How many hundreds of lives has she waited for a world like this? It is beautiful in an incredibly foreign way. Some places just speak to the soul. She has been born a thousand times before but never into a body made like this one. Her legs are long and slim, deceptively strong. She has been strong before, but this is a body built for war. Her lungs are a bellows, massive wells into which she can draw this worlds air in order to fuel the locomotion that this body seems to crave. Of all the shapes she has taken over the millennia this is immediately a favorite.


Perhaps she’ll stick in this one if she manages to earn herself another round.


As with every other time she comes into consciousness as an adult. Whatever she is, she assumes she is an ordinary one as this is the way it has always been. Sometimes she remains an ordinary whatever-she-is, and other times she doesn’t. That doesn’t affect the outcome, or it hasn’t yet.


Ausra arrives on the edge of a body of liquid that she finds to be water. Her body responds to the scent of bonded hydrogen and oxygen and she drinks from the stream to satisfy the urge before tentatively crossing through it. Finding that she does not melt or nearly get eaten by anything she can see she splashes up into the marshy grasses on the other side and heads toward the scent of salt. Crossing the isle she comes across a surprising structure and studies it for a long time. There are words, faded, but she cannot read them, only recognizes the shape of a language transcribed on an object that could not have been made by a being like her.


When the sea laps at her hooves she considers turning away to look for a creature like the one she now is. However, the tide is low and she notices that one might make their way to the not too distant mainland if they swam and moved across the sandbars. Her experiences with oceans make her a little wary, waves and monsters are features of massive bodies of liquid in just about every world she has experienced. Ausra considers that she has only died on her first day twice and decides to risk the crossing.


Something swims nearby and Ausra keeps clear of it without getting too excited, reaching the mainland easily. This body is versatile. She does look back, blue eyes scanning the water for whatever had drawn close to her beneath the waves but there is no more to see than the sea and the strange island. Satisfied that she has made the right decision in leaving the odd little island she proceeds with what is always her first task: finding another.



When she does or is rather found herself, her body knows the tongue in which she must address the creature that is like enough to her that they must be the same and she asks (as she has so many times before) “What are we?”

i've had dreams of you in places i've not seen

An answer to her persistent question, asked across a multitude of worlds, is not to be found in this meadow. The being speaking to her is a girl, she determines with this body's instincts-- at least two genders in this race, juvenile forms suggest offspring may grow quickly  but perhaps not with full independence. She will hope to meet younger examples, as this one seems to be on the cusp of adulthood. Making theses cursory notes, the overo considers the word 'speck' and what it might mean to the stranger. Insignificance? Dust? Even in dust there are worlds.

“Specks? Dear creature, we are universes ourselves. There is such a thing as Nothing but I don't think you have seen it before, and we certainly are not it.”

A pause, she has tried to develop the skill of not saying more than what will make her seem strange. No small task when one is thrust into an unfamiliar culture without any prior exposure to it. She is perhaps unsuccessful today but this is a place where unexpected behavior appears the norm.

"You were not nothing before you came to exist and you will not be nothing when you are gone."
Ausra has been a mother, father, guardian, sibling, elder and mentor many times and there is an ageless authority in her otherwise gentle voice. She is not unsettled, she recognizes the bravado and mischief of youth. The words may serve to correct the child's thinking, to help her recognize her own power as a conscious being, and how incredible it is to have your energy gathered into the form of a living thing. The reply may all the more readily be disregarded as the ignorant chiding of another unaware adult. Ausra knows the dance.

The children she has raised in other lives have all been unique into themselves, but there seems to be a basic formula for being a juvenile regardless of your world, species, or origins.

The Traveler abandons her initial question. Others she has asked have given her enough answers to move on to further curiosities. As she speaks she turns her eyes toward the tree the younger being had phased through before they began to speak. Ausra needed to walk around the flora as it appears most every other lifeform on this world did.

"What are you? Besides a speck, as you say."

i've had dreams of you in places i've not seen