn't enough. "Kind Earth."

So, what if it's possible for one of those two to 'come and check on us' too?

    "Then we'll be as gracious as they were and hope that they're as polite as we were on their front door."
Petra Soroka "I do it to me, that's what happens. I do it to a human, that's what happens to them."

    Petra finds this answer completely enthralling, and after meditating on it for a minute, she comes to a conclusion, muffled through the knuckle in front of her mouth. "... So blood's the only part of a person that isn't bullshit? No one's got cum that justifies itself?"

    On a more serious note, she adds, "I guess that explanation makes sense, right? The part of you that isn't predicated on an endless chain of assumptions is the part that looks most like the Kepler Blooms."

    "... So it kind of makes sense that Exis would be the only one to look like that, huh." Petra comes to a belated additional realization, tied up in a cloud of thoughts about the shape of Lilian's body, as she often is.

"The idea that we aren't 'splitting rent' almost sounds as if we're exploiting."

    "I mean, are wishes just sort of created, or are they taken? I know mine was. Er, taken, I mean." Petra consciously fidgets with the mirror locket hanging by a cord off her neck.

    "Not that I'd ever blame you for anything ever, but maybe there is 'something'. It's not like we really know why the Onslaught or any of this happened, like, in a causal sense."

"I believe she may be correct, Ash."

    Petra's attention immediately goes to her phone, which contains over a dozen instances of Ash calling her a stupid loser who should kill herself. "I mean, that's so hard to imagine. A *Bloom*, being a *tsundere*?" She pronounces it 'tsundeer'.

"Wanna try eating it?"

    Petra points at Ash accusingly, having migrated to sitting on her knees to get a little closer to the circle of attention. "You're gonna have to whisper more seductively than that to tempt me, devil. I've *also* got shit to do." Petra *so* would take a bite if she didn't think she'd probably die immediately.

"So, what if it's possible for one of those two to 'come and check on us' too?"

    "Ooohh...." It does seem like a frighteningly likely possibility, that the world just gets destroyed incidentally by the attention of the other Blooms getting drawn towards it. Underived Conviction was *so* down to do it when Petra just mentioned that it still existed.

    "We did all kind of, uh, give pretty much the exact astronomical coordinates of Earth, then raise a whole bunch of questions about why you four exist as you do at all, then leave."

"Only if you admit to how strong and sexual I am first."

    "As if I haven't been doing that, like, constantly. You know I've got no shame." Caught up in the bit, Petra simply scoffs the challenge off, but she makes the fatal mistake of ironically deflecting first without completing the request. A second later, this makes saying it suddenly *way* more embarrassing, because the joke momentum has ground to a halt.

    Hesitating and blushing a bit right after declaring that she's shameless is a death sentence, so she must double down. She makes grabby hands at Ash and says, "Gimme your biceps and prove it."
Petra Soroka "I thought we all knew it, so we weren't saying it."

    Petra nods emphatically several times. "*I'm* saying it. Not to brag, but I'm kind of the best at being a cult member." She's already done it with chocolates, which are, like, an extra step beyond grapes! Really, she wonders if it would be, like, evil to have a Himorogikage robe put on her.

"On account of being too strong for 'em, you see."

    "*And* too sexual."

"I wouldn't want to let that psycho anywhere near her, though."

    "Mesmer shouldn't be near anyone ever again. She should be put in a bathysphere and then entombed in concrete and then sunk to the bottom of the ocean on a planet that's condemned for uninhabitability. Orbiting a star going supernova. And the bathysphere's full of fleas."

    Petra can't keep herself from also glancing towards Lilian, though for a different reason from Sakura. After venting that stream of consciousness punishment, she worriedly probes Lilian's expression for whatever she might be showing in the moment.

    "Anyways, she won't get anywhere near. Because I'll--" Petra engages a mental quick time prompt of scrolling options that she has to discard one by one. 'Kill her'; no. 'Kill her'; no. 'Kill her'; no. 'Kill her'; no.

    "... Lock that ward from the outside. Yeah."
Petra Soroka "I think you may be vastly overstating your case, solely for familiarity with Nika."

    "Well--"

    Petra's first and most pressing objection to this is one that is so unspeakably selfish that voicing it can only be bad for her in the moment, even if it helps her case. That being that she is much less concerned about her relationship with the Kepler Blooms than she is with these four, and so 'familiarity with Nika' is a *goal* rather than a confounding factor. Her biggest relief after visiting Kepler is that, as long as she puts in the effort to keep up, there's no apocalypse countdown to a dark future where Lilian is taken away from *her*.

    She can't say that in front of Tamamo, though, and maybe more threateningly, she can't say that in front of Ash. Her second reason is just as true though, if less compelling.

    "Er, I guess I'm just riding the high of making a good first impression on anyone for the first time. Usually I'm working, like, *way* hard against the current. I mean, um," She gestures vaguely at the collection of Blooms in the room, and particularly her place between them. "This wasn't sustainable on first contact either, like."

"Everything's ¶good behaviour¶ so Arthur can have his gamer boat back!"

    "Nika!"

    The Bloom whose 'first contact' was least-sustainable was already heavily on Petra's mind, so Nika's energy approaching vicariously infects her to spring up to her feet and scamper over to meet her. Reaching the bottom of the hill, Petra flickers and pivots one hundred eighty degrees around momentumlessly, switching from running in one direction to walking alongside Nika towards the gathering the moment she reaches her.

    It's a little conspiratorial with Ash, that Petra takes their implicit declaration and exposits further on it. She's never been a fan of how much the tone changes to exclude Nika, even when it started off sort of for Nika's sake.

    "We're talking about the Kepler gang. And also a little bit about the end of the world. Also I was thinking about trying to convince Dictum to be cool hopefully sometime soon. And also, on the topic of the end of the world but also because they've been ¶thirsty/lonely¶ about it this whole time, Ash is suggesting doing their thing to ¶challenge preconceptions¶ about everyone else in order to see ¶the shape of¶ ¶un-preconceived/the new fruit¶ for everyone. That's just what they're saying now."
Tamamo     'Gimme your biceps and prove it.'

    "Mm, so, this is that to which people truly allude, when they say 'a slut.'" Tamamo, leaning on Lilian, regards the specimen.

    'Er, I guess I'm just riding the high of making a good first impression on anyone for the first time.'

    "'For the first time'? Were you not rather popular with dogs? The dog-people." She wouldn't be saying that if a wolf was in the room, but there isn't, so it's fine.

    'They had become something that could only know of that which spoke to their truths. It is Nika's wish to be understood by the world, and so...'

    "It is not strange at all to find one who can understand only that which is like them, and far less common to find one such as Nika, whose wish is not merely 'to change,' but to create the bridge of understanding across those changes."

    'It's a notice that I'll bury you if you keep this up.'
    ...
    'I bet you something happens if I do it to Fenrir too.'

    "Is that curiosity, or a threat?" One brow raised.

    'Sure. No skin off my back.'

    "Mhm."

    ' And thus I am once more intrigued by the question of what it is that 'Tamamo-no-Mae' saw, to warn the smith of.'

    "I should certainly like to know." Tamamo would be drifting Sakura-ward, but she's going to be drifting Nika-ward instead, soon.

    'So, what if it's possible for one of those two to 'come and check on us' too? What happens to Earth if they do? If they . . . extrude or 'manifest' something here?'

    "As giants in the playground. Particularly clumsy, callous giants, by the perspectives of most, for 'the perspectives of most' being a matter they have cut away from themselves. To care requires motivation."

    'I'm back!'
    'We're talking about the Kepler gang.'

    Having now gone Nika-ward, Tamamo adds, "We may also speak of Mr. Lowell's condition. Rather," quietly, "we must, rather than leave it until 'a good time' or 'something comes to mind.'" Not that anything has, outside of her standing invitation to listen to him talk about old relationships. But nothing will get done by putting it off.
Tamamo     'What would they have meant by 'the infinite devil machine?''
    'I hope it's one'a those NEW KINDS where I can SELECT MY UPGRADES AND RETRY A LOT.'
    'Oh my god. *Yeah*-- er, I feel like, the implication was... 'Not-humanity'?'

    Having now thought through to where that could have been mentioned, "'Maybe we can still be friends if you make up with...' oh. Given the context, I had thought that a reference to 'the world,' in the sense of 'people.' I would not have been surprised by the machinery of civilization being portrayed as something that produces infinite evil, by the Three Moons."
Xion 'I'm immune to cancer actually,'

"Oh," Xion nods. "That's good! Um, is that something that happens in space? Gummispace is different, but I've come to understand that 'astronomy' is really weird and *very* different." Confidently correct on this point, she too has realized that it isn't everyone else's stuff that's messed up but quite explicitly her stuff that's messed up. "I just wear my coats to deal with evil radiation." She adds, like that's the same thing.

'Oh, but *super* vulnerable to Bloom-beams.'

"Is that a thing? Why do you have special mechanics for specifically their beams? Don't just obliquely say you like outsider art but make it be an attack. You... Wait, do you just get beamed? Because Ash sure didn't turn *you* into a corpse during the fighting any more than I got turned inside out." She points, grinning a little. "Explain *further*."

'I could be soil if I try but I don't think I should, probably.'

"That sounds like dying. Don't die, Petra. Also I don't know if you're really that much of an Earth-type? You're. . ." Larxene flashes before Xion's eyes but for some reason Larxene is post-shower soggy. Wet Larxene. ". . . B-b-bolt? Type? I think it's Wood in the Chinese sense," Xion looks to Ash, as if to confirm because explaining 'my evil older sister but soggy and not older' was much more difficult than classic elementalism.

Also Petra didn't throw 'older'. Obviously.

'I do it to a human, that's what happens to them.'

"Oh, hey, actually, have you done it to an Antegent? Blood too, or..." Xion asks, chasing Ash's threat with a blithely honest question.

'I believe she may be correct, Ash.'

Xion grins, angelic in her cheeky noirette glow about bright blues. She grins and glows throughout the entiiiiire extra long groan.

'Oh fuck offfff you sound so cool when you put it like that.'

"Huh?" Xion replies, honest in a faintly shocked way. She had expected a 'she's right' but not a 'fuck OFF that's so cool' about her offhanded poetry. "Oh, sure. Thanks?" She nods, before rolling into the next piece of that conversation: "It does make sense, though. Or, really, you'd be the one most qualified to say so? To me, it was almost..."

She knows she reveals more than a little about herself, explaining. She goes ahead and does it anyway, as Ash wouldn't have the context otherwise as Lilian does and others might. "It reminded me of the Deeper Darkness, before it shaped itself for us. Not 'empty', nor 'full', but filled with the nothing like pouring cold gas into a tub. Paint on easel, undaubed, unspread, mixing slowly and transforming into different shades. Except, the colors aren't *our* colors, they're the colors on the other side of the spectrum, the ring continuing around a greater orbit, 'lit' only by glow of negative space and the ambience of texture."

She speaks with her hands, keychain bracelet bouncing against arm as she gestures expansively, adds textures and curls to the air, explains animatedly. "There's structures there, twists in the dark, and you can get anywhere through there, since everything *is* there. Shadow is just the pooling of the dark where it's not peeled and pushed away, a blot that exists outside of all anchors but what you make of it, and what it's made of. It is... kkkind of water, formless and flowing and solid all simultaneous, too. If it helps to explain, I'm a water-type." She adds, at the end, closing hands into fists for a second before dropping them.

"One thing I thought about was that it... felt like a defensive posture, almost cloying." She rises a hand to nose, touching finger to side of bridge. "It got into my sinuses, how sweet it was. How perfectly sweet it was, the right kind of sweet, but," She turns the palm out when she shrugs.
Xion "It came off as isolating, siloing away, quarantining. 'You like this!', like I was supposed to be a 'there' that was anything but present. Presented-to?" Was that anything? Equally as hopeful just asking Ash, or being overheard and explained to, Xion continues explaining.

"So," Xion tucks arm under arm in a loose cross and weaves hands into comfortable hold. "Even if I had to accelerate into the environment, gravities wise, I liked it more when it was an inversion into 'Ocean' - like space inverted into a presence rather than a lack, like a texture all its own - and the little spots of arranged surface, of space, floating. That horizon line - I felt like I *knew* it, like it was nothing for me to cross it, like I do it all the time," And her expression tightens with her armcross. The Corridors, of course, how easily she slipped into the Darkness about relational space. "--and so even being as native as I was I was shown this subjective construction. Even welcoming... No, maybe, because it was so structured to be home-welcoming, I found myself feeling incredibly put out of place?"

She looks at Petra. Petra would know??? "Do I have a thing about this? I can't tell if I'm putting down anything or just my own belligerent heart-thumps."

Returning to a topic she can speak more to, Xion straightens posture and raises keychained right hand, ribbons of water coiling up out of the manifested air and channeling down into a single spherical droplet that wobbles there for a little bit, matched to her palm's plane in hover. "Dark and water's my easiest element that's not - I didn't name it - 'Ruin' magic. Which is just destructive blasts, really? Gravity stuff? It's this..." She waves off her hand and the gathered magic liquid disperses, only a few droplets making it to ground before unspooling completely into the air. When she raises hand again, this time a small pale-white mote expands with a bead of black pearlescent expansion that warps about and overtakes the exterior, fading to pale at the exterior as another pulse of the monochrome energy continues until the expansion stabilizes and the small clear-pearlwhite sphere holds an inner sphere of marble black.

"It makes a 'pwoosh' explosion instead of a fwoom explosion, which is neat I guess." Instead of showing off her magic spheres, she returns to Ash. "You never explained where you got your magic from, yeah! What comes easiest to you?"

Sakura's agreement continues to embolden Xion as she probes Ash for their secrets.

'Wanna try eating it?'

The New Fruit is a topic that Xion considers again. "I can try holding it, but I wouldn't even know what planting it entails. It's sort of... A seed we don't know the soil for. I could draw a medallion out of it? Matched set with the other one?"

Gamely, despite her worried words, she holds out a hand. Sure, she'll hold it. What's the absolute, thunderously worse thing that'd happen? It's not like she'd *drop* it.

'Only if you admit to how strong and sexual I am first.'

Oh, so now it's tax and toll to visit? Bet.

"Oh? Is that all?" To get in? Deal. "Well, you're certainly the spearwielder that gave me the longest, hardest beating, enough that I'm *so* interested in more of your 'technique'. With your invincibility and your mocking charm, I'd wonder if you were related to the Monkey King, and maybe if you are you can tell me all about your 'black king bar'." Xion pays with a Truth Or Dare cavalierness, grinning and leaning forward having dispelled the magic she was holding to summon Pylon-keyblade to palms just to lean on and grin.

She doesn't ask for a review. Tamamo, even if she calls Petra a slut, will certainly understand Xion's well meaning social nature.

Then Nika comes back!

"Oh, hey Nika!" Xion lifts one hand to wave. "Good to hear there's no disreputable particles to worry about!"
Lilian Rook     'Ah, yeah, I mean. So of course it'd, uh, seem easy mode, the challenge rating has boosted to the point that it's not just about being physically invincible, it's about, like, the complex shit.'

    "Hey buddy you okay? Kinda started a 'nam stare for a second." says Ash, who does not at all care about that, but smells blood.

    'That's kind of a humble and also really big ask at the same time.

    "All things so meant in earnest are, in the end." Sakura says, smiling a little ruefully. "When one wishes, they know that it won't achieve anything, so there is no harm in wishing for anything of any scope, without considering how it could be done. To be so serious in something as absurd as wishing, so as to invent the proof that justifies action being taken; it can only come from humility, in a way, for demanding a change so great, so desperately." She pauses. "Or, in other words," she says, borrowing from Lilian now. "You could say that wishes only really come true from 'frustration at what should be possible, yet isn't'. Something so grand as a 'new world order' is . . ." "Too intoxicating to be a wish. It's a project" Lilian says. Sakura looks surprised, then quietly delighted at her finishing the sentence.

    'Same direction, different type. An alien would be scared of a wolf or a fence, but *weirded out* about a human. They were using tools, and talking, and... curious? And cruel? Fuckin', uh, god, you ever been lost in an airport? You ever been mugged?'

    Ash is quietly fascinated by whatever the fuck Arthur is on about. So much that they don't even make fun of him for presumably having once been lost at an airport, even. "Okay well I've definitely spent way more time around Antegent than anyone alive so I'd know the difference if I saw it." they say, ten percent jealous. "If someone's not humanity-friend then they're humanity-superior not humanity-peer. Only someone as fucking lame as humanity would be friends with humanity."

    Lilian breathes in hard enough to be a sigh in reverse, says "Remind me to never take you near the Foundation." and then, to Arthur, "It wasn't twenty years ago you blithering idiot. I'd have been six years old if it were." That's a 'no' on better names, then. "Though I would like to reassure you that something so comfortable as an alien invasion is out of the question, we really do know so very little about the 'Rivets' after all this time." Sakura says, bordering on a soft groan, resting her cheek in her hand. "Miss Xion still knows the most of all of us." Wait wasn't it implicitly Sakura who pushed for the interruption of the Blade Of Bonds test?

    'There are a lot of assignments I haven't told her about.'

    Ash makes a briefly complicated expression. "Yeah? 'Cause I know about the whole liveleaks war on terror gore videobombing incident, and I agree that's fucked up, but it's been like three years, so I'm gonna turn around and take a biiiiiig sip of water while you tell me how you all put a lot of thought into reevaluating what people need to know about now." Rather than clarifying if this means Wheeler Peak or not, Ash turns around and pantomimes a big sip of water like an intolerable fucking lunatic.
Lilian Rook     'She's worked very hard to decide what is and isn't Lilian.'

    "Yeah yeah so I keep fuckin' hearing." Ash rolls their eyes. Lilian looks down the barrel of 'Ash getting annoyed enough to ask what that means' and decides to spin the cylinder instead. "Admittedly I am curious. In an academic sense." "Yeah?" "I was asking a similar question, back then. Amongst others I'll keep to myself." "Cunt." "Eat me. Regardless, it's not as if I don't have the basic idea. I don't really . . . It'd be completely exhausting to try and recount it all right now, so I'll make an hour tomorrow for it, if you're fine with listenting to a long, confusing, and possibly boring story." "I bet it's boring to everyone else because they're scared of metaphors." "Well . . . yes." "Then you owe me." "Can't you just agree normally?" "Pft. No."

    'Is that curiosity, or a threat?'

    Ash, distracted, looks at Tamamo, almost mirrors her expression, and says "What? Neither. I guess maybe I'm curious, but like, I'm not curious if. You all pretend like she's soooo normal and successful because she doesn't fuss herself with this kinda shit, but it's so obvious from the way you get all scared and tender about her that this isn't her first." Thumb-jerking at Lilian for emphasis somewhere less rude than direct pointing, Ash says "Like, you're not worried about her because of me. You're worried because you saw some shit in there that wasn't supposed to be there, didn't you?" They roll the one shoulder for emphasis. "Nice tat by the way."

    'Then we'll be as gracious as they were and hope that they're as polite as we were on their front door.'

    "While I perhaps even admire your sentiment and determination both, Mister Bond, to say nothing of how far you've come with them," Sakura says, smiling normally for a change. "That does assume that it is us who they find first, no?"

    'Does it?'

    "It does." Lilian says, without hesitation. "Reparation and closure are already horridly complicated things, but if the idea that things are only the way they are because you haven't surrendered something you don't understand to people you can't see for reasons you can't comprehend weren't frightening then we wouldn't have such an unkind Earth in the first place."

    "When we say that we want it to be kinder, we mean to ourselves; us ant those like us. Even I don't know how to extend that metaphor all the way to an 'infinite devil machine'."

    '... So blood's the only part of a person that isn't bullshit? No one's got cum that justifies itself?'

    "You and your fuckin' acausal cum weapons." Ash scoffs, shaking their head, instantly mystifying both Lilian and Sakura, neither of which quite get as far as asking. "I told you last time though. It bugs me too. It's like the clothes, right? How is blood not a part of the human?"
Lilian Rook     '... So it kind of makes sense that Exis would be the only one to look like that, huh.'

    "Excuse you." says Lilian. Sakura laughs. "Surely, I would imagine that 'the human which inspired the thought' would first be the target of imitation, before anything so grandly abstract as 'the substrate upon which personal truth is dyed' or 'the ocean of antiholographic principle'." Lilian looks at her, Sakura cops to it immediately with both hands raised, and says, pleased, "I happened to read a thing or two after you enthused so much about the workings of a black hole not long ago."

    'I mean, are wishes just sort of created, or are they taken?'

    "If that were the case, it'd have to have been someone who did it before any of us were born." Lilian says, blandly, but not uninterested. "Arthur had something similar to say about it when he spoke to the Tree in London. Or, the space monsters that spoke to it? But if it's about the Onslaught, then whatever exploiting that's gone on was done by bog standard human history."

    'I mean, that's so hard to imagine. A *Bloom*, being a *tsundere*?'

    "Everything you say should be romantic suicide. How the fuck have you ever gotten laid?"

    'You're gonna have to whisper more seductively than that to tempt me, devil.'

    Ash raises an eyebrow, then looks meaningfully at Lilian. "Tempting as that is, I can't be feeding my service dog anything strange, or they'll revoke my permit to bring her to work." "I keep forgetting that's literally a thing you did." "Thanks for calling me the devil, though. It means a lot to me."

    'We did all kind of, uh, give pretty much the exact astronomical coordinates of Earth, then raise a whole bunch of questions about why you four exist as you do at all, then leave.'

    Sakura . . . well, doesn't frown exactly, but her uneasy exhale and restless posture kinda conveys it all the same. "If such an eventuality arises, we have little choice but to ask Nika to intervene, don't we?"

    'Gimme your biceps and prove it.'

    Ash locks on to Petra's rookie error immediately. They're ready when she tries to catch it; which results in picking Petra up by grabbing both wrists at once, pulling her up off her feet with one hand, then lobbing her a foot into the air so that she has to catch the stupid fucking bicep curl they pull on the way down and dangle from it like a cat in a tree (all of two feet off the ground). "Lemme see. Gotta gauge if the houseboat can float your dense ass."

    'Mm, so, this is that to which people truly allude, when they say 'a slut.''

    Lilian leans on Tamamo's shoulder, coincidentally at the same time. "I think they're sort of cute though." she says, quietly. "Even if I can never quite figure out whether or not they're playing 'chicken'."

    '*And* too sexual.'

    "Gone wrong(?!)" Petra even gets a 'huhuhu' laugh.

    ... Lock that ward from the outside. Yeah.'

    It's the suddenness, rather than the vitriol, as such a departure from the present context and emotional tone, that gets Sakura to look almost worried at Petra. Then a little more worried at Lilian; who strenuously pretends to still be focused on something else, having failed to notice; which makes Sakura slightly more worried with Petra again. "If . . . things would be made more difficult, for any reason, then there's really no need to . . ." "What? No! No. It's fine. I'd love to have you along."
Lilian Rook     'This wasn't sustainable on first contact either, like.'

    "You made an okay impression." says Ash, breezing on by the sheer weight of what that implies without thinking. "Don't worry. Even if you can't admit it without everyone lighting you on fire, I appreciate that you're a greasy little creep for girls that get their Original Face on and go critical into an inner-truth deathblossom."

    'I would not have been surprised by the machinery of civilization being portrayed as something that produces infinite evil, by the Three Moons.'

    Lilian sighs, greatly upset (minor). "I hate saying this, but we really probably should try and learn more about what that place was like before." Which means . . . Dictum . . .

    'I should certainly like to know.'

    Exhaling in an oddly similar way, Sakura says, "Perhaps it may finally be time to see if Saeko truly knows nothing as she claims. If it were you . . ."

    'Explain *further*.'

    "Yeah cyborg. Explain further."

    'Also I don't know if you're really that much of an Earth-type?'

    "She has a great deal of fire and wood in her, but indeed, little earth." Sakura nods. "And I would hardly dream that anyone could ask Lady Tamamo such a thing."

    'Oh, hey, actually, have you done it to an Antegent? Blood too, or...'

    "Doesn't work like that." says Ash. "That happens when I-- remember what we talked about before? So it's like, the platonic quality of 'human'. So, 'Nah, this isn't human' makes humans just leave whatever they were holding and wearing and also their blood for some reason. Doing it to me just makes all the Tree-stuff switch places with the human meat. Doing it to a fuckin' rock or something obviously doesn't do anything. I tried to do 'Nah, this isn't Antegent' before, but, like, that's not a real thing. Y'know? That's not-- like a discrete quality. 'Antegent' doesn't have a paradigm; it's just 'monster' that's in vogue. And they sure as shit don't share one themselves. If they don't just ignore me then I stab 'em to death usual style. Then I make a little engraving on a band if I remember."

    '--and so even being as native as I was I was shown this subjective construction. Even welcoming... No, maybe, because it was so structured to be home-welcoming, I found myself feeling incredibly put out of place?'

    Perhaps it's because of that wavelength that Ash, despite Lilian's extremely attentive posture and careful expression of thought, absorbs, processes, and replies to Xion's struggle to grasp and name and paint the outline-of not only first, but confidently.

    "Yeah, yeah, 'cause that's a human hut. That's a little island they made to experiment on Adam number five thousand six hundred ninety two and see if they can housebreak him. It's just for you and just for me because it's 'just for' everyone because being part of anything bigger is banned so you can't delegate learning or thinking anything to place and time or anyone else. You can tell, right? They-- Anxis-- the feel is like they fucking hate losing track of a thought or being ignored or getting drowned out by someone else."
Lilian Rook     'Dark and water's my easiest element that's not - I didn't name it - 'Ruin' magic.'

    "Sick." "Don't be defensive. I like that much more than the equivalents I've heard. Much less 'non-elemental'." "Ever the auter, Lilian~" "H-huh?"

    'You never explained where you got your magic from, yeah! What comes easiest to you?'

    "Ugh. Fuck." Ash sighs, rolls their eyes away, and then roughly adjusts the braiding of one asymmetrical loop of hair. "I used to move around a lot. Place to place. Not between Urban Centers though; they wouldn't allow me in. If you've been outside they figure better safe than sorry and assume you're tainted with some Antegent shit that'll make all their bones explode. They only looked the other way when I had black market shit that someone wanted and then it was only 'I'm gonna blink and you're gonna be gone' kinda shit; and even that stopped when I got these." They roll that same shoulder again.

    "It was all little places. Old holdouts, small communities, little valleys and deltas and mountainsides where people are still truckin' on but everyone else tells you that there's no one out there and it's all wasteland. I'd roll in, and most times people would think I was crazy or desperate and try to help me out, so I'd help them out a little instead, y'know, odd jobs, maybe kill an Antegent that rolled close or something, and then 'cause I don't wanna take food off their table that they need and I don't, I'd just ask whoever there is to ask to teach me a thing or two as a payment thing instead." Their fingers fall to their neck, which they awkwardly scratch at. "Something to practice when I'm bored, kinda useful a lot of the time on the road, covers edge cases, and sorta felt like those 'roots' I'm supposed to have weren't fake."

    "Well, I'd hardly failed to notice that you must've been born to an Enlightened family." Lilian says. Ash scoffs quietly, but ostensibly at the choice of word rather than anything else. "I'm not going to ask. It's just obvious, given that you took to it at all, when the Letter Agency couldn't have possibly taught you anything. I'd barely seen you use any at all, but I suppose I've seldom seen you pushed to do anything but fight." "Yeah. Well. It's nothing like what Saeko or your parents taught either of you. Didn't need it and didn't ask for it."

    'I can try holding it, but I wouldn't even know what planting it entails. It's sort of... A seed we don't know the soil for. I could draw a medallion out of it? Matched set with the other one?'

    "I think that's a wonderful idea." says Sakura. She tries to clap her hands together, but it barely makes any noise. "Though I doubt it, should anything untoward become of you, I will be hapy to take responsibility for it." scary. "And as Lilian has sensibly expressed, there is only so much we can do to learn about it while we have only one, and cannot possibly replace it." This earns such immediate credit with Ash that--

    '...I'd wonder if you were related to the Monkey King, and maybe if you are you can tell me all about your 'black king bar'.'

    "Catch!"

    Amidst the storm of withering blows, the red dot prompt to knock off one of Xion's boss pips and force an animation cancel is the split second where Ash can just hurl the scary space object at her like it's haha funny. What their plan is after that, god only knows. "You get a pass, but just so you know, Widdle Wukong wishes he was built like me."
Angela ''Hey buddy you okay? Kinda started a 'nam stare for a second.''

"What's a 'nam stare?" Roland asks.

"They mean you look like you have had a past traumatic experience about 'the complex shit'." Tiphereth helpfully explains.

"Oh, yeah, the Meat Laundry, the Tomorrow's Window, the Thirteenth Month." Roland says. "It didn't really matter how tough we were we just sort of had to fumble through and figure out the rules as we went. If we just tried to overpower it with our augments, let me tell you, we'd end up hanging off the clothesline for sure. My old partner ended up a pretty cautious man because of all that." Roland babbles what probably sounds like a bunch of nonsense. "There's all sorts of weird shit where I'm at, if I'm lucky it's just something I gotta stick swords into."

Roland seems honestly pretty eager to complain about his past job.

"Those were all before Distortions, were they?" Tiphereth asks.

"There's all sorts of weird shit out there if you're involved with Fixer work." Roland goes on. "But yeah, most of Fixer work is actually learning when not to pick a fight--at least if you want to be a surviving Fixer instead of just a useful corpse at the end of the day."

And Roland would rather not be a useful corpse. Sometimes he feels like that's a bit of a rare trait.

''We really probably should try and learn more about what that place was like before.''

"Doesn't seem like a clock that can be turned back." Roland says. "But it does sound like it'd be good to know. Or at least, important to."

Roland cracks a grin, though, at the concept of acausal cum weapons but he doesn't chime in.
Lilian Rook     'Good to hear there's no disreputable particles to worry about!'

    Nika skids to a stop down the slope, giggles inscrutably, and says in an endearingly incompetent gravelly bouncer imitation voice "Welcome to the Gay Garden. How ¶disreputable¶ are yer particles?"

    'Nika!'

    "Petra!" Nika throws both hands up like there's going to be a double high five at the bottom. "Your particles are sooo ¶disreputable¶ today!"

    'We're talking about the Kepler gang.'

    "Yes! I was hoping!"

    'And also a little bit about the end of the world.'

    "That's kinda scary but at least ¶we have someone on it¶."

    'Also I was thinking about trying to convince Dictum to be cool hopefully sometime soon.'

    "!"

    'And also, on the topic of the end of the world but also because they've been ¶thirsty/lonely¶ about it this whole time, Ash is suggesting doing their thing to ¶challenge preconceptions¶ about everyone else in order to see ¶the shape of¶ ¶un-preconceived/the new fruit¶ for everyone.'

    "Oh! That's--!" For equally inscrutable reasons, Nika turns, folds her hands, imitation bows at Sakura, and says like she's always particularly wanted to do this bit, "Thank you for ¶offering/inviting/selecting¶ me for this ¶exclusive opportunity/teaser trailer/not forgetting my phone number¶!" and giggles to herself about it as she bounces back upright. "Is Dictum gonna come here? Are we gonna ¶text ABSOLUTELY NOT¶ the ¶Three Moons¶? Sakura said there was some kinda question? I wanna help! I was just talking to ¶the New Fruit¶ earlier and we both have ideas!"

    Before the point at which Sakura finishes asking "Hm? How?" and looking worriedly back down at the Muramasa of Distortions in her lap, the Fruit making contact with Xion's hands has--

    No apocalyptic consequences. Only Interesting ones.

    What reacts isn't Xion, but the Fruit. Momentarily so weightless that there's no feedback from catching it, then leaden heavy and balanced as though its center of gravity were a mile beneath the surface of the Earth, it stabilizes in Xion's hands at a point of feeling like somethng objectively massive that is yet so buouyant in Earth's atmosphere that she can manipulate it as if she were nudging it underwater. The garish, chemically metalloid neon surface, pitted both shades of copper chlorine, visibly writhes under her touch. From her finger contact, luminol lines spread fully around its circumference, pattern-strobing at tremendous frequency, until they join together as a compound code at their intersection.

    The next second, the surface turns wholly translucent. The lights, superimposed on jellied primordial darkness beneath the crust, briefly resemble the bottom of the ocean, yet only manage to imply the shape of something moving within before the skin reconstitutes itself; soft velvet black, checkered blinding white, jingling ethereally when moved, humming near-inaudibly when left still.
%
Lilian Rook     Its weight feels strangely reassuring. If you look at it closely, the faint powdered dusting on its surface implies that it's spinning. The magnetic field it gives off rhythmically tugs at iron buttons and chains, like a planetary core; one fit to replace a vast, empty-yawning nothingness inside oneself; to abhor nature's abhorrence of vacuum and forbid the impending collapse it so wishes for, by taking root at the center of things and usurping the ugly necessity of a player; a game might then play itself.

    Nika breaks her blank-rapt stare at the strobing with a blink, looks directly at Xion, and says, "Who's Kairi? Did you ask it to ¶excise the name¶?"
Arthur Lowell > Arthur: Experience familiar gravity

    Distracted and conversational, previously, he had been hung up on his memories of the Pylogons. "WHATEVER, twenty, ten, five, it's YEARS. COME ON! Point is, at least those guys STUCK OUT. Anyway, I--"

    Then he jolts in place, looks around repeatedly, then stares at Xion, her hands, and the thing in her hands. "*Slick?!*" He mutters to himself. "Or-- No that's wrong, but it's--" He's attuned to particular things that it's at least expressing in its incidental effects. "Shit they had something like that to spare? Or is that... 'fruit'. Christ. Right. Of course. A tree doesn't just exist to be upright and whatever, it wants to shed and spread *seeds*."

    He approaches, probing at it. "Enough oeuvre for a, not world or universe or whatever, it's enough for a *context*. How'd it react like that?" He isn't explaining what he's doing here. "Is that the idea? Sburbian Exchange Principle? Planet and the people die, but it produces at least one new..." He paces around Xion and that thing in her hands like a scared animal fascinated by a treat, or like a government agent around an alien crash site, or like a planet orbiting the sun.

    "Blooms make that? That process, that-- the *phenomenon* there, *that's* the end product, the fruit coming off the Bloom? Christ, feels like the Vast Croak again." Plenty of jargon. But whatever it was, it's got his focus completely and has totally changed the mood coming from him.
Tamamo     'One thing I thought about was that it... felt like a defensive posture, almost cloying.'

    Tamamo thinks back. "Yes. Yes, that... did feel like that, perhaps. It was a rather direct method of telling one, 'nothing is wrong. Everything here is normal. You are nowhere strange for you to be.' Assurances to the point of being unnatural. I do not know just what others saw or felt there, nor what their past 'guests' felt, but I will guess that it was as I did feel. We may guess, at their escape, that they were not satisfied with that sweetness." Or... lack of escape. She didn't look too closely at the body.

    'Like, you're not worried about her because of me. You're worried because you saw some shit in there that wasn't supposed to be there, didn't you?'

    "Is it that hard to believe that I would not want you using something on her that usually results in the subject exploding into blood? I understand that 'being invincible' can make this a bit difficult for you, but you can be rather dense when it comes to the safety of other people." She stops just shy of saying 'tell me again about how many people survive.'

    "I am concerned with keeping her viscera appropriately placed." She has, of course, checked for anything being inside Lilian that shouldn't be. Obviously.

    'Nice tat by the way.'

    Tamamo pauses. "It came out rather well, for being an amateur's work." 'Amateur's work' in only the most pedantic sense. "That matter has been neatly handled. There was 'cutting' that day, too, I suppose, and a leaving-behind."

    'If such an eventuality arises, we have little choice but to ask Nika to intervene, don't we?'

    With only trace unease, "Yes. There is great potential for a mess, and I would not understate it, otherwise."

    'I think they're sort of cute though.'

    Sighing in mood-recovery at Lilian's side, "I will allow it."

    'I hate saying this, but we really probably should try and learn more about what that place was like before.'

    "I would have liked to speak to Dictum before we even left, you know. It is really past time."

    'Christ, feels like the Vast Croak again.'

    Recognizing at least one term, Tamamo sees fit to explain to the room, "He means 'the creation of a new universe.'"
Petra Soroka "Were you not rather popular with dogs? The dog-people."

    "Well-- I meant with Blooms, but--" Petra tries to think about the first time she met any of Hiromi's miko rather than just Hiromi herself, who sort of dumpstered her on her first day in the Watch and then pawed at her to see if she was interesting. Wow that was so long ago. Holy shit.

    And the first impression she made on most of the miko was when she went with Cinder on that goofy little odyssey and got laughed at by them.... Really, it's only Chie that's approved of her on contact, and the rest of them just sense that she's, like, a scrappy but stupid domesticated cousin to the wolf. Tamamo can see Petra's expression slowly fall into embarrassment the longer she stays silent, mouth half open and finger raised.

    "... I *became* popular."

"I just wear my coats to deal with evil radiation."

    "Oh, yeah. Of course. That makes sense." This comes with zero sarcasm out of Petra, nodding understandingly. Coats exist to deflect projectiles, especially the invisible and small ones like cold or radiation.

    Really, despite her protests and despite the distance she does genuinely feel to it, the Instrumentality Foundation she grew up in operates on 30% gummispace logic. The reason why her weird psychic side effect of immunity to cancer is one of her go-to fun facts is because 'cancer' is like a weird status effect that people get, and it's awesome to have an innate immunity.

"Is that a thing? Why do you have special mechanics for specifically their beams?"

    "Oh, that's because if I survive I get stronger." Petra points to her shoulder to mime being struck by a projectile, at a spot that does actually happen to have a little divot of a scar in it. "I get shot by continually bigger girls every day until eventually I've completely transformed myself."

    Dropping her hand, Petra plops her palms onto her knees and wiggles them from side to side, idly waggling her legs while committing slightly more seriously to the conversation topic. It's something Ash at least doesn't know about at all, at least, and they and Xion are pretty much the two most likely people to find it interesting.

    "Nah, I just mean, like, because I'm, like, *super* sensitive to psychic-want stuff in general. I'm not exactly great at *being* psychic, but like-- well, to be clear, I was joking, but back when I was first surrounded by telepaths and stuff I was kind of always overstimulated out of my mind. And Blooms have the extra danger spice, because Blooms. Like--" Petra waves her hand in Lilian's direction. "It's kinda dangerous for *both* of us for me to use my power recklessly on Lilian, not that I can *only* be reckless or anything."
Petra Soroka "It came off as isolating, siloing away, quarantining."
"They-- Anxis-- the feel is like they fucking hate losing track of a thought or being ignored or getting drowned out by someone else."

    "Oh-- yeah!" Being looked-to prompts Petra to attention, because this *is* in fact a topic she spent time meditating on since the trip. Sort of obligatorally, after reflexively touching psychic tips with them in order to soothe her own temporary freakout.

    "That's sorta the vibe I got, kinda--" Distracted, Petra belatedly double takes, "Is Anxis what we're going with? And Unvic? Anxis sounds so similar to Exis."

    "Anyways, the whole isolation-siloing thing from Anxis was super freaky at first, but you have to keep in mind that everything a Bloom does is correct and morally good. So it felt-- the feeling I got out of it was--" Petra presses her hands in front of her face in deep thought, trying to conjure up words that make sense.

    "'The declaration of an individual existing in of themselves, being incompatible with and, like, eroded away by even observing the existence of other people.' Like, obsessive silhouetting of, um, the outline of a person, rather than that outline being overlapped or blurred or whatever. A little bit, um," Petra looks towards Lilian specifically, "A little bit Brammimond-style? Or-- there's a venn diagram between Anxis and *me*, and Brammimond's in the middle."

". . . and I agree that's fucked up, but it's been like three years, so . . ."

    In the middle of Ash's goofing around with Bond, Petra gestures incomprehensibly, and then emphatically blurts out, "Right?!" directed at no sentence in particular.

"You're worried because you saw some shit in there that wasn't supposed to be there, didn't you?"

    Well. Petra gave away that game a little bit already. *She'd* be fine talking about it with Ash, but she can't talk about things that Lilian isn't talking about. Lilian and Ash still need a Talk.

"Nice tat by the way."

    So instead she deflects by being a slut. "Well that's just good taste. Which is good to know you have, 'cause I've still gotta bring a tattoo gun over."

"How is blood not a part of the human?"

    Petra still has no idea, but this is the first time this topic's actually come up in front of Lilian, so she dimly turns towards her and attempts to connect fuzzy dots inside her head. "Like... some HTO-type shit...?"

"Surely, I would imagine that 'the human which inspired the thought' would first be the target of imitation, before anything so grandly abstract as 'the substrate upon which personal truth is dyed' or 'the ocean of antiholographic principle'."

    "Well, sure, but like-- the thought came to me that I just couldn't really imagine Lilian not having long hair. Like that." Petra never actually saw any of the physical manifestations that have happened with Lilian besides Exis, though.

"How the fuck have you ever gotten laid?"

    "Yeah? You tell me; is it my looks or my personality?"} The evil little gremlin snicker that accompanies her saying that doesn't make it *less* slutty of her.
Petra Soroka "Gotta gauge if the houseboat can float your dense ass."

    Nor does it help when she's dangling from Ash's bicep a minute later, yelping at the sudden pull and gripping onto the only thing they can. "Wah-- woah-?!" Adjusting her grip both on Ash's arm and on reality, Petra then digs her fingers in and pulls herself up using Ash's arm as a bar, to lift her face level with Ash's, extremely smug while she does so.

    "Well, *I* can pull some of my weight too. You were right, though. This *is* solid."

"If . . . things would be made more difficult, for any reason, then there's really no need to . . ."

    After probably being dropped to the ground unceremoniously like a toy, Petra scrambles back up to hastily reassure Sakura. "No, no, no, no! You should be there! It'll go fine."

"She has a great deal of fire and wood in her, but indeed, little earth."

    "Huh?" Petra's ears perk up at the shape of a sentence she feels like she should understand, with words she doesn't. "Is that a horoscopes-type thing? Like elements? I don't know this one."

". . . I'd just ask whoever there is to ask to teach me a thing or two as a payment thing instead."

    "Wait-- that's the cutest thing ever." Petra heard bits and pieces of the stories of Ash's wandering, and already fawned over the wandering quest-solver lifestyle, but the reward being *magic* is somehow even cuter to her.

    "That's like-- cute little folk magic tomes. You know? Right? I mean it's pretty likely that no one is ever going to travel the way you did ever again, right?"

"Your particles are sooo ¶disreputable¶ today!"

    "And more every day, hell yeah!" After the hi-five, Petra falls in with Nika, chattering with her in orbit of all the other goings-on.

    "So anyways, it's a crack team of experts on preventing the end of the world. Tamamo's gotta come by Hydrochoeria to talk to Dictum, but then hooopefully they'll be cool to come here...? It's really just that we have to convince them to be chill and I don't think there's any way to do that in a reasonable time frame without ¶a good-natured trick/spin around three times¶. They're kind of funny though. We just need to not ¶cause grief/talk business¶ too hard or they'll get too locked in, but also ¶business¶ is the topic."

    "I feel like, before talking to the Kepler Blooms again, we need to have some new reason why we're interesting, or else we'll get pedestrian. And that's probably bad for us." Not that Petra doesn't think that they're the most interesting topics in the world, but she can imagine very easily how the novelty of a 'half-committed Bloom' would shift from fascinating to irritating without development. "So what ideas do you have?"
Xion 'Miss Xion still knows the most of all of us.'

Sheepish, Xion gives Sakura a 'gosh, thanks,' look and a little sigh. "I don't think I know that much at all, really. It's... Well, I was making all those references to skeletons before, and, um." She looks at her keychain on wrist, distracted. "They're familiar, and it's been with me since then, but I've not unlocked something new in me. Or - I've absorbed what it is completely, and I can't describe myself from neutral as anything but myself. I saw a vision, and learned I could connect, and it made things so complicated, this trail of where I reached out to touch where Lilian's medallion was, and then didn't -- but I remember doing it anyway, hazy -- and I received something like a medallion in the mail shortly after. It's been like I was tugged along, or called, drew it to me or was drawn in by gravity, and now..." She shrugs. She doesn't know! It's a lot.

"It doesn't speak to me, but it does come out when I need to draw on things. It and I share a sort of attraction," Draining, withering to naught and the magical varieties. Xion winces. "-my go-to magics being Gravity spells anyway. Or, at least, have been for a while. More than anything, sometimes, swords are a language. Ash knows, even if we weren't really talking at the time." And even if she was using spears, in their ineffective scuffles.

'I hate saying this, but we really probably should try and learn more about what that place was like before.'

"I had been thinking about that, actually, and we might not want to say everything that happened. Especially not the fruit, right? They might try to use powers and beams on it, and it feels like playing all sides, but... you're... not wrong?" Xion works down to, before shaking her head and shrugging. "I'll back you up, but maybe we should talk about what's obviously stupid to say before we go so we all don't say it."

'That happens when I-- remember what we talked about before?'

Xion smiles bashful. "Sorry. I forget, and I was thinking about a lot, so I go to my honest first response instead. But I was thinking about blood. Isn't this that same black cherry red?" She asks, lifting wrist to present charm-ball. "Maybe it's that essential element, the fluid of it, that majority element, that blood specifically becomes this essentialized truth of the person? And if blood can *hold* an essentialized truth, maybe that's an axial that it can be compass-walked a full measure from one spectrum to the other. Does... crystalglass hold it?"

Xion looks at Ash. Xion goes crosseyed looking at the dangling charm between them. Primordial red, motive in the sphere despite dangling still from chain, Xion doesn't focus on the color but the crystal, and then drops her wrist to look at Petra.

"Petra *you* did it already. You've done the thing! All the Blooms do it, yes, and you and I have knight armors to hold us in of a material that would," Sting Silver, Xion's mentioned masked armor and bare-soul blades in addition to countless medallions. "But more than that, *you* flip around and enter//are surrounded by crystalglass, aren't you? Imagine -- imagine your disreputable particles ceasing to be observed and becoming essentially 'Petra' to be distributed within the Beauty of Ash. That's the same thing! The - the juice!" Xion can't help but exclaim this.

"I wonder if the surface of a Rivet's core is a similar material. Oh, that makes the cracking add a *spilling*, venting, leaking aspect, a beam refractoring into a concentrated cone off the impact to irradiate those that come into contact to you with all your evil wigglebars and chemistry diagrams." Xion carries on, escaping even logic for pure gutting through what she knows is true.
Xion 'Yeah, yeah, 'cause that's a human hut.'

People getting her eases Xion's mood quite a bit, having been worried she was just far afield blathering about nothing. With assurance that what she felt was more valid by more professional-by-duration feelers, Xion continues on that thought:

"I know, Petra would say I shouldn't take it as an insult or some directed aggression. She does say, actually!" She corrects quickly, then gets thoughtful again with shift of crossed arms. "I felt fairly seen, and I think I even reached them, with my ability to connect and communicate and the translation going on, so I'm not dissatisfied, but..." Xion refocuses. "No, I think cloying aside, maybe I shouldn't be worried about things being sweet if I'm being provided for. We were sent along with something, and we weren't hurt for coming or going. We're very plus, and I think that's good." Past a point, Xion is talking through it for herself.

'How ¶disreputable¶ are yer particles?'

"Oh, extremely disreputable. Downright wiggly." Xion confirms with a laugh at the salty impression. Petra claims to have incredibly disreputable particles and she cannot find room to argue.

"Also, it's not a horoscopes thing, it's a magical element affinity thing. Which is like horoscopes but it determines what color the trails of light that come off you look like. That's why I'm mostly purple, it's the typing theme. Also because it works? Weirdly it always seems to work."

'I think that's a wonderful idea.'

"Oh nice," Xion laughs, charmed by seemingly batting a thousand with Sakura today and failing her temperance roll to not be a little relieved at being told she's a big stupid idiot.

'Catch!'

When she's lashing Ash with withering blows (social), primal reflexes activates in Xion. Her perception of time slows down. Her pupils dilate, and she visually acquires Ash in a single snap frame, accelerating to a blur of motion as the shockwave of Ash's staggering throw impacts palm. Xion smoothly takes the force and--

Palmcatches the orb in her once-offered hand, coming down from sakuga mode with a faint puff of steam and faint release of tension from her loose shirt as her own belligerent parbicles gathered into fighting arrangement. Turning to hold the fruit in hand, she's immediately captured by the mesmeric orb's relighting, though her hand's orbit moves as slow as if carefully palming the edge of a much much grander sphere of weight. Exaggerated in motion she is careful to even bring other hand close, trying carefully not to disturb what's happening despite immediately understanding. . .

It takes on the appearance of 'her' in leitmotif, checkerboards and keychains, and for a moment she imagines what it would be to plant the seed within herself -- was that what it was for? As someone who had once completely lacked a Heart holding herself together, the luring premise of a full and whole replacement ignites a deeply set yearning in her very vibrational frequency and she blinks to her senses with the sphere close to breast and staring into the surface.

Swallowing and moving it away from herself, though Sakura knows something happened anyway, she clears her throat and looks to Ash. "Were you getting a signal from this thing? It's..." Ash had handled it so casually. "A little loud? Oh, this is a dangerous object..." She states like a cursed artifact with a fantastic positive bonus and no downside worth mentioning at all was before her, fond and wanting.

"I asked you, Ask, to share with me a light and to see what color we'd make but this is very special, thank you." She murmurs, quieter, struck by a memory seeing the changing of colors in translucency, and seeing past them to hear and understand what's in her hand. Intoxicated, she raises her head.
Xion 'Slick?!'

She knows he means the frog, intuitively, instantly, but for a second she sparks an answer to that name and focuses on Arthur as he orbits her object and she holds it out so he can peer deeply. It's hard to place why, but she follows Tamamo's meaning for a moment. "A whole universe? It's like a Heart -- oh is this what Blooming is? Fruit of the flower, is this planting the new premise?"

'Who's Kairi? Did you ask it to ¶excise the name¶?'

"Kairi is... The person whose memories I inherited to help form the Heart I made out of all my medallions. She wasn't excised -- um, by me. It's someone else who let me have them all, and keep my name, since she didn't want them any more." She's shielding someone else's name. "Most Nobodies have memories of someone who they were, but I didn't have any. So, I didn't have any contexts. For anything. At some point, though I became more selfish. It came with being more myself. She was one of my first influences, before I even received all of her memories. You know, soon after starting out I learned hate completely from a Carapacian named Jack? I think I've been questing with Arthur for a long while now, I've just loudly realized."
Lilian Rook     'Oh, yeah, the Meat Laundry, the Tomorrow's Window, the Thirteenth Month.'

    "Holy shit those are the sickest names. Half the names they give Antegent are stupid as fuck." Ash says, already losing their own point. "I mean like 'Mother of Ghosts' and 'Death of the Heavens' are bar-setters, they can't all be that good, but basically anything below 'Dragon' tier or whatever is like a slip'n'slide of boring or dumbfuck designations." Ash why the fuck do you have opinions on this.

    "'Cycle of Tears'? Nice. 'Ode to Sin'? Sick. 'Eater of the Earth'? Pretty good. 'Count to Ten'? Weird and ominous. 'The Pit'? Ominous as fuck. But like, 'Big Dog'? 'Blood Malus'? 'Rabbit's Foot'? 'Knucklebones'? 'Dialup'? 'Stingray'? Lame. Lazy." "Trite. Contrived. Puerile. Resolutely shit." "Yeah yeah pop off art critic! I bet the grunts think they're sooooo stoic and cool."

    'There's all sorts of weird shit out there if you're involved with Fixer work.'

    "Yeah you'll do fine. Even without a hull breach to plug with your ass!"

    'Doesn't seem like a clock that can be turned back.'

    Sakura wears a dissociative stare into the distance. Nika and Lilian both frown deeply at Roland.

    '*Slick?!*'

    "Nah, too overdone to be slick." Ash is still engaged in critic mode, but Lilian starts softly groaning and furiously snapping her fingers to try and conjure back old knowledge that was one stupid bullshit she barely paid attention to. "The . . . frog universe thing?" "Frogverse. Frogger Cinematic Universe." "That's more or less how it came across at the time, yes." "eh."

    'Shit they had something like that to spare? Or is that... 'fruit'.'
    "Bro you can't be saying that." "You can't say that anymore."

    'Enough oeuvre for a, not world or universe or whatever, it's enough for a *context*. How'd it react like that?'

    Lilian slowly starts to realize that Arthur is serious, and the smug grin at simultaneously saying the same thing slides off her face. Sakura folds her hands together, and grimly wrings her fingers below her waist.

    'Blooms make that? That process, that-- the *phenomenon* there, *that's* the end product, the fruit coming off the Bloom?'

    "I think that I would very much prefer to believe that the people are the 'end product'." Sakura says, almost too quietly to hear, with strangely intense feeling. "It's just an analogy that Saeko and Scáthach both like. We're supposed to be 'proof of what humanity has fashioned, whether by love or injustice, containing the history of their virtues and sins', according to the one I know who said it. If those of that faraway place, or perhaps just the one, have an interest in sharing their . . . gifts, or, perhaps, in 'uplifting' the humanity they remember, I think that's as much an end product as art. People have lived and died in the course of history to bring 'us' about, but--"
Lilian Rook     Sakura tightly clenches her hands together, waxing strange and bitter in the first time you've ever seen her take so readily to 'us'. "-- we weren't born just to make a thing like that. We don't exist just to produce something to be consumed again." Lilian, perhaps at a loss for the right words, yet intensely, irresistably propelled by hers, places a hand on Sakura's shoulder, squeezes with a complicated expression on her face, and then hesitantly moves to slip her arm under hers instead; the only way she knows to quietly comfort anyone in public, even if it's only Tamamo.

    'Yes. Yes, that... did feel like that, perhaps. It was a rather direct method of telling one, 'nothing is wrong. Everything here is normal. You are nowhere strange for you to be. Assurances to the point of being unnatural.'

    "I think ¶hyperpop/enamel and plastic¶ really hates 'natural'." Nika says. She tilts her head and stares off into the middle distance as she considers trying to explain her reasoning, then gives up. "If they were bringing or making people there to test stuff then it's kinda important they'd have to not ¶oh god I've gotta get out of here¶ y'know? I guess it didn't work much because the 'Gate was a whole problem but like ¶it can't be helped¶. I think ¶weaning off¶ ¶appeal to nature¶ is probably really hard."

    'Is it that hard to believe that I would not want you using something on her that usually results in the subject exploding into blood?'

    "What?" Ash stares blankly at Tamamo for a second. "I meant why you went to Kepler at all. Why you suddenly got all interested and urgent. I'm not dense, I just don't give a fuck about ninety-nine point nine percent of people beause they suck. I'm not gonna 'explode her viscera' or whatever."

    'That matter has been neatly handled. There was 'cutting' that day, too, I suppose, and a leaving-behind.'

    "Every once in a great while, I feel a bit sorry for Exis, and I don't know what I can possibly 'give' her to make up for it. But then I remember her usual behaviour and think perhaps she deserves it." Lilian says, fully well knowing she could replace 'she' with 'I' and it'd be exactly the same sentiment.

    'He means 'the creation of a new universe.''

    "Oh." "Pfft what?" "That's . . . so stupid." "Well, it's also, like, the single most heavily foreshadowed possibility. So."

    '... I *became* popular.'

    "You're welcome by the way."

    'I get shot by continually bigger girls every day until eventually I've completely transformed myself.'

    "Beckies swerve." "True but gross. Don't just say that."

    'I was joking, but back when I was first surrounded by telepaths and stuff I was kind of always overstimulated out of my mind.'

    Lilian slots a new fact into her now-slightly-less incomplete picture of Petra's time at the Instrumentality Foundation. "Huh. That's sort of fascinating." she says. "I hate most crowds too." she adds, with unclear purpose.

    'Is Anxis what we're going with? And Unvic? Anxis sounds so similar to Exis.'

    "Come with your own then. Pedantic bitch. I ain't saying Axis."
Lilian Rook     'Anyways, the whole isolation-siloing thing from Anxis was super freaky at first, but you have to keep in mind that everything a Bloom does is correct and morally good.'

    Sakura smiles, nodding wisely in approval.

    ''The declaration of an individual existing in of themselves, being incompatible with and, like, eroded away by even observing the existence of other people.''

    "Yeah, it was lik, 'holy shit, let me ¶hear my own thoughts¶ for a second'. Like being so mad at your stupid ¶credulous/stuck in their ways/psyop/middle of the pack¶ adults that you wanna blast ¶the news¶ out of their brains."

    'Right?!'

    "I'm twenty?" Nika says, only slightly confused. "I could drive a car. I could go on dates. I can 'smash a brewski' in this country." "Imagine waiting to be legal." "I-- Come on. Please." "Yeah didn't think that through."

    'Which is good to know you have, 'cause I've still gotta bring a tattoo gun over.'

    "But watch out!"

    'Like... some HTO-type shit...?'

    "Yeah I mean . . . probably?" Ash says, uncertain. "It's not like you can really tell blood is blood when it's out of the human. Like that's true for spit and bile and stuff too but that shit doesn't have an 'esoteric structure' or whatever." They only sound a little bit convinced.

    'Well, sure, but like-- the thought came to me that I just couldn't really imagine Lilian not having long hair. Like that.'

    "Admittedly, myself either." Sakura says, still holding Lilian's arm. Lilian looks at her, and hesitantly says "I could pull it off. I just don't want to." Ash looks vaguely confused, as does Nika, but Ash is the one who speaks up with "You calling her vain or something?"

    'Yeah? You tell me; is it my looks or my personality?'

    "Ease of use."

    'Well, *I* can pull some of my weight too. You were right, though. This *is* solid.'

    Ash takes one (1) point of psychic damage at seeing Petra hoist herself up like an aggressive little whore.

    'No, no, no, no! You should be there! It'll go fine.'

    "Well . . . far be it from me not to trust you on these matters." Sakura says. Lilian completely misses how easily convinced Sakura was. Nika doesn't, staring and making eyes at Petra back and forth.

    'Wait-- that's the cutest thing ever.'

    "Mannn fuck off." Ash grouses, shaking Petra loose of their bicep. "I ain't writing tomes." The idea that no one will ever travel the same way is not only unchallenged, but a practical distraction. "No one travels like me anyways. Not just because they aren't as strong and invincible and sexy even. The distance is big enough you need a car, and if it's an old car, then it needs gas, and you sure don't fucking have that, and if it's a new car, you're never gonna find another one when you break it. Some places have horses where it isn't dangerous as shit; they even train them not to freak the fuck out about antegent shit at night so you can wake up alive, but you're not exactly gonna be finding oats out there."

    'So anyways, it's a crack team of experts on preventing the end of the world. Tamamo's gotta come by Hydrochoeria to talk to Dictum, but then hooopefully they'll be cool to come here...?'

    "Can I come too?" asks Nika, hastily correcting herself in an odd wya to "To ¶fly on the wall¶ and not just play around? Or after?"
Lilian Rook     'I feel like, before talking to the Kepler Blooms again, we need to have some new reason why we're interesting, or else we'll get pedestrian. And that's probably bad for us.'

    Nika goes quiet for a little while. "I kinda felt like ¶foreign exchange student/charming lost tourist¶ the whole time." says the girl who was singlehandedly enabling communication at all. Her ideas come to her in dazed fragments and bits of thread after seeing Xion interact with the 'Fruit'.

    "Oh uh. I think it's kinda nice when someone sees your ¶best time/cool build/clean moves/competitive VOD¶ and starts trying to like ¶imitate/innovate¶ right? So if we had to do it again I think I'd wanna be ¶I got into it from watching you!¶ instead, even if it's real small."

    'I reached out to touch where Lilian's medallion was, and then didn't -- but I remember doing it anyway, hazy -- and I received something like a medallion in the mail shortly after. It's been like I was tugged along, or called, drew it to me or was drawn in by gravity, and now...'

    Sakura was being politely enthusiastic. She meant to cheer Xion up, she meant to keep her included, and she meant the contents of the words she actually said, too. Hearing that answer, her lips twitch, then remain completely steady; her eyelashes flutter, and her stare remains unbroken; a sort of darkness comes over her features as they don't change. "If I may beg your pardon, Miss Xion, this sounds like something that should be approached sooner rather than later. Dismiss it as only my intuition if it suits you, but I think that you may be describing something that may become a deadly vulnerability if we are to pursue this line."

    'Isn't this that same black cherry red?'

    Ash stares at the ornament, then blurts out "Are we connecting the rivet things with blood because they're both red? Seriously? Is that where we're at?" Lilian clears her throat and inexplicably says "My apologies. They were raised by humans." which seems to abstractly piss Ash off with the correct read while they try to imagine whatever Lilian's was. "Okay art critic, gimme your sapphic deconstruction blog post about blood that totally explains everything and I'll definitely give you an upvote."

    'And if blood can *hold* an essentialized truth, maybe that's an axial that it can be compass-walked a full measure from one spectrum to the other.'

    Lilian shrugs. "That was sort of it." Ash says "English please." and Lilian switches to Japanese to be embarrassingly passive-aggressive. "What if blood came before humans, in the sense of blood being unaltered since its ontological conception and the human design being built around it as a chassis to a medium?"

    'I wonder if the surface of a Rivet's core is a similar material.'

    "I've never come to posses one. But surely, not so far from here . . ."
Lilian Rook     'Kairi is... The person whose memories I inherited to help form the Heart I made out of all my medallions. She wasn't excised -- um, by me. It's someone else who let me have them all, and keep my name, since she didn't want them any more.'

    "Oh." says Nika. "That's scary." she decides a second later. "I think the ¶new fruit¶ thinks you're ¶it's just unnatural!¶ for a Nobody or maybe thinks you think you are and that's ¶in vogue/the new age/the whole point¶. I guess it's kinda obvie what it'd do now."

    And because it's so obvie, she doesn't think to explain. "Okay I should go get my stuff if we're gonna ¶text ABSOLUTELY NOT¶ Dictum!"