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Susie grabbed Kris by the scruff of their mantle, growled something under her breath, then tugged them both out into the fountain without so much of a goodbye.
That was all fine and well, Ralsei thought. In truth, rather endearing. He softly laughed, joining the other two left with him—Lightners stood in a line and thought this world a dream, who certainly did not even know his name. Not that it mattered, really. To them, he was nothing but a background figure. A set piece. He couldn’t resist his role, nor did he have any real desire to.
“Ah,” he sighed, his laughter carefully culling itself, “right, then. It was an honour to be a part of your dream.” Per usual, his voice quirked into a higher formality when he spoke to strange Lightners. With Kris and Susie, at least, he’d nearly gotten over it. To a degree. There is a part of him that will always be performative, for as long as he...
Ralsei was polite. That was something about himself that he rather liked.
He dropped into a short curtsy, bowed head and gentle smile. “Here.” he smiled, paw extending to his left, towards Berdly, “Let me smooth out the crinkles.”
Berdly opened his mouth in some sort of obnoxious (...sorry...) reply, but Ralsei’s charm had beaten him to it, crumpling him down into a lightly snoring pile of feathers. His eyes lagged a moment behind, only closing as a fuzzy pink blanket fluttered onto him from a shock of heavenly light. As Noelle processed her friend’s collapse, she uttered a shriek of surprise, hooves clicking lightly as she backed herself towards the end of the scaffolding. Ralsei’s toes tapped after her, though his smile faltered.
As expected, though maybe a little too soon, he could feel the world unwinding behind him, the light pressing down at his back. He didn’t have much longer, despite his misgivings. He really didn’t mean to scare her, he just hadn’t thought... “Er… try not to have such strange dreams.” An attempt was made at saving this. Oh, well.
He wasn’t entirely certain how Ms. Holiday played into the Prophecy, but he certainly knew that her presence could have meant disaster, if things went slightly differently. Just looking at her made him a bit nervous, too. Not her fault. Her eyes, terrified-yet-steely, ran over him, then ran over him again, grasping for any sort of explanation. He twirled his claw around a loose tuft of hair on his wrist.
“Sorry,” he said again, redundancy sticky in his mouth. He’d, er. Done his best.
The spell took her out even faster than Berdly. She must have really needed that sleep.
She’d only get a moment of it before the light blew it all away.Ralsei exhaled something moderated. It prickled at the nape of his neck, now, as he kneeled on the slackening concrete, warm under his bare knee. The blanket he conjured—matching with Berdly’s, and he’d hoped that that was alright—was askew. He only had a moment, but he couldn’t just leave it off like that. He kneeled, and the ground slackened beneath his knee. Warm. He pressed his teeth to his bottom lip and moved on, pulling the blanket fully over Noelle’s slow-breathing body, up to her chin, down to her shins. He stood, and it really couldn’t be called standing, anymore, in the lightning storm of neons fading. It wasn’t really falling, either. It wasn’t anything at all, and then he was on his way home.