It's quiet tonight. The moon's just past dark, a slim crescent of silvered white, mottled with the face of the man in the moon.

Some people are calling him a rabbit these days. Or cheese. That has to sting.

A creature that on occasion calls itself Hunter is looking up at the moon thoughfully, leaning against a palm tree. The sillouette of the palm trees against the deepening twilight of the sky is one of those things you don't get anywhere but the tropics.

She's moving north soon. She'll miss this, even if she never really leaves.

If you cared to see her, she'd be tall and sturdy. Built for childbirth, perhaps, a corn goddess. Her hair is tawny, smooth as corn silk. Her eyes, if you care to see them, are a pale green.

Around her neck, a choker of vines, flowering yellow flowers, azaleas, petunias, hyacinths (though we aren't sure hyacinths come in yellow). No daffodils, just yet. Her tunic, for it is a tunic she's wearing, is low-cut in front and back, to better show off this marking, and she wears a long, grass-green skirt.

No one said she had to be predicable in appearance.

It's not so much of the why that's curious, but more of the how. Why is she here? has an easy solution: Why not? How did she get here? By walking, she supposes, which would be the most logic explanation. But if every world is founded on logic, then where would the fun be in? Maybe some geeks would enjoy learning about the technicalities and the laws and equations of physics used to calculate a roller-coaster's construction, but there isn't a necessity to understand all of those concepts to just have fun.

But there's only so much you can permit before people start looking at you funny.

Xu imagines that she's not on a beach, but on piano keys. The ivory's painted by the moon and the ebony's the imprints of her footprints. The sea's just the accompaniment, providing the rolling shhhhhHHHHHH to quiet the noisy audience in her head.

She's barefoot, one sneaker left beside the palm tree while the other's on its nautical way to Cancún. Her pink hair's still untidy as ever, dry as feathers and wiry like stray threads. She's wearing a red leather jacket from some forgotten high school; her purple skirt's too long to show her jeans.

Her dark eyes -- right eye encircled with gold against brown, other simply black -- catches sight of the Fair-Haired Lady and she skips across the keys, going backwards from C, to G, to D, to C.

She whistles an off-tune 'Tiiii' on the last step.

"Hiya."

"Hello there. Come to keep me company?"

Motherly. Very motherly, with a smile and a brightness and the twilight hides all this but why would she care?

This lady, this corn goddess, this tropical sun goddess, is used to being surrounded by people.

She misses them.

She scratches her head once before her finger snags on a knot. Fascinated, she twirls it in her fingers.

"Yeh, it sounds like it," Xu replies, mismatched eyes skimming the scenery around her and finding no one else.

A part of her asks, "Am I dreaming?"

She answers her own question with a shrug and a hopeful look towards the woman. She looks very kind. Sort of familiar, in a way.

"Have we met?"

"I don't do dreams. That's another department."

The night is warm, the sea is cool, the trees are full of life.

It's nights like these that make her feel proud inside.

"I've met you. I'm not sure you noticed me, though. Did you?"

Dreams or no, it's a dream-like night.

She combs her spidery fingers through her hair as she thinks.

"You feel familiar," she says, because 'look' doesn't cut it. "Were you at my birthday party? The one, um, some years ago?" She doesn't recall if she had a birthday party, but it was a good enough guess.

There's a knee-jerk reaction that compels her to ask,

"Should I know you?"

"I'd like it if you remembered me."

Wistfully, because soon enough technology is going to grow and summer and winter are going to be interchangable and who will wish for summer then?

It isn't death, but it's close enough.

She used to matter, you know. People used to love her.

"I don't think I was at your birthday party, though. I was busy," her tone is apologetic. She'd love to have come, but her brothers and sisters would have been irritated, and it would have been bad manners.

"I'm Sunny."

It's as good a name as any. She makes them up, you know.

The wistful note eludes Xu, but she answers with a whimsical smile.

"That's okay," she assures, absently, crouching down into the sand to trace a turtle into the sand. "I don't think I went to my birthday party, either."

A pause for the stones in the turtle's shell. And maybe wings.

"You 'mind me of my Ma," she says, 'Sunny' not registering into her vocabulary banks -- not yet, anyway. She glances up. "You a Ma?"

"Yes, sometimes," with that smile of hers that you can't see but that you can feel, inside, because it feels like the sun coming out from behind a cloud.

"What's that?" In reference to the turtle, because turtles are interesting creatures, you see.

"Armadillo," she says, because it looks more and more like an armadillo than anything else. And it's a fun word to say, Armadillo.

"Never saw one, though," she says, tilting her head to eye it with a critic's scrutiny. "Not really. I suspect it looks like that, though. Does it have ears?"

She glances up, one eye more hazel then other's swirl of blacks and mud-brown.

"You look really familiar. Like, reeheeeaaaally familiar."

She pauses, unperturbed from pursuing the thought.

"Pet store?"

That amuses her, who calls herself Sunny but isn't really.

"I'm not a pet, am I?"

She doesn't think she's a pet.

But perhaps she is, and she forgot.

Anything is possible.

"Would you like to see an armadillo?"

Anything is possible.

Anything at all.

Her hair looks silver in the moonlight.

She thinks on it, the hamster in her head pausing from its wheel-running to gnaw on the offer.

"'kay," she agrees. "As long as he isn't dead."

For some reason, her mental visual of an armadillo is connected with dead things. There's a reasonable explanation for it, she thinks, but then again, anything can be justified with reasonable explanation.

"You ever been to a pet store?" She asks, wide-eyed and trying to remember the last time that she, herself, did.

There was a talking monkey in a cage, she recalled. He wasn't for sale, though.

There is an armadillo. It is confused, and just a bit disturbed.

It curls into a ball, as she-who-is-Sunny strokes gentle fingers along its armor-plated spine. It trembles under her hand.

It's a nocturnal hunter, but there are bigger predators out there.

She doesn't want to break the mood. The surf, the moon, the insanity. Lunatic is the word, yes, and it is precious.

"I think I've been in a petstore a few times, yes. Once or twice." Maybe more than once or twice, but time is strange for gods and stranger for seasons.

"Shouldn't go there for puppies," Xu chides as she settles down onto the sand and reaches for the armadillo. Gingerly taking it in her two, calloused hands, she turns it over on its back and sets it in her lap.

Xu doesn't know the differences in reality and lunacy, other then the different sounds and the different words, of course. So she settles for neither, ghosting in-between that knife-thin, gray horizon line where sky meets earth (or earth meets sky?), conscious and sub-conscious and being both and none at all.

There's comfort there; reliability in the unreliability and Xu can't be persuaded to leave for anyplace but There.

It's claws, grubby with dirt and perhaps the blood of its prey (don't armadillos eat insects), scrabble in the air. It doesn't like feeling helpless.

It isn't stupid enough to strike out at anything here, though. Even animals know that pissing off a god is a bad idea.

"Really? Why?" Her voice is a part of this world, blending with it, blending from it, taking sound of surf and wind and sand and turning it into speech.

Feeling sympathetic for the critter, Xu carefully turns the armadillo over and sets it down onto the sands. And as it scurries away, she scurries along with it, on all fours and moving alongside it while matching its pace.

"Puppy farms," she continues glibly. "Puppy farms do horrible things to puppies; to puppy-moms, too, and to purchase a puppy from the local pet store would be supporting the existence of puppy farms."

She bends her head down so that her face's eye-level to the armadillo's head.

It sniffs her. She sniffs it back.

Sunny squats next to the pair, expression amusement and interest.

"I'm very glad I breed my own dogs, then."

But that was a long time ago.

"You like dogs?"

She answers with a nod digging into the sand.

"Mm'hm! Love them dogs, although Parents never cared for them. Unsanitary, they are, they say."

Parents were regarded as a single entity, capitalized as a pronoun because she can't distinguish from this or that, anymore. It makes life easier, it does, when like-principles and voices are fused into one.

"Would you like a dog, Xu?"

Because whatever else went on, Sunny was still a god.

And gods can give presents.

Xu grins and pulls up from her mimicking crouch, sand clinging to his hair as she does.

She's seven, suddenly. Full of shy, bony limbs and iron-pressed modesty.

"No'm," she says, shaking her head shyly. "I like the armadillo, 'nough."

The armadillo doesn't seem to enjoy the pet concept, though. It begins waddling away and Xu, in turn, waddles with it.

"What should we name it?" She asks.

"It's an armadillo, dear. It doesn't have a name."

Okay, maybe George.

But probably not.

At this point, Sunny is being a disenbodied voice. Simpler than bothering with the walking and the expressions and the hand gestures and all that stuff when she can just be waves and moon and wind, whispering in your ear.

"How about Philip?"

"Philip," Xu repeats, tasting the name and enjoying the new flavor. "Yeah, Philip sounds good."

She turns to look for Sunny, and she sees nothing but empty beaches and salt-laden winds. Confused, she blinks once. Then twice. And with every blink, a piece of Sunny's replica is constructed.

It wasn't a very good replica; the limbs were too long and the body too geometrical; the face seemed as if it was made out of crayola chalk and her hair looked like tattered, silk curtains. It looked like a five-year old's sculpture if a five-year old could gain a hold of such materials and the proper glue and safety scissors.

"Sunny?" Xu says, eyeing her craft critically.

"That's very good," says Sunny, "I didn't realize you could do that."

I think she's lying.

If her voice is coming from anywhere, it's coming from 'her', but it's also coming from, well, everywhere.

She's the world, you see.

"Pshaw," she scoffs. "Do it all the time. People just don't like 'em; don't notice 'em."

And are generally freaked out by them, but that's something Xu doesn't need to elucidate upon.

The armadillo curls up in a ball as she bats it around in her sand-sticky palms. She's calm with Sunny's voice, steeped in the kind of warmth that pools in the pit of your stomach and runs gentle shivers down your back. It vaguely reminds her of sedatives, only with less plastic and more lullaby.

The ocean's a soothing rhythm (a claim backed by studies and statistics and white-collared men in white lab coats) and it causes her eyelids to drift down and her mind to wander into sleep.

She yawns openly and luxuriously, leaning on her scuttling armadillo-friend and blinking back sleep.

"Heya, Sunny?" She asks. "Will you leave in the morning?"

"I'll probably send you home before the sun rises, dearling. Do remember me, won't you?" Softer than soft-voiced, unwilling to disturb the other's sleep.

Being remembered is important. It matters.

"Hmm," she hums softly, slanted eyes already closing as they watch salt-turned-snow drift across her face. The sand was a powdery cushion. It's a bit scratchy and a bit clingy, but its warm and inviting and Xu curls up without much thought, pulling the armadillo into her arms (much to its dismay).

As the critter worms its way out of the grasp, Xu murmurs something incoherent and inaudible. She might forget this situation entirely the following morning, or day, or night, or week. But the memory will linger in the backdrop; a flower among flower-patterned wallpaper.

Left unnoticed? Maybe. But Xu used to draw pictures on the wall when she was seven, whorls of her finger tracing an outline.

So, maybe. Possibly. And possibly not.

That's the extent of Xu's promise.

And the sweet night drifts away, and in the morning she's back in her bed.

I guess we're all a bit insane on the inside.