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caliginovsCvre · 03-13-2018, 05:40 AM

Quote:>Find your brother and make him rebuild your fallen sculpture.

Quote:>Rebuild, but begin to create a hollowed area to store your creations safely
>He won't know what he cannot see, right?

Eventually, I gather myself. This is nothing that hasn’t happened dozens of times before. Brother and I always play a game of cat and mouse with my creations, and when I lose I find ever-more creative places to build them. But he’s gotten uncomfortably smart lately, realizing I’d been careless because I’d been banking on him spending all his time by the volcano and instead sneaking off to wreak havoc elsewhere. Before, I would have gone looking for him to tell him how mad I was, maybe even trying to make him rebuild my sculpture to make up for what he'd done. But that never worked, and he can be hard to find if he doesn’t want to be noticed. Besides, yelling at him is wasting valuable time that I could be using to rebuild.

I’ll really need to go above and beyond this time… But after a bit of thinking, I’ve got it. Brother only looks at the surface of things, rarely taking the time to go deeper and see them for what they really are. What if I hollow out a space underground and rebuild my sculpture there? It would be a lot of work, sure, but if I do it right he won’t notice for aaaaages.

 I begin my excavation, digging down through countless layers of crust, supervised by only the moon. Its light dims as the clouds thicken over the course of the night, and thunder rumbles with increasing frequency. The first raindrops fall when I’ve dug out a decent tunnel, and it’s pouring up above by the time I have a large enough artificial cave. I compact the debris I’ve displaced into as small of a pile as I can make it and take it down with me so it won’t leave a trace on the surface. Underground, everything is dark and quiet and dry. I can hear the wind howling from here, even as I plot out ways to turn this rubble into a new sculpture. I need to go back outside and get the remaining pieces of my old sculpture before the storm scatters them forever.

I emerge from my cave just as the clouds open up, releasing a jagged bolt of lightning that streaks through the sky in slow motion. As I watch, paralyzed, it impacts the surface of my freshwater pool, vaporizing half the water with a mighty bang. It’s an impressive display, but the rain will refill it. That is, if Brother doesn’t -

Uh oh. He’s here, isn’t he? Did he really just ride that lightning bolt down from the storm? Well, that’s a new trick. I wasn’t gonna actively seek him out, but now that he’s here, what should I say?

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