> Be the Heir of Light.
> Be the Heir of Light.
The first clear thought that you have upon waking is that sleeping against the wall was a terrible, shitty idea and that you’re never doing it again, past you was a careless idiot. Your back throbs: You drag yourself up from your seated position, stretch out each leg down to the toes. The cramps in them evaporate and leave them feeling fresh and ready for another day of running around action-RPG style.
Your spine, and all the muscles in your torso for good measure, do not want to be so cooperative. They ache, and twisting your waist feels wrong, a sharp burst of dysphoric warning signals and a little pain with each movement. Rotating your shoulders is more of the same. You shake out your hair, shake your head to try to clear it, and fidget to and fro trying to get your full range of motion back.
“Good morning, sleepyhead!”
You look up, something in your chest jolting a little at the familiar chirping voice.
Siskier is there, beaming, an eye-blinding pale turquoise and white. Her top half is still in the white sports bra and long scarf she was wearing the last time she was corporeal, and her lower half tapers off into a long trail of increasingly translucent smoke that’s half mermaid tail and half cartoon ghost. The black horns poking up through her hair (one broken off halfway up the stem, courtesy of your boyfriend) are still jarring as all hell, but the pair of fangs that poke out over her lips when she smiles suit her somehow.
The past two years have been a constant study in missing her like you’d miss a lost organ, sharp and physical. Saying it’s good to have her back would be such an understatement it’d be paramount on insult, but somehow having her back like this-it just isn’t the same.
“Good morning yourself,” you tell her: Siskier, your sprite, frozen at seventeen, half-human and also some strange parody of Casper the Friendly Ghost. There’s a nagging sense in the back of your brain that you ought to apologize to her, there has been since you prototyped her ashes and she popped out of nonexistence like this. But you don’t know how to, and it would also feel really weird to when she’s smiling at you so brightly.
You should maybe put this down to being groggy as hell from sleeping against the wall like an idiot.
“Next time I try to nod off in a place that’s not a bed, please have stern words with me and remind me that I don’t want to spend the next morning with all the muscles from my neck to my tailbone performing a hearty choir of fuck you.” A thought occurs to you, and you append: “Actually, just go ahead and give me crap if I feel like sleeping somewhere other than the ground floor. The kitchen, the furniture, and the shower are all way downstairs, aren’t they.”
Siskier laughs at you, and you sigh.
“Whatever, I’m taking the fast way down.”
Your series of incredibly shitty landings yesterday have at least given you a better idea of how to work your rocket boots. It’s hard to get out of the window even when you’ve opened it all the way, but once you’ve managed to squirm out into the open air and unfold your body, the sharp snap of air on your face makes you feel much more awake.
You’d enjoy freefall more, you think, if the breeze didn’t keep trying to blow your shirt right up over your head. When you were exploring yesterday, the air of LODAF was warm and smoky, but right now it’s bitchtit freezing and feels like razors. Your stomach and chest are probably going to get windburnt as shit if you keep doing this.
Either you’ll remember to tuck your shirt in next time and see if that helps, or you’ll just cross that bridge when you come to it.
You fire off your rocket boots in time to land on your feet, and go back into your house.
Given that the outside was under assault by various underlings last night and there was a proliferation of imps upstairs, things don’t actually look too ransacked in here. Most of the ornaments and things have fallen onto the floor and some of the furniture’s shifted, but the fridge is still stocked and the dishes look unbroken. You give the living room a cursory patrol and shut lion statuettes into cabinets, then get to work on breakfast.
One omelet, three slices of toast, a plate of bacon, a two-hour-long shower, and a change of shirt and boxers later, you feel a lot less like a disoriented zombie and a lot more like a Gulcasa. Siskier is not downstairs yet, so you sit on the couch and put your feet up on the coffee table and flip through your array modus just to make sure you don’t need to pick anything up from here (you don’t) or try to dick around with the alchemiter to make new supplies from scratch (you don’t). Your strifes since your and Nessiah’s shopping spree yesterday have restocked your money, although boonbucks and boondollars still don’t quite mean much to you in terms of stuff you can buy. You have build grist, but really Nessiah is still in charge of making your house taller and not you; come to think of it, you need to spend some time on Yggdra’s house today. (You judge that this can wait a while.) You have a huge stack of obsidian grist (yours), a lesser stockpile of orichalcum grist (Nessiah’s), and a much smaller amount of pine grist (which must be Emilia’s). Your stat readout also has an empty meter of steel and copper grist, as well as a symbol for a mystery sixth kind that apparently needs unlocking.
The rest of your stat readout says that you are a healthy distance up your echeladder (Nessiah was a little higher when you split up, you think) and that all your various meters are replenished from sleeping. You try not to be too weirded out by the way that you can actually make a Squaresoft-esque stat menu pop up fully visible in your head by closing one eye and concentrating. You fail miserably in this endeavor.
Also, your PDA informs you that nobody is online. Go figure.
When you sigh and sit back against the couch (your back, which still appears to be miffed at you despite the shower, rumbles contentment at the softness), Siskier is suddenly next to you. Either spriteliness means being able to sneak around extra-unobtrusively, or she really can just poof out of thin air when you’ve got your back turned. Whichever the case, it doesn’t really matter much.
“So did you have fun on Prospit last night?” she asks brightly, propping her soft white face on a soft white hand. “You were asleep for a really reeeeeally long time! Gaooo.”
“Not particularly, I guess. I mean, I sort of got to talk to some of the white chess guys a little, but Nessiah didn’t show up and I spent all night waiting for him. Eventually I got so bored that I just went to sleep.”
Siskier narrows her eyes at you a little and tilts her head to the side. “You mean you managed to get both your real self and your dreamself to fall asleep at the same time?”
“Yeah. Are you not supposed to do that?”
“No, it’s just…” And she starts to frown, just a little tiny bit. “Did you have any weird dreams?”
You are struck with the very intense and familiar sensation of having forgotten something you wanted to commit to memory. It’s the kind of thing that always comes after you dream and then have an active morning. “I’m… pretty sure I did. I can’t really remember any details, though.”
This is not really a lie, as the handful of details that remain in your head are nightmare-vague and make absolutely no sense when you try to connect the images or otherwise get some meaning from them. All that’s left are the blurry impressions of weird aliens, a bunch of confused and jumbled-up symbols, a sense of sadness, and the creeping sense of wariness that’s fear before you’re willing to admit what it is to anybody.
It’s probably not that important, though.
Siskier keeps looking at your face for a while, and then shrugs.
“Anyhow, today we should go to explore your Land! I’m sure everyone else is busy with their quests by now, which means you should get started on yours too! It’s already past noon, and you can’t afford to get that far behind!”
Right now-to be honest, you’d rather sit still and give your back a bit more of a rest, and pester everyone else until they answer. You need to check on Emilia and try to smooth things over between her and the others, you need to check on Leon and make sure that the idiot’s not getting in over his head, you need to check on Yggdra because even if you don’t like her you’re responsible for her as her server player, and you just want to talk to Nessiah after a long frustrating night of waiting fruitlessly for him to show.
But that would be stupid, because everyone is offline and busy, and you did tell Siskier that today was going to be a questing and exploring day. There will still be time to check Pesterchum if you can figure out good pitstop places along the way.
So, out loud, you say “sure” and hope your smile comes off as genuine. If Siskier finds your expression odd at all, she doesn’t say so.