“Ooo!” Te gasps, seeing what I’ve made. I know it won’t last long, but I can always try to do it again later if she wants to wear it to show the rest of the family. I fumble towards her voice, and use one hand to find her face, from there I locate the top of her head, and set the radiant flower crown upon it.

“Heeeeeeee!” She scampers a circle around me, squeeing, then I can feel the air woosh as she strikes a pose. “How do I look?” She asks excitedly.

I give her an incredulous, disbelieving, “Really?” as my reply, but only jokingly. I continue, “Hah, but seriously, I’m sure you look beautiful.” Of course, right then, I hear Luni and Lil giggling as they slide down the muddy slope. I roll my eyes while awaiting their teases and taunts.

Lil and Luni for their part, don’t bother verbally teasing me, they just share a giggle or snicker once in a while, as they chat excitedly about the flowers we’ve found. Looking through their eyes is almost too cutesy to bear, I’m positive I don’t look that cartoonishly adorable. I'm more convinced I might possibly not be a human child, but be some sort of little elf, or some kind of pixie or fae creature. Anyway, looking through their eyes, I can gauge the rough size and shape of this indented meadow in the swamp.

I explain while requesting, “I’m going to try something, I generally have to touch something to claim it, for at least the first time, right? I’m going to touch the ground, and try to claim the tiniest layer of soil, and all the flowers in it, so, um. Well. Could you all stand at the edge of the meadow for a second, so I don’t accidentally claim you?”

“You can’t claim me, I’ve already claimed you, Dinglehopper.” Te jokes as she steps towards the edge of the meadow. I can sense Lil and Luni following.

I reach down, sinking my fingers into the earth, hm, soil, the planet might not be named earth, and I’m not even sure earth is the right term unless you’re on Earth. Distracted from what I was doing, I shake my head, rattling my brainpan, to try to focus. Oh yeah, distractibility and lack of focus, some more of my flaws, or did I already think of those ones? If I did, then short term memory goofiness, or hey, memory problems in general. Oh, right, the soil. With my fingertips slightly buried in mud, I imagine the thinnest possible platter of topsoil, I guess technically a cylinder. When I’ve got the rough shape visualized, I try to pick out each and every flower and herb, via Lil’s vision. Once I’m done thinking my way around the meadow, I gently tug the shapes to my inventory in a rapid fashion, nearly en masse.

Success! That is a lot more plant life than I thought there would be, based on how little vegetation I’d seen other than trees, most of my journeys. I try to set a little mark on the flower that Te found to be the prettiest, and luckily my mind’s eye can draw over things, hopefully I’ll remember not to use that one, in case Te wants to wear the flower wreath, circlet, crown thing, that I made her. However, with a rousing success, with my new limits, I feel spent, and drowsy. I walk, wobbling, over to Te, Lil, and Luni, and plop down on the muddy slope with them. “Blurgh, carry me home guys?” I plead, half jokingly.

“Nope, sorry Lazybones, you have to walk back just like the rest of us.” Te chastises me, I think playfully, I mean, when is she not? For the most part.

“Or hop, or slither!” Chimes Lil.

“I think I’ll take a pass on those last two, I did enough slithering downhill on my face in the mud, and hopping takes more energy than walking, literally, I don’t know how you do it.”

“Because I’m a draaaagon!” Lil accentuates the word dragon, elongating syllables, and wobbling their textual-tonal voice in a silly fashion. I can’t help but chuckle, even though it’s true, and also probably the right explanation. “Reggie, Reggie look, what’s that!”

I’m about halfway to making a snide remark about not being able to look, when I peer through Lil’s eyes, and see the glint of a hard object that was buried beneath the moss, flowers, herbs, and mud. Rather, the slightest corner of one.

“Huh, I’m not sure, I guess I can take a closer look.” Everyone stifles some minor laughs, they’d normally be more respectful, but it’s an unusual situation. We can afford to be lighthearted about my lack of sight, because I still have access to the senses with no problem. I know none of us would tease anyone whose sight, or other senses, or physical faculties were disabled in some way. I know they feel slightly guilty for even allowing themselves to partially laugh and tease me, because I can literally feel what they’re feeling, but I asked them to be as light-hearted about it as possible, early on after waking up and being able to move around.

Approaching the object, and peering through Lil’s vision, the object appears to be a buried box, or chest, with a metallic, uh, filigree? No. Binding? No. Moulding? Maybe. That outer metal reinforcement that runs along the perimeter of the faces. If this is really a chest, sunk beneath a flower meadow in a swamp, what are the odds it’s part of some weird respawning materials thing? Or maybe it’s a creature, just waiting for someone to react to. I swipe away a fair bit of mud from around it, and lay my hand along the surface where a lock should be.

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The good news is, the trunk pops open, revealing its contents, the bad news is, my hand is stuck to the chest, and its contents are teeth and a massive tongue. Seriously, life, did I need to add paranoia of containers to my list of trauma in addition to Day… One? That was probably a bad time to let my mind wander down that particular train of thought, as now my entire upper body, and torso, are inside of the box, as it uses its tongue to try to engulf me. I try to see through Lil’s eyes, but I think my panic is spreading to Lil and Luni, they’re both frozen, hyperventilating, like I am, and Te is starting to panic that no one’s responding to her.

Or maybe Te is just getting angry, she makes a motion like rolling up her sleeves, and then bounds on all fours from tree trunk to tree trunk, like earlier, gaining height and speed as she does so. Normally I wouldn’t even be aware while I’m frozen in a flashback like this, but I think the connection with Lil and Luni is granting me an out of body experience, or lessening its grip on me, while possibly sharing the burden with them.

I hear a loud snap, apparently from Te finding a branch to break off as she leaps into a glide. Teuila drops into a divebomb, then rolls forward so that her feet are pointed downward. She holds her branch aimed parallel to her feet, and wraps her feet around its circumference, like some kind of pogo stick spear. She then delivers a massive stabbing thrust with the energy of the leaping dropkick, barely missing my flailing legs as she plunges into the sticky wooden mimicked trunk. In a single attack, Te must have managed to fell the mimic. I hear the familiar sounds of derezzing, as all the triangular polygons bleed away from the trunk,leaving its red wireframe for barely an instant, before it shatters entirely and is gone with the loud crashing shattering sound that accompanies the finale of a creature’s derezzing.

I plop to the ground, and Te crosses her arms, tapping her foot impatiently. I think she’s waiting for thanks, but she doesn’t realize I’m stuck in nightmarish visions of the first time I was attacked while helpless. I simultaneously also experience the nightmares I had when I passed out in a panic that day. Her look of impatience and irritation takes a moment to soften into concern. She kneels into the mud and props me against her where she can hold me close. I can vaguely tell she’s whispering comfort to me, though it takes me a while to rouse from my frightened reverie. I feel like a terrible liability, because I caused Lil and Luni to freeze up as well.

After I start to come to my senses, I press into Te’s embrace, hugging her back, thanking her repeatedly. She jokingly asks, “I guess actually getting eaten was a pretty bad reminder, huh?” as she tenderly raps my cheek with her knuckles.

“That’s what it’s like for you Reggie!?” Lil exclaims, in a tremulous, almost furious cry.

I gulp, frowning as I turn to face Lil and Lu, “I uh, I guess so buddy, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to share that with you and Luni.”

Luni is still shaken up. I can tell she's holding back sobs. They must have both had the full experience, flashbacks deep into the dark nightmares, experiencing them as I felt them, not how they would feel about them. They felt it all from my perspective, including the terror, the hyperventilating, the tunnel vision, the disconnect from their bodies and senses. While I was able to at least observe, it seems like they took the full brunt of it. I resolve to never let that happen again. The trauma is my burden to bear. Oh, oh no, it was also probably the first time they weren’t able to feel each other thinking, if they were each trapped separately. I mean, the first time since our shared bond formed. Going from such an intrinsic bond, one that you start to base your entire life around, and having that wrenched away from you, while having terror forced on you as well, it had to have been awful.

I repeatedly apologetically mumble, “I’m so sorry, I can’t apologize enough, I’m so sorry.”

“You’re sorry!? I’m sorry you’ve been dealing with that alone!” Lil’s tremulous reply contains a mix of fury and remorse. I’m a little shaken by it, because it sounds like they’re mad at me.

“How often do you deal with that?” Luni timidly asks, her voice quivering.

“It varies, sometimes not for a long time, sometimes a series of similar things will keep triggering it in a row. I try to avoid thinking about a certain thing, or things that would remind me of it.” I explain as best I can, while avoiding the topic itself.

“Maybe we should go home for now. Here, Putz, here’s the things that creature left behind.” Te says, as she hands me a pouch. I accept it, claiming the contents to my inventory, and surprisingly enough, I see my inventory capacity jump back to 1337, an image of a large container replacing the pouch I accepted. There are some other contents I’ll wait til we get home to identify.

On the return trek, I feel miserable, awful even, for putting Lil and Luni through dealing with my emotional turmoil, or baggage I guess. Trauma is no joke, I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. I feel so weak and helpless, and pitiful and lame for having trauma over something that probably seems so small. If someone else told me they have nightmare flashbacks to the same event though, I wouldn’t ridicule them, or think that they were helpless or pitiful or lame. So why do I hate myself for having these flashbacks? Well, hate’s a strong word I guess.

“Lil, Luni, want me to carry you guys?” I ask, with the ulterior motive of trying to comfort them, and keep them in hugging distance.

In my mind Lil replies, “We know why you want to, we’re okay now Reggie, but I’ll never say no to a hug from my best buddy.” I half smile at hearing the shared thought, as Luni and Lil both plow into my open arms for a big hug. Once I’ve got them in my arms, I place Luni in my leaf leather hood sack thing, and place Lil atop my head.

Luni seems to be in the middle of mentally recounting the days leading up to meeting us, intending to share with Lil, but I have to ride along on their conversational wavelength to be able to see, so I try not to butt in. I especially try not to butt in as she talks about Penina, or Atamai, and the games they would play together to keep from thinking about previous events. My heart wrenches when thinking about them, but I try to push my emotions down so as not to flood the conversation with negative energy.

Te has been a bit silent on the trek back, and she disappeared ahead a short bit ago. Eventually I catch up to her looking contemplative, and a bit downtrodden.