#figment game

Also, bestow template upon ye

The only occupant of the house and the inhabitant of these distant, gloomy, rainy places was the former hero of The Mind, a warrior named Dusty. It was impossible to tell from him now that he had been revered and appreciated before; he had lost his sword and any desire to regain his former glory, but had gained a couple of extra pounds and an addiction to alcohol.

Even now, Dusty was sitting in a rocking chair covered in peeling blue paint, crossing his legs, holding a glass of cider in one hand, and flipping through the pages of the only thing that reminded him of the good old days with the other.

His scrapbook.

Dusty spent all his days like this, and the few residents of these places who dared to come a little closer to the former hero's home claimed that the only movements they could catch from afar were his fingers turning pages and the chair rocking. Maybe they could have caught the moment when he gets up to pour himself some cider, or when a deep nostalgia appears on his face, but disappears after a second, leaving behind only a barely audible deep sigh... but Dusty was never known for his kind nature, so as soon as his ears caught the croaking of a water lily, which was stepped on by a particularly curious neighbor, he raised his head and pierced the uninvited guest with such a look that even the most gloomy cloud in the entire Outer Cerebrum would not compare with this emotion, and, squinting, drove the visitor away with a shout:

"Get lost!"

At first it worked right away. Then a momentary grin began to flash on the unexpected guests' faces, but they still hurriedly ran away. But lately, the residents of the Outer Cerebrum seemed to realize that the former hero had completely lost his shape and didn't even want to get up from his chair; the younger residents even dared to tease Dusty and arrange competitions to see who would come closer to the his house. The luckiest and farthest-reaching Thought at the moment was the one that it was just about to put its foot up and set it on the island itself, to the very ground where the cardboard house stood, but Dusty scared it off by throwing a glass of unfinished cider right at its feet. The group of onlookers who had gathered to watch the spectacle ran away screaming, and the frightened Thought tripped over its own foot and almost fell off the lily pad.

Dusty shuddered.

A long-forgotten desire to serve The Mind faithfully stirred in him. He couldn't let the poor Thought fall into the abyss. A plan immediately formed in his mind. A quick roll, grab the tree with one hand, stretch the other towards the Thought... Regain his former glory. Dusty mentally crossed out the last point.

He shuddered... but he didn't budge. The poor Thought had already climbed onto the water lily and was staring at him with a frightened expression, trying to shake off the rainwater. Dusty gave it an unreadable look and watched the Thought run away. He sighed, looking at his empty hand. He'll have to get his ass up and get a new glass...

He got up heavily and stomped into the house. Dusty was inside only at night to sleep. What kind of crazy person would want to spend most of their time in the freezing, never-ending rain? Apparently, he was the kind.

The interior of the house was modest. A couch with a pillow. A refrigerator full of cider stocks. A broken ice machine. Maybe if someone had pushed him, he would have finally fixed it... He even knew someone who could do that– Dusty shook his head. Indulging in memories is a bad habit. But how could he avoid them when most of the room's wall was occupied by a closet full of masks of once-defeated Nightmares?

The Fear of Public Speaking's Mask. It took forever to catch them, because every time they started their hurdy-gurdy about dropped trousers or a text forgotten on stage, their voice sounded from everywhere and from nowhere at the same time. Even the Fear of Public Speaking can be afraid to speak in public!

The Fear of Dogs' Mask. One of the easiest Nightmares he's ever defeated. The Nightmare gave up as soon as Dusty scratched its belly!

"What a good boy...", flashed through Dusty's mind.

The Fear of Heights' Mask. This Nightmare was always somewhere high up, between cardboard clouds, occasionally descending to catch Dusty off guard with sharp claws or beak, "quite accidentally" piercing the ground millimeters from his body. There was no way he could defeat her alone. Fortunately, he had a loyal winged assistant, and even though she didn't like the prospect of fighting her own kind at first, she bravely helped, and in the end they prevailed.

Dusty shook his head again, more violently this time. Why can't he stop remembering?! It's infuriating! He decided to pour himself the strongest cider he had in stock to distract himself.

With a glass, he left the house, sat down on a rocking chair and opened the first page of the scrapbook.

Here's Mayor Relic, whose beard is much shorter than it is now, posing next to Dusty, who looked much thinner and leaned on his trusty wooden sword. Here, the two of them are playing cards, and Mayor Relic, with a kind smile, teaches him how to cheat without anyone noticing. Here's Dusty, frowning away, playing "spin-the-bottle" surrounded by clapping Thoughts. Here he plants flowers in the Gardens of Creativity, here he rides on the Train of Thoughts...

But now he finally got to his favorite photo. This was the last photo he could look at, because then in the photos he defeated the nightmares not alone, but with her...

In this photo, Dusty stands with a triumphant grin on his face, putting his foot on the chest of the defeated Nightmare, raising a glowing wooden sword high to the sky as a sign of victory. A crowd gathered around, chanting the name of their former hero...

"Well, I was still an active hero here," he thought.

Dusty always liked to look at this photo. He never got tired of looking at all the smallest details, listing in his mind the names of all those present, whose faces appeared in the photo...

He knew that she was also there somewhere. He knew that she was not in the mood to pose. She looked at him with great adoration in her eyes, and screamed and sang in his honor the loudest of all. Dusty liked her voice. Of course, he would never say it out loud, but he...

He missed her. He missed basically his whole great hero routine, but most of all he missed her. Her voice, her stupid jokes, the way she pushed his buttons, the way she encouraged him when he felt defeated. She always knew what to say, and always radiated optimism and faith in the best. Dusty even envied her sometimes, envied the light she radiated without knowing it. He could only dream of such a superpower.

She was the light. He's a shadow. He was mindless force, she was the voice of reason. They complemented each other. He protected, she helped. He was lost, she was guiding. And she didn't ask for anything in return.

Dusty's hand trembled with a glass of cider, and in the blink of an eye, the scrapbook was sprawled on the grass, completely drenched in cider and soaked in the rain. Something in him broke for a second.

"Damn it!", he swore.

Dusty immediately jumped up. Somewhere in the distance, the newly gathered brave Thoughts gasped as one and ran away to spread the news. "He got up! He really did!" they yelled at every open window, but Dusty didn't care. He carefully brought the scrapbook into the house and began to gently wipe the water off the album, bitterly biting his lip when he saw the blurred letters on the cover. The photos were valuable, of course, but the captions were even more valuable.

When he finished wiping the cover, he turned the scrapbook back to himself, wondering how he could dry it all... and he gasped.

One of the photos that suffered the most was the one that he had stopped coming back to a long time ago. The scrapbook fell with this photo right into the mud.

It was an unremarkable one: a peach-colored bird with a yellow beak and blue feathers basking in the sun at a waterfall on the Freedom Isles. They spent their holidays there. She splashed in the water so much that he was fully soaked.

Piper's whole face and beak were covered in mud.

Dusty frantically reached out with his fingers in the hope of removing the dirt, but only tore the page. He tried to remember all the ways to clean wet paper from dirt – in his absence from work, he was especially addicted to the art of scrapbooking and restoration, polishing masks from the closet every week, although lately he couldn't even look at them – but his head was empty. He couldn't get Piper covered in mud out of his mind.

Would she forgive him for being away for so long? Would she even want to see him? Will she want to continue to light his way?

He jumped away from the paper, not wanting to make things worse. Dusty sat down on his couch, trying to calm his racing thoughts...

"Mayor! Mayor! It's Dusty! He's moving!", Thought shouted, throwing open the door of the mayor's apartment. It was pretty rude, and the statement that someone was moving sounded ridiculous, but the excited Thought didn't care about that now.

Piper was startled by a sharp scream. She had been spending her days with the Mayor for a long time now, the two of them trying to figure out how to get Dusty out of his drinking binge. She could see that Mayor Relic was starting to lose hope. But she wasn't physically capable of that.

The bird and the old man exchanged glances. They knew they had to act quickly.

"Fly, my Piper, I won't repeat / We need to get our hero back on his feet!"

Piper didn't waste any time and immediately flew out the open door, accidentally hitting the Thought and making it spin like a bundle in the doorway. Surveying the Cerebrum City from a bird's-eye view, she was surprised at how many Thoughts were on the street at the same time. They didn't even seem to notice the rain – someone was huddled together and gossiping, probably thinking up crazy details, someone was running around and screaming, as if there was someone in the whole Cerebrum who hadn't heard all the commotion, someone was trying to calm everyone down. The Thought from the House of Anger was already beating someone up to silence them, the Thought from the House of Nerves leaned against someone's house, and, hiding its head in its lap, rocked back and forth, the Thought from the House of Optimism jumped and sang, pissing off one group of gossips, then another.

"It's good that they're all here," Piper thought. "The road to his house will be much quieter!"

Skillfully maneuvering through the trees, she raced through the air at full speed, until finally she saw a familiar house in the distance, hidden behind piles of junk.

She didn't have to worry about the croaking of the water lilies, because she didn't even notice them and flew over, stopping and catching her breath only in front of the familiar window. The bird looked around the little island with the house: there were glass fragments lying on the ground, there were spots of some yellow liquid on the legs of the rocking chair, and the dirt in front of it looked as if something had been dropped there, the wet mud looked especially flattened.

The door was wide open. If anyone was inside, they didn't care that the entire threshold was flooded with rainwater.

Piper flew inside quietly, and at the same time her heart sank down and fluttered with joy. Dusty was sitting on the couch with his back to her, breathing heavily, working on something with unbelievable care. She flew up soundlessly and looked over his shoulder at what was in his hands. He was trying to dry a photo from his scrapbook. It was clear from the barely noticeable brown stain on the paper that he had previously cleaned dirt from the photo. Dried leaves of paper lay ready next to him, he changed them every time the previous one completely absorbed moisture.

The bird didn't even immediately pay attention to the photo itself. And when she finally saw herself, she broke into a smile.

She didn't even have time to think before something came out of her beak:

"Dusty... Did you wipe yourself with my picture or what?"

"Oh, shut up, birdie, can't you see I'm busy?", he muttered, absentmindedly remembering a former habit, and this grumble of his became the most beautiful sound in the world for her right now.

One second. Two seconds. Dusty replaced the sheets of paper with dry ones, and then something clicked in his head.

"Piper?" He turned his head slowly, looking the bird up and down in disbelief, as if he thought he was already imagining things out of desperation.

Piper laughed, her ringing voice making Dusty flatten his ears to his head.

"Yes, big guy, it's me! And you can't even imagine how worried we all were about you and what a commotion you made there!"

He blinked. And one more time. And one more.

"... Why are you here?", he asked softly.

"I already told you, we were worried about you! And you are my friend! What, you're saying I can't visit my friend?", the bird giggled.

He stared at the scrapbook in confusion, then hurriedly began to replace the sheets again, saying nothing.

His first reaction was to be rude, to push away, to kick out, to shout... But Dusty knew it wouldn't help. He had already tried that a lot of times, and she still stayed by his side.

"... You all are not mad at me?"

"Well... I'm not." She made a movement with her wings, like she was shrugging her shoulders. "I don't know about the others. But I think they'll be very happy to see you.

Piper smiled again, this time gently. He couldn't argue with her natural talent for gentle coercion.

"... Okay."

Piper carefully sat on his head, watching from above as he carefully dried the photo. She saw herself in some of them. Well, what's left of them. The pictures were all moist after all.

They sat in quiet silence for what seemed like a very long time. When the last sheet was finally pulled out from under the photo, and the scrapbook itself was suspended from the ceiling using an intricate design that Dusty had built so that all the photos would dry in an open state, Piper finally allowed herself to exhale with relief.

"Great work! I didn't know you could do such a painstaking job."

"I'm full of surprises", he snorted sarcastically, stretching after sitting for a long time.

There was a five–second silence, which Piper broke.

"... I'm sorry your album got all wet. You cherished it so much..."

Dusty waved his hand.

"Meh, it'll be as good as new in a couple of days when it dries." He paused, wondering if he should say the next sentence or not.

In the end, he muttered to himself:

"What I won't have is new friends like you."

"What did you say?", Piper asked, even though she'd actually heard everything. She wanted to check whether he would repeat it or not.

"... I said, let's go calm everyone down! I don't want the Mayor to tell me off right after I get back that I made all the Thoughts scream and the old man had a headache."

Dusty walked out the door. Piper followed him. They stood side by side, and they couldn't ask for anything else.