Welcome to Gaia! ::

Arrival in Reality

It was well into the night when the newlyweds parted from their wedding party, and shortly after midday when they arrived at the room reserved for them. The drastic shift caused by rapidly hopping between time zones could be a bit disorienting for those who were not used to portals, but this worked in their favor - this was the closest thing to time travel that they could achieve, which Mimsy (blatantly) had positive opinions about.

A member of the hotel staff walked them to the door of their accommodations and congratulated them, prompting a reflexive congratulations in response, which in turn prompted a slow nod of anxious compliance from the deeply confused woman next to them. After a brief pause, she rattled off a list of amenities and services and how to receive each of them with awkward hesitance, as if she expected some portion of that to be repeated, and gathered enough courage by the end of it to take their picture just inside the room. The backdrop was a bit questionable - just a bed, table, two small chairs, and a clear sliding door that led to a tiny fenced area of plants surrounding a private onsen - but the sentiment of the moment was still present.

The camera printed two copies, which would have been a marvel if she had not recovered a camera on the beach that functioned in the same way, and the woman handed them over with their room key and a goodbye with a painfully forced smile.

Mimsy closed the door, locked the deadbolt, and held one of the pictures at arm's length to admire it. A smile crept across her face, spawning a giggle a second later, and the image began to vibrate as her excitement reached her fingertips.

"Look!" She urged it in his direction, gaze darting upward towards his eyes. "It is us--married! To one another! Congratulations, Robert."

Though the picture had stolen her attention again, she leaned against him, still plagued by bouts of her rattling giggles every few seconds. This was such an incredible new piece of evidence, and the fact that she had it in her hands, had it at all, was something that had fallen into the realm of all that was statistically highly improbable for a long, long time.

But this was real. A giggle broke into a laugh, and she pressed her cheek against him, pushing her smile off-kilter.

Arrival in--

Of all the things that Mimsy expected to hear, many of which were wildly off-target, 'get out' was nowhere in that category. 'Get out' was something that she would never have expected to hear from him now, as it had never been spoken following all that she had done that actually warranted such a reaction.

"What? No. No!" Panicked, she flung her arms out to her sides and clutched the doorframe with such insistence that it began to splinter beneath her nails. It was a very convincing impression of a cat that refused to vacate its carrier, for fear that certain death waited on the outside.

And in this case it did, as far as she was concerned - if he had suddenly changed his mind for entirely unpredictable reasons, there were no options for her to follow here. Unless it was the attendant...no. Surely not. She was far superior to a woman who could not even properly understand the conventions of congratulations, even if the woman had possibly used some sort of imperceptible sorcery on him.

"No, I need to stay with you!" she wailed, digging pits into the wood beneath her fingers. "Please do not do this! I can be a very good wife! I have researched many methods employed on honeymoons to prove this!"

Reality

No part of this made any amount of rational sense to Mimsy, especially when Robert ceased his attempts to urge her out of the room in favor of bringing her back into it to hold her close to him. That truly seemed to directly oppose all that had been happening just seconds before, and she was stunned into silence by the barrage of contradictions long enough to listen to his explanation without interjecting.

"Oh," she softly replied, following a long pause, quiet with pensive reservation. "Oh, I...yes, all right. I understand. Thank you. You are also inarguably the best."

Her arms loosely circled around him, held together by just one finger hooked into another. As she looked up at that puppydog face, she failed to consider how significant it was that he had immediately responded with comfort and attempts to reconcile. She skimmed past the fact that her gross misinterpretations were not laughed at or corrected with condescension. She did not take the time to note how clearly his intentions had been explained to her, nor that he faulted himself over her.

All she could see was a husband instead of the other side of that door, and everything was right again.

"Is it too late?" She blinked up at him, eyes mirroring the more sedated tone of her words. "I would like for you to carry me as you have specified, if it isn't. That is a nice idea. If it is always done in movies, then I am confident that it should be done in our reality too."

Reality

As important as clarifications could be, Mimsy didn't need one to know that it was clearly not too late after all. She was uninformed in regards to this entire practice, so she allowed him to show her without any commentary. Though it was not the most intricate of motions, it still managed to have its impact.

A shrill giggle, which sounded awfully like a high-pitched cackle of victory, emerged from her mouth the instant that he crossed the threshold with her in his arms. She clung to him so fiercely that putting her back on the ground again was not an especially smooth transition, relinquishing her hold in time to settle her feet on the floor without pulling him with her.

"No," she murmured, pausing to clear her throat. "Goodness, Robert. Not yet. I assumed that you would have known better. I am not yet in proper attire - I will fix this problem, and then it begins!"

My Deer

The morning had almost passed by the time that the two of them made it to 'breakfast'. They arrived with an appetite that the waitstaff had absolutely not been prepared for - namely Robert's, of course - but eventually had their fill before leaving to board a train into Nara.

Mimsy, who had never actually been on a train, spent three quarters of the ride looking back and forth between Robert and the sight of the countryside rapidly passing by them outside the window beside her, speaking almost as quickly about how amazing this was. She babbled from one connecting string of physics to another, excitedly snowballing into a near-endless mathematical marathon, until abruptly stopping mid-sentence to change course into an apology, opting to end their ride with a more inclusive conversation.

All of the uninhibited energy that she had exhibited on the trip over seemed to dissolve as soon as they stepped off of the train. She appeared to have calmed entirely by the time they arrived at the park, with the exception of the way that she casually swung their tightly interlocked hands between them.

"Use caution to touch them gently," she reminded him as they stepped through the gate, immediately acquiring the attention of a small group of the park's inhabitants. The two of them looked as human as any of the other visitors in the park; the friendly four-legged creatures could not have known better. Her fingers twitched against his as she took in a shaky, shallow breath as the thought of fragile little bones and warm, red--

No. She could be gentle too. A gentle, happy, married human on her honeymoon, just like all gentle, happy, married humans.

She smiled up at him and bent down towards the tiny deer closest to her, offering it one stiffly cupped palm.

My Deer

Rigidity was not an especially encouraging trait to animals who tended to be fairly intuitive in regards to their surroundings. Though Mimsy's stance didn't soften, the little deer eventually braved the few steps it took to reach her, poked her hand with its antlers, and extended a surprisingly long tongue to lick her hand like a dog.

She scrunched up her nose and looked at Robert. He was doing a much better job with this.

"Did you have deer on your farm, like the cow?" Recalling the story he told her about raising and slaughtering the animal must have had a physical effect on her, or she happened to encounter the single telepathic deer in the entire park - it jerked away from her, and she quickly withdrew her hand, staring down at it much like a deer in headlights.

The deer, being an actual deer, stared back at her in the very same way.

This went on until she thought to clarify what she had said. The implications were not really the same as what she'd intended to ask, and if the deer could somehow understand her, elaborating had the potential to positively influence this situation.

"I understand that they are not typically kept as domesticated agricultural livestock, but...well, I mean...were there ever cervid visitors?" A gasp accompanied an especially interesting idea and startled the deer again, who had just mustered enough courage to peek under the fabric of her dress skirt. She didn't seem to notice, but it appeared to be discouraged from this mission now anyway. "Did you domesticate any? Could you ride them? Like horses?"

My Deer

Despite the tame temper of the deer that saw human visitors each day, they were still skittish enough to prove Robert's claim. The commotion of the deer attempting to escape him was enough to convince the other to hurriedly seek more worthwhile company, which ideally possessed the food that they did not.

They had successfully scared off their welcome party.

Mimsy slipped one hand into the crook of his arm and began walking down the path towards one of the wooding buildings, assuming that they might collect some of the 'deer-crackers' that she'd read about to feed them.

"I think that your remark hurt its fragile emotional state," she teased, though she had very obviously waited until they were out of earshot for some reason. "Statistically, not everyone would believe that they are terrible companions. For example, you are the only one who believed that I would not be a terrible wife. As I presume I have proven, I am a very good wife. There may be someone with similarly accurate evidence that indicates that they have proven themselves to be very good pets."

She stopped walking so suddenly that she almost tripped over herself and looked up at Robert with an exceptionally pale face and grave expression.

"Not in the same way, I would hope."

My Deer

Initially, the failure to agree with her analogy caused Mimsy to shift uncomfortably as she swallowed past concerns of his statement's correlation with his opinions of her. Then he took off after one of the deer, which looked exactly like she imagined wrangling a calf might, and she could only laugh.

"Robert," she called after him, her smile echoing off of the hands she'd cupped around her mouth. "You cannot begin your interactions so intensely!"

The irony of this was lost on her.

"It is more effective to deceive them into creating an interaction for you!" She sat on the edge of the path, just outside of the pebbled surface, and tucked her legs carefully to her side as she smoothed the fabric of her dress. These were all motions that hardly took any conscious consideration by this point, so her attention remained closely locked upon Robert as she settled into the dewy grass.

The majority of their new cervid companions had scattered into other portions of the park, unwilling to risk being trampled on by what must have seemed like a giant just for a single bite of a wafer. The few that remained were watching her with tentative intrigue, as if they expected her to spring up to pursue them as her husband had.

But she didn't - when she pulled a single cracker from her pocket, she held it in her palm and waited, moving only enough to calmly breathe in and out. Within the span of a minute, the first brave deer wobbled towards her and began to nibble on the food in her hand, oblivious in its newfound state of contentment.

Her smile went unnoticed.

Once the first snack had been consumed, she reached into her pocket for another, and another to follow. There was a small gathering of little deer around her - two eating from her hand, one confident enough to rest its head on her shoulder, one sniffing at the length of braided hair that was just barely resting on the grass next to her. Had she been able to place the familiar feeling that followed, she might have recognized that the latter had begun to chew on the end of her braid instead of the food in the pocket beside it; instead, she would find herself with a slightly lopsided set of braids again, with no recollection of losing an inch of hair.