Home to a variety of cultural backgrounds, Lamenolai is a citadel city with stone walls that encompass the whole city and stone 'guardians.' It is also home to the Headquarters of the Purines, an opposing organization to the Imperialists of Lambastia. (+2 Defense, +2 Fame)

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The Closet [P]

Postby Kestrel » 06/28/2017 2:44 AM

It was already June, and she still hadn’t touched the closet. She had vacuumed the floors, washed the windows, cleaned out all the cabinets and cupboards and dressers, polished the kitchen counters, scrubbed out the stove, changed all the bedsheets, straightened her desk. All of it, weeks and months ago.

But when the last chore had finished, Ro had found herself with a perfectly clean house, save one closet. She just couldn’t bring herself to do it. And so the weeks ticked by, and here she found herself, already into summer, staring down the last item in her spring cleaning task list.

She faced the closet door and sighed. "Well, might as well get started."

[9]
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Re: The Closet [P]

Postby Kestrel » 06/28/2017 2:44 AM

Ro was, by nature, tidy. But for some reason that had always broken down when it came to her closet. Her clothes would be meticulously folded and precisely organized in her drawers, her desk would display neat stacks of paper and plenty of open work space, her living room would be spotless, every cushion and every decoration in its rightful place. But her desk? It had been accumulating over a year’s worth of junk of forgotten, perhaps-useful items, of unwanted presents, of inconvenient truths. To place something into her closet was to condemn it to being uneasily forgotten.

So now, facing the unforgivingly plain face of the door, she couldn’t help but feel a little…anxious. She wasn’t sure what, exactly, had all been placed in there in the last year, but she knew that every one of those things were things she hadn’t known what to do with at the time, things she didn’t want to deal with. But now, she had to face them all, and all at once. Daunting, surely.

[10]
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Re: The Closet [P]

Postby Kestrel » 06/28/2017 2:45 AM

She nudged open the door, already dreading the worst. But after turning on the light, all that met her eyes…was a surprisingly small pile of stuff. She blinked. Not many things had the unfortunate fate of being shunted into the closet, so she hadn’t really looked in here in a while. Funny, how dread also enlarged problems in your mind.

Ro glanced over the pile. There were some extra umbrellas (she liked umbrellas, okay?), a fish tank (that had been an unfortunate experience), an array of scarves (no matter how many times she told Angela…), a hat or two (really, who would think those were attractive?), an old keyboard (she thought she had gotten rid of that ages ago), a fraying box of toys in the corner (were those from when she and Skye were children?), and a number of miscellaneous small items, scattered haphazardly throughout the room.

[11]
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Re: The Closet [P]

Postby Kestrel » 06/28/2017 2:46 AM

Ro frowned. Much of this stuff was dusty and old, and she did so dislike getting dirty. But there was no putting this off any more. Today, she’d cleaned out her closet, guaranteed. She sighed and bent her head towards one of the umbrellas. There must be at least half a dozen in here, which brought her up to at least a dozen total. At this point, she might as well make an umbrella collection.

An umbrella collection…, she mused, drawing all the umbrellas into one pile. Now that’s not really such a bad idea, is it?

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Re: The Closet [P]

Postby Kestrel » 06/28/2017 2:47 AM

But…an umbrella collection, really? What kind of person collected umbrellas, of all things? Stamps, sure. Sports cards, fine. Coins, excellent. But…umbrellas? Ro frowned at the seven umbrellas arranged in front of her. Maybe it was too…weird. Maybe she should just donate these extras to charity. And maybe some of her others, as well. Did she really need six umbrellas in use at one time?

She reached for one of them, but paused. This one was blue, with little umbrellas patterned on it. An umbrella-themed umbrella. It was silly…but Teresa had bought it for her. She had to keep it.

Just because it was from Teresa? a little voice asked. Ro felt herself warm ever so slightly, so she clenched her teeth. Of course she wouldn’t keep the umbrella just because it was from Teresa. Mouth drawn into a line, she pushed the umbrella off to the side. That’d start her trash pile.

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Re: The Closet [P]

Postby Kestrel » 06/30/2017 8:02 PM

She quickly placed the rest of the umbrellas into the same trash pile, albeit with some twinges of regret every time. Moving on to the rest of the clutter was much easier, and sending these items to the trash pile elicited little to no response. As she passed scarves and knickknacks and old notebooks from the closet to the pile (while diverting the books and the odd bag to a separate keep pile), she was careful to place them all a little off to the side of the original pile. And every time she placed a new object down, that little umbrella-themed umbrella kept glimmering at her, accusing her.

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Re: The Closet [P]

Postby Kestrel » 06/30/2017 8:02 PM

It was distracting, visually, emotionally. It was stuck in the corner of her mind as much as it was in the corner of her vision. And whenever she added another useless thing that nevertheless had some sentimental value stuck firmly to it—a doll she and Skye had once loved, a paperweight from a past vacation—the umbrella’s presence seemed to grow.

But she knew how to deal with things like this. She knew how to mute feelings like this. So she took a deep breath, paused her motions, closed her eyes. She thought about new paper and straight lines, rulers and wood pencils, erasers. She opened her eyes, fixated on the pile of unsorted items, and ignored that umbrella.

[15]
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Re: The Closet [P]

Postby Kestrel » 06/30/2017 8:02 PM

As she sorted (head turned purposefully to one side, gaze rarely straying), she considered what to do with her closet once she finished. She had never stored her clothes there—she much preferred them neatly folded and placed into drawers—and the few items that needed to be hung had been placed in the much smaller closet-space near her bed that—importantly—lacked a door. Really, all it had ever been was a home for abandoned objects that, for some reason or another, she refused to get rid of. The tiny size of her keep pile, which currently consisted of half a dozen books and maybe three other things, was testament to that. She supposed she could always keep it like that, but considering how much she had dreaded and delayed this year’s cleaning, that seemed like a decision that would only bring future annoyance. She set aside the issue for now—perhaps she’d use it as a supply storage, for backup equipment, extra writing tools, archived papers, and the like.

[16]
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Re: The Closet [P]

Postby Kestrel » 07/03/2017 9:27 PM

At last, lifting up a final scarf (how many had she found in this one closet?) she had whittled down the unsorted pile to just a single item—a picture, framed in an elegant, twisting black metal frame. She froze, the scarf’s great migration to the trash pile abruptly halted. Her eyes flicked to the umbrella that, for the last half of her sorting, she had oh-so-successfully put out of her mind.

The picture was of her and Teresa, out in front of their biggest collaboration, the Stierlman Theater. Ro would never had taken (or really, been assigned) that project if Teresa hadn’t insisted. Her style was straight, utilitarian, sleek, sturdy. She got assigned commercial offices and cargo bridges. Never arts buildings, never clients who called for twisting lines and graceful curves and awe.

It was, of course, her favorite project.

[17]
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Re: The Closet [P]

Postby Kestrel » 07/03/2017 9:28 PM

As these thoughts passed, memories and emotions flashing through her, the picture began to glow. Ro abruptly dropped the purple-and-orange striped scarf, whose thickness immediately snuffed out any glow.

Ro blinked several times. If she didn’t pride herself on the precision of her observations, she would’ve thought she had imagined it. Heartbeat rising in tempo, she gingerly lifted up a corner of the scarf and peered underneath.

Yes, that was definitely a glow. But it seemed not to align neatly with the edges of the picture, instead bulging in the center. She frowned and threw the scarf off. The glow was still expanding, flickering through the rainbow. She picked up the picture frame.

[18]
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Re: The Closet [P]

Postby Kestrel » 07/03/2017 9:35 PM

"Oh." It wasn't the picture. It was a feather, pressed flat against the floor. She picked it up, and it was soft, and flexible, like a real feather. But it had the finely-grained texture and the color of wood. And it was glowing.

"Why...?" she said softly, turning the feather and examining it more closely. She vaguely remembered buying this thing, but she couldn't quite place the circumstances. She'd come home with it, she recalled, and had been unable to understand why she'd bought it in the first place. Even know it eluded her. Sure, clearly it was special if it was glowing right now, but Ro figured she'd have remembered if it had been glowing when she first bought it. It was very strange looking, yes, but what had driven her to buy it...?

As she pondered, the glow intensified, until it wrapped her up in a multi-colored ball of light. The light flashed white, bright; Ro shut her eyes against the intensity. Then she disappeared.

[19]
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