"Mind if I ask you a few things, Monster Mage?"

Blinking her eyes open to the warm sun she was letting warm her face, Cter turned her head to the jester monster suddenly stood next to her with his horned head and swaying coat bowed to lower himself. His grass-green skin and clothing reminded of Cter's robe, but a bit less...expensive, in its color?

She caught the thought with a chilled inhale and immediately bowed her head back as an apology even though it was all just in her head. "Of course you may, jester," she let the monster know with a sheepish reply. Once she straightened herself back up she did voice another thought that swept through her head. "You must be Donial."

The jester monster nodded, shuffling his pocketed coat that was somewhere between a carpenter's apron and a nobleman's jacket. Pocket convenience and storage potential of a workman's attire with a raised, perforated collar as well as fabric sticking out his jacket's wrists like the petals of an opened rose. "That I am, yes." His star-shaped eyes narrowed with the smile that seemed to grope out the green on his face just above his chin. "At your service."

Cter took the offered hand in hers, shaking it. "To you as well." Both parties retreated their arms back into the depths of their attires as if their actions were mirrored, prompting a friendly chuckle. "I've heard some about you from Idyll." Quite a lot, actually.

Maybe a bit too much too.

The jester monster turned his head to the scene playing out next to the carriage parked in the middle of the Jarasevo Castle courtyard. It had his shadow cast behind him onto the white wall of the castle grow as his angled horns met the sun head on. His eyes stayed narrowed even after he raised his arm over his eyes to help see better. "Knowing her I should probably ask you exactly what it was she has told you about me. Additionally, knowing her I should probably not ask you exactly what it was she has told you about me."

The Monster Mage huffed another chuckle while turning over to witness the scene she had turned away from earlier. "Your work, mostly," Cter answered vaguely while focusing more on Idyll and Sarbor embracing each other hard next to the lone carriage with the occasional sobbing shake from each of the two. "She finds it quite interesting."

"Mhm?" the jester monster murmured with a twang to his voice. "That so?"

Seems like he knew exactly what it was Idyll had told Cter. "You know her, after all. In a few ways more than I do." She raised a knowing eyebrow to Donial's glance underneath his shadow-casting arm, which prompted a slightly more embarrassed chuckle.

"Guess I do," he admitted with a strange hint of pride in his aura. Cter wasn't gonna mention it, but just feeling it had her eyes widen a bit in hopes that the images that the unnecessarily detailed images that her mind suddenly decided to conjure would spill out from her head. "She's unlike any other monster I've ever met, if I may?"

If he may talk about Cter's best friend with a loving fervor that would surely put her up on a pedestal higher than Cter ever could?

Yes.

A thousand times yes.

She was gonna need it once she felt comfortable letting her brother go back to Xoff again. Judging by how long they had been hugging with no sign of loosening their arms around the other though…

"Actually, can I ask you how you and she met, Monster Mage?"

Cter motioned for the jester monster to stand up straight. "Cter is fine," she remarked friendly. She was gonna heed King Asgore's advice to accept the respect given to her, but an exception for the monster her best friend clearly loved was natural. "Monster Mage perhaps when you get to refurbishing my room," Cter added as a half-joke. Before she said it she didn't really have any thoughts about the matter, but after saying it?

She'd entertained the idea of having a second floor to her study in the cone of the castle tower. Perhaps with bookshelves arranged at the inner rim and the stairs leading up in the center so that the ones ascending up it would be surrounded by books and scrolls lit dimly by a chandelier hung from the tip of the tower?

"Well for that you'd have to put in a requisition with Fang Shuey," the jester monster joked back.

Or did he?

In either case, Cter was intriguing herself too much about something barely tangential to the subject, so she waved the thought away. Not too far away though, because singe her soul did her mind imagine an atmosphere so cozy and wondrous enough to have her eyes want to close to keep it in. "Maybe I'll do that," she let slip with a smile and a lick to her thinned lips. A bit too much, perhaps, for once she opened them again she found that Donial's head was craned back with a brow lowered in slight hesitation. "Later though."

He nodded, slowly. "...Sure."

With her sleeved hand balled at her mouth, Cter cleared her throat before pointing over to a bench at the far end of the courtyard close to the low wall preventing monster and humans from walking off the hill in the wrong way. "We met there," Cter began to tell while a wave of nostalgia swept over her, trembling her voice a bit.

She'd forgotten completely how defeated she felt after the immediate rejection she received from the guard at duty behind the castle gate. "A human and a monster sharing a conversation about having both tried their luck at Jarasevo Castle, but failed. Head hung so low that our noses got stuck between our toes, you know?"

No, he didn't.

For the face with the neutral smile subduing a snarky comment that Donial turned to Cter was completely flat with no nasal protrusion to speak of or to huff out of.

Cter moved quickly away from the bump in the road of the conversation, with none on the face of it. "Anyways..." She made a conscious effort not to scratch her nose with embarrassment. "She was the one that approached me, actually."

Donial's neutral smile shifted into a pleased one. "That she does..." he let linger as if he suddenly forgot that there was another one with him.

It was the better choice for Cter to just ignore that. "Approached me because she saw quite clearly that I'd failed the same that she had. We talked, and she then asked me if I wanted to become her roommate in an apartment she had managed to rent down in Jarasevo. It was too big for her to have on her own, and too expensive. Since I came here from out of country I did not really have another plan than to get employment as a mage at Jarasevo Castle, so I agreed to it."

"From Hjearta, right?" asked Donial. "All the way to Jarasevo without any plans for what to do if you didn't manage a position at the castle?" He blew an exasperated exhale through loose lips. "Seems to happen more often than it should." With a thumb barely long enough to poke out longer than the flower-creased fabric out his wrist, Donial pointed at himself for a winking second before he let it fall. "Although for me I could always have headed back to Fieldston."

"I could have headed back to Hjearta too."

"Bit longer though?" said Donial with a smiling shrug. "A couple of weeks versus a couple of months travel is quite the difference. You can see Mt. Ebott and Mt. Ymmet from a hill a day's or so walk from Fieldston too, which I guess is another difference as well."

That it was, true, although if it was the jester monster bragging or not with that fact Cter wasn't fully sure of. "Then once we managed to settle as roommates I found work as an independent mage down in Jarasevo doing odd, magical jobs in order to become good enough a mage to find a position at the castle while Idyll found work at the tavern that Queen Toriel used to work at before she became the Monster Queen in order to build her skills too. We promised to march in through the castle gates together once we both were ready."

"Must've been quite the march then, I'd imagine?" Donial scratched his cheek with a soft sound as if he was scratching a pincushion. "It's an inspiring tale, Monster Mage. Knowing why Idyll came here to Jarasevo it must've hurt her greatly being rejected the first time. I'm glad you were there for her for that, Cter. Thank you, for what it's worth coming from me."

Cter wasn't gonna reject it or anything.

"She helped me find footing too so it wasn't altruism that led me to move in with her. I had to, otherwise I'd be abandoning my hopes and dreams of becoming a powerful mage. We became friends quickly, pushing the other to reach their goal. In the beginning though with us basically being two new roommates without any prior knowledge of the other we had some...awkwardness. Hell, waking up to her experimenting with her stews was sometimes worse than waking up with spiders all over me and my bed. Eventually though we became friends, as I said."

Donial's face lit up in a way that screamed that he wanted for nothing else than to know the context to what Cter just said, except for his mouth which was silent out of respect.

"I helped a spider butcher move a large shipment of meat one late night by letting my more powerful aura control more spiders than he could. Despite my more powerful aura it took me the entire night to ferry all the meat across half the town. Paid good money, but I was so exhausted once I came home that I must've forgotten to relax my aura." Cter shook with discomfort at the memory of opening her eyes to small, hairy legs all over her face and body. "My startled screams were muffled by the layers of spiders on me."

The jester monster shook with sympathetic discomfort too. "I'm no stranger to handling spiders in the older buildings I've helped spruce up, or mahogany up depending on the client, but never enough spiders to completely cover me fully." He raised a green finger quickly surrounded by white, creased fabric.

"Well except that one time when I refurbished a spider cafe early in my career in the outskirts of Fieldston, but that's not as interesting as your story. It was just me lifting away the wrong ceiling plank." He waved dismissively at his own words, fanning them away like smoke. "If you won't mind me prying some, but how do you feel thinking back on that time like you are now?"

A cloud's edge moved away, letting through a stinging ray of the midday sun that had Cter's eyes narrowing. "How do you mean?" came across as a bit more confrontational than she meant it to be.

Donial did not seem bothered by it though, instead motioning towards Idyll's direction where she continued embracing her older, human brother. They were talking, that could Cter see. About what though she could not hear.

"Idyll talks about the time she spent living with you almost like a prequel to her life now, in a way. Like the floor underneath the Xoff carpet, so to speak. She talks about it that she would not have been here in any other way had it not been for the luck she had with meeting you, Cter. Both in terms of not having found a roommate at such a short notice and in the way that you managed to make her more comfortable with her magic."

Hm…yeah…

"Also because I dared taste her experimental spice mixtures," replied Cter with a shrug. "I think that might be what I did most for her." She made sure to put on a laugh lest Donial took it as actual advice.

"And if she says that then I will say the same about where I am, thanks to her. I wouldn't have become a lower case monster mage walking around Jarasevo and finding enough mage work to support myself and pay rent and food had it not been for her lifting me by my crying shoulders as I lamented over having failed my first day as an independent mage." With her left arm raised she showed Donial her sleeve. "Let alone would I have been an upper case Monster Mage without her help."

The jester monster nodded seriously at the Monster Mage's words. "I see now why she considers you a sister." His nodding stopped and he peered innocently with his sewn, star-shaped eyes thin and wide. "Same from you to her, I'm assuming?"

"Indeed," Cter nodded back, but with a glance over to Idyll and Sarbor. "Not to the extent that her and Sarbor are siblings, but as close to that as she allows me to be."

"That so?" Donial replied while a crooked finger came up to tap at the top of his lips. The texture of the white, flower-like fabric out his wrist looked almost identical to his skin. "That's not how I've heard it from her." A small wave of thought sloshed through the jester's aura, causing his finger to begin tapping on his upper lip.

"The way her aura looks and feels when she is talking about you is more...ignited, than when she talks about her brother there." He pointed with one of his nodded horns over to the human doctor resting his forehead against his monster sister. "It looked a bit...strange, with how hard she threw her arms around her brother. I know he's heading back to Xoff, but her reaction now is not on the same level that she has spoken about it."

"Could be because he's human?" offered Cter as an explanation before folding her arms with a shrug. "She was raised in a human village, so her love for her brother is very human. Not as much love displayed in her aura, but even more displayed in her embrace." None in Sarbor's aura neither, hopefully.

It was his goal to be able to completely suppress it without a trace for either him or others to feel, after all. It would explain how hard he was hugging Idyll, if any other one than the two separating for another long, long time was needed. Hugging her with just him as a human feeling her chafing scales on his neck, and none of her aura. Hugging her as the big brother she knew, not changed in the slightest.

Cter was very happy for Sarbor's sake.

Even though it meant that Priestess Frioke would lose another one she used to have tea with in the Royal Garden. Poor 'ol monster. Her anxiousness about the Hjearta delegation having returned to Fenkeep Castle was shunted aside so that she could focus on treating Sarbor. She knew that the more she focused on Sarbor and his forced-upon aura, the shorter the time she would have with him to enjoy tea together in the Royal Garden. She knew that, yet still dedicated so much to the human doctor.

So that she could tell herself that she could save one, at least?

"Hm..." Cter muttered alone, forgetting in the moment that she had someone else next to her.

"You have a point there," conceded Donial while biting down on his angled-aside lower lip for a second. "Fieldston has nigh a human living in it, so I wouldn't know a lot about humans, unfortunately. I love their carpentry, and I did study under a human carpenter in a neighboring village, but I've never really interacted with a human beyond a passing friendship. I had my mentor, but he was not really much of a friend."

He still shook his head though even after conceding the point to Cter. "But it's also that I don't feel like Idyll has talked about her brother that much compared to you." He went quiet for a bit, thinking. "Maybe because he's leaving today?" His guess was very unsure, creasing his brow so that it folded over his star-shaped eyes like a pillow being fluffed up.

Cter wouldn't know anything about that though. "You'll have to ask Idyll about it." She did agree with the guess slightly though. If anything then because Donial wasn't invited to the dinner Idyll had the previous evening with Sarbor and Cter. A nice dinner that was reminiscent of the one she prepared for Cter and Sarbor when the two headed to Xoff and Noitaidarr Castle, but a bit more stooped in the knowledge that there would be a long time until the next one.

Idyll kept high spirits though, insisting that it was her way of saying goodbye to her big brother in one hand, but in the bigger hand being that she was fulfilling what she promised him the last time he went his separate way without her.

Her promise to make him a meal that would allow him to forget what happened to their parents, if only for moment, she had succeeded with. Sarbor didn't have to say it either, for his little sister could tell. It had been so many years, but she still remembered how his cheeks would form deep dents when eating something he truly and fully enjoyed.

The reason Cter was invited to that dinner to witness it was because Idyll felt that she wanted it to be a family dinner, and Cter was family to her. They all ate in relative silence in one of the pavilions in the Royal Garden, for it was what families did. A family could eat in silence and be content with it. The company was all that was needed.

Closely knit, even though both far away physically as Sarbor was about to be, and metaphorically with how Cter was born in a completely different human country. In Monster Country they were both close to Idyll, and that was all that mattered to her.

However though, implied that Donial wasn't yet family to Idyll.

However however though, Cter believed the fact to be on the positive side rather than the negative one due to the fact that the two had only known each other for a month or two, give or take. From having smooched within the minute of meeting each other it seemed like Donial and Idyll continued with a more...orthodox pace to their relationship. Slow and steady.

Although what did Cter really know about it? Not much in terms of experiences with relationships and all that. She did know her best friend though, more than anyone else could have reasonably guessed.

"Don't know if I should," muttered Donial with a contemplative tone to Cter's delight. "I had an ex that asked me why she wasn't invited to my parents' marriage anniversary after I told her about it on the...fourth time we met?" How he said it made it clear that he didn't really enjoy thinking back on it. "She was a slime monster so I won't put it past her that she meant it with good intentions. The more a slime knows about someone the more its soul and form can mold more solid and all that, but I wasn't really comfortable with that level of...sudden intimacy, I found out."

But smooching Idyll a minute or so after meeting her wasn't sudden?

That Cter raised an eyebrow at. Only one though, for she could sense in Donial's aura that he was speaking the truth. She'd let him sweat a bit with one of her brow raised though. "I-I-I m-m-mean..." he stuttered out while rubbing the tip of one of his conch-like horns underneath the challenging color of Cter's aura. "W-With I-Idyll it w-was...um..."

"Love at first sight?" Cter let the jester monster off the hook with a chuckle breaking through her stern facade. "Well as long as you keep that love in all subsequent sights too."

"H-Haven't stopped yet," Donial eased down until he regained his breathing normally. "And I guess I should make sure that I offer to do the dishes with her having a Monster Mage she can summon with a whistle and a snap of her finger."

The raised eyebrow sank down along with its twin sibling. "Her words?" asked Cter even though she already knew the answer. Before Donial could answer she shifted her gaze over to Idyll with a playful squint. "Of course it's her words."

"Any relief if I tell you that I promise not to pick up that habit from her?"

Cter would very much appreciate it, yes. "If you would be so kind, dear jester monster."

"Heh," he exhaled with a smile that bent down over the course of a few seconds. "I mean, it's the least I can do for you."

The Monster Mage furrowed her brow curiously. "How do you mean?" She turned fully to the jester monster who rubbed the tip of his other horn. There was sincerity in what he said, and more than she expected.

"You're a Monster Mage," Donial said as if reminding Cter. "Before I approached you I had to gather up courage just to come up and talk to you. I'd heard from Idyll how friendly you were and not to worry at all, because again..." He gestured a snap with his finger towards her yet did not go through with it. "And yeah, she wasn't wrong. From where I'm from, and I'm gonna assume everywhere else too, you're seen as a protector of the monsters. You, and the other thr–"

Donial caught his tongue a moment too late.

"You, and the other Monster Mages, are all seen as protectors of the monsters. Humans that are so dedicated to the monster cause that they rejected their humanity and made their souls to be monster. The most powerful mages in all of the lands acting to make sure that the monsters have a voice as loud as the humans. You are monsters that are so inspirational that even humans look up to you."

Cter had...never really been praised like that before. She didn't really know what to say. Her startled silence had the jester monster shrugging loosely.

"You faced the horror of the fusion at Clinic Hill yet you still stand here like any other monster enjoying the warmth of the sun on your face. You talk to me, a mere carpenter, like we are the same. I know I'm in a relationship with your best friend that you've known for many years, but you're still one of the Monster Mages," said Donial with a revering tilt of his head up at Cter. It wasn't a great tilt, just one that his lifting eyebrows dragged his head up with. "And for that I am grateful, Cter." He bowed. "Thank you for protecting us monsters while also being with us all."

"You're...welcome," Cter gave back along with a bow of her own head. She had respect given to her. "My soul is with the monsters, forever and always." So she should take it, for it was given to her in trust.

Trust gained from what she had protected.

"And so mine is with you, Monster Mage."

And from what she would have to protect.

"Forever and always."