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"There is," he says to the demon, "a way to travel between worlds without being summoned. I will trade you the knowledge of how to make it for three of them and some help identifying a habitable planet in our new dimension."
Midnight would like it known that he totally wouldn't have done this but he could've if he wanted to
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silver-lining
His thoughts drift lazily; he remembers the feeling of an imaginary stranger touching his soul, and - it was awful but he can definitely see the appeal; it would've been so satisfying to come back from that, if he hadn't been knocked straight out of it by an incoming emergency...
...hm.
He's thought before about how there's a signature to it, when Maitimo hurts him. He doesn't have a lot of practice at reading them yet, but he can tell they're there, he has a sense of them. And the signature of that incident, when he looks at it—to be hurt in that way, in that moment, after what he'd been doing beforehand, after what had happened the previous day—it reads as a pretty clear stop that.
Maitimo said he was trying to stop leaning on torturing people into more convenient configurations. Apparently he hasn't been completely successful.
Taliar isn't sure what to do with this realization. It doesn't make him angry or afraid, just... thoughtful.
silver-lining
Snuggle.
"...it really would destroy me to stop doing that," he says after a moment. "But if that was something you needed - we could try to figure something out..."
love-and-power
"What I needed was - this - today - to see you being you at a problem other than me -"
silver-lining
"Yeah, me neither."
Snuggle.
"Seems to keep happening," he says, thinking back to the twenty-four-hour flashback incident. "We get the things we need, but not in the ways we would've liked."
love-and-power
"I'm - not used to coming out of horrible things stronger. That's not how it worked before."
silver-lining
"Coming out of horrible things stronger seems to be the essential trajectory of being a Taliar."
love-and-power
"Sounds lovely. Isn't the way things go, I don't think. Horrible things happened to all my alts, too."
silver-lining
"Well, eventually I suppose I'll have to figure out why that is and put a stop to it."
love-and-power
"Fate. It stops once someone shows up, but no one seems to show up in time, unless they show up before I exist at all."
silver-lining
"Then I guess the thing to do is either find more Ardas faster, or figure out why Fate insists on being that way and make it stop."
silver-lining
"Okay."
Not that he has any idea how to do such a thing. But he's sure he'll think of something eventually.
love-and-power
He's pretty sure that Independence's current dimension is outside an Eru's reach anyway.
silver-lining
There is that.
Anyway, right now Raika-seren is not solving any cosmically important problems. Right now he is cuddling Maitimo because there are no emergencies to deal with and he gets to do that.
silver-lining
All right.
He gets dressed and pops over to the relevant world to eavesdrop on the aliens.
The aliens... are doing really well. He made the right call in leaving them alone. They've pulled out of the Suranse portal-maze, they're working on reintegrating the ritually-dead soldiers into society, plenty of people are very very nervous about the idea of the wing contagion spreading throughout society but the cult of the Destroyer keeps emphasizing that the time of outsiders being filth is over.
