[text] all apologies

[branchifer]

[cw: mild insinuation of cannibalism wrt to mentioning the Elf chewing on him]

[Several days after his freakout, Branch is trying to figure out how to apologize to everyone. So much that had colored his initial freakout had been filtered through a lens of feelings dragged with him from home. Just a long string of unfortunate coincidences. People spooking him by accident or through a lack of care. Escalation when he needed the opposite. Mistakenly thinking they were forcing a child to fight because said child also feared it (probably for good reason, depending on the situation Lucky came from.)]

[But mostly it's all been his own brain feverishly working against him.]

[It makes him feel a little broken. He likes to think he's worked past a lot of his issues but apparently, without the upbeat attitudes of his people, the tsking of his best friend when he gets too paranoid, and the safety of the bunker being nearby, he's more prone to losing it than he'd have hoped.]

[None of the others back home are like this.]

[But the others also can't always articulate their fear and sadness in the ways he can. Even if he keeps things pretty factual. It's hard for them to talk about negative things; they struggle even with relaying the events that have caused the negativity. Instinctually, he knows the ability to talk through things rather than deny them sometimes benefits him. Sometimes it helps him articulate complex feelings. Or convince the village that something needs to change or be acknowledged.]

[It serves him here. He could be blunt. He could keep things simple. Distant. Cold. Impersonal. Or forcibly overly upbeat. He could just try to gloss it all over.]

[But he's reckoned with the past enough to speak plainly about it, in the way some people do when they've processed a lot of it.]

[He's tucked away in one of his little boltholes as he types something up on the floating screen of the very teeny tiny watch the yetis made him. The little den has some entrances he's already built lockable doors to (just in case the place has mice) that lead to tunnels around the Pole. He's already partly furnished the place with doll furniture and has been working on ripping apart fabrics from the toys to stitches together a warmer wardrobe, using a needlekit he kept stored in his hair.]

[He keeps idly scratching his leg while typing. The myth healing is powerful but between necrotizing poison and walking on an injury so it keeps bleeding, you wind up getting a scar out of it. It doesn't really bother him that much, though. He's used to being the only one in the village with some kind of damage.]

Hey this is Branch. The guy that did all the traps.

(Yeah, I know, not exactly my best moment.)

They're all dismantled now. I handed over a map of the worst ones when they talked me down, and got the last few unsprung ones dismantled when I recovered. I really wrecked my leg running around on it or I'd have tried to make sure they were all cleared out sooner.

I'm sorry for the mess I caused. A long string of stuff twigged me out and tripped off some stuff in my head. Like not even just the monster stuff in that building.

Something important about me that you probably didn't get just from my voice: I'm very small. A little over 7 and a half centimeters, not counting my hair, and I checked, centimeters in this world measure the same amount in mine. So, 1) please watch out underfoot. I'm pretty good at avoiding big people while getting around, but still.

2) More importantly, as was probably obvious...

I have a lot of trouble trusting big people. I won't get too much into it, but the ones back home used to regularly kill my people. They knew we could think and talk and feel and it just didn't matter to them. So maybe it wouldn't have been the most logical thing for the ones here to randomly start trying to kill me but the problem is that kind of horribleness isn't really logical. It's just random and senseless.

One day the Bergens just up and decided, "hey you know what would be a great thing to do and make a whole holiday about doing?" So it gets really easy to think that if it happens again it also might just be random and senseless. Add in that I woke up to one of those stupid Elf kids gnawing on my head because he thought I was a toy and it just set me off.

I'll be the first to admit I can get a little paranoid. And it was worse here since I didn't have a heavily fortified survival bunker to run and hide in like I do back home.

[Boy does that say a lot.]

I'm not trying to make an excuse. I just wanted to explain. I didn't want to hurt anyone and I wasn't doing it to be mean. I didn't know human (and Elf?) kids did weird things like shove toys in their mouths because troll ones don't, so I figured someone gave me to him. I really thought at least someone was trying to kill me, in a way a lot of my people have died.

The good thing is I get that some of the big people here are good people now, which means a lot of the ones I haven't met yet probably are, so I don't think I'll wind up getting into that place again.

Annnnd even if I do, I at least know I don't have to rig the whole place up with traps to avoid dying. Since some of you are alright.

So there's that.

I think that was it. Sorry again.

[At least these people not being his people has one single upside: they don't know that the situation is severe enough to warrant an apology song.]

[He does decide to add one thing and decides to absolutely be a smartass about it because he's a little upset on Lucky's behalf.]

ps is that kid okay? He thought people were going to force him to fight. That's why I tried to bring him with me. I know now that's not the case but if we're all supposed to start trying to guard children and teenagers, we should possibly think like hmmmm "maybe we should make the ones here in the group feel safe first."

Just saying. That one's a little on you guys. And if nobody's done it yet for him, someone should.