[ h a l c y o n . ] ₍ ₁₈₊ ₎

"Alright then, alright," he says, picking the puppet up by the back of his jacket like one of those claw machines back on the boardwalk, bending at the elbow to place him on his shoulder. Talk about deja-vu.

"C'mon," he says as he does so.

He had seen dozens of people darting out of their prison cells, shouting about the situation: everyone had been imprisoned somehow-- imprisoned on the moon above Spirale City.

Legato needed to find someone that he knew. Collaborating in situations like this had been effective in previous incidents.

Rather than joining the rest of the crowd and running, Legato chose to walk briskly, keeping an eye on his surroundings and connecting with his senses. The sensation of static on his skin that usually accompanied his threads was weak-- just how it felt when he first arrived in this city.

Dimmed abilities were dangerous in situations like this.

Stalking forward, Legato frown with irritation and narrowed his eyes to try and focus on formulating a plan while he searched the premise for a familiar face.

Turning the corner in the sterile white hallway, he spotted someone draped in the bright red shade of the flashing lights of the emergency system. Legato's frown intensified momentarily.

" Vash the Stampede. "

He did not need to speak up very loudly. In all of his years of crossing paths with the Humanoid Typhon, they said very little to each other before recognizing the other half of their distorted reflection. It was a wicked aspect of their familiar existence, two sides of the same coin.

" Do you know what this place is? "

The first thing he realizes when his heart stops jackhammering, stops thinking it is somewhere it isn't, and his mind catches up to the realm of the waking, is that he's fully armored, despite having gone to bed in his usual baggy sweats; the Colt sits heavy at his thigh, too, beneath one of his coat tails, despite his tendency these days to leave it home more often than not.

The second thing he realizes is that he is completely alone in this cell.

Before his mind has time to start spiraling with worry there's a loud hiss, and his door's open. Vash barrels through without a second thought, goal formed crystal clear in his mind in an instant, as sharp eyes scan s o many others making for their escape, all vying for an exit- any exit, any way back.

He has people to find, first.

The planet far beneath(?) them, the great expanse spread wide; though Vash had near-immediately categorized them, had grasped exactly where they were, it came with a familiarity that made him level-headed, despite the alarm still blaring. Had to, after all; him being here wasn't what worried him.

his hand's hovering above a control panel mounted on the wall when he hears him. There is nothing like that voice-- one that still sends ice careening directly through his veins, seemingly no matter how much time they're given to thicken themselves.

" ... I don't know," Vash replies, voice surprisingly even, even to his own ears.

"From what I gather we're on the moon, but-- why this place is here, or what it is, is anyone's guess." The cells, even with their doors wide open, still leave an agitated buzzing beneath his skin.

"Goin' off of instinct, here," he says, nodding towards the panel. Even without the familiar sting of threads pressing down, down into muscle and nerve, he still feels frozen in place.

Vash had never been the one with all the tech smarts, though. He'd learned the basics ( and, by extension, far more than most back home ) simply by virtue of having lived upon the fleet. But this isn't necessarily close to then, and anything further than that, and he'd always looked over the shoulder of-

"Knives?!"

His head jolts back to the side, this time returning to facing the door he'd been working on. The buzzing of that ever-open gateway between the two of them seems to throw the gates open wide, a tunnel shortened to little more than an archway, even with the barrier between them.

The potential of having the both of them here at once-- it makes Vash's muscles tense far more than the alarms. Still-- he cannot leave his brother to fend for himself, not being so new to the island.

That, and he had made a promise.

"Are you there?"

A. DAY.

And he's already been beat on, stepped on, fucked up, thrown down, shaken up, stirred around, cracked like an EGG, had moon dust kicked in his eyes, nearly had his nose literally ripped off, been punched in the mouth, shot and left for dead, forced to drink orange juice, been thrown down the space stairs...

And you know what?

Then shakes her head. "No," Richeh says, "Richeh still wants to find them first."

Richeh starts to scoot off the shared bench. "Also that is not Richeh's contraption," she points out. "Professor Qifrey wouldn't know you."

Richeh has no idea if Vash has met her teacher before. "thank you for teaching Richeh, though, mister Vash." She does reach into her cloak and pulls out the gifted pen and journal. Quietly, the blue haired girl connects a circle and grabs the crystalline ribbon that pops out.

"Wh-- huh?"

"B-but-- I could give the phone t'you-- w-wait!"

No, he's not just a Plant. Her friend.

"I can understand that," Meryl says as she picks at the hem of her skirt. "Can't imagine bin' in this place is as sunny as it seems."

She glances over to Vash. "When you're ready," the former insurance agent says, "I want to hear how it all ended."

"I told you," he says,

"everything at Dragon's Nest ended alright." Don't think about Midvalley's mangled corpse in the rubble, nor Hoppered lying there with a bullet in his head. "Legato and Elendira left. Got you n' Millie to the hospital n' then me and Nick helped the the rebuild 'til folks didn't want us around any more."

He knows that's not what she means; there's a spiky elephant in the room that he's had yet to explain, has so far managed to dance around. The pitch of his hair is impossible to ignore for those who knew him, may as well be a neon sign pointing directly at himself.

The place he's standing at is quite sunny, and the angel's trumpet plant by his side not big enough to block out all the light. Not that Aurelius was bothered by such things—but waiting does bore him. So instead he summons a cloud over his head just large and low enough to cover the area around him.

It's this sight that greets Vash whenever he returns, along with Aurelius's cheerful questions.

"I meant to ask—you do want me to give this plant the best care?"

"Am I to refrain from blessing the dirt, purifying the water, or controlling the level of sunlight? What does a gardener like you do?"

It does unfortunately mean, however, that he really is being forced to allow Aurelius further into his abode, even if only slightly, as everything is sat on the porch table with a grimace. Two wicker chairs sit to either side of it. All Vash can really do is try to distort his grimace into something more acceptable-- but even that is done only half-heartedly. Dipping away into the kitchen had done very little in terms of lengthening his drastically shortened nerves.

"I want you to learn how to take care of it without any help. Especially from stuff like that. 'Blessin' and 'purifyin'' or whatever else you can 'will' into happenin'," he grouses, not bothering to invite the man up; knowing him, he'd go ahead and invite himself up, anyway.

Vash brushes past both Aurelius and the plant still hovering in the air, doesn't even acknowledge the cloud hovering within arm's reach as he does so; it would only be feeding into him further. "Just soil and water and sunlight, without any sort of tamperin' with any of it." His voice becomes muffled as he disappears into the small shed in the corner of the yard, built by his husband to have a proper place to stow away all of his gardening supplies.

"And the only way you should be controllin' the sunlight is by movin' the pot around," he goes on, the sounds of things being shuffled around filtering out through the open door. "Whether it needs more direct or indirect light." A few short moments later, he comes back out with a pot of soil large enough to fit the plant still hovering in the air.