text ❁ keep out of reach of children is an understatement

[roseblooms]

A few brief orders of business:

In the first: a package I retreived from the mailbox recently has afforded me a package of seeds with unusually helpful properties, given the current state of perpetual darkness we've found ourselves in. I've performed a handful of experiments with them and, as best I can tell, they're perfectly normal and harmless plants not unlike dandelions, with the one unusual property that the blossoms are luminescent — while in bloom, they glow.

Mass-producing them shouldn't be altogether difficult for me at my current state of...ability, so for anyone who would find it helpful to have one or several of these as an alternative light source, please let me know. Potting them seems as though it would be the easiest method of transfer, though I suppose if you really had your heart set on my weaving them into a glowing flower crown or somesuch, I could see about obliging.

In the second: in somewhat more alarming news, I also received a secondary package from Retrospec, which I'd like to have examined by...well, someone with some expertise in artifacts of an unusual nature. This request is slightly more...complicated, as I'm not really certain how to explain what it is I'm looking for, other than that if you happen to possess some means of perceiving when a potentially cursed object is actively working its curse, please let me know. I think it's rather imperative that I find out, as quickly as possible, whether this particular object is...operational, or not.

In the third: has anyone felt particularly restless lately, on account of the perpetual darkness or otherwise? I suppose it might just be me, but one never knows with matters including Retrospec, so I thought it prudent to ask.

In the fourth: I'm twenty-four now. Not that that's really an order of any sort of business, of course, but I thought it at least worthy of a footnote.

Comments

[roseblooms]

I'll do the best I can, from what I remember.

It's an orb approximately the size of a grapefruit or a cantaloupe. It's one of three extremely dangerous, exceptionally evil artifacts that, for some reason, exist in creation at all — I believe it's something to the effect of balance, that if there is good in the world there needs must be equivalent evil, and so some of the evil is housed in these artifacts. Which are, of course, kept under heavy guard such that no one can use them.

In my past life, I stole them — all three of them. I only really wanted one, a cursed mirror with the power to grant the user's heart's desire in exchange for their life. You...saw me seeking to use it in my nightmares a few months back, I believe. When I was trying to save my mother.

This orb is one I had no use for, but I took it nevertheless. I never used it personally. However, as best I remember, when activated it has the ability to separate a person's soul from their body, and trap it inside the orb. The body goes comatose, and the soul becomes vaguely tangible. One can reach into the orb and pull it back out again.

...From what I can recall, the creature that took possession of the orb intended to use it to harvest the souls of unsuspecting children in order to consume them.

[despirit]

better it's in your hands than the creature who had it. i can't imagine what sort of thing it must have been. thanks for stealing it.

were the children okay, in the end?

[roseblooms]

He was a Kyūkonki, the way that I'm...

[Fawkes is typing... appears on the screen for an unusually long time, before eventually that thought completes.]

The way that I'm a kitsune. Kyūkonki, an apparition who feeds on souls. He was certainly a criminal, cruel and heartless. I'm not entirely sure why the other me had any association with him at all, but it seems he did.

I think they must have been. Someone I care deeply about — the person I mistook you for in that same nightmare, actually, or whose role you were filling in at the time — hunted him down and killed him. I don't remember anything else about it personally, but from what I remember about that boy...I can't imagine he would have stood for the children being the victims of a monster like that. I believe in him, so I believe that he set things right, in the end.

[despirit]

[good, he wants to say, but there's a lot to unpack in here. Fawkes being a kitsune. this thing feeding on souls. he needs to trust that whoever this mystery person is, they did set it all to rights.]

glad to know it all worked out.

i've never spoken to a kitsune before this, though.

[roseblooms]

For what it's worth, I'd never encountered a kitsune until I started discovering I am one, myself.

It's — I've known since last July. It's taken me a long time to reach a point where I'm comfortable even admitting to it, honestly, much less with being it.

[despirit]

i won't pry, then. it's just one of those legends you read as a kid and then finding out someone actually is one...

it's incredible, in my eyes.

[roseblooms]

...I have a tail, when I transform. And ears.

I don't know if I'm capable of granting wishes, though, or of shapeshifting. And I rarely feel the desire to prank people.