Thiefly
Legacy Name: Thiefly

There's the hospital anchored at the edge of the cliff, with whispering in the walls and patients who seem more like inmates. Even I hesitate to slip through its doors too often, but the curiosity is irresistible. I want to understand them: the fiery dog wrapped in loneliness; the crazy little creature with his piles of stars; the starved celinox whom I followed through the woods before he stamped his paw on the admittance log, who shows a puzzling fear of fruits and vegetables and mutters about faces that I can't see.

So many of the patients seem to have odd obsessions centered around objects that appear completely ordinary to me when I pluck them out of the piles and take them to the corner of the woods that I, for the time being, call home. I keep going back for more, hoping that I'll eventually find a piece that will explain it all.

The head nurse caught me once, when I was dragging an unwieldy trumpet out of the old tigrean's raucous room. That may have been a mistake, anyway; it was one of the few items with actual musicality, so I doubt he'll miss it. The nurse, though: there was something intriguing about her. I should have heard her coming, with her pockets' merry jangle, but she still slipped between me and the door before I realized anyone was around. She glanced at what I was carrying, grinned, and let me go. "Just don't let the doctor see you," she warned. "He wouldn't be pleased." I think I'd like to get to know her better. It's the doctor who keeps me from going back as frequently as I'd like; I haven't seen him yet, but I can sense him, and a darkness in that building that leaves me uncomfortably on edge.

Then there's the cottage in the woods, with its funny-smelling bottles, and creatures that make me shake my head and wonder if I'm seeing things. I don't know what to make of it. There's a dog guarding a garden and a rat tending a shed filled with metal and cogs. The weird part is that they're just scribbles, as though they were simply drawn on paper and brought to life. There's no solidity to them, no rationality. I can't help wondering whether they'd rip like paper, too, fluttering bits of nothingness, but I never get close enough to test that theory.

I watch the cottage creatures from the shadows of the trees and slip in to investigate more closely when they're not looking. None of them have seen me, although I had a close call one evening, when a noise outside the cottage workshop startled me into knocking over a vial of some vile-smelling liquid. It splashed over one of the silly plushies that the lovesick popoko from the neighboring willow is always bringing to the inventor. No real loss there, but I stayed away for a few days, just in case anyone started to question the broken glass.

They're an odd mixture, this group. Sometimes they're close-knit, like a family, and sometimes they're lost in their own worlds, as though they're dreaming of something far away. I've gathered bits about a mythology--something with an island and a turtle--but I'm not clear on the details yet. The most coherent pieces so far have come from some of the patients in the hospital--which I suppose could say something about their validity--but the inhabitants of the wildwood speak of it, too. There are even fragments of it in the songs the ice-bear sings as he sets the table for his mini monster picnic. It fascinates me. I want to know more. The tricky part is that all the images I'm gathering seem to differ depending on the speaker. Volcanoes. Farmland. Forests. Glaciers. But an overarching sense of hope and longing in all of them.

I collect what I can. I examine them. Sometimes I pull them apart to see if there's an explanation hidden inside. Someday, I will figure this out. I just have to stay here, in this whimsical wildwood, until then.

(overlay by Bowser)