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| {{WIP}}
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| {{Universe|Xanadu}}
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| {{title
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| |name=Revan Saga Part 8
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| |author=Joysweeper
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| |user=Joysweeper}}
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| "-resounding joy, in resounding joy, ii-iii-iiii-iiiin re-sooouunding,
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| resound-ing resoun-ding joy!"
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| I opened my eyes and glared up at the ceiling. So much for my plans to sleep in.
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| Apparently someone in the room above me - ''those damn second-floorers have bigger rooms, I bet''- had a radio or something. The song had started soft, with only one or two voices, but it built with more and more singing in harmony, getting louder and louder. I thought I could catch a hint of instrumental, too, and it was now impossible to ignore.
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| "Shut ''up!''" I hissed despite knowing full well that I could not be heard. Somehow I’d gotten tangled in the sheets, as if I’d been flailing about in my sleep. I managed to escape them before too much time had passed, and swung my legs over the side of the little economy bed. I glanced around madly, spied the little coffee table in the corner, and half-staggered to it on stiff, aching legs.
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| The table had a little coffeemaker and a whole lot of papers sitting it, brochures and programs and whatnot. They went on the floor. I hopped up onto the disproportionaly large overstuffed armchair, picked up the tiny table by the round top, and inverted it.
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| Lifting my stool-shaped wooden weapon skywards, with one hand bracing the flat surface and the other wrapped around a leg, I poked the legs at the ceiling, first hesitantly, then with more vigor, not minding the flecks of plaster that drifted into my face. The voices and accompaniment continued on for a moment, then faltered, falling silent.
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| "Hey! It's only-" and I checked the red-glowing digital clock-"6:42 A.M.! Okay, that's not very early... But still! This is ''November''! Don't sing Christmas carols until next month, at least!"
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| "Oh... Sorry!" The reply, while very muffled, was definitely at least three synchronized voices coming from the same spot. ''Oooo-kaaay, maybe not a radio after all.''
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| I let out a derisive snort as I realized how ridiculous I had to look, standing up on a chair to reach the ceiling with a coffee table, and climbed down, replacing the papers and whatnot that were on it. I couldn't ''see'' anyone, but I couldn't dismiss the feeling of being watched.
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| ''Well, no way am I gonna get back to sleep now,'' I realized ruefully. When I get up, I tend to wake completely. On top of that, I was hungry – so hungry that I suspected my stomach of trying to grapple my spine. The granola bar and leftover pieces of Halloween candy in my carryall disappeared in about two bites; I was still hungry, but after a few cups of odd-tasting tap water, I knew that I could wait a bit.
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| I went through the ‘morning ritual’ – bathroom, washing my face, brushing my teeth, fishing out the spare clothes I’d brought and putting those on. Unfortunately, it looked like the underwear I’d had on yesterday had disappeared, so I had to stay in the stuff I’d slept in.
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| The urge to examine myself got pretty strong. I was still hungry, but decided that I might as well take a look now, before I ended up gawking in public. I wasn’t quite ready to look at myself naked or spend a lot of time with the stranger in the mirror, but there were other things to check.
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| It seemed that I actually didn’t need a bra anymore. The one I’d slept in was unsettlingly loose – the elastic was tight enough, but the cups kind of flopped. I’ve never exactly been buxom, nor really wanted to be, so that wasn’t a big deal. It actually rumpled the fabric of my shirt, so I removed it. I hadn’t gone without a bra for years – my mom and most of my cousins were endowed similarly, but I’d inherited a little more mass from the Caucasian side of the family.
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| After puberty, I’d ended up with a thick body, thick arms, thick legs, average breasts, and not too much body fat. Squarely between “skinny teenager” and “fat teenager”. Asian girls, particularly Filipinos like on my mom’s side, tend to lean towards one or the other, rarely touching the “busty” or “meaty” territories. Maybe it was my dad’s genes.
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| ‘Beef stock’, they’d called me in middle and high school, when everyone had been hunting for targets. As opposed to ‘dairy stock’ or ‘chicken’ or ‘pig’ like the other nonathletic girls. Livestock labels attached to women showed up a lot in my hometown. “Beef” was considered good for soccer, good for lacrosse, good for swimming, but not good for much else. I’d dabbled in sports, but the girls in them were just better. Until college, until Midtral, until I’d moved from Wisconsin to Florida, I’d been something of a recluse.
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| There, despite the fact that it was a pretty conservative campus, my body type, even in conjunction with my ethnicity, wasn’t all that odd. It had stopped bothering me; I’d briefly come to take an odd sort of pride in it, and then it just hadn’t mattered much one way or the other.
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| Now it seemed that that body type had been made a bit more obvious. Just patting myself down I could tell that my waist had thickened, my hips had narrowed, and my shoulders had squared. The T-shirt I wore strained a bit across the shoulders. When I put one hand over the opposite bicep and flexed, it swelled at least as high as it usually did after a bunch of reps on the weight machines. There was even a little definition.
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| It was a very strange feeling. My body didn’t quite feel like it had before. The same, but … different. In more ways than the obvious. It wasn’t bad, really, but … strange. A little exciting, a little scary… it wasn’t a big thing, but I couldn’t ignore it.
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| I feel like I have to do ''something,'' though.
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| My hair had become darker, dryer, straighter, and coarser, as well as noticeably longer. The ends just barely brushed my shoulders. ''Yeah, that’ll do.''
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| Spurred into action, I dug through my worn maroon pack until I found the scissors that I had brought along to make last-minute fabric alterations. Purposely thinking back to freshman year, I went into the bathroom, spread a towel over the counter by the sink, and bent over it backwards.
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| Fistfuls of hair were chewed through by the scissor blades, dropping every which way. The outer edge of my hand held against my scalp served as a measuring unit; everything past my thumb was cut. My hands seemed to be a bit wider than they’d been before, broader and longer, but they didn’t ''feel'' different.
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| This was the style I’d had yesterday morning, and pretty much ever since freshman year when my roommate had decided to cut it for me, citing that she was practiced in wig-trimming. It had turned into a disaster, so we’d had someone else neaten it out, but I’d kept the length.
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| My attempts were pretty messy, but I did get the hair much, much shorter. I took the edges of the towel and poured the long tangles of hair into the discreet wastebin that I’d seen under the counter.
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| After a bit of hunting, I found my cell phone – at some point during the night it and my duffel had been kicked off the edge of the bed. ''Hmm. Call home now, or wait a bit?'' My parents drove me crazy sometimes, but I loved them and didn't really have issues with them. A sudden cramping from my stomach decided the issue. ''Breakfast first, I'm'' starving.
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| There was no way that I was going to carry the duffel through the convention. Pickpockets had been the first danger that Dana had warned me about, and that was in normal circumstances. Now… well, I’d brought a pair of boy-type pants with deep pockets that had buttoned flaps. I knew that that wasn’t a guarantee of safety by any means, but I could put some stuff in them and not worry about a heavy bag, at least.
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| Wallet, including the room’s key card. I’d had two of them, actually. The other had been on my costume… It, like my shoes, hadn’t been seen since then, but fortunately I’d had my duffel with me. Somehow. ''Don’t think about that too hard.''
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| ''Shoes… shoes… oh crap.'' I hadn’t brought extra shoes. I’d come in yesterday wearing a pair of really old sneakers, and I’d used the tape in my duffel to wrap them, going up my ankles and over the long socks in imitation of boots. They’d been the weakest part of the costume, but with the low cuffs of the wide pants I’d worn, few people could get a good look at them.
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| And now they were gone. I sank down onto the edge of the bed. ''I’m not going to go barefoot, that’s for sure.'' Even if my recollection of what had happened yesterday was fuzzy at best, I did vaguely remember a few things worth running from. I also remembered doing my share of sprinting, and the dull aches in my legs backed this up.
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| When I’d come into the room before bed, I’d been wearing boots that came as high as my calves, and very thin socks of some kind beneath them. Where had those gone? I’d taken everything off to shower, I remembered, and I’d folded the clothes… where were they?
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| Although I looked through the whole room, I didn’t really expect to find the boots. And indeed, I didn’t. They had vanished.
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| ''Well, towels might work…'' Dana, my Midtral roommate who’d handed over the keycards for the room, was one of those girls who couldn’t seem to function for a week without at least six towels. I found some, crumpled up and barely damp, in a corner beneath the bathroom counter. Apparently, although maid service had at some point distributed fresh towels, they hadn’t quite managed to pick all of them up. For all I knew, they’d become overwhelmed by the number of people attending the convention. It was a big hotel, and it had a lot of staff, but...
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| Wrapping a towel around each foot and tucking the excess under my toes, I used the duct tape in my bag to keep the things more or less in place.
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| It looked ridiculous. It wasn’t particularly supportive or protective. But it was still better than going barefoot. If barely. At any rate, towels instead of shoes was a different, rather minor kind of "odd", compared to extras from bad sci-fi movies and whatever else was out there.
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| Armed thus, I exited my room, locked up, and headed for one of the hotel’s smaller food courts, reasoning that it would have fewer people and less of a disturbance. I’d gone to the nearest one for an early lunch yesterday, and there were still signs with direction arrows on the walls, so I doubted that I’d get lost.
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| There were some weird things and people about- a very scarred white-haired man with a faint, misty halo and ethereal blue butterflies around his head who was playing with a Rubrik's Cube, a girl riding a giant yellow chicken thing, a cow-sized bronze-plated dragon with a big blue gem in the middle of its forehead – but we all just ignored each other, and it was morning, so it seemed that most people weren’t up and about.
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| It was quiet, peaceful. Rather surreal, really. The chaos of yesterday hadn’t completely disappeared, but it wasn't as sharp or immediate. All the really crazy creatures had been subdued by now, and for long enough that all the rest of us had gone to sleep.
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| ''This is why I like mornings.''
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| As much as the arrows on the walls, it was the sound of several cats begging that drew me to the cafeteria.
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| Inside, I first saw a pixie-faced girl with insanely long blond hair sitting cross-legged atop a cafe table, dropping bits of deli meat to a swarm? horde? pack? of meowling cats. Some looked normal enough, but I thought I saw hints of forked tails, folded wings, odd-colored crescents of fur. That explained the noise. There were one or two other ... people, I suppose ... about, but they seemed as willing to ignore me as I was to ignore them. I felt very much like I was being watched, all of a sudden… still, there was nothing I could do about that except act innocent.
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| Nobody was there to actually sell food, not yet anyway. Whatever else had happened yesterday, someone had apparently seen to cleaning up the grill and closing down the deli. Fortunately a series of nice big vending machines sat out in the open, and I got to one while the place was still nearly empty. It was a close thing, though.
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| Deciding that it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to go out later, I also bought a few pears to stuff into my pockets. They would keep for a bit, I hoped. Just in case.
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| After I’d finished with breakfast, I couldn’t stop myself from watching a pair of brown-and-white anthro horses jockey- no pun intended- for their place in the suddenly-forming line of people and creatures trailing in. The jockeying ended when one bit the other on the neck and they both ordered Corn Flakes. The black-skinned - really, actually pitch black - elfin androgyn behind them muttered uncharitably and almost got a tailswitch in the teeth for his or her troubles.
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| I laughed quietly at this - some things never change - shook my head, and tossed the remains of my meal into a mostly-filled plastic trash barrel, then raked my fingers through my hair habitually and froze.
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| It had grown. Not by much, maybe by a difference of a quarter-inch or less, but it was decidedly longer. It took just an instant more to fingercomb than it should have. That was… not right. Hadn’t I already changed? Wasn’t that enough?
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| I glanced at my hand, at the single strand of near-black hair clinging to my skin. The irregularities of it seemed to jump out at me. The whole hand was broader and longer; my joints were knobbier. The very tip of my smallest finger was missing- the nail was still there, but not all of the flesh beneath it was. There was a minuscule pockmark just past the knuckle on my index finger. An invisibly thin white line ran across my palm, slightly puckering the "fat part" of my thumb. And several close-trimmed nails bore little white dent marks, as if they’d suffered some kind of impact.
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| Then my fingers flexed, nails touching my palms, then opening and splaying as my wrist turned, and my eyes went to a little mole, a birthmark on my wrist that I’d somehow kept. It was strangely comforting to see it – a confirmation that not everything was different.
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| The thing was, ''I'' was not the one flexing my fingers, rotating my wrist, moving my eyes. It was as unconscious as a reflex – and yet not. I felt a something at the back of my head, heat and pressure.
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| A chill traveled from the back of my neck over my upper arms, giving me goosebumps. ''That means'' -
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| To avoid thinking about that, I said in an unintentionally loud, disgusted voice, "I just cut this. C’mon. Give me a break; there’s a ''reason'' I don’t have long hair.”
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| Naturally, I was utterly mortified to hear a male voice shout "At least you ''have'' hair!" and would have slunk into the background.
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| Except that I caught sight of the shouter and felt my lips curl upwards at the corners, hardening, and my legs betrayed me and moved me towards him as my traitor tongue sallied, "Malak!"
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| "I haven't seen you," my mouth said, as the big man - ''Damn. He's'' big. - grinned and waved. A smaller and rather pained-looking teen who apparently had an elephant's forehead - and ears, trunk, and a pair of widely-spaced extra eyes - looked almost comically pained at the sight of me. They were sitting across from each other at a table.
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| "Hey, Revan. You're staying too, huh? Some guy was giving the secretary at the front desk a hard time, so I talked to him, and she was grateful, so she gave David and I a nice little suite. Kind of a cute girl, actually..."
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| The elephant boy's eyes - all four of them - rolled and his trunk wended sideways as he said "Cheryl, ''please!'' This is awkward enough! You're supposed to be a'' girl.''" I thought I remembered him, vaguely... hadn't I helped him find something yesterday?
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| "Ah, ''David.'' I trust that your camera thing is operating smoothly?" My voice interjected, heading off what promised to be an argument. "And have you found your friend?"
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| "Camera's in my room and I don't know where Jim went. Flew off, probably." David looked dejected, his eyes downcast and his shoulders slumped. It was kind of hard to tell, but I pegged him as fifteen, maybe sixteen years old. Just about as old as my little brother, with that same sort of "My life is ruined!" posture. In this case, I couldn't really blame him.
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| "Don't worry about it. We'll find him. How many big blue birdmen live in Florida anyway?"
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| "Yeah. Yeah, I know." Abruptly he stood up. "I'm going to go... place." David ambled away, big head down.
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| My eyes fixed themselves on Malak's head as he shook it from side to side. "I feel kind of sorry for him. He isn't really taking this well. Better than some, sure, but not well."
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| "And you are?" My voice was dry, almost mocking.
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| One of the corners of his mouth quirked up marginally. "So it seems. I don't actually remember being Cheryl - it's like I inherited all her baggage. I remember the things that she ''said'' and ''did,'' the people and the stuff she surrounded herself with, but not her thoughts or her feelings. I love David - he's my brother - but I don't feel that way about her friends or her parents. At all. I'll take care of David, but I'm not going to go and pick up her life."
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| "Oh?"
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| The quirk became a mocking smile. "She was fourteen years old, in the throes of what looked like a pointless and generally ineffective form of adolescent rebellion, and if I remember it right she spent a great deal of time and energy stealing items of minor value from stores. I'd ''hate'' that. There are only two real reasons why I haven't taken off. One, David's terrified about how his and Cheryl's parents will react so he's lying low, and two, I'm not a full Knight yet, so I'd like further instruction before I decide what I want to do, where I want to go. I have responsibilities, as a Jedi and as a brother." His expression became wry. "That was a speech, wasn't it?"
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| "Little bit. Don't worry about it." I grasped abruptly at an idea, and was surprised when I was able to blurt, "What do you mean by 'still here'? We can leave?"
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| He blinked. "Well, yeah. Nobody's stopping people like us - well, there are some who would ''try'', but it's not too hard to look harmless and confused. It would have been easier yesterday, but you could still tell them it was a mistake and they'd probably believe you. For that matter, if you waited for the right moment you could probably just slip through while nobody was watching."
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| "Huh." I frowned. "I would've thought that there would be some kind of crackdown on the place." My face smoothed itself as soon as I finished speaking. I tried to frown again, but it was as if I'd been given a shot of Novocaine that stilled the muscles.
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| "Oh, there is. There's a cordon and guards and everything, but from what I've seen they just aren't very good at it. There's a border around the convention grounds, and chain-link fencing, but chain-link can be got around and I don't think there are enough people to man the whole perimeter." His expression held just a touch of disgust. "The best-guarded section is close to the main entrance, and I tested it myself. Just because."
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| My mouth asked, "You just used the Force for that, didn't you?"
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| "Nope. It was at about three a.m. and they were all distracted by someone else, but they didn't give me a second glance. I got out and back in without trouble, and I'm seven feet tall, completely bald, and tattooed with stripes on my head. If ''I'm'' ignored, that's kind of a bad sign. Of course, she ''was'' literally glowing blue and babbling about the end of the world." He shrugged. "Maybe they'll shape up, maybe they won't. I'm pretty sure that if I went out and started to make trouble they'd find me. But just getting out is easy - Cheryl's been to ''shopping malls'' with better security."
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| "I'm sure," my mouth murmured. I could feel my eyebrows furrowed in a contemplative frown, but it faded and my shoulders hitched up momentarily. "Well, let me know if there's anything I can do."
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| "I'll trust you to do the same." He nodded firmly, but his gaze was already out, in the direction that David had gone. "Someone with ... I guess it's magic ... offered to make his face fully human. But then he wouldn't look like David. He isn't sure if he should accept or not, and all I can do is be there and support whichever choice he makes. Aaah, that's none of it your problem. I'd better make sure he doesn't get into trouble."
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| Rising, Malak straightened to his full height. My eyes came about to his upper chest, and the thought came to me, ''Wait, isn't this character a villain in the videogames?'' I kept silent about that, though, and after we traded nods, he left.
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| For a moment I held completely still, staring at nothing and waiting. Nothing happened. When the otter-type furry my eyes had happened to fix on started to shift uneasily, I decided that nothing was going to happen and brushed myself off. Then, distracted by the unfamiliar texture my fingers encountered, I looked down.
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| The T-shirt and the battered cargo pants I'd been wearing were gone. In their place was a sort of kimonolike tunic, like a jacket that extended halfway down my thighs and had wrapped around my chest, confined by the loose belt or obi around my waist. There were fingerless gloves that looked a little like leather and extended up my forearms from wrist to elbow, and pads of similar material wrapped over my shoulders. Now that I thought about it, I could feel that I was wearing pants or leggings of some sort, closer to the skin than what I'd had on earlier.
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| Uncertain, I lifted one foot. There was, indeed, a boot on it made of the same kind of thing as the armband-gloves and the shoulder pads, and it came all the way up to my knee, wrinkling the fabric there. It was very light, and didn't seem to restrict my ankle at all. I lowered it to the ground, gingerly, finding somewhat less than an inch of heel. Everything was in muted shades of brown, and I couldn't identify the cloth.
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| The fingerless gloves were really more like curved shells that went over the backs of my hands, and smaller, thinner pieces on my palms, connected by little straps between my fingers. The palm-piece and the back-piece were part of the armbands, but they didn't impede motion when I made several circles with my wrists. I couldn't possibly have missed those earlier, when I'd been staring at my hands.
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| The only explanation - well, besides that of someone undressing and redressing me without my noticing, which I liked even less - was that the clothes themselves had changed.
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| ''...I'm pretty sure that this is not supposed to happen.'' Of course, this was ''Xanadu.'' I'd just been talking to a guy who quite earnestly called himself a Jedi and spoke about memories of himself as a fourteen-year-old girl, I was standing in the same room as a bunch of people and things that would normally be considered impossible, and my hair was growing fast enough to notice a difference less than three quarters of an hour after being cut. But if it ''was'' supposed to happen, why not earlier? Like when I'd first dressed myself? Why hadn't the towels turned into boots right when I wrapped them around my feet?
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| ''Yeah, that's decidedly weird.'' I managed to keep from shuddering. The immediate impulse I had was ''take them off. Now.'' But I was ''not'' about to strip out here in public. Even though a number of women and female furries that were pretty close to nude were within eyeshot, it wasn't going to happen.
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| Luckily, I didn't have much trouble getting back to the hotel room. The halls were getting more and more congested as people got up, remembered that everything had changed, and went looking for food or freaking out, depending. Some of them were running about desperately calling out names, evidently hoping to find lost friends or lovers or relatives. It was kind of sad. I saw some sort of anthro canine wearing a red leather jacket, probably a dog, locked in an teary embrace with someone who looked an awful lot like Arnold Schwarzenegger in his acting days, both of them completely oblivious to the public setting.
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| The other searchers didn't seem to be having as much luck, I noticed. A tall, spindly anime-looking guy complete with hair that violated the laws of gravity was either mute or had stopped calling out and was just looking desperately from face to face, as if hoping for some spark of recognition. I shook my head as he skimmed me and kept from shuddering again, feeling very sorry for whoever he was. I knew what it was like to be completely adrift, although the situations were very different.
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| ''Where are'' my ''friends?'' The thought caused me to bite my lip. My roommate, Dana, had gone back to Midtral. She was pretty experienced with conventions and did a lot of cosplay, but she hadn't stayed for the big day. Gwen had said repeatedly that she intended to spend the four-day break from classes that the college gave us at Kublai-Con time alternately studying and playing speedruns on videogames. 'Thaniel was ''supposed'' to have come with me, because I'd been nervous about wearing my costume in daylight, but I hadn't seen him. Everyone else had gone at one point or another, I suspected. I'd heard a lot of bragging over the last week. Midtral being a liberal arts college, most of the student body had intended to visit Xanadu. That was the reason for the college setting up a four-day break, including restricted mealplans.
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| ''Well, I can call them'', I thought decisively. ''Or send emails. That's got to work better than looking at each and every individual out here.'' How many people had attended the convention, anyway? Seven thousand? Eight? Nine? More?
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| With that, I found my way back to the room. At that point, I realized that the leg-hugging trousers I wore didn't have pockets.
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| Searching frantically through my... whatever it was... eventually yielded a leather-colored beltstrap with a pouch. Instead of a zipper or some kind of visible catch, the opening had some strange clinging mechanism that I couldn't figure out, although it opened readily enough when I got my finger under the flap. My keycard, thankfully, was there.
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| Back in the room with the door shut and locked, I shucked the strange clothes as fast as I could. It took a bit longer than I'd expected - I had to remove the glove-armbands and the obi to get out of the kimono-wrap with the shoulderpads, and the boots had to come off before the leggings. Above the trousers and below the kimono-thing was actually a weird sort of shirt with a sort of tail that extended down the front like a loincloth, but it went in the pile too.
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| As soon as everything but my underwear was in a pile, it sort of ''blurred''. Like a camera view that went out of focus. Only when it came back ''into'' focus, the pile was made up of my shirt, a battered pair of cargo pants, and two very rumpled towels with duct tape wrapped around them.
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| What was more, when I got up the nerve to put my stuff back on - except for the towels, which were probably ruined now thanks to the tape - it ''stayed'' a shirt and a battered pair of cargo pants. I decided, after a moment, that it really wasn't worth thinking about.
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| ''Well, what do you know. The world goes insane, and somehow the beds still get made in the morning,'' I thought, noticing both the smoothed, fixed bedcovers and the note lying on the coffee table, among the brochures and whatnot. It looked like it had been photocopied in a rush; I saw from the left side of the paper that whatever this had been copied from must have been hole-punched.
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| Curious, I looked it over. It identified me only as an "occupant of the first floor", and contained instructions to stay on convention grounds and call for various needs via the room phone. It also advised me - and, by extension, everyone else on the first floor - of how friends and family might be contacted, and it assured that we would be safe, that our needs would be met. At the bottom was a hasty-looking signature that I found to be completely illegible.
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| ''Well, I'm hardly important enough to get a personalized missive, anyways. I'm in one of the cheap rooms; the bed's twin-size and I don't think I could wedge a second one in here if I tried,'' I thought with some disgust. ''Nor did I run about wreaking grand havoc or anything. Well, I suppose they have more important things to focus on...''
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| Putting that aside, I fished my laptop out from my red carryall. It wasn't a particularly fancy or fast model. But it worked well enough for what I used it for.
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| I stretched out on the bed, powered up, and checked my Hotmail account. News reports from my ''New York Times'' subscription, most of them having to do with Xanadu. I decided to check through them later. New messages from my Yahoo groups. Advertising for dog food, notification of a rebuttal to the anti-Roswell stance I had taken on some forum... personal mail. From my dad, from Dana, from 'Thaniel. I decided to open 'Than's first.
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| "Nathaniel of the Blue Side" had written "So sorry. There was a car crash on the interstate. Traffic was all tied up. It took ''hours'', I didn't get to the Center until noon.
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| "There was a police line at the Con, did you know that? Told me a load of BS about terrorists and biohazards - no two people had the same explanation. I don't know about you, but last I checked there weren't any weapons that need Animal Control to mop stuff up. I suppose there could have been hallucinogens, though, because I could have sworn I saw a dragon... and something really weird happened.
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| "I'd have liked to show you my Darth Nihilius costume - spent ages on the mask. Then someone broke it. I'm really bummed about that. Yeah, I know, I'm shallow. What I'm getting at is that I really hope you're not dead or whatever. Give me a reply, okay?
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| "May the Blue Side flow to you. 'Thaniel out."
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| I twisted my badly-cut hair around my little finger. 'Than was a decent friend and all, but I was kind of glad he wasn't here, truth be told. We would probably have ended up sharing the room. And I didn't like sharing a room as small as this one with anyone as clumsy as him. Besides, what he might have turned into...
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| I replied to his message - heavy with "I'm fine, but it's really chaotic here"s - I felt slightly guilty. I could have just checked and responded appropriately to the rest of the mail, but I knew that wouldn't be right. I wasn't looking forwards to a longer version I'd had with my mom last night. But, it had to be done...
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| ''That's duty.'' I made the call.
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| {{series bar
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| |series=Revan in Xanadu
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| |previous=[[Revan in Xanadu (Part 7)]]
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| |next=[[Revan in Xanadu (Part 9)]]}}
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| [[Category:Story]] [[Category:Joysweeper]] [[Category:Xanadu]] [[Category:Alien]]
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