ORIGIN - in bloom

The pale remains of her chrysalis sat at the base of the hill.

It had been several days, now, since she came out. The solid agate lay in pieces, littered with white petals bathed in Voidlight from strange, black crystals above. Where some might abandon their rock without a second thought, Niamh liked to visit on occasion-- not for any particularly profound reason, or to question existence as a whole, but for the tree.

She could always see it from where the chrysalis used to stand-- it stood tall atop the hill, covered in pretty pale flowers, surrounded by a blanket of petals like snow. Niamh liked to run back and froth through the silky blossoms, cloven hooves kicking up large plumes of litter into the air to scatter like dust. She'd roll in them, sometimes, too-- and she'd spend too much time picking little pinprick petals from her hair afterwards.

Today, though, the faun's eyes were set on the tree itself, rather than the litter it produced. Instead of skipping through an ankle-deep sea of white, she went for skittering around the trunk of the tree until she found the lowest branch. She ran, she jumped-- her hooves scratched against the bark, until her little hands caught it.

She affixed herself up there with some flailing and "wah"-ing before one blush leg was flung over the branch, and she sat with her belly to the wood, slowly snaking forward. The branch bent, even under her little weight.

No, that probably wasn't good... Her head craned upwards to the stronger, thicker branches up above as the platform she was on continued to curve dangerously underneath her.

@Akane

Now, Akane? The remains of her chrysalis sat untouched somewhere in the frigid wastes of Ursa; she'd abandoned in favor of a pair of pants borrowed from the Palace (with... permission) and half of a tabard cinched around the waist. It just so happened that Cepheus was quite an interesting place to linger in. Lingering let you stare at strangers all day from your perch near the ceiling, or venture into random rooms to nose through drawers that hadn't been opened in five hundred years, or... watch as a child scrambled up a tree in the backyard.

She sniffed.

Interesting place indeed.

There was no hesitation between that thought and her stepping off the patio. Glittering eyes tracked the movement of the scrappy little thing, intrigued by the sheer determination it must take to get such... uh, not dexterous hooves to comply with actually climbing up. Perhaps it was a thing like woolly deer scaling sheer cliffs?

Another question was, of course, How did this kid get here?; this was promptly answered by the sound of a chrysalis crackling underfoot as she slowly plodded and marched toward the tree. "Ah," Akane thought aloud, and pressed on until she was at the very foot of the tree. I really oughta—

Thinking better of just shouting up there with no preamble (and having learned to knock on doors first) her knuckles rapped against bark in a one-two rhythm. Knock, knock-knock. Knock, knock-knock. Then, she hollered. "Need a boost?"

Responsible supposed adult, right here.

@Niamh

Even without a concept of what isn't socially acceptable or not, the childhood instinct of being caught in the act rose in Niamh's belly as she saw a pale figure approaching. The branch bent and she started to peel herself back off the tree-- by the time Akane had come into speaking range, she was dangling from the branch with her hands, hooves flailing back and forth.

No reprimanding came, however-- just knocking, and an offer. An offer Niamh could not refuse.

"Yes!" she cried, legs kicking faster as she tried to haul herself back up on the (still bending) branch. "I have to go higher!"

No reason given, of course, but she had managed to haul her upper-half onto the tree, clinging to the creaking branch with her armpits. It was here, slightly more stable, that she took a look at the stranger lingering around the tree.

And her brow furrowed. "What are those!!" she wailed, pointing accusingly at the cloth around Akane. Why did she get to cover up all those soft bits with nice clothes, after all? What an injustice. "Where did you get them!"

The branch, meanwhile, cracked.

@Akane

Strange, how every living and breathing social creature had some predisposition to helping young ones in need. Just the sight of Niamh with hooves flailing on empty air was enough to get Akane's heartrate soaring to astronomical levels—even if she was just barely above her own head after putting the faltering branch in her armpits.

"I have to go higher!" was a perfectly reasonable excuse not to immediately peel the faun from her branch and warn of the dangers of being high in the air. The Oni was more than happy to hold her meathook of a hand (probably big enough to hold Niamh by the torso, honestly—) up for a foothold and hold her up to the admittedly much more sturdy-looking branch higher up. "Let me know when you've got it."

... what if she climbed the tree too, actually? The kid should be on stable ground first, at least, though Akane was sure she could reach and catch at any moment. Responsible.

In the midst of all of this, her "Um, pants?" were being pointed at. Brows furrowed in approximately equal amounts of emotion, though hers might've just been confusion. Was it that weird to be wearing pants? Should she have picked a dress instead... ? She liked to have her upper half out, though—

"From the Palace," came the fun fact, spoken like it was the most obvious thing.

@Niamh

"I want pants," the child announced, as her little pink hooves fell still on Akane's hand. Her tail whipped, briefly-- she'd never been this high before! Akane was tall, was this what it was like to be tall? "I gotta get pants. From the Palace?"

She was rambling on as she ascended to the branch the Oni had picked out for her: her little hand clung to the branch, and she swung onto it-- "I've got it!" --perching with her legs on either side. This one was thicker, sturdier, and very high up. "I went there once and there was this scary lady," she went on, scooting along the branch idly. "Or, uhh, a lady and her three friends that lived on her butt. She seemed scary, so I just left again."

Niamh hadn't even bothered to introduce herself to Isra, in fact. Or to the three friends that lived on her butt. She'd barely even got within the threshold of the river, since. She snaked around the strange hut where some Purple People lived, sniffing around but never finding anything interesting enough to interact with, unless it was unattended food.

Back to the tree, of which Niamh was still scooting along the branches of. When this particular one split into a Y-shape, she stopped and reached out for one of the pretty pale flowers affixed onto it by a thin twig and pried it off. For a moment, the faun studied it, curious, and then pinched the stem gently between a finger and thumb.

A little spark of light-- a white glow from the agate upon her chest, before it fizzled out again. "It didn't work!" she exclaimed, distraught, without bothering to explain her newest predicament to Akane. Instead, she let the flower flutter down to the Oni below, aiming for the tippy-top of her head.

"Do you live in the Palace?" She asked, changing the conversation entirely, her palms on the tree branch. "You're a little scary-looking. Is it for scary people?"

@Akane

This was totally a normal thing, holding a child on one hand as easily as a waiter holds a platter full of steaks. Her arm barely even strained with the effort, and the faun's hooves hardly had the weight to cut into her palms. Akane found it... a little endearing, and already there was a sort of I have to protect this at all costs feeling rising in her stomach.

Part of this self-assigned duty now involved acquiring pants for the child. The Oni nodded gravely, jabbing her free thumb toward said Palace while Niamh was still looking. "Just over there," she confirmed. First architectural marvel on the left. "But, uh—" "I've got it!" "oh, all right!" Akane grinned reflexively, and some weird instinct deep within her gut told her to extend out a thumbs-up. A second one demanded she say some words of encouragement, but no constructive ones came to mind.

So, instead, she busied herself with unfastening the rope holding her tabard to her waist. A temporary solution, really, to be tossed over her shoulder while she fumbled for handholds on the tree itself. It didn't seem too wise to make the faun reach for it from her precarious place, even if she was perching rather nicely where she was (and God, if Akane didn't feel a little bit of envy about that choice of perch.)

"A scary lady?" There were several of those— "Oh, her. She's nice as long as you don't make a mess." ... Akane thought, anyways. She hadn't talked to the... extremely large and muscular cat with many tails yet. Priorities. Priorities—

Clawed toes gripped at the base of the tree, and she hiked herself upward. "What didn't work—" she muttered by way of idle conversation, though her gaze was directed downward.

It was quickly becoming apparent to her that she had no experience climbing trees—which was far different from trying to scale banisters and sconces. Even more apparent was her loosening grip, legs scrabbling against the bark. One wrong foothold, and—"Agh!" Fallen, flat on her ass and flopping onto her back with an exaggerated puff of air. The sunshine-yellow cloth fluttered dramatically from where her shoulder had once been and landed on her face.

Akane snapped her legs once, performing a single effortless sit-up and bunching the cloth up in her fists.

"Scary people don't fall flat on their asses," she chirped, still in surprisingly high spirits despite the embarrassment, "want this as a temporary pair of pants?" Or... "Um, a skirt?" At least until they could get to the Palace, the Palace in which Akane didn't entirely consider herself to be a permanent resident of merely out of courtesy. (You don't just... invite yourself in, do you?)

To answer Niamh's question simply: "I sleep there sometimes."

@Niamh

Niamh took another flower from the twig and then twisted around to look at the Palace in the distance. "A mess?" She asked, trying to imagine what a mess was supposed to imply. In the meantime, she was pinching it by the stem again, pink tongue sticking out with concentration.

The flower gradually began to glow pink, a strange little aura emanating from it that went up the stem and eventually spread through its petals. "I can make things pretty," she offered as Akane ascended, and then promptly descended, leaning over to look at the Oni on the ground. "Everyone falls," she said in an unusual moment of wisdom. "It doesn't make people less scary."

She spent a moment adjusting herself on the tree-branch, shuffling to sit with both legs over the same side and tail folded along the branch to keep her from falling-- though, if she did, it likely wouldn't help much. Briefly she glanced down at her pink legs and miscellaneous soft bits before asking-- "are they supposed to be covered?"

Either way, Niamh was shaking her head. "I want my own pants," she said, as she tossed the glowing blossom down to Akane, too. "You should keep your-- your pants-bits? Your yellow."

@Akane

Akane shrugged vaguely and gestured even more so. "Like... throwing stuff all over the floor. Bothering the birds." (Though said birds would take care of that themselves, if you were hassling them.) "Common courtesy stuff." A dismissive wave of the hand sailed through the air from her place on the ground.

"All right though," she conceded, gilded eyes fluttering away from her yellow, "you've got me there—not any less scary-looking." Though the Oni felt no such thing as fear in her heart; the merit of that remained to be seen, because it may just be that her assumed bravery was stupidity and obliviousness to danger. Akane had never fled a day in her currently short life. It was fish that feared her, women that—wait.

Her face set into an earnest sort of smile, no teeth but her natural tusks exposed, eyes pinching upward. "You don't have anything to fear from me or anybody in the Palace." Arms spread outward, palms up.

Unless you make it happen, probably, she thought, and wisely kept to herself.

With feline grace and a flick of her own tail, she gathered her feet underneath herself and sprang back to standing. The cloth remained tossed over a brawny shoulder, and she ran her hands beneath the tangled mess that was her hair to get it back into some semblance of orderliness. Glimmering petals fluttered from her snowy mane.

Niamh shifted with a creaking of branches, and something fluttered down from her grasp. Movement in her peripheral vision, Akane's head snapped upward. Pupils dilated in catlike delight, and a hand reached out to snatch the glowing flower by its stem. A petal drifted away from the force of being torn from its gentle, wobbling drift down, but... oh, "this is pretty."

Every vein shimmered with unnatural, warm light. Glittering, sparkling, unchanging as she twirled it between her thumb and index finger. "I can do that too," came her remark, hummed down at the flower. As simple as breathing, her hair took to that same glow, though it was a cool white. The thin lines of light marring her elbows and flanks flared dimly, and she glanced up at Niamh with the same Duchenne smile as before. "Matching!"

This was just the most delightful thing. The flower was lifted and set into her hair. Accessorizing.

And speaking of—her eyes glanced upward, trying to discern what they might be, exactly. Akane followed the line of sight, and Ah, that. Her own miscellaneous soft bits were naturally covered in a thick coat of hair, but wearing pants felt like... a courtesy thing. Some sort of base societal instinct dictated that they should at least not be exposed to the world. That, and they had gotten cold despite her innate protection. Except, sometimes it was appropriate to not be wearing pants. Maybe it was weird that both of them wanted pants?

The Oni's contemplative grimace said much about how deeply she was thinking on this subject.

Her ultimate decision on the matter was: Who cares? To each their own idea of clothing.

Her brows unraveled from their intense knitting just a few seconds later, and she waved her hands again, "They get cold sometimes, don't they? You can cover them if you want." A coarse chuckle sputtered from her lips, still pulled tight into a smile. "Or not. But, let's get you some pants." The kid had made her decision regardless of advice, and it was now Akane's singular Mission to get her some pants; a Herculean task, perhaps, given the total lack of equally small humanoids in the Palace, but... they'd build that bridge when they got there.

First, Akane needed to position herself underneath the faun's perch and brace herself for the most important catching of her life. Palms held aloft, she indicated toward herself, "Hop on down, I'll catch ya." Nothing but well-placed and -meaning confidence oozed from her words. As extra encouragement, she tacked on, "Promise."

@Niamh