fandomtownies | Furnado Animal Shelter; Sunday [09/17].

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Furnado Animal Shelter; Sunday [09/17].

Sidon had been absent quite consistently these past few weeks...maybe even these past few months, really...because things were getting worrisomely more intense back home, around the Calamity, around Zora's Domain, around Vah Ruta. And naturally, it was his princely duty to be there for his people, especially if things were finally ramping up to the crisis that had been having over their heads for the past one hundred years. The monsters were relentless, the blood moons more frequent, the evil ichor swirling around the castle more vibrant and spreading than ever. Was it finally time for Calamity Ganon to make his final strike to destroy Hyrule entirely, once and for all?

Needless to say, these distractions had definitely lead him to be neglecting Furnado quite a bit lately. And while he could not feel bad about being where he needed to be, there was a part of him that realized that his duties were swaying him hard in another direction, and he had to give Hyrule the absolutely most of his attention.

Which was why he came back to the island today to get in touch with Prompto and had for him a proposal: the two of them went way back, further than most, when one considered their varying time disparity, but no matter how much time had passed, there would always be a firm place in their hearts for the animal shelter, where so much of their friendships had grown over their time as students here. He knew Prompto himself had a lot on his plate these days, with supporting his family and everything, but he also knew that the animals at Furnado were always a part of that family, too. So he could think of no other person better for the job of keeping an eye on the place while he was gone than him.

And Prompto was also uniquely able to truly understand what it was like to have a complete apocalyptic destruction of your home hanging over your shoulders, as well.

So there was barely any hesitation from Prompto to agree and promise to do Sidon and Zack proud. Granted, he wasn't really sure this was wise, but, well, Noctra was growing more and more her own capable person by the day, and he was sure he could find somewhere to slide the business of the place into his schedule, especially with the help of the vet.

He did have one condition to his acceptance, though: that should Sidon find that he needed help, he wouldn't hesitate to ask for it.

And that was a promise that Sidon was more than happy to make, clapping a hand on Prompto's shoulders (without even knocking him forward too much, even!) with a laugh and an agreement, and then he went to show him all the finer details involved in running the shelter as opposed to just working there.

Furnado is open!

[[ and this will very likely be Sidon's last post for a while, as I finally nudge him toward going through canon, huzzah! ]]

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"I'm not sure what a Stitcher is," Prompto admitted, trying his very best to not swallow too obviously at that, "but I think I'm okay with that."

And as for the other part? Even Prompto could tell that it was a pretty sore subject for Liliana, so he just sort of smiled apologetically for asking, even though, technically speaking, she's the one who brought it up.

"I don't really know that much about them," he shrugged a little. "I know around here, angels and daemons kind of go hand in hand, and while I know a lot about daemons..." There was a pause there, and swallowing became a little harder again, "...the closest thing we have to what I've heard about angels are probably the Messengers."

Because we were working off the English translation with this one.

"And there's Angelgard, which was the sacred isle said to be the gathering place of the gods, but...." He shook his head a little. "That's more Gladio's thing than it is mine. All that stuff just goes right over my head."

Even when they were actively interacting with and fighting the gods, there was always a part of Prompto that was very much feeling waaaay out of his league.

....to be fair, Prompto felt way out of his league in most things, though.

Edited 2023-09-17 22:22 (UTC)

Liliana was all for fighting gods, though. At least actual gods. Those were rarer than most people thought; most of the beings known as gods were actually just pre-Mending planeswalkers ~~in her corner of the Multiverse anyway~~. Hell, she'd been a goddess on several planes. It had been fun for awhile, but she'd eventually gotten bored and wandered off.

At least she hadn't been in the habit of creating planes just to be worshipped. Looking at you, Nicol Bolas.

She looked at him, noting all those little swallows, and understood far better than she wanted to admit where such things came from. "Demons," she said quietly, "are not the province of necromancers." She was also unclear about the difference between daemons and demons, but she hadn't really gotten a rundown on them. "Demons are evil creatures, cruel and vicious and delighting in their power. Necromancers and demons exist independent of one another."

Sure, Liliana currently had some stuff going on with demons, but that was a her thing, not a necromancer thing.

"My home plane of Dominaria had a problem with demons for a very long time." She shrugged. "Still might, I just haven't been back home to know."

"Well," said Prompto quickly, "not all daemons."

Yeah, yeah, yeah, technically Hellboy was a demon not a daemon, but Prompto, in all his time here, still didn't seem able to make a distinction.

"But Eos was like that for a long time, too," said Prompto, with a little bit of a tired sigh. Even if it had been over a year now since that all ended, you didn't shake off that kind of darkness and oppression and exhaustion that easily, especially not when things kept happening to constantly remind you of it and make it real all over again. "But we....took care of it."

The next pause was a little longer, his brows knitting with a frown.

"I hope. None of us have been able to get back there for a year now, we have no idea how things are going, but...after I left, everything seemed...fine."

"Mmmm," Liliana hummed, not willing to concede #NotAllDemons. Maybe once she was done betraying and murdering the four who owned her soul.

She shifted her chair a bit, much to the further disapproval of the poor kitten who had just been falling asleep, enough that she could reach over to Prompto and offer him a reassuring pat on the arm if he didn't object. "Did you leave anyone you trust behind?" she asked, leaving off the part where trust was generally a fool's game and how people changed, especially when your back was turned.

You're welcome, Prompto.

Yes, okay, fair point, what what if he told you that this daemon liked cats, Liliana?

That had kind of been what ultimately won Prompto over, really.

Also, like Prompto would ever objected to reassuring pats, considering he was pretty much a puppy in weird scientific clone experiment form. He gave her a soft, grateful sort of smile.

"Yeah," he said, "the people we left there are really capable and strong. I mean, you don't survive something like the Long Night without coming out pretty much prepared for anything. So I'm sure they're doing fine. When we all got kind of....sucked back here, I guess, it was staggered; Iggy actually came last, and he said things were starting to head toward restoration pretty solidly. And then there was....well, there's a thing that happens here sometimes, where, like, loved ones come back from the dead?"

So, like, relevant to Liliana's interests, he supposed?

"But, like, only for the weekend. And we got Noct." Surely, they had mentioned Noctis to her, right?? "And he sort of reassured us all that everything was going fine, he's, like, watching from the heavens or something like that. Which, I mean, is good, because it's one thing to save a world and then get booted from it, but it would really suck to sacrifice yourself for the world and then have it not even work."

Mmm. Even stopped clocks were right twice a day. She'd remain wary.

...Though, honestly, she'd meet Hellboy, declare him a red mana demon and dismiss him as a concern. Annoying, probably, but not through-and-through evil. Something more along the lines of what the Rakdos might summon for a weekend block party than, say, a Lord of the Pit. Or a Kothophed.

She blinked at Prompto several times. "The only thing I knew about this was that the Long Night had been a decade without daylight and many wandering monsters and...Noct?...had been sleeping in a crystal. So, I honestly have no idea what happened. Ignis and I haven't talked about your home at all."

And she had no plans of ever discussing hers at all!

"Oh," said Prompto, returning those blinks in a way that someone might think they'd decided to communicate suddenly in morse code. "....really?"

It was hard to tell what he was more surprised about, that Liliana had only gotten those little tidbits or that she hadn't gotten any of them from Ig--

--nope, no, it was definitely the first one, now that he thought about it, and he shook his head a little and sighed and sort of wanted to give Ignis a little shake by the shoulders, except, obviously, he would never.

He might ask Gladio to do it, though.

"Eeesh," he then said, making a face, because he was probably the least equipped to be the one to fill in all those gaps. "Uhh, well, there's....there's definitely a lot more to it than just that. I honestly wouldn't even know where to start. But...Noctis was the Last King of Lucis, and he was destined to save Eos from the Starscourge, that's the stuff that the daemons come from and turned the planet into the Long Night. And me, Iggy, and Gladio, we were his Crownsguard, sworn to serve and protect him..."

Oh, no, Lili, now look what you've done. Prompto was starting to get a little wibbly, though he tried to smile through it. He was trying not to blink, otherwise those tears that were gathering in his eyes might actually start falling, and then what would she think of him? She came in just to get stuff for her cat, and was getting a big sentimental softie Prompto instead....

"...ever at his side..."

Maybe the soft laugh he tried would help bolster him against getting too emotional, too. Probably not, but worth a shot...

"Kinda hard to do, you know, when he's trapped in a crystal, but, eventually, he came back, we stormed the city that had been taken from us, fought the god trying to stop us, and then sent Noct in to face the immortal asshole who started this whole thing, and..."

A shrug.

"That kind of brings us up to a year ago, when we all started showing up back here. I didn't even get to see how the battle finished. All of a sudden, there was just this blinding burst of white light, I covered my eyes, and when I opened them again, I was back here for the first time in ten years, only it had only been a few months that had passed by here. A couple weeks later, Gladio showed up, and then Ignis. I mean, it kind of made sense for me, I've got a really deep history here, and it turns out, my girlfriend was actually pregnant, so I kind of feel like, now that I'd done what we were meant to back on Eos, I was needed here now, but it felt like kind of a bum deal for them, you know?"

Oh no. There was wibbling. Liliana gave him a few more patpatpats in a futile attempt to be comforting, and eyed the cat as a possible weapon in the face of tears. The cat looked back up at her as if it knew what she was thinking, and promptly leapt down from her lap with a disdainful tail swish. It hadn't gotten to eat Sidon, it definitely wasn't about to be sniffled at.

Miserable creature. Liliana was proud of it. This is why cats were the absolute best of all creature types. Not counting zombies, of course.

She took a moment to be quiet and consider her words, which on a scale of Liliana Vess was the emotional equivalent of hugs and kisses. For example, she didn't shrug and say, 'Oaths were made to be broken,' so, like, this was some top-notch compassion right here. "I...understand," she said slowly. "What it is like to lose...everything. To watch your home burn. Become profaned, as laughable as it is for me to use that word. To be flung away and not know what happened to those you left behind."

And she knew what it was like to go back and find only a ruin. But she wasn't going to mention that to him.

"It sounds like you left a world healing. And, as a former healer myself, I can promise you that no healing ever goes smoothly. There will be bumps and pain and days when they backslide. But if you left a good foundation for healing...and someone you trust to guide it...then it will. It will never be what it was, though. And perhaps it is a kindness, that you are here instead. So that you can focus on building your own lives, rather than trying to pick up your old ones in a world that has changed without you."

Not that she knew anything about any of that. Beyond, like, hypothetically.

Edited 2023-09-18 00:03 (UTC)

Funny that Liliana should liken the word profaned to being laughable, because that, in particular, as he looked down at the counter in front of him and listened carefully to her words, seemed to force out a dry laugh of his own.

But that helped so that, when she was finished, he could look over at her with a grateful smile and a nod. "That's pretty much what Noct said, too," he noted, that smile going a little crooked and fond and wistful and sad all in one. "When he was here. A lot of stuff about us having to give her up to save her..."

Then, there was a pause, as he considered Liliana carefully, thoughtfully, blue eyes searching her face as he tried to decided whether to say anything more, but, well, with a response like that, he almost felt he owed it to her now.

"It made sense," he said, "for me. Gladio's started to come around lately, especially after that visit. But Iggy?" He shook his head a little. "Hard to tell with that guy. He definitely likes to keep his cards close to his chest, you know?"

Really, if she didn't know already, it was probably good for her to go in with that warning.

Then, he broke out a real grin, a genuine one, not one of those soft, squishy ones meant to cover up everything else.

"The food makes it worth it, though," he added.

It was good to know!

Liliana liked to have a decoy hand, that she held out for everyone to see and admire while keeping her real cards as hidden as possible. So hidden, hopefully no one would even notice she had them at all!

This was gonna be just blue skies and clear sailing. Zero problems ahead.

"He does make truly excellent food," she said with a laugh - a laugh hopefully bright enough that Prompto would miss the swap between that hidden hand and the obvious one, as she closed down that moment of ~~weakness~~ ~~vulnerability~~ and pretended that it had never been. Or, at least, that it had been less than what it was. "Your King sounds smart and not just because he agrees with me. Also, I refuse to make it a habit to praise royalty, so you know I think so."

"Oh, no," Prompto assured her, and the grin growing a little bit showed that not only did Liliana not have to worry too much about any cards that Prompto may have gotten a glimpse or two at today, but that she didn't have to worry about him getting his cards all soaked with his own squishiness (well, never say never, but they seemed to have cleared this hand, anyway). "He was a total dumbass, more often than not," said, of course, with the utmost love and adoration, even a little bit of a wistful sigh, "but I guess maybe those ten years in that crystal gave him at least a little bit of insight."

"Your king sounds smart, in this one particular instance, wherein he agrees with me," Liliana said with a laugh, appreciating them quickly maneuvering away from danger.

She didn't have a phone to summon the other boyos if he'd started crying. Which meant she would have been stuck there, awkwardly patting him, at least until she came up with a suitable excuse to leave. And he only got that much consideration because of his connection to Ignis.

"So, what else should I know about him?" she asked, changing the subject yet even further. She was enjoying learning a great deal about him while returning only a pittance of information about herself. It was a game he might not know they were playing, but the important part was that she was winning.

Sidon was still nearby! Liliana could just make the big friendly sharkman take care of it!

Or literally just toss him in the puppy pen, Prompto would not mind.

"Oh, you know," he waved a dismissive hand, "the usual. He likes long walks on the beach, pina coladas, and getting caught in the rain. He is not into yoga, but he does have half a brain."

Prompto.

"Figuratively speaking," he added, hastily, because, uhhh...necromancer. "Not, like, an actual half a brain."

Liliana glanced down at her gown. Satin was not particularly water friendly. "Even with half a brain, he's a better conversationalist than roughly three-quarters of the Multiverse," she snorted. "I'll add 'getting caught in the rain' next to 'morning jogs around the island' as hobbies he can enjoy by himself. What are pina coladas and yoga?"

Sorry, Prompto. No one has made a concerted effort to introduce her to pop culture.

You know what, though? Bad pop culture reference or no, she was interested! And that had Prompto grinning (even if the mention of morning jogs had him rolling his eyes a little with a faint groan).

"A pina colada is a drink," he said, "all pineappley and tropical and fruity. And yoga's a type of exercise and, like, meditation practice that involves stretching..."

And now he had to decide which was better, waiting and seeing how that actually played put, or fessing up. But Liliana had been nice, and Iggy had had a hard enough time with things like this,so his grin turned apologetic once again.

"I actually don't know if he likes any of those things," he admitted. "They're all just from a song."

Nice on a curve of Prompto, maybe. She hadn't been actively harmful and for some people, that was enough.

She raised a slim black brow, mentally erasing those points she'd just scored from her tally of things she knew. Rude to Lilis.

"I suppose I shall just have to find out for myself," she said. While keeping her edge, obviously, it hardly as fun the other way. "And see how long I can keep him believing I think his personality comes from a song."

For Prompto, not actively harmful was usually everything.

He chuckled a little bit, thinking that he was looking forward to seeing how that might go, but then he tilted his head and considered Liliana a bit thoughtfully before adding, "Isn't that half the fun of it, anyway? Getting to know what they like, discovering all the little quirks and details of what they like, what they don't, what they're all about? And, I mean, I know he can be a tough nut to crack, but...knowing him as long as I have? He'll make it worth your while." He snorted, just faintly. "He can't stand wasting time."

Oh Prompto. She was going to let you down so hard.

"Were you not planning to tell him everything you learned about me from this conversation?" Liliana asked archly. "Whereas I must do all my digging myself."

She was fairly certain the fun of dalliances was the dallying, honestly. Anything else moved it into relationship territory. Which this wasn't, for reasons.

"Tell him?" asked Prompto, now laughing a little. "And miss the rare opportunity to actually have something to hang over his head for a change? No way. Not unless he can offer me something better."

Problem was that it would...not take much for him to be swayed, but they'd cross that bridge when they came to it.

This was what Liliana got for not having friends. She had no idea that that was a thing. She looked at Prompto with surprise before laughing, adjusting her tally even more in her favor.

"How does that work exactly?" she asked. "Just make little comments about how that reminds you so much about something Liliana said the other day with no further explanation?"

"I mean, sure," said Prompto, with a shrug, and a faintly crooked grin, "that's one way to do it. You don't even have to go that specific, either. I could just....mention that you stopped in, and then that's it. That's all. You leave it there, and they drive themselves crazy trying to figure out how to fill in that blank."

And they used to do it to him all the time, so, in a way, he felt like this was finally some payback a long time coming.

If Liliana had known friendship had involved mind games, she might have been better at it.

"Well, you'll have to keep me informed how it goes," she decided. "It's only fair, after all."

How? Listen, that part didn't matter. It just was. Trust her. That never ended poorly for anyone!

"How it goes for both of you, I should mention." Since she had a feeling that Ignis would be harder to spin up than merely mentioning her name.

...And if he wasn't, wouldn't that be fascinating to learn?

Edited 2023-09-18 14:40 (UTC)

And ass-slapping, Lili! Don't forget all the ass-slapping!

Prompto chuckled again, and he nodded, although, really, let's be honest, this was going to be far less of a mind game on his side because he would probably break and want to gush about how nice he thought Liliana was well before Ignis would even twitch.

"I'll definitely keep you updated," he promised.

Yes, but she was unfairly banned from ass-slapping as a method of bonding, sob. ;_;

Also, Prompto had a very low threshold of 'nice,' didn't he?

"How very convenient we've turned out to be neighbors, then," she said, since texting remained outside her knowledge. "Plenty of opportunity to stop by and offer delightful updates on how that's going."

No offense, Prompto, but she agreed with the above narrative and was giving you one (1) conversation. And that was because she was rounding up.

Or maybe, just maybe....Liliana could be a lot nicer than she herself suspected?

(A little of Column A, a...okay, a lot of Column A, maybe a smidge of Column B? Perhaps? Just a little?)

"Plus," Prompto pointed out, certainly not one to think that he alone could ever be enough of a draw for a person, even if he did come with juicy Ignis gossip, "we got kittens."

Furnado Animal Shelter; Sunday [09/17].

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