bottlebay | 4th Quest [Audio, early morning] [Dawntrail spoilers]

[She's awake. Has been, since the weakest strains of dawn. But Firoza has not the energy or the desire to project any image of herself when she makes this post. She just wishes to speak to someone. Anyone. Even if no one deigns to respond.]

...So these months. The ones where new arrivals begin to appear. The hazy ones.

[A pause. A stifled sigh.]

They feel as dreams sometimes. Especially when whomever you met does not remain once the air clears. And...I am not opposed to dreams. Bittersweet though they might be. But it does make me wonder something.

[As much as Firoza is keeping her tone even, the emotion that seeps out is palpable. Heavy, tender sorrow. Longing and loneliness, and...a sparkling, defiant mote of hope.]

Do you think...a-and if this is personal to you, please, do not feel you have to respond. But could it be possible that the living are not the only ones who can find themselves here? That...that those who ought to have passed on, in one way or another, could still...appear?

[Just gripping those fuzzy memories of reuniting to her heart, bidding them not to escape. It would be too much.]

I ask only because...well. I adore you all, truthfully. Even if we have not been introduced properly. But I cannot ignore how sorely I miss so many from home. Both those who live, and those who do not. I just...even in a new form, I...I'd like to be a little selfish, and hope to see them again.

[She ends it there, but not without a definite sense of being torn by this desire. Both an insistent palm pressed to a deep bruise, and a gnawing worry tinged with gold.

"Am I as they were? So desperate to preserve their dead, allowing them no rest, no renewal? Stagnant and ever present in a dream?"

The thought doesn't mean to come out, but it does. Oh, it does.]

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[ let go, let go, he's gone, it's time to move on, is the distant echo in the link, met with faint tinges of a stubborn, insistent refusal, demanding nothing less than clarity in black and white before the feeling's owner will even consider listening to the echoes. Flickering beneath it, a guilty curl of something else before it's superseded by a brief flare of alarm and bounceback concern at her worried sympathy and apology, of all things, did he not pull back enough—

No. Throw the switch, track change before they get caught in a loop. For now— a siding. Sure. Very tightly he tamps down on any runaway thoughts or feelings on his end, trying to control his tone for the telepathic message sent next: ]

Sorry. Did not mean to concern you. Not your fault.

I-I am still sorry to have caused you distress...!

[His whirlwind of emotions is not one she can parse - not one she feels right in parsing. It's too raw, too personal, to just go snooping. So there is a...a gentle sort of reassurance, like a warm hand on one's shoulder. Steady now, it seems to say. You are safe.]

[ What she gets in return is a sense of acknowledgment of the hand, the reassurance — but then also backing away and distancing oneself, as if to shrug it off of that same shoulder. ]

You were distressed. You sought reassurance. There is nothing to apologize for.

[ He's the only one who reacted like this anyway, so it's on him. ]

[Ah - understood. Space is given, but the warmth radiates. It's there should it be needed.]

But it was wrong of me to...I should have phrased it better. Maybe not have brought it to a public forum such as this, unannounced.

[Irresponsible on her part. But she knows she hasn't been thinking the most clearly about it.]

[ Unnecessary. There is no need to worry over him. ]

Not sure what else you could have done about it, since you wanted our opinions. Possible but not very practical to go up to each one of us separately.

[ ... ]

... What was that? About being trapped in dreams.

What? I didn't say...

[But she thinks. And then realization dawns on her. Ah, she'd...let a bit too much leak out, hadn't she? Godsdammit.]

Oh. Oh, I...my apologies. I was thinking of something I had experienced recently, before coming here. It was...a strange place. Full of the living memories of the dead, who walked and laughed as they might in life, never knowing suffering or loss.

[It sounds like it'd be a paradise, but. There's something tinged in her words, something like. Mm. Not contempt. It's hard to say.]

But the process for doing so...it stripped memory from the soul, and kept the soul as - as a clean slate, to just. To use, if one was in need of it. Bartered like currency. And to keep the memories alive, so much energy had to be used...so much aether as to sap the land of strength. It wasn't...sustainable? I think that's the word. But the people who did so knew no other way. I...I'm explaining it poorly, I'm sorry.

[It still rattles her now. The Alexandrians and their use of souls. Their lack of fear of death, the loss of loss and the ongoing preservation of that which by right ought to fade away, not because of any cruel thing, but because the person that once was ought to rest. The soul they bore should bring about new life, a new person. New memories and experiences. That was the cycle of it all.]

So. All the people that were clung to. And kept alive in a dream. They didn't remember anything?

[ It's not that simple, she said there was more— ]

They couldn't remember anything. They ... couldn't make new memories? [ Is that what keeping them as a blank slate means? ] They had no past. And they could not move forward.

All because someone wanted to hold on to them. And keep them the way they were. Yes?

They made new memories there, yes, but...they couldn't leave where they were. They couldn't reunite with loved ones until they passed, too. And they couldn't know anything that happened in the world of the living until the news was passed to them by the recently deceased.

[So in a way, it really was stagnation. A cozy dream, from which the only release was darkness eternal. And for a people so used to the option to stay curled up and away from it...]

But they were only memories. Only...data, apparently. And their souls were cleaned and used to bring others back from untimely deaths, bartered like coin...never to properly be reborn. Just, retrieved and cleaned of memory again and again.

[ His end of the link is quiet for a good while. Eventually, and particularly devoid of inflection, even over the Grumpearls: ]

... So were they just data, or did they have souls. [ Were trapped souls. ] Which was it.

[ Not to say that beings of data can't be alive in their own ways — the Porygon line, for example, does exist, but the way she talks about it, back and forth like so ... ]

They were data. They were the memories. The souls were kept elsewhere.

[Memory and soul ripped apart so...surgically precise.]

But to think of them as lesser...I don't. It's...there's still...personhood there? In my opinion, if that makes sense. A soul without memories is empty, full of promise. But those memories...they make someone who they are. They alone are unique with every birth and rebirth.

I'm sorry if I'm not explaining it right.

So it is less—

[ Souls, the spirit, it is hard to explain even in a world that knows they exist and can quantify or qualify them, at least to some degree. ]

... there is a cave in Unova. They say the deepest part of it connects to Sinnoh. I do not know if that is true. [ But if, but if ... he will be finding out. ] What is True: there are three Pokemon connected to it. What is also true: those Pokemon represent the spirit. Are said to have taught humans the three things that make up the spirit: knowledge, emotions, willpower.

[ There's one particular myth he found on a deep research binge that he'd skimmed over, but one particular punishment from it...

(If the memories make someone who they are, should that be applied in reverse, then? That a person without their memories is not that person at all?) ]

Knowledge. Memories. It is the same.

[ Not just data, then. He doesn't know if that's better or worse. ]

In that sense, yes, I would agree.

[But if one loses their memories...if they aren't taken away, they can be found. And even for the Alexandrians who lived, there were ways they could yet restore what was lost. She doesn't know that much yet, but someday she will.]

Our experiences make us who we are. I think...in the way souls are typically reborn, there is always something remaining of who came before. Like...it is cleaned, but it is not cleansed. There's a common thread between lives, sort of thing.

[How else does it explain the similarities between sundered souls of different shards? That there might be something deep inside of her from long, long ago, longer than she can fathom, that pulls someone to the surface that has been dearly missed?]

I am really not explaining it well enough, I'm sorry.

4th Quest [Audio, early morning] [Dawntrail spoilers]

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Dawntrail Spoilers

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