rekindleme | To look back upon it

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To look back upon it

Who: Ramza Beoulve, some memories, and you!
Where: Citywide, but particularly Housing Building #1 and the market
When: All day on May 30th
Summary: A catch-all for the memory event! Ramza's been having some pretty unusual dreams lately, drawn from the memories of others. And he's starting to gather that others are likely seeing his own...
Warnings: Memories of familial disdain, death, kidnapping... let's be honest, Ramza's life wasn't sunshine and rainbows.

They weren't the most grisly of dreams he'd had, but the images had burned into his mind with impeccable clarity: Massacre. Betrayal. Confrontation. Elation. Sights and sensations he'd all seen and felt in his fair share yet in worlds unknown... and with names disquietingly familiar.

He knew well enough that the memories weren't his own. The question was whether others would come to recall his.

Ramza had done well in keeping himself out of sight for the first day or two- the last thing he needed were questions about battle or blasphemy when he'd worked for more than a half-year to free himself from the shadows he'd hoped to leave behind in Ivalice!- but he couldn't keep himself out of the eyes of his friends forever any more than he could cloister himself forever.

Besides, he had his guesses for the owners of the lost memories that drifted his way. And if they saw his in kind, they deserved answers. Or perhaps he simply hoped he could exonerate himself from the doubts they no doubt had of him now.

And either way, he was running out of groceries. He'd just... spend a little extra time in the building's lobby and the market square today and see what came of it.

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Given everything that had happened, and the way dreams tended to work in any case, Davesprite felt that a number of weird dreams was pretty much just to be expected. Except most of them, he usually had some idea of how his brain had cooked them up, and this he didn't. Didn't seem to belong to him, even if it seemed strikingly similar to some of his own memories. Except for who was involved.

The obvious thing to do would be to just ask Ramza when he saw him, only Davesprite wasn't sure how that kind of conversation was going to go at all. 'So I might've seen part of your history, my bad. Mind explaining what gets people transformed into floating skeletons in your world?' Yeah, sure. Great opener.

Still, when he spotted Ramza in the market place, he didn't turn and go the other way like he'd half-meant to. Obviously having a cat around had done nothing for stifling his curiosity gland. "Hey," he called, raising a hand. "How're the goods looking today?"

It had gotten to the point where Ramza not only found Davesprite's appearance less than unusual, but he was growing accustomed to his ways of speaking as well. But, even so, for all the oddities and curiosities he had seen since his arrival, only in his dreams had he seen other such brightly-colored, almost inscrutable strangeness.

And, even as soon as he'd awoken, he knew those dreams were not his own. The rightful owner was easy enough to guess; the bizarre happenings and meanings, on the other hand, he was hopeless to cipher out.

Even with Davesprite right in front of him, Ramza hardly knew where to begin. But a greeting would do for now.

"I will keep," he replied as he approached. "Though I... hope I haven't troubled you, either."

It wasn't exactly subtle, but the sooner they could acknowledge the elephant in the room, the better.

Honestly the best thing to do, considering Davesprite'd sooner skirt around the subject as long as possible left to his own devices.

"Troubled? Naw." Even if he wanted to shake out his wings and get rid of the feeling that someone was poking where they shouldn't, since Ramza clearly wasn't referring to just being around Davesprite. And if Davesprite didn't know what had brought the dream on, he figured it was pretty unlikely that Ramza had any more of an idea. "I've been around, watched some calamari try interpretive dance, got into whole piles of messes at the same time, that barely even registered." He's seen some shit, man. Even if he wasn't quite that jaded, taking a breath and letting it out before he spoke again. "Guessing you got a look at some of that, though."

For his delivery as much as his style of speech, Ramza sometimes-- often times had difficulty ciphering out which of Davesprite's tales were humorous yarns and which he was meant to take to heart. For the strangeness of the world he'd seen in those dreams- however little of it he had glimpsed- he wouldn't be writing off the notion of fanciful performing squid.

He wished he'd seen something so whimsical, anyway. He shook his head in reply.

"Naught of the sort, though words fail me in speaking what I saw."

Still, he'd try; and as he peered off aside- more into space and nothing than at anything in Saeng Seong or the world- the image had stuck with him surprisingly well.

"...Some manner of black knight, twisted with power; and the fear in the air as bestial shape and divine might overtook him..."

Well, there are some whimsical squid around. They're just not the ones he was talking about, so that wouldn't have been a huge improvement on the whole.

Davesprite still, feathers beginning to fluff up after a moment, wings shifting up. "…Jack Noir," he said. A phantom pain twinged in his wing, and he pulled them back in tightly, talking to fill up the space and ignore the feelings the memory brought back. "Wow. Talk about shitty memories, that's not even near the top of the heap. Must've done a whole lotta digging for that one. Don't think he was even a knight, man, knight would've had more of a concept of fair play if anything in there did, probably not, or half of all the shit that happened wouldn't have gone down in the first place. Like him getting the power."

"An enemy of yours, I presume," he spoke back with an attentive nod; though his gaze was still distant and unfocused, as though in the blurred shapes of passerby he hoped to recall the rest of the memory's details. But a few words swiftly pulled Ramza from his recollections and his gaze focused back on Davesprite's shades.

Knights. Fair play. It'd have brought a bitter laugh were it not for the scowl. Well... at least Davesprite probably didn't see those horrid moments of his. His voice nearly sounded defeated when the words left him, a hard-learned and wearying lesson from his own life.

"Don't mistake title for honor."

It was a few seconds' pause before he spoke again. His own rumination was well enough, but another set of eyes upon it left him uneasy. "...You saw a remembrance of mine, did you not...?"

"Final boss and all that jazz, yeah." And just generally a huge pain to fight. Or get utterly defeated by, but he doesn't intend to go back their.

Davesprite snorted at that, lips twitching, and looked down for a moment. "Nah. hard lesson to forget once it gets all ballsed up." The knights on Skaia's battlefield probably did whatever it was they were supposed to do, but when the whole thing was rigged, either way… what did that matter, in the end?

He leaped on the change of subject with a glee only equal to the discovery of a fresh chip packet when he'd thought they were all out. "Oh, yeah! Crazy setting, looking kinda like someone zombified a ship or something. Hella weird captain, if that's what she was, had that whole Pirates thing going on except without the moonlight, just because she could. Still freaky as."

"The High Seraph..."

'Final boss' wasn't a bad term for her either, come to think of it... the last of the challenges he had faced in his world, as well as the one who masterminded and commanded the demons he had faced.

"...She was the last, wretched sight I glimpsed in Ivalice before I was sent here. She and my sister..."

A sister who never quite left his mind, for that matter, and whom he hoped against hope he would find well upon his return. Or-- better yet-- that she should come here and find some peace and safety. After all- all politics aside- he wasn't even certain if there was any life left within them to live, back in Ivalice.

"If only she had revealed herself sooner. We'd run afoul far too many of such fiends in human guise."

Davesprite nodded, flicking his wings, disquieted. "Pretty shitty thing to have for your last sight of home. You think she's okay?" There didn't seem like there was any way of knowing, not from what he'd seen.

"Ain't that always the way, though. They know they're sure as hell not going to get results if they just let people know what's their deal from the get-go. Can't imagine what it'd be like if the place was riddled with things like that." He hesitated for a moment, then nodded and let his lips quirk up. "Pretty impressive you managed to get up to the leader, though."

And there, at last, came the reminder of the final, miserable mystery from his homeworld. His mood sunk, and with it, so did his expression and his shoulders.

"...I do not know. I know not even if I will be alive upon my return."

Davesprite's second statement barely even registered, and it was a long, pensive pause before Ramza finally addressed it. "You may idly speak such words, but I'm not without my doubts... between the stones in the snow fiends and the transformation talismans, I wonder if those same trouble lie waiting to greet me here."

He couldn't help fluffing up a bit at Ramza's reaction, his own shoulders rising- but it wasn't as though he could've known, was it? (But he could have made an educated guess, considering the ship looked more like a ghost ship than anything else. Not something inspiring thoughts of return journeys.)

"Can't be," he said after a few moments, "that'd be the shittiest end to that tale."

He frowned, folding his arms across his chest. "Doesn't seem like such a long shot," he acknowledged, after a few moments. "I doubt we're about to be left to fend for ourselves without any help here, though."

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To look back upon it

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