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Kanaya: Wake up.
You wake up, and cloudy green fills your vision as your ganderbulbs open.
Your face had sunk below the surface of the sopor while you slept, you realize, and your nictating subocular membranes are still closed to shield your bulbs from the slime. You straighten your posture pole to lift your face fully out of it. It feels strange on your skin, still, minute but noticeable, as though the soothing slime around you were a garment made of comfortable fabric but half a size too small. The sopor is different, here. It serves the same purpose, obviously, but the ingredients are sourced differently, the texture of it is different. You’re all experiencing this. After seven and a half sweeps of sleeping in the Alternian formula it’s going to take time to get used to.
You stretch your limbs and start to lift yourself properly out of your recuperacoon. That’s new and as-yet unfamiliar, too; you’ve had the same one for such a long time. But you got taller over the last sweep, and you’re going to keep getting taller, so when you and Rose were moving into your new hivestem-style apartment you bought a new one along with all the other new furnishings. It’s deeper. You haven’t adapted yet. That’s why you sank, presumably.
You scrape the sopor from your knuckles on the side of the ‘coon so you can wipe it fully from your face. After a few attempts your instincts are satisfied and your suboculars retract, allowing you to blink and focus your vision properly. This quickly reveals, as you look over the side at the human respite platform your ‘coon is attached to, that Rose isn’t in your block.
The bed isn’t made. The sheets are tossed aside. You find the switch to drain the sopor and climb out.
You spend your sleep cycles with her, most times. For about half a sweep, now, it’s been that way. Since you rose again as a drinker you don’t need nearly as much sleep as you once did, and when you do, you often can’t bring yourself to leave Rose’s bed for your recuperacoon; you’re willing to accept the consequences of unconsciousness without slime in order to stay with her, to be with her when the memories find either of you in the night - or even just to feel her in your arms for its own sake. But, for the sake of your long-term health, you do still sometimes need the relief of immersion in the comforting depressant sludge.
You look at the clock as you wipe the residual ooze from your body with your soporrag. It’s still relatively early. Rose usually sleeps much later than this, despite your best efforts.
KANAYA: Rose
You frown deeply as it occurs to you that she might have had a nightmare and you were too deep in the slime to notice. Her slippers aren’t on her side of the respite platform.
KANAYA: Rose?
There’s no response.
Maybe she just has her headphones on. You pull on your undergarments and style your hair and then step out into the main block.
You see everything else that’s supposed to be there. All the things you brought with you from the meteor - the handmade knick-knacks, alchemized gadgets and novelties, your sewing kit where it sits with Rose’s knitting basket between your armchairs. All the new things you’ve acquired - the furniture whose hues and designs you haggled endlessly over, the paintings and pictures of memories now that you’re more regularly making ones that you want to remember, the full-length mirror you fell instantly in love with at a gallery and mounted beside your front door so that you can check your fit one last time before you leave.
The only thing that isn't there is Rose. A pair of her shoes are missing from under the mirror.
With the sopor flushed from your snifftubes you can smell clearly that she isn’t in your hive. The scent of her human blood is unmistakable, and there’s no fresh source of it anywhere here.
You can feel your anguish bladder begin to seep. Disquiet initiates a spread up from your thorax into your pan. You are a troll of faith - not in any Messiah or deity, rather in destiny, in Skaia - but the long dark monotony of the meteor and the loss of your original matriorb had reduced that flame of conviction to a dull, fragile ember. For some perigees, you have been committing yourself less and less to an abstract idea of the destined future, and more to the people you love. Your matesprit has been what matters to you above all, now. All that you do, you do for her.
Your victory over the evils of your homeworld and the miracle Rose’s dancestor bestowed on you have reignited the light of your belief, and you once again see it illuminating the way to the future - but Rose is still central in your thoughts, your self now filled to bursting as your heart tries to share the same space with your destiny. And now you don’t know where she is.
Panic wells inside you, sudden, unbidden. It’s a feeling you’ve been unacquainted with for so many of your sweeps - and then it was upon you, the Empress towering over you all. You died, you remember it, you died a second time, and this time you would not rise again, and you saw Rose fall to the ground, her own death utterly, valiantly Heroic and thus equally immutable. Jane brought you both back but your enemy still loomed before you, impossible to overcome, you were so close to the end, Roxy had just given the future back to you and now it was to be taken away again, and you were going to lose Rose too, when you had nothing left to you in those long dark perigees between universes you had her, and you were going to lose her too-
You didn’t lose her. Roxy delivered to you your future once again. But the terror is still there, lurking deep but always ready to appear, like a coiled shadow dropper. You won, you’re in the new world you helped give birth to, you’ve achieved the ultimate reward and you have peace - but that doesn’t matter. You’re in a new place, still unfamiliar, and you don’t know where your matesprit is.
Frantically you check Trollian. Rose is online, but set to ‘away’.
-- grimAuxiliatrix [GA] began trolling tentacleTherapist [TT] at 08:26 --
GA: Rose
GA: Rose Where Are You
GA: I Woke Up And You Were Gone
GA: Rose
GA: Rose Please Where Are You
There’s no response.
You don’t know where to go or what to do, so you have to prepare for the situation however you can. That means calling the others for help - and it means looking your best. To meet a crisis presenting anything but the best possible face is anathema to you. Composing yourself properly before confronting a threat or a problem is an act of meditation. ‘If I Had The Spare Time And Effort To Coordinate My Colors And Arrange My Garments Before Challenging You,’ it says, ‘I Never Took You Seriously. You Were Never Dangerous To Me.’ A finely crafted presentation is like a suit of powered armor. You feel your stitches fraying and you need everything you have to hold them together.
You rush to the vanity and apply your lipstick.
Okay. She and Dave are always harassing one another.
GA: Dave Where Is Rose
TG: what am i her babysitter
TG: i have a lot of shit going on ok kanaya
TG: i cant be expected to devote any more of my time than i already do to chaperoning my screwball ectosis every time she goes wandering off on another new ontologically hazardous science project
TG: isnt the entire point of her having a girlfriend that theres someone else to do that for me
GA: Dave With All Due Respect Please Shut The Fuck Up
TG: uh
GA: I Have Even Less Time To Indulge Your Ridiculous Blathering Than Usual
GA: Which If We Are Being Brutally Honest Was Already Really Not That Much
GA: Do You Know Where Rose Is
TG: isnt she still in bed
TG: its 8 30 thats still basically the middle of the night by her standards
TG: and mine too but i drank way too much soda last night so my circadians are currently nonexistent
TG: which obviously is the normal state of affairs so now its more like theyre in the negazone
TG: they went back in time and retroactively stopped existing
TG: my sleep schedule is in the negative math hell from the charlie and the chocolate factory sequel getting gnawed on by fog goblins
GA: Dave Where Is She
TG: wait do you actually not know where she is
TG: you two have been basically stapled together by the pelvises for like a year
GA: Where Is She
TG: jesus i dont have her microchipped
TG: shes my sister not my rambunctious misbehaving pet
TG: i dont have a constantly updated satellite feed of her exact location
GA: So Youre Useless To Me
GA: Thanks For Nothing
Roxy, you’ve spent a lot of time together.
GA: Roxy Where Is Rose
TG: wow
TG: im hurt
TG: its tru what they say abt trolls
TG: they only want 1 thing
TG: info abt yr ectoteen mom from another universe
TG: amirite folx
GA: Roxy Stop Talking And Tell Me When The Last Time You Talked To Rose Was
TG: uhhhh last night hun
TG: we had a nice lil chat abt witches
TG: and cool animal familiars they can have
You disconnect. Your seams are tearing. Who else? Karkat? No, why would he know, if Dave doesn’t know anything neither will he - okay, okay, the other pre-scratch humans, she’s been reconnecting with them-
-- tentacleTherapist has gone active! --
TT: Oh.
TT: Well, that explains why Dave is blowing up my phone.
You can breathe again. Fear begins to uncoil itself from around your acid tract.
GA: Rose Where Are You
TT: I went for a walk.
TT: A long walk.
TT: I didn’t worry you, did I?
GA: Rose I Didnt Know Where You Were
GA: You Were Just Gone And You Werent Responding To Messages
GA: Of Course I Was Worried
GA: Where Are You
TT: I’m at my old house.
TT: On LOLAR.
GA: What
GA: Why
GA: I Thought We Were Going To Go Together
GA: Never Mind Im Coming To You
TT: You don’t have to.
TT: I appreciate the concern, but I’m a big girl, Kanaya, I can manage on my own for a couple of hours.
GA: Youre My Matesprit And Im Coming To Where You Are
TT: Fine.
Jade brought a lot of things with her when you stepped through the victory door. Her powers made it easy; even something the size of a planet could be made small enough to easily captchalogue. So she did. Once their grist had been offered up to Skaia and they had no further part to play, she chose not to leave the human players’ lands behind. She had a few reasons for it, one of which was that most of you agreed that it felt mean to uproot the consorts from the only homes they’d ever known when it wasn’t necessary. So Jade shrunk them again to the size of cueballs, carried them through the door, and found a place for them.
The radiance of another foreign star shines through the windows as you appear on the meteor. The warm light makes the place almost unrecognizable, it feels like an entirely new location to those of you who lived there in the dark for so long. Once the decision was made to import the session’s other bodies you decided to include the meteor, too - it seemed a waste to lose its extensive laboratories and equipment, and you and Rose wanted to maintain access to its libraries until you could fully document them. Its pre-existing network of transportalizers made it ideal as a hub for the new consort solar system Jade was creating, and so the pad on the new world leads here, with further reprogrammed pads leading to the various lands.
None of this matters to you now. You almost sprint across the hub and emerge into the entryway of Rose’s childhood hive.
KANAYA: Rose
You cast your bulbs across the space. You have vague memories of this hive, from your observations of Rose’s timeline in your Trollian viewport, and later from equally vague memories preserved in the dreambubbles. The muted sound of running water from beneath the floor is difficult to forget, as is the enormous looming wizard statue with the grotesque misshapen face to your left. But you’ve never seen this place properly - and at the moment you take in absolutely none of the details that in any other circumstance would be so interesting to you. Your oculars sweep the room and filter out any details that aren’t Rose, which, currently, is all details.
KANAYA: Rose!
ROSE: Upstairs.
You speed up the staircase with your drinker fastness. Rose is there on the gallery, by the wall, casual, looking at her palmhusk, her sudden presence in your vision somehow unceremonious. She jumps as you appear in front of her. Her palm falls from her grasp. You let it drop to the floor, ignored, in favor of grasping at her arms. Rose blinks as you look at her face.
ROSE: …I suppose you did worry, then.
KANAYA: Its My Responsibility To Worry About You
KANAYA: Youre My Matesprit
KANAYA: Or My Girlfriend I Really Dont Care What You Call It
KANAYA: I Care About You
KANAYA: So Much
KANAYA: Why Did You Just Leave Without Telling Me
Rose doesn’t pull away from you, but she turns her head, looks down and to the side.
ROSE: You were in the slime. You’re hard to wake up when you’re in there, and anyway it’s been a while, I knew you needed it. I didn’t want to interrupt.
KANAYA: So You Could Have Left A Note
She looks back up and meets your eyes, now.
ROSE: Is that how it’s going to be, here?
ROSE: Do I have to register an official petition every time I leave the apartment?
ROSE: We made sure to get a place near a library, do I need to schedule the excursion with you and get the paperwork stamped in triplicate whenever I want to take advantage of it?
You’re the one who pulls away from her. Her appearance is perfectly arranged, not an eyelash or dot of mascara out of place, her form draped in her violet-on-black blouse and long flowing skirt with the golden highlights. She is so beautiful, and yet she looks so ugly. Her face is petulant. Her lovely black-glossed lips are pressed into an almost rectangular flat line.
KANAYA: Rose
KANAYA: Are You Mad At Me For Caring About You
KANAYA: For Asking You To Take Maybe Fifteen Seconds To Leave Me A Note When You Go Somewhere
KANAYA: It Might Be As Long As Twenty-Five Seconds Out Of Your Day If You Wanted To Use Your Best And Very Lovely Handwriting
ROSE: I’m not mad.
ROSE: That’s a significant exaggeration of my emotional reaction to this situation.
ROSE: I just think your response is unreasonable. Do I really need you to worry about me? I’m a high level god tier player-
KANAYA: I Almost Lost You
You grab her by the shoulders this time.
KANAYA: We Almost Lost Each Other
KANAYA: We Almost Died
KANAYA: The Dreambubbles Are Gone
KANAYA: We Wouldnt Even Have Had An Afterlife Together
KANAYA: Weve Only Been Here For Two Perigees And Suddenly You Werent There
KANAYA: Id Say Im Sorry If It Bothers You That I Dont Want To Lose You Again But Frankly That Would Be Such An Extravagantly Insincere Apology That I Couldnt Say It With A Straight Face
You realize that you had raised your voice. You don’t think you were shouting but your words still feel terribly loud against the waterfall white noise of the abandoned hive. The color has drained from Rose’s face. You release your grip on her sleeves. Your claws have creased the fine fabric.
Rose swallows. Her mouth opens. Then closes. Then opens again, stays open longer. It looks as though words are meant to issue from it, but none come forth. Her mouth closes again. Then she bends at the knee, her skirt flaring out elegantly, and picks up her palmhusk.
ROSE: The screen’s cracked.
ROSE: Not your fault, really.
ROSE: Just one more of my mother’s questionable decisions, not carpeting the gallery.
Her words and voice are absolutely crisp, syllables with measured right angles, perfect like pressed clothes. She returns her eyes to the screen.
ROSE: I was answering Dave when you came in.
ROSE: It sounds like you gave him a real fright.
ROSE: I’ve rarely seen him so worked up.
ROSE: It’s sweet, really.
ROSE: To know that he cares.
She continues to look at the screen. The awkwardness becomes so oppressive and thick on this sterile white gallery under the gaze of the absurd gap-toothed wizard that you feel the urge to equip your chainsaw and cut it. You don’t have words. You don’t know how you expected Rose to react, exactly, but it wasn’t this. She taps at the husk a few more times and then puts it back in her sylladex. She’s still not facing you. An awful distance seems to have come into being between you. You want to reach across it, to touch her hand - but you don’t know how. It suddenly seems too vast. And then she’s walking away. She sits down at the edge of the stairs down into the main block below. Her legs and the skirt of her dress dangle down.
You don’t really know what else to do, so you sit down beside her.
She’s staring into space directly ahead. You look at her for a moment and then follow her lead.
ROSE: I’m sorry.
Your head swivels instantly on your torso pillar towards her. Her voice is so small.
ROSE: I …
KANAYA: Do You Understand Why I Was Upset
ROSE: Yeah. I mean … yes. I do. I’m sorry.
You reach out a frond. The three-quarters of a foot or so between her skirt and yours still feels vast, but it’s smaller, now, and you manage to extend your arm across that gulf and place your hand over hers.
KANAYA: Why Did You Leave Like That
KANAYA: We Were Planning To Come Here To Retrieve Your Old Things But I Thought We Were Going To Do That Together
KANAYA: And Roxy Wanted To See It Too Right
KANAYA: Her Alternate Selfs Hive
Her tendons are taut beneath your touch stalks. She’s still gazing straight ahead, oculars fixed determinedly on a nonexistent something in front of you.
ROSE: I don’t know.
ROSE: I had a nightmare, and you were in your recuperacoon and I didn’t want to wake you up.
ROSE: And I couldn’t sleep, and I got to thinking, and…
ROSE: …no, that’s not true.
KANAYA: What Do You Mean
ROSE: …I’d rather not talk about it.
ROSE: It’s uncharitable.
KANAYA: What Is
KANAYA: Rose Im Not a Seer Or A Psionic
KANAYA: I Cant Divine What You Mean If You Dont Tell Me
KANAYA: Please
KANAYA: You Know You Can Talk To Me
KANAYA: Right Now I Dont Really Care If Thats Sort Of Pale
She chuckles, muted and barely audible over the water. You see it more than hear it.
ROSE: It always comes back to quadrants.
You bristle a bit. That’s not the kind of thing you expect to hear from her. She’s always been very interested in troll romance.
KANAYA: Ive Told You How Strange This Still Is For Me
KANAYA: I Understand That If Im Going To Date A Human-
ROSE: No, no, I didn’t mean-
Your voices fade again into the background drone of the river below you.
ROSE: I don’t really want to be here any longer than I have to. Can we … get started? We can talk as we go.
You’re really not sure what’s going on, but you know by now that Rose is … skittish. Trying to get her to be honest about her feelings is a fraught endeavor, prone to false starts and often outright failure. You know you have to push, you can’t let her completely withdraw, but if you push too hard she closes up like a bivalvular sea critter.
But you think this is important, so there is nothing to do but keep pressing onwards. Your fabric still hangs loose, along a ripped seam that might threaten to tear away entirely - but you think it can be sewn up, now.
KANAYA: Okay
You stand, and offer her your frond. She hesitates for an instant that pains you, and then takes it so you can help her to her feet.
Some things, Rose says, are not as she left them. There are books sorted improperly on the shelves and statues and ornaments misaligned and some items just stacked in bins or boxes off to the side.
ROSE: It looks like Jade’s been here.
KANAYA: Or The Consorts Perhaps
ROSE: Whoever it was, it looks like they had a party and then made a truly very earnest attempt to clean up.
KANAYA: That Means It Was Probably Jade Then
KANAYA: The Consorts Are Very Cute But Wouldnt Have Cleaned Up
KANAYA: Unless Yours Were A Lot Smarter Than Mine
ROSE: Well, some of them were very capable apprentices to me. Maybe the Viceroy came here and hosted a wild rager in his master’s living room, and then afterwards had the good sense to put the place back together for fear of her terrible retribution.
ROSE: If that’s the case then all is forgiven. Raising an army of the unquiet dead and leading them into battle against our cosmically-ordained adversaries I think roughly makes up for messing up my living room and shelving my mother’s books out of order. I’m willing to call it a wash.
ROSE: But really, I don’t mind.
ROSE: I’m glad to think this place was of use to someone at some point in their lives.
This strikes you as a concerning pronouncement. You remember her talking to Roxy about how she’d reconsidered her guardian, her wigglerhood. Does she really have so little regard for this place that she would prefer that someone trespassed on it?
She kneels to inspect some tomes on the bottom level of a bookshelf. There are quite a few of them lining the walls of the main block (which makes sense, you think, for the hive where Rose grew up).
ROSE: I didn’t take basically anything when I left for the last time.
KANAYA: Because You Didnt Have Fond Memories Of Things Here
ROSE: That’s probably part of it.
ROSE: But mostly it’s because the last time I left this house, I expected it to be the final time I would ever go anywhere.
ROSE: No point in bringing along any books or sentimental gewgaws when they’d just get blown up and die with you.
She’s nonchalant as she says this, as though it weren’t significant compared to the bookshelf she’s perusing. You don’t know how to respond, so you examine the shelves. Sophisticated scientific texts, some extravagant high fantasy novels. And various other things, works of human literature for which you have no reference point.
KANAYA: So What Do You Regret Not Bringing
ROSE: I’m not sure, to be honest.
ROSE: I ... thought I had a plan, when I left, but now that I'm here I'm not even sure what I came here to get.
You pull down a book with a particularly florid title and page through it. It’s an artbook, a collection of fantastical paintings and illustrations (many of which are of, guess what, wizards).
KANAYA: This Place Existed In The Dreambubbles
KANAYA: I Saw It A Few Times
KANAYA: But I Never Saw It With You
KANAYA: I Think I Always Assumed That Was A Coincidence And That I Would Get You To Give Me A Tour Eventually
KANAYA: I Showed You The Memories Of My Hive After All
KANAYA: But Then Time Kept Passing And Then The Journey Was Over
KANAYA: And I Just Wrote It Off As An Interesting Opportunity That We Had Missed
KANAYA: It Wasnt A Coincidence Was It
ROSE: No.
You abandon failing to absorb any of the foreword of a book on molecular biology and look at her, now.
KANAYA: Was It Really That Bad
KANAYA: Sorry Im Not Trying To Diminish Your Feelings
KANAYA: Im Just Still Having Trouble Wrapping My Sponge Around It
KANAYA: Having Something Other Than Memories Of Comfort Associated With Your Original Hive Or Your Guardian
ROSE: Based on my understanding of your homeworld, it sounds like you were an outlier in that regard.
KANAYA: It Wasnt That Bad Really
KANAYA: Different People Had Different Relationships With Their Lusii
KANAYA: Some Were Good Some Were Bad
ROSE: But it sounds like yours was particularly good.
KANAYA: Yes
KANAYA: I Think She Was
She’s leafing through books. She only seems to look at a page or two before putting them back on the shelf. A few she captchalogues. You can’t discern any pattern to which ones she keeps.
ROSE: It wasn’t that bad, no.
ROSE: Not compared to what a lot of people went through.
ROSE: With the benefit of hindsight I would say that it was probably better, on net, to be raised by an emotionally unavailable human woman than by a crab or a giant spider.
ROSE: Oh, this one. It was one of her favorites. She was always telling me to read it, so I refused to touch it on principle.
ROSE: Instead I wrote an extensive essay analyzing its themes based entirely on what I could glean about its plot and characters from online customer reviews.
ROSE: I wanted to get into a petty literary debate with her. I wanted to stick to my wrong opinions no matter how much textual evidence she provided me with. I wanted to make her mad that I had such bad takes about a story she loved.
ROSE: I gave it to her and she thought it was hilarious. She adored it. She didn’t even blink. She didn’t call me out on anything. I sulked for days.
ROSE: Is there anything you’d like?
ROSE: There’s no reason for only me to derive some value from this.
KANAYA: I Guess
KANAYA: I Wouldnt Really Know What To Take
KANAYA: These Are Mostly Either About Science Thats Way Over My Pan Or Things I Wouldnt Have Any Cultural Context For
ROSE: You could learn some old human culture from them.
ROSE: There are a lot of things about Old Earth that I won’t mourn. But it is where I was born.
ROSE: Or, well.
ROSE: Not literally.
ROSE: You know what I mean.
KANAYA: I Know What You Mean
KANAYA: If You Want Me To Take Something Ill Just Pick At Random
KANAYA: This Is A Cookbook
KANAYA: Why Is This Over Here And Not In The Mealblock
The ugliness returns to Rose’s face.
ROSE: Because she couldn’t actually cook.
ROSE: She tried when I was little and she almost burned the house down.
ROSE: Almost doomed a whole timeline by fucking up … I don’t even remember what it was she tried to make.
ROSE: She probably put it on the shelf after that and forgot it existed.
You’re starting to think that being in this hive is actively bad for Rose’s mental health. You consider for a long moment and then put the book in your sylladex.
KANAYA: I Might Try Some Of Them
KANAYA: We Havent Even Fully Decorated Our Hive Yet So I Will Endeavor Not To Burn It Down At Least Until We Finish
Your notice a set of tomes with red covers. At first you think it’s an encyclopedia or something similar, but there are alien symbols that aren’t from the Old Earth alphabet on the spines. You take one down and look at the cover.
KANAYA: Whats This One
It has a title on the front cover in characters you can read.
KANAYA: ‘Halakha’
ROSE: Oh. That’s a religious text. A collection of texts, actually.
KANAYA: What Does The Title Mean
ROSE: I think it’s ‘the way’ or something like that.
KANAYA: Was Your Mother A Member Of This Religion
ROSE: No, I don’t think so. But I think she was raised in the community associated with the faith. She talked about them sometimes.
KANAYA: What Was Their Religion About
ROSE: I don’t really know, to be honest. I never took much of an interest.
ROSE: You can read it if you want.
ROSE: And we might as well keep it for posterity. There’s probably nothing left of them other than this. It seems like letting it disappear would be disrespectful.
KANAYA: Is There Anything Else Here You Want
ROSE: Not really.
KANAYA: You Should Take Something For Roxy At Least
KANAYA: Unless You Want Her To Pick Something Herself
ROSE: No, that won’t be necessary. We’ll take the biology books for her.
She grabs them a little too quickly and then turns away.
Beneath the main zigzag incline is a second one that leads down to a basement. (A cellar, actually, as Rose corrects you, as it’s entirely underground and used exclusively for storage.) Lights in the ceiling come to life anemically. It’s full of boxes and crates and chests. One wall is devoted to racks of large wooden casks. Rose raps on one with the back of her fist, producing a hollow sound.
ROSE: You’re meant to let wine and whiskey age, is the idea. Supposedly the longer they sit in the barrel, the better they taste.
ROSE: It never managed to stay in there for long after she bought it, so I assume it wasn’t very good.
Whatever her mother hadn’t consumed seems to have been plundered by partying consorts, as have the contents of many of the boxes. A number are piled in the corner of the room, empty and purposeless. Rose drifts between those that remain, listlessly lifting lids and peering inside.
ROSE: I never went down here much. There was usually mold. This room is right next to the river.
ROSE: It makes one question the wisdom of building a large house directly on top of running water, if one were so inclined.
KANAYA: I Thought You Said Your Perspective On Your Guardian Had Changed
She glances at you, manner indifferent.
KANAYA: Youve Been Very
KANAYA: Passive Aggressively Critical Of Her
KANAYA: And Also Non Passively Aggressively
KANAYA: Its Just A Bit Incongruous To Me Especially After What Youve Been Saying To Roxy
ROSE: It has, yes.
ROSE: I understand a bit better, now.
ROSE: I wouldn’t have wanted to be in her shoes.
ROSE: And meeting Roxy has put a lot of things in context.
She doesn’t elaborate. She pushes some boxes aside.
ROSE: It’s so strange, being here now.
ROSE: My experience of this place is based on certain criteria.
ROSE: On pre-existing reference points that were fixed when I last saw it, both physical ones - how tall I was, how long my arms were - and in terms of the available possibility space.
ROSE: When I was thirteen it would have taken me all day to go through this stuff. It’s so heavy.
ROSE: Now I’m a high level god tier player.
Carelessly she upends a huge cardboard box with one arm. Its top partially gives way and a handful of brightly-colored decorations like the alchemized ones you recognize from Rose and Dave’s Earth Christmas parties on the meteor spill across the floor.
ROSE: I’m a completely different person.
KANAYA: Is That True
KANAYA: You Dont Seem Completely Different To Me
KANAYA: You Are Different Of Course But Youre The Same Person Whos Just
KANAYA: Shifted A Bit
ROSE: Shifted how much?
KANAYA: Not That Much
KANAYA: Youre Still The Person Im Flushed For
ROSE: …
ROSE: …flushed for you too.
ROSE: But I don’t know if I agree.
ROSE: If I’ve changed in any way, aren’t I by definition a different person?
KANAYA: Isnt That Normal Though
KANAYA: We Are All Different People
KANAYA: Its Been Almost Two Sweeps
KANAYA: Thats A Long Time
KANAYA: What Was The Phrase From That Book We Read
KANAYA: ‘People Are Acted On By Their Experiences’
KANAYA: Is This So Unlike Revisiting Any Previous Place Or Thing After Youve Had Some Time To Change
ROSE: I think it is.
She finally transitions from near-complete to entirely complete disinterest in the contents of the boxes around her and returns her attention to you.
ROSE: Not only am I not the same person, I’m not even the same kind of being. Normal human limitations no longer apply to me.
ROSE: I don’t even need to use my hands, I could move any of these with magic if I wanted.
Her stubs leave the floor. Her skirt billows softly as she hovers above the miscellany.
ROSE: I don’t even need stairs to go from the living room up to the gallery, now.
ROSE: I have access to entirely new verbs with which to take action.
ROSE: Would your childhood hive feel the same to you, now that you could cross it in a handful of seconds and you barely need to sleep?
She has a point. You admit as much to her. She alights on the ground again, her sequined shoes avoiding the worst of the dust and stains.
ROSE: And if I’m so different, is it even the same location, really? If the experiential points of reckoning that anchor it most strongly in reality have changed so much?
KANAYA: My Answer Were I To Give This Matter Serious Thought Would Be Twofold
Rose raises her eyebrows and focuses on you. Despite the perigees elapsed and the less than uplifting surroundings it still causes a small, remnant manifestation of the flutterbugs-in-your-acid-tract response caused when Rose first looked at you with such interest.
KANAYA: The First Would Be That This Is Not A Dreambubble
KANAYA: It Is The Actual Physical Place That Various Previously Encountered Memories Were Based On
KANAYA: Unlike This Land Itself It Existed Independent Of You Prior To Your Arrival In It And Any Perception Of It You Might Have Had
KANAYA: As Weve Already Settled Im Completely Uninterested In What You Referred To As The ‘If A Tree Falls In The Forest’ Proposition As Anything Other Than A Thought Experiment
KANAYA: Most Parts Of Creation Possess A Physical Externality That Does Not Have Our Observation Of It As A Precondition
KANAYA: As Evidenced Here By The Fact That A Bunch Of Silly Consorts And Also Maybe Jade Absconded With A Bunch Of You And Your Mothers Possessions And Left Some Unsightly Stains On Various Surfaces
KANAYA: You Being Taller Or Even Possessing God Tier Powers Would Not Logically Make You Perceive That Some Things Had Gone Missing From The Cabinets
Her wry smile isn’t large or all that warm, but it’s there. The sparkle in her eyes is dim, but very present.
ROSE: What a terribly Hero of Space argument to make.
ROSE: Your second answer?
KANAYA: Is That You Said You Wanted To Be Done With This Sooner Rather Than Later And There Are Better Places To Debate The Subjectivity Or Non-Subjectivity Of Significant Locations
Rose’s face falls.
ROSE: I’m sorry.
ROSE: I’m just recording another questionably-honorable entry in my lineage’s storied chronology of procrastination. If I come up with enough other things that are even vaguely compelling to talk about, and expend enough superfluous words on them, goes the Lalonde-Strider family ethos, then surely the object of my discomfort will eventually succumb to entropy and die of old age, or at least just get tired and go home.
ROSE: You’re right, of course. I need to just focus and push through. Any further prevarication will only rein-
KANAYA: Ahem
ROSE: …right.
You wade into the heaps of mouldering human artifacts with her, your jadeblood muscle density and Rose’s god tier strength making short work of the boxes. There’s not much left; the damp has gotten into even the unopened ones. For some reason, it’s this fact that impresses upon you in a way that nothing yet has some of what Rose dealt with, here. If Roxy is any indicator, Rose’s mother was a kind and affectionate person who probably loved Rose dearly. But she left her hive in such disarray. Your lusus, your own mother, would never have permitted this. She taught you to be careful and conscientious, to be organized - and to store anything of any value in receptacles sealed against the elements. You would never have selected a space so close to a water source as a storageblock.
This was what Rose lived in.
You find an unopened package of very fine candles, which you keep. Rose captchas an ancient video game system and a set of dusty cartridges. You spend a few minutes prising what meaning can be salvaged from a sizable box full of old newspapers. You find them a fascinating novelty - no such straightforward channel of information existed on Alternia - and Rose seems to think there might be some meaningful pattern to what issues and headlines her mother collected. But most of them fall to pieces in your fronds.
And beyond all of those, buried and concealed beneath the rest of the clutter, is an old stublocker.
Unlike almost everything else in the cellar, it's held up well. It’s damp, but the damp doesn’t seem to have penetrated, it’s made of something very durable and resistant. It’s also locked, and the lock doesn’t yield to your claws.
ROSE: I took an internet course on lockpicking once.
ROSE: Bought lockpicks online.
KANAYA: Do You Remember How To Do It
ROSE: No.
She shatters the lock with a bolt of white majyyk.
ROSE: And I have better lockpicks now.
Inside, you find accolades.
Laminated certificates. Awards in frames secured behind glass. Prize ribbons. Rolled-up scrolls. You can’t percieve any detail on any of them. They’re all completely covered in dust. Rose kneels down to brush some of it away and examine them.
ROSE: This is her doctorate.
ROSE: The official recognition of her qualifications as a scientist.
ROSE: And this is … a second doctorate.
ROSE: These … are all prizes. For groundbreaking scientific discoveries.
She lifts more out of the locker.
ROSE: This is a grant… wow, that’s a lot of zeroes, it must have been a prestigious one… and… Excellence in Science Award for Experimental Biology… Outstanding Young Women in Chemistry Award… Annie Jump Cannon Award… ‘for outstanding contributions to astronomy by a woman within five years of earning a degree’...
All of them, covered in dust. The acknowledgements of what seem like a stunning, world-renowned career as a scientist, particularly in the bafflingly gender-unequal society Rose told you characterized her Earth. Even with your limited context, you’re sure that if you had received honors like this in any field you were passionate about, you’d display them somewhere. Maybe not out in the main block in front of everyone, but you’d at least put them in your respiteblock or sewingblock or something like that. You wouldn’t bury them. Lock them away for who knows how many human years, all but forgotten, out of sight and out of mind.
Rose doesn’t seem to know what to do. She kneels there, for a long time. There’s nothing you can do but kneel next to her, and be patient. You are good at being patient. Space is patient. Space is calm. It waits for its moment.
Eventually, Rose moves some of the framed certificates out of the way. Beneath, is a photo album. She pages through it, eyes drinking in the contents, starving for knowledge in that way that she is and that way that you so love.
It doesn’t seem to have aged well - it must not have always been kept in this secure, preserved container. Old, grainy, faded pictures of her mother, younger, closer to Rose’s own age. She looks so, so much like Roxy. She looks happy, laughing, arms around the shoulders of other people you don’t recognize. One of her wearing the robes and odd square hat you understand from a human movie to be part of an advanced schoolfeeding ritual. A number of her with other people in lab coats. Excitedly showing off pieces of advanced scientific equipment.
A few pages are torn out. Behind them are the most faded pictures of all. You can’t even see most of them. In one she’s holding hands with someone. You think, from the side of their face that’s just barely visible, that they were wearing glasses - but that’s all you can tell. The rest has decayed.
Rose stares at all of this for a long time, and then puts everything back into the locker and seals it without a word.
At the very back of the cellar, completely buried and concealed beneath the rest of the clutter, are several huge, heavy pallets. Rose levitates one into the middle of the block with her magic so you can examine it. Stacked on them are large quantities of tightly-packed supplies. Canned food, sealed drums of purified water. Medical supplies. Air filters. Batteries and personal light sources. Nutrition rectangles and several hundred rounds of ammunition for a projectile velocitor that Rose says presumably came from a ‘military surplus store.’ Beneath the pallet is a clearly-defined square of perfectly clean floor that was shielded from the water and humidity. These have been here for a very long time.
ROSE: This is like a doomsday prepper’s stash.
ROSE: …she was preparing for the apocalypse.
ROSE: She always knew.
ROSE: She must have known since she first moved into this house.
ROSE: And then … eventually she realized that it was meaningless. That there was nothing she could do.
She stands there in the middle of the decrepit cellar, forlorn and striking.
KANAYA: You Sound
KANAYA: Very Certain Of That
ROSE: I am.
ROSE: I’m not sure why.
ROSE: But I think that maybe it was how I felt.
ROSE: The other me. Roxy’s mother.
ROSE: That gradually over time I came to understand that the end of the world couldn’t be prevented or survived, and things changed for me.
ROSE: From what Dirk’s told me, it seems pretty clear that she remembered being me, at least partially.
ROSE: Maybe it’s starting to go both ways.
She shows you the rest of the hive. She shows you the dustmuncher her mother immortalized via metallicization. She shows you the practically-unused mealblock, stocked, she says, with more soporifics than food, though almost all of both are missing, the hunger trunk ransacked, empty bottles heaped in a refuse receptacle. She shows you the parlor, a room you like very much but that Rose says that she took the only possessions of worth from long ago. (With her permission you help yourself to a few tasteful cushions.) She shows you all of the wizard busts and statues and paintings, every single one she knows by name, even though she says she despised all of them.
There’s at least one exception. On the gallery upstairs, next to what you’re pretty sure you remember to be the door to her respiteblock, there’s a nightmarish smudge of mangled pixels that very vaguely suggests the shape of a wizard and a behornêd musclebeast.
ROSE: This has to come, of course.
KANAYA: Its Certainly
KANAYA: Unique
KANAYA: I Think In You And Daves Estimation It Might Be Considered Tastefully Hideous
ROSE: That’s wonderfully put.
ROSE: Dave’s comics inspired me. One of the only things my mother and I’s idiotic games ever produced that I actually liked.
ROSE: I got my hands on an image of a painting that she particularly liked, then I bought, bargained, and stole Dave’s techniques for defiling images into desecrated parodies of themselves from him, and then blew it up until it turned into this hideous abomination.
ROSE: She bought this gorgeous frame for it. The stupid thing probably cost the annual budget of at least a few Third World countries.
ROSE: It was the wrong size, the picture didn’t even fit in it, which in retrospect was brilliant of her.
ROSE: So I copied it again and resized it to fit the ill-fitting frame.
This is the brightest she’s sounded since you arrived.
KANAYA: Ill Be Honest And Admit That I Still Dont Really Understand Your Preoccupation With Intentionally Bad And Stupid Things
KANAYA: I Dont Know Why I Was Surprised To Learn That Your Dancestors Both Shared It
ROSE: Surely you listened to at least one of the six hundred and twelve or so times Dave’s explained it.
KANAYA: Not Really No
ROSE: Understandable.
KANAYA: His Capacity To Babble On About Things Like Irony Might Actually Equal Karkats Ability To Lecture About Romance
ROSE: That seems unfair to Karkat.
ROSE: I found his lectures very educational.
KANAYA: Ok Yes But Their Capacity Is Similar
ROSE: Dave’s certainly passionate about irony, but I would question how much useful information can be strained from the thick verbal broth of his long-windedness.
ROSE: Karkat’s special interest - capital S, Capital I - is at least potentially valuable to someone.
ROSE: Where would we be without him? How would I ever have navigated your hazardous troll warren of xenosocial romantic dynamics without the maybe fifteen minutes or so of actual useful data I was able to absorb from his hundreds of hours of exposition?
She’s smiling at you. Her eyebrow is raised, just a few millimeters, and the shape of her lips has just a tiny bit of smirk - so little that if questioned, she’d have plausible deniability as to whether she was really smirking and not just smiling pleasantly. It’s one of her most attractive expressions.
KANAYA: If Placed Under Duress I Would Admit That He Does Actually Know His Stuff When It Comes To Quadrants
ROSE: Are you under duress now?
KANAYA: No
KANAYA: I Like Being With You
Her face tints with human-red, mutant candy-red. You smile as you fill in your side of the horseshitometer a little. You think it’s very funny that you can score such points against her by saying something so simple - and straightforwardly true.
ROSE: By desecrating the painting, I was creating a piece of intentionally shitty art. That’s mildly funny in its own right, mostly because of the amount of effort involved, the time wasted, to make something actively worse. But I was also passive-aggressively profaning something she liked, implying that her taste was so terrible that debasing it like this was an improvement.
ROSE: She retaliated by embracing my act of aggression, taking my insult and turning it around on me like a jiu jutsu master by enshrining it, placing it in a position of high honor, stating by her action that my attempt to piss her off was something to be commemorated, and thus had failed catastrophically at its intent.
ROSE: But at the same time she was also improving my work. She was enhancing the intentional shittiness of the art by making the frame the wrong size, so to the outside observer it not only looked shitty, but careless.
KANAYA: So
KANAYA: Your Work Was Making The Painting Shitty
ROSE: Correct.
KANAYA: And So She Was Saying That Your Art Which Was The Art Of Making Art Bad Was Itself Bad Art
ROSE: Exactly.
KANAYA: Do You And Dave Think About This Stuff All The Time
ROSE: A lot of the time, yes.
KANAYA: Being You Must Be Fucking Exhausting
She’s grinning, showing only a miniscule white line of her teeth.
ROSE: It’s extremely difficult, yes.
ROSE: Only someone incredible at being me could ever possibly be me.
ROSE: Thankfully, I am equal to the challenge.
KANAYA: Well I Cant Argue With That
KANAYA: There Is No One Who Could Possibly Be More You Than You
KANAYA: And The Art Of Being You Is One That I Very Much Admire The Skillful Practice Of
She adjusts her hairband a bit. You know very well, and she knows, too, that her hairband is perfectly aligned, and that this is a habit of hers she defaults to when she is uncomfortable or embarrassed. You don’t know what to do, though, other than this. You feel like you can perceive the motion of something large in a body of water, but you can only see the ripples made by its displacement. The thing itself, you cannot detect. Whatever is happening with Rose, here, you don’t understand it - and until she’s ready to open up about it, all you can do is be there for her. That means loving her. And linguistically convoluted declarations like this are part of your love.
ROSE: Well. That’s fortunate for you, then. I’m simply the best there is, after all.
She captchas the meticulously vandalized painting. Somewhat against your better judgement, you inquire further.
KANAYA: So Then What Did You Making It Fit The Frame Mean
KANAYA: Doesnt That Mean You Were Admitting That Shed Done Something Right By Trying To Undo It
ROSE: And you said you didn’t understand this!
ROSE: You’ve got the right mindset.
ROSE: But, no - the goal was to improve the shitty art further - making it fit the frame removes some of the plausible deniability. It makes it look like a complete, coherent work, like someone actually did think this was good enough to merit such a luxurious mount. At the same time, I was again denigrating her decision. Implying that she didn’t go far enough, that she had been insufficiently ambitious in her pursuit of ironic shittiness.
KANAYA: I Cant Believe Im Saying This But This Is Actually Starting To Make Sense
ROSE: Oho.
ROSE: Am I getting through?
KANAYA: Sort Of Yes
KANAYA: Its Penetrating In The Sense That A Parasitic Fungus Would Colonize My Sponge
KANAYA: But I Think Its Happening
ROSE: You say the sweetest things.
ROSE: Do I inhabit your thoughts so? Do you keep the things I say so front-of-mind that my influence is like that of a cordyceps infestation?
She leans in, hands clasped coquettishly behind her back, somehow as she so often does making it seem as though there is no difference between your heights, or even that she is just a bit taller than you. She only comes up to your clavicle, but you can never look down on her.
KANAYA: Is Dave Absolutely Awful At Explaining This Stuff Or Are You Just Really Good At It
ROSE: It can be both, surely.
KANAYA: Yes Its Probably Both
You smile back at her for a moment, charmed and mildly exasperated. It’s a hybrid feeling that has characterized your interactions with Rose since almost the very first time you trolled her, and that you have long since become so acclimated to that without it there would be a terrible hole where your pusher should be.
Up the spiral stairs from the second floor is the observatory. This was one of the only places she ever really enjoyed being outside of her room, Rose says. She would climb to the top of the tower and gaze at the night sky, and envision that the stars were looking back at her, that somewhere between them swam the beings she had imagined since she was very small. Sometimes when her mother’s behavior became too distasteful or discomfiting her own respiteblock did not feel like enough distance to retreat, so she came up here instead, and looked up into the heavens, and dreamed of monsters.
You’ve never heard almost any of this. You knew about her awkward relationship with her guardian, she had admitted bits and pieces to you in your perigees together on the meteor, as you became formally quadranted and as you stood at her side with Dave as she struggled with her addiction, and you had at least enough context for a basic understanding of the significance of her meeting with Roxy. But now, in this abandoned hive, all of this is pouring out as though from an unstoppered bottle of soporific when Vriska dumped it in the load gaper. You feel as though you have learned more about your matesprit in the last half an hour than in the almost two sweeps since you met her.
She stands in the middle of the room, posture pole measuring-stick-straight.
ROSE: A lot of the time when I would come up, it was after she’d been up here using the telescope.
ROSE: So when I would look through it, I would see whatever the last spot in the sky she was looking at was. And I knew that when I was done with it, the next time she used it she’d see the last thing I saw.
ROSE: For some reason that felt profound to me.
ROSE: Like it was some sort of connection between us. I used to stare at those stretches of sky that were the subjects of her previous observation and try to divine meaning from them. Like if I stared hard enough at what she was looking at I could finally understand her, in a way that I never could by just talking to her.
ROSE: And I thought that maybe if she looked where I was looking, she’d learn something about me. That I could finally get through to her.
ROSE: Wasn’t that childish of me?
KANAYA: I Suppose
KANAYA: But You Were A Child
KANAYA: Thats A Rather Appropriate Time To Do Childish Things Dont You Think
KANAYA: And Anyway Weve Been Known To Receive Knowledge From Strange And Esoteric Sources Havent We
KANAYA: Youre A Derse Dreamer
KANAYA: It Was Your Destiny To Obtain Dark Enlightenment By Looking Into The Void
KANAYA: Perhaps On Some Level You Always Knew That
She doesn’t seem satisfied by this, and strolls with excessive indifference through the observatory towards the telescope. A few alcohol soporific bottles are scattered near the wall.
KANAYA: It Actually Might Have Been A Different Kind Of Premonition If You Think About It
KANAYA: Roxy Is A Void Player
KANAYA: Maybe You Were Sensing Her Pre-Scratch Self’s Aspect
KANAYA: And In Your Desire To Gain Insight Into Her You Intuitively Turned To The Void
KANAYA: Or The Closest Representation Of The Void That You Had Access To Outside Of The Medium
ROSE: I suppose.
She’s knelt beside the telescope, examining one of the bottles. You step to her side.
ROSE: Worried I’ll relapse?
ROSE: That proximity to an empty liquor bottle is all it takes to suck me back into the grasp of chronic inebriation?
KANAYA: Rose
ROSE: It’s okay. You can say it.
ROSE: I’m weak. If I didn’t have you looking over my shoulder I’d probably backslide inside of a couple of weeks.
You bend at the knees and lay a firm hand on her arm.
KANAYA: I Would Never Say That Youre Weak
KANAYA: I Would Never Even Think It
KANAYA: Youre One Of The Strongest People I Know
She doesn’t look at you. She’s staring at the bottle with an intense and singular focus.
KANAYA: What Is It
KANAYA: Is Something Wrong
ROSE: I remember this bottle.
ROSE: This specific brand.
A swirling spiral symbol marks the glass vessel - it reminds you, oddly, of the distinctive shape of a human fingerprint - above the brand name ‘Hpnotiq’. A few dregs of lavender liquid remain in the very bottom.
KANAYA: Thats Not One Of The Ones You Alchemized On The Meteor
KANAYA: Im Pretty Sure Id Remember It Its Extremely Tacky
ROSE: It is very tacky. So, yet again par for the course with my mother.
ROSE: I didn’t have it on the meteor. I never had it at all.
ROSE: The other me did. The Rose whose memories I inherited. From the doomed timeline.
ROSE: With Dave.
ROSE: Davesprite, I mean.
KANAYA: Oh
It’s been a while since she mentioned that. She doesn’t like to talk about the doomed timeline, the one that she and a different Dave sustained as long as they could so they could arm their alpha selves against the impossible odds their session presented them with. It came up in conversation with him, once, words that you don’t think were intended for your hearducts - but she expanded on it, later, a bit. You understand that her fixation on human soporifics was in large part derived from that version of her when she absorbed her dreamself.
ROSE: I have to thank that version of me. For her sacrifice. For her contribution to the greater Rose.
ROSE: Without her experiences, I genuinely don’t think I’d’ve arrived at the perspective of my mom that I have.
KANAYA: What Do You Mean
KANAYA: Because You Both Struggled With A Soporific Habit
ROSE: No.
ROSE: Well, that too, I guess.
ROSE: But more that I understood why she drank.
ROSE: I remember what it was like. Only in flashes. Vague impressions. I don’t remember everything she went through. But I remember.
ROSE: I remember what it was like to know that the end was coming, and that there was nothing I could do about it. That we were doomed, because of something completely outside of my control that I could never have prevented - and that I only existed to make way for the success of someone else.
ROSE: Even if that other someone was me.
KANAYA: Rose
ROSE: We were in there for a long time. Longer than the duration of your session, I think.
ROSE: I remember how hard it was to keep going.
ROSE: And all this stuff was just laying around, to distract me, to take the weight off for a little while.
ROSE: Her last gift to me, to help me get across the finish line.
ROSE: My inheritance.
ROSE: We were doomed. Dave and I, alone, with the note desolation plays getting louder and louder in the distance.
ROSE: Of course I drank.
ROSE: Of course Mom drank.
Your pusher pumps pity. You reach for her hand. She doesn’t acknowledge you but she lets you lace your touchstalks with hers.
ROSE: And I remember this one. This specific bottle.
ROSE: If I concentrate I can see the logo.
She looks down at it, for a long moment, reflective, reflecting in the glass.
Then she hurls the bottle at the wall. Shards of glass explode across the confined space of the observatory.
KANAYA: Thats Your Respiteblock Right
KANAYA: Your Bedroom
ROSE: My old one, yes.
KANAYA: Do You Want To Go In
ROSE: No.
She goes in.
You’ve seen it before, but that was what feels like a lifetime ago, and you didn’t understand. This is different. When you opened the door to this room in the bubbles, it wasn’t wrecked, with a gaping hole in the wall, rubble and scorched detritus scattered across the floor. Your walkstubs leave indentations in a film of glittery dust as you step inside after her. By all appearances it’s just a long-neglected respiteblock that Rose hasn’t lived in in a long time, but with the tension you can see and sense in her body as she enters it, the tempo of her heartbeat that you can hear, the feeling comes upon you that you have disturbed the peace of a tomb.
It certainly looks like a space Rose inhabited. Beneath the wreckage there are half-finished knitting projects and half-read books scattered everywhere (attributes that spaces inhabited by Rose tend to adopt). To one side, another well-stocked bookshelf. To the other, the broken remains of her totem lathe.
KANAYA: Isnt That Where Your Bed Used To Be
ROSE: Yes.
ROSE: Dave threw it out my window into the raging inferno consuming my house to make room for the lathe, because he’s a horse’s ass.
KANAYA: Oh
KANAYA: He Had To Do It To Save Your Life Didnt He
ROSE: Yes.
ROSE: He’s still a horse’s ass.
Looking down on the lathe are posters of horrorterrors, images that to you seem more like menacing depictions of beings to be feared than things one would voluntarily have in their hive. Rose kept them in pride of place above her pillow, the dark gods looming over her as she slept.
KANAYA: Id Ask If Youre Okay But
KANAYA: Youre Clearly Not
ROSE: I’ll be fine.
KANAYA: I Really Am Sorry To Keep Saying This But Was It Really So Terrible
KANAYA: I Thought This Was The Place Where You Felt Most Comfortable
ROSE: It was.
ROSE: If you were trapped in a bunker for years, you’d be safe there. But would you have much affection for it afterwards?
Across from the bed is the chest-of-drawers, where a bizarre poster of a man with a projectile velocitor stands watch over a violin with his one eye.
ROSE: Obviously Wizardy Herbert has to come along.
ROSE: Maybe I should have prototyped him. Jaspherbertsprite would have been a sight to see. I think giving Jaspers a gun could only have been considered an improvement.
KANAYA: What About Your Violin
Rose alchemized violins on the meteor, and played for you a few times. It was beautiful. She holds it to her shoulder.
ROSE: It doesn’t fit right anymore.
ROSE: And why would it? I outgrew it.
ROSE: I’m taller, remember? My arms are longer.
She puts it back on its stand, brow wrinkled slightly to communicate what you understand as total derision. It makes you deeply sad.
KANAYA: You Could Use It To Alchemize One Thats The Right Size
ROSE: I haven’t played seriously in years.
ROSE: I don’t think I ever actually enjoyed playing the violin in the first place.
ROSE: Why bother.
KANAYA: Well
KANAYA: I Love Hearing You Play
KANAYA: For One
She stops, blinking, as though this had never occurred to her.
KANAYA: Id Like To Hear You Play On Your Original Instrument
ROSE: It wouldn’t be the original instrument.
KANAYA: Not Literally No
KANAYA: But I Think It Would Still Have Significance
There’s been so little expression on her face for so much of the time you’ve been here. Even for Rose, so reserved, with such self-control, it’s unsettling.
ROSE: …okay.
Your walkstub brushes a chunk of broken wall. You glance down, and stop short as you notice something pinned beneath it. The fragment of human building material yields easily to your strength, and you push it aside, revealing an old, white book. Upon the cover, in the elaborate purple longhand of which you before expressed your appreciation, are the words, ‘Complacency of the Learned.’
ROSE: …my journal.
KANAYA: I Remember You Told Me About This
KANAYA: This Is The Original Version Of Your Story Right
ROSE: Yes.
She takes it in her fronds, looking down at it, stroking the cover with her thumb, handling it with a strange reverence.
ROSE: Thank you. I probably would have left without noticing it.
ROSE: Some Seer I am.
KANAYA: I Cant Help But Notice Some Inconsistency On Your Part In This Particular Philosophical Grid Square
ROSE: Pardon?
KANAYA: Most Of The Time Its ‘Classes And Aspects Arent Meant To Be Interpreted Literally’
KANAYA: ‘No John Daves Mythological Role Doesnt Mean That Hes A Literal Knight’
KANAYA: ‘He Doesnt Rescue Princesses In Towers Or Serve A King Or Follow A Chivalric Code’
KANAYA: ‘Unless You Count Being A Hipster Asshole As A Code’
KANAYA: ‘No Being A Breath Player Doesnt Mean That You Have Wind Powers’
KANAYA: ‘That Part Is Just An External Manifestation Of A Deeper More Allegorical Metaphysical Principle’
KANAYA: And On Every Other Occasion Your Attitude On This Is Pretty Much Constant
KANAYA: Except When Such A Superficial And Overly Literal Reading Would Allow You To Be Unfairly Self Deprecating
ROSE: …
KANAYA: So In This Particular Situation
KANAYA: Especially Considering That Alternate Selves Are A Major Point Of Discussion Here
KANAYA: I Feel The Need To
KANAYA: As You Once Put It
KANAYA: Rep You
KANAYA: Or More Specifically To Rep The Version Of You That Mysteriously Disappears When Youre Talking About Yourself
KANAYA: ‘No Rose’
KANAYA: ‘Being A Seer Doesnt Mean That You Always See Everything Perfectly All The Time’
KANAYA: ‘Its An Expression Of The Predisposition Towards Knowledge Of Certain Truths And A Comprehensive Understanding Of Ones Aspect’
KANAYA: ‘Occasionally Not Noticing Something In A Really Messy Respiteblock Thats Been Literally Half Blown Up Doesnt Mean That Youre A Bad Seer’
There is an extraordinary silence in the block.
ROSE: …wow.
She captchalogues the journal.
ROSE: I hope you’ll forgive me if I take my time finding a place to sit on the maltreated corpse of this lathe that isn’t complete murder on my behind, because I feel the need to sit down and there’s no longer a bed in that spot upon which to sit.
You nod, graciously, and she carefully perches her beskirted and appealing bottom on the flat plane where cruxite dowels were once upon a time placed.
ROSE: Thank you. I definitely need to take a seat after how hard I apparently just got served.
ROSE: I feel rather like a Christmas ham, extravagantly glazed and ferried to a table full of hungry winter celebrants and placed upon it with a side of roasted vegetables, with how hard I just got served.
ROSE: How long have you been sitting on that?
KANAYA: A While
ROSE: I’m not sure you needed to call me out quite that hard.
KANAYA: Im Sorry
KANAYA: Sort Of
KANAYA: Not Really
KANAYA: I Feel Strongly About It
KANAYA: I Think You Are Wonderful And I Like Who You Are Very Much And I Wish You Wouldnt Be So Uncharitable Towards That Person
KANAYA: Particularly When Intellectual Dishonesty Is A Quality You Have Such Disdain For In Other People
ROSE: …
ROSE: …am I really so predictable?
She turns her bulbs towards the floor. She looks glum and irritated.
KANAYA: I Wouldnt Put It That Way
KANAYA: But I Think One Can Observe Certain Patterns
KANAYA: And Like We Said If I Am Going To Date A Human Im Going To Have To Accept That Sometimes Ill Have Pale Feelings And I Dont Have To Just Push Them Down
KANAYA: So
You attempt to sit next to her, but there’s really nowhere to sit, so you just stand beside her awkwardly.
KANAYA: I Think You Hate The Idea Of Being Predictable
ROSE: …Dave’s said much the same about me.
KANAYA: I Dont Think Youre Predictable
She looks up at you, sharply.
ROSE: Really?
KANAYA: No
ROSE: Thank you.
ROSE: For saying that.
You sit on the exterior of Rose’s house, next to the broken-off entrance bridge, gazing out at the Land of Light and Rain. It’s very different, now. The light of a new star shines down on it, a stable, inviting yellow orb that Jade found for the humans’ old planets to orbit in place of Skaia, and the alternative source of illumination filters through the clouds and reflects on the kaleidoscopic water to produce a golden iridescence, the land’s ambiance suffused with a warmth that it previously lacked.
KANAYA: Is It Okay If I Read That Original Version Of Your Story
KANAYA: Reading Your Post-Scratch Selfs Grandiose Tomes Is Pretty Cool But Ive Always Wanted To See The One That This You Wrote
ROSE: You could always have asked Dave for the captcha code.
KANAYA: The What Now
ROSE: I’m a little fuzzy on the details, but my understanding is that during our session he concocted some kind of elaborate machination to make a copy of my private thoughts and writings by obtaining a captcha code he could use to alchemize them.
KANAYA: Wow
KANAYA: He Really Is A Horses Ass Isnt He
ROSE: Indeed.
ROSE: It’s okay, though. I didn’t really mind.
ROSE: I always showed him the things I wrote anyway.
KANAYA: Really
ROSE: Mhm.
KANAYA: Wow
KANAYA: I Like Him Well Enough And I Respect His Accomplishments But I Dont Know If Ill Ever Understand Your Relationship With Him
KANAYA: Its Not Like Any Moirallegiance Ive Ever Seen
ROSE: I’ve told you. He’s not my moirail.
ROSE: He’s my brother.
ROSE: Or something.
ROSE: We weren’t raised together. It’s hard for me to actually see him as a ‘sibling.’ But I think the other meaning of the word is rather appropriate. ‘Brother’ in the sense of brother-in-arms. ‘Comrade.’
KANAYA: Like Vriska And Terezi You Mean
KANAYA: The ‘Scourge Sisters’
ROSE: No.
ROSE: No, thank you.
ROSE: Even if the linguistic comparison is technically accurate.
ROSE: I don’t understand-
ROSE: Never mind.
Her attitude towards Vriska seems to have deteriorated with time. You should probably stop bringing her up. It keeps leading to unpleasantness. You still have a lot of respect for Vriska, and despite her past sins everyone owes her a great deal - but you also really don’t want to get into a conversation that would lead to having to discuss the exact nature of your previous feelings for her. (There was never much of an opportunity, with Vriska around and loudly declaring that she'd turned over a new leaf. It seemed unfair, to bring up past embarrassments - in most respects, you believed her.)
You try to change the subject.
KANAYA: Its A Lot More Tolerable Here Now Dont You Think
KANAYA: The Light Isnt Quite So Glaring
ROSE: Mhm.
ROSE: I almost hate it more, now.
KANAYA: Really
KANAYA: Why
ROSE: I don’t know.
ROSE: It feels like it’s trying to make itself more palatable to me, like adjusting the lighting a little will make me change my mind about it.
ROSE: It makes me think of an author who wrote an unsound, poorly-considered story coming back years after the fact and trying to fix it.
KANAYA: Is That So Offensive As An Idea
KANAYA: What If You Wanted To Come Back Later And Revisit A Work You Were Dissatisfied with
KANAYA: Would That Make You Worthy Of Contempt
ROSE: Maybe.
ROSE: Maybe not.
ROSE: But the readers that I failed would have zero obligation to humor me.
She has her fronds folded in her lap. Her blunt human claws (that still feel somehow sharp and exciting, because they are at the ends of Rose’s splendid skillful fingers) are immaculate even for Rose. Her violet claw polish that makes her look so royal and dangerous, that made Karkat so cautious and you so reluctantly enticed, looks as though it was applied with monomolecular precision. You think that she is like you in this way, that she makes herself look so lovely and finely fashioned as a form of protection, a declaration of strength to the world. You help one another apply your makeup and style one another’s hair, and critique one another’s fashion choices - you are a warrior inviting her into your arming chamber to prepare for your next campaign, even if you are in peacetime, and you’re sure she feels the same.
KANAYA: I Dont Know If I Ever Quite Understood Why You Disliked This Place So Much
ROSE: I always felt like it was mocking me.
ROSE: Like Skaia had assumed I was a stupid little girl, and that this was what I wanted from a mystic quest into another realm. Bright colors and rainbows and fairy dust.
ROSE: This was what a lot of children’s books for young girls on my Earth looked like. I thought I was being lumped in with an identity and an aesthetic I didn’t want anything to do with.
KANAYA: When You Put It That Way It Does Seem Like Quite A Jump From How You Conducted And Presented Yourself Beforehand
ROSE: Mhm.
ROSE: But, of course, Skaia had the last laugh in the end.
KANAYA: Skaia Isnt Actually Sapient Though
KANAYA: It Has No Will Of Its Own
ROSE: You’re right, of course.
ROSE: It’s just a machine. A vast cosmic engine that perpetuates our continuum according to the ritual conditions of SBURB, that only has agency to directly affect events within certain very strictly defined boundaries - and most of those are in response to specific inputs by players.
ROSE: Its power over fate is acausal, paradoxical, and requires no conscious input on its part.
ROSE: And yet I’ve never been able to shake the feeling that it was laughing at me. That both it and this planet had some kind of irreverent intelligence that was making fun of me.
ROSE: This obnoxious epileptic fit-inducing Pretty Princess Paradise of a planet - it was still where I realized my teenage daydreams.
ROSE: I dreamed of consorting with dark powers and becoming a practitioner of illusive arts.
ROSE: And that’s what I ended up doing here, wasn’t it?
ROSE: My planet did fulfill my fantasies. Just not in the way I expected.
ROSE: The game always had my number.
KANAYA: Did It
KANAYA: You Never Actually Did Your Quest
ROSE: No.
ROSE: And it didn’t end up being a problem, did it?
You pause to think about this. Rose continues, still staring into the breathtaking alien sun setting over the sparkling sea without seeing or appreciating.
ROSE: My quest wasn’t important. It contributed nothing to the session.
ROSE: And why would it have? It was never supposed to be completed at all.
ROSE: My denizen would still be down there, in theory. There’s still no fish in the sea.
ROSE: And I’d bet you money that if I went down to the ocean floor to face her in her lair, the door wouldn’t even open.
ROSE: I bet she was never in there in the first place. I bet if you used a cheat code to clip through the walls there’d just be untextured empty space inside.
ROSE: If I ever tried to ‘play the rain’ - whatever the Hell that was supposed to mean - I suspect the game would just play a default sound because the developers never bothered to make a music file.
ROSE: PlaytheRain underscore Placeholder dot MP4.
ROSE: I never had a quest.
ROSE: It was put there for me to give the middle finger to.
ROSE: I was only ever doing what it wanted.
KANAYA: That Was Necessary To Get Us Here Wasnt It
ROSE: Maybe.
ROSE: Probably.
ROSE: I don’t know.
ROSE: I don’t think I believe that this is the optimal timeline. I think it’s just an … acceptable one.
ROSE: A better one than … whatever it was John and Roxy came from.
ROSE: It meets the standard for victory, but nothing more than that.
ROSE: There are too many things I can think of that could have gone better.
ROSE: I think we could have done things differently and still succeeded.
KANAYA: What Do You Think Could Have Gone Better
ROSE: Where do you want me to start? A lot fewer people could have died. Us included.
ROSE: We shouldn’t have needed Vriska. We could have done it on our own.
KANAYA: Could We Have Gone Better
You’re staring at her for a moment, hurt filling your thorax and pusher, before she turns to meet your bulbs. Suddenly her faultlessly composed porcelain mask is melting, shows flaws.
KANAYA: I Dont Think We Could Have Gone Better
KANAYA: I Wouldnt Want Anything To Be Different If It Meant Not Being Here With You Like This
ROSE: No, firefly-
ROSE: I didn’t mean it like that.
ROSE: I - I wouldn’t mind if we could have skipped the drinking part. But - no. I wouldn’t change anything about us.
Now it’s her that reaches for your frond, finally, after all this time of you being the one trying to bridge this gap flickering between existence and nonexistence between you.
ROSE: I am so happy that I met you, Kanaya. Every day.
You grasp her frond tightly, too tightly, you think you feel her skin giving way beneath your claws, and the smell of human red iron in your sniffnode confirms it, and you try to pull away - but she takes your hand in both of hers, fierce.
ROSE: It’s fine.
ROSE: I love the way you touch me.
The mask is gone, now. Both of yours, you think. She looks so vulnerable, and it is so awfully sad to see, but in this moment, it makes you happy.
ROSE: I’m sorry.
KANAYA: Its Okay
KANAYA: I Know What You Meant
ROSE: No.
ROSE: I mean, I’m sorry about all of this. I’m sorry for scaring you. I should have thought-
ROSE: Because I feel it too.
ROSE: Like I haven’t really accepted that we made it.
ROSE: I don’t think I ever really doubted that we’d succeed, but then, the Condesce-
KANAYA: No
KANAYA: I Get It
KANAYA: Me Too
You hold one another’s arms. You aren’t looking at one another’s faces. You’re just feeling her presence. The scent becomes difficult to ignore and you lift her hand to press your lips to it and heal the little red pinpricks with the natural procoagulant in your rainbow drinker saliva. She smiles a little and flexes her fingers.
ROSE: I think I tried to come alone because I was afraid you would enjoy this.
KANAYA: What
ROSE: Like you said, you always wanted to see my house. I understood that.
ROSE: And I knew you’d find it really interesting.
ROSE: And I had such complicated and negative feelings about the place that I…
ROSE: …I didn’t want to see anyone deriving anything positive from it.
ROSE: It was so stupid, and so petty. I recognize that, intellectually.
ROSE: But it was so strong.
ROSE: So I made excuses all that time, and then-
ROSE: It would have been even worse with Roxy.
ROSE: Roxy would have loved it. And I don’t think I could stand that.
ROSE: Roxy is a wonderful, generous person, and she doesn’t deserve me resenting her for something so stupid and shitty.
She looks back out at the sunset that would abscond with your breath if you still had much breath to steal.
ROSE: I think back on all of this, and I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel.
ROSE: When I revisit these memories with the context I now have, with a more charitable mindset, they don’t seem so bad.
ROSE: I feel like I should have enjoyed all of this. Like my mother and I should have been friends.
KANAYA: No One Is Saying You Shouldnt Feel That Way
KANAYA: We Can Grow And Change
KANAYA: We Can Evolve Our Understandings Of Things
KANAYA: We Are Acted On By Our Experiences But Exactly What That Means And What Form That Action Takes Can Be Variable
ROSE: I understand that.
ROSE: It’s just that there are things that can’t be recontextualized.
KANAYA: What Do You Mean
ROSE: I can accept - with the difficulty inherent in breaking any habit - that she was sincere about a lot more than I realized. Roxy is such a sincere person.
ROSE: I can accept that most likely she actually did care for me, and she was legitimately trying to reach out and engage with me in a way that she thought I would find fun.
ROSE: It’s just that that was only some of the time.
ROSE: I don’t know that I can find a perspective from which to view more charitably all the times I needed something and she was too drunk to help me, and usually I ended up helping her, I'd help her clean herself up or help her stagger to the bathroom so she didn’t throw up on the carpeting.
ROSE: There were a lot of times we didn’t make it.
ROSE: Or the times I had to eat oatmeal for dinner six nights in a row.
KANAYA: Rose
ROSE: I got so tired of it that I’d just scrounge up anything I could find in the back of the cupboards to season it with. I’d dump so much maple syrup on it that I made myself sick from all the sugar.
ROSE: Or white bread. Oatmeal on white bread. Maple syrup on white bread. Salt and pepper on white bread. I learned every Goddamned thing in the universe that you could put on white bread. Another time I made myself sick by dunking a slice of white bread in fucking cough medicine.
ROSE: There were so many things I had to learn to do by myself, because eventually I realized that she was never going to be there for me.
So much slots into place in your mind.
You place a frond gently on Rose’s shoulder. She doesn’t react, but she does not withdraw.
ROSE: So, one part of me misses her. And mourns for what could have been.
ROSE: I wish she were still here.
ROSE: I wish I’d gotten to grow up with her and understand her.
ROSE: I wish we could have sat around and complimented one another’s choice in pretentious fantasy fiction and enjoyed ironically shitty art and and appreciated all these magnificent wizards together.
ROSE: I understand that she had a horrible burden to carry. From what I know of my post-scratch self, I would have done the same thing in her position. I did do the same thing in her position.
ROSE: And I believe, now, that she did love me.
ROSE: I really, honestly do.
ROSE: But all the bad times happened, too.
ROSE: And I don’t know what to do with that-
Her voice cracks, there, at the end. She’s hugging herself around the midsection.
You can’t resist the urge to take her in your arms. So you do. She turns and leans into you, pressing her golden crown into the space beneath your chin. You smell sodium and human dismay fluid. She’s crying into your stained glass-print dress. You’ve almost never seen her cry. Only once when she was sober, ever, and that time she didn’t know you could see.
KANAYA: Im Sorry
ROSE: *sniff*
ROSE: It’s not your fault.
ROSE: You’ve never done a thing but help me.
KANAYA: I Thought We Agreed To Accept The Intent Of That Statement Rather Than Get Hung Up On Its Literal Meaning Again
She chuckles miserably against your thorax.
ROSE: I know.
KANAYA: How Long Have You Been Holding This In
ROSE: *sniff*
ROSE: I don’t know.
ROSE: It’s…
ROSE: I believe what I said to Roxy. I do.
ROSE: My mom was a good person.
ROSE: And I miss her.
ROSE: I miss her a lot, firefly…
Another round of sniffles overcome her. You squeeze her close, you feel her precious softness that can never be mistaken for weakness. Your rumblespheres are beginning to purr with delicate flushed affection.
KANAYA: I Miss My Mother Too
ROSE: I believe all of it. It wasn’t a lie. But-
ROSE: She can’t see herself in this light.
ROSE: She can’t know.
KANAYA: You Know A Lot About Your Alternate Self
KANAYA: And The Trials She Endured
KANAYA: Has It Harmed You
Your purrs and hums continue as you talk. Rose leans into it and nuzzles her cheek and the top of her skull into your chest. That might have been when you knew you had found serendipity outside of your own species - when you saw that she enjoyed your subvocals, that despite having no auricular clots and no rumblespheres and no thoracic cavity, she appreciated your body’s insectoid nonverbal expressions.
ROSE: …not really, I suppose.
ROSE: *sniff*
KANAYA: Then Are You So Sure It Would Be Bad
ROSE: …Roxy never had to deal with me.
ROSE: She never had to actually be raised by the person I really was.
ROSE: She was raised by my legacy. By the idea of me.
ROSE: Which is appropriate.
ROSE: And I think I’m jealous.
ROSE: She didn’t have to hold my head while I threw up into the load gaper. All she had was a story. A story she could interpret any way she wanted. And Roxy is wonderful, so she chose to interpret it favorably.
ROSE: I don’t think I would have done the same.
ROSE: So she didn’t have to have any bad memories of me. Only admirable hypotheticals.
KANAYA: Rose
you say in a harsh whisper,
KANAYA: Stop This
KANAYA: You Cant Blame Yourself For Something That Never Happened
KANAYA: And This Isnt Even Something That Happened In A Timeline That Isnt This One
KANAYA: Its Something That Literally Never Happened
KANAYA: Stop It
KANAYA: Do Not See Yourself This Way
KANAYA: Theres No Reason For It
She’s shaking. Her tears are hot and soaking through your dress. You don’t care.
ROSE: For all my power as the Seer of Light, I can’t see the one thing I really want to see.
You glance down at her.
KANAYA: Whats That
ROSE: I wish I could see myself the way you see me.
You hold her, close, with all the love you possess, which for her, is a great deal indeed, and the agitation slowly drains out of her. Troll or not, your body expresses your love, and she receives it.
If you could do this forever, you would. If you could hold her and encircle her, if you could wrap her in a shroud made of your flushed feelings and hide her away from everything that could hurt her, be it in the world beyond her beautiful mind or within that mind itself (because Rose is by far her own worst enemy), if you could make a haven of your limbs and your love around her that would protect her from everything in this vast and wondrous continuum of yours for the rest of her eternal life and your long undeath, you would.
But you cannot, because you know that she would not abide it. She would not stand being sealed away from the world. Rose has no tough dermal layer, only soft human skin, and yet she does not protect her hands when she knits.
A flower needs light to grow.
KANAYA: Youve Gained Strength And Insight From The Knowledge Of Your Other Selves
KANAYA: I Dont Have Any Evidence That Any Alternate Version Of Me Killed A Grand Highblood And Rode His Corpse Down A Waterfall But If I Had It I Would Value It Highly
ROSE: Ha.
ROSE: It was cool to hear that she was a hero, yes.
ROSE: But her story is also… really sad. It’s dark. Depressing.
ROSE: It seems likely that all Seers eventually draw knowledge from other possible selves. That we connect to one another across timelines and universes in a way that’s more intangible, but also more horizontal and in some senses more direct than what a time player is capable of.
ROSE: Which has had its advantages, to be sure.
ROSE: But I won’t burden Roxy with it.
ROSE: She doesn’t deserve to know about that version of herself.
KANAYA: Im Not Sure She Would Agree
KANAYA: But This Is Your Family
KANAYA: Your Memories
KANAYA: Its Your Decision
ROSE: *sniff*
ROSE: I want to have a relationship with her.
ROSE: Not with my mother.
ROSE: She deserves a clean slate…
KANAYA: Okay
She crawls into your lap, clinging to you, and you embrace her, fronds folded over her waist.
KANAYA: You Might Be Right
KANAYA: About Attaining This Kind Of Knowledge Being The Destiny Of A Seer
ROSE: We have quite a few data points.
KANAYA: Thats Not Really What I Mean
KANAYA: I Understand The Idea That Witnessing Other Lives And Other Timelines Can Be A Burden
KANAYA: I Remember How Many People We Saw In The Bubbles Who Had Died Too Soon
KANAYA: Who Had Lived Different Lives
KANAYA: People Who Had Been Unfortunate Enough To Make Decisions That The Alpha Timeline Didnt Favor
KANAYA: Some Of Them Were Me
KANAYA: And That
KANAYA: Really Unsettled Me
KANAYA: I Wondered If They Did Something Wrong To End Up There
KANAYA: Did They See Something In The Clouds That Led Me Astray
KANAYA: Did They See The Same Things I Saw But They Misinterpreted Or Just Didnt Listen
KANAYA: That Idea Terrified Me
You’ve never said any of this out loud. Rose has tilted her head and is listening quietly.
KANAYA: I Was Never Able To Build Up The Courage To Ask Any Of Them
KANAYA: I Was Afraid Of What The Answers Would Be
KANAYA: But You Have To Engage With These Things Directly
KANAYA: Despite Everything I Said Before The Idea Does Scare Me
KANAYA: I Was Too Afraid To Face It
KANAYA: So I Think Maybe The Reason Youre A Seer
KANAYA: Is That Youre Strong Enough To Handle It
Before you know it all of that has tumbled out of you.
ROSE: I’m coming around to your point of view.
ROSE: I think I do like the atmosphere here better.
ROSE: It’s easier to see you glow here now.
KANAYA: Oh God Am I Glowing
ROSE: You are.
KANAYA: Sorry I Thought I Had Full Control Of It By Now
ROSE: Don’t turn it off.
ROSE: …oh, no. I’ve ruined your dress…
As you attempt to manage your embarrassment Rose rearranges her skirt as she orients herself towards you. Most of her makeup has been left behind in a mass of tears and snot on the front of your frock. She wipes at what remains on her face and largely only succeeds at smudging it.
KANAYA: I Will Survive
You decaptcha a handkerchief, but you mostly just make more of a mess of her face, so she takes you by the fronds and floats you both down to the riverside. She cleans herself off in the shimmering current while you contemplate exactly what you will need to use to salvage this frock. Lifting her elegant head from the water, she sits beside you.
ROSE: Well, now this ill-conceived expedition of mine has claimed both of our dresses.
She looks better, but still unkempt. The lack of rouge and eyeshadow have left her face wan and unprotected. Her hair is wet and tangled. The sugary sand of the beach has coated her skirts.
ROSE: We should get out of here before there are any other wearable casualties.
Her hairband isn’t so perfect, now. You reach up to remedy that situation.
KANAYA: I Love You Inkling
ROSE: …I love you, too, firefly.
With your sylladexes full of Lalondian treasure, you walk back to the transportalizer, hand in hand.