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Lilian Rook	As if to compensate for the relaxation improbably enjoyed aboard the Respite before and after Kepler (Arthur Lowell dropping dead notwithstanding), everything to do with the apple-sized question on everybody's hands has been relentlessly busy. The meeting discussing it the first time lead to Lilian taking it to the LSCC to be studied, which was first preceded in the middle by Sakura insisting on making sure it could be restored if anything went wrong, then taking a journal on the four of them individually holding it.     Then the first look-over from the cryptography team lead to a demand for samples, which leads to more, separate work to be overseen, whilst Petra and Tamamo acted on the immediate, emergent need to ask Dictum a lot of very important questions. Xion is now engaged a brand new Quest with Sakura's cryptic approval, which no one has had time to do much more than think about starting on, much less Arthur's much longer-standing, adjacently-cleaving issue, much less the original one, which was Dictum's claim that Lilian still has observable and diagnosable aftereffects from her brush with 'the Syndrome' that can't be left alone.     Now an entire unfinished semi-scientific pseudomemoir series and over a solid week of random pervert researchers conducting individual tests with the samples between their actually LSCC-assigned tasks later (plus only somewhat related houseboat time and taking notes on the 'other Xion' phenomenon), there are twenty times the original number of viable leads and no more reason at all to suspect that there is anywhere safe to keep the souvenir and anything safe to proceed with.     It all leads into a frustratingly culmination of having too much to talk about with nothing conclusive in any of it. So here you are again. With another excuse to go to the beach. Darn.     The 'New Fruit' is back inside its tempered glass box, floating between the eight corner magnets in a fashion that really has no impact on its presumed safety, but which greatly enriches Nika, who came up with and assembled the thing under the auspices of 'this way it can't touch anyone'. You arrive to an ongoing conversation between her and Ash about whether it should be put out to sea, on an anchored platform of some kind, which Nika contends would be cool and Ash contends would be more inconvenient than just leaving it on the houseboat.     Both seem to feel comfortable doing so at a hexagonal table that was designed for playing cards, now serving as a place to put chairs and a simple railing on the spot where Sakura always seems to watch Nika from; the one by the rough path down from the manorhouse, which is now raised up off the sand by a wooden deck that screams 'resting spot along a hiking trail in a state park'. All it really needs is a coat of hideous green paint on a bench somewhere. The conversation involves pushing the cube back and forth such that it slots into each corner of the hexagon in some pattern the two of them have either memorized or fallen into.     It's a burning-bright day. Unlike last year, you can actually hear the sounds of cicadas and grasshoppers, if you listen. A handful of people are retreating from the layered fields off to the cliff wall, either by coincidence or because it's an unwritten rule not to run farming machinery when Sakura is coming outside. The babble of the village uphill is drowned out by the waves, driven by a strong ocean wind that breaks on the nearer cliff and trickles in as a humid salt breeze.
Xion	Xion's quest, somewhat pressing, somewhat awkward, was one consumed more of her time, idle slopgrinding on phone app heroing services ditched entirely for a dedicated search. Yet, it was a challenge almost impossible to pin down to search 'for herself' out in the world. In the infinite Multiverse, Xion herself could be anywhere doing anything and so could her alternate... Yet she kept returning to her own world to search. For a meeting about the Fruit, though, Xion returns, dressed down to black shorts and monochrome thong flipflops, with a red t-shirt and empty black star on it and black edging at sleeve, neck, and hem. She walks around bearing keychains off her waist as usual, the casual wear of her heart-weapons, with the glass sphere of primordial crimson chained in black besides the pale gold cross on gold chain off the same beltloop. "Remember when you asked about how I linked the self-evident blood with the rivet-fluid?" Xion asks Ash, thumbs in shortspockets and at a conversational mosey. She had moseyed her whole way up, casual since Ash was just hanging around, and not really able to report anything to Sakura so slouching around instead. Xion tilts her head to look around Ash's back and see Nika, smiling. "Oh, sorry Nika. I think putting the New Fruit out there somewhere feels... worse than keeping it around? Like a strange, avoidant form of 'at arm's length'?" She re-lanes into the present conversation.
Arthur Lowell	> Arthur: Should it be out to sea or on a boat?     "I could CAPTCHALOGUE it." Arthur contributes, as he's suddenly there. "NO-TOUCH ACCESS. Long as you don't RIP THE CARD EARLY you're gold on keeping it POCKETED." > Arthur: They don't know what captchaloguing is.     "Sorry, I meant, I could CAPTCHALOGUE it in my SYLLADEX with my FETCH MODUS so you can have it in a CAPTCHALOGUE CARD." > Arthur: That's less helpful.     His teeth gleam when his sunglasses shine in the brilliant light. > Arthur: Move the conversation forward!!     "So you got some LOWDOWN from SPEAK N' SPILL I hope? We get an ART THEORY PERSPECTIVE on this biz or whatever it was?" He's surprisingly less contemptuous of the idea of an actual art-theory interpretation of the artifact, given the circumstances.     He's got beachwear! No sense in anything besides trunks, though the fact that he's been accumulating multiple eternities worth of cosmetic rewards means that his God Hood's idea of beachwear sometimes is a big over-accessorized -- the hat's excessive, the neckwear is too many at once, the sunglasses are too eye-catching, the texture of the trunks is too complex. > Arthur: Forgot your sunscreen?     At one point someone might realize he's reached up, turned some sort of dial in the air. There's no indicator of what that was, until about eight and a half minutes later when the sun flickers very slightly and immediately stops producing certain ranges of ultraviolet light in just this area, making sunscreen redundant.
Xion	'I could CAPTCHALOGUE it.' Xion fingerguns at Arthur. "Maybe! But would that involve you accepting it into yourself? I mean... I don't think I'd mind you trying it? Sakura's here. But I could just as easily put it in my inventory, except, that's either metaphysically 'in' me too, or, is even worse than putting it out at sea because it's parazonally exiled." Xion sighs, shaking her head and shrugging. "Do you think it'd make a weird card?" She asks, faintly curious.
Lilian Rook	If you look, Nika's little fishing boat is, actually, tied to the side of the houseboat platform, the docking of which must still be under construction. She has her waders on the deck next to her, but she surely cannot possibly intend to wear the overalls in the heat. Even she stripped down to a faded pink t-shirt (featuring a gaggle of chibi creatures of some kind carrying forth the raised banner of some organization or event you've never heard of) and jean shorts that were once normal but are rapidly becoming 'distressed'. Ash decided to change absolutely nothing except digging up a shirt that says 'HAMBERGER FRIEND !I am happy when I eat him!' that they've sewn a military patch into the text of, some fuckass wide-brimmed hat currently serving as a back accessory, and a mall ninja tactical arm carry pouch that is currently holstering a Nintendo 3DS and covered in tote bag pins.     Lilian has to trot down the stone-then-log steps as the first Warpgate entry blinker goes off inside, carrying out a tablet computer under her arm and a folded beach parasol under the other, apparently having just come off her LSCC shift, tied up her hair, thrown on a chartreuse-white-green summer halter-miniskirt-sandals ensemble, and rushed back out. Sakura follows her at a slower remove, and though she can't possibly get away with dressing as casually as she did at Laplace here, she haggled down to a yukata-over-juban because she wanted to use the beach hat Lilian got her.     "Christ. That took forever. Sorry, sorry, I've got the whole battery with me but these people can't summarize a report to save their godforsaken lives."     "Latest episode of infiltrating the wagies, spy thriller."     "Hi! It's totally okay. Even if you read them all and ¶English please?¶ I kinda wasn't gonna listen anyways."     "Really? Because I've made arrangements to take you there next, you know. As soon as they ask for my 'linguistics specialist'."     "Really? It's not gonna be like Petra right?"     "Like with the 'surgically grafted dog tail' thing or with the 'look at my funny animal' thing?"     "I guess either. I'm just ¶clearing up/warning you¶. I don't wanna go if they're ¶primed¶ to ¶your little friends!¶ like sorry but you know."     "No no. Don't worry. They're actually total freaks. They'd never get a job outside that place."     "Oh awesome."     "I better see you buy something at least as nice as that cherry branch hairpin if you're taking her."     "What? I didn't buy Sakura that. Didn't she just have it in a box somewhere?"     "Are you ¶serious/high¶?"
Lilian Rook	The lady of the thirty-seconds makes her way down the stairs just as Lilian is prodding the cube out of the way and setting down her tablet. "I apologize for keeping you all. There was some business I had to--" Sakura gets that far before Ash says "Nah it's cool. You'd have fucking melted in all those layers. I get it." and waves the worry off, to which Sakura smiles. Lilian reaches across the table, saying "One second please." as she properly attaches the parasol to the railing hoist and flips it open.     Ash goes "Aw fuck now it's dark in here." on cue, which makes Nika snort into her hand. Sakura breathes a "Thank you very much." in relief, and moves to an empty seat, which Lilian takes the back of and smoothly pulls out for her, picking up her tablet in the crook of her other arm and having to scroll through it with her pinky nail. With her eyes moving back and forth across the screen, she doesn't notice Sakura still standing there, not Nika staring bug-eyed between the two of them with her hand over her mouth, nor Ash nodding at Sakura while trying not to laugh. Sakura whispers "Thank you." as if it might break a spell, and sits down.     'I could CAPTCHALOGUE it.'     "Oh god not this again." Lilian groans, and finally looks up from the screen.     'Remember when you asked about how I linked the self-evident blood with the rivet-fluid?'     It's actually Ash who jumps on it first, continuing the inertia of the moment in a very deliberate way. "Yeah? And now you're gonna tell me that you sucked on one like a lollipop until you got to the gooey flavour center and it tastes the same, right?"     'I think putting the New Fruit out there somewhere feels... worse than keeping it around?'     Nika slouches forward across the table, oozing her arms out until she can touch the cube with her fingertips. "But it's so boriiiiing keeping it on a shelf!"
Tamamo	Tamamo's had so much to do. She has, for one, read through the entirety of a journal she now badly needs to talk about, but also kind of doesn't want to reveal to any of the four people who could most be affected by its contents. One of those four is Lilian, and she's extra-reluctant in that case for the obvious reason. There follows Ash, whom she's unlike to tell because it might be exciting in a different sense. She really needs to--     Well. It could be called 'unlikely,' but it really isn't. Petra's spoken more to Dictum than anyone else here. If anything, that's the natural choice.     . . .     It's a bright, burning day, and Tamamo hasn't decided to take the plunge from beach to water, but she's perilously close. The oversized white t-shirt and brightly colored, blues and oranges sarong are there for decency's sake just up until revealing her swimsuit becomes appropriate, if it does. Her 'sandals' are really just high-soled geta again, but with enough pearl, coral, and starfish beads along the thongs to match the vibe, along with that huge-brimmed straw hat.     She doesn't have a drink yet, but she's sent someone to fetch a few of something refreshingly cold. In the meantime, she's sitting, one leg crossed over the other, at the table close enough to Nika. Somehow, Arthur and Xion are helping her relax off thinking about the journal. Mostly.     No, not 'somehow.' It's a simple matter of enjoying company.     'So you got some LOWDOWN from SPEAK N' SPILL I hope?'     "We did speak, and learned a few things." She's thinking about how much of it, or which parts, or which parts first, it would be safest to bring up. "However, I have not learned more of the supposed malady we left to remedy." That's really the firstly important bit, isn't it.
Angela	Neither Roland nor Tiphereth have even really talked to Dictum! Roland, at this point, isn't really sure why he's around except for company. For a mission where he was supposedly a hire hand meant to help deal with any possible trouble, there really hasn't been any trouble for him to fend off. And he certainly doesn't have that much of a stake in the New Fruit. If anything it's a little scary for him in the way that any Singularity would be except maybe even more so since from what he's managed to get about it, it's considerably spookier than any Singularity in terms of what it could lead to. Besides, he likes LIlian, and frankly he's starting to like these Blooms that he's been slowly getting to know. To see them bounce off each other reminds him of his old times at the Charles Office and how, for a time, that was as close to heaven as he could imagine. But at a distance like this, it feels a bit more like mockery. All his comrades have drifted apart if they haven't outright died. The ambiguity of what they actually intend to do with this thing is a little scary for other more personal reasons. What if they all become their perfect selves and abscond into the multiverse or whatever after turning their world topsy turvy so down is up and he loses one of his few remaining links that make it feel like Angelica is still in this world? In a way, it'd make what he has left to do easy. But he still feels like he has so much to say, so much to confess, a ghost of a life that he can still see the mirage of. His adventures here could end today when they decide exactly what to do and step off into adventures he cannot even imagine and so he is feeling a little somber about it all, even as he worries that it's just all something he just doesn't get and never could because he's kind of an idiot. Tiphereth meanwhile is excited at the prospect of an augmentation of meaning, a growth of existence and it's purpose, and a trueness of self buried deep under expectations and lessons that slowly chipped away at your self. It's arguably what her brother burned himself up for and having spent some time with the Blooms having followed their journey, for the first time she's starting to understand why Enoch tried at all. If only he could have embraced a fruit like this. Some part of her hopes that maybe he didn't die. Maybe he just left behind what he no longer needed and he was out there somewhere between worlds discovering and embracing sides of his self that he could never see with the City's lights and smog blinding out the stars. Maybe one of them will eat it today. Or they'll split it into four pieces and something incredible will happen? She is hopeful that whatever conclusion they come to, that her friends will find meaning and joy in the answer. And if they find meaning and joy in the answer, maybe she can come a little closer to understanding her own meaning and her own joy and discover something about what it means to BE that The City could never teach her, no matter how many books Angela shares with her. Angela herself is somewhere between these points of view, and also on an Angelapad, though she is in her room with the upside down tree and wearing a bathing suit despite not having any beaches largely to be supportive of the environment she is looking at through the video. She is sitting under the tree and reading rather than stoically staring through the video screen to see what's going on though. Roland is wearing shorts and a tanktop that has a friendly skeleton on it holding its head in its hands and looking invested and a pair of sandles. Tiphereth is wearing a sunhat and yellow one piece bathingsuit with a ribbon attached at the hip. She is the one holding said Angelapad in her hands and is humming to herself quietly. Maybe she intends to take a dip after all this. They both moved pretty quickly to find a place to sit.
Angela	"What would happen if you did the uh--Alchemitizing to it?" Roland asks Arthur with morbid curiousity. "Let's not make silly suggestions." Angela says, automatically assuming it's silly because that feels like such a wild gamble. ''Like with the surgically grafted dog tail'' r"I am curious about the tail." Angela admits. "What is going on with the tail?" Angela's expression is still neutral as ever. "Do tails just sometimes happen now?"
James Bond	Bond arrives, navy duffel bag slung over one shoulder. His cornflower blue swim shorts end well in advance of his knees--together with the fully unbuttoned ecru cabana shirt, they leave little to the imagination in a way that's different than just not wearing a shirt at all. "Ash. Nika. It's good to see you again."     Shrugging the duffel bag off to set it down out of the way, he pulls up a chair and takes a seat. Like a strange, avoidant form of 'at arm's length'?     And what would the problem with that be? He doesn't speak the thought immediately, chewing silently on it instead. "I trust any of you with it. The fact remains that a boathouse, even one that belongs to Ash, isn't the most secure place imaginable."     Arthur arrives. Bond takes a single up-down look at his outfit. "Trouble deciding at the novelty store?" he asks, before returning to his original thought.     "I'd rather have it someplace equipped to deal with potentially dangerous unknowns, where access is tracked and reported. I don't know enough about the specifics of Xion's methods to give my opinion on the efficacy. The captchalogue might prevent someone from having to *touch* it, but--and I mean this with nothing but professional fondness," he says, "Arthur is probably the most vulnerable out of any of us to being unceremoniously tranquilized and black-bagged."      With that assertion made, he greets--"Lilian, Tamamo, Sakura."
Arthur Lowell	> Arthur: But would that involve you accepting it into yourself?     Arthur chatters with Xion, sipping on-- something? Where'd he get-- ah, yeah, just Mountain Dew in a glass. "NO IDEA. Maybe I only have to ACCEPT a GLASS CUBE. I think I'm really tolerant of GLASS CUBES. I COULD ACCEPT MOST CUBES." > Arthur: Oh god not this again.     "It's NORMAL." The gleam makes that sound, you know the one, the "ding" kind of sound, when he grins at Lilian. > Arthur: We did speak, and learned a few things     Tamamo gets a less shitty grin! "SICK! Gimmie that shit in NARRATIVIZING ORDER. Really FUCK ME UP with a whole FLASHBACK" Arthur: What would happen if you did Alchemitizing to it?     Roland gets a surprising answer: "Oh, think that's EASY. It's a NO GO." He goes on, oddly, explaining further. "An ALCHEMITER can't handle a SESSION-ENDER like that, you need a whole-- we call it a GRIST RIG. The idea is you do these, for this world it'd be FOUR RITUALS where the BLOOMS confront whatever a DENIZEN is here. And then they get access to this kind of, I guess it's like MATTER-CONCEPT-ENERGY stuff and they have to FIRE IT INTO THE SUN from four points of the SOLAR SYSTEM, and since you only got the ONE EARTH it'd be a fuckin' YEAR-LONG PROCESS. Then the FRUIT would do an CRYPTOBIO-ALCHEMITIZING METAMORPHOSIS, basically this fucked up TRANSFORMATION, into like HUNDREDS OF GALAXIES SHAPED BY THE WILL OF THE BLOOMS."     He does a broad shrug. "It's FUCKED, it's this WHOLE LONG THING and I don't even know if it'd just decide to EXPLODE AND KILL ME for trying, so I'm NOT GONNA DO ANY OF THAT." > Arthur: Trouble deciding at the novelty store?     "I got so many COSMETICS LOOTBOXES bro. I still haven't opened like EIGHTY of these fuckin' things." He snaps his fingers and a small cube drops in front of him, shudders dramatically, and fires out two sets of sunglasses, some type of elaborate spray-paintable galaxy-themed design that hangs in the air, and what looks to be some type of hybrid mix of a biohazard protection outfit and funerary wear, all in Arthur's classic black-and-white-and-a-little-red color-scheme. All four float away after a few seconds. "SEE THE SHIT I HAVE TO DEAL WITH?"
Petra Soroka	Well Petra's got a lot of feelings on everything that's happened! You can tell she does, because as she scampers down the path leading from the warpgate, the whole metal smear of the morphmetal 'fur' surrounding the new tail she got from the Fruit lags behind her overeager pace like she's outrunning it. It snaps back into place when she skids to a halt on the platform, whipping back and forth as it so often has been in the past week.     Petra is not nearly so concerned with the safe handling of the Fruit as others might be, because in her opinion it's basically fine to hold!! What she is concerned with is instead the charcoal-written notebook that she and Tamamo got, and now slaps her hand on the table and points emphatically. . "We gotta talk about Dictum!" > She doesn't have a drink yet, but she's sent someone to fetch a few of something refreshingly cold.     "Oh, yeah."     A looney tunes screenwipe occurs, after which Petra is now running down the hillside in an identical manner as she did before, but now miraculously holding several filled and frosty beverage glasses that she manages to not spill over their rims as she sprints and then slides to an animation-saving identical halt. There's three, and the third isn't for her! "Like a strange, avoidant form of 'at arm's length'?"     "It's gotta levitate!" Petra slaps her hands down on the table, in compromise with Nika and Xion. "You know how hub warpgates are? It's gotta be suspended in a big metal circle by electric blue lines." "So you got some LOWDOWN from SPEAK N' SPILL I hope?"     "Well, I mean, we know what the Fruit's about, by extension we know what Underived Conviction's about, and I've got some *thoughts* about some other stuff!"
Petra Soroka	"It's not gonna be like Petra right?"     "Huh?" Petra gets excited at the mention of her name, and then momentarily worried about the context of her name as a 'what not to do', and then waves it off once she fully processes the sentiment. "Oh, no, no. That's just 'cause it's me. They treated Sakura normal, and I think it kind of just immediately makes sense to them that Lilian has a whole entire other social circle of people with insanely specialized skills given that they also are sort of that to her." "I better see you buy something at least as nice as that cherry branch hairpin if you're taking her." [ansi(190,"But what kind of thing, though....")] Petra chews on her knuckle, now transparently interposing herself into the role of buying Nika a piece of flair. "Thank you."     Petra is making some sort of hissing noise in the back of her throat like an extended whispered cheer, fingers splayed across her mouth while raising her eyebrows at Sakura. "What is going on with the tail?"     "Oh, I don't know." Petra twists around to look at it, where the metal-sheathed extra limb has finally worn itself out of its excitement to hang down. It's as intricately detailed as a chrome-plated iteration of the real thing, with plating under liquid fur where there would be skin, and wiring below that.     "I mean, I do know, thematically. But it's sort of belaboring the point a little to talk through the whole process of, 'rejection of natural law as a theme of transcendence over the presumed culture and form of 'human', and how my legitimate reasons for getting deroboticized years ago don't fully encompass all of my opinions about bodily construction or expression or whatever and so poking a little too hard at Underived Conviction's little gift-seed thing of their wish made it graft a tail onto me', right? Really it was just *so* embarrassing at school."
Xion	'And now you're gonna tell me that you sucked on one like a lollipop until you got to the gooey flavour center and it tastes the same, right?' Xion scoffs, rolling her eyes and lifting a hand to pull the charm-ball up between thumb and forefinger and lift it to lips, to kiss. "I already sucked it to completion and drained out all its energy, Ash. But you also already told me 'it was the same', but you're just making me justify why. It's what you do, I get it." Xion rolls the chain-draped charm in grip with a motion of thumb. "'It's the same color', you said. Except, there's no reason for it to be. Except, if you used your ability on it - if it was created 'in that way', it is evidently that? And then I realized..." She swishes the ball, rolling it around palm and catching it on palm and with backs of knuckles as she spins idly, mixing the contents as she does. "It's a form of communication. It's telling you what it is, itself. If you say that they're the same color, 'so what', I say: that *is* the connection, it's self-justified. That there's... Some element, some same element, that isn't the design on the coin, isn't determined by face or spectrum, but is the coin's material, the metal itself." 'But it's so boriiiiing keeping it on a shelf!' "Yeah..." Xion agrees slowly. "There's really not a limit to what I can put into my inventory? I can just sort of take things." She put a person in there once, but she isn't going to say that out loud. They used to be some CEO and now they were a line item. It was all very poetic in the moment. "But it goes on a shelf? A place I things go and I can retrieve." 'I don't know enough about the specifics of Xion's methods to give my opinion on the efficacy.' Xion tilts her head, takes a breath, and shifts to be a little straighter. "I make things go to a place I think only I control, which isn't anywhere else. Dr. Maricel called it 'para-zonal', which sounded right so I went with that." She thumbs to Arthur. "It works on everything including most cubes." 'It's gotta levitate!' "Oh, dang. It might have to levitate ominously in a cool array. Really, more thing should. Missed opportunity." 'Really it was just *so* embarrassing at school.' "Petra you're a poetry-spewing motorcycle-riding guitar-playing well-built badgirl with a *cyborg* dog tail. How? How is this 'so' embarrassing?" Xion asks, dragging her tone a little bit to exaggerate her note.
Tamamo	'I guess either. I'm just ¶clearing up/warning you¶. I don't wanna go if they're ¶primed¶ to ¶your little friends!¶ like sorry but you know.'     Tamamo thinks about it. Frankly honest, "I suppose every single one of them, of those I have yet met, are exceedingly strange."     'What? I didn't buy Sakura that.'     'Are you ¶serious/high¶?'     Tamamo glances between the three of them.     'I apologize for keeping you all. There was some business I had to--'     'Nah it's cool. You'd have fucking melted in all those layers. I get it.'     "Even if no one else would, Sakura-chan, I would forgive you dressing down for the sea-side." Tamamo still sounds like a thousand-years-past imperial courtesan, even if she's currently in what's a couple rings away from 'picking up at the beach' wear.     'But it's so boriiiiing keeping it on a shelf!'     "Well..." Tamamo takes a few moments to think, less to work out something to say than to confirm that it literally won't matter for any purpose past keeping someone she likes entertained, and says, "I suppose we could design an underwater palace filled with locked doors and traps and place the sealed fruit at the center of it. That would keep it in a known position of importance, no? And it is just what a place by this name, 'Dragon's Garden,' would need."     She doesn't think of 'underwater dungeon' as 'hidden' or 'distant.' Just keeping it in this area is sufficient security, given what she's already done to keep the place safe.     'Do tails just sometimes happen now?'     "Tails only happen for a reason. It would be terrible, otherwise."     'Lilian, Tamamo, Sakura.'     "A pleasure, as always, Mr. Bond." She smiles. She'd raise a glass, if they were--oh, there she is. While Petra's still bleeding momentum, Tamamo toasts James Bond's arrival. "Mm."     'Then the FRUIT would do an CRYPTOBIO-ALCHEMITIZING METAMORPHOSIS, basically this fucked up TRANSFORMATION, into like HUNDREDS OF GALAXIES SHAPED BY THE WILL OF THE BLOOMS.'     Hmm. No, not doing that.     'I already sucked it to completion and drained out all its energy, Ash.'     She was drinking! Xion said that while Tamamo was drinking!
Lilian Rook	'Ash. Nika. It's good to see you again.'     Ash glances James Bond up and down. Nika says "Hi! You too! Is that bag ¶enough to share with the class¶?" Then Ash says "Catching a lucky flight later, lucky strikes?"     'I trust any of you with it. The fact remains that a boathouse, even one that belongs to Ash, isn't the most secure place imaginable.'     "Houseboat." Ash quickly corrects. "It's literally the same thing." says Lilian. "It's even the same two words." "Yeah well it's the order I said them in first."     'Lilian, Tamamo, Sakura.'     Lilian sighs. "Good to see you as well. I'm shocked you haven't gotten sick and tired of this yet." Sakura, slightly dazed, says "Hello as well, James. Ah, Mister Bond."     'I'd rather have it someplace equipped to deal with potentially dangerous unknowns, where access is tracked and reported.'     "Like Mount Wheeler?" Ash shorts. "What unknowns? Who's gonna come and steal it? If there's some freak accident waiting to happen then it's gonna happen to Lunatic Scientists Convention Center." "Thank you for not saying Lapdance. I know that took a lot of restraint. But you can't be saying that word either." "Why?" "They practically use it as a slur." "So?" "For you." "Then I'm reclaiming it."     Sakura, caught in the midst, politely clears her throat, and says "In the eventuality that there is an . . . 'access', are we currently prepared to imagine what form it could possibly be in? If storing it were to result in an unexpected crisis of a nature originating from itself, or its makers, what preparations could be made in advance of them? If you were to have an answer, of course, I would be pleased, but also terribly surprised."     'NO IDEA. Maybe I only have to ACCEPT a GLASS CUBE.'     "No no. Accept yourself. Let the fruit into you. Let the fruitiness take over. Put the cube up your ass. You can't be intolerant. You're already a gamer. You're on thin ice."     'The idea is you do these, for this world it'd be FOUR RITUALS where the BLOOMS confront whatever a DENIZEN is here. And then they get access to this kind of, I guess it's like MATTER-CONCEPT-ENERGY stuff and they have to FIRE IT INTO THE SUN from four points of the SOLAR SYSTEM, and...'     Nika is too distracted by what Arthur's going on about to even notice. She looks like she's going to vibrate out of her seat. "Wait! Wait wait waitwaitwait; can we do that?! Do you know how? If you're scared of ¶exploding and dying¶ you can just write it all down!" Trying to find anything at all to convince him, Nika reaches for, "Doesn't it seem like really ¶sus¶ that it's 'fruit' here and 'gushers' there? Like they're ¶tomayto tomahto¶?"     'SEE THE SHIT I HAVE TO DEAL WITH?'     Then she scrunches up her face like she's just smelled something foul. Lilian puts her hand on her shoulder, Elite-style, and says "You don't have to say it. We all understand." She doesn't, of course, but Nika seems to decide Lilian must be close enough.
Petra Soroka	"Arthur is probably the most vulnerable out of any of us to being unceremoniously tranquilized and black-bagged."     "Fuck!!! I'm losing my edge!"     Petra is not really expecting to get in the water or do beach activities, but she's still beach tourist equipped. Binder-worn-as-top serves as sort of analogous to a sluttier bikini top, underneath a breezy linen shirt with the loose sleeves rolled up and buttoned at the elbow. She's got on her long poofy harem pants and sandals, and has traded her purposefully visible Calvin Klein waistband for something that extends in two bands above either side of the top of her pants, wrapping over her hips to attach somewhere in the back.     She is already panting a little, because of sprinting around at her top speed to every objective, and then talking a bunch while her heart rate is still elevated. "There's really not a limit to what I can put into my inventory?"     Petra immediately raises her hand to ask, "Can you put a person in there?"     "Oh, but it *would* probably be pretty, like, prudent, to maybe check with some of the spells Dictum taught me whether there's any ¶disreputable/quasi-¶ particle stuff to worry about with interacting with it or keeping it around." "Petra you're a poetry-spewing motorcycle-riding guitar-playing well-built badgirl with a *cyborg* dog tail."     "Look. Like-- look." This is all objectively true, and Petra even *revels* in it and plays it up on purpose, but it still stuns her for a moment! Embarrassed, her tail swings side to side, accidentally thwacking into the table with all the casual force of a baseball bat.     "Ah-! Sorry. See, that's embarrassing! No, it's just like-- okay, I'm there one day. I'm there the next day, and suddenly, I have a mechanical dog tail. I have to *explain* that I didn't build it for myself on purpose, you know?? They're gonna start calling me 'representation', dude!" says the girl who makes every single choice in her life based on observing herself as a representative ideogram of he own behaviors. "I suppose we could design an underwater palace filled with locked doors and traps and place the sealed fruit at the center of it."     Petra glances between Tamamo, Nika, Xion, and Ash with a dawning expression of awe. "Oh my god. We could." "Tails only happen for a reason."     "Right, see? I'm still two behind."     After, like, a solid fifteen minutes of this whole cartoon back and forth, getting caught up in every single bit passed around at the table, Petra recenters herself by abruptly palm-slapping the table for a third time. "Oh! Yeah! So I'm pretty confident that Dictum and Underived Conviction know each other personally."
Angela	''HUNDREDS OF GALAXIES SHAPED BY THE WILL OF THE BLOOMS.'' Roland understood like every third word here. "Is that bad?" ''If it'd just decide to EXPLODE AND KILL ME for trying'' "Okay, so it's bad." Roland says, relieved that there's a truly simple answer there and he can stop wondering. ''Arthur is probably the most vulnerable out of any of us to being unceremoiously tranquilized and black-bagged.'' "Oh, I'm not the most likely one." Tiphereth says, smiling a little more. ''We gotta talk about Dictum!'' "What about Dictum?" Angela asks, considerably more interested in the deal with the tail, actually. ''Really it was just *so* embarrassing at school.'' "I suppose we shouldn't look a gift tail in the mouth." Angela admits, feeling a little weird that Petra has technically become more robot while Angela is still seeking to shed her robot self. Not really because she hates robots, though she has a pretty negative experience with every robot she's ever encountered, but because it prevents so many experiences for her and also chains her to a single building unless Petra is there to puke feathers to compensate for it. Even now, some part of Angela wishes she could just be here and ask Roland's stupid questions herself. "I imagine that demon girl had a whole reaction to it." Angela says. "But I'm surprised it is embarrassing, isn't this supposed to be some sort of partial transformation into an idealized form free of that sort of thing?" Of course nobody at the school got their tail so. ''How is this 'so' embarrassing?'' "Xion has a point, aren't you the coolest person at that school? I imagine Arthur could deliver some analysis of your precise radness, coolness, suaveness, moxie, and style but I have to imagine that you are leagues beyond the average student. Maybe they should be explaining why they don't have cyborg dog tails yet." ''Tails only happen for a reason.'' "That is good to hear." Angela says. None of the Librarians have spontaneously grown one for no reason so Tamamo's logic pans out. ''Fuck!!! I'm losing my edge!'' "Doesn't a lack of being blackbagged mean you have MORE of an edge?" Angela asks. "Maybe she means losing her edge in the getting blackbagged competition." Tiphereth offers. Angela hrrms ''I'm pretty confident that Dictum and Underived Conviction know each other personally.'' "Why is that?" Angela asks.
Lilian Rook	'You know how hub warpgates are? It's gotta be suspended in a big metal circle by electric blue lines.'     Lilian reaches over and takes a drink without even looking. Nika says "Nope. Can I go see a 'hub warpgate'? Like for reference." Ash laces their fingers and says "Nika. Remember what we talked about?" Nika revises the previous. "Actually, I'm gonna go see a 'hub warpgate'. ¶Put it on my minimap¶!" "Nice! There you go!"     'Well, I mean, we know what the Fruit's about, by extension we know what Underived Conviction's about, and I've got some *thoughts* about some other stuff!'     Lilian lowers her tablet, first to drink, then to widen her eyes at Petra over the rim. "That's a bold claim." she says. "I'd imagine that your 'by extension' is going the wrong way around. Care to back that up?" Sakura, meanwhile, has to thank Petra with a silent tilt of her head, and take the third drink while hiding her slightly red face.     'Oh, no, no. That's just 'cause it's me. They treated Sakura normal, and I think it kind of just immediately makes sense to them that Lilian has a whole entire other social circle of people with insanely specialized skills given that they also are sort of that to her.'     "Hear that? We're your social group now! We're ¶in the circle/at the campfire/what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas¶!" Whatever Nika was hoping to achieve is either thwarted or completely validated by Lilian saying "You're some of the most interesting people in my life, and you don't have anything to do with the workplace through which I meet the rest. I'd rather this be called my 'circle' than the one where everyone spends all day hooting and screaming about turning people bald and getting pegged and random unsolicited childhood trauma." Lilian isn't actually sure which, because she deliberately made it silly enough for Nika to laugh at it, but she did already describe this group as 'her inner circle' to TTT the other day, so . . .     'But what kind of thing, though....'     "It's so ¶inconvenient/new ground¶. I can't just do my name. The flowers aren't as ¶pretty/iconic/okay is this a bit?¶."     'But it's sort of belaboring the point a little to talk through the whole process of, 'rejection of natural law as a theme of transcendence over the presumed culture and form of 'human''     "Yeah yeah be gay do crimes reclaim the nipple; we're all caught up on how many transcendence, Slopcrates." Ash says, waving off the topic they are the single most invested-in prson at the table. "Do the kids think you're a furry now, or just practising to actually suck the chrome off a trailer hitch? Spill." Ash is also the age where they would be going to Petra's college. Sakura, a little into her drink, frowns very slightly, and says "Ash, would it really kill you if she were allowed to show off just slightly?", which makes Ash uneasily quiet for a while, because it's Sakura.     'That there's... Some element, some same element, that isn't the design on the coin, isn't determined by face or spectrum, but is the coin's material, the metal itself.'     Nika knows what they're thinking anyways. "If they're made out of ¶blood¶ so they soak up ¶magic/earth's oxygen¶ then that's kind of ¶shakespeare written by infinite monkeys/fucking metal¶ huh."
Lilian Rook	'But it goes on a shelf? A place I things go and I can retrieve.'     "I bet we look so stupid. I bet we look like a dog that walked a leash around a pole and can't figure out how to get out. They're clipping us. We're on space tiktok." Nika says, gloomily spreading herself out across the table like butter.     'Petra you're a poetry-spewing motorcycle-riding guitar-playing well-built badgirl with a *cyborg* dog tail. How? How is this 'so' embarrassing?'     She and Sakura both glance over at Lilian when she takes such a sharp breath in, presses her face into both hands, thumps her elbows down on the table, and groans "Don't remiiiiind meeeeee!"     'I suppose every single one of them, of those I have yet met, are exceedingly strange.'     "Not just Mesmer?" "Nika . . ." "Hey I'm not being ¶that bitch eating her crackers over there¶ she was literally here and so ¶I disavow, I disavow/And theeeen whaaaat~?¶ about it." "Be that as it may . . ." Sakura sighs. "You should practice not saying it. Some of them are quite lovely people."     'Even if no one else would, Sakura-chan, I would forgive you dressing down for the sea-side.'     Setting down her half-empty mug, Sakura sighs, leans to one side, and stares vaguely in the direction of Tamamo's everything. "One day. In this lifetime, I should hope." "Chill DD. Last time I went swimming in the ocean I had a whole-ass diving suit on. Nika's the only one who went to the beach." "Hm." Sakura glances from Ash to Lilian to Ash and says nothing.     'I suppose we could design an underwater palace filled with locked doors and traps and place the sealed fruit at the center of it. That would keep it in a known position of importance, no?'     "Thanks Tamamo." Nika burbles into the table. "You're a ¶School of Athens¶."     For some reason, Nika glances up at Ash, who is openly staring at Tamamo trying not to inhale her drink, crunching the data on how to make this everyone's problem, and then Nika rolls her eyes with an annoyed little sigh.
Arthur Lowell	> Arthur: Be probably the most vulnerable out of any of the group to being unceremoiously tranquilized and black-bagged.     "IT'S IMPOSSIBLE to TRAQUILIZE AND BLACK BAG me," Arthur asserts with a confident, blackbaggable smile. "I'M TOO QUICK." > Arthur: Petra knows what the fruit's about, and has thoughts     "THANK GOD. I only know about this kind of thing if it's a FROG." He gives a single, sharp cackle. "Why ARE you MORE DOG now? Are you DATING SOMEONE NEW?" As if that were connected to anything. > Arthur: Put the cube up your ass     "I CAN'T DO THAT WITH THAT ITEM." Arthur says in a way that will, somehow, gray out that dialogue concept for Ash.     > Arthur: Can we do that?     Nika's interest gets a wincing sort of smile. "I mean, I COULD FOR SURE take a shot at ALCHEMITER STUFF, but like... What are your DENIZENS? You know? Do you got DENIZENS? Look, let me try to-- You need Denizens. Are you getting me?" He makes a weird, ineffable grasping gesture. "You'd have to track that down. MAYBE then I could at least get you started on GRISTRIGS, bare minimum."
Angela	''That would keep it in a known position of importance, no?'' Angela feels weirdly uneasy about this, feeling a strange sort of empathy for a fruit. "I don't know if I like the idea of leaving it in a trapped full dungeon, even if it's a pretty one." But saying that she's worried that produce, even cosmically mighty produce, might feel a bit lonely in the death palace would make her look like a lunatic so she doesn't actually explain her reasons for thinking this. "Maybe it would be better if you just make the most of the gift sooner rather than later?" ''I CAN'T DO THAT WITH THAT ITEM'' Roland breathes a sigh of relief. "I am a bit surprised you aren't advocating for caution." Tiphereth admits to Angela. "I just don't see the purpose in drawing everything out if it only increases the odds of someone unpleasant stealing it. It doesn't seem to be a hostile fruit." Maybe EVERYBODY should reclaim the nipple RIGHT NOW, maybe every moment the nipple isn't reclaimed is TRAGIC. "I mean, eventually it will be a leap of faith either way." Angela adds. "I doubt every mystery will be revealed before someone just decides to, I don't know, get all the tails their heart demands." ''What are your DENIZENS?'' "Maybe we're the denizens." Angela says, having no idea what the denizens are but she does finally set her book aside to wiggle her fingers to sell the maybe-spookiness of the denizens.
Xion	'Can you put a person in there?' Xion, who was loudly thinking it, is most shocked by the direly unempathetic psychic girl picking up on it. Missing a beat, and asking "Are you... raising your hand?", Xion makes a face and looks away and sighs, and remembers its Petra and she's already made Tamamo nearly spit her drink. Shame was beyond her. She was being normal about things! "I can." She eventually gets to, after having her own little reaction pause, stunned in her own way. "It doesn't seem to matter. Like I can just plunge anything into a hole that goes nowhere, goes 'away', and call it back." She makes a weak smile. "You know, inventory." Thankfully, Petra's extra normal after so she has room to breathe, leaning on the table and sighing. "Tamamo could probably seal any especially disreputable particles with enough seals on a glass box. 'I have to *explain* that I didn't build it for myself on purpose, you know??' "Just say that you did build it on purpose as a future you and then went back through time to give it to yourself. I think the future self-around excuse is true enough and also escapes you from direct culpability while also working into your lore that wild things happen to you? Aura of danger and all?" A beat. "You *are* representation, sibling." Xion shoots back at Petra, eyeing the tail for good measure. 'I suppose we could design an underwater palace filled with locked doors and traps and place the sealed fruit at the center of it.' 'Oh my god. We could.' Xion lifts her hand and brushes bangs away from temple and behind ear, looking thoughtful. "I mean..." She begins, and then nods. "That'd be a pretty cool place? I've not really done that many water temples in my time. Two, three at most." 'Xion has a point, aren't you the coolest person at that school?' "*Thank* you!" Xion gasps to Angela, underhand gesturing to Angela while grinning at Petra. "You're so cool I think the future self thing just hits right." A beat. "Radness, coolness, suaveness, moxie, *and* style? Jeeze, Angela, all that and Arthur will start getting into stat exposition, too." 'I bet we look so stupid. I bet we look like a dog that walked a leash around a pole and can't figure out how to get out. They're clipping us. We're on space tiktok.' Xion goes from grinning about metal/monkies to a little confused. "Do you think so? Because of... Inventory?" She asks, ready to believe already but confused as to why. She had probably been on space TikTok before, and did a little quest selfie (questie) content while she did her mercenary gigs, so... 'Don't remiiiiind meeeeee!' "Sorry, Lilian, you created a monster who wanted to be created on purpose." Xion eulogizes, eyes closed and hands clasped together.
Lilian Rook	'Look. Like-- look.'     "Fuckin'-- Watch it!" "Petra!" "Oh I'm glad I was still holding my drink." "Loud."     'They're gonna start calling me 'representation', dude!'     Bat to the table situation solved, Ash comes around to "Oh. No I totally understand.", said with a shiver of crawling dread.     'Is that bad?'     "I'm going to fashion an immortal Sarracenia from primordial dust in every single one and write an ancient prophecy on every inhabited planet that whoever hunts her down and puts her in the inescapable torture cube will ascend from their universe and know the face of their creator, as a kind of cross-universal trascendent ideological alignment process. So you tell me." "I'm going to make something nice." "I bet your soul works just like it's supposed to."     'What are your DENIZENS? You know? Do you got DENIZENS? Look, let me try to-- You need Denizens.'     Nika suddenly sits up. "¶What do you know/Have you heard the good news¶ about Tomodachi Island?"     'I just don't see the purpose in drawing everything out if it only increases the odds of someone unpleasant stealing it. It doesn't seem to be a hostile fruit.'     Sakura faintly smiles. "I happen to agree. However, my concerns are not that someone would take it from us, little-known and even less-used as it is, but that, if it is possible, someone or something that 'recognizes its own' may be curious what has become of it." Using both hands to hold her drink, slightly too big for her in general, she sways back and forth on her chair a little while she sips and thinks. "No, I can't begin to guess how long is 'long', then . . ." Lilian barely opens her mouth before, "But in the course of time, all possibilities inexorably count upwards to a certainty of occuring." which Lilian laughs in an odd way about, and turns hurriedly back to her tablet.     'Oh, but it *would* probably be pretty, like, prudent, to maybe check with some of the spells Dictum taught me'--     Lilian takes her turn at nearly choking on her drink. "I beg your fucking pardon?" she says, back of her throat still raw. "You went from stealing them out of Mesmer's office to learning spells like a fucking junior witch at a sleepover?" Her posture adjusts a second time. "Wait, can they even still-- I know that they're supposed to be from a civilization that never sequestered magic, but, can they use it? As they are? Is Dictum casting spells in my office?!"     'Oh! Yeah! So I'm pretty confident that Dictum and Underived Conviction know each other personally.'     "Excuse me?!" This one is, perhaps, more warranted. "On what basis?!"
James Bond	SEE THE SHIT I HAVE TO DEAL WITH?     "I'm quite sure I don't, considering you made the effort to open as many as you did in the first place, much less grab them from wherever they've gone off to." He pauses, and then, "You wouldn't survive cigarettes." I'm shocked you haven't gotten sick and tired of this yet.     "Should I be? It's somewhere between work and socializing. Where either of those is concerned, I could do much, much worse in terms of company." Like Mount Wheeler?     "Yes, actually. Or Laplace, for that matter. There were layered dependencies in that mountain that made it difficult for even you to cover your tracks, as clever as the faux-scorched earth approach was. The more dangerous and convoluted it is, the harder that perverts with determination, skill, money or all three will try to go after it. If you really want names, I can have those ready for you by the end of the day."     Almost begrudgingly, "Though I do suppose we're blessed enough that everyone here generally understands the importance of operational security, startlingly rare as it is." I suppose we could design an underwater palace filled with locked doors and traps and place the sealed fruit at the center of it.     "I would prefer not to," says Bond. "The place will be irresistable to the sort of idiot that Sarracenia Sundew wants to marry. You'll have them barging in thinking it's all a production for *them.*" Fuck!!! I'm losing my edge!     "Not quite. You're trading it in for another." I'M TOO QUICK.     "Quickness has nothing to do with it. You're incapable of being quiet and you have shockingly little situational awareness for someone focused on manipulating space. You give people the chance to show you their best side, you want feelings to matter more than physics, and sometimes you *do* manage it." A beat. With the bizarre friendliness of a Western spy talking to a Soviet, "Remember Tallahassee? Years ago? I do. I remember what you look like under a crosshair, too. If I'd been fifteen years younger or more mentally ill, that would have been the end of you. That being said, I appreciate being given the chance to do otherwise, whether it was intentional or not."     Nodding towards Ash, "I don't suppose I could peruse the same liquor cabinet Petra did?"
Angela	Angela is frankly relieved that she's not being chastized for not thinking of some odd extenuating circumstance but she is surprised that Sakura agrees. Truthfully, Angela didn't think it would be stolen in the first place--it's more leaving this situation in a state of arrested development that puts her ill at ease. That, and she doesn't want this fruit to be locked away in a dungeon even if she can't possibly say why. Apparently Petra knows magic now? But at least it's a surprise to Lilian too so she doesn't have to feel stupid at all for not knowing about it. She doubts, at least, that Petra is learning to cast fireball at a third level, at least. ''I'm going to fashion an immortal Sarracenia--'' Roland hesitates for three seconds before saying, "I mean I don't like her at all but there's no way she's that caught up in your head, right?" He has too much respect for Lilian to think that she'd waste a thousand galaxies on tormenting Sarracenia. Maybe ONE galaxy at most, she's got other stuff going on! "Tomadachi island?" He asks. "Oh it's a game where you make friends be friends with each other and you can see them engage in soap opera type shenanigans, sort of an emergent story that you sort of plant the seeds for." Tiphereth says, as she has gotten more into the video games than the other Sephirah. And then she frowns a little before adding, "Though ... aren't you all excited?"
Tamamo	'Not just Mesmer?'     "They are each possessed of their own peculiarities. Medicine Pocket, for example..." And then she doesn't explain MePo at all.     'You're a ¶School of Athens¶.'     Interpreting this positively, Tamamo reaches over to pat the sprawled Nika's back. There, there. She won't say 'they probably aren't paying attention' out loud, though. That wouldn't make it much better.     . . .     After recovering from a sudden bout of nothing important, Tamamo gets around to answering Arthur. "We learned somewhat more about Dictum's background, and their work with... their society saw them as 'infected,' so I suppose we may call it that. It was something that may have been triggered by the 'Pandemic Threat,' but it was also an infection of ideas, spreading by circumstance and communication. They had very, very many of these individuals, and it should be surprising that there are now only three." Or, less 'surprising' and more 'grim.'     'Oh! Yeah! So I'm pretty confident that Dictum and Underived Conviction know each other personally.'     'On what basis?!'     "Speculative and uncomfirmed, but possible. Dictum considered one particular 'subject' to be the closest they had to a friend, after what happened to... the rest. Kin, even. Oh, but this is not in order, at all."     Backing off of that for the moment, Tamamo considers how much of this qualifies for 'narrativizing order.' The chronological telling doesn't strike her as helpful, but much of the rest doesn't, either. "We already knew they were a researcher, and that they classified 'vectors' by discrete stages, which were thought to be separated by breakthroughs. We know, now, that each of the three moons had, at one point, one subject of particularly advanced stage, and that their civilization descended further down its path of destruction in its attempts to prevent the 'spread.' It was, truly, not too dissimilar from the actions of a tyrant pressing ever more harshly against elements of rebellion, such that these spread further flames. Much of Dictum's journal considers this rapid slide toward inhumane treatment, a period of a few years being enough to replace mental healthcare sponsorship with preemptive executions, though little seems to directly address the connection between harm rendered to a target and the resulting slip toward either rebellion or madness in any who observed these acts."     Taking a breath just to space out her thoughts, and then a sip when that's not enough, "Each moon, I think, had their own survivor. The one who was far enough along that they could not be killed by what followed. And every other person died -- all those 'early stage subjects,' the ones who were not-quite-Blooms, included. One of these, one who maintained 'recondite vacuum' as a means of defense, was the one Dictum knew personally, and Dictum was the only person they would allow approach. 'Asterism' is the translation chosen, for their name."     That's most of what she feels like saying about it right now. "Dictum considers Asterism to have died, because of what happened on another moon, that provided their breakthrough transformation. They remember it as losing a sibling, at the end of all their efforts."     'I mean, eventually it will be a leap of faith either way.'     "I would just as soon not use it." Tamamo's touched it. She knows what it would do, and it's exactly what she'd decided not to do well before any of this happened.     'Tamamo could probably seal any especially disreputable particles with enough seals on a glass box.'     "Naturally so."
Tamamo	'The place will be irresistable to the sort of idiot that Sarracenia Sundew wants to marry.'     "A terrible thought. I suppose we could create a dummy labyrinth, however..."     'I'm going to fashion an immortal Sarracenia from primordial dust in every single one and...'     Tamamo stops patting sprawled-Nika and reaches over to rub Lilian's arm.     'Wait, can they even still--'     "They were able to do so from a recording. Their tradition does not require od, it seems. This is not wholly unexpected for something strongly aligned with orderly aspects."
Petra Soroka	"I imagine that demon girl had a whole reaction to it."     "Oh my *god*, did she." Petra groans at Angela, rolling her eyes so hard that her entire torso tilts with it. She plants one hand on her hip, the other held up to her mouth in a mocking ojou-pose-- the morphmetal coating around her tail tightens and stretches, squishing into a temporary spade-tipped succubus tail to complete the image.     "'Kukukuku~ is that a *canine appendage*, Petra Soroka? How fitting of you to imitate the likeness of the dog you are! At three-thirty PM today I will silence your mewling barks once and for all behind the Environmental Resources Building!', and I was like, 'this isn't even your class!'."     Petra sighs again, dropping the posture while her tail sloshes loosely back into metal fur. "I know what I just did. I know what's going to happen now." "Actually, I'm gonna go see a 'hub warpgate'."     "Yeah!!! There's a really pretty hub just outside Hydrochoeria that's on a moon of Earth somewhere. That's exactly the ones I mean." "That's a bold claim."     "I mean-- okay." Petra, too caught up in her excitable puppy sugar high sleepover energy, has to briefly backpedal off of her wildly confident assertions. She tries to pull up a chair to psychologically slow herself down, but they've all been taken, so her tail just swivels down and squishes into a little tripod stool that she squats on weirdly.     "Okay. Like, you four all touched it. I touched it. Everyone touched it. We can draw some lines about the nature of the Fruit through all of that, about its effect on 'denying the human things that are accepted just because they're taken for granted'. And... I mean, really, I don't see *all* that much difference between what we can glean from a packaged gift Paradigm that Unvic practiced and gave to us, and the ÷person/paradigm÷ themselves. That's sorta the whole ÷Stage V Metamorphosis/bit÷."     Petra wiggles her hand, equivocating only as far as Lilian's tone demands that she does. "If we can't make assumptions about-- like, it's their *name*. It's not the whole picture, sure, but the Fruit's literally the only thing we can derive information about Underived Conviction from besides themselves." "I can't just do my name. The flowers aren't as ÷pretty/iconic/okay is this a bit?÷."     Petra's consideration for Nika's fashion is just as serious as her thoughts on the apocalypse. "Hm... well, one of your ÷pieces of flair÷ would be your 3DS, for sure, but I can't think of what else would be there. ... We could go shopping for a whole outfit? Maybe online?" "They're clipping us. We're on space tiktok."     "That's not fair! I can't add that to my metrics!" Petra obviously does not check the metrics on her TikTok account that she pointedly does zero engagement with.     Shifting around, Petra gets bored with sitting and so she finds a perch leaning with her elbows on the table between any two of her favorite people. "Anyways-- I know what you mean, and like, I guess I'm coming at it from a different angle. But we *are* categorically the least cringe any human has ever been in history on any planet. I don't think anyone's done things this way before."
Petra Soroka	"Why ARE you MORE DOG now? Are you DATING SOMEONE NEW?"     This is one of the most singularly cutting things anyone's ever said to Petra. She slumps like she's been shot, losing the strength in her arms that held her torso propped up on the table, and just sort of slithers down to the ground under its edge. "Noou." "Are you... raising your hand?"     "Oh. Yeah." It was habit!! She's very polite. "Yeah, okay! A person's a type of inventory object sometimes. I mean, I've literally got one in my inventory right now." "I think the future self-around excuse is true enough and also escapes you from direct culpability while also working into your lore that wild things happen to you?"     Petra folds her legs criss-cross on the ground, stretching up just enough that her chin can poke up over the table. She does this because of not having a chair, and because she was bored of her other options, but it does make her look a lot like a dog inviting herself into the conversation.     "Yeah, everyone already *knows* shit keeps happening to me. I mean, they know about my Silver obviously, and the whole mech fight with Regulus and everything, and a million other-- like it's not hard to *convince* people that it's something that happened! I just have to *say* it!"     Lounging, melodramatic, "Everyone already assumes I'm *so* cool. My reputation is a prison! They all wanted to grab and pull it!" "Don't remiiiiind meeeeee!"     Closed eyes, Petra amends her statement sluttily, "My reputation is a gift and the product of hard work." "Is Dictum casting spells in my office?!"     "Yeah. That's why we know about the eighty year timeline based on your particles." Her goofy mirth drains away finally, and she shuffles around to sit on her knees, palms splayed on the ground between them as she looks up at Lilian. "Which, like, we could check, also." "On what basis?!"     Adding on to what Tamamo said, with which Petra nodded along, she adds, "The whole, like, picture it paints, is that Dictum was gradually worn down morally and emotionally by the whole totalitarian anti-Bloom panopticon, and how every civilian was extrajudicially murdering deviants out of fear, and how the Vectors would lash out and murder people back and then be put down like dogs. It, uh, honestly makes this place seem like their ideal, impossible fantasy utopia. Like, the Garden."     "... So the last, um, 'betrayal', was that Asterism eventually turned out like the other two Vectors did, despite being happier and being friends with Dictum. ... I'd wanna *confirm* with them that Asterism and Unvic are the same person, but really, like, assuming they are, I think we've *really* got the ability to get Dictum on board with what we're doing here."
Petra Soroka	Petra adds, lingeringly sentimental and achingly heartfelt, from definitely having cried about it earlier, "I mean, it's destiny, really. It's justice. The one who was most willing to talk to us on Kepler was the one who had a single human friend close to the end. The only human who survived was the one who clung on to seeing the Vectors as people until the apocalypse disillusioned them."     She squeezes her knees together while sitting on the ground, emotion-driven tail thwacking the wooden planks of the deck. "One kind action almost a thousand years ago made this possible. Isn't that, like, the sweetest possible proof you could want? For why all of this matters to do at all?"
Lilian Rook	'Should I be? It's somewhere between work and socializing. Where either of those is concerned, I could do much, much worse in terms of company.'     "Naturally." There it is. The hair-brush-flip. "You could be somewhere without me." "Ash?"     "What?"     "No 'Gay!'?"     "Huh?"     "Okay."     'If you really want names, I can have those ready for you by the end of the day.'     "Sure. Write me a list. I'll put it on the fridge. But I really fuckin' doubt you're gonna find anywhere better than this. Because in my experience, gizmos are bullshit and the real problem is people. You ever try to sneak past a single guy sitting in a narrow empty hall? Same thing."     'Sorry, Lilian, you created a monster who wanted to be created on purpose.'     "Fuck! I'm always doing this!"     'Do you think so? Because of... Inventory?'     Nika shakes her head. "Because it's gotta be so ¶obvious/intuitive/read the damn label¶ to them right? What we're supposed to do. Like, the ¶mechanics/premise¶ of it."     'The place will be irresistable to the sort of idiot that Sarracenia Sundew wants to marry.'     "Lili--?" escapes Nika's mouth before she arrives at "--oh wait right you said 'idiot'. So like ¶m'lady/Atlas Shrugged¶." She blinks. "Huh? Isn't that kinda thing like ¶four-player coop/adventure funnel/we'll need a local guide¶ stuff?" While Nika is pondering the nature of who wants to raid underwater death-palaces, Sakura looks very pensive and a little broody over her drink. Lilian awkwardly clears her throat. "OpSec was a consideration back when we found this place as a ghost town. Even before Nika and her people moved in, it's been properly warded against scrying, divination, tracking, and accidental infiltration for some time."     'If I'd been fifteen years younger or more mentally ill, that would have been the end of you.'     "I'm fifteen years younger and mentally ill. When do I get to kill him?" Ash huffs, suddenly annoyed at themself. "Nah, fuck, you're right. I don't know about a blackbag situation, but he'd smoke the poison cigar on purpose." "The what?" "Oh, let me tell you about Cuba for a sec."     'I mean I don't like her at all but there's no way she's that caught up in your head, right?'     Midway into a brief synopsis on Castro, Lilian says "I think she's taken the place of a little squeaky stress ball in my brain. I think she might be the closest thing to a human being I can feel the urge to Omelas." "I think you can kinda do that with anyone on account of we're ¶the child¶ anyways." ". . . Oh my god." "Yep. You see it."     'They are each possessed of their own peculiarities. Medicine Pocket, for example...'     Sakura, over the rim of her cup as it reaches her lips, murmurs Tamamo-ly, "I've read similar things about two halves of uranium in laboratories."     'I know what I just did. I know what's going to happen now.'     "That's really cool." Nika says. "You're ¶cooked/finished/search history leaked¶."
Lilian Rook	'We learned somewhat more about Dictum's background, and their work with... their society saw them as 'infected,' so I suppose we may call it that.'     Post-Castro explanation, Lilian frowningly interjects, "May we? We've called all sorts of things 'diseases' for perfectly nasty reasons just in our own history" She doesn't feel committed enough to pushing on it to want to stop Tamamo from explaining, though.     'They had very, very many of these individuals, and it should be surprising that there are now only three.'     "Not really." Lilian breathes. "It would be that three is the number that couldn't quite be killed." says Sakura, in a very deliberate way.     'Dictum considered one particular 'subject' to be the closest they had to a friend, after what happened to... the rest. Kin, even. Oh, but this is not in order, at all.'     Lilian looks faintly aghast, because now it's Tamamo saying so, and so now she can't so much as consider the possibility that Petra got ahead of herself and injected a structure of drama into the narrative. Ash, at first blank-faced, having not heard most of the identifying verbiage, swears midway through, and says "Fucking always with this shit. It's always someone they knew and it's always fucking cope for not doing anything! It's post-hoc justification!"     'Dictum considered one particular 'subject' to be the closest they had to a friend, after what happened to... the rest. Kin, even. Oh, but this is not in order, at all.'     "We don't even know that isn't true." Lilian finally says. "What's the difference either way? We've seen what was left over. They wouldn't have been in space for hundreds of years if there was any other choice."     "I did glean the impression from Nika's translation that there existed a . . . gradient, perhaps; of shades in sociability." Sakura sets her drink back down, placing both hands in her lap, and leaning further into the shade, eyes half-closed. "But though they knew each other well, in some fashion, they barely recognized 'us'. And so I am given to wonder what became of all the others, not so far 'gone' as they, who may have suffered similar, and yet vanished with the rest."     'Okay. Like, you four all touched it. I touched it. Everyone touched it. We can draw some lines about the nature of the Fruit through all of that, about its effect on 'denying the human things that are accepted just because they're taken for granted'.'     Very quickly, she has even more to be frustrated by; because the conclusion seems so obvious even though nobody wants to draw it out-loud, and the traced line to Dictum is something that only Petra gets to know firsthand on account of being nice to the alien everyone hates (for encouraging them to put her in a concrete cell). "That's so contrived, though. The last survivor of Kepler just happens to be--" Sakura opens one eye to side glance at Lilian in the exact moment she plays out the entire argument in her head, and slowly closes her mouth.     'They were able to do so from a recording. Their tradition does not require od, it seems. This is not wholly unexpected for something strongly aligned with orderly aspects.'     'Yeah. That's why we know about the eighty year timeline based on your particles.'     Lilian draws in a deep breath. Sakura says "I see. You know where this is going, and you've decided, haven't you?" Lilian makes a confirming throat noise.
Arthur Lowell	> Arthur: Noou     A small +100 pops up over Arthur, cause unclear. > Arthur: Take in flashbacks     Arthur takes a while to listen to the whole memoirs. He turns over the story he's been told, ancient separations and might-as-well-be-deads and other chasms. His face twists a few times, between happy, and curious, and brow-furrowed concern, and anxious, and back to happy again. He's following along with this, and visualizing it as he goes. Once Tamamo and Petra have reached the end of their explanation, he starts to rub his face, eyes tensely squeezed shut.     "So," He mutters. "They lived in this, all this *hellworld* of tyranny. And they're worn down by it. Winds up losing their last link there. And then, shows up, with this answering machine saying to do that whole thing again." He grits his teeth, stressed. "And we're still banking on that? The strangelet-wish theory, but this time they're gonna be nicer on their third chance? Have we actually *got* them on board? What *are* we doing?" He does this big spread-hands gesture. "We got old-ass quest-types from back in the day. We got fruit. We got, *maybe*, wish-strangelets, and maybe we can detect 'em. I've got a list long as my fuckin' arm of guys causing problems but none of them look like they're pumping bad atoms up in Lilian, unless she's been seeing the Pylogons when nobody's lookin' at her."     His frown barges its way across his face, but this one time he seems like he's just talking enough to feel like he's said his piece and can hear them out. "So what *exactly* are we getting them on-board with, and what *exactly* is the way we're gonna get the person who's all beholden to some shit none of us are social authorities for to stick to it." He jabs a finger at Lilian, rhetorically indicating her brief moment of more visible discomfort. "'Cause, *definitionally* it's gonna be all about something *not* what Lilian wants. Right? This," He sneers the word. "'Infection', I'm *not* calling it that by the way, of wish-stuff, if the big plan is heading that off then how's that not telling Lilian to fuck off for the sake of someone who was killing people like her ages ago?"     "Give me," He does a focused, clenching gesture. "The *specifics*. What are you pitching to Dictum?"
Lilian Rook	'It, uh, honestly makes this place seem like their ideal, impossible fantasy utopia. Like, the Garden.'     "It's ¶ours¶ too though." says Nika. "I know it's not normally supposed to happen, and ¶Earth¶ didn't mean to let it happen, and everyone being here is ¶too good to be true/post-game extra ending¶. It's just a thing we all did." The stare she gives Sakura is too soft to really be accusing, but Sakura averts her eyes from it all the same. "Yeah, like . . . I don't know. I didn't believe it either, because that's not how it's supposed to work, and it sounded so stupid and bullshit and culty. So, yeah, I was wrong, but that motherfucker has infinity times more reason to doubt than I did." Ash says.     'I think we've *really* got the ability to get Dictum on board with what we're doing here.'     "We're not showing the Fruit to Dictummmmm--" Lilian whines, already defeated.     'One kind action almost a thousand years ago made this possible. Isn't that, like, the sweetest possible proof you could want? For why all of this matters to do at all?'     Sakura keeps her hands in her lap the entire time Lilian works through the urge to nitpick and complain her way out of this. "We're in no hurry. We came here as friends, to spend time with one another." she says, in the midst of the third inarticulate noise.     ". . . I didn't even get to talk about our findings."     "Thank you Petra."     "Thank you Petra."     "We will go through them together, as we decide where it should be newly homed. Especially if it may be moved without trace, as through Miss Xion's 'inventory'."     "Or just make Nerd Alert eat it and melon ball out his whole brain problem."     ". . . Mmm."     Lilian finally looks up out of her hands, at Tamamo instead of Petra, and says "And you were there for it?" as a way of weakly grasping at a rock she knows won't support her weight. With a great big theatrical sigh, she pushes her chair out as she stands, walks over to the railing a short distance away, and says "Okay. Check. Cast the fucking spell before I change my mind."     Sakura turns over her glass to Xion, saying "Surely, within the 'cube', it shouldn't count as something so intimate as 'to take in', no? As Nika has so thoughtfully provided, in speaking to metal and glass and bidding it not be touched. This matter and that are, for the moment, still something separate."
Angela	''Kukukuku~ is that a *canine appendage*, Petra Soroka?'' "Ah." Angela says, reaching over to pat the camera she's using to transmit in an attempt to reassure Petra that no number of canine appendages will ever stop Angela from thinking that Petra's just the keenest. "It is good to know that your tail can be other tails, adaptability is a very important skill to have, presumably also for tails." Maybe that's why some people have more than one. She considers the tripod stool while Tiphereth awkwardly holds Angela so she can still get a look at it. "Maybe it is not so much that the tail is dog so much as the tail allows for a variety of positional expressions of identity, such as with the stool it is forming right now, taking into account your talent and predilection towards platforming, it may be that the purpose of the tail is so that you can transform it into various useful maneuvering-centric devices such as a a pogostick, or helicopter blades that spin around and let you hover for a useful for a platforming amount of time." She pauses. "I applaud your impression." "I really wonder what it must have been like..." Tiphereth murmurs. ''Dictum'' "So uh, Dictum thinks their friend died but nobody died and this is just a series of miscommunications and misleading...stuff?" "I suppose there is no rush." Angela concedes when Sakura says there is no hurry. "I just wouldn't want you all to get, shall we say, 'Water Element' about it." Oh god she's still thinking about that. ''Cast the fucking spell before I change my mind.'' Roland's Elite Fixer Training that made him one of the top Fixers in the City gives him the adventure game knowledge of taking several steps back. His instincts have never failed him. Tiphereth leans forward, fascinated and curious. Angela picks her book back up.
Arthur Lowell	> Arthur: Chat with Bond on the side     At some point, Arthur was not engaged in the Bloom chatter, which meant he could go back and forth with bond. "That's QUICK! I get GREAT TIMING and then I wind up being TOO USEFUL FOR EVERYONE. It rocks, and I'm SO GOOD AT IT. Only got," He counts on his fingers. "Three, four... FIVE ASSASSINATION ATTEMPTS, and I think one'a them was for, like, DATA. Also they CHEATED but whatever."
Lilian Rook	'And we're still banking on that?'     "Nah. We're banking on them saying that cause all the other shit is true." says Ash, who expressed no opinion about which course of action to take until right this second.They lean back in their chair with their arms behind their head too. "'Do that again' is human. It's doubling down, or sunk cost fallacy, or huffing copium or whatever you wanna call it. If they tried resisting it, then went along with it and felt like a fuckup for their personal moral-intellectual spinelessness, then hit a limit and eased off it again, and got nothing either way."     "Think about it. No bittersweet good end with a ton of sacrifice and no general victory condition after being fucking evil. Just little sacrifices for an inconsistent goal that never materialized. Like four out of five people in that place are gonna think 'Ah, my kindness was pointless anyways' because that's easier to tolerate than thinking they just didn't do enough, fast enough, when it mattered, or like, 'Ah, my fuckup was in vacillating; I didn't have the determination to get it one way or the other' because they can believe it was all their personal moral choice that they failed and not all of fucking civilization, because it's easier to think they can just lock in and do it right the second time."     Sakura, seeming vaguely impressed, says, "I'm happy to hear that you've found something within it to connect to your own well of experience. I know that it is a vast one, in matters like these." Ash shrugs. "There's times for devil's advocate and then there's times even Nerd Alert is trying to be serious about shit that actually matters."     'We got, *maybe*, wish-strangelets, and maybe we can detect 'em. I've got a list long as my fuckin' arm of guys causing problems but none of them look like they're pumping bad atoms up in Lilian, unless she's been seeing the Pylogons when nobody's lookin' at her.'     "I don't know if you recall, but this happened before." Ash leans in. Lilian braces, scoffs, says "When I lost my leg in Zanzibar." which makes Ash lean back to a more respectful distance. "The whole reason Tamamo went on that 'quest' for the tattoo stuff was because it started happening to me. Every time I got hurt, it'd heal back 'not human'. Big chunks or bits and pieces, even if you used magic to do it, the cracks all filled in with . . . other stuff. I told Ash a little about it last time, but the thing they do reminds me of it every time. Except they have it-- under control? I don't know."     "My point is, if it's anything, it's that. If it's not an evil wish cancer particle, and it exists, I can only imagine it's supposed to 'kill me' like it 'killed' the other three." "So, I'm gonna get to just show 'em, right?" "Oh absolutely. Make them have a fit."     'So what *exactly* are we getting them on-board with, and what *exactly* is the way we're gonna get the person who's all beholden to some shit none of us are social authorities for to stick to it.'     Nika looks to Sakura for the answer, lost at this point and certain that she has it. "With the idea, if not the truth, that their actions had meaning, the one they lost is still there, and that they were changed for the better by those actions. That the gift they've left us is proof, and that their world was destroyed in vengeance and not apathy; that it was done because it was evil, and not as trees bear flowers that bloom and spread their seeds."     ''Infection', I'm *not* calling it that by the way'     "Thank you, by the by."
Arthur Lowell	> ==>     "I *don't*," Arthur wags his finger at Ash. "Sympathize with big-picture. I don't do it! Never done it, not starting now. Big picture don't got *psychology*, it's got, 'let me push a little more and get what I want one more time, no consequence, otherwise I blow us all up'. Because *big picture* can go consequence-free whenever it wants, and it *does*, as long as it makes sure the only consequence it ever gets is everyone dying, so you can *never* say it just thought this, it was just this kind of human, 'cause it wasn't!" He clenches the fist, trembles it, and swings it through the air at nothing at all in tension. "And you *shouldn't* be connecting with it too, it... Nnnrrrh." He slackens a bit and rubs his face. "I can see one person in a satellite thinking like that. Maybe."     As for the healing, and the idea of this being something someone cooked up to kill Lilian? "You know what, fine-- you get this spell cast on you and it says, here's the fuckin' assholes trying to treat this like an infestation, I'll be number one in line to kick their ass."     As for what the plan actually is? "Gonna be a hell of a surprise for me if they take that instead of talking mad shit about how the fruit is a hazard. But fuckin', sure, take a shot, let's see where it goes. If Lilian wants a scan and we can get an expired fuckin' panopticoid there was a real consequence, I'll get on board right up until anyone talks about 'containment' again."
Xion	'You give people the chance to show you their best side, you want feelings to matter more than physics, and sometimes you *do* manage it.' Xion lingers on that for a while, producing a purple soda can with a white pompom creature hugging or otherwise attached to a fizzy grape bunch without other label or packaging. Not even ingredients! "It's important, when it happens. Even if a lot of the time physics matter quite a lot, and people don't show it. It has to matter." She breathes, a hinge on unsure. Does it matter, now? What care wins? 'They remember it as losing a sibling, at the end of all their efforts.' Xion's eyes shade over as she retreats into looking down. Something ugly is withheld. It's not quite her feeling, but she almost voices it anyway. 'The place will be irresistable to the sort of idiot that Sarracenia Sundew wants to marry.' 'A terrible thought. I suppose we could create a dummy labyrinth, however...' Recovering faintly, Xion finishes another sip of grape drink soda. "I wouldn't mind a water labyrinth either way. But it's a lot of effort for a fake place, right? Why not just make a water palace because we want a water palace? That just seems like a feature a place like this might have, secret water temple with treasure but the treasure's gay or something." She suggests, eventoned and straight faced, ending in a sip. > the morphmetal coating around her tail tightens and stretches, squishing into a temporary spade-tipped succubus tail to complete the image. "Oh my stars your tail can do different than doggie." Xion gasps, not having fully Gotten It before, but the Evil Demon Ojoucubus vision is inspiringly clear, and the thick spade adds a lot. "Petra do you have demon girls loudly propositioning you to 'silence your mewling barks' out behind buildings? Because that..." Sounds like it leads places!! 'Fuck! I'm always doing this!' Xion gives Lilian a pensive yet sympathetic face. She did this. She made the lesbian otome badgirl game happen at college with the expressive tail main character. She did this. 'Especially if it may be moved without trace, as through Miss Xion's 'inventory'."' Xion locks in, looking attentive for a second. 'Surely, within the 'cube', it shouldn't count as something so intimate as 'to take in', no?' "Mmm," She looks at her soda can, and wiggles it to a faint fizz-slosh, and then receives the glass herself. "Well, I don't become full of soda through the can and bottle walls, either, so magic bidden glass is probably better. You don't automatically use it on picking up." She makes a little smile. "We already tried that, too." Lilian gets ready for a spell. Xion, lost again, tries to follow the talk of Dictum's motivations and the path they'll be taking, but it seems like a decision's made, so in the moments of her own 'Water Aspect' moment, she simply accepts things as they are. "I don't think containment works anyway. All those amputational paths..." Xion goes quiet again.
Lilian Rook	'taking into account your talent and predilection towards platforming, it may be that the purpose of the tail is so that you can transform it into various useful maneuvering-centric devices such as a a pogostick, or helicopter blades that spin around and let you hover'     Nika opens and closes her mouth several times. It's unclear whether she wants to explain something very embarrassing, agrees to the point of giddy speechlessness, or has just been revealed a great secret at the temple.     "Petra you've gotta ¶chug! chug! chug!¶ pretty please?." she decides, turning to face her.     'So uh, Dictum thinks their friend died but nobody died and this is just a series of miscommunications and misleading...stuff?'     Lilian buries her face in her hands for another few seconds.     "Goddddd don't ask me! Years ago I thought this was all some weird fucked up thing happening to me because I was an evil greedy person who wished too close to the sun and stole fire from god! And then there's three more and a prophecy about it! And then it's a prophecy because it's already happened a bunch of times! And then it's actually happening everywhere humans are in the universe to someone! And then it's actually so well-documented as the fucking failure state of humanity that nobody wants to acknowledge the inconvenient facts of that it's a syndrome and you can diagnose it to them!"     "Literally the only reason we got to have a different set of ideas about it was because of Sakura! The only reason we have the ideas we do are because I fucked off into the Multiverse and met the right people! And I met them because of them being drawn to me! Nothing can ever happen randomly I swear to god! Everything in the universe happens because someone made it happen and nothing is for no reason and I'm so tired!"     "Be that as it may . . ." Sakura gently repeats herself. "I believe that our friend is asking after the more fundamental premise. The one in which Dictum advocates for immediate, stringent action, because they are without the many small kindnesses that have built up our foundation of knowledge, and can only feel hopelessly lost in the tides of these events, dragged along in the flow without meaning." Nika, with much more gravity than would necessarily be asked for in so few words, murmurs "Right. Yeah. They couldn't ¶just ask¶."
Tamamo	'It would be that three is the number that couldn't quite be killed.'     'And so I am given to wonder what became of all the others, not so far 'gone' as they...'     All Tamamo need say to that is, "Yes."     'I mean, it's destiny, really. It's justice.'     'That's so contrived, though. The last survivor of Kepler just happens to be--'     "Though it should seem unlikely, it is the most likely thing to be true, after all."     'The only human who survived was the one who clung on to seeing the Vectors as people until the apocalypse disillusioned them.'     'They lived in this, all this *hellworld* of tyranny. And they're worn down by it.     ...but this time they're gonna be nicer on their third chance?'     Tamamo shakes her head. "To them, losing that last connection, the one they had been trying the most to keep alive, to the point of appearing disloyal to their civilization by their soft ideals, was met with heartbreak. It was a final, unjust punishment, a vindication of everyone else's fears, and a statement that they had been wrong to try. The only lesson to be learned from such a thing is 'I should have lost my heart sooner.'"     Unlike Petra, she hasn't cried over this, but when she thinks of 'learning the wrong lessons after being unrewarded for a thousand years,' she'd like to, a little bit.     ''Cause, *definitionally* it's gonna be all about something *not* what Lilian wants. Right?'     'The *specifics*.'     Aghast, "We are not doing Kepler. Even Dictum does not truly want to recreate Kepler. Their motivations are justified terror and an unfortunate lack of awareness of better methods." Looking a little frustrated, "They are unable to comprehend my methods properly. It may be a cultural issue, or it may be related to their rather young age at the time they became effectively deceased."     'And you were there for it?'     "For a talk, and the receiving of a journal. Dear Nika was there, as well."     'So uh, Dictum thinks their friend died but nobody died and this is just a series of miscommunications and misleading...stuff?'     "Their friend transformed into something that, to their knowledge, could not communicate, nor recognize them as a living person. They were a bit wrong about this, but not entirely. That they would have been killed if they had remained is not unlikely, and so, to call it 'miscommunication' seems a bit too light."     That said, "I should like to say, 'they are wrong, of course,' but if a miracle cannot be extended to provide this missing understanding, then, so far as their own life and experience is concerned, it is no different from their impression being the truth."     'With the idea, if not the truth, that their actions had meaning, the one they lost is still there, and that they were changed for the better by those actions.'     "It would help."
Lilian Rook	'You know what, fine-- you get this spell cast on you and it says, here's the fuckin' assholes trying to treat this like an infestation, I'll be number one in line to kick their ass.'     "Mister Lowell, there is no doubt in my mind that if you knew only knew whom and where I might look up to see them already vanishing into the distance." Sakura smiles. "As to all else, you may leave it to me of course."     'I can see one person in a satellite thinking like that. Maybe.'     "Can't hide from the truth." Ash says, obnoxiously smug. "Once it's a hundred guys in a mountain instead of one freak in a satellite, then they go consequence-free. Our guys are in here and the consequences are outside! Fuck yeah brother dicks out semper fi! It's easy as fuck to sacrifice the world when yours ain't gonna change. The whole fucking point of NAZCA was 'human intervention' on this shit. Like 'if we can't stop it then our Bravest Boys should learn to control it, like when man first harnessed fire and learned to kiss boot'."     "But one person? Some isolated freak who catches feels and has to make personal decisions about whether they even believe the big picture or whether they wanna believe the person right in front of them? That's when they really wanna believe that everything was their fault or nothing at all was their fault. Because if they fuck up, there's no other guys. If the consequence affects everyone, it affects them, because that's everything outside their own skin."     'If Lilian wants a scan and we can get an expired fuckin' panopticoid there was a real consequence, I'll get on board right up until anyone talks about 'containment' again.'     "Nobody is going to say anything about containment." Lilian sighs. Desperate for levity, she shares a glance with Sakura at the exact same moment, and both start giggling. Sakura says "After all, Miss Mesmer is very far away.", which makes them both laugh harder.     'Why not just make a water palace because we want a water palace?'     Nika perks up. "Are we finally having this conversation? Nobody ever went ¶down the rabbit hole¶ big magic tidepool in the cave and I so wanna know what's at the ¶end of the rainbow/bottom of the sea¶."     'Petra do you have demon girls loudly propositioning you to 'silence your mewling barks' out behind buildings? Because that...'     "AUGH! FUCK!"
Angela	''Petra do you have demon girls loudly proposition you'' "I haven't even met her yet myself." Angela crosses her arms like this is somehow a problem. ''Petra you've gotta chug! chug! chug!'' Angela is immediately distracted by her distress by trying to imagine what sort of tail makes chug chug chug noises. Like a steam whistle? In a cartoon? Is that possible? The New Fruit is truly miraculous. ''--because I was an evil greedy person who wished too close to the sun and stole fire from god!'' "Well..." Roland looks to Tamamo for a moment. "...But I'm starting to think it might not even just be a one world or one universe thing, exactly." Maybe he's thinking of Big Tree now. "People are people, I guess, and so some things just sort of happen eventually with people, even if some of the dressing changes." "I didn't account for you to be a philosopher." Angela says. ''Literally the only reason we got to have a different set of ideas about it was because of Sakura!'' "It's strange isn't it? That events just so happened to transpire, multiversally, to a place that led here instead of some other failed state that had already happened over and over ago, that in this moment maybe something different is happening. The Flow of the River is long but maybe there's purpose." "I didn't think you believed in that--" Angela begins. "I didn't." Tiphereth admits. "I didn't for the longest time. Just different energies, I thought, but...It's just a fanciful name, the name doesn't really matter. Who else could we trust with such a fruit?" She looks to Angela. "You do." ''Everything in the universe happens because someone made it happen and nothing is for no reason and I'm so tired!'' Angela looks at Lilian for a long moment, and then smiles. "I don't know if I am quite as spiritual about it as Tiphereth, but if everything is happening because someone made it happen, and if you all are in this position for a reason, perhaps there is no need to worry. I think desperate caution caused more problems in this case than they solve." And perhaps it's that little magical girl of friendship within her that adds, "I think it would be good to reunite Dictum with their loved one. There is no villainous secret organization involved right now. It's only people, now, who are largely fine, at minimum." "It's not my world," Roland adds. "And Kepler is definitely not my world, but it's probably been a long time since they got a gift of their own."
Lilian Rook	'The only lesson to be learned from such a thing is 'I should have lost my heart sooner.''     Sakura suddenly picks up her glass and downs the remaining half of her drink in one, long go, trying not to show how out-of-breath she is when she finally puts it back down. It coincidentally prevents doing anything else.     'It may be a cultural issue, or it may be related to their rather young age at the time they became effectively deceased.'     Lilian winces. Nika says "I didn't want to ¶materialize it/speak of the devil and he shall appear¶ but yeah I kinda . . . got that impression." She looks at Petra.     'Dear Nika was there, as well.'     She nods. "They didn't even notice. I dunno whether they're gonna be ¶mad/owned/stalked¶ or ¶glad/surprised/come to Jesus¶ about it."     '...But I'm starting to think it might not even just be a one world or one universe thing, exactly.'     Lilian responds with a richly layered series of exasperated decompression noises. "I just can't believe I live in the universe where it's so direct. Like I'm finding out my world has a special quirky trait after all, and the special quirky trait is 'if you can't justify your society to a twelve year old anymore it stops existing'. My world's thing is that humanity can lose the mandate of heaven and get regime changed. Hi, I'm from ontological guillotine Earth!"     'The Flow of the River is long but maybe there's purpose.'     'I don't know if I am quite as spiritual about it as Tiphereth, but if everything is happening because someone made it happen, and if you all are in this position for a reason, perhaps there is no need to worry.'     Lilian, who is the only one even vaguely familiar with 'the Flow' at all, forms her first opinion on it ever. "I don't think there is a Flow unless there's a purpose anyways. It's almost tautological. I've always said that everything is as shitty as it is because everyone individually thinks they can read the future and game the system by doing little evil things now for a justifying good later on, and all their individual waves crash into it each other and turn it into noise, so all the evils stay and the good never materializes; and then it's all 'material analysis' in hindsight."     "There's only a flow to things when enough people feel the same thing in the same direction and they decide to believe it more than the reality in front of them. Those are the only conditions in which someone's will is passed along through time and people's decisions form a current that pushes in the direction of what we really want." She theatrically exhales. "That part is up to them, but it wouldn't sit properly with me to just not let them know."
Petra Soroka	". . . it may be that the purpose of the tail is so that you can transform it into various useful maneuvering-centric devices such as a a pogostick, or helicopter blades that spin around and let you hover for a useful for a platforming amount of time."     "Ange. I'm deadly serious. If I ever use my tail as a pogo stick like fucking Tigger the tiger then I want you to kill me. If I ever use my tail as a *helicopter* like *Tails* then I'll do it myself! God! I have to have better aesthetic standards than that!" "Petra do you have demon girls loudly propositioning you to 'silence your mewling barks' out behind buildings?"     "Oh my godddddddd!"     Petra groans so dramatically that she flops onto her back, limbs loosely splayed, tail squished into a puddle. "She does it multiple times a *day*! I don't even bother responding anymore! The one time I did, she was fifteen minutes late, puffing on an inhaler, and she *cried* when I took it away from her! It's *really* not what you think it is!"     The puddle reforms under her, extra limb propping her back up hands-free as it consolidates back into a tail. "... The tail's cool though. I haven't been complaining about having it." "Petra you've gotta ÷chug! chug! chug!÷ pretty please?."     Instantly defeated by Nika being enthusiastic, Petra looks at her with wide wet eyes. "... Like, the Fruit?" Her soggy gaze turns to Lilian, to check whether Lilian is going to encourage her to see how many tails she gets by consuming the Fruit. "Fuck! I'm always doing this!"     "Speaking of monsters that wanted to be created on purpose, I started reading Frankenstein," comments Lilian's Monster, either purposefully or not playing up the slutty English Lit angle. "I didn't wanna start it until I finished Paradise Lost, which turned out to be the totally correct decision. I've got *so* much stuff I could say." "It would be that three is the number that couldn't quite be killed."     "I've been fucking *losing* it over that part!" Petra makes an aggrieved groaning noise, scrambling up to her hands and knees. Just entertaining the topic makes it feel like the wind's knocked out of her all over again.     "God. They had hundreds, or thousands. They killed so many people just on the *suspicion* that they were Vectors that they probably created hundreds more from trying. And there are still only *three*." Petra rocks backwards, sitting on her ankles. "I guess the Three Moons couldn't distinguish then, either. I mean, by the end, there were more Blooms of every prior stage than there ever had been before. They just got killed with the rest."
Petra Soroka	Whereas Tamamo is the ruthlessly efficient conveyor of the failures of a doomed world whose ideals would have Lilian executed on sight, Petra's mood makes her the more melancholic stand-in for Dictum themselves. Sentimental and regretful for things she never did or saw, the apocalyptic attitude of the long gone world is background texture for Dictum's own perspective, and that of the Blooms on Kepler.     "... I mean, it was *so* frequent. Stage one was before even developing any powers at all, which they routinely detected. One of Dictum's best school friends was a Vector, and they killed themselves once they couldn't hide it anymore. It feels like... um, from a sad, stupid sort of perspective, it makes sense that they have to take the emotional stance that the Existential Threat is 'something else' that takes their friends away and replaces them with monsters." "The last survivor of Kepler just happens to be--"     "Well..." What Petra doesn't say, is that if this Earth ended right now, she imagines that it would be pretty likely that she'd be the last human survivor. "It's ÷ours÷ too though."     "Yeah. I mean, um, if the Voyager had landed any loop before this one, it would've been over for them for forever probably. None of this is for granted for any of you, and I super duper don't want it to be fucked up at all." Petra hesitates, then repeats, because she's keenly aware that she's arguing on behalf of someone who at least passively participated in the systematic murder of Blooms. "Like, I really really do mean it, that the thing I want more than anything is for this to turn out well for you. I'd fuck over every other Bloom in the universe if I needed to, much less Dictum. Just, like, it's so ÷Golden Ending÷ for the disillusioned cast out villain to come to terms with a kinder way of being that they hoped for once upon a time and gave up on when confronted with what they thought was harsh reality." "We're not showing the Fruit to Dictummmmm--"     This hadn't been on Petra's mind before, but now that Lilian says it... "... Huh." ". . . I didn't even get to talk about our findings."     "Ah! Sorry! I didn't mean to take up all the air or anything! I wanna hear about your stuff too! I just, like, only know about the sappy stuff, not the nerd stuff-- like, because Laplace is-- not you."
Petra Soroka	"The *specifics*. What are you pitching to Dictum?"     Petra sighs, and pulls a fistful of Silver off her tail to begin tying her hair up with in preparation for Spells. Slowly settling into the mood necessary to draw own her own psychic paradigm of them, her language takes a slight but noticeable turn along with it.     "Our goal is to get, like, perpetual voluntary Stage IV status in all four of the Blooms, insofar as the progression on Kepler really makes sense to apply to our situation on Earth, without whatever instability or incursion that leads to Stage V-- also, like, I'm not going to call it an *infection* either, obviously, but we don't have any terminology for the other stuff besides the evil-tainted ones, so, you know."     "There was a time Dictum believed that their friendship with Asterism was the, uh, palliative care or appeasement that would help in that same way, and then Underived Conviction went and probably killed billions of people after that anyways. Obviously, they're a fucking moron, and one person being nice-ish in a psychotic hell-facility isn't undoing the whole collective harm of the world, but we have two very convincing reasons to show them how that's still worth trying. Unvic, and the Dragon's Garden, because kindness actually is the most important thing and children's books are more reliable than science journals."     With the Silver from her bottle, Petra twisted a little wire in a spiral around the center of a three-pronged metal structure, on the base of which she puts a piece of paper. "Look, dude, they don't have the fucking power to stick anyone in a containment cell. You're shadowboxing against nothing. The scientific method for studying the Blooms was, like, implemented evil-style, but we're not gonna throw the science baby out with the torture water here. I don't think we can operate on just vibes and good feelings when the only living human who knows anything about 'everting' says it'll happen to Lilian in a few decades no matter what."     Petra's last preparation is putting a trio of quartz crystals at the pronged slots in her weird Laplace-esque device (it's even chrome!), and then twisting the spiral needle so it points down to the paper. She looks up at Lilian from her place on the ground. "Okay, um, I'm ready."     This isn't strictly 'the spell' that Dictum would cast to get a reading on Lilian. There's the looming chasmic vista of Petra's psychic power kicking into gear, and then a sourceless fizzle and directionless tug, as the mimicked impressions of 'what the spell should do' fall into the space she opens up. The needle coils and shivers, dripping lines that form shapes and waves as readings on the paper provided.
Lilian Rook	'Ange. I'm deadly serious. If I ever use my tail as a pogo stick like fucking Tigger the tiger then I want you to kill me. If I ever use my tail as a *helicopter* like *Tails* then I'll do it myself!'     "Aw come the fuck on! Can't I do it?"     'She does it multiple times a *day*! I don't even bother responding anymore! The one time I did, she was fifteen minutes late, puffing on an inhaler, and she *cried* when I took it away from her! It's *really* not what you think it is!'     "God she sounds so funny. I need to meet her. I need to train her."     '... Like, the Fruit?'     "Well I was thinking the ¶toon power¶ but if you're gonna unalive yourself then I guess it's fine not to." She uses the word in an oddly passive-aggressive way, like trying to get Petra's goat.     'I didn't wanna start it until I finished Paradise Lost, which turned out to be the totally correct decision. I've got *so* much stuff I could say.'     "Save it for the broadband." Lilian sighs, just barely not saying 'Samantha', because she's not in a bad mood. Ash mutters something that sounds suspiciously like 'Edgar Allen Homo' then shakes their head. "Lilian's Monster is right there. It's too correct. She's a doctor."     'God. They had hundreds, or thousands. They killed so many people just on the *suspicion* that they were Vectors that they probably created hundreds more from trying. And there are still only *three*.'     "I wonder about that myself as well." Sakura says. Drink guzzled, face slightly flushed, she touches her finger to her cheek. "You've observed, with both Ash and Lilian, that only the 'Divine Tree' strain of World-Rivet can produce, or 'give birth', to a fully formed 'other self'. The others seem to have no such ability to bring 'an untrue thing' from elsewhere into our world, as a living thing. At least, I've never seen it in all my lives." she shakes her head.     "I've never seen my own, and-- beg pardon Nika, but you may have suspected by now that one belongs to you. I had wondered when to broach it, but each day I watch, you seem to be more and more prepared to receive it; not less." Nika sighs, something confirmed, and says "¶Pen pal¶. Yeah."     Moving on ambiguously, Sakura says to Petra, "We know so little of why. Were there only ever the four of us, and Earth failed to produce another? Or are there others, scattered across this depleted world, we know nothing of? Is it that, amongst the many, only the number that there are 'Divine Trees' might win their final transfiguration? Their place in writing the new world's laws? Or is it merely that their world was vastly more populated than ours, and there were simply too few humans near each great augur?"     'They just got killed with the rest.'     "Presumptively." she says, uneasily. "Though it sets me ill at ease. If the 'Existential Threat' compels no loyalty, or even competition, then I think I feel less that it is our guardian of any sort." She skims right past that thought which she has never before voiced.
Lilian Rook	'It feels like... um, from a sad, stupid sort of perspective, it makes sense that they have to take the emotional stance that the Existential Threat is 'something else' that takes their friends away and replaces them with monsters.'     Ash gestures at Arthur, but doesn't look all that happy about it. The posting energy has more or less left them now. You can tell by the way the unplaceable pan-Amterican slides out of their accent. "You can still accept that everyone else made it a billion times worse from that angle, so you don't need to do cognitive dissonance, but if you have to think a 'phobia was what killed the world, then you can't not accept that there was jack shit you could ever have done and that hiding your jews in your attic like the American fantasy doesn't even matter to anyone."     "If there's a monster then you can kill it, or seal it, or chase it off or whatever. If there's just the fundamental moral-ideological cloth your world is cut from, then it's already too fucking late and all you can do is cross your fingers. And that sucks. That's not a last chance at redemption humanitarian mission through space. That's just being debris that got lucky and washed up in time to see it happen again."     Even Lilian doesn't prod Ash for speaking their mind directly. "I think I'd go mad." she says.     'Well...'     "I think it's kinda sad. That it's ¶I got lucky/unrequited love¶. I think it'd help a lot to get them to believe us if they knew they were getting ¶saved for last/I'll buy time/pushed from the nest¶. They got a spaceship working even."     'Just, like, it's so ÷Golden Ending÷ for the disillusioned cast out villain to come to terms with a kinder way of being that they hoped for once upon a time and gave up on when confronted with what they thought was harsh reality.'     Nika nods vigorously. "I suppose that hyperfixating on redemption hasn't gone wrong in the longest possible term." Lilian sighs. She's thinking about herself. Then she starts thinking about Petra too. "Just been gruellingly miserable in the moment." Then she thinks about Ash. "Don't look at me. I'm already thinking 'man fuck redemption' 'cause you're right. You're right and it sucks." "My apologies for being such a deontologist about it." "Whatever. I'm allergic to utilitarians for life."     'I just, like, only know about the sappy stuff, not the nerd stuff-- like, because Laplace is-- not you.'     "The sappy stuff just did most of the heavy lifting." Lilian sighs, only glancing at her tablet forlornly. "It's nothing terribly unexpected anyways. Most of the fruit's reformatting is presumed psychologically perceived rather than strictly physical. Animal testing is a total waste of time. It just seems to kill insects on the spot and put render anything less intelligent than a rat catatonic; and it isn't good for the rats either. We can't isolate any organic or even inorganic compounds, seeing as it doesn't seem to react to anything other than a person."
Lilian Rook	"Arcanum doesn't seem to 'take' very well, like it can't quite decide what the target class is and tries something random or gives up after a bit. Psychometry, thankfully, just seems to make people slightly ill. The most promising lead we really have is that we're calling it 'the New Fruit' because its paradigm is somewhat botancal in its sort of arch-nature. I'll try to get an expert on that soon, but my own work is mostly in trying to extract and distill whatever's in it. My strong theory is that it'll demonstrate normacausitive lensing when taken to a place with the equipment. It'll confirm something about the Trees for me if it does."     'Look, dude, they don't have the fucking power to stick anyone in a containment cell.'     "Yeah that was me, remember?" Ash says to Arthur, who put them and everyone else in the vicinity in a kind of containment cell, which was made out of bullshit videogames and triple triad. "Though I agree completely that it shouldn't be suffered to be said at all, I do wonder who you imagine would come along to agree with them." "Other than--" "--the obvious. But that's much--" "--too late now." Again, the giggle about it. "Cute." "Hey are we still good on operation Spider Jar? Just in case." "Oh yeah whenever it's ¶any time/rainy day/after school club¶."     'Okay, um, I'm ready.'     Momentum brought Lilian to this point, and now it struggles to keep her there. There was a small amount of curiosity involved, certainly, and a more than a little bit of the looming worry from the back of her mind, catalyzed at the moment of action being near at hand, but for the most part, it was Petra making a series of annoyingly compelling points while demonstrating the vast gap in understanding between them that she and Tamamo had come to while she wasn't looking, and now she has to stand and wait while Petra sets up a sketchy-looking Device and points it her way.     The look of anticipation that Ash gives her restless shifting and nervous little glances at Petra's work keeps her to the course out of petty contrarianism. Sakura's beatifically soothing smile makes it a little bit embarrassing to do so.     Then the psychic waves hit, along an exacting axis mirroring the precise pattern that invokes absolute natural law, designed to be absorbed in the vacuum of its presence and come back as a black spot on the proverbial X-ray. The mechanism is immediate, but it takes a short time for the purpose of it to be obvious, as the tiny burns it makes in the paper beneath the focal needle, formed by splinters of focused light through quartz, seem random until the broader wave pattern emerges, whereupon it resembles something like a dot matrix printer making butterfly-passes shaped by radio wave interference.     It isn't so cartoonish as to produce a nice little human silhouette, but it's not too far off, painting a series of three-dimensional orbits that demarcate a Vitruvian Man-esque triple overlap of a human shape, making the X-Y-Z axes shots relatively intuitive when you grasp where to start. A perfectly regular gradient that normalizes to a pale gray colour seems to denote human mass, with paler, near-white points along the spine to the crown of the head connected to branching channels throughout the body seeming to denote areas of concentrated arcane resonance in line with the human body's naturally resonant geometries.
Lilian Rook	The tightly clustered black spots can only be 'corruption', then. It's easy to tell by the clustering of them in the left leg below the knee, gathered around an irregular seam, and the second greatest darkening being in the right hand, thickest at the fingers and trailing off towards the wrist. Even then, the black is like grainy radiation static in visual footage, dusted throughout the body in trace uniformity, only thinning out near the white lines. The darker grey gathered in the facial scar region, smeared like graphite towards the back of the eye, clinches it in absurd detail.     Altogether, if carefully measured, it's less than one percent of the paper across most of it, but closer to three or four in the most affected regions, most tightly clustered in bone. It's hard to imagine the minuscule rate of growth that Dictum projected every becoming threatening, looking at the utra-fine mist of black static on the silhouette, but eighty years is a long time for geometric growth, and it famously doesn't take much to damage the right nerve or region of the brain when it comes to the human body.     The effect on Lilian is slightly less immediate, but ultimately dramatic. It begins with restless weight-shifting, then anxious foot-tapping, then shallow and discomfited breathing, and finally becomes a soft, back-of-the-throat whine, rising into a plaintive moan. Unable to keep herself still, she rocks herself to her toes and back, then slowly clutches her arms in against herself, intending to hold the energy down, but only sinking her fingers tightr and tighter into her upper arms. She shivers multiple times. Her left foot twitches, then kicks like a misfired reflex, and her right hand spasms for a split second.     "Oh god I can feel where it is." Lilian whispers loud enough for everyone to hear. The words come out purring-hoarse in strange and heated tones. "It prickles. It's like feeling something really warm on my skin but on the inside instead. What the hell?" Lilian mutters, despite nobody asking for the feedback. She repeats "What the hell . . ." twice, spaced out, the follows with a shivery whine, and an even more strained-plaintive "My whole body feels hot. What is this? A microwave beam? God it's like I've been working out for an hour. Or like I'm sick. Is that metabolic? Holy fuck." She vacillates between strained high pitch and gasping-irritable fry.     "Fuck. Petra. Are you sure?" Of what, she doesn't say. "This is like holding the Fruit times ten. I can smell the incense from the house up the hill. I can hear your heartbeat this close. Fuck. Do you have any idea what it's taking to sit still right now?" Her first guess might be right, because she's beguns sweating, too, lightly beading her shivering skin, where the goosebumps are. Her wiggling, clutching, desperately held-down drive to go somewhere, do something-- god knows what, but not nothing-- translates to a woozy-sounding whine. "Petra, hurry it uuuup! It's weeeeird! I can feel every single thing about my whole body! Do you have any idea how weird that is?!" She can't seem to stop talking, even as her breathing gets faster and more laboured.
Lilian Rook	"Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck. Oh my god I can't sit-- It's so hot! I need to go-- Is it done yet? Please? Can't you call it done? I can't-- It's hard to think Petra. It's-- I don't-- Everything feels so weirdly-- F-fuck that's way too much sensitivity in-- I'm burning up! Petraaa!" Bouncing up and down on the spot. Ash looks enthralled at the weirdness of it, and somehow stillless than Sakura, who is holding both her hands over her mouth and nose.     "Petra please! I trust you! You know I do! You know I love you! I just felt like I had to catch up with what you and Tamamo did all on your own! I'm proud of you! Thank you for working together; it really means a lot when you get along with my wife! And thank you for looking after Dictum, too! I do sort of worry about them sometimes! But can't you wrap this up? My head feels fuzzy. I can't-- I need to sit down. I need to go take a shower. I need five cold drinks and a long-- Petra please!"     Lilian's strange, flushed, sweating, shivering, oversharing marathon comes to a close when the spell finally completes the readout. She can clearly feel the instant the bombardment of high-intensity Waves ceases interacting with her, because she staggers on the exhale and catches herself against the railing, holding her hand to her chest where her heart flutters out of control.     Sakura scoots her chair out and trots over to her, immediately doting with "Oh goodness. Are you feeling alright? Did any of it last?" and causing Lilian to twitch and breathe in sharply when she touches her arm. Nika stares at the readout, makes a soft 'wow'-shaped silent exclamation with her mouth, and gestures at Petra to give it to her. Once she has it, Ash leers over the page with strangely fervid intensity; for a posture so scholarly at least.
Lilian Rook	"Hey I can work with this. This is easy."     "What? What are you talking-- Now isn't really the time."     "No no, I'm serious. This is pinpoint info. I don't have to touch the rest of you with the eye-- the power, at all. I can just go slow and kinda zap it out of you."     "You can't be serious. You--"     "I just said I was. Doesn't that totally solve it? Or even just set it back like five hundred years. You already know I can do it. You've seen it; and my case was worse than yours. You're not going to explode. You didn't when Nerd Alert did that weird shit to you at the convention fight."     "I . . . Come on, you can't . . ."     "Don't you want to see what it is? I do."     "I do! Who else is gonna? Asking for another ¶miracle/destined bond/happily ever after¶ is kinda too much isn't it? We're already doing stuff nobody else could! I think you should! It's like ¶user experience/always meant to happen/a monument to all your labours of love¶! Right?"     "I-- That's a really cute way to put it Nika. I know it's . . ."     "¶Golden ending¶!"     "Right. Right. Hh."     "So?"     "Let's not pressure her right this very moment, please? If the solution is that which all the pieces were laid in front of us all this time, we are in no such rush at all."     "Y-yes. Thank you. Sakura. I need to. Gather myself."     "No way . . . It's real."     "Sure. Fine. That's chill. But if you don't figure something out by the end of the month, you come back here. Deal?"     "Sure. Okay. Whatever. Deal."     "Provided it doesn't bother Lady Tamamo, of course."     "That goes without saying. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need a moment to . . ."     "Oh, of course. Please. I'll show you back inside."     Sakura, taking Lilian by the arm, helps her unnecessarily to the stairs, and then trots after her rapid pace back up. Looking back over her shoulder, she 'shouts' (as much as she even can) back down "Please, enjoy yourselves! We'll be right back! I promise!" As soon as they're both out of earshot, Nika looks directly at Petra and starts giggling like crazy. "What?" "I'm never gonna be able to explain. Never ever ever."