Welcome to Gaia! ::

She smiled, somewhat pleased with the sudden contriteness in his voice, and took a berry with a soft thank you. If it took a little guilt- however gentle and ill-placed- to get Lucas out of his hermitage, she was willing to be the matronly bearer of it.

She sank to the corner of the bed, bent over slightly to accommodate for those spines that angled out above her hips. Reuben settled down around her feet with a whine and a whuff. He was bored.

"So, fellow hermit." She clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. "Feeling up to going out somewhere today? Maybe for a swim? The ocean, as per the usual, is lovely today."

She laughed. "Not without you." She looked up from giving Reu a good scratch and smiled. Her whole point in asking had been to try and get the man out of his duplex. He was her friend, and as much as she herself had a prediliction for self-imposed hermitage, she hated to see it mirrored in anyone else.

She was surprised to hear the name- dredging her memory to think if either man had ever mentioned the other before. But she wasn't wholly unhappy to hear that Ambrose had visited Lucas. The dhole man could use all the friendly company he could get.

"So Ambrose stopped by to see you?" She asked, trying to draw Lucas out- since it seemed to be a subject he was willing to talk about.

"...I never thanked you for mine, did I?" She said with a soft realization. She'd not seen him since then- so tied up was she in her own brand of isolation. "I really liked them. ...The pillow was beautiful. I still have it on my bed."

"I'm sure he understood." Then she thought it might be patronizing, so she backpedaled. "...Why? What happened?" She wasn't one to want to ignore the fact that he'd had his eye taken from him... but to bring it into mention frequently- even inadvertently- was just as bad as sugarcoating it.

Emelyn didn't know what to say. She wasn't willing to ask for more details, and yet, wanted to say something meaningful to try and make him feel better. She came up short, and after a long pause, shrugged her shoulders in a sad little gesture of apology for her 'comforting' shortcomings.

"Well, if it helps, Ambrose is a hard one to shake. ...I can tell you that one, my friend, from personal experience." She reached over and patted his leg- not as absently as she'd stroked the dog at her feet a moment earlier.

"Mm. He doesn't take offense very easily. I think you'd have to do something pretty devious to ruffle his fur." She took a moment to think of the best way to explain 'personal experience'- mainly, because when she'd suggested it in the first place, she was just trying to assuage Lucas' fears. She didn't actually have an incident in mind, so now she had to back-catalogue through the interactions she'd had with Mr. Maurlias to try and find something that would fit the bill.

"I mean, I've certainly done enough things that he should want to steer clear of me. I treated him pretty harshly for a while. I enjoyed when he felt guilty, tried to milk it." Wasn't entirely true, she thought- but it'd suffice for the purpose. She didn't realize how true it actually could be, deep down. "He didn't... ruffle."