First off: An EXTRA-big thank you to everyone who reviewed chapters two and three. Please bring any inconsistencies to my attention.


Pixie: Always Remember

You'd think I would've gotten over it by now.

Mu's shuffled off the mortal coil, at least as far as anyone can tell. You don't see any monsters with his symbol anymore- not that that's a bad thing, it's just that somehow I keep expecting them, they've been around for so long.

Some things won't go away just because you want them to. Sometimes I have… dreams. And in those dreams are everything I want to forget.

Those are the ones I always remember.


Maybe if I think about it more during the day it won't come out at night…

Gali. Okay, better think about Gali first. He was quite the rich brat- I'm using the word "brat" loosely here-roughly twelve years older than I- I'm guessing thirty. He had been the most educated (by the standards by which humans are judged) of all of us. At the start he was the only one of the Four who could read and write.

He'd razed his town of origin, claiming it had been done on his own- though I doubt he was that powerful- and then went off and joined Mu. I gathered that much. He wasn't much for revealing all the details; nobody was, really. We'd all just assumed that the humans had done something Unspeakably Horrible to him, and he'd exacted retribution. Just. Like. That.

Now that I look back I see how stupid an explanation that was. Those sorts of humans were never much for giving us education equivalent to theirs, if that; they wouldn't want us to get dangerous ideas. It's safe to say that Gali's learning was actually higher than what most humans had. Therefore, it couldn't have been so bad as we thought.

Knowing him, it's quite possible he did it out of boredom.

Once he recited a list of poisons that could cause an agonizing demise, many of them undetectable (of course there are few means to determine cause of death from a Lost Disk), at least five of them real, and we were all wary when eating around him after that little display. I'm sure he had quite a laugh over it.

When I picture what his mind must have been like I think of string knots, looped around one another and tied into bigger knots and twisted into something that could take a thousand years to unravel.


Grey Wolf was perhaps the most quiet of any of us, never bothering with anything like Gali's officious shows of learning or Naga's assertions of strength. By silence, I suppose, he avoided making slips of the tongue that could cost one quite a chunk of respect. If the slips were particularly bad, loyalty might be called into question. Nobody wanted that.

Of course, there was never any question about his loyalty.

You only spoke to him if it accomplished a purpose besides relieving boredom. That was the unspoken rule. A random Jell once attempted to engage him in conversation concerning the weather. The Jell just barely survived; everyone else got the point. If you didn't have a message or something of the sort, you waited for him to speak to you, and unless you happened to be Mu you had to keep your replies as short as his statements; refrain from rambling on. I was quite satisfied with that arrangement.

Talking, of course, was the usual diversion in between training sessions; there wasn't much else to do. Grey Wolf put in extra time; if not he could often be found at the spot in the castle unofficially designated his area, staring off at the sky. He was especially disagreeable when interrupted during those times

He put me in mind of deep water, full of dangerous things, so deep I didn't dare try and see what was in it.


And Naga- I didn't really know much of anything about him. He certainly wasn't in the same way Gali was- he couldn't read a word and was proud of the fact. Couldn't swim, either, though that didn't matter so much. All the subtlety of a landslide. What I saw, what that came to mind when I thought Naga, was just another strong monster who happened to be so much stronger than so many others that he was promoted to the Four.

I'm sure there must have been deeper water, a knot or two, to him as well, but all I ever saw, all I ever remembered, was the obvious shallows, straight and predictable string.


Now that I look back I wonder why I stayed with Mu. It must have made sense to me then, but now it makes no sense at all. I should have known back then, before it got as far as it did. I really should have known…
This part has been tweaked due to a goof-up involving timelines and Big Blue, pointed out by Alex Warlorn. My bad.

And to answer his questions (spoiler warning!): Naga got knocked over the side of a cliff by Mocchi's attack but grabbed onto the edge. Holly offered to pull him back up, after which the other six also offered to do so. He let go of the edge and went splat.
In the last episode Genki got home, and he knew it wasn't a dream because he was still wearing the shoes he got in the second episode.