#eidyllon

Cross rapped his knuckles against the door to his brother's apartment. His calls and messages had gone unanswered and unread while Maru's location data continued to hover within his housing. He knew this meant Maru had slept in, effectively spitting in the face of the plans Cross made specifically for him today.

After another round of unmet knocks on the door, Cross relented with a sigh and fished out the spare key Maru gave him. He preferred not to encroach upon the others living in the apartment, but as he unlocked the door and stepped in, he felt that he had no other choice.

Immediately upon entering, he saw his brother splayed out on the couch in the living area, a snot bubble rhythmically inflating and deflating out one nostril and some kind of console still limply grasped in his hand. Cross stared at that sorry sight a moment, all emotion in his expression flatlining, then slammed the door behind him. The snot bubble popped.

Dam-bi frequented the Library in Cotes ward often. There weren't many places she liked to travel to, but Cotes was nice and usually quiet. The library here was peaceful and had a lot of greenery. She liked it.

She sits outside, a book in hand, while Soft Elk, her creature, rests beside her, sunbathing under the hot sun.

Green eyes spot a familiar presence. At first she thinks it to be the boy she met at mistwood, but...

Out in the Cotes Ward, among the trees....there was simply Chiikawa.

The small white creature held a wooden sword in their paws. While it had a different feel and weight when compared to their sasumata, it was also the same weapon as their mentor, Rakko. So, holding such a weapon made them feel close to their mentor somehow.

It was like Rakko was right there next to them, smiling confidently and warmly as he always did when encouraging Chiikawa.

With that image in mind, Chiikawa leaped forward and...pointing the sword at a rock which had a scary face drawn onto it?!

Chiikawa paused right in front of the rock, then they began to shake. With such an active imagination, it was easy to think that this rock could really be a scary bad guy opponent!

"Wah....h-h...hyah..." A weak strike, then a sigh. This wasn't going well.

The longer he looked, the less he perceived the universe for the distances between him and infinity. The black, immeasurable expanse yawning before him seemed to compress upon itself, forgetting its dimensions and smoothing to a flat ceiling overhead. As though he drew a woven blanket over himself, he saw the stars as the peeking lights of a higher sun filtering through the holes between the fabric's stitching--no wonder to feel, just a place to hide. He blinked and rubbed the bridge of his nose to reorient himself, and when he returned his gaze to the stars, his mind had restored the dimensions between and beyond them. But his glimpse at the flat fabric could not be undone. Numb distress preyed on the things his mind called shelter, starving him of even space's vast potential. The stars ceased being constellations.

Releasing a near-inaudible sigh, he rubbed around his eyes again. Thoughts weakly tethered to his mind's gravity orbited his consciousness, listless and meandering. He wondered if he ought to return to the forest, to the kiln he built to recreate examples of Rumel's pottery before he could forget what his culture looked like. He considered that he ought to sleep instead, before the mental detritus of his long, uneasy hours awake poisoned him further. He then thought that both could wait until after he had a chance to talk to Maru.

His third eye bulged open before the other two did, his brain resonating with the proximate tingle of Harmony. Cross glanced about the lowlit observatory, first by his sides, then behind him. At the open entrance to the room, weak starlight diffused across the curves of the ship and obscured down the hallway's long shadows. Searching the dark for signs of movement, his heart palpitated with the uncertainty that, like the flat universe, his mind had devised a world meant to hurt.

Trembling from the fatigue of weathering the tsunami and expelling saltwater from his lungs in racking, full-body coughs, Cross lugged his brother inland. What began as a steady retreat from the beach tarried into a sluggish plodding that dragged Maru's feet through the sand then dirt, Cross' own footsteps smearing into wobbly, tired lines in the ground as he stopped to cough, breathe, then carry on. By the time he crested the protective boundary of a forest out of sight of the Earthling, Cross considered heeding the alarms of his body and resting to collect his willpower, but Maru's gradual stirring unilaterally forced him to stop.

Easing Maru down against a tree, Cross backed up a few steps, at first intending to rest against a trunk standing opposite but finding his legs numb and unwilling to move. The screaming in his muscles blared loud, but his wariness deafened in comparison -- rooted, he watched his brother wake, and when he appeared conscious enough to respond, Cross hoarsely uttered his name. 「Maru...」

"Dude, you look like a Pikmin."

"How do you find this? Is it done well enough?"

Promosis sat calmly in the grass as she held up a figure weaved from sticks. This was a craft that many children liked to participate in back on her own planet.

The stick figure was made from several layers of smaller sticks and twisted together to form a body. It was difficult to position the sticks in the right way, where they didn't snap.

The figure was in a position of dance.

"What - you mean baseball? You don't know what baseball is?"

Oh, well. Maybe that's insensitive to say. Reel it back, Gojo.

"Okay! Come here, I'll show you the rules." He's already pulling up clips on his phone, crouching down a little to show Maru. "So you start here with the batter...."

It's going to be a long afternoon.