𝕳𝖔𝖘𝖙𝖊𝖘𝖘 - (Ranboo)

𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝟏𝟕

It was a while later. Venus had long since gotten better thanks to the witch, whose name was Flora. The girls were exploring some woods. If only Hertha could have appreciated the scenery. But it was hard, extraordinarily difficult, when she wanted to stay safe, make sure Venus was safe and sure everyone was content. They travelled past the woman who Hertha would be in debt to, though she wasn't sure for how long - and had eventually reached a mythical forest.

A forest where the roots travelled upwards and created tunnels with their arms. A forest where the trees were purple-wooded and had white leaves. A forest where there were glowing mushrooms growing from within the trunks of every inanimate citizen of the woods. Fairy lights shimmered across the canopy and friendly childish giggling could be heard from all corners of the biome. It was somewhere Venus was apparently familiar with, and so she comforted her shorter friend explaining that the giggles were from pixies and inchlings which scurried under the crevices of the woods.

It served no interest to Hertha. She didn't want to see any more new places. Not yet. Not until she had somewhere she could return to. But there was no place for someone like herself. There was only more adventuring. Was it ironic? That Hertha was growing sick of learning the same new things? Probably. It felt like she couldn't take anything more from walking around.

The trees looked bored of her, the rain seemed sick of trickling down her hair, the mushrooms seemed tired of the warnings they received from others of the pair eating them. Everything was beginning to blur into the same.

Hertha was dissociating. Nothing felt new, she felt she had lost all human desires and excitement. There was nothing, she thought, nothing to excite her in this saddening state.

Only shame, regret and guilt really got to her. The shame of becoming an explorer because her mother was mad at her; how feeble was Hertha to not be able to withstand such a petty argument? Regret would always be a part of her, any little danger and she'd think back to how she sat admiring fishes while Venus was slowly dying above her. And guilt, well, guilt from feeling those anyway, it was a vicious cycle of feeling bad and because of that, feeling bad. Hertha's morale was hitting an all-time 0.

"Hertha, would you like to live here?" Venus suddenly asked, looking around the woods. Hertha couldn't say the place wasn't mysteriously beautiful, but she knew couldn't say she thought for herself that the place held a new type of beauty. But Hertha thought of the question nonetheless, it was a unique question: Venus had never asked before.

"Hm... where? There isn't nearly enough room anywhere to build anything sustainable enough for living." She pondered and looked from under the roots, which Venus ducked into and posed.

"Become a tunnel dweller, but on the surface." She joked with a small smile, appreciating the purple tint that reflected off of her face.

"But caves are so much more pretty!" Hertha smiled back, joining Venus under the trunk and sitting down. "Look around at this, it's purple and... oh... Venus." She sighed while suddenly thinking of small interior decorations for under the roots.

"What? Wouldn't it be so pretty? I personally prefer the ocean. Imagine an underwater home! Oh, Hertha, that sounds splendid." She continued with some more enthusiasm. Hertha hadn't seen a lot of Venus being excited or expressing herself, so Hertha tried to focus more on that than her ever deepening hole of bleak trauma, "but impossible, the pressure and light levels of the ocean is just a bit too much for anything long-lasting." She concluded and looked away.

"You're only saying that because of the merman boy you had a crush on." Hertha scoffed and laughed at Venus's guilty face. It was true, sadly. Venus only held a connection to the ocean because of that boy. But she didn't want to hear it from the likes of Hertha.