dissonates | [Voice]

[Silence.

There's too much of it. It burns into his mind, the echo of emptiness in the corner of it, that ache he can't seem to brush aside no matter how he tries to distract himself. He's tried going outside, he's tried burying himself in that braille stuff Xion gave him, he's tried striking up conversations with his housemates (even the animals), but he runs out of things to say far too quickly and in the back of his mind it's always there. The silence, the echo. The fact that something is missing.

Dead.

And then he's had enough.

The journal's camera is partially obscured when the feed flickers on, and what it does show is his face - eyes, a flash of red hair, his bangs down - just enough to make it seem like he's not quite himself. His voice, too, is softened; it's not as open and friendly as Luke would have been when greeting the village, but it lacks the usual anger or pent-up frustrations of the socially-awkward soldier. If anything it sounds... hushed, weary, tinged with a bit of desperation. He needs this. Whether or not he wants to do it is irrelevant.

It hurts. The silence hurts, more than last time when Luke had been sent home, and he honestly hadn't thought it would.]

Tell me about your day. Tell me a story. Talk about anything. Today I'm listening.

[He might not care. He might not be nice about it. He might not even remember it later. But he'll listen.

He just needs to hear something, so he can forget about the nothing in his head for a while.]

((Asch is blind, so all tags must be voice/action or he cannot respond to them!))

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[He considers that for a moment, really mulls it over, rolls it around in his head a few times. Pea = prissy = princess.

....]

Yes. Without a doubt, it's the most stupid.

Clearly, you've never heard about Rumplestiltskin.

[What the hell kind of name is that...]

Definitely haven't.

It's the one where the girl's gotta guess the little imp-troll-loser's name and why would anyone ever guess that one, I don't know...

Why would anyone bother to guess an imp or a troll's name? They're only good for killing.

Well? You can find out for the low low price of letting me tell you the tale.

[...SIGH. He's going to be stuck listening to fairy tales all day, isn't he.]

Fine, tell it, then.

The story starts -- as so many of these stories do -- with a baby.

I hadn't realized it was that common.

[Though, actually, many of the stories from home that he knows start with one's birth Score.]

I guess that babies make for good beginnings. Anyway -- this baby was born to a miller and his wife. I guess the wife died...

That kinds happens a lot, too. Moms dying.

It's common enough.

[Royal inbreeding kind of stuck him with a sickly mother, so he's got no argument for that one.]

What might not be so common was that the miller promised a king that his daughter could spin gold.

...That's a big promise. Why would he do that?

Patronage, I guess. But it backfired. Later, the king took the daughter and locked her up in a tower.

Amazing, I didn't see that coming at all.

[Dumbest. Peasant. Ever.]

So there she was -- stuck in a tower with a spinning wheel and loads of straw. The king expected her to spin gold over three nights or be killed.

Kind of an impossibly feat, I guess.

Sounds like it. So what did she do?

Nothing. At least, not at first. Not until a weird little guy showed up claiming he could do just what she couldn't. But only if she could guess his name.