Welcome to Gaia! ::

He thumbed through the wallet, peering at the fat wad of cash housed inside, then at the books.

"Vivien Hawken," he read aloud. "That's her, that's-" He paused, throwing a quick glance over his shoulder just in time to see Sunny spring into action and disappear into the clouds. "That's the girl I was telling you about.

"What does this mean?" he wondered, his gaze passing across the blurred photographs, then scanning the rest of the room for clues. Had he also, in some past life, been acquainted with Vivien? Was that why she'd shown herself to him?

He picked up the one photo that wasn't blurred, finally, and showed it to Lucas. "Something in the future, do you think?"

The text message popped up a little red '!'. Not delivered, but that was as expected.

Rylan's kitchen--otherkitchen?--has the odd, antiseptic feel of a stage set, as if opening the cabinet doors would reveal nothing but set walls. Outside the windows, there's only blackness. The light they have comes from the sides of the room that are open to the library. But they do hear something: a young voice, a child's voice, reading. Who in this world can survive unchanged?

Across the gap between the strange 60s kitchen, the eclectic room beckons. The rain-pregnant clouds hover close over it, and the scent of rain rolls in on the wind.

Rylan didn't recognize the voice, though it was familiar. He'd heard someone like it before...

They approach the eclectic room. The air hangs heavy with coming rain and static electricity, but once they step into the space it feels quite cozy. Beneath their feet, the floor is piled with rugs of varied designs, colors, and ages; the base floor could be hardwood or carpeted or nothing but scaffolding and they'd never know. The walls are similarly masked by tapestries, paintings, the debris of a well-traveled life. Some of the people in the paintings look familiar, but it would bear closer examination to put names to the faces. A chest is shoved up against the single, lonely window, and from it spills a t-shirt that reads WHAT ARE YOU DOING? WHY ARE YOU DOING IT?

There is a massive pile of pillows, but no bed.

Something in the pile of pillows moves.

Rylan glanced back one more time, thinking of the voice, before following Lucas to the other room, unable to shake that lingering sense of familiarity.

In the new room, he paused to examine the paintings, wondering if they, like the photo in his other kitchen, held clues to to the future. Or potential clues to a potential future. Whichever.

Then the pile of pillows shuddered, and he turned toward them with a slight frown on his face.

The wolf utters a very canine sound of confusion, blinking at the child that paps him on the face. He is rather familiar with the warmth of Pack, but to feel it again? Lucas is baffled. He partially leaps into the pillows around her, shifting back to his human form as he picks Sunny up in his arms, an irrepressible grin forming. "Hey there, irmãzinha. Why are you all over this library, hm?" Carefully moving out of the pillows with the elder child in his arms, he sways a little, trying to entertain her --

but it's not her it can't be her this is all wrong --

Children. Why did it have to be children? And this one of them all? "Ry, if this one doesn't shoot off to the sky, I can't leave her." It was said with a smile and in a sing song voice, but the words were less than jovial. Fear wanted to tell him it could be a trick, but his sense of Pack overrode it; and this, the third incarnation of Sunny, what was it supposed to mean?

"You were a darling chunky monkey, weren't you?" he kissed the child's cheek. "What are you doing here? Do you live here?" Grey eyes flickered to the chest, the shirt there -- that didn't really seem like something a small child would wear. Swaying towards the chest in question, he fairly waltzed across the floor with the child in his arms - as if suddenly, everything was different, because though he was there for the Pack, it was truly there for him now. This was -- a different Pack, but his, all the same.

"Let's -- let's see what we can find and get the heck outta dodge," he said to both of them and neither of them in particular, using the toe of his boot to open the chest.

Sunny gives a little screech of delight at being picked up, throwing her arms around Lucas's neck. She isn't shy about it, either, setting her head on his shoulder and closing her eyes. Her answer is piped in a sweet little voice, but not in any human language. It resonates with their surroundings, it belongs there, but it's not intelligible in any traditional way. Lucas and Rylan hear it in impressions: Home, mine, memory--this is my home, this is my place.

She wriggles down from Lucas's arms once they're closer to the chest, and reaches into it. There's a stuffed animal inside the tangle of shirts, and Sunny tucks it (a little black cat, worn-out, one amber eye lost to time) against her chest as she moves away to go touch the paintings. She pushes at one insistently, and looks up to Rylan beseechingly.

Beneath the stuffed animal, there's a beat-up old journal. It's open to the first page: a bold, sloppy hand labels it property of Michael Mitchell.

"What's in it?" Rylan asked, instantly curious. If this was a memory of some sort... that meant Sunny must know more about this than she'd said. Which didn't surprise him in the slightest. But maybe there would be more in that journal. More clues that would give them a better understanding of what exactly they were looking at, or for.

He felt a smile cross his face as baby Sunny waddled over to him clutching a black cat with amber eyes. Leaning down, he hefted the child up into his arms, poking her stuffed cat. "If my bird was a cat, he'd look like yours," he told her, smoothing down her hair with his free hand, tucking her against his hip like he had with young Nina Wilson just days earlier.

"This one?" he added, turning to the painting she had picked. "Who is that, hmm?"