Chapter 772
Ben took extra care getting up to make sure he didn’t disturb Thera. She’d had a long enough day and it had been at most a couple hours since she went to sleep, not the sort of time he should have been bothering her when the morning was sure to be just as full as he applied what levels of stealth he had to leaving the room, walking over to his old one before knocking on the door.
“Mora, it’s Ben, up as promised. Mind if I come in?”
“...If you want.”
Good enough I guess.
He opened the door to the room, finding the boy had at least appeared to have tried out some of the games and flipped through a few of the books, with a couple neatly stacked on the bed he was sitting on the edge of instead of the desk where they’d been left, which he took to be a good sign.
With another positive being that it seemed the boy hadn’t spent his sleepless night alone. While Ben couldn’t see them properly the way Thera could, all of the souls around them and the minds he felt while reaching out with connect revealed that the many spirits who would come to their home had found their new great one, approaching the boy in confusion and curiosity to talk a bit.
Although, based on what he was seeing in their minds, it seemed the talks hadn’t exactly gone smoothly either, difficulties brought forth from the fact that Mora didn’t represent a pure affinity but something new, making it harder for a species that was more typically wrapped up in the nature of their own individual powers to relate to without the eons of history living amongst each other to at least give the knowledge of what being any type of spirit meant.
He wasn’t going to try and look into Mora’s mind again, being caught once was bad enough when he wanted to get along with the boy and Ben would just be blocked off again anyway, but he could only imagine being separated in such a way from his own kind was a whole new issue on top of what his brief upbringing and far more recent abandonment had already left him.
It wasn’t a conversation he thought he’d be able to have until the boy opened up to them a bit though so he instead focused on trying to be positive and friendly, doing his best to create a comfortable atmosphere as he spoke up.