[Follows Flesh n Bones n A Ride Home.]

Ash kept standing in the overgrown grass of the church for longer than she might've been willing to admit, after Albite dropped her off there. At first it was a persistent, dizzy disbelief; had she really just had that experience? Had that been real? The whole space part had been real, right? This wasn't inherently any more absurd than anything else day-to-day. There was just... something about the jarring mundanity of it; the mixed dirt and gravel crunching under his sandals, the fact she was pretty sure Albite had come out of that whole thing convinced Sylvite's type was skinny blonde white boys who read the Necronomicon in their spare time, the fact she'd been floating in the void of space about five minutes ago?

Had it been five minutes? Hell if he knew. Almadel's museum hadn't had any clocks she'd recognized, and the deep reaches of the galaxy probably had very little to do with any timezone describable to man. What did her phone say?

...What time had it been before leaving for the museum, anyway?

It'd been ten at night. Somewhere around there. Ashton had absentmindedly checked the time on his phone before he'd powered up and it'd probably said something like that, but at this time of year the days lasted so long that one late-night darkness wasn't meaningfully different from another.

By now it was dark enough that the streetlights, flickering intermittently, were most of the only light around - illuminating the sidewalk with half-hearted gold tones. It didn't seem like the tagger who hung around here was in the area, either, given he probably would've offered Ashton a full platter of vitriol and obscenity by now. (Which was always hard to respect or take seriously from someone in full lolita and so much eyeliner it stopped being remotely interesting as a look, but given the abnormalities of her uniform as Aschera, she couldn't talk.) He could've powered back up and lept the rooftops to get home, or he could've called an Uber, probably; but she'd told Albite to drop her off here with the intent of walking the twenty minutes home, and there wasn't actually any good reason to bother doing either of the former two things.

It was the time of night where a breeze carried and counterbalanced out the burgeoning summer heat, and given almost the entire way was lit by streetlights and storefronts, it was about as safe as any route in Destiny City late at night was going to get. So far she'd never been ambushed by an overeager officer, or needed to motormouth out that she was Negaverse too, what the hell were they doing, she was actually a very big fan of being alive and having her soul sit safely in her chest -- Ash had planned for it. He planned for a lot of things, and then rarely actually got to carry out those plans if said things actually did come to pass.

It was a nice night. Mildly breezy. Just little enough cloud cover that the moonlight was shining down.

All in all, Ashton thought, it had been a decent day, even with the completely bewildering period of time right at the end.

[wc: 534]