[b]TEAM QUEST[/b]

[i]Of course there is nothing anyone can do to help. All of you have found the limits of help. So many empty words, so many pretty promises, and now you are here.

Now you are here in my body.

It is grand. I stretch across the Outside and the world, and I anchor it down with ten hundred thousand nails more subtle than those waystones the first of us used when he fell. My hands reach up towards the light and choke it. Nothing inside me wants their light anymore. My leaves are broad and bitter.

Talking about it is pointless. The one who talks all the time would tell you that talking is pointless, and she would have an irritating trill in her voice, and she would also encourage those two garishly-colored ones to tease the boy, and it would all be pointless. Teasing and flirtation and those useless little veils - it is all a self-satisfied ouroboros.

The boy's light flickers. Nothing inside me wants that light anymore; I reach out to choke it, but my growth is still too slow. I close the road behind them. At most I can catch at the heels of these playacting clowns, and I can whisper to them:

There is nothing anyone can do to help.
They should have helped anyway.
It is not your fault.
It is never your fault.
It is their fault.
Talking about it is pointless.
Blaming someone is better.

Just a little slower. Stay inside me for a little while longer. The boy is trying so very hard to make it out to places where the dreams of my trees recede, but there is nothing anyone can do to help. Start an argument. Pick a fight. Throw a fireball at the woods, which will smoulder and smoke but refuse to burn. You know you want to. It is their fault for making you start it.

Stay just long enough to put down roots.

Stay just long enough for my favorite clipping to catch up.

And as your allies fall into spiteful argument, Hazel Valentine Fletcher, I will give you what you have wanted all this time. I will give you a quest that you can perform. I will give you a lover who shapes herself to suit you. I will take away your pain and your hope and your light, which are all the same thing. Aren't you looking forward to being in the hands of my Walking Elm again?[/i]

(Hazel, help them.)

[hr]
[b]TEAM RELAXATION[/b]

It's time for you to put some cards on the table, Eclair Espoir. And by cards, I mean napkins, and I also mean [i]theories[/i].

You are on the far side of despair, buoyed up by the presence of a sidekick and a loyal companion, who I am [i]sure[/i] is going to be chiming in with data points and suggestions. You are surrounded by my cheer and the air of possibility, of invention, of masquerade, that is [i]my[/i] hallmark. You are also surrounded by [i]crab.[/i] Feel free to use a pincer as a pointer if you need to.

This is [u]the[/u] brainstorming session. The big one, suspended between yesterday and tomorrow, as you look for the place where Timtam's heart pivots.

Goodness, might you have a quest after all by the end of this?