Being a tourist is the worst

[assonant]

"Wooooooow..."

He wasn't a bumpkin. ...okay maybe so he was kind of a bumpkin. All of Midorijima, from the ring of seaward cliffs to the center of Platinum Jail to his house in the Old Resident District, what was to Aoba the whole world could neatly fit into Tokyo's central metropolitan sprawl. That wasn't even including the cities and towns beyond the special wards that fanned outward from Tokyo Bay, filling a whole prefecture with a mass of close-quarters humanity. On his island, walking distance applied to everything; here, it'd take him a day to get from where he started at the Haneda Airport to the house of his grandmother's younger brother in Hachioji. And sure okay, it wasn't technically Tokyo Tokyo, but the Tama Area but they all fell under the same blanket name and it was...huge. Almost too huge to take in, because while Aoba had certainly never considered himself ignorant or sheltered, there was a big difference when it came to poking at directions on his Coil and staring down a public transit map that on first glance looked like flashing neon snakes and crushingly difficult kanji until Ren pointed out that there was katakana in smaller text underneath.

"Haha...! There is!" He nodded vigorously, because he was not nervous in any way. At all. "You can navigate, right? Are all the maps I uploaded current?"

In his arms, a black Pomeranian with a hint of pink tongue poking out of its mouth nodded.

"Yes."

Aoba was not also so relieved he could sigh and lean against a pole for a second. At least he'd packed light; the rest of his things for his month-long stay would arrive by freight shipping.

"Then we'd better hurry, I don't want to miss any of the trains." Trains, his mind reminded him excitedly. He'd never been on one. "Just tell me where to go."

Six hours, three incorrectly purchased tickets, two missed stops, and one mild bike accident later, Aoba was hunched over on a bench outside of what a very nice and very sympathetic elderly couple told him was the Oji Shrine, in Kita. The sun was just dropping behind the friendly square rooftops of office buildings and apartment-style housing. It was a strange, new, exciting experience, watching the sun set; usually the buildings in the Old Resident District were stacked so high as to block the view. But it was a little hard to enjoy it when net searches were turning up hotels two stations and one already-missed train away and his great-uncle was, according to his call message, out for the evening to go pick up his great-nephew.

"I'm sorry, Aoba."

He let out a breath and looked down at Ren curled in his arms, drumming up a smile he didn't quite feel.

"It's not your fault. Don't apologize."

scrap of sassafras

[femina]

Maybe, in the twilight hour, she had strayed too far.

Maybe that would have been a notion in her mind had she any reason to think the wood unfriendly. It was an old land, one whose roots ran deep and far, whose trees, she felt, reached infinitely upwards. Even in the dark depths of night, it was not a land that attributed itself towards terrors, not in her mind.

It had been with that comfort that she had accompanied the stag on his journey that day, unquestioning of his destination, unconcerned with what lay ahead for herself. There had been the creek they had to pass in which she had paused to encourage the blooms of lonely trillium, and then further on, the embankment on which they rested and she shared the secrets that could be found in the reading of cast stones.

Finally, it had been in a glade unfamiliar that they parted, and in the final, quiet moments of sunlight, she basks. There is no hesitation in the way she settles among fallen leaves and soft mosses, the sheer layers of ecru fabric draped lightly across her chest, the rest falling to pool across her legs. A moment to push back hair, strands of auburn desperate to cling to the last rays of sunlight, a moment of content contemplation…

Maybe she had strayed too far, but it's a worry far from her mind.