Puppies!

Puppies!
Date of Scene:	20 October 2012
Location:	Fluorgis, Shard Seekers HQ - Garden
Synopsis:	This log is full of puppies. And deep emotional conversation, but the puppies are the important part.
Cast of Characters:	Shiki Misaki, Lily

---

Lily has posed:
The Garden is looking pretty incredible! Or would be, if there weren't a lot of puppies frolicking. The poor flowers might not last through it all, and the fate of the tomatoes is similarly imperiled!

But that's not the first things that go through the mind of Lily as she hops through the door and shuts it behind her on her daily trek to the garden to deweed.

In point of fact, there is an enormous patch of re-planted WEEDS way over in the corner, they weren't just tossed out, but the plants everyone says are the good ones - the flowers and the vegetables and others - have been given plenty of weedless room to flourish.

No though, it's not the plants that the girl's got her eyes on - eyes that have gone wide with perplexed amazement. A brigade of PUPPIES are clamberoung around, whining cutely, and letting out weak yips and barks.

At first, those eyes are wide with confusion, butvery quickly it shifts to delight and wonder. With a squeal of her own the white-clad mage leaps out into the dirt onto her knees and leans down to get a closer look at the nearest one!

Shiki Misaki has posed:
Weeds? Really? Lily, you're strange.

Shiki is not quite sure what we're going to do with all these puppies! There's a lot of them, they're going to be difficult to feed, and they're really more of an expense than they are a benefit. But they're adorable and that's what really matters.

Also, there's Lily, who is much like a puppy in several ways.

Shiki walks into the garden to look for her,but she's gonna... stand back and see how this goes.

Lily has posed:
As you might expect, sticking your face down next to a puppy that's barely able to walk in a straight line to get a better look has a very predictable outcome.

The little puppy whines, totters, then very suddenly starts licking Lily's face with reckless abandon. The little girl splutters in a laugh-like voice and topples onto her rump, wiping her face with a sleeve! "Aheeheee! That tickles..."

But what ARE these energetic and happy little miscreants...?

And who put them in the garden?

Shiki Misaki has posed:
Riku did! We couldn't just keep them in a sack! Apparently.

"Having fun?" Shiki asks from the background, not really moving yet and content to stand there and watch, because really this is amazing.

What, indeed? Does Lily not know what puppies is? Are? What a puppy is?

"We need to figure out what to do with these guys.."

Lily has posed:
Lily has her back turned to Shiki, but when a puppy crawls up to her, she reaches down to hoist it up with a hand on either side... then pulls the yipping beast in for a close hug to her chest, giggling the whole while.

"Hug them!" Suggests Lily, laughing all the while. "Oh... Shiki!"

Shiki Misaki has posed:
One of them's pawing at Shiki's foot. She sits down in a wire chair and picks it up. It's probably going to get into all sorts of dog-scale adventures and talk in a language humans can't understand as soon as we leave the garden.

"The thing is... we need to save money for guild status as well as feed ourselves. Half a dozen extra puppies to feed might not work out well for us. I'm not really good with pets, anyway..."

"But what's up with you anyway, Lily?"

Lily has posed:
"Oh... that's right, everyone keeps talking about food." And Lily's always been at the table, eating, but never with a lot of gusto besides with foods she likes!

"'Hunger,' this thing everyone keeps talking about, I don't get it," She mumbles thoughtfully before looking back at Shiki with the squirming puppy still clutched tightly, and it's yipping happily!

"What do you mean?"

Lily has posed:
Lily shakes her head after a few moments. "No. What does it feel like? everyone seems to know when they are."

Shiki Misaki has posed:
"...ok, uh, wow."

Shiki looks pretty surprised. She bites the bottom half of her lip, and... lets the puppy go run off to do stuff. Puppy stuff. She looks at Lily again like she's completely new.

"Lily. You just said Reize found you out of the darkness, one day? Just kind of pulled you out and you don't really know much other than that?"

"Do you really not know anything other than that? Like, you didn't have any parents or a place you grew up? You look a little younger than me, but..."

Lily has posed:
Lily winces, thinking back to the memories of that darkness. "N-no, I don't... think he really pulled me out. Just... I remember being IN the darkness... attacked by those dark creatures... fighting as hard as I could to get away, but there was nowhere to go..." The girl's shoulders slump and she shivers. Shivers HARD. She only keeps speaking after the puppy unexpectedly licks her hand, startling her.

"But then there was a light, far away! I didn't know how long I'd been in that darkness... or when the light came, but I followed it. Then I saw Reize! ... on big... steps---" She seems to be hunting for the word. "Leading to a door out of the darkness, and I followed those! The light was from his pendant. But that's... all I remember... after that, I think... I remember falling and lots of green! ... then when I woke up, he was carrying me... he said another monster was about to get me when he found me... everything else I remember happened after that, there's nothing before."

She looks downsadly, a bit perplexed. "... is that bad?"

Shiki Misaki has posed:
"Not bad," Shiki replies slowly, "Just... interesting."

She realises, now more than ever before, what her life has really come to. She feels acutely like- because it's what she /is/- one of those stories where a girl from the modern world is dropped into some sort of fantasy land where nobody has heard of TVs and everything works on magic and you slay monsters for a living and everywhere you go there's another mysterious, fantastic person or thing or place.

It's funny, she realises. Mr. Hanekoma told her she could crash at WildKat whenever she needed, and she thought she would.
She's never been back there since she headed out to Goug. Fluorgis feels like home- or rather, home feels like wherever the Shard Seekers are.
Or maybe just where Reize is.

"Sorry if remembering it was tough. I didn't know... but..."

"It's just strange. You have incredible powers but you don't know what being hungry means... (incidentally, it means when your stomach's running on low-to-empty and you want to get some food, preferably something that'll give you energy, or it's easy to digest, and not make you fat...)"

"I mean really that's all I can take for granted about you. Super cosmic power and your humungous crush on Reize."

Lily has posed:
Lily blinks a few times, but doesn't seem too bothered by this. She adjusts herself a bit though, what with the squirming puppy that's now reaching up to lick at her chin and make her giggle despite herself! "Aheeehh- down, down down!"

And so she carefully forces the puppy down to her lap.

"Energy... but I've been getting that from... all around... hmm..." She gives Shiki a helpless ook, then shakes her head. "I thought everyone could use that power, but that seems wrong... and nobody else has anything shiny on their faces either... I don't know what it means... um, what's a crush?"

Shiki Misaki has posed:
OK, Misaki, you need to remember something:

You are an idiot.

You say and establish that you're talking to a person who has no awareness of any concept, term or idea that is not introduced and explained to her, then what do you do? You introduce a new concept to her. In thirty seconds. Idiot, idiot!

Naturally the concept- the sheer, mind-breaking idea that Lily literally sustains herself by somehow feeding off the raw background energy of the cosmos- is also lost on Shiki as she goes all sweatdrop and wobbly mouth.

"A-ah... well, maybe that's not actually the best way of putting it... uh..."

Shiki is gonna have to go into the tank here. "...I'm gonna need to think about how to explain this..."

Lily has posed:
Lily's shoulders bunch up and she leans forward expectantly, waiting an explanation! "U-um, I'm not going anywhere, if you want to think... there's a lot of questions about things I need to ask recently... like that word Lenn used the other day, I was going to ask Ivo..."

Shiki Misaki has posed:
"You know, funnily enough, I don't think you'll have to worry about that any more," Shiki muses.

"OK, Lily. Remember when we found Reize in the desert?"

Lily has posed:
"Mhm! Of course... we worked so hard to find him, and then... how could I forget!" She giggles happily at that relief of a memory.

Shiki Misaki has posed:
"And we were all so happy-" Please don't make me explain what happy means- "That we all ran up and hugged him. And before that when he wasn't around, we got worried and we felt bad because he wasn't around."
"Right?"

Lily has posed:
"Mmhm..." Lily looks a bit perplexed at Shiki now. "... that's not... ah... I don't have a word... that's not how anyone would have felt?"

Shiki Misaki has posed:
"Maybe," Shiki says. "But I think this is... ah... different."

"You, and me, and Lenn ... I think all of us have a certain sort of feeling for Reize that is different to normal."

"We all like him," and if this was Japanese she'd be pronouncing 'like' as that particular contextual way of saying 'suki'. "He's... precious to us... we all treasure his kindness and... does your heart ache when you miss him, Lily? When you thought he'd died?"

Lily has posed:
"Mmmhm.... it... it did... I didn't have words for it at the time, but... those... those fit perfectly." Lily replies, voice crcking a little. She hugs the puppy tight again. A bit too tight. It yelps, and she loosens her grip in a hurry. "Sorry, sorry..."

Shiki Misaki has posed:
"Careful," Shiki says. "They're still small."

She puffs out a big breath of air.

"Lily, do you want me to just tell you everything in one go, or do you need some time to get comfortable with your feelings?" Shiki asks. "I mean, this is all really... kinda new for me, talking to you about this, so I don't wanna overload ya."

Lily has posed:
"I want to learn about this world I live in." Lily answers after some time to think. "And the people I'm living in it with. ... I'm not sure what being comfortable about feelings means, soo... I'll listen!"

Shiki Misaki has posed:
"OK, hold on tight," Shiki says.

"When you feel comfortable around someone, when you like being around them... when you like doing things with them and when you feel protective of them, that's called friendship. We're all friends here: it's why and how we all stick together. Because of our bonds of friendship."

"But you and me and Lenn... we found ourselves in a funny situation, 'cuz I think what we all feel for Reize is something more than friendship. It's... bigger and stronger and ... fiercer. We hate it when we're seperated from him, and we know that he makes us better people, and that light in his heart... we hate being seperated from it."

"If you were gonna court someone, then you'd... I dunno. Courting someone means you establish ... like... you look to cement those feelings between yourself and one other person."

She sits back. "But me and Lenn decided we don't care about that. Neither of us wants to keep Reize for herself, annnnd I don't think we want to keep Reize from you, either. We all like him, we all know we like him, we all like one another but maybe not as much as we like him... but we don't want to make one another like us less by insisting he just like us and not anyone else..."

"So we decide to share him!"

Lily has posed:
".....we aren't already?" That's what Lily says in a bit of confusion after quite a while of thinking to parse all of that. The blush is apparently lost on her - but she's smiling to herself. At least for a while. Then she frowns. "... I don't understand, you're talking like normally you can only 'court' one person and then nobody else can..." She starts scratching her cheek, looking a bit troubled.

Lily has posed:
Then she stands up and leans in a bit at Shiki, before reaching in gently with a hand to poke Shiki's nearest cheek. "...your face changed color! Are you okay?"

Of course, she's not noticed when her own cheeks have done that. How could she?

Shiki Misaki has posed:
"Hey, I look the same way you do," Shiki says. "It's hard to talk about this sort of thing... I'm not good at talking about my feelings sometimes. Now, I will answer your question with a story, Lily.".

She shuffles her chair forward a bit.

"Imagine you live in a city like Fluorgis. Only there's no waterfalls, and no markets, and no desert outside, so pretty much nothing like Fluorgis really. Imagine every single building is covered in glass, and everywhere you go there are cars rolling around on four wheels, full of people, and everywhere- /everywhere/- there's something electronic. Something like Ivo's shard seeker machine, but ones that run on electricity and batteries. Electronics that can do anything- show massive moving pictures, let you talk to your friends from any distance, look up libraries of information. All of these sort of things that fit in the palm of your hand."

"Now, think of the society of people. Hundreds of people. All of them, humans. No Burmecians, no Viera, no Seeq, no Lamias, nobody that looks like you. Everyone looks the same. And they have a society. They have /rules/, rules that they follow, rules that their parents followed, rules that their grandparents' grandparents' grandparents followed. Rules on how to act, how to talk to people, about who was less important than you and who was more important than you. How you should respect people, how you should treat them, the Way Things Should Be Done."

"Now imagine the Heartless ate that world and everything in it. Now you're in another world. A world where none of those things exist. A world where none of those /rules/ exist."

"So forget about the rules of courting boys. You're better off for not knowing them, because now they don't apply to you. Nothing is around that could punish you for not following them, so who cares?"

Lily has posed:
"... Uuum..." Lily sits back down, petting the puppy while listening. There is an awful lot to listen to.

And by the time it's all finished with... she's peering hard at Shiki. The innocence that she's so often surrounded by is momentarily gone as she thinks and thinks hard.

And this girl isn't exactly stupid. "...There's a lot of rules here in Fluorgis too." She murmurs out thoughtfully. "Like the rules about not using fancy magic in the street nobody told me... and this thing about money needed for homes and being a group. I don't know what the meaning of that really is though... the home was here, and nobody else was using it! And we're acting together without all of that money, right? So... so many things seem strange and silly..."

Shiki Misaki has posed:
"Haah, I guess you're right."

Shiki smiles. "It's different rules, not no rules. But it might as well be, for someone like me. And for someone like you, there's no difference, since you never knew them to begin with."

"Money's a whole different thing. Even I'm having to learn about it fast, but it's a good thing I'm pretty good at it. Gotta make money to buy food, for me and you and, who knows, maybe puppies. But I guess one thing's for sure, right?"

"We all work together better when we're honest withour emotions. And Ivo told me I deserve to be honest with my emotions, so... I'm gonna do it again."

"Let's all accept that all three of us like Reize and we're all going to treat him as our precious person. No getting jealous or upset with one another because we think someone else is taking Reize away from us. Because what matters is making our own rules for this kinda thing. Creativity, friendship... sticking together."

Lily has posed:
Not knowing to begin with is right. The highly happy speech combined with the smile seems to be contagious, because Lily starts smiling right back, nodding vociferously and cheering at the end with a HUGE smile of her own for good measure.

"Mmm... nobody's taking Reize away!"

... and then... a few moments later... puzzlement flickers in the naive mage's eyes.

"Um... Shiki? What does jealous mean?"

Shiki Misaki has posed:
Shiki Misaki begins to open her mouth, when something flickers across her face.

Oh, this was meant to be a simple explanation, but before she can say it the full weight of the question sort of... smacks her across the face. Because, you know...

Shiki Misaki's sin is Envy.

As such, she suddenly gets... very quiet. "Jealousy is a terrible, terrible thing, Lily. It's when you see someone else with something you don't have, and it makes you hate them. It makes you want to take it from them. It can change your life for the worse... in... in ways you'd... never expect."

Lily has posed:
Yet again the change in mood seems almost palpable. Lily edges back a little as if scared of this sudden shift in Shiki's mood. The girl in white presses her lips together thinly, a bit stunned.... but eventually speaks up, also quiet. ".... I think... I can understand that..."

... all she has to do is imagine Shiki or Lenn taking Reize somewhere far away, and the awful feelings start. Lily blinks a few times, then hurriedly shakes her head as if to clear those thoughts away.

"It... it doesn't sound wrong to want things you don't have, but putting it that way... it sounds really scary."

Shiki Misaki has posed:
"It's when you let that desire..." Shiki gets a lump in her throat. Why can't she find a better way to describe this than-- "Change who you are."

"Anyway, yeah."

"That's pretty much all I can think about on that subject. Let's play with some puppies."