Lucky for Obieth she was long gone from Aethril's mind, for the Hand's sudden urge to chaotic ruin would have frightened her. As it was, she was settling back in, puzzling over the explanation but finding it useful enough.

"So we cannot... go into each other's minds... without being invited." It was a credit to her intelligence that she picked it up that quickly, at least, and after committing this to memory, she spent a moment digesting the concept of "shit" as well. Then, proving to be an attentive student, the Valkhound put two and two together, looking at Aethril with slightly widened eyes--like said student hoping now for praise. "If I go into your mind... it is shit," she concluded, and lay a little more confidently upright, proud of her new knowledge.

But Aethril's other question--the question of whether she could "make it up" to Obieth--left her puzzled once again. She hesitated to consider it.

Perhaps were she a more greedy, less self-satisfied creature, she'd have had some request to instantly ask for. Maybe if she knew more of the world, she'd have found something she wanted and didn't have. But she wasn't even sure that (material gains, if anything) was what Aethril meant.

Her tail flicked as she considered, and it was with a tentative sort of confusion rather than hopefulness--as if unsure if this were the "right" response--that she formulated a slow reply. "May I have..." she started, then paused again before finishing, "a pillow?"

Did she already have a pillow? She wanted one. One she could maybe carry around, and use to make her bed-space more of an actual bed.

Yes; a pillow sounded good.

@Aethril

She nodded gently along, encouragingly-- until Obieth came to a new conclusion. Her mouth opened, shut, and then twisted with restrained amusement. When Aethril thought more, she realised that Obieth wasn't entirely wrong. Her mind was a piece of shit.

"It would be shitty, of you to go in there without asking," she said. "Try not to say it too often, however-- it's a word that makes some people upset."

The Hand waited patiently for Obieth to figure out what she'd like, gently folding one hand over the other. When she did bring up her heart's deepest desire, Aethril decided to one-up it. She was rolling out of the lounger and pushing up.

With a brief shake of her skirt, smoothing it out, she said, "I'll do you one better. I'll give you a pillow from my bed." And clearly, from her scandalous, gentle tone, this was a Very Special Gift. "Come on. You can pick which one you'd like."

And away she was going again. Weaving back to the residential wing and passing the barrier back into the dimly-lit room. A pale hand gestured to the bed-- the stepped-on bed --and to the mass of pillows that lay on top of it. There were pillows of all kinds of shapes, sizes and colours. Some were very soft and feathery, some were a little firmer but covered in a sort of long, shaggy fur. Others were silken and smooth, and others had patterns sewn into them. One or two even had little tassells on their corners.

"Any one you want, it's yours."

@Obieth

Obieth had, in fact, meant that the intrusion must be "shit," but she wasn't a mind reader (or, rather, she was but not right now because that was rude, apparently) so she didn't know how drastically it'd been misinterpreted. She only murmured, in echo, the correction: "shitty," and then committed that to memory.

Too, she decided to tuck away the fact that the word made some angry, in case she needed to whip that tactic out for some reason in the future. (Cue some future Obieth slyly asking an enemy if something were 'shitty,' and then waiting with smug cunning for them to burst into a furious rage. She didn't quite grasp the finer points of this.)

'I'll give you a pillow from my bed. Come on.' The secret tone had Obieth perking right up, interest sparking in her eyes. One of Aethril's own pillows-? Well, Obieth wasn't sure where pillows came from, so in retrospect she wasn't really sure what the alternatives were, but she did like the idea that it would bear Aethril's scent. She found it a pleasant one, and it was already growing familiar to her.

She followed back along, paws padding quietly beside the Hand, her mind filled with dancing images of one Pillow atop her singular cloth. Now she'd have two possessions, and well, before she'd only had one, so this meant she'd double her worldly belongings! And to think, all this had come about because she'd angered Aethril! -Actually, that was a strange thought, and Obieth faltered a little. Did making Aethril angry mean Aethril would then apologize, and give her things..? She was a little too single-minded to actually consider the manipulation aspect of this, but it puzzled her nonetheless; she didn't quite understand the Hand's apology or the reasoning behind it. So far as she was concerned, she'd intruded, Aethril had laid down the line and that should be that, as with the bed. So why did she get a pillow, now?

There wasn't much more time to figure this out, however; now they were sweeping back into the pleasant, slightly-chaotic darkness of the room, with the pillows scattered over the bed in pleasing disarray. Obieth tried to look them over, but she wasn't all that tall and couldn't see them--and certainly couldn't feel them--from the ground. She looked up at Aethril. "Should I--may I--go onto the bed? To pick one?" she asked.

Once permission had been granted, she coiled and sprang onto the mattress once again in a smooth movement. She tried to disregard that pang of "wrongness" about doing the thing she'd just been told not to do, and instead turned her attention to the pillows.

She eyed them over: the rainbow of colors, the myriad shapes and sizes. She nudged some--rubbed her face into them, testing them like some grimly monstrous Goldilocks; this one too firm, this one too soft... They all smelled lovely, the downy and furry ones particularly appealing with a faint, faint odor of some long-lost other creature in them, some... prey?

In the end, the pillow that she chose--pawing it toward her and looking questioningly to Aethril--was almost white; a very, very pale perhaps pink or lilac, so close to white it was hard to tell. But she liked the way it caught the void-light, shifting it to other hues. It was of middling firmness--somewhere between very hard, and loosely soft. It was a soft fabric, synthetic by the feel of it, a little like velvet, or something along those lines, but the sort that running a hand along in a given direction would leave it slickly smooth. Golden fringe and corner tassels ringed this pillow, which as a whole was only a foot or two square--small, not a full-body thing for Obieth but something she could carry around and rest her head on.

Golden-gilded white might have seemed the exact opposite of something a creature like Obieth would choose--but she laid a paw beside it nonetheless and looked at her Hand. "This one?" she asked, with a hopeful flick of her tail.

It represented, though she didn't quite think of that, almost everything she'd hoped for when first she'd laid eyes on Aethril: fine living, soft fabric, a gentle scent, and an elegance far beyond what she could have ever found in Draco.

The tassels, though-... those were a little too orderly, and she felt she might have to rip just one away. Three was a better number, anyway, than four.

@Aethril

Aethril offered a subtle little nod to Obieth's question, allowing the Valkhound to go into the bed and snuffle around the pillows. In the meantime, she half-turned and slunk out of the room, opening the door to one adjacent. There was a fainting couch inside with only one arm on it-- good for a cat resting its head, she decided --coloured a sort of washed out blue that was almost white.

Her arm twisted, and there was a shot of pain that drove up the underside of her forearm as a black, oil-slick tendril sprouted out of the palm of her hand and folded itself around the couch, half-lifting and half-dragging it along the marble floor.

She guided it along into her bedroom and tucked it into Obieth's corner. The tentacle writhed, drew backwards, and then severed itself from her skin. The Hand's hand was bathed in what was either oil or blood-- both purple-black and iridescent dripping down her arm. She kicked the withering appendage to the side for the cleaners to deal with.

With a familiar click-click-click she stepped back in to observe Obieth's choice. "Very nice," her tone was laced with approval. "You can sort out your sleeping space to your liking. It might be about time for the both of us to get rest."

Aethril needed it, personally. She pushed by into the washroom and ran the water to scrub the black from her hand and arm, teeth gritting as her fingers kneaded the tender muscle.

@Obieth

disclaimer: i thought it was meant to come out the skin. i now know it's meant to come out the ground. sorry for body horroring

Obieth lowered her head--gently, reverently--to take her new pillow into her jaws. Then she leapt off the bed, a second neat coil-and-leap that took a mere instant to complete, and prowled to one side--and stopped.

The sudden tentacle--and subsequent grind of furniture-on-floor--gave her pause, and she was left half-cornered by an oncoming couch. Alarmed, she leapt back onto Aethril's bed (where she pranced in place, she wasn't meant to be up here) until the couch had been settled in place. With a glance at the Hand (and her oilslicked real hand) to ensure that all was now finished, and that no more surprise furniture was coming in for the attack, Obieth leapt down again more slowly.

She padded to the couch, half-waddling to carry the pillow before her; then she set it down, carefully. Fabric was lifted, arranged, and then the Valkcat spent several long moments adjusting and moving and maneuvering. She stepped back to regard it, and then--deciding that it was too neat, too well-framed--used a paw to tug one side out from the wall so that the couch lay askew.

Perfect.

"This is... good. Perfect. Thank you," she said, leaping up and turning around on the fabric several times. She revelled in the feel of it--the texture, the give--beneath her toes, beneath her weight; and the scent of it, a little musty... a little dirty, sweaty-? Unclean, in any case, so of course the aesthete revelled in it. The fabric was over it, anyway--which was good, as the light oil Obieth gave off would quickly stain it all anyway.

A yawn, whiskers back--and then she regarded Aethril, waiting patiently to see what next. Nobody'd explained "sleep" to Obieth, before, and though the word brought with it vague understanding of "rest," she didn't know the technicalities.

@Aethril

Her bedtime routine was meticulous, a ritual that in itself helped her fall asleep. Her hand was dried off and the curtains were drawn, she kicked off her heels and vanished away into the washroom again to change out of her dress and into loose, linen clothing.

When the Hand was crawling into bed she passed a glance towards Obieth. "You're welcome," she said softly, wriggling against the mattress. One quilt was pulled on top of her, and then the second, and a stray pillow was taken into her arms to rest with.

Her head hit the pillow and she realised in that moment just how exhausted she was. It'd been a long day-- it'd been a long few days. Waking up and re-adjusting to everything was overwhelming, and although she still knew the palace hallways and the nest's tunnels, so much had... changed.

With a frown, Aethril's eyes flicked shut. She'd get used to it. She had to. At least she had Obieth to help her through it, now.

"Goodnight," came the little murmur before the Valkhand was rolling over and went very still, drifting off in a matter of minutes.

@Obieth

exit

Obieth lay like a queen on her couch, watching with a sort of impassive observation as Aethril prepared for bed. The change of clothes faintly confused her, and she made a note to ask about that later; she could understand wanting to take advantage of the ever-changing colors fabrics could provide, but why now? Why did sleep need new cloth?

She kept watching as Aethril swept into bed, into the comfort of the blankets, and when greeted with a "good night" she floundered. She searched her mind but found no appropriate response to that, and so she echoed it in a tentative fashion.

"Good... night," she tried, and it was half a question; but given that she wasn't corrected, she assumed she'd gotten this one right.

Aethril went... quiet. Still. Breathing slowly. Obieth was going to ask about this, but some instinct told her that it would be unwise to disturb her now.

When she awoke the next morning, she wouldn't remember drifting off: only laying her head on her paws as she dutifully watched the door, and then--nothing.

Only dreams.

exit Obieth