[BROWTOBER] Found Footage feat. Astrean angst

The shoreline is gray and cloudy these days. With summer on its deathbed, autumn creeps in silently as the tourists depart from the oceanside. All that said and done… 

Fjara is lonely.

The wind is cold against her scaled skin. She reaches over and pats Lucy, face expressionless. The crabbit chirps and curls up against the Astrean for warmth, though Fjara is uncertain how much of it she has in her. The least she could do is move to drain herself of that restlessness… At least, then, she will be able to sleep when the stars of the celestial seas hang overhead.

As she begins to rise from the damp sand, Fjara uses the ground for leverage to balance herself. When she does, however, the sensation of something hard beneath her fingertips presents itself. Her brow raises. With a gentle brush of her thumb and Lucy’s curious digging, Fjara finds some kind of camera.

She has seen such a thing before at the autumn festivals she visited of late.

Blowing off the layer of sand, Fjara searches the metal surface for a button of some kind. In the meantime, Lucy bounces up and down, pacing around her shell in her excitement. 

After some digging and cleaning sand out from the cracks of the device, Fjara zaps it with a bit of a magic charge with her astral aspect— and it clicks on. The screen blinks two or three times before staying on.

Fjara quietly gasps. Lucy’s bouncing halts when she realizes something is wrong with Fjara. The Astrean clicks slowly through the images at first, before her pace quickens. Something floods through her, a lump catching in her throat.

These are undersea remnants of the Astreans. Cities, temples, cathedrals. Her head spins— suddenly, she has to sit back down. Lucy chirps sadly and sits back down at Fjara’s side, specifically crawling into her lap now, however. 

Once the initial shock sets in, Fjara breathes deeply. This is years of research images from someone, lost. That in and of itself is its own pill to swallow. But seeing what she remembers for the first time in reality outside the dreamscape… It overwhelms her like a tide she cannot outswim.

She swallows hard. Putting the camera down to collect herself, Lucy blinks up at her friend.

Fjara sighs. “I am sorry, little one,” she says softly, reaching down to pet the top of Lucy’s head as something hot stings her eyes for the first time in a long time.

(She thought she’d forgotten how to do that.)

“I don’t know what to think.” 

The Astrean’s wings shift inward in a sort of self-hugging motion. Her arms wrap around the concerned crabbit. To her speechless companion alone, Fjara quietly cries. The waves muffle the sound of a woman lost in time and caged behind bars of isolation. Were anyone else around, the sun would threaten to reveal her existence to them… But in her current fortune, nobody else is around. 

Tomorrow, she will carry on as she knows she must— to honor people.

After all, if she cries and nobody was around to see it, did it really even happen?