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Returning had been a chore of sorts. Coming home after so long of being away - and he'd left nothing that would die without his immediate care. Still - it took some work. The lone trinket of a bracelet he'd gathered in the aftermath of the battle with the wisps gone nuclear - went in a drawer beneath a drawer. Little pop out of a hidden compartment, because he never wore such things. While powered or otherwise. Didn't want it looking out of place when he showed up adorned with a charm bracelet of unknown origin that buzzed with power - whether his students would sense it or not.

Began a series of notations - endeavored to make lists - to make himself enough work to keep his mind busy for the next few hours between dusk and true evening. He ordered new plants. Packed away anything from his travels - bare necessities and a light bag. Ordered takeout, consumed it, for the sake of survival because he barely tasted it. Cleaned up and then rifled through his journal and put away the newly procured gemlike seed he'd obtained from a trip to the rift.

Marvled at the thing and promised himself he'd find a way to deliver it to Iolanthe. Would raid his oldest of tomes and pull out the yellowed lined parchment that held a map to her den. Crudely drawn thing of his youth. When he'd been poor with his lines and terrible with his descriptivism. He knew well enough that it was near the castle's furthest borders, away from prying eyes and insolent others...

Figured he'd research the precious little seed first to see if it could bear any fruit. Maybe find someone amongst their rank and file who would be knowledgeable about the subject to be of some better use to him. No lieutenants - and he wasn't sure what the aversion was to 'newness'. Only that he didn't want to deal with it outright. Recruits, underlings, subordinates. None of it at all. It didn't belong near him, with him, he didn't wish to be responsible for it. Barely wished to be responsible for the molding of young minds through his place of employment.

The reminder of that - led him into his work - into sorting though online grading systems. Planning lesson plans, sending out online documents. A blessing of all blessings that the digital age was a true living thing - it gave him space from the enclosed walls of the academy. He didn't want to see those young smiling faces right now. Slews of bright minds..of dim minds..of children that may or may not be slated to be slotted into a place amongst the organization.

Not sure either when his cheer for that had died. He'd heralded it once. Thrilled internally at the chance to do - to do good - to put use to himself and his accolades in a productive manner. Would've kissed at lepidolites booted feet for the prestigious offer of being allowed to work on the stunning grounds. To make sure what came in was better than what had come before. Piss on Charonites legacy, his curse, bring in fresh things that would be less reckless - that would die and flee less often. That would not be disabused by the new system's being dragged into place by a kinder wave of General Kings and Queens.

Only later had it dawned on him that for the new to truly exist and be embraced. To flourish. The old had to be weeded out. Torn out of the foundation - torn down - like an old building. He'd realized he was part of the problem. Old guard embittered and for all that he may have wanted better, wanting did not magically make things so, didn't erase years of indentured differences - endemic mistreatments- long standing ingrained issues that had pervaded the Negaverse from before, since they were children. Mold in the cracks in the walls of the thing - webbing outwards and sucking out all life from its surroundings - leaving the hollowed mess that survived nutritionally deficient and sickly.

Reed closed out his work - closed out his grade books and his projects and his programs entirely - stared at a clock that ticked towards nothingness until his eyes itched. Wondered what the ******** he was doing with himself.

He thought of someone to call - and realized they were all gone - fled - dead - purified. If not all, then most. If not most, then some. Enough because he'd had so few people in his life before, that the absence of even one or two now felt like a gaping wound. He'd thought it'd scarred over, but sitting in the dark of his kitchen. Staring at a closed out screen. He realized it'd never healed at all. He'd placed distraction laden bandages over it, time and again. Fled facing the truth of it because the aloneness terrified him in ways he wasn't used to. In ways he refused to acknowledge - because he was fine - he didn't need - a n y t h i n g.

Thought of reaching out to Ochre again - of getting up and going out to find Ochre deliberately. To find Slate and beg his company, make a call, find that seedy dive bar and glue himself to one of the filthy stools therein until he became it. Stopped himself from doing even that much.

Aborted attempts at attempting to be more than an aborted attempt at being a person. One single outing with drinks did not a lifetime of missed opportunities make. Did not make up for those missed opportunities. Neither did a successful job, or appropriate promotions, or an equally measured influx of income that should have been a boon but felt more often like a burden because what was the point of money if he had nothing worth spending it on?

Not even himself.

Maybe himself - maybe himself in that moment - because he couldn't bear to think about anything else any longer. Opened the laptop again and started ordering plants. Fresh cut seedlings, clippings because he would grow a multi-tiered-fruit bearing hybrid in his lifetime. Invested in the one thing he knew and understood - topography, topiary's, and a variety of vegetation.

Knowing full well that if he didn't get himself something to invest himself in that was living - that was living in his home - even if it was something as small and pointless as a ******** fern. That he would go mad. Get up and run out and burn the place down behind him - except he couldn't do that a second time in his life - the arson trick only worked the once on unfortunate abodes when he was in a particular mood.

"I need friends" said alone in the dark seemed like the most foolish of things. He'd said it at least. Would maybe try to do something about it in the morning. Would maybe find that leather hided crocodile of a captain again...no..not him..or maybe him?

Would definitely reach out to Slate, as Reed, as an actual human being and not simply as a hollowed out extension of an organization. He'd liked that, in retrospect, being a person sitting across a table from someone else. Commiserating.

"Maybe there are groups..." not for self help, no, but for commiseration. Maybe a place for people embittered with life to join in and b***h about little meaningless things - b***h meaninglessly - venting - That was what he needed. "Oh, my dear sweet philodendron...I need therapy, I'm thinking about getting therapy, aren't I? Talking to an empty room about.." a huff of air that dissolved into a cracked sort of laugh as he pushed his own vibrantly indigo hair out of his eyes. Stared stunned at the low lighted screen before him. Struck dumb by his own interpersonal revelation.

That maybe...

Just maybe.......

He needed someone to talk to about - e v e r y t h i n g - someone professional even.

WC: 1,298

"I need a roommate" - there, he'd said it aloud. Spoken it more than once even. To the empty air of his kitchen, to his bathroom mirror, to his newly blooming crocus; fresh bulb potted on his sill. Sweet little yellow and purple thing.

He - Reynard Michaels - Was officially putting the statement out there, verbally, if only to himself. It was a start of sorts. Admitting to needing things. A sort of manifestation - speaking it into being - and that line of thinking ran afoul of all his other lines of thinking and felt stupid to think at all; because thinking and speaking were merely functions. A thing all base beings did. Even plants. They equated to nothing unless actions were put behind them.

So he needed a roommate, and he'd said as much, and he'd said it more than once. The crux of the issue came when he tried to put it into action.

He needed a roommate, but he didn't want one. He'd thought of getting a gardener, a maid, a house guest? Having someone over for dinner even - a stranger to a gathering. Had recoiled and hissed at the very thought. The thoughts that arose at the thought of that - he didn't want people touching his stuff - he especially didn't want anyone other than himself touching his plants - gardening in his garden - eating at his table.

Black vitriol bile of a thought process and he didn't understand why, he just knew it irked him. Rankled something buried. He'd done these things before, surely. Just never in his own personal spaces. He could be social - could be polite society - acted as such even in his own home. It was just that the others stayed out there, and when he brought himself back it was only ever him - in his own spaces.

".......I still need a roommate...." more than a plant, because even with the plants he was still 'something' - lonely, alone? He needed something else living, alive in his home that wasn't a pet or a potted shrub. A shame that there were only two people in existence that he trusted with all of himself. With his very life, if only because those two singular individuals were the reason he was still alive at all. Had saved him, and he owed them a great debt, and giving of himself as part and parcel was hardly a burden because it was an earned thing.

"Maybe...maybe if...I just put it out there? Or put it on paper?" There were sites for such things - used for the sole purpose of this - finding people to put into rooms in their homes. Qualifications lists, and standards, and other such nuances and itinerary boxes that could be checked and unchecked, descriptors of what one wanted that could be put into those boxes. Lines of dialogue and likes added onto the ends of other lines.

Except Reed found that when he did that - the difficulty of doing it well enough to get his point across without sounding like a serial killer. Without being so overbearing that no other human would endure it - or so sparse with details that he'd surely invite in something wholly unhuman...

How other attempts made him sound like he was a man searching for a missing pet instead of another human being to share a space with.

Except when he tried to make it as though he were searching for another human being...the third, fourth, and fifth attempt at that came out sounding like a wanted poster. Like he was hiring a day worker. Like someone had wronged him and he wanted recompense. Like he was looking for the man who killed his non-existent dog.

"I don't know what I'm doing..." and that was upsetting. Frustrating beyond words, because he wasn't unintelligent. He was a grown adult man, he had ******** degrees, was well educated, he knew how to do plenty of things. That such a simple task escaped his grasp was just...

"I don't know why I'm doing.." phrasing it that way made him feel a little better, breathing at the end of it. Doing that. Sitting and breathing. At least it made those parts of him which were angry over nothing a little less upsetting. He wasn't going to sit and cry stupid hot tears out of anger over having a home with space in it and no people. He wasn't.

WC: 742

A Seed of Growth

Though the Rift is a timeless, season-less, place. The little burgeoning shrub seems to keep a tempo of growth that mimics those of its living counterparts in the world above. It keeps a season for itself, as if twinned somehow with the intent and innate knowledge of the gardener who saw it's strangeness planted in such a desolate place.


At it's tallest point - the tip-top of it's upmost branch - the bush is nearly 8ft high - and 4ft across. Despite the care of the Youma that seem to inhabit the area around it (of which one of the primary habitants is Iolanthe herself), the plants season seems short. It's preciously infrequent with blooming and bearing fruit; and so it becomes something of a race against the ever shifting timelessness and the known dangers of the Rift, in order to venture down in search of the gemlike 'growths' (if they can even be called that). For some it may be worth it though, for the sake of story and having a flashy bit of oddity to show off. To bravely take up exploring the path into Rift in search of the secret crystalline garden, and the gems it holds.



A call goes out briefly across the comm's. A message to all given in soft, droll tones. The cadence of speech that dissects the words as though they were the thousandth lecture of the day, is a passionless one.

"This is Captain Prehnite"

Followed by a parse of errant static - a pause as if to ensure that there was a chance for those on the other end to listen if they so desired.

"To any who are either inquisitive or daring, who've a love of horticulture, or geology. Who are in study of things that are crystalline or earthen in nature, and wish to test the potentials for success of the continued growth of such things within the confines of the Rift. I invite you to seek out the Garden of the Briar Rose...."

The details offered up on how to find the garden in question are beyond vague, and only seem to hold the castle as a sightline point. Told as if the map being read were something pulled from the memory of a person retelling how they reached their friends home during a summer adventure in their freshman year.

"This venture is not to be attempted by those who are unsure of their capabilities, nor by those whom find the dwellers of this place -- 'their home' -- to be lesser than themselves. The Guardian of the Garden would take up issue with any misbehaving in the garden proper, should it occur. As they are my partner in this endeavor, any who upset her ire? Will find themselves met with swift recourse."

No intonation as to whether the recourse would be provided by the Captain offering up the information, or be handled simply by the precarious nature of the creatures that lay within the Rift proper. The warning could be ignored as easily as the rest. For it was as if all verve for the topic had been smothered beneath bore in the telling of it. The offering of the information seeming no more interesting than a grocery list being read.

"I must insist that all who venture into this be cautious, selfless, and respectful. I cannot warn enough against greediness. I've found that this trait, when expressed within the confines of the Rift, often ends with those who ventured in leaving with far less than they initially came."

Though there was a heed to caution, though the words for it were there, there was nothing in the speakers inflection that implied anything threatening, everything uttered as if it were a recital of basic arithmetic solutions.

"That is all. Prehnite out."

- - -
'What Persephone's Fruit Bears is Strangely Barren'

Stunted though it was, not as true and grand as a thing could become if was of the Earth proper. If it were a real tree grown fresh and fragrant beneath an actual sun instead of a false smattering of imagined stars and purple hues. If it'd sprung up from dark soil that covered the world 'above'. Instead of ash layered upon ash of ageless detritus that drifted like topsoil within the world 'below'.

Still - - -

Still, the plant itself grew. Placed within a shallow hole, dug by soft claw and slender finger. Granted life seemingly by the same magics that dwelled not only within the capsulized bundle, but within the pocket of space that held the other crystalized flora and fauna. That held a stunning Briar Rose - thorned from hoof to hip - soft only at her petals, and yet if pressed -- Oh, how one would bleed on the p***k of it.

Danger belied in beauty - life imbued in stone.

All unnatural - yet all some sort of 'alive'.

Alive enough to bear fruits, however inedible. To reach up to the sky, shriveled, grasping, yet strong and sturdy as stone. Rooted deep - anchored into the earth deep with the teeth of its crooked vines. What sprouted out from leaf and bud. What spiraled out from stunning flower and cut of glass leaf was a familiar fruit - cruel mimic of juice filled rind, of ripe fullness and gorgeous lush skinned variants.

Some that were the hue of a garnet, the shape of a grenade. Others pitch black and gold that ran through, as if some of the rift had soaked into them, as if the thing when blown by the fires within the brush had tainted its growing and made it dark. Prehnite found that if the crystal glass was so cracked open, like an ugly geode beneath hammer and steel, that pearlescent seeds sprung forth, dainty and deadly as marble scattered across the tile by an errant toddler.

Prehnite could only laugh at the sight of it. Shocked sound cracked wide like pith from the rind, smattered with red and lace, like the fractures within the stunning thing he held.

Shocked as he was at the very idea that she- his reason for seeking to plant the very thing there - completely unknowing of what would bloom forth.

That it was of course, a woman, who had become his traitorous inspiration that begged he seek apology in the only way he knew how, with all that had spilt between them- that she would be his Persephone in this.

That he had played the role of Hades against her. With his destruction of her life, encapsulating her within his realm.

Prehnite laughed at the irony of it all, for all that he was trying to marry none. For all that he craved for all those things, cared little in the ways that others did - for 'human' things. Here a human thing was, influencing his very design in form. The fruit which that had sprung forth and reminded him so viscerally of 'her'. Of all the things she had - that he lacked.

Oh, and he held jealousy for them, that was undeniable.

Yet if given even a quarter of it, he'd do as gods oft did with playthings they coveted. Cause destruction, cause fractures and leave a wake of death behind. Weep and gnash his teeth over his lack of knowing how to do anything more than that. How it'd last, but for a moment, before fading back beneath the seas of poison that so easily coated all his thoughts and made them numb.

Better to stick with plants. With the denizens of the rift.

For none of those were people, and were easier to care for by far. There was no confusion to be had within the realm of a garden; where he was master and they, the things which grew within it, were his simple minded charges with simple needs.

It was with that knowledge that Prehnite lay tend to the garden in the Rift. Coveted the crystalline structures, poured energy and life into the soils around it, to ensure that the strange shrub which grew there would outlive him, would hold fast and bear fruit beyond his span of time. A stunning legacy, a mockery, a mirage of an oasis that held death instead of life. Branches that would bend heavy enough to creak with frond and fruit - yet starve any who attempted to taste of it - whose seeds would choke instead of save. The only juice that would be gotten from it would be the blood and tears of those who tried to get any at all...

WC: 1,603

Ochre had died on the battlefield. Not even forty feet away. In his periphery, <********>, he’d probably even seen it. Blocked it out. Tucked it into a vault along with every other thing he’d ceased to care about. If he poked at it - that evening on the hill - or the moments after he’d left the bar and left Ochre - now Slate - to himself. He remembered thinking ‘Poor thing is a bit of a cracked cup’. Not in a pitiful way, even, but in a way that felt achingly 'same'. Because they were all cracked cups to some degree. Chipped, dented, broken the ******** open and superglued back together.

So long as they still held water, no need to throw them away? It was fine. Ochre was fine. Ochre was Dead, Jet had killed him, and Ganymede had caused it…

Hadn’t she?

She had to have….

That was a thing he should’ve known. He knew it. A thing he was going to ask. One on top of many on top of – Reed was already penning a list, but Prehnite was drawing in the margins, like winding vines full of poisonous flowers that’d overflowed. Honeysuckles, only black.

He’d been across from them, from the mess of Ganymede and her endless auras and all those others who’d flocked to her for the sake of finding….Whatever that winged b***h offered. He wanted to blame her for all of it, so badly. No, he did blame her. For this one thing - for pulling a stunt mid field, in view of – Except her stupid blond face and cracked laughs and pitiful teasing smiles didn’t stick.

He hated her like he hated a roach. A thing he didn’t want in his home, but none of it was personal. She was just another being who was living the way she’d been made to live. Princesses purified people. Led rebellions. Participated as figureheads and guiding lights in the midst of wars. That was what a princess did.

That was what Ganymede was. Dead, alive, it didn't matter. He didn't care about her so much as he'd cared about - Jet.

The hurt of that - a fellow person he'd put his horses behind - backed - he didn't know even remotely how to sort it, because he cared about Jet. Cared whether he lived or died. Was happy for him being a General King. Because Jet was better?

They were supposed to be better - they had to be - they'd die otherwise and nothing would change and ---- the pen in his hand snapped and spilled hot over his hand. Blood, ink, tears, every page in the margin was torn out and tossed. Became things worth stepping over and grinding into the floor like so much mulch.

The terrible winding thoughts welled up like a tidal wave of molasses. Slow moving, deadly, thick enough to drown. Ganymedes words, the briefest of conversations with Sylvite, a promise to come get her once -- after. He'd only meant to give her a medal, to see Ganymede and use her pain as a balm to sooth past hurts on his teenaged psyche. The rush of it all coming back to haunt him down – to hole him up in his office like some rabid, pacing thing.

'You're a terrible friend...'

In the midst of all the chaos, the absolute *high* of it - God, and it’d been so good, hadn’t it? He’d been merely a Captain, but he’d felt like a *King*. He had the only people he cared for at his side, beck and call, at his aid. Hatsya had been a brilliant pillar of fire - even if all she’d done was show up, was be there in support. He didn’t care, it was the act of it which’d moved his coal crushed heart so.

Iolanthe? Oh, sweetest Briar Rose, the guardian of his most precious garden. Her’s, and yet? How easily she’d loaned him a space in it. Singular kindest creature he’d met outside or within the negaverse (*save for one other*)...and he needed to bring her out more often. Needed to loose her on the masses of their huddled enemies and let her run them through – He needed to give her a garden full of starseeds, a whole damned *feast*.

Had he lost his mind? Had he really blocked it all out? Like some chaos induced hallucination? Like when one ate far too many starseeds and became...No.

Was Ochre – really – truly….

*No.*

Stranger things had happened, hadn't they? Faustite had come and gone from the dead like a ghost innumerable times - Hell - Wolframite was still around!? How many examples of beings with nine lives timesed by ten; nigh death defying and unkillable down to the atom did there have to ******** be?

Maybe Ochre was one of them. He was the Senshi of Pentacles afterall…

He could see things. He could be reborn. He didn’t have to be dead after months had gone by of-of—of not *seeing* him. Not seeing Ochre didn’t mean anything at all. After all? How surprised had he been to run across Slate on some errant rooftop in the most downtrodden ramshackle part of the city?

So very lucky!

Why, it was a ******** miracle any of them were alive, wasn’t it!? Miracles, those sorts of things happened! He was alive in the very moment of his cracked little spiral, purely because Ochre had been a miracle, for him, and oh - how he’d betrayed him in that.

Come and gone and had a drink and been an a** when he should’ve hunted him down immediately after…

He hadn’t done that though. No more than he’d chased down a princess to beg out of existing. As if maybe that was the line uncrossable for him. The one thing he couldn’t abide by, some ultimate form of cowardice.

Not that he hadn’t thought of leaving once, too. Twice. Three times. Not just the city, no. He’d thought of leaving the negaverse in its entierty a long time ago. Then he’d stopped thinking of it at all, because it no longer appealed to him. He was happy in his complacent numbness. After all the fear sloughed away, after all the years turned over on their heads, once he finally had people around? Who woulda ******** thunk. People made it better, made it good. He didn’t have to run, or fight, or wonder where he belonged.

There was freedom in not caring – more precisely? There was freedom in finding that people still existed who were worth caring for after so long of believing there weren’t.

His team – the small little group of thirteen - the shock of a hospital that meant ‘betterment’ after so many years of nothingness. Ochre should’ve been one of them. Should’ve been the first. Something he’d cared for enough to….

Papers ruffled in his wake, drawers burst open, little knicknacks and bobbles popped askew and scattered to the floor. He snapped, like a hurricane, so quickly out of subspace and onto an open and empty street in the dead of night. He kicked off car alarms and cracked nearby windows. He was careless with his power. He cared ‘too much’ even, and that was the new problem now, wasn't it?

The little void he'd lived his life in before had been comparably sweet by proxy. Oh - it'd been so very nice. Nice to commit atrocity's like some unhinged child playing with dolls, nice to be corralled with fear enough to whip him into it, and nice to give it all up! To reign his stupid youth in and grow enough to show more than blithe bitterness and banal boredom for all things he put his eyes upon. Now? Now he was angry; <********> he *cared*. It was like adding insult to injury.

It didn't matter...

He'd go to Slates home, find him in a shower, under a couch cushion, down a ******** drain. Maybe even sleeping on some errant park-bench along the way?

And if he didn't...Well, he knew who exactly he was speaking to next about such things.

WC: 1301

His precious spaces, despoiled, and the Rift remained untouched (Thank God), never so quickly had he summoned Iolanthe and begged her on answers about how things were faring there - strange, everchanging space well removed from whatever magic graced the citadel. The Rift might has well have been another world entirely, another planet, another plane of sphere -- except Prehnite'd heard rumors about issues elsewhere too. Vague whispers about some great dying while he'd been out, which meant much or little depending on whether it was a wonder or a world - everything in space seemed dead, what was a little more decay and dying atop that which was already on it's way out? Which had already, a thousand years or more, been dead and gone and buried in ash and fire of wars well past remembrance

Prehnite cared far more about the *now*, his gardens, his parks, his plots of land and near pristine gravesite done up for 'friends'. His very living Earth. The planet itself, more than the actual people on it.

Which meant it was with much dismay that he found more of the same blighted rot creeping --- slow as a snails crawl and messier by far -- edging out living roots, chewing up ripe summer greens. Where he'd left plots of mint and basil that usually flourished like weeds -- death -- decay -- and as he'd followed that plodding path on further still?

Sparks of voids.

Blackness he'd seen in his periphery, over and over again, all month long, and now here; just past his clearing, into government owned land that was very much public property. He saw it again, ten times over, in thickets, in blinking lulls. He was drawn to it, mothlike, and then? Swallowed whole, like a rock sinking straight down to an oceans bottom, tossed about in blackness and spat out rough on the backend into some ichor-stinking gully.

Reed was unreachable -- every attempt to dispel the guise, to drop a form -- and then the skitter and scratch that started at the edges of space he couldn't see with his own limited human gaze. Suddenly he was glad to be a General with some bit of protection on his side, a blade at least, though who knew what it'd cut -- if it'd cut -- into beings that didn't seem to breathe but did seem to be ever near enough to get him moving.

Suddenly he had other worries than dead zones and pale grass, couldn't go about saving a garden if he became mulch right then and there. Prehnite started moving -- kept moving -- couldn't stop because if he did? Those eyes, tracking things, hunting visages, he knew damned well enough what that felt like after being at this so long.

So he moved.

WC: 505

Live a Life of Plenty - Not a Life of Peace!

It wasn't long ago he was scraping encrusted graffiti that wasn't, monstrous, shadowy, imagined in its entirety; off the walls of Sonias establishment. There was something fond in the memory, to touch it while wandering wherever his feet dragged him that night. He loved the parks, their careful care matched by wild symmetries. The way people tried to tame everything they touched into something owned yet 'natural' looking in its ways. Ancient oaks -- tiny suffering bonsais and the way their miniature stagnation was a thing of hundreds year long beauty passed down time, again, again; the way anything could be made a bonsai -- given both care and a blade just sharp enough.

The scrape of stone didn't make him jump the way he would have years ago, something about being a 'General' beneath all the trappings of his civilian guise. a tweed jacket and matching hat and thin rimmed metal rectangular glasses that came from a vision-works instead of a Gucci store -- because whether or not the agents were getting 'paid' now, he still liked to live his life on 'teachers salary' level and not a single stroke higher than that. The niceties of a quiet neighborhood being 'faculty' to the school provided, a little bit of inheritance (that pittance of a sum claimed from dry insurance brokers at a local state farms -- apparently 'arson' was a covered thing for certain old residences!) spent sprucing not only that but his distantly owned and fall cultivated plot of land *up*.

Money well spent by his own minding, he had to keep the singular occupant happy and covered by seasonally appropriate greens and their wildness, while also making sure any visitors who passed by would enjoy the space *enough* to believe it owned, and not at all something to be vandalized. That desire was maybe what led him here -- to visit graveyards of old, pursue their outcroppings, their edgings, the things that lived within their designs. To spark new ideas that would encourage him to get back to work where he belonged--

Not in an office, or a lab, no -- the place he'd belonged since he was young enough to heft around brightly colored plastic toys and tools covered in 'playschool' logos while attended to by beyond bored adults and nannies and teachers alike.

*The Dirt*

The Earth was a thing to yearn for, everything green, the way all that was in mankind tried to dress it up with their own adornments as if they could possibly compare to the body of natures vast works!! Like a few hundred thousand years of human history could paint in matching strokes--

Infantile, the lot of them, himself too, he considered.

But!!

Reed had no desires for men of stone -- or handsome beasts -- or veiled maidens; virgins or otherwise -- living or otherwise. Didn't care for marble chiseled abs, clawed busts, nor where they lay scattered about on the ground. Clearly monuments to something timeless, but also unable to face the wrath of man. The earth and its bounty was where all his desires formed, lived, devolved into something else entirely.

And so the third -- fourth -- fifth -- time something in the shadows creaked, squeaked, and shifted past his vision. He was oh so very much done with trying to become inspired in this particular spot tonight! He ducked the nearest hedge, pulled power on like a greased pig sliding through filth. No regal, only speedy shifting and hasty steps to match it.

And then got the ******** out of there--

He'd been in Destiny City too long to tread around where he clearly wasn't wanted. Long enough to find he had less interest in probing all that moaned and groaned in the dark, than he did living.

Leave all that nonsense to the younger sort, he had tea at home -- and a juniper bonsai to prune.

WC: 615