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Maybe she could feel like things were normal for a bit.

Let herself adjust to things as they were, not think about everything else, for a bit.

That was her goal, anyway. Just a normal life with a normal roommate and a normal ... normal. Like the things she read about in those slice-of-life books, where people sat with their friends and talked about the mundane stuff they did on the daily. Who they met. What they did for fun. What kind of coffee they enjoyed (although Delilah had quickly discovered she couldn't stand coffee without it being sweetened to death; how did anyone drink it black?).

Okay. So what she wanted to talk to Jade about wasn't exactly the stuff that normal people talked about in most of the novels she read. Maybe in an urban fantasy novel but--

But then, this was normal for them.

So far as Delilah knew, Destiny City had always been full of magic and full of strange happenings, and some of them had certainly happened to her recently.

Like that damn peacock with that damn--

"Jade!" called Delilah, as she entered the familiar apartment, an envelope from the local photo printing place in hand. The people she had talked to for printing the photos were convinced she photoshopped them, but whatever. "Are you home?"

"Over here!" called Delilah, lifting her hand and waving at nothing as if that would somehow help Jade locate her easier.

It didn't, necessarily, but she kept waving until Jade actually spotted her and then lowered her hand. Jade. Right. This was a perfectly normal day with a perfectly normal conversation and Delilah planted a grin on her face to make sure she enforced that in her own mind.

It seemed like Jade noticed the envelope she was holding pretty quickly, and it was enough to distract Delilah's mind from trying a bit too hard on the grin, face settling into something a bit less wide as she looked down at the envelope. "It's photos!" explained Delilah, glancing back up to Jade with a softer smile, this time. "I saw some really cool stuff when I was out the other day and I decided to take some pictures on my phone, and then they were so neat I got them developed. Figured maybe I could make an album or something..."

Photo albums, solid proof of things that she should remember, so maybe those memories couldn't run away again.

... And also snowflake flowers were just really pretty.

"I wanted to show them to you because I think they're really cool," offered Delilah, as she popped the envelope open and slid one of the pictures out. Eagerly, she held it out towards Jade.

It was a picture Delilah had taken when she had gotten really close to the ground, an almost upwards picture of a snowflake flower against the faded green backdrop of the half-hibernated bushes. The light reflecting off the snowflake flower made it almost appear as if it was sparkling.

"Yeah," replied Delilah, honestly, as she looked down at the pictures she had taken. She liked photography for the same reason why she liked reading; pictures told stories, stories she could immerse herself into, stories that could give her context for what she had seen and stories that she could remember not by having to count on her own brain to do so.

Or on the good will of others...

Discarding that thought where it stood, Delilah grinned as she looked back to Jade, humming happily at the compliment to the picture. "Thank you! I think I was assisted by just how good the scene itself was though." She giggled. "And phone cameras are pretty good these days."

Not that she had much context for the difference, but it sounded like something people around her had said...

At the idea of Jade hanging it up in their apartment, Delilah's eyes immediately lit up. Thus far, the only area that was really hers was her bedroom and the attached bathroom. To have more in the house she could definitively say was hers...

Well, she loved the idea.

"Yeah! Maybe we can find a white frame to go with the picture. Ooh, or maybe a black frame, to make it pop a bit more ..." Delilah coughed. "Or whatever goes with the apartment, I guess."

She paused, before offering over some of the other pictures. "There's more in here too! Mostly of the same thing, but I also took like, some scenery pictures and people and such..."

A regular camera?

Her eyes shined at the idea. Her phone camera worked well enough, but she had seen some of the cameras that the people over in the Photography department had, both at Argent Industries and at DCU's campus, and those cameras looked so good. Her phone took good pictures, but those things took amazing pictures. One time, she had peered over to the shoulder of a photojournalism student and realized they could see even the little pores of a plant's leaves when they got in close.

And that was so cool. Imagine the stories she could tell with one of those. Imagine the details she could remember without even having to think of what exact things the scene pictured--

"I'd love a real camera!"

Happily, Delilah followed after Jade, sitting herself down on the couch next to her.

Some of the other pictures in the group were fairly mundane things, but things that Delilah thought were important--people she had met at her classes and the DCU campus, a few things related to AI and her work there, other pieces of scenery and a particularly nice picture of a sunset, but there were also a few other things contained, including a picture of an odd bottle that contained what looked to be a miniature graveyard inside it, and another bottle that contained ... several other bottles.

"You can ask me questions about anything if you want."

Honestly, part of Delilah was proud of just being able to talk about things she had photographed and experienced. These things were hers. They were memories she had and could actively recall and could actively see.

Her own camera, the ability to shadow professionals, paying for her classes, perhaps beyond what they had at DCU...

It was true, the Negaverse seemed to provide for everything. Jade, herself, seemed to provide for everything. Delilah had never really wanted for much. Materially, anyway. She had her own designed room. She had her classes, she had a job, she had clothing, she had her own things, and yet--

Ignoring the nagging thought, because that wasn't the point, wasn't the purpose, she didn't want to think about that right now, her eyes zoned in on the picture Jade had chosen, the bottles. She let out a quiet chuckle. "I actually have those in my room, if you want to get an actual look at them." She had figured they fit her somewhat nautical theme in her room anyway and put them on one of the higher shelves. Higher because she honestly didn't really want to look at that graveyard bottle very closely--

"I received them after I got sucked into a," she squinted, thinking about what Stillwaterite appeared to be holding at the end, "bottle with some other people. Another corrupt. Some other Negaverse agents. Some of," she swallowed on the names she thought about saying, continuing with, "the White Moon, too. It forced us through these strange trials in this other dimension filled with bottles in the sky. A ship fell on us, at one point."

Or by her, anyway. It had crushed a few people, but she hadn't gotten sent to the graveyard that particular time.

"We fought against some trials, against some graveyard keeper, against some kind of bottle goddess who apparently owned the dimension. Some really weird stuff happened in there."

Delilah scrunched her nose at that.

She only had memories of less than a year and even she was able to tell the events were outright bizarre.

"Yeah, sure! Actually, let me go get the bottles."

Delilah hopped up, wandering off to her room for a few minutes. She returned for a second to grab a chair, before returning to her room once more, retrieving what she needed to from the higher shelf it sat on.

Looking at the graveyard still gave her a chill, even as it was just contained within the bottle herself. Delilah decided she didn't want to look at it for very long, so she hurried back to the couch so she could hand them off and get them out of her sight. One was a bottle with a gravestone that simply said 'RIP' on it, on top of soil and grass. The other bottle contained four other bottles, one with a skull, one with a boat on water, one with a crane in the stars, and one as a stone in the sand. She didn't recognize a couple of the scenes herself, but...

"I'm not sure if she was aligned to anything," offered Delilah, thoughtfully, as she sat back down next to Jade. "It seemed that she had trapped a lot of people in her dimension, over time. People asides from us here, I mean. So other creatures, I guess?" It brought some interesting thoughts to her head, really, the idea that there might have been more beyond this dimension of existence. Who knew what this bottle stuff was connected to.

It made the fact that she knew only the past several months or so even more intimidating. How much was out there?

"Some weird things happened to us. Uh, like, I got attacked by a peacock with a two by four? But everyone looked like peacocks? And the two by four was from the ship that fell on us from the sky by the way. It killed some people. I died, at one point. But we kept coming back?"

It was an experience she didn't really care to repeat...

"Which sent us to the graveyard, which is that other bottle, I guess, the one by itself. The other bottle with the lots of bottles in it, I think those represent each of the trials. I didn't go to all of them, but," she pointed at the sandy one, "I did go to that one, and basically we got attacked by a big whale thing that was forced into being a big whale by the bottle goddess. Because the whale had been set free but the bottle goddess wanted to trap her I think."

She squinted.

"Never?"

She had certainly thought the whole situation had been bizarre, even for what she could compare it to, but to hear it was truly that far off the expected made Delilah 'hmm' quietly to herself. What had caused it? They had been sucked into a bottle that didn't seem to follow the rules of any reality she knew. Was it just truly some weird cursed bottle?

Delilah glanced at Jade, curious as to what she was thinking. Was she thinking about the alignment of it still? "So far as I could tell, everyone was fighting it as hard as I was..."

At least, she had fought beside a few members of the White Moon herself. She wasn't about to say that, though. Didn't seem like a smart thing to admit to her general.

Anything else?

Well, there was that time she wrote out a fake memory on a sheet of paper for a tree at that damn winter festival and ended up dreaming of a stout man and a taller woman who both resembled her, who bought her some equestrian rides for Christmas on a pretty pony--

No, no, no, no--

"Uh, well, I got a weird email with a song attached to it?" That was an acceptable thing to share. "It was a pretty good song, but then it got stuck in my head, and then I ended up getting like, unbearably hungry. Like desperately hungry. It felt like my stomach was gonna eat itself. I found some dude on the street who knew the location of a really good buffet and some festival," ******** that festival, "but we went to the buffet and ate and it was better."

Quietly, she laughed, "And then I crashed? It was weird."

Delilah almost hated it even more that it was such an unusual event...

Oh, that one was an easy one to answer, at least--

"Like, I suddenly felt really, really tired. And then I just slept. Slept for hours, even. I like had a carb crash, I think I've heard it referred to online? But it felt different. Felt unnatural."

She squinted, attempting to figure out what about it felt unnatural. Perhaps it was the sudden onset, and the sudden stop of that irritating music in her head, and the fact that she went from feeling like she was literally going to die if she didn't eat to feeling like she was perfectly fine, just tired. Just very, very tired, like she hadn't slept in years--

What would not sleeping in years be like, anyway--

Maybe it was just that whole situation.

Delilah let the path of her thoughts go, shooting Jade an excited grin. "Sure! I'd love to go get some dinner!"

She paused.

"Well, so long as I don't get that unnatural tired after again. But I shouldn't. Don't hear music in my head."

Being alive was weird, sometimes.