An Age of Mysterious Memories

Te responds in a confused but yet again matter-of-fact manner, “Probably when I hatched? Like when else would I start existing?” Her response, however, causes my brain to, what’s the phrase, blue screen of death? Whatever a BSOD is. Teuila, my Teuila, came from an external egg, was a sphere, and is now a mostly humanoid otter.

I realize Teuila was slightly concerned and she probably figured, or at least assumed, that I must have mentally checked out. She’s hugging me, telling me it’s alright. Lil and Luni seem to have been bounding ahead, letting us have our moment, as we’ve nearly reached our home base.

I shake my head, rattling loose several thoughts in my brain, “Oh, oh it’s okay, it wasn’t that, I just, I’m so confused. Do you know whose egg you were?”

Teuila's confusion is still palpable within her answer, “Whose egg? The Shellcracker Rockcrusher beach’s egg I guess. I don’t think there will be anymore though, not if the great beasts of the sea keep flooding the beach.”

My incredulity fights the revelation, trying to assure me that Teuila is still running a bit on me, but I know that she isn't. I virtually stammer my thought train, trying to still form conclusions, “Wait, you came into existence, as an egg, on the beach, with no, um, activity that preceded that? Like uh, there wasn’t an event that triggered your egg existing?”

Teuila shrugs in response, “Hm, I don’t think so, I think it was Shellcracker’s turn, and so Iakopo and the other old ones chose the egg that would be me, then Rockcrushers picked the other egg. When eggs spawned, we always took turns. Now I’m here.”

“Now you’re here.” I repeat, rather dumbfounded. If Teuila just sprang into existence as an egg, at random, could I have hatched from an egg at random? Teuila didn’t need parents, apparently neither did Lil, though I thought as a reptile, maybe Lil was just accidentally lost or abandoned as an egg. Do people, beings, creatures, all just spawn into existence, at some stage of personal evolution, with various memories?

I might not even have had to hatch from an egg, I could have just been the island’s random spawn choice for the day. But all these words, phrases, all this knowledge, preconceived notions, hints of memories of the way things should work, but they don’t. Why would the world spawn me with those? And why was I broken at the start? Or does everyone start not being able to understand the mind’s eye interface?

I prod the line further, curious still, and seeking more answers, “Um, Te, when you hatched, how long was it until you could use your analysis, or talk, or understand the mind’s eye interface, or join parties, or anything like that?”

“As far as I remember, right away.” Te’s reply is just so, so, I don’t know, I suddenly doubt reality, and am simultaneously reassured that I belong in it. Maybe there was just a glitch in the system of the world where I spawned, and then everything happened afterwards, maybe that’s why I bleed blood instead of pixels or polygons. Although, why did Vampguppy have a skill specifically related to blood? Maybe bleeding polygons still activates the skill, who knows?

This day has been a whirlwind of revelations, I’m actually starting to get dizzy and I feel mildly ill to my stomach from it. Though maybe that’s more like, uh, neurochemicals? Overproducing and flushing and overproducing due to rapid emotional changes?

I try to collect my thoughts, as I realize I’m just staring blankly into space, right through Te. “Oh, thank, um, thanks, thank you, uh, for letting me know, filling me in.” She cocks her head to the side curiously.

Now Teuila seeks answers, “You spawned alone, and then later met Lil? So you didn’t have anyone to tell you where you came from?”

I nod in response, “Yeah, and there’s something broken about me, glitchy, it kept making me wonder if anything I knew was accurate. I have a lot of memories and knowledge that don’t seem to really apply, like they’re knowledge based on rules and physics from another world.”

“Huh.” She emotes rather blankly. Te’s not unintelligent, it’s simply that my rambling must sound like non sequiturs because of how much of my experience is tied into these weird broken bits of knowledge.

I try to reason aloud, “Okay, like, take words for example, how do we know what they mean? How do we start talking to each other? In my knowledge or memories or whatever, people have to be taught, and they can’t do it right away, like in our baby form, or sphere form equivalent, humans literally just wail and cry. I don’t know if we’re even capable of learning til later. Then when we start learning, our vocabularies are tiny, ridiculously small, a few words at a time. Not only that, but someone my size would be really young, and have a ridiculously small vocabulary, I think.”

Te nods along, agreeing that on our world, vocabularies are nothing like the world from our memories, since we're given encyclopedic knowledge of terms as soon as we're introduced to them. She takes it a step further, “Yet you’re, what would you call it, wordy, verbose, loquacious perhaps?” Te comments, almost in a jokingly accusing tone. I blink rapidly several times. I'm ever so mildly stunned that she’s using vocabulary that, as I was saying, normally doesn’t just show up in young individuals.

Te's teasing catches me off-guard, so my response is rather dumb, muted, “Uh, yeah, kind of exactly that.”

Teuila taps my cheek and lightly bumps my shoulder with her fist, “So, what are you thinking it all means, now?”

“I have no idea.” Honestly, as best I can surmise, I can one hundred percent trust Te’s statements, which aren’t exactly at odds with anything I was expecting, surprising though they may be. It’s just that, with this knowledge, my place in the world is more fluid, and questionable. If we can just spring into existence, live, fight, and die, entirely at random, then every possibility that led to my meeting Lil and Te and Luni are all the more precious. “I guess all that I do know is, is that you’re important to me, and I want to chase this dream, this goal of a safe community. I can’t find the time to find the words to express how to, to tell you how, well, just, stuff, things.” I trail off, mumbling, rambling at the end.

“Well alright then, Brainiac, let’s go chase a dream.” I’m not even sure Brainiac is an insult, but the way she said it, with that double-tinged tone of endearing and insulting feels like it was.

We start rushing to catch up with Lil and Luni, running down my dream of all of us together. The first step of which is convincing the rest of the Shellcrackers that it’s worth journeying through an incredibly dangerous swamp to find our way up to my pond. Actually, wait a minute, Te said she evolved, by herself, from an otter-tailed sphere, into the type of otter she is now. Could I help Lilagni permanently evolve into Lilagnewt? Or what about any of the others? I guess I’d have to get my energy capacity back to its previous levels, and go even higher than that. Well, I was planning on doing that anyway. Maybe combining plants and herbs will help me do just that. Either learning more alchemy, just the act of learning and manipulating, or maybe some kind of potion. Thinking of that, I grab any nearby mold, fungus, or moss, from trees, or the standing water that we wade through.

When we return, most of the Shellcrackers are bedded down in their usual cuddle pile, interlocking hands, and holding onto tails, well, okay, nowadays that’s just Mataalii, Manaia, and Manamea, as Agway and Laomati are not yet laying down. I suppose this is a holdover from more aquatic behavior, but it’s just adorable honestly, and it saved my life, and most of our lives, on the night of the tsunami tidal wave.

Agwai and Laomati appear to be just sitting, staring blankly at one another, I don’t feel like now is the right time to broach the subject. Breach the subject? No, I think it’s broach. Regardless, they sit at the edge of the cuddle pile, and only slightly nod at our approach.

Lil, Te, Luni and I quietly head to the opposite edge of the cuddle pile and snuggle up to one another holding hands or tails as we bed down. While I try to plot out exactly what to say to convince the family to head northward with me, I’m also cautiously testing out some of the plants and herbs in my inventory, how they react with one another for example. In order to make more of the water walking potions, I’m missing a certain type of lily that I had actually seen growing before leaping over the edge of the cliff in the swamp, now that I have a moment to parse and recall that day. I’m not comfortable trying out more combinations while falling asleep, in case something should turn out to be explosive and somehow escape my inventory.

As I drift away into slumber, though Luni and Lil have already fallen asleep, I can still sense my surroundings slightly, and it feels like just as I slip into dreamland, that Agwai and Laomati are leaning in to hug one another. Hopefully whatever glances they were sharing, or conversation they’d been having ended in a way that helps them both. I regret being a part of the pain they’ve recently suffered. I can’t help but wonder if they would have been too far north to have to worry about the tidal wave, if I hadn’t bumped into them on my journey to the south. I try to push aside the guilt so as to not accidentally cloud Luni or Lil’s dreams with dark thoughts and somber emotions, instead focusing on the warmth, closeness, and love, of those around me.

Memory Logged, Dream:

Wiping the same mug clean, awaiting customers, I sigh. I watch as more individuals, obviously adventuring types enter my establishment, not for patronage, not a bottle or a jug, nor a night’s stay, rather to test out the various doors within the inn. These reckless planeswalkers don’t even care if they open a door to the abyss, letting in demons to be fought off in my tavern. Of course the ol’ Bottle’n’Jug is still standing, regardless of how many times we go through this mess, thanks in part I suppose to the adventurers that risk life and limb to fight back their own mistakes as they open the wrong doors. We normal residents see a room on the other side of a door, those that freely traverse planes instead see a location somewhere else in the universe supposedly, and that sight enables travel back and forth, letting them through, or occasionally letting in unwelcome guests from the other side. I sigh and, just in the nick of time, bend below the counter as a familiar roar shakes through the tavern, some aquatic tentacled beast awoken by the adventuring types. A massive tentacle strikes against the wall where I’d just been standing, business as usual these days, while the sounds of combat rage, I lift the cleaver from beneath the counter as I set about hacking pieces of the tentacle away. I suppose free ingredients for fried squid isn’t the worst thing that could have come through the door. Sometimes the doors have opened to worlds that work differently, lands of clockwork whose rules of time passage bleed through, causing everyone to rapidly age, or to move slowly for example. Yet other times, a door will open to a land whose gravity is fickle, sending myself and any patrons falling to the roof, or falling sideways. Why the adventurers don’t just construct a hallway of doors in an alley mystifies me. They’ve admitted it can be anything with closed edges, so why my rooms, in my inn, every day?

I awaken, yawning and blinking with a confused expression on my face, I can’t quite remember what I was dreaming about. Also as I awaken, I can feel Te’s paws on my back, her hips against mine, our ankles intertwined, her snout leaning against the back of my head. I think that’s called spooning for some reason, and makes me the little spoon, even though if I remember, Te might actually be shorter than me. Though perhaps we’re the same height, it’s hard to gauge from memory alone, having lost my sight.

Speaking of losing my sight, I’m slightly excited to begin experimenting with alchemy and disenchanting, if nothing else, skills that are lower tend to raise faster, triggering that pleasant chime mentally, internally. Mine are about as low as they get, in those two. Te appears to catch my excitement, or just my stirring, she lifts away, parting us, ever so gently rapping her knuckles against the top of my head. I half want to pout as we’re separated as Te walks away to go exercise. We have our own lives and goals though, and I don’t want to hold Teuila back from hers. Feeling outwards with my senses, I can’t locate Lil or Luni nearby, so I assume they’re off somewhere playing together, in fact, I appear to be alone in our sleeping area, so I must have been the last to awaken, and Te must have stuck around to make sure I didn’t wake up alone. I’m so incredibly lucky to have the friends I do.

Thinking back a few weeks, or months perhaps at this point, to when I was alone, unsure if I would ever see another living being that wasn’t either fish, or something that treated me like food, I can barely see the line of events that led me from one point on the timeline to another. Well, metaphorically see the line of events anyway, with my vision currently little more than a slight splotch of darkness on a slightly lighter splotch of darkness. Hm, darkness sounds like harkness, but where have I heard harkness before, and what does it mean? Or maybe I’m just thinking of harkens, and my mind is treating it like a partial anagram.

Regardless of all of the pondering I let myself get up to while I’m stuck in my own head, I still work at making progress with disenchanting and alchemy. I don’t seem to actually make anything that shouts “this is magical, use me”, but the herbal combinations in water do actually tend to raise my alchemy skills, disenchanting however doesn’t raise much at all. Maybe I should try exercising and training with Te, especially while blinded, because survival is a bit of a challenging struggle. Combat and fitness seem to be a pretty big part of that struggle. I guess I’ll ask her about it tomorrow, although I don’t think I’ll be swimming or sailing through the air like she does, leaping from tree to tree. I might be able to at least dodge her if I can hear her coming.

I wonder if Mataali and the twins train like Te, I don’t actually know anything about them, whether they’re avoiding me because they don’t like me, or they don’t want to acknowledge me, or if they feel bad for me, or anything like that, I have no idea. Most of the time, I wake up, and they’re gone, and when I come to bed down, they’re already cuddled up. They don’t avoid me during the sleep pile at least, so maybe we just don’t have enough in common to get to know each other. Plus, like all the Shellcrackers, they’re dealing with loss. I sigh as I think about the losses that have happened around me since I awoke on this island or continent or world, whatever the place is that I’m located in. I can also laugh at how precious a walking stick was to me early on, I actually crossed a river to go back and fetch a stick after events on Day… One.

Whoops, I come to, sweating, my breath ragged, as I must have mentally checked out for a while when reminiscing. Thinking on it, the way the world works, where there are so few plants other than the enormous trees, and the biomes are all so perfectly delineated with cliffs or similar things is just odd to me. Probably only due to my preconceptions, but still. There are very few branches littering the forest floor, and so on, it would be hard to have a group of humans trying to cultivate fire regularly. I wonder how the Shellcrackers had a cooking pit, or if that was simply more of a meeting spot, like a rock garden. No matter, I suppose, like Lil once said, I probably won’t get very far, pondering about what I don’t know, about what I don’t know. How can you even fathom what information you’re missing about topics you lack knowledge on? Ugh, I’m giving myself a headache thinking in logic circles.