>>5898983>>5898987>>5899029>>5899106>>5899138“No, it’s okay,” you tell the nigh-identical attendants. “I don’t… The company is nice.”
You can’t tell if Nym and Devi’s smiles widen any further, or really reach their eyes, but they nod and both bid you ‘goodnight’. Night, though? Is it, really night? You can’t be sure. Your muscles are weary, head spinning as you speak the magic word to close the door before you… And yet, you aren’t tired. The <Goodberries>, the energy of the celestial sphere, they both invigorate you to the utmost, suspending you above the dark sea of sleep on a raft of wakefulness. Even with the patterned window to the outside closed, the everpresent nightlight of the moon’s own eerie, bone-white soil keeps you awake, as does the deep black sky—blacker even than night, pierced here and there by the staring eyes of scattered stars in unfamiliar configurations and at odd angles.
You busy yourself in watching your little fairy-bird friend fly about, exploring the room.
“You sure aren’t tired, are you… Uh…”
You were going to say ‘boy’, but that’s a habit from keeping Muffins close for so many years. IS this animal a ‘boy’? a ‘girl’? A… wiuligar, or some aviary equivalent of the intersexual aspect? Do Luna’s cultivated forests play host to such thing? You’d ask the attendants, but you’re a little self-conscious that, even with their names, you have no idea what sex Nym or Devi are, either. You try to brainstorm a neutral name, considering several possibilities—from the ironically intimidating to the blandly simplistic, to something a bit more obscure and meaningful. You haven’t yet settled on one, though when the unnamed bird’s buzzing and squeaking is accompanied by a thump and rattle as it impacts the window.
“Hey!” you cry. “Calm down. Here, let me open that…”
You do so, and before you can even register it, the bird is gone, up and away. You watch its glimmer flit and flicker erratically about as it zooms off in search of—one assumes—food or drink or entertainment. Well, that’s fair enough—it’s not like you have nectar here for it. You sense, in your fey-touched heart, that it will return. Maybe by then, with a rested mind and body, you will settle on a name.
