Journal of a Rose

The Hills of Progress and a Forgotten Town

[The original date written was for two days after the last entry, but has since been scratched out and replaced with one written a few days later than that. Some of the ink is smudged by various small water...? stains, along with various dots and pools where a pen has been tapped and rested against the edges of the pages.]

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Y'know, I've been told by a few people that journaling your feelings is a great therapeutic way to not have to talk about them, but what they never told me was how hard it was going to be to write them all out. Not that writing out "I'm sad" or "I'm pissed off" is that difficult, but in this context words are very hard to put together just to paint the big picture. The whole day was shit to begin with, but this part of it I really had to put off writing about for my sake. But, I gotta start at some point, so...

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It was a very unassuming start to a trip, honestly. Based on my last update, yes we bugged Wayrren and he actually pried our biggest hint out of Igni! Though it opened a dangerous portal in the middle of my bedroom, but that's not too important. What was important was that it was a lead and the kicker: I got my memories back. They're not memories I enjoy, believe it or not. Actually, they're the absolute worst, but it wouldn't have been so bad if I had those in the first place instead of Igni of all people keeping them from me. What's weirder was once we found all this is that Iris and Irene were being oddly quiet...

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Right, so to be safe we decided to get a small... ish group together to investigate the portal. Naturally, at the time my hopes were wearing thin, so my expectations were low on what exactly we would find. Wayrren stayed behind to make sure the portal, which was rapidly expanding??? didn't eat the castle while we were gone. Cal, surprisingly, trusted me with a temporary leadership role which, in hindsight, was a terrible idea! I appreciated the trust and all but my man... I did an awful job... Next time that happens I might shave myself bald.

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I digress though. So...

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This nightmare spiral starts with a boobytrapped portal. Not your regular boobytrap with, say, a spike pit or giant pendulum blade, no, no. I mean a steep drop from a high height plummeting to our deaths!!! Which was absolutely awful!!! If you thought that was the first time I thought I would have died that day, you're sorely mistaken. Luckily, with Ib's quick thinking Ummi managed to catch me on the way down, so score 1 for me I guess...?

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The vibe was suprisingly mellow on the hike to the City of Light. At the time I didn't really know if we did actually find the Hills of Progress, so we mostly trekked through hills and shit. Y'know, like in the name? ... Eh, I tried.

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On the way there, we mostly just... hung out. Everyone kinda talked amongst themselves about their lives and all sorts of things, Cal messed with the fabric of the world at one point to make some slopes for some sleds Simon randomly spawned in. Everyone else raced down them and I hitched a ride on the back of a giant shapeshifting fox! Moriko, I think her name is? I dunno. It was fun, for what it was worth. We also stopped by the lake so they could see the isopods! I'm surprised no one wanted to sneakily take one home. Probably because of the other little creature we found, which I'll get to in a sec. I now realized I could have taken a pit stop by Tobias's tree while we were there... Ah, well, the next time I plan to go there I'll make sure to add that to my list of things to do. It would have been the first of two times anyway, so it's not like I didn't visit.

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Things start to get a little worse from here, the world started looking lifeless and corrupted the closer we got to the City of Light. So we finally get to the front gate and, unsurprisingly, there's Heartless causing a problem. The problem, surprisingly, was that they were bullying Enya of all people. I didn't think we would run into her, but knowing who the token general is it sorta clicked in my brain that she would be there. Wol, the new guy, was being an absolute gem helping her out while we cleared out the Heartless. Chivalry isn't dead, I guess. I was even more surprised at how quickly she got adopted into the group when we started prying some answers from her. What freaked me out was the fact that 1) she recognized me and 2) wasn't pissed that I disappeared. It was almost as if I hadn't left at all! ... Almost.