Wiz Chocobo Post and Surrounding Environs; Duscae, Eos; Saturday, Fandom Time

[deathsmajesty]

Listen, nobody needed to make a big deal about it or anything, but Liliana could, very rarely, bestir herself to rise in the (ugh) morning if she had sufficient reason to do so. And today she did, which was why she had, with a minimal amount of reluctance, woken up while Ignis was still dressing for the day and accompanied him out of their suite.

No, it wasn't because the bros were heading off for a day of fishing and reminiscences. If it were simply that, she would have thoroughly said goodbye to Ignis the night before and slept until noon without thinking twice about it. But, this was Duscae. Which meant there were chocobos to ride, swamps and the Nebulawood to explore, spiracorns and mesmenirs to befriend admire, and, most importantly, tombs to explore. Royal tombs. Who could sleep in with all that on their plate? It would be like sleeping in at Christmas!

So enjoy your fishing time, gentlemen. There was plenty here to do in your absence!

[A catch-all post for the folks what are in Eos! Who knows who will have time to ping into it because, lol, free time, but it's here for anyone with an idea and a few minutes here and there to play! NFB for distance]

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[hashtag_chocobro]

Prompto had also been up pretty early, but that had more to do with having a two year old kid too excited to sleep in herself demanding to see chocobos as soon as the sun came up, pretty much.

The sun coming up. On Eos. Prompto realized, yawning and waiting for his coffee and breakfast at the café, that this was the first time he'd experienced that since the Long Night. He'd been whisked back to Fandom before that New Dawn had completely realized...

It took Noctra shouting his name a few times, increasingly impatient each time, before he snapped out of that thought, gave her a soft and gentle smile, and apologized. The food was ready, he took them all in hand, and let her less the charge outside so she could rush over to thr chocobo pen and wish every one of them a good morning.

And gods bless the rancher that came over with a bunch of gysahl greens and the offer to help her give the birds some breakfast so Prompto could have a moment to enjoy his own, too.

[deathsmajesty]

"It's lovely, isn't it?" Liliana said, taking a seat across from him, her own breakfast in hand. "The sun rising, I mean." She gestured carelessly towards the sky, still stained pink and gold at the edge of the horizon. "Your first, is it not? Since the Long Night?"

You know, I barely even got to see the sunrise, when it finally happened. It was just so bright, that I had to close my eyes, and when I opened them again, I was just....here.

Quiet words, spoken on a chilly February evening. A brief sharing of hurts to never be spoken of again, but of course she still remembered.

[hashtag_chocobro]

Liliana remembered it far better than Prompto did. Prompto had mostly taken that conversation and sunk it deep down inside of himself, the place where things sunk to as he pulled up the buoy of his happier self, where it was easier not to think about it all too much.

But right then, he wasn't looking at the sunrise as much as he was Noctra, on how it made her dark hair gleam, of his it cast a golden shade to her freckled face as she listened with deep concentration to the ranch hand explaining how best to feed the chocobo, much like she had when Liliana had gently guided her to feed a tiny pony, attentive and reverent.

That he remembered easily.

So he smiled softly, though distantly, as he turned back to Liliana, a faint shining sheen to those blue eyes that he shared with his daughter.

"You know," he said, "whoever said that if you've seen one sunrise, you've seen them all was really full of it. And clearly never had to go through a period of time where he didn't see any at all. But yeah. First one here in over twelve years. That's fucking wild, isn't it?"

And even if that dread still clenched his stomach that when they went to leave tomorrow, they'd discover that they couldn't, the prospect didn't seem quite so bad now. And even if it did happen...he was still feeling pretty gladio that Iggy convince him to do this after all.

[deathsmajesty]

"I shudder to tell you about my opinions of sunrises then," Liliana teased lightly. "And the longest stretch I'd managed to go without seeing one. Unlike the rest of you heathens, I prefer the far more civilized hours of afternoon."

She nibbled on some toast with a kind of fruit jam smeared over the top, washing it down with a mouthful of tea.

"By the way, darling," she added, very casually, "has Ignis told you my pet theory about the Starscourge and its effect on portals?" Just a very random conversational gambit, not at all why she'd say down in the first place, honest. "Planar mechanics and metaphysics is an interest of mine, as I'm sure you can understand, and he's good enough to indulge my curiosity and desire for discussion."

He made a truly excellent sounding board, offering details and insights and arguments.

[hashtag_chocobro]

"I might've agreed with you," Prompto said, a slight blush rising to his cheeks with the reminder that his experiences were probably pretty novel and insignificant to the breadth of what Liliana had gone through, but he sort of felt that way about nearly everyone, too, even if they hadn't lived through centuries, "but one thing or another has made it pretty clear that I'm doomed to be a morning person..."

He was quiet for a moment before answering her question, as much as a decision on how to answer as it was whether to try and avoid answering it at all.

"Not...a lot," he admitted then, "no. But he did say that, even if the portals messed up again, you should still be able to Planeswalk out of here, so there was at least that..."

Another hesitation, before he quietly asked, "Was there ever a time, though? When you did get stuck somewhere for a while?"

[deathsmajesty]

Liliana shook her head. "Not like what you went through, no," she said and boy was this going to be dramatically ironic in a bit. "I've been unable to Planeswalk for short times, either too exhausted to do so, or unable to concentrate the few seconds needed to do so, but I've never been stuck. The catastrophic disruptions of my powers manifested in a different way."

She sipped her tea again, very much not about to go into the horrors of the Mending, thank you. "But, my home plane, Dominaria, went through something like that," she said. "About four thousand years ago. A magical explosion utterly devastated the plane, and, in its aftermath, something called 'the Shard of the Twelve Worlds' formed. Dominaria and twelve other planes were bound together and, around them a barrier was formed that prevented travel in and out of the affected planes. No Planeswalking, no planar portals, nothing. Everyone was trapped, not unlike bugs in amber. That barrier has been described as 'a darkness', cold and repelling, a 'wall of ebon ice, or a 'black glacier' surrounding the nexus. During the time that it was forming comes the period of our history we call 'the Dark,' for both literal and metaphorical reasons, followed by the Ice Age."

She thought this, while not precisely what they'd gone through, was evocative enough of their experience to ring a few bells.

[hashtag_chocobro]

Prompto listened, quiet and careful, clinging to his own mug and his eyes drifting over the scene before them as he did, nodding along slightly.

"At least it looks like we get to skip the Ice Age part," he noted, with a soft huff. "Is that...what you think might have happened with us? I...it makes sense, I guess. With how the crystal works. Worked. It created a wall to keep the Starscourge out of Insomnia. Maybe once the Starscourge spread everywhere, it made a wall to keep it in. And us inside with it."

[deathsmajesty]

"That is one of my theories," Liliana said, giving Prompto an approving smile. "We also don't know the mechanism by which the Shard was created. Some scholars theorize that it was made by Gaea, Dominaria's World-Soul, as a kind of bandage? Mana can hemorrhage away from a plane, like blood from a severed artery, and, like a severed artery, a loss of mana on that scale can kill a plane. Thus, the Shard, to protect Dominaria until it healed. But!"

She leaned closer, violet eyes sparkling with enthusiasm as she warmed to the topic. "While that was my first theory, it didn't necessarily line up with your experiences, since you were trapped and mostly out of communication even before the miasma fully took over. I think it was something much more basic even than that. So, with the caveat that I certainly can't definitively speak for how the Portalocity portal network works, my theory is that it works much the same way our old planar portals worked, and your telecommunication devices piggyback off that same network, which is how a Fandom phone can usually get signal anywhere and, when portals aren't working, phones often fail as well. Though, usually not as quickly or as completely, because sending information is much smaller than sending an actual person."

All of which was a lot of preamble for to get to-- "Light! I believe the network, at least in part, uses light! Light can transmit information, even Earth is using it now for various information networks. Light is energy and information and magic can be encoded into it. How do portals often appear, hmm? Light." She was full-on grinning at this point, hands tracing out invisible glyphs and patterns in the air, as she leaned forward with excitement. "And what was the miasma? Light-devouring organisms. So, as the levels of miasma grew in the atmosphere, it manifested visually as shortening days, but also in a steady consumption of the networks that linked Eos to the rest of the Multiverse."

[hashtag_chocobro]

If Prompto was entirely honest, he would have to admit that, after a bit, he was paying slightly less attention to the words Liliana was saying and more attention to the woman herself. A lot of stuff like this could sometimes go right over his head, and while he tried to follow along, it was a little distracting, this spark of enthusiasm from her, this eagerness to tell him more about it, no matter how much of it might potentially be completely lost on someone like him. It was kind of a side of her he didn't think he'd really even seen before, except maybe when they took that trip to Strixhaven.

And that was probably a good thing, because, boy, was it freaking adorable, or what?

That always expressive and tell-tale blush started creeping up along Prompto's cheeks again as he knew the bend his thoughts were taking, and he looked away, back to the rising sun over the woods around the post, burning away the fog from the pond in one direction and the mountains in the other. Looking at the sunrise instead of Liliana herself helped him piece through her words, considering it in this new...

Well...light.

"Huh," he said. "I never really thought about it that way before..."

And it opened up for him a whole load of other questions, unsurprisingly about himself and the daemons and what exactly it was doing go people when it infected them, but those were maybe thoughts for another time. Or quite possibly never.

Either way, his hand rubbed almost mindlessly at the barcodes on his wrist, as he turned back to Liliana with a soft smile.

"Maybe you should write a paper or something," he said. "Shake up all the scholars trying to figure it all out."

[deathsmajesty]

"You say that," Liliana said, "but don't be surprised if I actually do." She tossed her hair, her grin not lessening by a jot. "I need to get a better idea of the scholarship around the Starscourge beforehand, to see if there's any additional data I need to take into account for my theories."

[hashtag_chocobro]

There was another hesitation from Prompto, another absentminded rub of his hand around his wrists.

"Most of that kind of thing," he said, "would have been done up in Niflheim. They were the ones doing all sorts of experiments with it, you know, like with the Magitek soldiers and everything. I know they got things way worse than we did down here thanks to that, but I have no idea how things are faring up there now. Probably a good question for Iris if you get the chance, I'm sure she's working with whatever whatever left of a nation up there. Pretty sure most of what Lucis did was just all defensive stuff, you know?"

[deathsmajesty]

"Perhaps I'll send a note around before we leave," Liliana mused, idly glancing at his wrists. Prompto, darling, she would love to play poker with you sometime, though, for now, she was just filing that away. "Iris seemed charming enough. Aranea, I couldn't really tell if she disliked me or if she was just like that."

[hashtag_chocobro]

Come on. Playing poker with Prompto would be like...well, about as challenging as playing with Noctra. She might actually be better, in fact.

A smile tugged at Prompto's lips at that, though, with a soft, fond sort of breath of a laugh. "She's just like that," he assured her. "You know the first time we met, it was be ause she was trying to kill Noct? Actually, now that you mention it, she might actually be the better one to ask. She used to work for the Nifs back then. Before we...." And now, a fuller laugh, and flashing Liliana a big grin, "charmed her on over to our side, clearly!"

Definitely them and, you know, not a sudden development of a moral conscious in light of all the war crimes and planetary destruction or anything!

[deathsmajesty]

Bah, challenge! Liliana liked winning.

"Ah, yes, definitely what happened," Liliana said. "She breathes consummate professional, but who could stand up to you and tall, dark, and dour?"

She loved you, Ignis, truly and fiercely, but she'd seen the pictures of you from that time and your absolute allergy to smiling.

[hashtag_chocobro]

With that distant smile still playing on his face and a new, though slightly different blush, beginning to creep around his freckles, Prompto looked a little lost in a thought for a moment, the kind that you weren't sure whether to just hold onto and keep to yourself or go ahead and share.

His head tilted slightly toward her when he made his decision.

"I don't know," he said, the faintest hint of an apology in the smile for what he was about to say, "why don't you tell me, Lils."

[deathsmajesty]

"Darling, Ignis has never been dour around me," Liliana said, with a toss of her dark curls. "Did he never tell you, darling? I had him smiling from our very first conversation. My very first comment, even."

She was just that good.

"Don't worry, though." She reached out to tap Prompto's nose. "You're still charming. Gladio remains tall. Though if you'd like me to tell you more about how Ignis keeps me--"

Wait.

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaait.

"Prompto," she said, purple eyes gleaming and a sudden, delighted grin breaking over her face. "Darling, please tell me I'm not misconstruing that insinuation you just made."

[hashtag_chocobro]

And now Prompto's expression had shifted into one of pure, abject uncertainty, brows and chin lifted as he tried to think of all the different insinuations he might have unintentionally made.

"Uhhh," he said, "wha...I don't think so? I think you may have construed it exactly as I meant it. You know. That you could also be charmed by all of us, too..."

And he was going to leave it therr, but so help him if he wasn't now curious.

"What, uh, other insinuation might I have made?"

Because delight has not been what he would have expected in response!

[deathsmajesty]

Listen, Liliana enjoyed gossip and that would have been fun to learn. She had no reason to stress over past lovers he might have had; there was no questioning who had his devotion now.

Also, while she generally had no compunctions about being a hypocrite, but being threatened by a lover when she'd had so many might be a little beyond the pale.

"Do you really want me to tell you what I was thinking and how I got there?" she asked. "Because you know I will, darling, but you always make the most distressed noises."

[hashtag_chocobro]

Prompto was going to very pointedly swallow down one such distressing noise right now, because that response was all he needed to get there himself.

"I didn't mean it like that," he said, witheringly, as that blush grew into a raging splotchy red.

Although she...probably wasn't that far off. They still didn't know for sure about all that, to be honest. Speculation and gossip definitely leaned strongly in one direction, but both parties had been incredibly tight-lipped and evasive on the matter.

[deathsmajesty]

Well, now Liliana had to ask. Ignis looooooved it when she asked him probing questions about his past.

"Can't blame a girl for being nosy," she said gaily. "And hoping for salacious gossip."

[sword_chocobro]

Gladio had, of course, been up plenty early, especially to get in a good run over at the racing tracks before the rest of the world could wake up and catch up with him. A little bit of time traveling over some old familiar roads, as well, and some new ones through familiar territory.

But eventually, he made it back, and then it was all about double checking and making sure they'd all have what they needed for thr big fishing trip just a stone's throw away.

Although after his jog, he was thinking of shifting it a bit more to the wilder spots to the northwest. Quieter, better fishing....

He didn't think it would be hard to convince the others.

[deathsmajesty]

Liliana was used to saying she wished for something and having people scurry to provide it. However, it had always been because of her power, reputation, or wealth. It was something altogether different when it was because of who her companions were.

Not bad, but...different.

Still, when someone accompanying the Heroes of the New Dawn asked for a sackful of apples, a chocobo, and a mounted guide, those things were provided forthwith. And soon she was riding sedately towards where a pack of spiracorns had been spotted most recently, a bag of bribes swinging from the saddlebag.

She was not an animal person, apart from cats, which were the gods' most perfect creatures, but there was (and probably always would be) a bit of a horsegirl hidden deep below her tattooed skin.