Haunting, again
So spirits apparently have an affinity for haunting me recently. Luckily, this thing wasn’t a Poltergeist. The human word for this creature is just “ghost” but that isn’t actually very specific. There are lots of kinds of ghosts! Human dead, dead animals, sentient energy, balls of light, the list goes on.
This creature, Threllva, is sentient energy. Mostly they’re light photons with a shit ton of water making a misty physical form. So, like, fog? But alive.
Threllva are very, very, very shy. Like you think wild bunnies don’t like confrontation, oh no, wild rabbits are the friendliest, most assertive creatures when compared to a Threllva. Seriously if you ever see a Threllva just keep on doing whatever it is that you were doing because they’re probably busy trying to blend in with the foggy morning mist and praying to their cloud gods that you didn’t see them because as far as they’re concerned, you’re terrifying.
So super duper shy. Threllva have never once in the history of magic willingly Bridged anywhere, so all Arasivs can automatically assume that if they see a Threllva, the poor thing fell through a hole. Threllva don’t hurt anything (and they are acutely aware of other creatures’ pain), so people are rarely made aware that there even IS a Threllva in the area, and the poor things will either worry themselves into a mess that is so bad that they literally stress themselves to death and dissipate into mist, or they find an Arasiv and just sorta follow that Arasiv around for a while, hoping that we’ll notice, because like hell they’ll just float up to one of us and start a conversation, or even make it easy for us to find them.
I found this specific Threllva because I pulled out a mirror so I could practice an expression, and I saw jiy briefly before jiy floated away, panicking. Jiy is a pronoun, by the way. Threllva have ten “genders” (they’re actually not genders, not in the human sense of the word, but they do indicate what pronoun should be used) and this one was a jiy.
So jiy was scared and freaking out because oh my gosh I saw jiy but I managed to coax jiy out from the ceiling vent and jiy answered my questions- albeit very quietly. Luckily, all holes and Bridges coat the person crossing with a sorta magical translating substance that makes it so no matter what language the crosser initially has, they’ll be understood and understand the denizens of wherever they’re visiting. That’s why magic creatures in movies always speak English, even though technically they shouldn’t be able to.
So jiy name was Aeori, and jiy fell through a hole while jiy was visiting a shrine to the cloud gods of jiy homeland. So I started lowkey panicking because holy fuck a shrine is a well populated area and I told jiy I would get Seltzers out there to fix the problem STAT but jiy should probably avoid the area for a short while anyway. Honestly, I don’t expect jiy to go anywhere near that shrine again for a long ass time, maybe ever. Threllva are very, very easy to spook, and getting sent to an entirely different Realm would probably ward jiy off of the area quite vehemently.
Jiy was very, very scared of my teleportation mat. And I wasn’t really helpful, since my hand slipped and the thing hit the ground with a thud. Aeori went right back up into the vent and I decided that I should probably just leave jiy there until I had all the runes drawn in and was totally ready to go. Then I had to coax Aeori out of the vent again, and somehow convince jiy to hover in the middle of the circle. I don’t remember the last time I had to say “It’s not going to hurt at all” so repeatedly.
Lucky for everyone, Threllva are extremely difficult to differentiate from each other, their physical attributes are constantly shifting and as far as anyone is concerned all of them behave in a timid, skittish manner. So I can just write “Threllva” in the description portion of the form and be done with it.
“Threllva” is also a word that takes top priority, since they will die if they get forced out of their homeland for too long. My cousin Theo called me a mere hour after fixing the hole telling me that he’d been assigned to this one too. The higher ups had sent his team off their previously scheduled course to take care of the problem since they’re so efficient and when it comes to Threllva, there is literally no time to waste.
So Exavier is in charge of sending out magical pulses every fifteen minutes, trying to call any other Threllva in the area to us. We can’t find them unless they want to be found, and we also can’t be sure that Aeori was the only one to fall through.
He’s got a long night ahead of him. We’re gonna take shifts, though. I’ll let him go to bed at around 3am and take over for the rest of the night, and then he’ll go to work and continue sending out pulses while I catch up on my sleep. Yay summer!
Here’s hoping Aeori was the only unfortunate soul that got sucked in!