2024-07-15 - Outside Contact

Neath stirs awake to the feeling of excitement and intent. It is, by now, used to the hustle and bustle of the Bowl, but it's not often that it becomes aware of someone new approaching the tent with such eagerness. It unsettles it briefly before it settles into curiosity. Who is coming, and what do they want? These minds feel younger than many of the ones Neath has encountered and this intrigues them.

They enter the tent - far, far too many of them. Neath balks again. What do they want? Go away. What will its more nervous siblings think? It reaches to Misogauth and Myrcelleth vaguely but pays little attention to any response it gets, too distracted by the flood of new minds.

Things worsen further when they begin to touch - one, then another, and then another... It's too much. It's too much by a long way - it squirms and pushes against its shell, trying to discourage them. The movement only encourages the excited candidates to pay extra attention to them. It hates it, hates it, hates it - but it starts to pay attention.

THE HIEROPHANT

The first truly calm mind to touch it, the first it can really register, is hardly thinking about it at all. They're thinking of... Something else. Something white, made by human hands. Clothing. What is it for? Why is it important? It reaches further into their mind and keeps them at its shell a few moments longer. Candidacy, the hatching. Personhood, freedom, suppression. Neath wants desperately to know more. What does their hatching have to do with a white robe? With this person at all? Why do they attach such complex topics to an item of clothing? It tries to ask, but despite its best efforts, the Hierophant has to move on.

THE HANGED MAN

It settles into the rhythm of touching, though it doesn't make much of an effort to reach into many minds itself. The next to catch its attention does so for the opposite reasons of the Hierophant. He's cheerful and yet anxious, strong-willed despite his death wish. It feels sorry for him immediately and reaches out to him. Why do you want this? What is the matter? it tries to ask with feelings as much as words. He does not respond - his resolve does not waver. Neath hopes dearly he will not lead any of its siblings to an early death, but it still feels more sorry for him than any hypothetical sibling that would bond to him.

THE STAR

The next is younger and feels, somehow, more fragile to Neath as he rests his gentle hands on its shell. He is kind, and he is trying to be happy, but there's something sharp and brittle in him as he pushes these well-wishes onto Neath. It tries to soften this as it sends them back to him. It is not ungrateful, of course not, but it feels he needs them more than it does. He reminds it of its darling Myrcelleth: loving and beautiful and worthy, but terrified and sad around it all. Are the candidates it pays little attention to also this sad, it has to wonder, or does it just have a fondness for delicate, half-broken things? It adds its own well-wishes onto the ones he had sent to it and hopes that he's received them. It cannot change much, but maybe, maybe, it can help this one.

JUSTICE

It almost despairs when the next to catch its attention is sad too. It's all going to be okay, isn't it? Neath mourns its lost siblings, but there's good that's come from the chaos and destruction as well, isn't there? (It can't quite understand that grief is different between a being that's been conscious for but a few weeks and one that has lived a full life of over two decades.) This one's sadness is unlike the other two - it's undercut with a current of the type of fear Neath does not fully understand yet - the need to know why. She hasn't accepted yet that everything will be known in its own time, that sometimes there isn't a why. It reaches out to soothe her. Why did there have to be a 'why?' Could she have stopped it if she'd known why it was going to happen? It doesn't think so, and tries to leave her with that feeling. Perhaps it will harm more than it helps, but it wants to try.