Quote:
The holidays are close to ending and it’s time to start packing away your decorations. In a stroke of bad luck, you drop an ornament (or other small bauble) and it shatters. Inside was a strange, glistening dust that you accidentally inhale. You are immediately met with a strong hallucination of a previous holiday memory. It only lasts for a few moments, but it feels like you are back in the memory, reliving it. It seems so real but when it ends, you are back in the present with no trace of the dust left in sight. Which holiday memory did you relive, and how do you react to being torn from it?

(You can only relive a memory from a holiday in December and it must be from this lifetime. Characters who have lost civilian memories, such as in a side swap, will have a much vaguer memory. Locations and faces will be blurred and unrecognizable, and the memory will not reveal anything about their previous life. These characters may be left feeling a little hollow after the memory.


Suri realized several things when she entered her apartment, late in the evening after a long day of proposals. Firstly, she suspected that Maverick was displeased by some sort of event, as evidenced by the hairball he'd left almost perfectly centered on her decorative rug in front of the front door. Secondly, she had the inkling that someone had broken in to her apartment. It was harder to be sure, but she made her educated guess on the fact that there was a fully decorated Christmas tree in one corner of her living room, where there had previously only been college textbooks.

She blinked, closing the door behind her. Maverick was nowhere to be found, but then again, if he was punch-drunk on tinsel, she wasn't sure he would want to be found. In displeased silence, she cleaned up the mess on her rug, and once the carpet was sufficiently scrubbed, she inspected the Christmas tree itself, which upon a closer look had a bright red envelope nestled between the branches and lights.

Suri pried the envelope free, and the resulting momentum of the branch it was resting on was just enough to drop a glass ornament to the ground, no ceremony, only the crisp crunch of thin glass. She stared blankly, more disappointed than angry, then sighed. Letter first, then more cleaning, she thought as she untaped some snack package from the back of the envelope and unstuck the glue with a hooked pinky finger.

The card featured a depiction of a pair of what appeared to be Santa, riding a stallion through the snowy wilderness at sunset. Its message read as follows:

Everyone needs a tree for Christmas! It's a shame work won't let you spend time around ours. XOXO Mom and Dad

It was no secret that Suri's father had a key to her apartment, in the event that she went out of town for a conference and Maverick needed to be fed. But this was a new low, even for them, and Suri seethed as much in anger as she did in guilt, tossing the card on her kitchen counter. Her scowl deepened as she crossed into the kitchen proper in search of her dustpan and broom. It was her mother's game to use this kind of gift as a means to manipulate, to make her feel like she had somehow failed her family with the holiday season. Didn't they understand how important her work was? Everything that was on the line if her research failed to be a success? Who cared what her distant relatives were doing out at the farm--she had nothing to satisfy their prying questions.

She knelt down for the broken bauble frowning, only barely taking note of the powdery residue she kicked up as she swept the pieces away. Suri breathed in and sneezed, shaking her head, and

her hands are full of flashlight and book and a tripod that is taller than she is, and when she breathes out its a wave of smoke. No. Condensation. The other kids laugh at the slow fullness of her vowels when she says it, cawn-din-sayy-sion, but none of the other kids ever got first place in the science fair so who was the real loser. It isn't Suri, because she knows that tonight is the best viewing of the Geminid meteor shower and she's going to be the only kid who knew about it and she's going to see real shooting stars and won't they all feel so stupid, stupid like this town that isn't Dallas and smells like fart.

She makes her third trip from the back door of her house to her observation site, a tent she pitched herself because she's nine and she knows what she's doing, stocked with all the essentials like rations and a farmer's almanac and at least two blankets because the best viewing isn't going to be until after midnight and she might have to tough it out. Dropping the rest of her supplies, she begins the clockwork of setting up the tripod to her telescope, angling it towards Orion, the easiest constellation to see. She shivers under a puffy hunter's jacket, but she names the stars one by one: Betelgeuse, Bellatrix, Rigel, Saiph...Alnilam. She sees the Pleiades, too, and an out of place light that must be Mercury. Suri knows, she's good at knowing, and one day she'll be good at doing, too, which keeps her warm enough that the cold is nothing.

"Peanut?" She hears Dad and then he trips the lights to their backyard, washing her station in guilty yellow light. It's bad enough that she had given them a week's notice about the meteor shower and still he refused to fly them back to Texas, so she has to make due with their back yard, but now he's contributing to the light pollution, and she huffs, giving him the coldest shoulder she can muster with a pom-pom hat keeping the chill off of her head. Suri will not be deterred by such little--inconveniences.

"It's so late," her dad yawns, dragging a lawn chair down from the porch to her little outpost of discovery, and she huffs again, because apparently he doesn't know what light pollution is, and walks past him so that she can make a point of slapping the switch off.

"You have to have the lights off," she explains to her giant toddler father, seething over the way he just steps on her pillows, which were placed with care and great purpose for maximum comfort, but all the same she gathers herself in the fluff of a blanket and wiggles her way into his lap, using the trunk of one of his legs to spread out her almanac. "And it takes up to thirty minutes for your eyes to adjust to the night sky. Now you have to start over."

"It takes that long?" He'd lifted her arms to allow her space to settle in, and now that she's comfortable he lowers them like they're the arms of a harness, locking her in for lift off. He hands her a cup and she feels the heat more than she smells the chocolate but she accepts it as a peace offering, because it's not his fault that he just doesn't know, that's what Mom says. His chest is warm, too, and its only with this context that she realizes how cold it is, her nose stuffy and burning.

"That's what it said on the Discovery Channel," she murmurs, sipping on the cocoa. She looks up and thinks she sees something twinkle, and she presses against the barrier of Dad's arms, trying to see better.

"Uh-huh, that's very interesting." Dad doesn't sound like he's very interested, but he's also bad at lying, that's what Mom says, too. He moves in his seat and it jostles Suri but she keeps the cocoa stable, the way it wouldn't be if she was floating in space. "You know what I saw on the Discovery Channel?"

Suri doesn't believe her dad's ever watched the Discovery Channel, so she snorts. "What."

He pulls out what he's been searching for, a series of shrink-wrapped packages in chrome that say 'Freeze-Dried Ice-Cream' in a funky font that makes Suri think of aliens. "Space snacks. You wanna try one?"

Suri snatches the package out of his giant hands, turning it over in the low light. "You know," she starts, and this time she's sure she saw a twinkle overhead, "They don't actually freeze space food, they dehydrate it so it

doesn't expire."

Suri blinked, alone in her living room, dust pan in hand, the edge of an explanation on her tongue. She frowned, touching her nose like it would still be red, like there would still be chocolate on her mouth. Eyebrows furrowed, she stood in silence for a moment longer and then reached for her pocket to slide out her phone.

"...Dad? Hey. I just got home. I found the tree...thanks. It's cute."