[35th Fall 507]
Moving clumsily through the water of a canal in Mura, she was slightly irritated that her mother never taught her how to swim properly. Or it could be because she never asked, the answer seemed viable enough, knowing her mother's strange personality. Yet she still continued to faze Ruby, the most recent case being their landing on Konti Isle a few days back.
'It's nice to be back.'
or so Ruby pictured her mother would say upon their arrival, but the memory of her mother's dejected face kept floating in her mind. She had often remarked to her daughter that she was a free spirit, but Ruby never expected it to be this extreme. Still, highly aware of her similarity to her mother's, Ruby tried to associate her mother's mental case to herself and to her surprises found that she could understand the case easily.
Population centers asserted a stricter adherence to norms, even in the absence of a rule managing the behaviour in question. However the case did not rest more heavily on the restrictions imposed by being in a city, but rather the possibilities denied from one by not being outside a city. But it wasn't just nature's beauty that she missed, no, it wasn't simply that.
Ruby brushed her hand on the tip of an Anthozoa forest, and brightly colored small fishes scattered to her face as if in feeble retaliation, similar to a Gorgonian Whip that she buried her face in later on. Then she put Elodea flowers in her nostrils, one in each, before finalizing her opinion (though not before rubbing the nape of her neck to the soft pouf on top of a Plumose Anemone to confirm a written knowledge that its stings were relatively harmless to Kontis and Chorodas).
She missed the humbling might of nature itself.
How feeble this feels, she mused. Elodea and Gorgonian Whips could cause chest pain and bowel irritation respectively if ingested, that much she remembered very well from her mother's notes. Even so, look how easily she belittled both even on a first encounter.
Feeling calm and relaxed from a Chali she was starting to nibble from under the water surface, she began expanding the parameter to cover other things that might be of influence to her in the past and the future.
'What is it to look at the world properly ?"
Upon emerging from the water with the Chali pad on top of her head like a hat, she found herself in direct eye contact with a delicate-looking woman standing on the footbridge nearby, perhaps too close to such a pair of dazzling green-blue eyes. Switching from gill-breathing, she blew out the Elodea flowers in her nostrils and gave an awkward smile.
"Uh... Do you like books ?"
Dang it brain, what did you just make me say ?!