Noelle's September Quest Ho-ho-home [Catch-All]

[holidaygirl1225]

Who: Noelle & Shoka, Archnemon, Bigby
What: Quests! (Scholastic Decisions, No Pain No Grain, A Dour Struggle)
Where: Icefall Lake, around Death Blood Murder Skull Town, the woods
When: Mid/Late September
Warnings: Pokemon battling (violence/injury), potential references to death/disassociation

Comments

[wovensecrets]

Tch... I've been there. Unfortunately, the hot springs we found there are more likely to kill you instead. Probably.

[ She hasn't given up on the hope of finding a nice natural springs tucked away somewhere, but she's still got the memory of the burns from just being near the geysers. Ugh. ]

[holidaygirl1225]

[Oh.]

... maybe not! Still, um... a spa would be... nice?

[wovensecrets]

It would be! Just a little music, nice warm water, a good masseuse and only calm, peaceful thoughts.

[ Workaholics have to have some kind of indulgence. Or at least wistful aspirations. Oh, is this the field they were supposed to work in? Right, better get properly started on that... ]

Even just a nice car ride would be nice. Not that it's the same like this...

[ Hitching a ride with other Pokémon isn't quite the same. ]

[holidaygirl1225]

[Noelle works quietly with her for a while, daydreaming about the spa. Hatenna doesn't seem like the type to dwell on the past, not even using whatever her name might have been before... but she imagines her as a metropolitan woman who worked a nice job. In her spare time, she would play the flute, and maybe drive a nice car to the spa...

... it reminds her of some of the dreams she had about what her future might be like. She never could have predicted this, though.]

... Do you miss home, Miss Hatenna?

[wovensecrets]

Hm?

[ She'd been a little caught up in her peaceful thoughts. Usually she didn't care for tedious work, but she'd chosen this, it was different, certainly more calming than just being in the more emotionally dense areas.

What was "home", truly. Even in this place, where everyone had a place to return to in some way once the guild adopted them, was any of that truly "home" or was "home" always supposed to mean where one came from... it should have been a predicted question, that someone might ask her this, but she hadn't been prepared. ]

Oh, I -- guess so? I try not to think of that, so much...

[ Aside from. What she's pointedly avoiding thinking about, as she doesn't even know if she could get back there at all, and difficult enough to try and spin on that smoothly -- Still, if Noelle was asking her, then clearly that's an opening... ]

Though your own must be on your mind... you've probably never been away for this long, before.

[holidaygirl1225]

[A wave of anxiety, homesickness, and longing washes over her-- but Noelle follows it with resolve. Maybe she'll never go home again. Maybe she'll never see any of them again. But there has to be a reason she was brought here.]

You're right... I've never been away for this long. I wonder how everyone back there is doing... do you think they're looking for me, too? [She doesn't explain the 'too' part.]

I... know people are working on finding a way to go back. But I don't know if it's actually possible.

[wovensecrets]

[ It would be so much easier to respond with a cheery sounding "Who knows!". Were it a different situation, the two of them might not even be meeting like this, having a conversation over work. Or anything else, for that matter.

(There might be one person who'd miss her, but she doesn't - know about that. Doesn't want to Consider that. She's Here, in a new situation. Working on a way of getting back - that wasn't on her radar, not when she doesn't even know what That would be.)

Noelle was - likely a teenager by some standards? She'd observed enough of them, certainly heard woes before. ]

If time works the same here than it did there, then they would likely be aware of it, no? If you have a good relationship, then surely they would be concerned for you as well...

[ But with the amount of worlds and dimensions involved... hard to know. Hard to say. Don't worry about it? ... Constructively, how to do this. ]

... Not to complicate it another way, but there's also a chance, that time here might not be in sync with back there. So it could be that very little at all had passed, too.

[holidaygirl1225]

That might mean I'm older than everyone else in class when I go back, haha.

[Noelle isn't sure what else to say. Hatenna sure is private... but maybe she's just focused on looking forward. And it's very kind of her to listen to Noelle so much and advise her again, just like before.]

Well, either way, I'm glad we met.

[wovensecrets]

... Oh? I am as well.

[ She's slightly surprised by the sentiment. It shouldn't have been surprising to hear from someone like Noelle- but wasn't often something she'd heard from others, either. Especially not after being so... discarded. ]

Just think, you'll be able to have lots of stories for them, won't you?

would you like to wrap this one soon?

[holidaygirl1225]

A-and I bet you will also! [She's assuming that Hatenna will want to return home as well. Why wouldn't anyone, she thinks?]

[wovensecrets]

... Who knows~?

[ There, she said it, in a light sort of enigmatic way.

She's not certain of the possibility and what it would mean if she could - but she was not the best at relating those sort of concerns. Easy to see them in others, the more inclined to bury... ah, well. ]

Now, we have some more work to do, don't we? Get enough of that done, maybe you'll be able to teach me some of your songs, later.