kali

NIGHT? ...The English word NIGHT?

The man only spoke once, before he turned and his attention was taken up by someone else, so Kali's decided that she's misheard. Aincrad has no lack of diversity in languages, so a word can be pronounced one way but be written and mean another. She follows closely behind 'NIGHT,' and appearing to look about the colorful gathering in mild curiosity, she instead puzzles over this: if you were living in a house with another person, would you or would you not forget about the things within it?

The kitchen is just as much of a relief as closing the front door had been. Small, warm, and cozy, her fluffy friend's valiant efforts to escape its fate of becoming a cat burrito for the next half hour instantly weaken, and when Kali peers at it from above the blanket, she's treated to the adorable sight of its tiny pink nose twitching as it eyes the plates laid out on the kitchen counters. 

"I'm NIGHT, by the way."

(Oh. It really is NIGHT.)

"I figured I should've mentioned that sooner, but... --also, I didn't catch your name."

It's a pretty word. A thousand pretty imageries for a pretty girl, but it's vague in its abundance -- more a general idea than a unique identifier. However, it would be the peak of hypocrisy for Yue Hua to internally question another's naming choices, not to mention, as a stranger in her own house, so she settles for a gentle prod. 

"Ch'ang Yue Hua." Her expression doesn't change, but her voice takes on a friendly tone. "Or Kali. Just call me Kali. No big deal -- the burden normally falls on the one asking the favor."

When NIGHT turns away from the stove, it's to the cat now peering hopefully up at her. Kali doesn't quite notice this, but when she feels its head move toward her hand, she resumes her favorite gesture of rubbing its chin. "Mm. I forgot this little guy's name, but he was in a missing pet poster and I spent the better part of the day tracking him down. He ran away from home and I suppose he liked the rebellious act too much, because after rejecting all the offered cat food, I only caught him when he decided to steal my dinner." A troublesome chase, but the fact that she didn't come out of it with fresh scratches made it all too easy to look back on it with mild amusement. "He looks so sweet now though, doesn't he? Want to pet him? I've been holding onto him all this time -- promise he doesn't bite."

Her answer comes in the form of the... pet slime? bobbing away from the foyer on its own accord. In a very expressive manner. It partly vanishes behind a door, where she can still see part of it visibly deflating, then hops back into sight moments later, now a quarter of its original size.

The rest disperse, leaving her with the woman she greeted earlier. 

"Uh-- come in."

"Th-thanks!" 

Kali gratefully shuts the door behind her. In a somewhat delayed reaction, she shivers. She didn't realize how cold it had been outside until she had actually taken shelter, and the thought spurs her to free her cat from its quickly dampening entrapment before speaking any further. Immediately, it starts wriggling in her grasp. "Kitty, kitty," she holds its front paws together with one hand and follows its line of sight to the space heater on the opposite wall of the living room. More than the concern of letting a missing cat loose in a house she barely knows, she can't let it warm up too fast. "Stay still."

From her inventory comes a pair of dry towels, but before she wraps her cat in them, Kali thinks for a moment then turns to NIGHT. "Do you have something warm for him to drink?"

the world parts at your heel.

//escorting only

The branch is snapped into a manageable length, shaved, then carved into a thin flat skewer. It's left to soak in a pail of boiled water along with a dozen similarly made implements, a process which is supposed to take half an hour. In the meantime, the meat and vegetables are generously seasoned and cut into uniform slices, and Kali digs through her inventory for a pair of ceramic bowls. One for her, another for the herbalist.

NIGHT? ...The English word NIGHT?

The man only spoke once, before he turned and his attention was taken up by someone else, so Kali's decided that she's misheard. Aincrad has no lack of diversity in languages, so a word can be pronounced one way but be written and mean another. She follows closely behind 'NIGHT,' and appearing to look about the colorful gathering in mild curiosity, she instead puzzles over this: if you were living in a house with another person, would you or would you not forget about the things within it?

The kitchen is just as much of a relief as closing the front door had been. Small, warm, and cozy, her fluffy friend's valiant efforts to escape its fate of becoming a cat burrito for the next half hour instantly weaken, and when Kali peers at it from above the blanket, she's treated to the adorable sight of its tiny pink nose twitching as it eyes the plates laid out on the kitchen counters. 

"I'm NIGHT, by the way."

(Oh. It really is NIGHT.)

"I figured I should've mentioned that sooner, but... --also, I didn't catch your name."

It's a pretty word. A thousand pretty imageries for a pretty girl, but it's vague in its abundance -- more a general idea than a unique identifier. However, it would be the peak of hypocrisy for Yue Hua to internally question another's naming choices, not to mention, as a stranger in her own house, so she settles for a gentle prod. 

"Ch'ang Yue Hua." Her expression doesn't change, but her voice takes on a friendly tone. "Or Kali. Just call me Kali. No big deal -- the burden normally falls on the one asking the favor."

When NIGHT turns away from the stove, it's to the cat now peering hopefully up at her. Kali doesn't quite notice this, but when she feels its head move toward her hand, she resumes her favorite gesture of rubbing its chin. "Mm. I forgot this little guy's name, but he was in a missing pet poster and I spent the better part of the day tracking him down. He ran away from home and I suppose he liked the rebellious act too much, because after rejecting all the offered cat food, I only caught him when he decided to steal my dinner." A troublesome chase, but the fact that she didn't come out of it with fresh scratches made it all too easy to look back on it with mild amusement. "He looks so sweet now though, doesn't he? Want to pet him? I've been holding onto him all this time -- promise he doesn't bite."

//ref.

Spoiler [level 1.]

Humans see Christmas.

Yue Hua sees a locked door barring her from her objective.

It's four hours into the night, tightly packed clouds raining down a heavy snowfall, and the ghost wears a small pout on her lips as she spins around in a small circle – searching for a familiar face she knows isn't there. At some point after she had inquired with the elderly man who lived alone in the corner lot, he must have gotten up, went for dinner at someone else's place, locked all the doors behind him. The pure white snow has since covered his tracks, and as much as she wants to be happy that the old widower isn't spending this eve alone, that now leaves her standing in a winter storm with quite the troublesome bundle in her arms.

Two fingers draw back the blanket just enough for a pair of ears and a fluffy striped head to poke through. "I can't leave you outside in this weather, kitty," she apologizes, then in cat language, she rubs the pad of her middle finger beneath her new companion's chin. "So you're sticking with me tonight."

She tugs the blanket back into place and lets her feet take her in a random direction away from the empty house.

In the morning, Taft will be up to its neck in snow. The people will spend the day shoveling it from their doors and the colorful banners dangling between the buildings will turn a uniform white until the sun melts it all away. But in this gray evening, the snowflakes pile into a tiny mountain atop the ghost's white hood, and she talks with her new friend and hopes her voice isn't carried away by the winds whistling in her ears, and she thinks she likes the feeling of sinking ankle-deep into the snow with every step. She leaves a visible trail behind her and peers at lit windows, stares back at empty roads.

She's not familiar with this city, so she goes to the brightest beacon she could find: a foreigner's settlement, if she were to guess from the way it contrasts the old European feel of the place, playing the cheesiest Christmas music she's heard in a long while.

The door is slightly ajar, she learns, because it swings open some before her third knock could land and it's the numbness from the cold that makes her stutter, "Oop," before she pushes it the rest of the way with a gentle nudge of her knee. Blinking fast against the light spilling out of the entryway, Kali shakes off her hood. "Hi. May I take–"

–shelter in your house a bit.

The floor is wet. The snow beneath her shoes is wet; there's a stream from the front door to the center of the road where the ground is darker than the rest. And there's a gelatinous blob about half her size in her face, and a tracksuited woman is behind it, clearly having been pushing it towards the door. A small group of partygoers gather behind her in a semicircle.

And Mariah Carey's All I Want for Christmas is You is playing.

"..."

The politeness in Kali's expression drains into a mix of concern, astonishment, and the face one makes when they aren't sure if they're the only person in the room who finds the comedian's awful joke funny.

“Um. Do you guys need help?”

| 超度我 |

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SSF

//

Relationships

//

//

"Hua. I also wanted you to be happy."

若以色见我 以音声求我 是人行邪道 不 不能见如来 一切有为法 如梦幻泡影 如露亦如电 应作如是观 非空非有 亦空亦有 不生法相 无所住 非空非有 亦空亦有 不生法相 无所住

Ch'ang Yue Hua  /  常月華
|   19 > 21 YRS OLD.  SHE/HER.  5'1".   |

Born in the early hours of spring. Died seven-odd years later. Grieving, still.

(

The younger of a pair of twins. She spent her early childhood with her fingers in her other half’s palm – the two of them inseparable, until one day she walked through the threshold of their home and fell. Short of breath, unable to move her legs. Her mother found her, and spent the drive to the doctor's office tucking her hair behind her ear, comforting her, and the drive back in utter silence. 

Three months later, the girl was living under her grandparents' care.

Within reason, they gave her everything she asked for.

And they expected nothing of her. 

And for many years, the girl smiled and closed her eyes and life went on. Nevermind the questions simmering beneath. Nevermind the estrangement, for her other half was still attending the same school as her and her father appeared in the television every night to read the weather report. Her parents had made a decision.

She became the girl in her class who passed her subjects entirely at the teachers' mercy, but who simply did not care, but who still overshadowed her genius older twin's popularity because she was indiscriminately friendly and never studying meant she always had the free time to go out after class. She made extremely disorganized diary entries her outlet. Then she picked up creative writing classes, and dropped halfway through with no complaints from her benefactors, who were unable to secure a full refund. The same went for theater, and every art that happened to draw her mild interest. Her fickle nature was a 'topic for later.'

Seasons came and went. The topic of 'archaeology' found its way into her diary entries. Her legs stiff beneath her. She scribbled it out.

On her seventeenth birthday, her sibling mailed her a copy of Shakespeare for Dummies. The girl read it in a day, and remembering their passion for overanalyzing dead men's words, she opened a notebook to a blank page. It stayed blank until she folded it back up and wished she hadn't sent them edible flowers. 

A blot on the canvas, its ink slowly spreading outward in an uneven circle. A tendency was rooted in a feeling. The feeling was a sum of more than one part. The feeling couldn't be described in a single word, a single concept, but it had been a decade, and the letters were in plain sight of her.

It was the generosity. It was the shaky handwriting. It was the yearly rite, a dead person was visited for the purpose of the living and not the other way around. It was her other half being someone she didn't share a destiny with being someone less than her other half being someone as equally bitter and resentful being the one who didn't stop the fight that mutually ceased their communication but kept them sending presents to each other on birthdays. 

And somewhere in there was something that the decade never gave her.

On her eighteenth birthday, she heard the truth.

She spoke with her grandparents for a long time. Then she brought out her phone and dialed a saved number.

)

Dearest sister. Beloved daughter. Ch'ang Yue Hua.

i d   0 5 7 6 3

+ Fey
Ask in any settlement she's passed through and you'll find that its dwellers know her by name. The common thread among their narratives goes like this: fair-haired woman with a sword, appeared one day and resolved every bounty she could find, and poked about the place and its immediate zones in her free time, turning over dungeons, picking the crops in their fields, drinking their ale in the taverns. Like a mischievous spirit, she took as much as she gave and simply moved on without warning, leaving only the trace of where she had made camp in the nearby combat zone. Yue Hua understands Aincrad's emotions like no other and is almost a part of it herself.

+ Open-minded
Led a wanderer's lifestyle for six years. Came to realize just how limited one's perspective can be. You can't change a person's life without knowing where they're coming from, neither can you do it in an instant.

+ Resourceful
Aincrad removed her 'rich girl' status. Yue Hua's solution: earn it all back from zero. Find all the best ways to get EXP, then materials, then decent equipment, then Col -- the essentials to living a comfortable life in Aincrad -- take advantage of the loopholes in the system (ethically. ethically), use what little she had to get what she wanted in the early game, use as little of what she had to get what she wanted so she'll have plenty leftover for personal use. Profit.

- Sentimental
Excessively soft-hearted. Gets attached too easily, carries losses with her for years. Stories get to her, even when it's thrown into question whether they are fiction or reality. A lot of things turn out good in the end when people agree to help each other, but at what point does it begin to drag the giver down?

- Lost
Her purpose left her the moment 'she' died. The ghost has wandered the earth ever since, searching for something. Of course, without having ever gained anything that enabled her to define it, she doesn't know where to go and is eternally at square one.

- Melancholic
There's a weight to her shoulders that one should become aware of when they get to know her deeply. It permeates her every word and action. She keeps all her friends behind a certain line so they couldn't peek past that carefully woven veil.