Happy Mother's day to all mothers out there.

Beginnings
By Neko-chan the Mewse
5/10/09

Natalia had been born and raised a princess of Kimlasca. While the country had ended up uniting with Malkuth and being renamed, she was still a princess and she was bored. She wasn't used to being bored. She usually had something to do but…

Her current routine currently consisted of making sure the sun rose and set, sometimes changing the intensity of the light. She still had an important job (well, perhaps this was more important) but why did it have to be so repetitive?

She sometimes took human form and walked the streets to get a feel for modern life. Everything was so different; she could barely wrap her mind around it. She was so lonely though. She didn't bother talking to mortals—they had a much shorter lifespan, so making friends was rather redundant. The only highlights of her life were the times she and Asch spent together.

She loved Asch, but he was still a male and a male could never truly understand the mind of a female. She needed some one on one girl time, dammit, and neither of the other two could accommodate her schedule! She sometimes saw Anise, as their duties occasionally overlapped, but she hadn't seen Tear in nearly three centuries.

She spent the next few decades or so trying to contact Jade to see if he had a possible solution. Out of all of them, Jade still had the best capability to brainstorm ideas. When she finally managed to meet up with him for longer than a few minutes and asked him, he shrugged at her. "It wouldn't hurt to take a day or two off every so often." He told her. The look in his eyes said that he expected her to connect the rest of the dots.

Well, if it wouldn't hurt her to take a day or two off, then surely it wouldn't hurt Tear either. And they could take a day off at the same time and actually get to sit and talk! Natalia was overwhelmingly excited.

Then she had to arrange to get Tear to take a day off as well. It was a long and harrowing process, simply due to the fact that they were playing telephone using Asch and Luke. The two took it in a surprisingly graceful stride, most likely having foreseen this, and delivered their messages back and forth faithfully.

"Luke said that Tear doesn't want to abandon her duties," Asch relayed to her. Natalia responded with a string of expletives and then had him deliver a long speech about how taking time off a single day out of several years was not abandoning duty.

Thinking back on it, Asch most likely delivered her speech word for word while Luke simply condensed it to a single sentence. Well, there went a good waste of a speech.

It took some convincing, but, after a decade of arguing via Lorelei, Tear finally agreed that they did deserve a day off every so often to catch up.

The first time Natalia and Tear got together, it appeared as if the moon had simply erased the sun and plunged the world into darkness. It sent the people into such a panic that the girls ended up agreeing that they would meet every other decade rather than every other year and for no longer than a few minutes. A whole day of darkness might not be a good thing for Auldrant.

The people were still bewildered by the darkness, but less frightened. After the first few times Natalia and Tear met, it was recorded in history and became a perfectly normal occurrence. Natalia was pleased. She got her girl bonding time (even if it was short) and she didn't have to worry about the populace panicking too badly.

The others were perfectly supportive of their desire to hang out with each other. Asch and Luke wouldn't have contributed to the effort otherwise. Guy thought that it was cute and teased them about it. Tear and Natalia agreed to plan out a clever form of revenge later.

Anise was offended and demanded to know why she wasn't invited. Tear informed her that it wasn't that she wasn't invited; it was just that she hadn't shown up. Anise joined them on the next outing and the people watched the sky in awe when they saw that they could still see an outline of the sun.

And as for Jade…he just cackled and told them that a few solar eclipses were good for variety. He looked very satisfied with himself.

Natalia took one look at his face and didn't even want to ask what a solar eclipse was.