Abraham was still struggling to bring the atmospheric disturbances anywhere close to ignition much past a few meters away from him. He could start one at his fingers and then trail it for a while, but the projectile-looking discharge would soon die off before it got too far away.
It had become clear to him why Isaac had been so insistent on setting up the protective barriers around him, as more than once, he’d gotten his fingertips scorched by his own fires - despite Serah’s useful tips. But after a particularly malicious misfire, the two had decided to move on to the next of the ‘mind-magics’ on his list - the ‘spark’ as she called it. To him, it had always been known as Bravelle’s lightning, but as he was learning… Bravelle had nothing to do with it.
It had taken him some time to understand what she meant when she had explained the procedure. First, he was to gather up an area with ‘sad air’, then another with ‘happy air’, but it was important to keep the two separated. After a few days of trying, he had finally learned how to identify the two moods of the air - the charges as he would later learn they were called.
By meeting the two fronts together, a spark would form in that area and although he knew it to be one of the miracles he had once learned, it seemed far more potent when he shot it from his fingers and fried a fish mid-air with the ‘mind-magic’.
It was in this event that she had clapped excitedly and jumped in place, tearing off a segment of the moss to send them both fumbling into the waters. He’d thought that’d dampen the mood, but before the then-fried fish had clapped into the cold, evening pool, she’d wrapped her arms around him in the warmest hug he’d ever received.
It had been enough to nearly drown him.
But having learned the initial two on her list of five, practice lay ahead of him. But, as she was dreadfully eager to remind him, he had to do that part alone.
He hadn’t given much thought to his current circumstances, much because he didn’t really know how to feel about his current circumstances. The death of one of his closest friends had raised many questions and now that his life’s ideals had been wiped away, he was left questioning what even was real. For the moment, he was happy - happy like a young, hormone-fueled man might be in the presence of someone he found endearing. But would this happiness last? Would those images of Michael being swallowed up by the Anza-Behemoth soon surface to wipe away this happiness? If what Logan had told him was true, it inevitably would.
He still struggled to sleep through the night. Like Logan had promised, he kept seeing the writhing tentacles tear his friends and acquaintances apart. If he’d stayed in Anza, he was fairly certain he’d already have thrown himself off of the wall, but his departure had saved his life - at least for the time being.
He hated the Monstrum, but above all else, he had begun to wish that none other would suffer like he had - like Michael, Marcel and Isaac had. Now, he had the weapons to make a difference - to prevent such a fate from happening to anyone else.
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Now… he’d watch them burn.
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Across from where Abraham sat on the mire, Luna was heaving for breath. Thirty-six poles now stood in a line pointed towards nowhere in particular - towards a hypothetical Hive somewhere in the mires, from which Monstrum had supposedly hunted the wildlife to near extinction. There was something oddly poetic about it. She, too, was a monster, belonging to a race of humans nearly hunted to extinction, themselves. Now, she’d lay down her blood, sweat and many, many tears in order to prevent the same from happening to frogs and other mire-critters, all in order to save the hounds.
She was nothing short of exhausted where she sat in the wet, cooling moss next to her stalwart, empty-eyed, long-nosed, white-furred friend. Pupper had become a constant to her - from the moment she got up in the morning, until the late evening, she’d be around her, just staring for the most part. Listening on occasion, as if she could understand Luna’s constant cursing the man who had left her in the wet landscape of horror. But she didn’t blame it for him - not really.
She’d gotten everything she could’ve wanted from the trip. Friends, skills, food - diarrhea on more than one occasion. But most of all, she’d gotten to bond with the creature looming at the edge of her mind.
As luck would have it, they were getting along quite well, albeit… differently than she would interact with people. She’d always been a private person - stoic, for the most part. But for the creature seeing the world through her eyes, she had little to no secrets - the thing had, technically, shared in having intercourse with her. This had all been made possible by Jorn’s aura of assurance that it was all right, it was good to connect with it, as opposed to what exuded off of Logan - that self-loathing she’d always felt around him.
Their conversations were silent and mostly concerned sharing memories and feelings - voicing her insecurities of past decisions, only to have them reaffirmed in the form of glimpses of Mars or her father reminding her of wise words. More than once, she’d been on the brink of crying inside that casket, as the conversation had been a beautiful thing.
With this increasingly more intimate bond, she’d begun to feel… different. Stronger, faster - more aware. She imagined this must’ve been what Pupper would’ve felt if she were like the other hounds. But, as a trade-off, she’d noticed an increasing hunger for meat and a desire to eat more or less any critter she’d come across, perfectly natural, according to Jorn, who would inform her it only became a problem when there wasn’t any meat to go around. At that point, the symbiote would allow her to digest parts of it, degenerating the positives, but allowing her to sustain herself longer.
“Whaddaya say, girl? Should we head back? Bell rang a while ago-” Before she could finish her question for the hound, she saw something moving inside a pool in the distance. It was too early for the mists to begin building over the mires and, due to the deadness of this area, she doubted it might’ve been an animal. But there was definitely some form of movement under the surface of that distant, small pool of water… something writhing… something familiar.
She rose up and walked past her barrier of spears to watch it more closely. It was dark - darker than what she would’ve been able to see a week ago, but light enough for her to make out movement.
A whine from the hound preceded a communication from the symbiote - a feeling of immense danger, accompanied by a passing memory of Sitalii, of her running down the hallway as countless taps of feet against metal followed closely in her wake.
This… was Monstrum.