entrancelogs | merry christmas; i could care less [ open ]

Their nose wrinkles faintly, scrunching up as they consider it.

"Is it candy paper?" It feels prudent to ask. Candy paper probably won't last as long as regular paper, so it bodes mentioning that they wouldn't very much want to write on candy paper. Hopefully that isn't too picky of them. They say that you should love what you do, but Frisk would prefer to love it visually, and not edibly.

She smiles, reaching into her robes and producing a blue journal with ornate silver trim. It's not the original, but thankfully, she always keeps backups.

"I've managed to acquire some without the, ah, flavor of the day, as it stands." Which she's thankful for- writing on candy paper isn't easy, or even very possible from her attempts this morning. "But that was a smart question, considering the Mansion's recent... tricks, as it were."

“I tried playing on a ukulele made of candy,” Frisk informs her gravely. “It didn’t sound so great.”

But it tasted delicious, and there was something to appreciate about the candyfloss strings, the elegantly carved chunk of dark, swirled chocolate with the frets crafted of peppermint. It had been a work of art in and of itself.

But they’re still glad that they still have their own instrument. They sit at attention, legs crossed, looking all the world like a preschooler at story time.

She laughs a bit, gently, imagining them moving to strum the strings and the whole thing shattering. But regardless, she flips the journal open. As she navigates to a new page, they can see loopy, curved handwriting dotting through the pages, along with detailed sketch notes of a variety of people- Dipper and Mabel, Mettaton, Legion. She flips past Lup, lingers on it only a moment, and continues. There's even one of Frisk in there, with their own page of notes. Finally, she settles on a fresh page, retrieving a pen.

"Admittedly, I'm more of a painter than a sketch artist. But I've learned a quick picture sometimes describes much more than words." Lucretia glances towards them a bit, smile warm. "What should I sketch for our example?"

They don't want to encroach, glance over things that might be private, but they still recognize little slips and shapes as Lucretia cards through the pages. The Pineses. Mettaton. Legion. Lup. She's good, too - every sketch is beautiful, detailed, accurate to a tee.

She really is good at this.

They almost suggest themself, complete with a dramatic pose, but that would defeat the purpose of learning on their own. So they slip the strap of their instrument from their shoulders and set it down.

"How's this?"

She would have loved the dramatic pose, to be honest, but it does make it hard for them to watch. So she nods, backs her paper on the journal, and begins to draw the outline.

"Now, ideally, you would do this in pencil as to erase mistakes and rough lines, but my expertise is in getting a quick piece, like a memory." She ruminates for a moment that of course, of course she chose that word, but continues quickly. "So the key is to start with the outline and fill in the details. Get your biggest shapes first."

Her lines are sharp and deft, and despite the swiftness of the marks, they manage to look almost effortless, nothing like the painstakingly traced outlines they've struggled with, only to scowl at the finished product in utter disappointment at its mangled lack of a resemblance to the inspiration.

Still, they watch closely, though one of the phrases she picks sticks out to them.

"Like a memory?"

They are so sharp, so quick on the uptake, she wonders if it's just that easy to get into the cracks of her. She'd be the first to admit that she hasn't kept as careful a control over her persona since her arrival, but without all her informants, the straight path of the story she's been writing for so long, it's much, much harder to find her place in it.

She goes slowly, her hands steady, as she adds some lines for depth.

"Well... yes. It's difficult to project the way any of us see the world, truly. But if you can do something right, it will stick in their mind. They imagine it as you do."

If you can do something right, it will really stick with someone. One good deed, one kind word, one refusal to FIGHT. Sometimes that’s all it takes.

“I think it makes sense,” says Frisk, with a short little hum of acknowledgement and a nod. “It doesn’t cost anything to be kind, but for someone who’s had a bad day, it can mean everything.”

Considerably more simplistic than they’d like to imply, but now isn’t a time to talk about things like how bad memories can stick just as badly, if not more so, as good ones. Sometimes they eat away at you. Sometimes they can be the one thing you need, when all is at its lowest point, and all you have is a Bad Memory and the realization that, without any determination at all, even something cruel can behave like a Last Dream instead.

"Of course." Underneath, she is thinking the same- the significance of one action, the gesture of one moment, the feeling of letting one thing fall and disappearing, her disappearing, from everyone she had ever loved. Seconds. Moments. And then nothing.

But that isn't what she says, either.

Lucretia pauses in her movements to look over at them, gesturing with her pen. "So once you have the main shape, you add other dimensions, and then you move on to details. When you're doing work like this, you want to be sure to draw what would be on the bottom first, since you can't erase lines. Since the strings go over the middle, we'll want to detail that first."

"Dimensions," says Frisk, a casual repetition out of curiosity rather than lack of understanding. People have called Wonderland that, before. Dimension. Its own little isolated pocket of world. Apparently it means something in drawing too.

You can't ERASE your mistakes. It's like the way the world ought to work. It's like the way the world usually works.

Usually. But not always.

"What if you could erase it?" It hardly takes anything. A little fraction of determination spilled into a SOUL overfull with it, these days, pinning the moment in crystalline suspension for a handful of a moment.

"Yes, like a plane of existence." She replies idly, starting to add depth to the hole inside, anything she'll be going over later. Lucretia almost misses the second question when it's said, tilting her head just a bit their way.

"Well, if you were using pencil, or an erasable material... but ink simply smudges, I'm afraid." She's also incredibly literal, most of the time. "So you couldn't."

It would be good for her to know, just in case. And...maybe it'd be good for them to know, too, for posterity. Just how Determined is she? How likely is she to remember? They suspect that, given their conversations before, she might be very Determined; enough to feel a ripple in the water-bucket when the pebble drops.

"It's not about if it's erasable," says Frisk. All things are, they know, to an extent. Entropy. Decay.

A tincture of unidirectional force and SOUL, poured into the butterfly-pin stuck in the inching creep of linear time.

"It's about going back and fixing it."

That's what it's about.

Going back.

And time leaps back, a skip and nestling back into the ordinary way of things. A dark, rusted red iris peeps out from underneath heavy lids, peering at Lucretia for a reaction.

"Ink smudges," says Frisk softly. "But you can still erase it."

She almost misses it, truthfully. If somehow Frisk found their way into her SOUL, it would undoubtedly shine purple, the odds to keep going whatever the cost, to live, to survive. But there's no denying that bit of red, the way she has learned to shape the world, the way she has taken her brush strokes and written herself from the narrative. But what tells her isn't any of that. It's the muscle memory of being remade. Of, at the top of each year, she and her companions would break into a thousand pieces, knit back together, and the transfer of action in that leap.

What happens, is she almost misses a line where she was drawing. And Frisk takes the next line right out of her mouth.

"... And how exactly did you pick those words?" Lucretia can't be sure, but curiosity has found her as she readjusts her hand properly. "I hadn't quite mentioned ink smudges."

"You told me," says Frisk. Their eyes have pinched half-shut, but there's still a glimmer of dark scarlet, eyeing her carefully. Can she remember? Can she see past the skips and leaps across time?

Is she as Determined as people like Dipper, like Shepard, like Chara?

"But I went back to before you told me."

It would be easy enough to dismiss it, if they hadn't said anything. Just a little misstep. Time magic is incredibly complex in her world, even among other planes they visited and techniques she learned across worlds. Causing any kind of temporal disturbance to move yourself is hard enough, but to bring another person? They're just a child. But how could they have pulled that wording, the movement of her so precisely?

Lucretia idly wonders if this, combined with the ukulele, means she's simply found an incredibly good bard. Not a bad thing. But unexpected.

"How did you do that?" She's keenly aware this time, wonders how there wasn't even an uttered word. "That sort of magic is very advanced. Getting through time isn't at all simple, especially with a passenger in tow."

People call it that all the time. Magic. Some kind of superpower. Even if they should know that ordinary humans don’t have magic - not from their world. Not normally. Then again, what about an anomaly counts as normal?

There’s really only one answer to her question, and it’s the simplest one.

“Determination,” says Frisk, simply. “It’s what makes humans different from monsters. The resolve to change fate. I just have a little more than normal.”

Abnormal. Ha ha.

She's finding herself twisting the pen in her hand instead of sketching further, her mind moving with the fidgeting in her hands. There are versions of something like this in her magic, of forcing the universe to do your bidding, but they'd be much too complex for any child to learn- some scholars don't make it there their whole lives. This has to be something different, and she wants to know about it immediately.

"Is it a... spell? From the way you're talking, it sounds more like an innate ability." Maybe less like a power, more like a racial trait, if they mention humans and monsters. "Can all humans in your world do this? Can it be learned? Did someone teach you?"

“I don’t think so. “ it’s easier to talk about like this - looking down at their hands and speaking all matter-of-fact like it’s not something that puts people off. Like it’s not something dangerous, that others can and should fear. “I’m an anomaly.”

There it is - the word that explains it all. Anomaly. Different. Wrong. Don’t belong.

Something that was never supposed to exist.

She notices. Lucretia is good at this, the subtle changes in behavior, from years of dangerous cycles, from picking up cultural cues and needing to do it fast. It's hard to say what of this is the source though, but she knows to tread lightly.

"You're unique." She picks, after a moment's deliberation. "It sounds like you have put in a lot of work into cultivating and practicing this power, even without proper instruction. That's quite admirable. And incredibly difficult."

Lucretia isn't properly sure how to finish this thought, but chews on the thought a few seconds before speaking again. "Thank you for trusting me with this."

"I let everybody know." Is that...does that discredit what they just said? Clipping it away, defusing any potential for some sort of secret, for any manner of trust? It seems discourteous to lie to her, to claim that this is something they trust people with, when it's more of a failsafe instead.

It's something everyone should know, in case someone needs to stop them. Someone with the power to know what they are.

"They deserve to. So I don't mess things up for them."

So they won't be tempted.

"That's a lot of pressure to put on yourself." She can't imagine living a life without any kind of secrets; even now, trying to explain all of the things she could do with magic would take much, much too long. "I can't imagine constantly being on display like that. It is... honest. But straining."

She twists her pen in her fingers, the drawing forgotten in favor of conversation. "Though, that is often the weight of responsibility, you needn't be so harsh."

"It's okay." They already know they have to be. That's...what they've always done. For something approaching two years, now, that's been their policy. It's nice of her to pretend otherwise.

It really is nice of her.

They curl both arms up, fists balled up, flexing what poor excuses they have for muscles with an expression of mock intimidation.

"I'm tough."

She can't help the pull of a smile at her lips, the small bit of laughter as she raises her hand to cover it. It's not funny because of their diminutive stature, but there's always a certain humor in such conviction, such drive. It reminds her of her family. It reminds her of a lot of love.

"You remind me a lot of someone I used to know." Lucretia remembers him now, jacket over a shirtless chest, starting a barfight just to stop someone from getting hurt. "He was young, but confident, too. Strong. Willing to be there for others at any cost."

It's charming- even if he needed to be stopped and helped sometimes. "As long as you have friends to help you when you need it, I have no doubt in your abilities."

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