She nodded. ”I can’t remember what my name is and I haven’t given myself a new one. I feel like I need...to earn it. Or remember what it was before, if I can.” Her argument suddenly sounded a lot weaker next to her fears.

The goose hesitated when Giggle offered to look into her past. She’d had the offer before - Tyr had told her that he could touch her and see who she’d been before, just as he’d touched the gemstone that now hung around her neck, but she’d been too scared back then. Everything had still been new and she didn’t know what she was doing. She was still content with staying nameless.

But things were different now and she needed to know. It was like an itch that wouldn’t go away and Giggle had even told her herself - the past would always be following her. That’s what the bones had said, at least. Still, she was scared out of her wits. Because what if her past was not what she thought? What if it was the worst possible scenario?

What if her memory wipe...had been a punishment for some reason?

She closed her eyes and took a shaking breath. It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter if it was a punishment or a coincedence or whatever else it could be. She had to know. And here Giggle was offering a chance. ”I...if you can...thank you. I would appreciate that a lot, if you can.” She stepped forward and then hesitated again. ”If it’s bad...please don’t hide anything from me. If I’m getting the truth, I want the whole truth.”

@Giggle

"Well, let's give it a shot, then," the hyena responded, with a tone the equivalent of a vocal shrug. She stepped forward, and paused, thinking.

She could open the mental link first, but she wasn't sure she could both hold that open and try to tap into the past at the same time. She shook the thought away; better to play it safe, to look at the past first and relay it second.

Giggle pushed up, padded forward, and stretched her neck toward the white bird, intending to touch her nose somewhere to her feathers. Then she focused, going quite still, pushing her magic forward and willing her mind to follow in its path.

For a time, she was still, as the images began to flow through her. They weren't too badly-fragmented. The first thing Giggle noticed was that the goose was completely different in coloration. A fuzzy, dull yellow chick--She was new, then--a different color when hatching, maybe. Feathers must've grown out. The image jerked, and jarred Giggle with its sudden shift: the tiny, fuzzy chick had gone from mutely speaking, her words not quite reaching the hyena's mind, to fighting. Her bill was fastened onto a white wolf cub, her wings flailing--and with a start, Giggle realized that she recognized the wolf. Kera-? she thought, in some surprise, recognizing the cub's eye color, the cub's prominent stone. The wolf was biting the goose, in turn, and flailing wings met scraping claws.

Then, bewilderingly, the image fell away--to be replaced by another. Now the goose was large, brown and black, scarred and mutilated, covered in spines and quills. It looked nothing like either the chick, or the pristine white bird before her, and she was momentarily baffled. A lot of time must have passed--but not that long; I don't think Kera's older than I am. She was just a pup when I met her the first time, wasn't she-? And in this image, too, the goose was fighting--or perhaps being attacked; her torn body was pinned beneath the far larger bulk of a tiger (fucking shit-cats, Giggle thought, in an absent and automatic manner). Behind them was another creature, one that looked to be related to the brown goose, perhaps--brown-winged, with somewhat-similar feet--and it was shouting. 'Stop!' it cried; 'Don't... fight! Please-' and there the vision faded.

Giggle stepped back slowly, thinking. She committed the magical sight to memory, and then focused again on the white goose. "You're younger than I am. You sure you want to see this shit? It doesn't look good," she added.

rain stock: D Sharon Pruitt wiki commons; hyena Benjamin Hollis on flickr

@Nameless

The goose felt nothing when Giggle pressed against her feathers with her nose. She had thought there's be something, some kind of indicator to say that the magic had worked, but there wasn't anything. Nothing but Giggle going still as the memories flashed through her head. She blinked and waited, incresingly impatient, for what the hyena would show her.

And when she did, the goose froze. She was...younger? She didn't know exactly how old the Hyena was, but Oliver had put it into her head that she was old - very old. Ancient even and her memory loss was due to far too long spent in the chrysalis. "How old are you?" she blurted out. It might be a rude question, but it was important.

She hesitated. She had been afraid of this. Very afraid that she wouldn't like what her past looked like, but there wasn't any turning back now. She wasn't just going to have Giggle know and bear the burden alone that she was supposed to be carrying herself. So she nodded. "Y-yeah. I'm sure."

@Giggle

She huffed, absently, thinking. She had no real way to measure the time, in here--who did?--but had some vague, intrinsic knowledge, as animals so often do, of its passage. There was a unit of time that they all called a 'cycle,' though how they knew what that was had never really been discussed. They just... knew.

"You know what a cycle is? I mean, I don't, but it's what everybody uses. Cycle of what? Don't ask me. But I think I'm... fifty, sixty of those, something around there. There's a cub I met a bit before the lights went out, and you were children at the same time, according to this. Twenty cycles, maybe-? That's a guess. Kera might know better than I do." Likely, she wouldn't--she slept most of her life away--but Giggle didn't know that.

She eyed the goose, and gave another mental shrug, sitting down with a soft poof of spores and bone-dust. She concentrated--both on her magicka, and on the memories--trying to first tap into the white bird's mind and then, as clearly as she could, show her what she'd seen.

When she felt the link open up, she did her best to replay the new memories in her own mind: to show them, in image and in sound, as best she could.

The dusty yellow hatchling, fighting the white wolf pup.

The torn, spined, half-bald brown goose, pinned by the tiger; the strange creature beyond wailing for them to stop.

When it was done, she stayed silent--letting the link slip closed naturally, and watching the white bird in silence. She knew what trauma was, and she got the feeling that none of this would be easy for the bird; she'd have to give her time to process it, without interrupting.

rain stock: D Sharon Pruitt wiki commons; hyena Benjamin Hollis on flickr

@Nameless

Her throat went dry. Twenty cycles? That was it?! There was no way her memory could have been destroyed in that amount of time. She thought it had been thousands of cycles since she'd last been awake. But no. There was definitely a different explanation.

As the link between them opened and the goose saw memories flooding into her head, she focused on them, trying to see if she could remember. But as she watched them play out, such violence, brutality, and chaos within them, as she saw...was that her? The mangled body, the spines and the claws? The sharp beak and the quills? She was horrified at what she saw. She was absolutely disgusted and, for a moment, she didn't process that these were her memories. That that was her fighting and her that looked like a monster.

She had to see more. She had to. It was a bad idea, she knew that all too well, but she had to see more. Because that couldn't be her, that just could not! There had to be a mistake - perhaps it was from her eyes? Maybe it was someone else she was seeing and this was only something she'd witnessed.

And that, perhaps, is what caused the magic to activate. Perhaps Giggle would see it too, if their minds were still linked. As the goose delved into her own memories on accident and saw things she had never wanted to see.

She was facing off against a plant-covered cougar, taller then she'd been in the vision with Kera, but not yet full grown. She suddenly snapped her head and screamed "SHUT UP" before flying at him in a rage and wailing on him in a frenzy. The cat yowled with surprise and tried to back away, but she followed, screeching all the way. The image shifted to a horrifying sight, the same monstrosity as before, but far less mangled, with the spines and claws and everything bending over the body of a splotched dog. It was screaming as she tore brutally into its struggling body, blood and viscera splattered across the ground and over her feathers. They were both screaming, the goose with an insane delight, the dog with a dying terror. It shifted once again and it was her again, mangled, broken, trapped behind a cage of plants. Her head was thrust through the bars, desperately screaming at a strange blue hybrid that had the same black and white face. "Kill me, please, I don't want to live like this anymore! I can't do this I can't take this!!" The hybrid looked at her with disgust and shock before responding in a horrified whisper, "That's your solution, again-? Your solution to every problem; to kill?"

The images faded and the goose was left where she was standing. Horrified. Shocked into utter silence. Nothing was processing, nothing but a rage of emotions she couldn't explain. She knew them, all of those that had been in her memories. Familiarity pulsed, stronger for some, but for all...a sense of guilt. Hatred. Despair. All mixed together for an indescribable experience that left the goose absolutely overwhelmed and empty at the same time. She said nothing - what could she say, after all, after seeing all of that?

@Giggle

Giggle, for her part, was blissfully unaware. She'd let the link close before the goose had used her own magic, and she had no way of knowing what the white bird was even doing. If she knew how to look into the past, after all, she'd have done it on her own, no?

So Giggle just assumed that she was upset by what she had shown her. Mulling it over, maybe; and she waited, silent, as the seconds ticked past.

rain stock: D Sharon Pruitt wiki commons; hyena Benjamin Hollis on flickr

@Nameless

It was a moment before she regained her voice, spending longer then she should have to process what she'd seen. But the only thing that came from her bill was a strangled honk the had her quickly clearing her throat. "I...something happened? I didn't know I could...I was trying to do it too, see the past but...this is the first time it worked for me..." She gazed past Giggle, off into space, her stomach churning as the images of that torn up dog kept pounding into the back of her head, their screams implanted in her head. "I saw...more."

She gulped. This was way worse then she'd thought. So, so many times worse. That couldn't be her, right? She felt no connection to that...that...that thing she'd seen, she couldn't even begin to imagine herself being that creature, being that cruel. Even the thought of doing those things, of fighting and killing made her so sick that she wanted to vomit. And, worst of all, that last one, where the creature had turned around...Your solution to every problem; to kill?

And then, in a horrifying streak of memory, she remembered the last time that someone had talked about a goose. Pride had warned her of another goose walking the caves. A sadistic, malformed creature...but...he would have recognized her, right? It's not like their scents could be that different, or their voices. Maybe there was a different one and she was seeing those memories through her own eyes. Perhaps she'd only really known this other goose, that that wasn't actually her. Or...maybe there was a different one - worse then her? But then how did Tyr's hindsight fit in? With the moose and "Blackberry"?

She shuddered. She was utterly lost and confused. "I...s-saw that goose again, with all the spines? Attacking this...this big cat with plants all over him. And k-killing some kind of dog. It was really h-horrible and bloody. And this other things with like...the same markings on her face with also with...I don't know, other things? Antlers and four legs, they were arguing. I don't know...what to think about all this. Was that really me?"

@Giggle

Killing a dog? Giggle felt a little doubt, at this--she'd never seen a dog smaller than Bones, and she doubted that a goose, even with a somewhat-hooked beak and claws, could even really harm a dog before it tore the goose apart. Sick, maybe-? Young, or already injured? Doesn't matter, I guess, she thought to herself.

"I don't know," the hyena answered bluntly. "We can keep looking, and find out; you could look for Kera and ask her. But if it is you, it's probably a good thing you left behind. What I don't get is why you look like this," she added, eyeing the white bird over.

Well, the bone reading now made more sense. Tangled by her past, starting fresh in a pure, bright place--couldn't be clearer, really. And now they had to get her to--what had it been? Enlightenment, or something. Sure.

"That last part of what the bones said--bringing light. Maybe if this stuff is real, you were given a chance to make up for it. By who, I don't know. And I don't know how," she added, with a shrug. "The only Gembound I know with the power to do that kind of thing are probably Astraea, Nemean and shit. And I don't know that any of them are nice enough to do that, unless you really pissed one off and this is--punishment, somehow?" she added, looking the bird over.

Giggle's demeanor was easygoing--not flippant, not dismissive, but neither particularly concerned, nor tense. She seemed attentive, sure, but she was waiting for the white bird to progress through this at her own pace. The hyena was here to help, after all, not to take control of the bird's problems for herself.

rain stock: D Sharon Pruitt wiki commons; hyena Benjamin Hollis on flickr

@Nameless

She looked down at herself as Giggle pointed out her appearance. She had a point - how had she gone from brown and white and black and covered with markings and spines and teeth and horrible, horrible injuries to this clean, pure white, with no traces of any scars left in sight? Who the hell even had that kind of power? It was one thing to glance into the past or move things with your mind, but to completely alter a creature’s entire body and somehow make it so that they’d never remember their past? That sent a shiver down her spine. There was somebody with incredible powers here.

”Do you think it would be...wise to seek them out?” she whispered, softly. ”I don’t know this “Astraea” and “Nemean.” If we really do have a history, and this really is a punishment, then how will they react to seeing me again? Will they want to kill me?” She shook her head, a lump forming in the back of her throat. ”I...If they attack me...I can’t defend myself. Not that...not that I don’t know how to fight, I do, but I just can’t. The thought of it makes me sick. Like it goes against my very nature to even consider violence.”

The words were coming out now, faster and faster and she couldn’t stop herself from voicing it all - perhaps it helped, though, mumbling through her problems instead of holding them all in. ”And that’s what I don’t understand. How could I be the same person as that goose in the memories? Even in what you’d seen...she was violent. Crazy. In what I saw...she…” She swallowed the bile that was threatening to rise. ”She was leaning over that dog’s corpse. It was all bloody and mutilated and she was laughing and screaming. Like it was the most fun she’d ever had in her life.”

She paused again, squeezing her eyes shut because her brain was still trying to connect herself to that monster. And she couldn’t because how could she do things like that?! All she wanted to do...was good. Good for herself, good for others. She wanted to help and heal and protect, not hurt and scream and murder.

She looked down at the gemstone on her chest. There had to be something else here. Why was she carrying around this gemstone? Why was she so connected to it? Why did she feel strange things when she encountered certain people? ”There’s something else too.” A wing came up and gently touched the apatite hanging around her neck. ”This gemstone...it means something. Or, at least, it meant something to me. When I woke up, it was with me. It was the only thing with me and when I had a friend look into its past for me they heard...about someone called...Blackberry? I’m...I’ll see if I can use that magic again.”

She closed her eyes and willed for the same thing as before - that she could see more, more of the past, but not of herself, this time of the blue apatite hanging around her neck, and she felt a tug at the back of her head as the past revealed itself.

@Giggle
Also can I get a GM post on that hindsight roll?

"Astraea's a stag. He's got the same sort of magic I do; fungus, though I have things that I haven't seen him use. He doesn't read the bones. Nemean's some kind of small, winged thing. I don't know details, but I know they're strict, they're arrogant, and they're powerful. We had a Gembound come to us recently saying Nemean'd had his eyes torn out for doing unpleasant drawings of her on the cave walls," Giggle explained. All in all, her tone was rather indifferent. It wasn't much better, or worse, than other Gembound she'd met. Just stronger.

"I don't see them making you-... all pretty, and shit. I imagine there's more to it than that. Whether to seek them out's up to you, though I could try and ask the bones what might happen," Giggle added. She then paused, eyeing the goose curiously. "I could try to ask them what happened to you."

Talk about being weighed down by her past. You were dead on, as always, the hyena thought wryly, glancing back to her bone pit. She spoke to them, sometimes--now she was just thinking at them. But they'd never let her down.

"As for violence... I've known all sorts. Violent children I was able to teach a better way. Violent adults who wanted to tear me apart for no reason other than their own bloodthirst, many cycles ago. I knew one who went crazy at the scent of blood, turned mindless, tried to kill everything around him. I was working with him to desensitize himself from that," she added. The images flashed through her own mind--the puppy Kerberos, half-intent on eating her, now her beloved son; Rafael, had it been?--the vicious bird-stag-thing that had tried to tear her eyes out. And Baratheon, the young pink-and-white furred... reptile-thing? "He stopped coming to me, for whatever reason--it was working, but I guess he decided he didn't want it anymore. I know he got in a few fights around the caves. He probably found his death," she added, grimly. She'd never know why the dragon had decided not to pursue the curing of his... 'condition,' but it hadn't served him well, in the end.

Giggle fell silent as the white bird spoke of using her magic, waiting. The rest of her offers, and information, waited on the table. So to speak.

rain stock: D Sharon Pruitt wiki commons; hyena Benjamin Hollis on flickr