"Cataphractism is not really my thing,"  She admits.  "And no, I don't think it's because of Biryu!  That uptight girl is missing a part of herself and a child is its own being, right?  It's not her, so it's no replacement for Biryu.  Maybe just maybe she wanted a kid."

She walks over to him and waves a hand.  A chair appears behind him, comfy and covered with green plush.

"Take a seat and tell me more about your day, hubby!"

"Funny hearing someone call her a girl. Still, depends how you look at it. A child is not the same as Biryu, but it is something born of you. Still, I'm inclined to agree; I don't think she would consider anything a true replacement for the part she's lost."

He sits down, one elbow on an armrest and legs spread in a warrior-king sort of manner.

"It's actually a day off. Not by personal choice, just that for once there's no fires to put out that need my immediate attention. I'm not even sure when the last time was."

He scratches his temple a bit as he backtracks through the day, eyes resting on the Fae's ephemeral form. A little voice nagged reminded him it was all just a game, a manipulation, an approximation of empathy... But maybe he didn't mind playing along for the moment.

"Anyway... I set off for some steaks, talked a man selling void-tainted rat sausages to make less seedy business, ended up forming a possible counter-movement within Exercitus Terrae, cooked the steaks at Serenity's place to avoid my self-proclaimed high priestess, visited Anna, ended up between a gang war on the commute here, killed a hundred men and reformed the community there to hopefully seek a better life together."
This message was last edited by the player at 14:48, Fri 14 Dec 2018.

"Eight and a half months ago,"  She says as she immediately settles on his lap, an arm snaking around his shoulder like a stalking python.  She plays with his shirt with one hand while the other strokes his hair, fingers splitting thousands of times until they functionally become a comb.

"And did you make any friends?"  Her eyes are alight with pink and white lightning, "Was it at least fun?  How long was your gang war?  Did it make your blood sing?  Did strange rhythms beat in your heart?"

Daniel rests a hand on WAL's thigh as she takes her place.

"To tell you the truth... Not much. The gang war took maybe a minute and made me feel little more than frustration. It's something I've seen time and time again, people broken in the despair of our age and spreading that brokenness around. Lacking vision of their place in the grand scheme of things. I just did what I could to call out the true enemy and instill enough light to drive it back to the shadows."

He looks to the lightning crackling in her eyes. Was that his type, ancient spirits with celestial effects in their eyes? Psh.

"I think I succeeded this time around, though. Left one loose end in the form of a Dragon-Blood who led the worse of the gangs, but I think he might be smart enough to not return to those hoods. Or even if he did, find himself unable to return to his shenanigans in the same magnitude. That's how he would draw my attention, and the day he comes in my sight is the day he dies."

"Well... that's not right,"  She says, quite unamused.  "That's not the way it's supposed to be."  She withdraws her hand combing through his hair, "It wasn't supposed to be like THAT.  And a Dragon-Blooded?  What is THAT all about!"

She shimmies a bit in place, content at her location but also with a bit of annoyed energy.

"What's the point of a day off if you don't even have fun?!"

"I thought it might be relaxation. Seems the world disagreed."

He gains a frown as he looks at her. Was this some sort of trick she'd set up that backfired?

"...What do you mean it wasn't supposed to be like that? Was this something you were involved in or knew about?"

"Err... well, kiiind of?"  She remarks.  She swivels in place, her back rotating with her unnatural flexibility. "One of my nobles met a Man, and we got to talking and flirting, and there was a wonderful WONDERFUL ball... and while dancing he promised he could make all my dreams come true, which is LEGIT, right?  But I had a test for him!  I told him that all my dreams could already come true but one, that my True Love would have a wonderful day, meet a wonderful friend, right wrongs, eat enchanted food, you know...  and he said all he needed was a single hair, a single one!  Which I of course gave him from the stockpile, and he said that today would be the day! But it didn't completely work.  What did you do wrong?"

"........"

Daniel inhales veeeerrrry slowly, then exhales, then pinches the bridge of his nose and breathes again.

"You...That..."

No, this time he couldn't contain it.

"I don't even know where to start with what went wrong. Maybe the fact that you probably made a deal with BRAHE. You essentially made a wish with a fucking evil genie! You gave the biggest thorn in my side a mystic connection to me! Only you could fall for a ruse as cheap as this!"

He jolts up, tipping the chair over and quite possibly flinging WAL in the air in the process.

"The 'wonderful friend' would be Pauline, who I thankfully avoided. The 'enchanted food' would've been the void-tainted rat sausage. The wrongs righted were nothing more than standard everyday fare except with even more idiotic people than usual! I preached to steer some teens from Exercitus Terrae to the right path but they were probably too high on bath salts to remember a word, and by all reckoning Brahe is laughing his ass off somewhere right now at my expense! THE ONLY WRONG I DID TODAY WAS OPENING MY EYES IN THE MORNING!"

A kick hits the chair with enough force to instantly turn it back into fine gossamer dust.

"Wait, how do you know it's even him?"  WAL asks defensively as she floats backwards; her body is not to touch the floor. "It wasn't a bad guy, or else my noble would've fallen apart just at his touch!  I mean how bad can it be?!"

She puts her hands on her hips.

"You righted a wrong and fixed a community, right?  You had steaks with a Sidereal, which I bet tasted AWESOME even though it's not Fairy food, right?  You killed a bunch of scumbags and reformed a community with almost no effort, RIGHT?!  All that's missing is a new wonderful friend!  The friend was supposed to be new!"  She sprouts wings from her back, white feathers with black razored edges, glistening with red veins.  "Wait, did I say that?  Eh... probably... but it was supposed to be a new friend!  I should've known, you Exalts don't play so nice with storytelling magic!  But the point was to have you RELAX for once and you won't RELAX and it's making me stop RELAXING."

"There's degrees of 'bad guy', and Brahe is maybe a single one away from the Abyssals. The pool of suspects who possess the means, the will and the gall to cast such a curse on me is a shallow one indeed, and looking back to every moment that went wrong - which would be JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING TODAY, MIND YOU - I now recognize the subtle taint of his involvement!"

As WAL doubles down on the defense, his anger reaches a boiling point.

"Stop relaxing? Stop... Relaxing. Are you... Are you seriously trying to guilt ME for not relaxing after YOU hand the GREATEST THORN IN MY SIDE all he needs to ruin my day on a silver platter?!"

As if to call and raise her sprouting wings, Lucifer's Anima bursts forth with searing intensity, crown blazing with barely contained rage and blood-stained wings lashing angrily every which way.

"YES, YOU SHOULD'VE KNOWN! Everything - EVERYTHING - even hinting toward good today has been the result of me salvaging it from a pile of shit! I took ZERO pleasure from killing those poor fucks, I cooked the steaks MYSELF after barely avoiding eating VOID-TAINTED GROUND RAT, my preachings to Exercitus Terrae were pearls before drug-addled swine! Every situation has been mundane misery turned up to eleven. I'd rather have spent the day getting non-stop pummeled by Abyssal prototype weaponry than this shit! All because you - Luminary and manipulator as you're wont to be - are more gullible than the simplest child! If you wanted to do something nice, MAYBE you could've tried just about ANYTHING beside handing my hair to some slick bastard you just met in the hopes of supernaturally fucking with my day? You know, maybe visit me and watch a movie, cook together, ANYTHING BUT THIS SHIT?!"

If there's anything nearby that's not important to the reactor's functionality nearby, it's getting pulverized right about now.

"I've fucking HAD IT with ancient bitches using me!"

There's nothing more to smash in the reactor room but WAL.

"OH, SURE.  JUST THAT EASY TO GET YOUR ATTENTION, HUH."  WAL snaps back at him, "How long has it been, huh?  Since I've been stuck in here with nothing to do?  Know why there aren't any towering spires or fawning courtiers?  Almost all of my personal energy is getting sucked into this ship!  Visit you?  I'm a self-imposed prisoner!  Two fifths of my being are wrapped into keeping this ship active!  Fine, you know what? Let's go see a movie."

The white globe of the reactor, once a pulsing, glowing white, begins to fade to dull gray.

"Great idea!  I'm just going to leave,"  She lands on her feet, "I mean, I only need sentient interaction to maintain my hold on my personal consciousness, right, so this is good for EVERYONE.  Because what's good for Daniel is best for me, and what's best for me is best for the living.  C'mon!  Let's go!  I've got to make use of the first time I've seen you in three quarters of a year!"

"Yeah, OF COURSE, take the one slip in what I say to focus on and turn the blame around! I know you can't leave, but you DAMN WELL know why I don't visit as well!"

He steps closer to WAL, grabbing her by the shoulder to lift her up from the floor. Not unnecessarily forceful, but enough to ensure she's not actually depriving the Last Refuge from its lifeblood.

"You think you're the only one sacrificing herself for the greater good? Yeah, I'm SO SORRY that ensuring the continued existence of the Living - YOURSELF INCLUDED - is SUCH a bore! Good thing I'M living it up doing what I please just so I can ignore you!"

His eyes are locked on hers, relinquishing his hold of her as the worst of his rage begins to subside.

"Look, here's how it's gonna go. You acknowledge and apologize for your well-intentioned fuckup, I apologize for my prolonged neglect, we avoid this visit being added to the clusterfuck of things gone wrong today and spend the time on something worthwhile instead. Like formulating revenge on Brahe, that fucker. How's that sound?"

He's no expert in wyld-energy.  Nobody really is, nowadays.  How much she's taking or adding to the reactor is a bit of a mystery.  So, in essence, he can't tell.  But he IS dealing with a fundamentally selfish, self-absorbed creature...

"THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IS THAT I AM THE MOST IMPORTANT,"  She shouts back at him as soon as he grabs her shoulders, but then quiets when his tone softens.

A third arm extrudes from behind her shoulders.  In two delicate fingers is a single black hair.  Short.  Maybe turning a little grey.

"I'm a gullible idiot, huh?!"

Daniel's experience with the Wyld was that intention rules; the best way to accomplish something was to do something to further it, no matter what that something may be. "Best guess" was the best he could do.

He tilts his head somewhat at the sprouting extra arm and the hair it's holding.

"Yeah. Not so much as to not hedge your bets though, apparently."

"Well, I mean... it's probably his.  Maybe.  The noble didn't manage to say much before I ate her,"  WAL says matter-of-factly, "We do need to figure out a way for me to make proper kids!  Not the halflings, but you know, real people.  Real Fae.  If I can get another one of me it'd be so much fun!  And maybe we can power more, who knows."

She hands the hair to Daniel with her spare hand.

"I'm not a specialist when it comes to cursing though.  But nothing worse than what he did to you!"

"We can barely handle one of you as is. Any ideas on where to start with in the absence of an actual second Fae?"

He takes the hair offered, giving it a vengeful glare before wrapping it in a tissue and putting it in his pocket. Brahe was about to have himself a very bad day sometime soon.

"I'll figure it out."

"Wellllll, when in doubt and looking for a thaumaturgist, I'd go to Juno but she never likes being seen so screw her." She begins floating again, waving a hand and forming a small Disney-esque castle far, far away. "Orrr I could make a goblin good at thaumaturgy.  It would work!  Sort of."

"Thaumaturgist? Are we talking about your procreation or cursing Brahe now? I'm almost tempted to take your latter suggestion for the latter purpose. As for the first... Well, I'm convinced I could figure it out but I'm uncertain if I want to."

"No no no, I can procreate the REALLY HARD way with enough normal breeding... or with you, I guess, though your Solar nature will make it more Solar than Fey 75% of the time..."  She puts a finger to her cheek in thought, "Nah!  I can make a thaumaturgist goblin to cast a curse on Brahe!  We can make him fart spiders or something."

"Y'know, there's a saying among the Finns on the ship: Haste makes nothing but bastards. Or more directly translated, piss-headed children. While we say that good things come to those who wait."

Wonder how much that applied to his own apparent offspring...

"I'm not convinced farting spiders would be much of a difference to his normal life. No, we want him noticed by all the wrong people. Put into the spotlight with contacts NOT of his own design. Get stuck on the train with Pauline Smitters preaching her misguided gospel about my greatness. Find his cronies putting up a mini-shrine to me in the break room. Fantastical curses are nothing compared to mundane misery."

"Hahaha, that's hilarious!  Everyone knows Finland never existed."  She laughs a little, "Oh, but his LIFE is mundane misery.  Everyone's is here!  Anyone who doesn't spend all their time just with me is wallowing in despair forever." She twitches a hand and a waterfall cliff erupts from the 'entrance', making a gorgeous fairy glade of sunshine and rainbows and little kittens with eyes half the size of their head.

"Didn't it? So you've got competition in figments of imagination running wild on the ship."

With the situation more or less calmed down, Daniel breathes in the disgustingly refreshing forest glade air and sighs.

"Some prefer the ugly truth to the beautiful lie. Anyway, I'll figure out a suitable retribution for the bastard later. What have you been up to beside being lonely and forlorn?"

"Frigging Finns," She mutters under her breath.

"Well, let me tell you in exhaustive detail!"

Her life- lives- are astoundingly varied, complex, and excruciatingly similar as time goes on.  For a being of utter imagination she's got a limited repertoire.  The beautiful ingenue who's also inexplicably badass getting rescued by princes/Exalts/sweaty workers and then in turn rescues them from something even worse is a tired trope.  But one little thing pops up that he catches.

"- so after we passed the wyld pocket a few points ago -"

Daniel struggles to keep his eyes from glazing over after he starts losing track on which story is which, but snaps into focus as by a stroke of lightning as he catches something VERY out of the ordinary.

"Hold up. Wyld pocket? THE Wyld pocket? That we passed?"
This message was last edited by the player at 15:50, Sat 12 Jan 2019.

"Well, yes."  She says, "We've passed, ummm, three of them.  They're pockets though, I mean, you didn't notice them?"  She asks, head tilting, "Remember New Jersey?  They were like that.  Just little pockets of unreal space.  But we're passing more of them!  Which is a good thing, we're coming up to a real wyld zone."