tabularasa_rp | [open] I'm in love with a shooting star

Who: Rinoa Heartilly + you?
What: catch-all for January!
Where: different places around the Void
When: during January
Content Warnings: n/a! will update if anything comes up

I ☆ ❝We promise to see shooting stars together.❞

[ It's easy to miss the changes that happen to the world when you've spent most of the last however-long indoors. In the end, her time in the nightmare that was Mementos hurt Rinoa somewhere deep, bringing with it a heavy feeling in her heart that took time alone to process. It was a little while after the clocks started to work that she emerged again, and she wasn't surprised to find that her processing time had brought with it further changes to the rest of the world.

The sky was one such thing, dark where it had been a light near-nothingness before, complete with auroras and stars that aren't from home, but could be. Since finding it for the first time, seeing the lights dancing across the darkness of the endless abyss, Rinoa's found herself spending a lot of time outside, amongst the ever-cycling purple scenery of the lake, looking up through the canopy and watching the stars. Sometimes, Angelo and Felix come with her; sometimes, like now, she's alone, her companions resting back in their apartment.

Every time a star falls from the sky, it brings with it a mixed feeling. There's a sense of its beauty, an absent-minded smile on her lips as she watches its path across the sky. But with it comes the hollow sense of homesickness that has haunted her ever since she got here, worsened by the fake Squall in the nightmare, strengthened even further by the taste of her magic, pulled abruptly away upon waking.

It's a feeling still trying to burrow itself into the pit of her stomach when she realizes that the star she's watching is getting remarkably close. But where most might try to move away, Rinoa moves toward it, black boots hurrying over the withering grass, and it's with pursed lips, a curious expression on her face, that she gathers the small glowing rock into her hands. ]

Wow...

II ☆ ❝I can be fearless, too.❞

[ When she's not watching the night sky, the next best thing is training. Rinoa's never been good at fighting alone; even here, she's proved that she needs people around her if she wants to stand even the slightest of chances against a foe. But she's already seen how people tend to wink in and out of existence around here, which brings with it a special kind of fear unique to her existence in the Void.

It's not the same terror that woke her from nightmares back at home, or the pain of the reality she's living now - no one can be as precious to her as Squall; there's no one she can fear losing as much as she fears being without him - but she does have friends here, people she trusts and has come to rely on. If something happens, and if they disappear too... what then?

She can't fight alone.

But maybe she can learn.

Without the power of her magic, Rinoa is left to the blaster edge perpetually strapped to her arm, and it's with that that she makes her way from place to place, setting up targets of whatever she can find and obliterating them before starting over. Today, she's in one of the many caverns within the mountain. If you find her here, feel free to join her; perhaps you can even teach her how to use something new! ]

III ☆ ❝Cool 'em down, Shiva! Freeze them to the core.❞

[ It's not like snow is a new thing in the Void; it was part of Rinoa's arrival on the top of Mt. Silver, a constantly-falling cold in a place that otherwise seems to not know how temperature works outside of "mild". She's even experienced the sudden storms before, the way the snow sometimes just tends to just dump itself out of the sky into whatever is underneath it, only to disappear moments later.

She's never tried to actually build a snowman, though.

This particular snowfall has been going for quite some time now, and the rocky ground underneath it is covered in a blanket of crunchy white. Rinoa's clothes don't offer much in the way of warmth, but that doesn't stop her from stomping into it, gathering handfuls of the stuff and piling them into rough spheres in order to try and create a figure.

Whatever she does make, well... it's not very good.

If you try to tell her as much, though, you're liable to get a snowball to the face! ]

IV ☆ Wildcard

( something else in mind? hit her with something random, or hit me up if you want to request something specific! ♥ )

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I think we both do. I'm not sure we have the same reasons, but I think we both do.

[For her, the distrust was more of a natural default setting than a specific worry about what might be the motivation or the long-term implications. She was so used to weird megalomaniacal behavior that she expected it from situations like this far too easily. It could make her oddly blase at times.]

I guess we have to resort to experimenting to figure it out, don't we?

[ Another nod. She knows that Parsee is right. It's not even just the two of them - surely everyone here has questions, frustrations they want cleared up and addressed. Even those who have friends here have things they don't understand. For Rinoa's part, all she can do is hope that whoever or whatever brought them here is benevolent rather than cruel.

Parsee says something that helps her shake it off, though, and Rinoa looks at her with raised brows. ]

What kind of experiments?

That depends on what we want to test. I know that if we coax the Void enough, it starts to learn what we think is supposed to be the case. That's how time started to work right. I was arguing with my clock for ... I guess months honestly, before it worked properly and eventually time started to flow.

So, we can test its limits over time by convincing it of things. That's one experiment. But there's probably others. What do you want to know most?

[Hey, if it got her mind off of what had been causing her to be a little gloomy? Probably not a bad thing. And it was definitely something to do with their time here, right?]

[ Test its limits by convincing it of things... Despite how hard Parsee worked with the clock, it kind of hasn't occurred to Rinoa until now that that's how they're making things happen - by talking, and thinking, about things. Perhaps because her own thoughts, no matter how repeated and longing, seem to have led her nowhere at all.

But as for what she wants to know most...

She shakes her head, frowning. ]

I dunno. I think most of my questions are about "why", and I really don't think experimenting would find us an answer to that, you know?

"Why?" Oh, now you're not wrong there. That question has been really hard to get the Void to communicate about yet.

[She had definitely tried. It was readily apparent in her voice that she'd put in an effort to try and figure out. But for now, anything of the sort was frustratingly elusive, and she didn't like not knowing the real motivations of this world for holding them essentially hostage to help make it reality.]

I've seen it put words into blank spaces, but it's like a parrot. It repeats back poems, things we've said, songs we've sung. It happens sometimes at the fringe of the void. But it doesn't actually talk to us.

[ Despite all her concerns, Rinoa can't help but chuckle at that one. ]

Like Leo's songs, right? I've seen them written down here and there...

[ She hasn't really given it much thought, but she can't help but wonder if she could make her mom's song appear in the same way... ]

[Almost exactly the same, which was why she nodded quickly. On top of that? Rinoa was probably right to wonder. She almost certainly could get that song to appear just the same way if she nettled the void in the right way.]

Yeah, just so. I'm not sure it understands language yet, not completely. So it might be trying to pay attention to how we talk? And then parroting it back until it gets the meaning.

It's getting smarter though.

[ Getting... smarter? The comment doesn't make a lot of sense to her at first, but if she stops to think about it... ]

You mean like how it didn't understand anything at all when we got here, right? But now we get hungry, and tired... time passes, things like that.

[ It's learning new things from its inhabitants all the time. Parsee's right - that means it's getting smarter. ]

Yeah, exactly. It's learning more quickly now. Not fast, but it is. So... I bet rules like "Fire Burns" are easier to learn? At least that's my current guess.

[She wasn't sure on this. It was as much an experiment to see how quickly it would learn.]

I'm wondering if we'll eventually get to talk to it directly.

[open] I'm in love with a shooting star

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