"My comrades! Look out!"
Berdly's voice cut through the silence, as swirling streams of air formed around ABAC, unfolding its pages piece by piece, and quickly dragging it down the path, until neither could see it anymore. The armored bluebird gracefully landed before the two, dematerializing his halberd. "A-Are you okay? My perfect eyes almost deceived me— I could barely recognize you, but then I saw that beast from above and I was sure that they..." Berdly stood up, noticing that the he was being stared at by the lizard without a shred of appreciation in her eyes, "...w-what? What did I do this time?"
Susie looked down, more embarrassed than angry. "It isn't a 'beast', Berdly, it's... uh..." She scratched at her hair, feeling the shame rise within her as Noelle stepped out, figuring this would be a good time to ask: "Are— Is it from one of your adventures? Y-You never told me about any... um, A-ABAC, you said?"
Berdly looked back and forth between the two, as Susie's blush grew by the second. "Wait, you knew it? I thought I heard it say—"
"ALRIGHT! FINE! GEEZ!" Susie yelled out in frustration, crossing her arms and pouting her lips like a toddler that was asked to present in class. "It's— ugh. It's my..." Her eyes darted between Berdly and Noelle. Unable to choose whom to look at, Susie looked to the ground, "...my notebook."
She sat on the floor, with her legs crossed as she talked. "After everything ended, I was... ugh. I felt... alone." Her shoulders slumped, guilt seeping into every word, as if she was confessing to something terrible. "Obviously you guys were great, I wouldn't trade you for the world, but no matter how long we hung out for, I would always come home and feel this... wrongness. Like I didn't belong there, that every day I'll wake up and just be alone again." Berdly sat down with Noelle, avoiding eye contact as Susie continued. "I missed them, too. Kris moved on so fast, but every single night I just kept laying in bed, staring at the ceiling, until I could see the Sun in the window. I couldn't sleep, so I...
...imagined."
Her sharp nails mindlessly drew out shapes in the turbulent floor, a mournful smile stretched across her lips as she spoke. "Lancer, Queen, all the darkners... all the people we saved, even the King... I could hold them all, Hell, I could dump all the junk I dragged home on my bed and sleep with my head on the laptop, and I still wouldn't be able to see them again." Her eyes wandered to the side, the two realizing she was speaking from experience.
"But I had to know. I— I had to know they were okay.
Kris found out pretty soon. You know how they get when someone starts acting weird. Heh...
I thought they'd be mad, but the next day they came to my place. With a blue notebook. Said that I could 'dream for the two of us.'" Noelle shrunk in her place, feeling guilty for what Susie had gone through without the deer being there for her. She knew a lot about their heroics, but it never occurred to her that Susie would hold her darkner friends so dearly. They were her first real friends, after all.
"So I... imagined. Bit by bit, I wrote it down. Their lives, our adventures, what could've been if only they just... stayed with me." The image of a blank page appeared in her mind, her hands unsteady as she slowly drew an blue, open book atop the canvas. "I imagined ABAC so it would help me remember, help me with ideas and stories. I wrote about myself, about us, so that it could tell my friends about the Light World, and how much everything changed."
Her posture shifted, straightening out as she looked up into the dark sky, nostalgia overflowing in her voice. "Once the pages ran out, I kept gluing more and more in until I couldn't close the notebook anymore, and by then, that... pain in my chest had almost gone. I wrote down everything I could, gave everyone a happy ending. I couldn't just throw it away, so I put it in my drawer and...
...forgot about it. Until now."
