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♥ Who: Lup + Close CR (who will be contacted! <3)
♥ Where: Lup's house
♥ When: start of August
♥ What: A ladies (kinda) night, the redux!
♥ Rating: PG and up, probably

Those who Lup deigned to grace with an invitation will receive one at random: that at the recipient's convenience if they so desire, they are invited to join her in what she is calling (without explanation) a Pocket Dimension Party. As per the instructions, any time within the next 24 hours, they can enter through the garden back door and "find the cat".

Should one accept the invitation and follow those instructions, they can find Ditto curled up in the grass beside the house, dozing, though at the arrival of any visitor he perks up and stretches. Rubbing up against their legs, Ditto will head over to a section of the wall and paw at a corner, until a door abruptly glimmers into existence and opens for him. He meows plaintively and waits. Go on in! Just close the door behind you.

Inside the doorway, visitors will find… a mansion. Elaborately decorated, warm, and inviting, it is like entering a rich and immaculate house that someone's taken a lot of time and TLC to make perfect. No one greets them as they enter, but if they call for attention and no one is in the immediate vicinity, a semi-transparent spectral servant will arrive and guide them to Lup. Otherwise, they are free to explore the house and make use of the facilities as they please.

The following areas are available:

An extravagant entrance hall with soft wood paneling and fancy art on the walls
A lounge area with big fluffy couches, pillows, and blankets, as well as a projection screen that works with communicators and whatever digital media Lup is familiar with, or a music mix in lieu of said media being played
A full-service kitchen and dining area, where a collection of spectral servants (features to be determined) will upon request cook any meal a person desires, assuming they (and by association Lup) are familiar with the recipe and ingredients. It's all delicious, too!
A sizable basement with regenerating training dummies, various targets, and more servants who will act as moving targets on request. They can't be hurt, but they can move around freely.
A big and beautiful spa with all the soaps and pampering material that anyone could ask for
A "pet room", AKA a room devoted to toys, climbing shelves, cat trees- whatever an animal might want to stay entertained for hours unsupervised

More details to be added as needed! This is a mingle free-for-all, there is no set schedule. Visitors can come and go as they please for 24 hours, and at the end of the spell anyone still inside will be summarily booted out into the garden.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I'd be worried if you didn't.

[Surely no one is that unobservant...]

Seems like you have, mm... no-go spots. But you like to be touched, right?

[thankfully, ardyn tended to get some hints sooner rather than later.]

...I wasn't entirely sure how I felt about the idea for a while--it's taken a fair while of getting used to. But I do enjoy it, in some moderation.

Moderation?

[That's a little vague for her purposes.]

It's more that... [He trailed off briefly, looking for the right words.] ...after going without contact for a long while, it's easy to find myself a little overwhelmed by it.

[.....ah.

Lup's hands pause for a long moment, frozen against his hair. Ah, yeah.]

I get it. [Her voice is calm, but quiet.] Even if you get used to it, even if you love it, it's still... a lot. Time doesn't necessarily change that.

[He frowned a little when her hands stopped, caught between primarily concern with a faint selfish desire to want her to continue.]

...I hope I haven't said a little too much. [Gods forbid he should have upset her with his own problems.] But...yes, it's been a difficult thing to readjust to.

No, it's not... it isn't you.

[She exhales quietly before resuming her movement, though with some hesitance that wasn't there before.]

I understand, that's all. I was... stuck, for a while. On my own. It takes a long time to get used to corporeal touch when you've gone without for so long.

[Ardyn didn't answer for a long moment; he knew better than he wanted to how difficult a subject that kind of thing was.]

...I'd only just left when I arrived here. A...few months before, I think--I don't have much of a grasp on the passage of time anymore.

Yeah, that happens too. Part of it comes with agelessness, I think- when everything changes except for you, it's harder to gauge how long it's been. There's a weird uncertainty that comes from being constant, if that makes sense.

[She's not entirely sure it makes sense even to her, but it feels right nonetheless. She hesitates after, and then adds,]

No one notices, so no one asks.

[It was a good way to phrase something Ardyn himself hadn't fully understood. He felt out of place in more than mere exile; without Somnus or Aera he was the only one left in a way that lacked definition. Far from the only Lucian or even the only inhabitant of Eos in the city; the furthest thing from isolated or alone, and yet he felt so painfully lonely more than he felt made any sense.]

...it makes perfect sense, actually. And even if they asked, however would it be possible to explain?

Probably not in a way that people can easily get.

[Lup shrugs. That's just the way of it; she's gotten used to keeping it to herself. It's actually kind of nice to have someone who gets it the way that Barry did when they were stuck on a "lich year". A handful of months can't compare to years and years of isolation and touch-starvation, but the similarities here are aching in ways she hadn't expected, to both those years and her time in the Umbra Staff.

It's not just the touch thing. The rest... maybe she should have reached out sooner. She'd had no idea how deep this went.]

I can only say I've found it near impossible even when I thought I had the nerve to try.

[Even if he could fully bring himself to state it outright, how could anyone understand how it felt? He feared no one could ever come close, and the mere idea that Lup had the slightest inkling from the sound of it was an incredible relief. Even if he wished no one else would have to understand such a thing, at the same time...he felt a little less alone at the idea someone might.]

[His hands curled uncomfortably into loose fists before he folded both arms under his head to hide them.]

...I've rather brought the atmosphere down a little, haven't I? I hope you can forgive that, it's a terrible habit.

[She hums a response, noncommittal, and works quietly on brushing and weaving through his hair for a little bit before she speaks up again.]

Can you guess why this room exists?

...I don't know. My best guess would be you desiring a place where it would be easy to relax, though I wonder if it's not quite that straightforward.

A fair guess.

[On both parts. Very little about her is straightforward, after all.]

We were on a very long journey, my family and I, with no control over where we going or what we were looking for. Sometimes we'd end up in places that had no food, no water, no shelter. If not for magic we'd absolutely have died. This spell? It gave us all of that, once a day. We couldn't take food or supplies out, but while inside we could eat our fill and sleep safely. All we really needed was a couple of bedrooms and a kitchen to survive the year.

[She sets the brush aside and begins weaving his locks into a loose and lazy braid.]

We were stressed out of our minds, though. It'd been decades, living like that, with no end in sight and the apocalypse nipping at our asses. We were unravelling bit by bit, and it sucked. This place... this room... it's a room made for healing.

[That made an abundance of sense, even if the workings of magic like that were well beyond his understanding of magic itself. He was definitely a little envious of it now, but such was just a difference in skill and definitions of 'magic' as their worlds understood it.]

...it's beautiful, quite honestly. This entire place is so magnificently crafted that I might think it easy to forget it were woven by magic at all. No doubt it served all of you well.

It did the job. Or at least, it did what it could.

[There's no room in the world that can erase all hurt, ease all stress. But little things like this help. They can help a lot, if you let them.]

What I mean specifically is that everything's safe here. You can't heal from a wound if you don't show it to anyone who can help you mend it.

...I did say that I might speak on it another time, didn't I?

[He said that mostly to himself, hands barely stopped from their nervous fidgeting by virtue of his hiding them both.]

Would it....be acceptable if I told you now? You don't--there's no need to reciprocate by exchanging dismal tales, if you would not wish to.

[She hesitates only long enough to undo his braid and start all over again, taking her time with it as she feels the tension ease back into place.]

I'm listening.

[Whether or not reciprocation happens can wait until after.]

... [The hands in his hair were about as calming as anything could be right now, and he took a slow breath to put his thoughts in careful order before speaking again.]

I'll spare you the details unless you should wish to hear them, at least for the moment. The general shape of the matter is this: long ago when the kingdom barely existed, I was yet mortal, and I sought to save our world from a plague upon it. Everything I did-...no, the only thing I thought I could do was eroding at my very humanity. At the same time, there was...someone else, who endeavored to save the kingdom and her people in his own way, and we could never convince the other to see our own point of view on the subject.

Ultimately...it came to violent conflict as such unresolvable matters often do. He cut me down and I became a monster, or the reverse--it no longer matters which happened first and which came second.

[Because in the end, they were both right and both wrong. Neither of them could have accomplished it alone, even if the whole situation hadn't apparently been rigged against them. He wondered, briefly, if it would have truly mattered; if they had worked together, would there ever have been a need for Noctis to do what the future and the gods demanded?]

[Very likely it still would end similarly. But just like the matter of which brother struck first, it meant nothing more than an empty idle thought.]

...When I was next aware of anything, I woke up on an island called Angelgard; a prison older than legend, said to be reserved for criminals of an ancient civilization and overseen by a god of lightning. In reality...it was deserted and isolated, with no one but myself restrained in darkness and solitude.

[Ardyn wasn't sure how he managed to keep his voice as steady as he did. Maybe because it didn't quite feel as real to him right now, so deeply entrenched in his dreams and delusions as he had been. With such a warped perception of time, he could never have put a number to how long he thought he was there until the second Verstael had told him as much.]

...The next time I saw another living, breathing human and- [Then there was a brief pause, voice caught on some flash of clearer and deeply unpleasant memory.] -left the island, I learned it had been two millennia since the day I was killed, for lack of any better term.

From there, it is as I said--only a matter of a few months at most until I found myself here.

Edited (extra word) 2020-08-10 03:33 (UTC)

[Lup is quiet for a little while afterwards, carefully considering those words. Two millennia... the scale is greater, the circumstances that started it different, but the end result is undeniably the same. Darkness. Solitude. No living soul between one stretch of time and another, no path to freedom, no ears nearby to hear a call for the cessation of that pain, the loneliness-

-oh gods.

She notices abruptly that her hands are shaking, and she slides them out of his hair to wring them together, exhaling a sharp huff of breath in between as if just banishing a sudden chill.]

Hah... so that's why... yeah, that makes a lot of sense, considering everything. Must've really felt like- forever, huh?

[It's fine. It's fine, though. They're both... fine.]

I...find it hard to define with any clarity--dreams and waking delusion had a blurred line between them, and I can't say whether I felt it to be longer or shorter a time than it actually was.

[He sat up slowly when she pulled her hands back, brushing loose hair away from his face with a hand marked by that miserable confinement. Not looking directly at her, for whatever reason--he wasn't sure why, if it was the uncertainty in his voice or her own that led him to find some spot on the floor to focus on.]

...I haven't told anyone about it in any detail--only of where I had been and how I came to be there. Past that...no one could ever truly comprehend it, so I said next to nothing lest I have to think about it myself.

[Oh boy. Oh boy, oh boy. With him sitting up, she shifts closer and just plunks herself down in the spot on the chair next to him. At least it's a lounge, so even with how much bigger he is than her, it isn't a terribly tight squeeze. She's somewhat hunched over, arms hanging and rested on her thighs.]

Yeah... yeah. [She exhales a bark of humourless laughter.] Fuck.

[How often has she felt that same sentiment? Just clamped her mouth shut every time it might have come up, any time the opportunity to share could have come to light, because she's fine and doesn't need fucking therapy and it's not like it left her shaken and petrified to go back, it's not like she'd lost the sense of everything, it's not like even after all this time the slow drip of water on stone makes her remember the cave, that goddamn cave and the way it always echoed where her voice couldn't reach-

She curses again, softer this time. Clamps her mouth shut, just like always. She's fine. She doesn't have to say it. A sentiment like "I'm sorry" or "that sucks" or "anything I can do?" might be more appropriate in this instance. Keep the focus on him. Keep listening. It's what she always does, and it works.

She doesn't mean to say it, initially- but when she opens her mouth, what comes out is,]

You're wrong about that.

[No one understands. She'd thought the same thing for so long.]

...

[Ardyn knew better than to say anything himself. There was nothing one could say about anything like that; nothing that could make it better, and very little that could make it worse than it already was.]

[Instead, without a word he placed a hand light on her shoulder and just waited for her to do or say whatever she would.]

[It takes her a bit, but his touch is grounding, similar to her hands in his hair, she suspects. Who knew? Truly, who knew that there'd be... so much. She'd held this for so long, stubbornly, protectively, yet when she opens her mouth it all comes spilling out.]

I was on my own for a bit- real secret mission, some save-the-world bullshit. I was deep in this abandoned mine, headed for a hidden door that would seal away a dangerous weapon, hopefully forever. I didn't know it'd corrupted my guide, though. Managed to get them both sealed away, but not before he stabbed me in the back. It didn't take long for me to die.

[That part's easy. Dying? No problem, she's done that plenty of times before. This, though... this, she struggles with.]

...Liches are... spectral. If my body dies, my soul crawls out of it like a ghost, and I can keep on existing like that. Normally it's fine. But here... my spell focus, the Umbra Staff, consumes the power of defeated magic users. And a lich is... all magic. I didn't even have a chance to fight- suddenly it just yanked on my soul and in I went. I woke up in a dark room with no one and nothing, and no way to escape. My voice couldn't reach outside. I couldn't do anything but sit and wait. I couldn't feel anything, I could barely hold on to who I was.

[She pauses, taking a shaken breath, and adds,]

Someone would have come for me. Enough time, and- my family would have found me, I was sure of it. No one came, though. I didn't find out until years later that it's because all memory of me had been erased by a- a spell, more or less. No one found me because no one was looking.

[Or almost no one. Barry was trying, at least, when he was alive, when he knew to look. But he's only one man, and he'd surely been... hindered, by Lucretia.]

By random chance, my brother ended up in the cave eventually. Except... he just found an umbrella and a corpse. Neither meant anything to him because he didn't remember me. All year it- I- was his spell focus, and... no matter how much I called for him, he didn't hear me. My voice couldn't reach him.