middleofsomewhere | Memory Cave

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Memory Cave

After the passengers see a glimpse of a life that is not their own they appear in a cave. It is light, a strange moss glowing on the walls and ceiling illuminates the cave nicely and it is large enough for them to pace around in without trouble.

They are not alone. In the cave with them is another voidtrecker. Maybe someone they know well, maybe someone they have only seen in the aisles of the train. But they are together in this cave together.

The cave has no exit, at least not yet. They know that it will, eventually. When the time is right.

But for that time to come, they first must talk...

(OOC: For reference: memories!)

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If Catra was expecting that to make him look less confused, she would unfortunately be disappointed. "I guess?", Lea said, scratching his head a bit as he tried to figure the whole situation out. "I mean, I don't know what all you saw, but since you recognize me, and since I've gotten a couple of yours, I assume they are."

"I'm not sure why you assume I'm the one behind these weird memory flashes though. I mean, even if I could do something like this, I wouldn't be using it just to mess with someone I've never even talked to before. And that wouldn't explain why it's apparently happening with other people too."

"You're studying magic," she points out; and she's more disturbed by the knowledge that he's been prying into her memories, too. The mention of it flattens her ears in upset, but Catra presses on.

"Let's pretend I believe you for a second." which she doesn't, but the urge for violence is being slowly replaced with a feeling that -- they should talk. (She's suspicious of that too, but the feeling comes in the same sort of way as Melog's impressions on her do. It's still her choice to action it, and it's not control being exerted over her... it's just a suggestion, one that she knows isn't exactly hers.) "How do we know you didn't go ahead and screw something up?"

"Was studying it," Lea corrected her. "And only because it was kind of a requirement in the last world I got hauled to; really not much of an academic normally, but the threat of blowing up or otherwise being killed in an icky way if you don't learn to control your new power is great motivation. Anyway, if I could've done anything even close to this my grades probably would've been a lot better."

He was glad that Catra had seemingly decided not to fight him. Not that he couldn't hold his own- far from it-, but something told him that that wasn't what they were supposed to do here. The question about him possibly screwing something up does prompt some thought though. "If I did, I've got no idea what. I wasn't doing anything all that unusual; I was just looking forward to a nice, relaxing vacation, when I suddenly got a weird memory flash. Right about when we we landing, actually..."

"Maybe it's something specific to this world?", he wondered. "I guess there could've been some kind of weird magical reaction or something. I know there's a girl in my world named Naminé who has power over certain people's memories; she was actually on the train when I first arrived, but she left not too long after. Even so though, where I'm from it takes some really specific circumstances for one person's memories to wind up inside another person, and we definitely don't fit those circumstances. So if it was a reaction to something from my world, that wouldn't fit either..."

Catra's lips twist into a scowl, but the defensively raised fur along her neck and fluff of her hair has settled back down. She still doesn't believe that he has nothing to do with this situation, but he's the only lead she's got.

"Great," she grouses, grinding the word between her teeth. "Why can't anything ever be normal?"

She doesn't want to turn her back to him, but she's got to see if there's a way out of this cave. So that's what she's doing, turning on her heel to start stalking the perimeter, looking for any sign of weakness in the walls.

"There has to be someone behind this. People don't just wind up with each-other's memories." The back of her neck itches, but Catra's not going to check it. Not again. She knows there's nothing there. But she does tug at the collar of her torn-up polo, pressing the fabric of it tightly against her nape, just to make sure it's going to stay that way.

Lea couldn't help but chuckle slightly at her question about things being normal. "I've been asking myself that for years now," he said. "If I ever figure it out, I'll let you know."

Taking a cue from Catra, Lea also began looking around the cave, searching for any sign of an exit. Somehow though, he got the feeling that they wouldn't find one just by looking. And somehow, he found that that fact didn't bother him much. "I'm with you on that idea," he said. "Or if not someone, something. And I'd bet you any munny that it's something on this world, since the whole thing first started when we got here. Question is, who or what, and maybe just as importantly, why? I mean I guess it could be just to mess with us, but somehow I don't think so..."

He trailed off a bit there, continuing his search for an exit for a moment or two more without success before speaking again. "Out of curiosity, what memories of mine did you see? I'll tell you the ones of yours I saw too, just to be fair."

Whatever assurance his agreement had given her evaporates the moment he mentions exchanging details of the memories - and Catra's claws scrape a little too hard into the glowing moss lining the cave.

"I forgot," she lies sharply. "And you should forget mine, too. Just focus on getting us out of here."

Edited 2020-08-20 14:03 (UTC)

"Forgetting's not really my thing," Lea said, scanning the parts of the wall not covered by moss for any obvious cracks or defects. "At least not something like this. Besides, the kinds of memories we each got could give us a clue to what might be doing this, or why. If we compare them, and maybe compare with other people once we get out of here, we might find some kind of pattern."

Catra has to scoff. Yeah, yeah. 'Got it memorized?', she mocks in her head. Ugh. What a lame catchphrase.

His reasoning sounds entirely unlikely, and Catra hates to actually Talk About Things, but at the end of the day... she really does not know much about how magic works. Maybe he's right, maybe there is some correlation between the memories that will clue them in to what's going on.

Or, maybe he's trying to play her.

...she hasn't got much in the way of options, unless she feels like testing the walls and potentially caving them in, so after a long moment of scowling at moss - she begrudgingly speaks.

"You had a rat," she says shortly. The rat is clearly the most important part of this memory - because she still hates how its nose had twitched and its little wriggly paws. She waves a hand over her shoulder, not bothering to look at him. "In yesterday's one. You were working on some sort of magic stuff -- and kind of sucking at it, from the looks of it."

Since magic seems to work a bit differently in every world, Lea didn't know much about how it worked on this world either. But that was all the more reason to explore every possibility.

He gave a bit of a wry smile at how she mentions his rat. "I take it you're not a fan of rats," he said. And clearly the irony of that wasn't lost on him. "Anyway, that was Smoke, my familiar from back at Diatu. If it helps at all, I didn't pick him; they just kinda foisted him on me when I got there. I tried to give him away a couple times, but... eh, what can I say? The little guy kinda grew on me after awhile. Still would've rather had something cooler though."

That narrowed the time frame down a good bit at least. "The magic stuff... could've been homework, I guess. My grades there were barely passable most of the time when it came to magical theory; stuff was drier than the classroom chalk, at least to me. Though I had to knuckle down on it a bit before I got yanked here. Was trying to make a set of magical emergency beacons for my friends and I to use, which turned out to be a lot more complicated than I thought..."

"Anyway, the first one I got, you were in a big grassy field, with sparkles floating around everywhere. You were there with a blonde girl; you called her Adora, and I... well, I got the feeling that she was someone really special to you. Someone you loved." As best friend? No... it had been different than that. More. It had reminded him a little of how he felt toward Isa, honestly... But now wasn't the time to ponder too deeply on that.

"You were both happy about somebody being gone. And you weren't the only ones; there were lots of other people celebrating further away. And then you and Adora got tackle-hugged by two other people. One of them I met here on the train- Glimmer- and the other one was a guy that I think she called Bow. And you said you were planing to go along on their trip to bring magic back to the universe."

"Honestly, it was really beautiful. In a lot of ways. Hope things turn out half that well for me and my friends back home..." He was less sure of that than he once had been, but he tried not to let himself dwell on that.

Her tail flicks with annoyance in response to his wry remark. His rat and all others can just stay well away from her.

But magical emergency beacons actually sound... really useful, she thinks. Lea might not be able to work it out on his own, but maybe between him and Glimmer and Della, they could figure out a way to--

--Her plotting is cut short, embarrassment searing through her as soon as he mentions the grassy field and the sparkles, because she knows. Straight away. What he's talking about. She can only hope that what he saw was her awkward exit from the Heart and the moment she'd stood, struck dumb with awe, staring at the healed world.

Buuuuut then of course he mentions Adora and Catra's ears flatten, her shoulders tensing and heat flaring in her face.

"--I get it!" She interrupts. Mortification has her heart pounding fast, and she would love to just. Ditch this topic completely. "I was there, you can spare me the details."

She does cast him one look, over her shoulder. Looking him up and down, just once, before turning her attention back to the walls.

"...What happened to your friends?" Not that she cares. (She doesn't. She's just got -- a little bit of a hangover from today's memory flash, it must be.)

Lea couldn't help but smile a bit at her embarrassed reaction, but nodded. "Right," he said. "Moving on from that particular subject..."

"Anyway, a better question might be what hasn't happened to my friends and I at this point. If I tried to go through the whole story we'd be here all day, and even I'm not sure I understand it all. But the short version is we have to fight a guy named Master Xehanort and his Seekers of Darkness. He's this crazy powerful evil Keyblade Master who's out to gain control of Kingdom Hearts, the heart of all worlds and basically everything that's living where I'm from. We're not 100% sure what he plans to do with it, but he's made it abundantly clear that whatever it is, it'll be Very Bad News for basically everyone who's not him."

"Trouble is, that by going to fight him, we're doing exactly what he wants. He needs his Thirteen Seekers of Darkness to fight our Seven Guardians of Light to create the thing that unlocks Kingdom Hearts. If we don't fight him though, he'll just kidnap seven innocent people who's hearts are full of light and use them to forge it instead, which would basically force our hand anyway."

"He's been planning this for over a decade, setting things up so that no matter what we do, he gets what he wants, and he's hurt a lot of people, wrecked whole worlds, to do it. And lot of those people he hurt are friends of mine. So as much as I wanna save the world and everything, I'm in it just as much to get my friends back and get some payback in."

"Until recently, I thought I knew for sure how that fight was going to turn out, thanks to some timeline screwiness in the last world I got dragged to," he said. "But since I've been on the train I found out that it's possible for there to be more than one version of the same universe with the same people and everything in it, but with some events turning out differently. So now I'm back to worrying about everything again and just hoping we can find a way to beat this guy."

Doesn't that all sound familiar.

"It was Horde Prime." Catra's contribution comes after a long pause, wherein she sort of just. Soaks in the information, and debates with herself whether or not she should tell him anything. In the end, that urge to talk wins out. "The guy we were glad to get rid of. He was... pretty much the same as your one, that Xehanort or whatever. It happened not long before we had to get on that stupid train."

She's trying to pretend like she hadn't been actively listening, but Catra does finally turn around to face him; wiping the moss from her claws off on the leg of her pants. Gross stuff, that.

"I hope you get your guy too," she says. She's serious about it, no trace of a lie - but she can only hold his gaze for a second before looking away, ears flicking uncomfortably. She's not good with being earnest, so it's time to move on quickly before things can get any more awkward in here.

"The one I saw today, just now -- you were heading to a castle with..." his best friend, but those two words are still something of a sore point for Catra. So she skims around them at the last moment. She doesn't need to describe the others anyway, she tells herself. It's Lea's memory, he'll know who she's talking about just fine. "...Isa. But you got distracted losing a fight to some Ventus kid on the street."

Who he'd decided to be friends with, just like that. As if it were that easy to make happen. The quirk of Catra's eyebrow is absolutely judging Lea, and there's so much more to go through in his memory - why were their weapons so weird, what's a Cinna-bomb candy anyway, is that really what a sun feels like? - but what she sticks with, after a moment of hesitation, is simply: "You were... pretty happy. Seemed like things were going your way."

Edited 2020-09-05 08:54 (UTC)

Lea nodded, both in understanding of her explanation and in thanks for the well wish. "Glad you got your guy out of the picture at least," he said. "Hopefully with less damage along the way than Xehanort managed to inflict." Having been part of that damage and seen what one guy's ambitions had done on a large scale, he was firmly convinced that no one and no world deserved that sort of fate.

He smiled a bit remembering what she'd described though. "Wow, that's a blast from the past. And at the same time, weirdly relevant to the present back home. The reason Ventus kicked my butt that day is that he was a real, trained Keyblade wielder, not just a kid messing around. We're actually searching for him to be one of our Seven Guardians of Light, along with his friends, Aqua and Terra. They apparently fought Master Xehanort decade or so ago, and managed to foil his immediate plans, but well... let's just say they all came off the worse for it in one way or another, and nobody's really seen them since."

"But yeah, Radiant Garden- the city you saw- was every bit as great a place to live back then as its name implies," he said. "And Isa and I had it pretty good. Just spending our days dodging schoolwork, getting into trouble, and eating ice cream. Guess at the time we kinda took it for granted..." He sighed. No point in getting into that right then.

"Anyway, the one of yours I saw today was where you were inside this big mechanical hulk. Some kind of crashed ship or something, I think. Adora was there again, plus a bunch of other people- some the same ones as before, some not-, but it was a lot different than the first memory. There was a fight; a lot of rough-looking people shot a bunch of darts at her but they were blocked by a big, burly lady with purple skin. Then you used a whip to steal Adora's sword, which was apparently more than just a weapon, before a lady with scorpion claws and a tail stung Adora and knocked her out. Then you tied her up somewhere in the ship and had a party to celebrate."

"You... seemed like you were having a pretty great time." Which didn't at all seem to fit with the first memory, but given that he was only seeing bits and pieces, maybe there was more to it?

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Memory Cave

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