The Ghosts of Me

6

It took hours, and they were all waiting anxiously in the kitchen and dining room. None of them had a lot of appetite, but there was food in front of them, just waiting to be eaten. None of them wanted to talk about what had happened, they were all just waiting for Makoto to return with Alain, and then maybe they could talk. Set things behind them, figure out what it was that they were going to do with Adel, because it was becoming more and more obvious that they were not going to be able to just leave him alone. He would need to go down, but how would Alain take it? How were they going to do it? Adel was very powerful, and had hundreds of people at his command, with undying loyalty. That was not something that they did have, and they couldn't even just go into the planet themselves. That was a death sentence. It was lucky that they had managed to escape the times that they had, and none of them wanted to risk that again.

What should they do? It was plaguing all of them. A question that none of them were able to really answer. They would need Alain to even be able to plan a strategy, and he was definitely not ready to talk about it. There was something so ingrained in him that he wasn't even able to call Adel by his name. Unable to even be disrespectful to him. It was going to be a nightmare trying to convince him to help them plan his downfall, but there was no other way for it. They needed it.

Philip was stuck wondering if he should go into this world's library, and see what he could find. It was a dangerous thing to try, and something he would request permission from Alain first before doing, but it was an avenue to consider. Not that anyone here even knew he was able to do it, but he would not do so without asking Alain first. He knew that the boy was bound to be in the records of Adel, not just because family was typically intertwined like that, but also because of the obsession it seemed Adel had with him.

Still, all of this would require coming clean, and he was not sure he was ready for that. What would happen if they wanted to take him back? Return him to Shotarou? He was not sure he could stand that. Knowing how Shotarou truly felt about him? It was just too much for him to handle. He was not sure he could take being returned like discarded goods to the person that had done the discarding in the first place. When he thought at how he had first shown up here, Alain had helped him, even when it was obvious the other had no idea what to do, and was incredibly wary of him. The guy had a good heart....Philip didn't think that he would let the group discard him at a moment's notice, but there was other things at play here.

They needed to get Alain healthy again first. Alain was currently unconcious with severe wounds, and he would not heal the same way now that he was not in his eyecon form.

That confused him, greatly, but he was slowly understanding the weird jargon. Eyecon form was similar to the united form Philip and Shotarou used to take, only not quite the same, and it was more similar to his side than Shotarou's. The true body was elsewhere, and the eyecon was more of a secondary physical form. Apparently Alain was in his true body, something Makoto seemed to think was going to hamper the healing process. Philip was not really understanding the whole healing thing in eyecon versus physical form, and he did not know how one transferred to the other, but he was not going to bother with all of his questions...Not at a time like this.

That and he really would prefer to ask Alain these questions. It was, after all, somewhat his fault that Adel had become so vested in stealing Alain away. The fact that Alain had been teleported to him, Philip had seen that glimmer of interest immediately curl in the man's eyes. With an inner shudder, he could not help but understand that his part to play in this was definitely not innocent, even if he had not quite understood it at the time.