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[neededproof]

A little over a week into the whole ordeal, Ryan was starting to believe it wasn't actually a dream, and he hadn't just hit his head in Portland. There was so much about this place that just couldn't be happening, not really, but he was running out of other options. A dream would've been preferable, but they worked differently. They got all blurry

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[broken_brushes]

It was a nice day, and I'd been thinking about taking the boat out. After the revelations I'd gotten and given recently, I thought some time chilling out might be a good idea. You can only think so long about something before it drives you insane.

"You look a little lost," I observed from a few paces behind Ryan. "Everything okay?"

For reasons I couldn't quite explain, I felt responsible for him. Summer, while kinda crazy, had the sort of go-to attitude that led me to believe she could take care of herself and adjust fairly well. Ryan, though, I wasn't so certain of. Maybe it was the way he looked at me, like he kept hoping I'd be someone I wasn't.

[neededproof]

Ryan kept looking out ahead of him for a moment, composing himself carefully before he turned around to look at her. He knew that voice well, but he wasn't about to start getting his hopes up. However long he was gonna be stuck here, he couldn't spend his stay thinking she was gonna be someone else every single time. It was just one more thing he had to deal with.

"Yeah," he said, almost smiling as he nodded to her. Shari. "Not lost, just... thinking." Where he might ordinarily have glanced away, he kept looking at her now. She wasn't about to turn into Marissa, and he had to make himself face that. It was the only way it'd get easy.

[broken_brushes]

"I freak you out." It was an observation, not a question, and I didn't look away. "That's fair. I would be freaked out, too, if I were you. She was your girlfriend, right? And here I am, looking just like her but shorter." I hesitated and then gave Ryan a pointed look. "That, by the way, does not mean I give you permission to call me Short Coop or any variation thereof."

[neededproof]

There was no point in denying it. Ryan had hoped he was less obvious than that, but he wasn't exactly surprised that he wasn't. "Sorry about Summer," he said. "You kinda get used to her."

The rest was a little more difficult to address, but Shari didn't need all the details. "And yeah, Marissa was my girlfriend." The 'used to be' part had been a matter of necessity, not because they'd wanted it that way. There was no point in talking about the complications, or in mentioning to Shari that she actually was different in one other way. It would only underline the ways in which she was the same, and he had no intention of spending a lot of time looking into her eyes. "It's... been a while since I've seen her. Summer actually called you Short Coop to your face?"

[bylightofmoon]

Zorya Polunochnaya was standing knee-deep in the water, dressed in a shade of blue that made it look like the ocean had swallowed her up. Perhaps it had, the water deciding to come and reclaim the wayward midnight sister in a way that the sky never could. This was not the case and she swayed slightly, eyes half-closed behind dark glasses as she brushed her fingers across the surface of the water.

In and out, in and out, in and out. Eventually she hoped it would pull her with it and take her home, back to the moon and where it was cool and dark forever. Slowly she lifted her head, eyes opening wider behind the frames as she spoke.

"Come out come out wherever you are."

[neededproof]

"I'm not hiding," Ryan replied. All the same, he headed further out toward the waves, coming in close enough for the waves to sweep over his ankles as they crashed in. He remembered her from the party in the Hub; she'd be pretty hard to forget. He still couldn't make much sense of her, though. "You're the one camouflaging yourself."

[bylightofmoon]

"I know."

She had not been talking to him in the first place, not in any direct sense of the word. Baldur had been confused by her at first, and she was sorry for it now, sorry that she had taken something from him that he would never know to miss.

The youngest Zorya squinted behind the glasses. "Do you like running?"

[neededproof]

"Uh, yeah, I guess," he said. There wasn't a whole lot else to do around here, it seemed like, except explore and all. "It's fun. You run?" There was no point in getting out of shape just because the whole place seemed to be laid out like a permanent vacation. Besides, with his new place as far from the Compound as it was, he'd need to.

[acarelesslife]

When the entire business with everyone going mad had happened a few weeks before, Leon had, to be quite honest, found the it terribly entertaining. Unaffected himself, and quickly coming to the conclusion that the body switching was perfectly harmless, it was a matter of sitting back and watching the show. Like something out of a fairy story, it was, or some droll comedy at a cinema.

But it was shocking just how quickly even madness could become dull, and the second time around he had left the more heavily populated areas around the Compound and escaped to the beach.

He had brought a book, but it had bored him quickly, and he had soon found himself staring into the ocean, until the young man had paused in front of him, the newcomer's gaze seemingly unseeing. Leon sat up and rested his elbows on his knees. "All right there?"

[neededproof]

One thing Ryan had noticed in the days since his arrival was how friendly everyone was. They were all nice and chatty and they wanted to know how you were and where you'd come from and what year it had been. It wasn't bad, but it was weird. If the completed picture was supposed to be something Ryan had made up, he was pretty sure that was a puzzle piece that didn't fit. His imagination was, or so he suspected, a slightly more volatile and unwelcoming thing.

He turned around and looked over the guy who'd spoken. "Yeah," he said with a nod, "I'm fine. Thanks." He drew in a deep breath. "Just checkin' out the view."

[acarelesslife]

If Ryan had voiced his thoughts, Leon would have been surprised. Oh, yes, people were found of conversation and all that, but why shouldn't they be? In his world, everyone could be friendly with the right sort of welcome.

"Bit of a view, isn't it?" He stood and brushed the sand off his trousers, then stuck his hands in his pockets. "Can't say they make water that blue where I come from."

[neededproof]

"And where would that be?" Ryan asked. The guy was English, that much he could figure out, but beyond that, he didn't know. Back in Newport, it really had been that blue, and he thought there should have been more similarity, that it shouldn't have been so different from one ocean to the next. It could have been a beach in California or further out in the Pacific, but it wasn't like home at all.