[voice], within the first week of October

[hasapoint]

[You feel something reaching out and touching your mind... Poking it, actually, like a prodding finger. It withdraws and tries a softer, finer touch. That withdraws too, and there's a pause. Looks like Need can't get around her powerloss and covertly use peoples' senses/look into their minds just by using the pearl network. Unfortunate.

After a moment, Need allows her presence to bloom into the connection and make itself known. If you can gauge this kind of thing at all two things are immediately evident. One is that she's very old. Not tired, not fragile, but distant and distorted to the point where her mind doesn't really feel human. The other is that she's female. There's nothing stereotypically feminine there but it's very clear. She's something crushed into a tiny space a very long time ago and also: she/her.]

Someone always figures out how to make a teleson. [Telepathy via technology.] How far does this reach? Does it work between people who haven't met?

[Need is far more accustomed to speaking mind-to-mind than using anything else, so her "voice" has a particular quality to it that I'm gonna keep rendering as italics.]

Where I'm from it's possible to visit other realities, where things might be very different, and be fully embodied in them but one's actual body remains behind. The more difficult part is getting back to it. I wonder if that's happened here.

Comments

[hasapoint]

[It is an unusual reaction, but she wasn't expecting empathy. Need watches with interest. She wants to say Noble, but stupid and decides that that comment might be taken as antagonistic; she's not here to apologize, she's just also not out to make impressions worse. However this creature's mind works, armchair direction is rarely welcome.

Flowey and her are not, to her reckoning, that similar, but that's because in Velgarth there are several ways people can end up remaining attached to the world after they die, changing in the process, and hers was pretty distinct. Part of the reason Need's so distant and strange is how long she's been active. Emotions not related to her purpose have worn down. She's unwilling to talk about her emotions but internally would say she doesn't feel real love because grief has become a fleeting melancholy.

With a rueful, self-deprecating sympathy and no passion to speak of:]

Wretched, isn't it? I couldn't take it when someone I knew used my name, so I had to keep telling people to forget it and call me Need. Now I've forgotten it myself, and doesn't that just sound like senility.

[friendlyflower]

You said it, not me! Hee hee.

[He hasn't forgotten his old name yet... but he doesn't think he could go back to using it any time soon, even if he had a small measure of reconciliation with it.]

'Flowey' for me. Sounded innocent, unassuming... [... and he's not good at names. And also, his old one was so steeped in meaning that he liked having a name that doesn't really mean anything at all.]

... you're REALLY old, aren't you? Some might say immortal, even.

[hasapoint]

I'm probably going to forget that a few times. It's the memory going, you see.

[not so much that as Need is also bad at names. She tends to refer to people with really uncreative nicknames instead. Including calling a catgirl "kitten". It has the additional effect of keeping them at a bit further of a remove.

Swords can't sigh, Need included, but there's a sense that she would have here.]

I hate that word. For one, I'm very much dead and for two, it's just so arrogant.

[Not that Need isn't arrogant herself. She's very sure and confident, it's just that the caution and her aversion to boasting make it less obvious.]

[friendlyflower]

And have you got a better one? It doesn't seem like you're going to die again that easily. [And neither will he, even though he's far weaker than she is.] 'Dead' usually implies shutting up, and 'undead' makes it sound like you're going to be groaning and trying to eat brains.

[hasapoint]

Usually for you! Try 'spirit'. I was already ghost-type before I got here.

['guardian spirit' and 'angel' are more specific but she's definitely not using those. Also also: normally she'd cheerfully admit that while she's hard to put down it absolutely is possible. That seems like pointless bravado considering the circumstances and how much less power she has here.]

Or spirit-sword works, if you feel the need for precision. Lykeblade. Kalyke, even, if you want to say the same thing in a different language.

[the connotations there are also something like 'dead-sword'.]

[friendlyflower]

Spirit, huh? [He knows someone kind of like that, now. They probably would've liked being in a sword... or maybe a particularly ornate dagger.] Sounds like you got the better of it. I was a stupid flower.