Quest 105

( Private//Hackable by Friends )

[Filtered from Alexis Hargreaves | Blue's Codes | Unhackable]

I almost wonder if it's really a coincidence, that one recurring aspect in all of my nightmares was the loss of all of my friends...and now today I've found myself in an entirely empty City. It does seem like the sort of thing that the City would do, wouldn't it? Taking someone's worst nightmares and making them come true? I almost wonder if that's the curse today; after two days of making us dream all our worst nightmares, now the curse is to make us live through them in the waking hours, rather than only in our dreams. And yet somehow...somehow it's because all this is the stuff of nightmares that I'm not afraid of it.

The City has taken plenty of people I care about away from me already. Sometimes they come back; many times, they don't. But it's that small, singular loss that makes everything else so painful, because the ache is felt so strongly when one thing changes and everything else stays the same. It's like having a hole inside you, and everything else is fine, but you know you're incomplete without that part and you can't help but feel it because it's different and awful and wrong.

But this? To take everyone away, and leave me alone without any of them?

No. Pandora didn't let hope get away, and neither will I. Nightmares aren't so fearsome when one knows they're nightmares, and nothing I did made this happen. This is a curse and I'm in the middle of it, and while I can't stop it, I won't give in to it, either. My friends are not dead. And even if they are gone, for however long this lasts, they're not gone from my memories. They're still with me, and they'll always be with me, that way.

What would they want, if they knew I'd found myself alone today?

I never knew my grandfather; his name was Sir Hereward, and he died many years before I was born. But his advice has been a part of our family for as long as I can remember, passed down from him to my father to me:

"If I have learned anything in my life, I have learned this: when in doubt or when in trouble, pick up anything that is not nailed down, and if it is, look for loose nails or boards. Check carefully into, under, above, below, and behind things. Read everything; you might learn something. Wear clean undergarments, brush after meals, and always remember, nothing is as it appears. Nothing."

Nothing is as it appears, and this emptiness is no exception.

On the bright side of things, it's rather pleasant, in its own way, to spend a day in a perfectly quiet City. It's a bit unnatural, not having any noise from birds or bustle or anything like that, but it's not the first time I've been alone in the near-silent wilderness. Tamir was rather this way, too. And I don't lack for noise, anyway, since the stillness of this curse seems to have rekindled my bad habit of talking aloud to myself, and goodness knows I talk enough for two people at times.

How long will it last, I wonder? It's a Friday today, which means there's a reasonable chance it might go the whole weekend--long curses seem to favor the weekends, don't they? And that's the ridiculous part about asking questions when one is on one's own; who do I expect to answer any of these questions? Perhaps I ought to start answering them myself, but then I'd feel doubly ridiculous about talking to myself, so I think I'll leave them be for now.

And Valor's disappeared with the rest of them, too, so I'm without a horse today. I do hope he's all right, wherever he is. But for right now, I won't let this bother me. If there's no one around, then there's no one to bother by jumping and running and yelling all I want, and Mother and Daddy always did stress the importance of making the best of a bad situation. And when I'm thoroughly tired of that, I think I'll go to the beach for a while. The beach is a lonely enough place already, under normal circumstances, when it's just yourself and the sand and the waves. I doubt it'll seem any different today, after all.


[OOC: A little rest, a little time, and Rosella's optimism is now beginning to return to its usual ridiculously high levels, so she's determined not to let this curse get her down. Also, while she's figured out that it is a curse, she hasn't realized yet that people can still reach her through the Network, so expect surprise for a bit on that one.]