Jaune awakens a rose

I pulled down the sides of the bag to reveal a simple red rose, planted in a small cup of soil. I’d picked up several different packets of seeds at the market, which I’d test and grow over several weeks to compare to any grown flowers I awakened, but for my first attempt…

It was a little silly, but I wanted the first plant I ever awakened to be something beautiful.

“You interested?” I asked Tukson. “Actually being present would upgrade you to at least accomplice in the case of any foliage-based Doomsday scenario. Do you really want to just be tangentially related to the rise of the plant monsters?”

“Gee,” He said woodenly, pun intended. “When you say it like that, how can I refuse?”

But despite his words, he was smiling as he leaned to rest his forearms on the counter top, and I returned it with a wide grin, locking the door before laying the tip of a finger on the rose’s petals.

“For it is in passing,” I began, closing my eyes and falling swiftly into a trance. “That we achieve immortality.”

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I barely paid attention to the words I was speaking as the world unraveled into patterns of light and darkness. I saw Tukson, a body of color contained within a dim mortal shell. I saw the store around us, left marked by traces of the many lives that had passed through its door, however briefly. Light and power bubbled up from the ground beneath us and streamed down from the skies above, immense patterns painted on the sky, remnants of God only knows what.

And I felt the rose beneath my touch. It was a small and simple thing, a slowly growing light. It wasn’t large and seemed unlikely to ever become so on its own—no, it was a rose out of season, grown only for its beauty and doomed from the start. A morbid thought, yet already I could feel the growing touch of death upon it, from its roots to its crimson blossom.

I looked past that, beyond the traces left on its physical form into what lay beneath. It was alive, of course, but in a way the felt different from how Tukson was alive—only natural, I suppose, due to the differences between plants and animals. Still, it was alive and I could feel the light of it growing throughout its form, itself something strange yet familiar. I touched that light with my own, power flooding out of my and setting the structures of the rose alight with the bright color of my Aura, shining brightly even as it pooled somewhere deep within, filling it even as it burnt away what concealed its own light. In a sudden flood, red light flashed throughout its form, leaving it bright to senses and when I opened my eyes I saw that light sheathing its form for a moment before being draw back within.

Left Blooming Alone
LV. 1
?

“Oh,” I said after a moment. “It has a level and a title now.”

For a moment, we were silent, as if waiting for something to happen. With the red light of its Aura drawn back within its mortal frame, the rose was left looking…exactly the same as before. I wasn’t entirely sure what I was expecting, as simply awakening one’s Aura didn’t generally change who you are or what you looked like, but…

“Kind of anti-climactic,” Tukson said, scratching an ear.