Welcome to Gaia! ::

It was a gorgeous summer day. The sun was up, the grass was green on the lightly rolling hills, the birds were singing, the gnats were buzzing (ok, maybe that one could have been done without), there was a mild breeze blowing through the branches of a long leafy tree...it was beautiful.

And Kildegard had absolutely no idea where he was.

"Oh, you've gone and done it again, haven't you?" The reproach was mild, but heartfelt; being lost was nothing unusual to the stallion, but that didn't mean that he had to like it. In the half-hour or so that he'd been aware of himself, he had unsuccessfully tried to determine where he was, or even what direction he was facing, with minimal success. Luckily it was a clear day, otherwise he wouldn't even know what time it was!

As things stood, he knew that it was midday, knew that it was summer, and knew that he'd been out of it for a while, because the last time he'd been aware of his surroundings he'd been on the edge of a forest. Now, he was surrounded by hills; gradually rolling hills that sported a few isolated and sad looking trees. No signs of a river, no signs of the massive inland lake, no sign of the sea...yep, he'd gone quite a ways this time.

But fretting would get him nowhere; he'd given up THAT practice ages ago, and had no desire to begin now. A growl from his stomach helped him decide to leave off worrying about locality for now and deal with a more pressing concern: Lunch!

Now, if he was a body of water, where would he be hiding?

Kildegard was used to strange things popping up around him. When one was given to drifting into what could at best be described as an active trance at the drop of a hat, weird things were pretty much to be expected, whether they were strange in that they were all mental, or strange in that he came to in the middle of something he knew not what. He had learned to adapt, because the alternative was going stark-raving mad.

But disembodied voices were something completely new.

Having decided that the best chance of finding a drinking place was somewhere near the trees, he had started off towards a stand of them off in the distance, ignoring the poor solitary trees that dotted the hilltops and the sad-looking bunch off behind him. Consequently, he had had his back to the flutter when she appeared, and even if he'd been looking...well, she was small, and he wasn't very observant.

But that voice! Loud, shrill, and completely unexpected, Kildegard had jumped about a foot when the first syllable rang out and was barely collected by the end of the statement. "Wai-wha-huh?" Wheeling around, he scanned the hillsides as far as he could see, looked back at the trees, and even up in the sky for the speaker. Seeing nothing, he was left blinking and very, very confused, continuing in a very slow circle until he was once again facing the same direction he'd started out in.

Had he started daydreaming again, already? If so, he was getting creative, because he couldn't think of anything that would have made him think of disembodied voices. Really, he'd never thought of disembodied voices at all; though now that he thought about it, it was a shame. There was so much to be considered about disembodied voices! Like how they could occur with no lungs to force out the air or lips to form the words, how they achieved their volume, how they carried; there was a great deal to think about, actually...

And he was very soon starting to think about them, with the unfortunate regular side effects. As he mulled over the origins of disembodied voices, the likelihood of invisible persons being the source of said voices, and whether invisibility was more or less realistic, his dark eyes took on a somewhat glazed expression, and he was very shortly staring blankly into the distance, a faraway look on his face and his mind racing with thoughts of voices.

Nevermind that somewhere close there was a disembodied voice, one that had wanted a question answered!

There are those that would argue, and Kildegard would be among them, that it was height of foolishness for any small creature to plop itself right at the foot of a larger creature capable of squishing them to death with one step. Kildegard, in fact, would have been absolutely horrified if he'd been paying attention at the time and seen her, because he could easily have killed her and never known.

Fortunately for them both, he had been standing still when he drifted off; consequently, his hooves remained rooted to the ground even as his thoughts raced along, contemplating the mysteries of sound and vision without the slightest notice of the micro-mare right at his feet.

And so he might have remained for a great deal longer, had not the mare's shrillness and volume suddenly increased at "Full Wrath". All at once, Kildegard was back in the hilllands, blinking in confusion and disbelief at what appeared to be a Soquili mare...only one smaller than his foot, standing AT his foot.

For a moment he stared down at her as she stared up at him, completely quiet. Then he looked up, shook his head, and murmured, "Wow...Kildegard, old boy, you are honestly going to have to get a grip on yourself, because you're going mad!"

Obviously he needed a drink more than he'd realized!

This was honestly the strangest day/dream hallucination he'd ever had, because he had no idea at all what had spawned it. Perhaps it was the gnats, making him think of bugs and then his subconscious decided that he needed to talk to someone other than his own self, so they combined the buzzing gnats with...well, that didn't make sense either, because he was pretty sure he hadn't been thinking of gray mares recently, either.

But he supposed that it wasn't the point of daydreams to make sense, was it? Obviously this was a metaphor for...something. Something that escaped him at the moment, but would obviously be revealed to him once he made proper sense of this.

He would play along.

Smiling, he raised his eyes upwards, announcing to no one in particular, "Alright, subconscious, but I expect a full explanation for this at some point. Humor me?"

By now, the Soquili/bug was airborne, and fluttering around his face. It was very odd, and very noisy, and very surreal...and he was very confused, even while accepting her metaphorical existence. For a moment he was taken aback, trying to remember what it was that she was asking, why she was calling him fiend. Unfortunately, he'd missed the initial part of her speech and only recalled being called a fiend and being warned of full wrath. Not helpful.

Hopefully she was a merciful Soquili/bug/hallucination, because he needed it. Resisting the urge to brush her away from his nose, her gave her the best possible smile he could muster, hoping that she wasn't going to bite him or fly in his mouth or something. Though if she was a hallucination, that likely wasn't possible anyway, so he ought to rest easy on that account. "Um, excuse me, Miss, but I think I missed something somewhere. I'm not a fiend of any sort, I promise, and I haven't committed any crimes. Well, I hope I haven't."

That was the troublesome part of his blackouts; he had absolutely no recollection of what he did during them later. So it was more that he believed and wished he hadn't than actually knew he hadn't. Though it would be very paradoxical to have committed a crime in a hallucination when he was away being coherent.

It was enough to make his head hurt. "What crime am I accused of?"

Note to self: Do not ingest any plants that you're not completely familiar with, as said plants might have an adverse reaction with one's physiology and make one see things that make no sense. If self has a history of spacing out to begin with, multiply importance of previous note by ten or more.

Kildegard was so confused now that he probably couldn't have spaced out if he tried; just trying to make sense out of this mare-bug was enough to try every inch of his overloaded brain. Even accepting her presence, hallucination or not, was a stretch, and her bewildering behavior only added to the mystery of this 'interaction'. The only thing that he was reasonably certain of at this point was that her presence was tied to the gnats he'd been dealing with; her rapid motions, tiny stature, and quickfire reasoning were very similar to that of gnats. Well, reasoning aside, as he'd never had a gnat talk to him. But if one were, it would probably act like this!

He was also pretty sure that he'd eaten something bad at this point; perhaps some sort of hallucinogenic mushroom or flower. What other reason would there be for his actually feeling the mare as she reclined on his nose?

Well, confusion or not, at least it was an interesting hallucination. And since trying to make sense of the situation was giving him pains, he'd just accept it for now and play along! "Those are very strong words and accusations, but much as it pains me to admit it, there might be some truth in them. My size and my inability to hover or fly means that I have to walk, and it is possible that I unknowingly wreaked some havoc on whatever structures are on the ground. Is there any leniency for lack of intention or awareness?"

Having decided to just play along with his hallucination, Kildegard decided that he might as well go for broke. If he was going to see insectoid Soquili who were going to charge him with fanciful crimes, the least he could do was treat the matter with all due seriousness. Well, all the seriousness that the pixie mare apparently thought that it was due, anyway.

Paradoxically, his firmly held belief that this whole affair was in his mind made it much easier for the stallion to stay focused and serious than would otherwise have been the case. The previous minutes had been bewildering enough; had he been certain that this was reality and not fantasy, he would have had to obtain all the particulars of the mare's existence; how, when, why, whether there were any more like her...he would have had had enough fodder to keep his mind happily occupied for months. Yet because he was of the opinion this was already taking place in his mind, he was, for now, 'safe'.

"You certainly do have a point. It's only through the actions of fate that there aren't actually larger creatures stomping around above me. Quite lucky, in fact, because I'm the type who'd be among the first squished. It's very fortuitous that I'm at the bigger end of things. In that respect, your punishment seems just, but..." He broke off, giving the statement all the dramatic pause he could muster, before inquiring, "how do you propose to shrink me?"

Kildegard had been bemusedly tolerant of the pixie mare's pronouncements, playing along with all the good humor and indulgence of an adult listening to a small child. He had nodded in the right places, made the appropriate comments, and been otherwise a model listener, wondering all the while just how his subconscious was going to 'shrink' him and make him see the world. He had been somewhat amused at the idea of having a snail's view, truth be told!

But when the mare sprinkled her magic 'dust' and welcomed him to the fairy kingdom, Kildegard was greeted by something he hadn't been expected. Instead of the world growing up around him, the only thing to change was the mare herself. With great rapidity, she went from being a small, bug-sized thing to a...well, a still dainty-looking mare, but a mare the size of a mare, rather than an insect. Hallucination or not, the fact that she was the only thing to change caught him off guard. If this was a proper hallucination, wouldn't the whole world be changing? Wouldn't the ground be closer, the grass be towering overhead? Shouldn't his feet be trapped between some pebbles that were now the size of boulders?

At first, Kildegard's expression was one of sheer confusion and bewilderment, his acceptance of the situation thrown into disarray by things happening in less than the logical order. But after a few moments, it was replaced by an expression very familiar to those that knew the stallion: as his thoughts spun out of control, his mind raced desperately after them, attempting to make something logical out of something completely (to him) nonsensical, causing his focus to drift and his eyes to glaze over, his attention sucked once again into his own mental world.

If other Soquilis would be appalled with Meii's behavior...well, to be frank, they would be in the vast majority. But they were also unlikely to be familiar with Kildegard and his somewhat unusual malady, and have no way of knowing that the best way to knock him back into things was to either give him a good clout or directly engage his focus. In doing both of those things simultaneously, Meii was actually ahead of the learning curve, unintentional as that might be.

At any rate, the action had the desired result. Winded by the firm blow dealt by her solid hooves to his chest, Kildegard was back in the moment before she'd had a chance to finish her order, feeling a pain in his chest and staring in complete (but focused) bewilderment at the mare whose nose was in direct contact with his own.

Kildegard had always prided himself on being a realist. He had long since given up hope that he'd just stop fading out, had long since come to deal with his mental disorder and come to learn the symptoms of recovery and post-fade. He could always tell when he'd been out of things by a void in his memory, often accompanied by being in a completely different location than what he last remembered. And though he was in the exact same last place he remembered, the pain from the kick and the all-too-familiar blackness in his memory were enough. He'd just been out, he was now back in, and that meant...

It was perhaps a trifle outdated for someone to be so confounded by a flutter, but Kildegard had never seen one before and while it was one thing to accept a Soquili of that sort as a mental prank, it was quite another thing to realize that the world with the size-changing Soquili was the real one. His brain was stretched to the limit trying to accept that fact, and were it not for the fact she was literally in his face, it would be reasonable to expect him to fade out again immediately as he tried to reason it out!

Instead, he was left in utter confusion, staring at the mare in front of him as if she were sporting a second head. "I-well-that is-" Attempts at conversation failed him as he grappled with what was the most relevant and realistic question at the moment; whether it was better to state what he was thinking, address her question, own up to his own ignorance, or what. Were he a less stable Soquili, now would be a good time to faint. As it was, he felt more overwhelmed than he had in...well, as long as he could remember.

After a few more false starts, he finally managed one coherent sentence: "What type of Soquili ARE you?" Not exactly the most tactful or simple, but this was no time for tact!