ORIGIN

Four hours.

It had taken four hours until Serendipity had enough of the fucking whisper-axe.

All through Canis, while trying to find the most interesting bones to give to Azure, it had murmured into her ear. Things she didn't care to listen to, but things she was a little bothered she could almost hear. Down through Tunnel K it continued, and in the shadows she could have sworn she saw moving shapes, but similar to the whispers-- she could just barely see them.

She snapped halfway through Orion. The smell of ash hit her nose and she was frustrated, upset at the thought of her lost home, that Azure didn't feel safe anywhere anymore. Angry that the axe wouldn't shut the fuck up. She put it down, rifled through her pockets, and stuffed two pieces of cloth she found in there right into her ears.

And it helped, somewhat. She couldn't hear it anymore when she continued to Monoceros, though the shadows continued to flit by the corners of her eyes. It was, she found, infinitely less annoying on its own than it was paired with the distant rumbling of fuckery.

It was good to be home. She was exhausted from the trip, from casting earlier, from having her brain blasted with new objects the Collector had strewn around his hut. Serendipity wanted nothing more than to fall into her assigned blanket-pile and go right the fuck to sleep.

Oh, but this fucking halberd.

She didn't want it here a second longer than it had to be. She didn't want Azure or Laurel coming into close contact with it-- she didn't want them to hear or see the things she was seeing. Serendipity was fine suffering in silence for their benefits.

It was set down on the stone table as Dip went to take another look at it. It wasn't... rusted, it seemed, but it was oily and slick to the touch, as if it were covered in grease. She might as well start trying to grind the scratches on it back and smooth it out, and see if it were any... drier.

Serendipity rolled her shoulder back until the joint clicked, loud enough that she heard the muffled noise through the cloth in her ears, and picked up the glow-dusty rock laying on the table to start loudly sweeping it across the metal.

"Dip? That you?"

The call came light and hopeful--with a thread, of course, of anxiety through it (because what if it was a stranger?!). Azure came hoof-and-nail-clicking out a moment later with a new stone in her beak. She paced over excitedly, laying it down on the table probably a tad too close to the halberd, looking proud of herself. It was diamond, perhaps, or quartz--something perfectly transparent--but through it lay a swirling streak, upward and to one side, galaxy-like, of the ground-up glowing dust.

She opened her beak to speak, and then leapt back, feathers ruffling. "The hell is that thing?!" she cried, beautiful glowing rock forgotten. Her head tilted, and she focused for a moment, listening; "...And what's it saying?"

Serendipity didn't hear Azure at first-- if it be the cloth lodged into her ears or the screeching of stone on metal was unclear to her (though probably both), but she did see a flash of black and white out the corner of her eye. It took her a few seconds to process the situation as she tugged the rags out again.

And then, when it clicked, she hauled the halberd off the table and held it back at arms' length from Azure. Not trying to hide it, but get it some reasonable distance from the hybrid. "Ah-ah-ah-ah!" She yelped meanwhile, alarmedly.

She shifted on the spot, scooted, to put the thing against the wall on the other side of the table from Azure. Unfortunately it still didn't really seem to want to shut up even long after Dip stopped touching it. "I, uh, wouldn't bother listening to it. Try and keep away from it," she cautioned, wiping her hands instinctively onto her jacket. "I have to repair it for someone but I don't really want the fuckin' thing here too long. I can tell you about it if you wanna-- sit away from it?"

If Serendipity were, to be honest, this question came more from the desire to just have some damn distance from the halberd, even if just for a few minutes. But, Azure was still an adult. She could try to protect her all she wanted, at the end of the day Dip was the little sister and if Azure wanted to investigate it then she couldn't really stop her, no matter how little she liked it.

The humanoid's nose crinkled a little at the thought, and then her gaze dropped to the glittery stone. "Oh, shit," she mumbled, in turn forgetting (if just for a moment) that Void-whisper was chattering in the corner. Dip reached out to take a careful hold of it. "Is this from the gemstone dust? It almost sorta looks like Orion's ceiling."

Azure scrambled backward, and eyed the halberd uncertainly.

"It's fuckin' creepy is what it is," she muttered, and stepped back a few paces.

Dip's interest in her gemstone creation sort of distracted her, though not entirely; a little of the animation returned to Azure's face as she replied, but anxiety lingered and kept driving her to sneak glances back to the whispering black weapon in the corner.

Seriously, what the hell was that thing..? "Uhh--yeah! The glow dust," she confirmed, blinking her way back to the current conversation. She turned back, struggling to focus on the pretty rock instead of the whispering metal. "I think it's got a lot of potential. Easy to make, and it looks pretty good right? I think, if I had the right magic, I could even put it on cloth. Like... the way I can move stuff with my mind? Or maybe I could use sap, you know... glue it on..." Azure gave a little, half-embarrassed, four-winged shrug. She paced forward and moved to take the stone back up in her pointed beak, and then moved away, to the opposite end of the room from the halberd. There she curled up, dog-like, on the floor and laid the stone between her forefeet.

"Anyway yeah I'm not going near that thing. Are you sure it's safe for you?" She eyed her 'sister'; Azure wasn't entirely sure that earplugs alone would be quite enough. It didn't feel like the thing was sound alone, although she couldn't be sure. It felt... unnatural, unpleasant, somehow. "And who wants it repaired-?"

Serendipity nodded along, because thinking about anything that wasn't the halberd was good. "It looks great," she agreed and, as usual, it was genuine. Always genuine, always admiring her sister's work.

She straightened when Azure took the gemstone and went to the other side of the den, following her-- leaving the halberd where it was. She thought, for a moment, as she started to tug her massive coat off. "You might have to be careful with that," the humanoid went on after a moment. "If the cloth is too thin it won't hold, and the gem's too big and heavy then it won't matter how much sap you use. I can find some super thick cloth for you to try it on, though?"

There was bound to be some, somewhere, in the piles of stolen stuff from tunnel J or stashed away in Dip's pockets. She popped a squat next to Azure and leant down to bump her forehead against hers briefly, affectionately, before she moved on to toss her coat on her own assigned bedding.

"I don't know," Dip's voice was a little more grimer when she returned to the table, reaching for the halberd. "It's not given me any, uh, trouble other than whispering-- it's name is Void-Whisper, apparently --but I don't really trust it." There was a pause. "I don't think it can do anything I can't handle, though." She was very confident about this, at least.

Serendipity picked up the rock and started scraping out the scratches again. "The guy's name is the Collector," she went on. "He's the only other person I've met with hands and he's a lot older. Made a lot of stuff, I think, but he, uh.. collects specifically cursed shit, I think."

Her head turned for a moment to peer back. "He's gonna give us something called a-- waggit? Waggrin? He says stuff goes missing off it, sometimes, but it's good for transporting, apparently. He said I might be able to make another, too," she said, and then looked back to her work. Scrape, scrape. "Which means I will be able to make another. Just gotta give it a while."

Azure headbutted gently back--regretting, just for a moment, that she didn't have proper hands or arms to... ...shake hands? Hug? Whatever. In any case, Dip was off and back to work, but sitll chatting and Azure listened curiously.

At the idea of cloth and heavy gems, she snorted.

"Dust, Dip, not whole stones! -I said! Imagine, though--swirls of glowy dust over your shirt?" she offered, almost shyly. She didn't want to push the idea, or anything, but the concept to her felt... pretty. Dip's tunic, or whatever one might call it, streaked with light like Orion's stars-! "Maybe I can try it out on the... wagrin? Or whatever? It might draw, uh, customers in," she hazarded, uncertainly. The wagrin wasn't to be hers, so again she didn't want to push that sort of thing but--maybe it'd help..?

Azure gave a mental shrug; she didn't even know what a wagrin was, really. They'd find out sooner or later, it seemed. Which brought her gaze back to the whispering--Void-Whisper? "Not a real creative name, is it?" she pointed out, idly. As she spoke, she stood and paced off to get her flowers, then brought them back, splooting back down in the corner to work with them. "Cursed, though-... What's that mean? Like--in this case..?" And for the wagrin? she wondered, unsure, but then something else caught her mind and she looked up, blinking.

"Oh! I met other people with hands! There's-... a kid who kinda looks like you, actually, like--hands and... little horn bits and the same sort of, um. Face. Ish? And skin and hair and things. She was lost, and couldn't talk. She and her dad--he kinda looks like you, too, but he doesn't have a deer-like body-... Shit not--not like. I mean, the kid had a deer-ish sorta body, but he doesn't. They both live in Eridanus, I was thinking... maybe they're related, somehow? I'm not sure. But it looks like he makes stuff, too. I was just-..." Azure paused, embarrassed. How to explain "hey, I was too freaking nervous to hang around in the cave where I'm probably still wanted, at least a little?" "I didn't wanna hang around too long," she finished, her voice a little quieter. For a moment she was silent, as a small, yellowish stone grew up around one of the preserved flowers, slightly misshapen but acceptable enough. "But maybe they could sell stuff with us? Maybe we can make things together, even, he-... said I could visit. We could both, if you like." Not that Azure wanted to, exactly, but it was sort of an apologetic peace-offering for the unsaid "I was too cowardly to get the full story myself just then."

Serendipity blinked a bit. She had been imagining a big, blocky gemstone on a shirt-- but the dust made more sense. And she did imagine it-- her jacket glittering a little when it played of the orbs of light. Hm. "I think it'd be pretty but my shirt gets pretty grody," she said after a moment.

"Oh, yeah, for sure-- I dunno what it looks like or how it works, though. He just said I'd like it," this much was, once she said it out loud, vaguely troubling. Who knows what the fuck it might actually be. "I can bring it back and we can take a look at it together and decorate it together, yeah?"

One of Dip's ears was angled backwards to listen to Azure talk-- all while ignoring the murmurs coming from the halberd, which was being turned in her hands. The markings down it would need fixing up. She pushed it aside and leaned down to the ground for a moment, planting her palm against the dirt.

A cloudy gemstone appeared underneath her hand-- small, but sharp. She turned it over for a moment, checking it, before pushing up again to lean onto the table. "I told him it was a bit on the nose," she responded to Azure. She positioned the thinner end of the gemstone downwards and began carefully wearing down the sigils running down the metal, making them clearer, engraving them a little deeper into the blade. "And, uh, apparently stuff sometimes goes missing off it and he doesn't know where it goes. I have a vague suspicion he might just yoink it." Not that she'd be against it, mind. It seemed fair enough, to her, to give her something that was apparently that valuable-- especially if she could make more of it.

She blew over the metal, cleaning the dust off it, and then continued to twist the stone into it. Keeping herself focused on Azure's words and the conversation and her work was enough to just forget about the shadows creeping in the corners of her visions and the incessant murmuring of the halberd. She couldn't help but notice, still, the oily metal underneath her fingers.

Eugh.

Eventually, Azure began saying things that really did distract her, however. She was curious, about the mute kid and her crafter of a father, but it took a side-step to Azure's admission of reluctance to stay in Eridanus for too long.

She turned her head to watch the hybrid with her hands hovering above the axe, silent for a few beats as Azure made stone around the flower. Dip's mouth twisted. She'd do anything just to make her sister feel a bit safer where ever she went. It wasn't fair that she felt anxious about just being somewhere.

"Yeah," Serendipity's voice was a little distant. "Do you wanna visit? I'd like to meet more people with hands but I don't want you going there if you don't want to. Though-- if they invited you then it might be fine?" She wanted Azure to meet new people and have more friends and to see her a little happier for it.

This seemed like a good start, too, if she was being invited places. Azure might just need a little push for it, someone to help her through it, and Serendipity was absolutely fucking determined to help her sister.

Azure laughed at Dip's question, shaking her head. "No, I don't want to. I don't want to be in Orion, though, or Monoceros or just about anywhere. But I'll come anyway," she added, brushing off the nervousness in favor of brash, fake courage. "I know it's not really that big a deal, I-"

Kill her.

Azure tensed, freezing up and staring blankly at the halberd in the corner. And then the corner of her eye caught the shadowed shape behind her and she jumped, hooves and talons scrabbling at the floor, sending her gemstones scattering. "WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT!?" she cried, terror rising in her voice.

-But it was gone.

Azure looked to and fro, eyes wide, legs splayed out in a tense stance. She could feel her heart hammering in her chest and she looked, then, to the halberd. Her voice came shrill, shriller than she'd have liked, trembling as if on the verge of tears. "Dip, what the fuck was that?!"

She watched Azure, listened with her head twisted back over her shoulder, but she flinched and stared down at the halberd as it, for the first time, spoke very clearly.

"Go fuck yourself," she spat right back at it, the bridge of her nose crinkled into the approximation of a snarl. She only briefly saw the figure-- another shadow in the corner of her eye to add to the list. Her concern was on Azure and her panic.

She turned for the hybrid and went to wrap an arm around her, crinkles moving from her nose to her brow. She was most definitely not going to kill her-- instead, she started trying to gently guide her outside, further away from Shit-Whisper, while speaking quietly, as gently as her fire-damaged voice would allow. "It's just magic. It's just being a bastard."

At least, Dip hoped it was just magic. She knew there was magic to make people see things-- shadows, and she knew too well that there were other magics to make people hear things. They were harmless. Nothing bad would happen. No one was killing anyone. She at least, tried to keep confident certainty on her face when she said "everything's alright," and guided Azure back to the puddle.

She let go of her, then, to sit down by it-- but she offered her arms to her again to hug her if she felt like she needed it. "I'll work on it somewhere else if it's gonna be shitty, yeah?" She went on, voice hoarse but as soft as she could make it. "I'm sorry it's-- like that."