Demon's Paradise / 12

12

LeBlanc notices violet mushrooms littering the dirt around the roots, as if they are nourishing themselves from the trees' strength. She almost wants to pick one for herself, but the harried pace of the scouting squad has her almost jogging just to keep up. Her bunny slippers seem to squeak to a musical beat. It only makes her feel more of an outsider – run, or you'll never keep up with us.

Then one of her feet get caught on the roots, and she slips and stumbles face-forward onto the ground. Peh.

"Come on." Twisted Fate helps her back up, and she is panting, exhausted. She dusts off the dirt and other debris on her robes.

"What's the hurry?" LeBlanc asks.

"Hm?"

"It's like.. you're having to run for a race.. or something," she says between breaths.

"To save time in explorin'," Twisted Fate goes. "You'll get used to it."

(A memory resurges from the depths: she's running or skipping down the hallways whilst the other children prefer to walk there. Why, you would ask? And she would answer, she simply likes the feeling of running, of skipping. It's enlivening.)

"I recommend skipping!" Lulu pips, before gallivanting forth on her little legs.

So LeBlanc tries skipping – lightly hopping over the roots, and she finds how easy it is to do.

And as it turns out, Odette the cleric is suspecting that the nature of the path blockage may be due to extrinsic forces; the dense trees are there unnaturally, and that something has made it so. She tells the group to wait, while she kneels down and pulls out a ruby crystal. Of which, she closes her eyes, shutting herself to her surroundings and entering a seance – her eyelids seem to bulge with rapid eye movement.

A subtle aura develops around Odette's languid form. She starts to fade in and out of existance. You can start to see through her form, until at once she is gone. LeBlanc heads to the spot where Odette once was and tries waving her hand through the space, feeling only empty air.

"Where'd she go?" LeBlanc asks.

"To wonderland," Vayne flatly says, picking at her sharp fingernails.

"What's wonderland?"

"It's a place of chaos, underlying the current reality here," Twisted Fate goes. "Sometimes, there's special, indescribable forces that can drastically change the way things are.. though they may not be obvious at first.

"We stumbled across this one time; our entire camp was travelling in circles by a lake, no matter which way we went. Even when we tried walking away from the lake, we'd just come by it again. It was perpetually day. Until Odette suggested to explore the lake itself, to dive underwater, in which.. it was an illusion, and we emerged on the other side, where it was night. But we were still trapped by it.

"That crystal you saw Odette hold – it's a red eye, which pierces into the formless void, underlying the surface. Sometimes, when you have the feeling that you just know something, but what it is, it's hard to explain, but you feel it nonetheless.. on the edges of awareness.

"When a newborn is born, the world around him is a muddle of light and noise," Twisted Fate says. "As he grows, he learns more and more about the world – language, morality, ideas, and other people. But at the same time, he forgets more and more of life. Because the very things he learns, they imprison him too. He forgets the idealism he once had as a child, which animates the dolls and toys he held. He forgets the unbridled joy of the unknown, learning to fear it as an animal fears the vast ocean. He becomes crystallised. 2 + 2 can only mean 4 to him, and nothing else. And often.. some of those crystals just don't seem to fit neatly so right, no matter what, and so, the paradoxes exist that make it possible that war is peace, death is life, hate is love. Where people seem peaceful and content with war, even if given the choice, they would choose peace. Where people don't live a day without anxiety and trepidation of the future, and they say they are happy to be alive. Where acts of the greatest hatred are easily done with the name of the greatest love.

"But sometimes.. in the little cracks that show, the formless void whispers inside us, even if briefly, nudging us awake from the imperfect definiteness that we grow inured to, as a fish remembers the very water that it swims in."

"Why is this happening?" LeBlanc asks.

"Because existence progresses as a heartbeat," Twisted Fate says. "Life in its many forms swells and fades, like the seasons of the year, like the tides of an ocean wave, searching for a perfection it can never truly attain, and so it continues. Where every end it finds is always a new beginning."