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soul food
more adventures of a tiny neurotic child
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Maitimo's friends get to stay out past their bedtimes when he is around because none of their parents want to tell them to stop playing with him, so when they seem to be actually getting tired it is his responsibility to declare that he is tired and going home.

He is not tired, so he takes the long way home and eavesdrops and doesn't notice anything strange at all before a large snake with a portal for a mouth eats him up.

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The snake doesn't accompany him to his next destination, which is a warm forested area with tangly undergrowth and all the sources of light being high overhead and various colors. One of those is silver but there's also a blue one and a red one; the shadows are interesting. There's a chirping bird over there and the terrain slopes downhill to his right and there are six different kinds of trees around here.

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Also a screaming adolescent tearing through the woods off to his left being chased by an incredibly ugly black monster.

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- well that's concerning and really not in a way that he can...help with?


He can hide. 

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Then he will miss the visuals accompanying the loud cracking noise, whoosh of flame, and further hollering that ultimately finish off the horrible black monster.

Some of the hollering is words but not words Maitimo knows.

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If the person fighting the animal he doesn't recognize is sharing their eyes he can watch. 

Otherwise he will probably wait until there is definitely no more hollering.

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Her eyes are available. She's looking at her injured hand and a tiny cageful of mice that sits at the bottom of her backpack, glancing back at the burned husk of the monster, and coming Maitimo's way.

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He steps out of his hiding place. "Hi?"

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She still doesn't speak Quenya. She says something, though.

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-hi?

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What. What are you doing here.

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I don't know! I was somewhere else a minute ago. I'm Nelyafinwe Maitimo. Nice to meet you.

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This is a super bad place to be and we're probably all gonna die but okay! She resumes walking in the direction she was headed before she saw him, calling out.

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- then why are you here? Did you randomly appear here too? I think there was a large snake with a weird mouth. What's your name?

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Holly. We decided to come out here to go exploring but we're not tiny children! Do you even have a cohabitor?

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A what? 

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How did you even get this far with your soul. She shakes her head and proceeds forward. How are you doing the talking in our head thing?

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- the same way everyone does it? Who else are you talking about - I told you how I got here, I just appeared here very suddenly -

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Did someone stick a cohabitor in you without your permission and the first thing he did was run toward the spitting pit?

She finds who she's looking for, a lanky blond boy about her age up a tree. He climbs down; they converse; she pulls a mouse out of her mouse cage and the mouse dies and her injuries disappear.

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 - I think I am very very far from home and nothing you just said makes any sense.

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Well, that's better than you actually living here. She keeps talking to her friend; eventually she starts calling another name into the woods until a white fox runs up to her and jumps into her arms. You're not tired, are you?

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- I am mostly scared. What language are you speaking?

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We are too, kid. It's called Nlaaki. She sighs. Rimward's this way. Try to keep up and tell me pronto if you get tired, the mice are mostly gone but there's the fox still. She and the boy start in a direction. She's trying to estimate how much Maitimo will slow them down and how long they can all go between instances of putting tiredness in mice and how much the remaining live mouse can take.

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He is surprisingly fast for his size. 

Where're we going?

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Civilization, obviously, we can't stay here with no mice!

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What do the mice have to do with it?

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So we don't get tired?

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Where I am from mice do not have anything to do with whether you get tired.

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I mean, you must use something, it doesn't have to be mice. You might be too young to have seen it done much.

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I think usually when people are tired they sleep. Or they eat special foods. I guess maybe you could eat mice but you didn't do that, earlier -

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Well, yeah, little kids sleep, if you've got a dreamward, but otherwise no.

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I think I might be from farther off than you're thinking.

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Are you from far enough away that you don't even worry about klaonso? How the pit did you get here then?

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I don't know! There was a sort of snake but I don't know how it got there or how I got here after that.

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...okay. Well, we're getting you to civilization and can get you under a dreamward and I don't know what you're gonna do after that. You really, really can't sleep here.

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Why not? What's a klaonso?

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It's a kind of demon that isn't made of stuff, so walls can't keep it out, so they're all over the place. They can only eat you if you're asleep though.

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Well now he has a guess at where they are, at least.

So people here...don't sleep?

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Right. I mean, our bodies don't sleep, our souls sleep but they have to take turns.

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- take turns with what?

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Sleeping. Right now I'm awake and my cohabitor's not, and Book's awake and his cohabitor's not.

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I have not got one of those. It sounds neat, though.

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Places with dreamwards don't do it to little kids, they let you sleep under the dreamward till you can pick your own cohabitor. And I guess maybe you never even do that if you live out too far for klaonso to be a problem but you should really at least have someone who knows how in case even one klaon drifts over and starts eating people's souls.