Welcome to Gaia! ::

When the clumsily shambling creature first approached her, Simmy only stared at it, lacking both the curiosity and the cheerful smile that greeted those before it. She functioned on the assumption that she was helping them, doing them the favor of giving them direction and removing their pain.

Now it felt a lot like she was achieving the exact opposite.

"Do you have a purpose?" she called to it, keeping it at a cautious distance with the end of her spear. "Is there someone who cares about you?"

Though she fought against it, her words shook and faltered at the end of her second question.

She didn't ask a third.

The warning was more than sufficient, startling her into a clumsy stance meant to be defensive. None of the others had ever risked harming her for the sake of dispatching one of the creatures. None of them had been so reckless. None had been so bold.

Her breath caught in her throat and the way she was looking at her was the way a child looked at their hero, full of unquestioned admiration. She was a good shot with firm words and claims that were accepted easily as fact - it was what she'd wanted to believe in the first place anyway.

"Are you?" she asked, stuffing the pair of words as full of honest curiosity as she could manage. She wasn't sure why she hadn't asked that of anyone, unless she never wanted to consider the possibility.

Her spear sliced into one of its legs. She tried not to think about it. More and more things were so much simpler when she just didn't think.

A simple 'yes' or 'no' would have sufficed, Simmy wanted to say, but she held her tongue and tried to understand what she was talking about anyway.

"I like the Goddess." A helpful response, after all of that. "I want to make her proud. Do you think she's proud of you?"

Surely she had to be. Someone so dedicated, so skilled, so different than the others. The Goddess must have loved her in a very special kind of way. Their Goddess was smart, and always seemed to know exactly what was best for them; she'd know what was best for her too, wouldn't she?

"Does it?" she asked, tone full of an airy wonder better suited for questions of ravens and writing desks. "What if a purpose is complex? What if our meaning requires more than one piece, like...a puzzle, a big puzzle!"

She waved the spear to indicate just how big the puzzle was, getting in an incidental strike to the multi-limbed creature.

Two words into her response and Simmy knew that she'd done something wrong. She should not have used that word, because it was the word she kept repeating, over and over in everything until she spoke about herself. And it was inarguable, really, until she mentioned the value of her opinion.

"I don't think that's true," she murmured. "I mean, how you said what you think is insignificant. Everything else seems right, but..."

"She would not love something that was insignificant in any way." If it was not already very clear by her words, her stare still carried a fawning glimmer, urging (but not asking) for her to see through her eyes. It was steadfast, even as her chin was nudged up with the weapon, sidestepping only for a flicker of uncertainty when she squeaked as the trigger was pulled.

But she wouldn't have destroyed her! She saw the good inside her that even she forgot about sometimes, and complimented her, even if it was in a very weird sort of way.

"We'll survive together, then, if you think so!"

Simmy very obviously wanted nothing to do with anything to the contrary,