Sometimes nights turn out as expected. You go to a party, hang out with friends, drink a little, dance a little, maybe enjoy something wilder, but those were normal nights.
This one turned out to be anything but normal.
First off, Nahi had been cursed in a game of chance. She spun a wheel and ended up compelled to yell out random body parts every few minutes. It embarrassed her, she could feel people’s eyes drawn to her like she was crazy each time she did. After about an hour, Fio had asked if Nahi wanted her to try breaking the curse, and she might have begged for it if she had to. Nahi smiled and said that it wasn’t great for her voice to keep yelling, which was true, but deep down she recognized something else, being under something else’s control was making her skin feel too tight for her body.
Then the group headed to a fortune teller. Nara, Fio, and Ema all went before her while she lingered, still unsettled from the curse. Their fortunes were the usual: follow your heart, bright things ahead, surprises await, type things. When her turn finally came, though, the fortune was different. It told her to relax her hold over something she was working on, that if she did, it would all work out.
Letting go of control in most of her life was not a skill she had mastered. It wasn’t even one she’d practiced. She knew what needed to be done and made sure it got handled. There were things she couldn’t do, of course, and she accepted that, but the things she could? Those were hers to manage. Her work wasn’t always perfect, and she failed sometimes, but at least when it was her mistake, she could learn from it.
Later, as the night wound down, they began talking about her fortune and why it bothered her so much. There had been sympathy, but the advice the fortune gave was reiterated by her friends and she could feel herself pushing more against the idea, listing all the reasons in her head why it wasn’t that easy. Those were things she’d talk through with Dr. Deh’lorei next week though, not sitting on cushions by a pond while strangers wandered past.
After a night whose only bright spot had been spending time with her friends, she was frustrated by how everything else had unfolded. Still, there was always a way to turn things around. When she got back home, she took out her comm unit and sent out a message. The reply came quickly, an invitation to a place she would normally never go. Her first instinct was to refuse, fingers already typing out, No thanks, but if you want to come by later I’ll leave the door unlocked.
But then she paused and erased it.
All night, everything had been pushing her toward one lesson: relax, let go, stop clinging so tightly to control. Maybe this was her chance to try. She could say yes and see what happened next… or she could do what she always did.
“Let me change into something with a little more sexy Hallow’s End vibes.”
(Mentions of @fio-renze, @themadamelioness @emaisynstarsorrow and @xanelen)
