Residential Miss-trict [Karu]

As the time of the supposed jump festival approached, Lucian couldn’t help but feel like this was an opportunity to take care of the last factor making his life miserable; knowing that Alice was unhappy. Sure, she might’ve been glad to see him in god health this morning, but what she’d said to him prior to him going unconscious resonated within his mind like a bouncing ball of resentment and regret. He had always imagined that Alice was bothered by his constant absence, no matter how out of his control it was or how hard he tried to lessen his time outside home, but he didn’t imagine it had affected her this much. To have heard her so heartbroken and angry about his constant absence and his failures as a father had, in short, broken the man’s heart. Tonight, he planned to remedy that.

It wasn’t like Lucian had already grown accustomed to the colossal anomaly that was Junction – quite the contrary, in fact, he still felt entirely out of place and… not at home at all. Regardless, he was being given a chance to leave his presidential duties and struggles behind, desertive of his duty as a savior of the people as it might have been, and to simply enjoy the life of a man with a daughter and a best friend in what might have been the most interesting place in the universe. It just so happened that later that day a festival was scheduled and Lucian wanted to remedy his relationship with his daughter as soon as possible before it grew any more severed. Thusly, whether he was prepared or not to throw himself into the melting pot of the bizarre, they would spend the festival together. There were some preparations he would have to make first, though. Like getting his hands on some form of currency to spend at said festival. He planned to head back home to shower and change, then ask CWIS about these preparations shortly before heading out with Alice, but… once again, Junction’s infrastructure proved to be too powerful an enemy. He could tell he was in the residential district, but where in it exactly? All the houses were so cramped together and tightly knit that the place looked more like the minotaur’s labyrinth than it did a residential area. And no terminals that he could see, too… great, it looked as if he’d be walking aimlessly for a little while longer.

And then, a yelp, then a peach.

No, seriously; a random peach.

Lucian watched in confusion as a peach rolled in on the ground from seemingly nowhere until it stopped moving. ‘Did somebody drop this?’ he wondered as he picked it up to inspect it. On all fronts it was… a seemingly regular peach. Odd; he expected the fruits and other foods available in junction to be much more… well… alien than stuff he could find on Scarred Earth, let alone actually be food he could up and find on Scarred Earth. The man looked around, confusion still plaguing him, until he spotted a small… glowing critter a few meters away, and it was carrying around peaches and looking around in confusion as well! Key, meet keyhole.

Lucian picked up the peach from the ground and calmly approached the bright creature. Was it even sentient like the rest, or was it Junction’s equivalent of a stray animal? It did look slightly racoonish, so… maybe that would explain why it’s hoarding food. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to try to talk to it. “Excuse me?” He called out, holding the peach up front. “Did you drop this?”