Season 04 - Episode 15

‘try her mother’

Ri is back in her travelling box where she is comfortable if a little bored.

The box has a floor and a ceiling and a front and a back and curtains on either side. Inside the box is a comfortable chair where she sits for hour after hour. The box sits atop two long poles, running front to back on either side. These poles in turn rest on the shoulders of men, four men to be precise. Huge and muscled, one at each corner, they carry her on through the corridors.

Her mother, she knows, is just ahead, in a travelling box all of her own. Her mother's travelling box is much larger than hers and infinitely more ornate. It takes eight men to carry that travelling box but it's their honour and so they enjoy it.

Ri spent a lot of time in the travelling box when they left The Levels. She didn't like it at first but after a few days she got used to it and now doesn't really mind. She doesn't know how long or how far they went or in what direction. All she knows is that once they arrived, everything was different.

The clothes and the words and the rooms and people, everything was strange and bizarre. It was so overwhelming that for while she gave up on practicing living in the world of light and hid in the darkness as much as she could.

This hiding seemed to please her mother so she kept hiding even once she started to feel safe. That took a while because of all the violence, all the blood and the screaming and death. There was a lot of that for quite a while but then everything calmed right down.

Her mother gave her two whole rooms, one light and another pitch black. The dark room gives her an open feeling of broad, expansive peace. It reminds her of the olden days, of the time she had lived with her father.

The light room connects to her mother's many rooms and is filled with many, many things. Ri knows the things are special and important because everyone who sees them says so. To her however, they are just things, hard little pieces of the world of light. It makes her mother happy when she pretends to like the things however and so she does that too.

Recently she has started practicing again, being in the world of light, talking like other people do. She has been doing this secretly as she knows her mother doesn't like it, but it feels important to her to try.

Her mother rarely tells her to kill these days, just Ri's presence is usually enough to make people behave. So overall, Ri is happy with her life, or at least she was until this new journey started.

She doesn't know where they are going now, nor how long it will take to get there. All she knows is that she misses her rooms and hopes she can return to them soon.

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