Portia lay on Aeric's lap as he gently caressed her hair.
He still wanted to speak about her vision but knew how she felt about it, so fell silent till she said,"Have you ever had this feeling where there's someone you know you're supposed to hate for something terrible they did to you but...you just can't?"
"I need more info."He said.
She looked at him then said,"It's okay, it was a stupid question anyway."
"No, no, no, no, no it wasn't, yes, I've felt that way before."
"... who was it?"
"...my father."
"..."
"Portia, I love him even though he was indirectly responsible for my brother's death and tearing my family apart, but what about you? You've never even met your parents and you blame them for every bad thing that happened to you, do you think they would have given you something as powerful as your gem if they didn't care about you? Portia, think about it..."
"Think about what?! Even though you were denied of fatherly love, you were given love from every other person, your uncle, your mother, aunt, brother and had literally the most lavish life in the entire city, and you think I'm ungrateful? You have no idea how long I had to live on the streets, praying every night for my parents to come back for me, walking from town to town, barefoot, looking for the people who never cared about me and you know how I know? Because even the one time I met them, they took me and dumped me in an orphanage with a gemstone to buy my love!"
"Wait...I never knew you met them..."
"I did, and I hated it, that was the day I lost every remaining bit of love I had left for them, I don't want to talk about them anymore, so please, don't bring it back up."
"...I won't, ever again... I'm sorry."
She hugged him and cried when the memories of everything they did to her replayed in her mind, she had healed all her own physical scars with the gem, but the emotional scars had never healed, that was why she was so hotheaded, she had been treated like a burden by her own parents, she didn't want to think about them again, she wouldn't, she couldn't...
***
Tuña, the wielder of the dream gemstone, was from a planet covered in oceans of liquid methane and water, the latter being more than the first.
As such, they had to adapt to live in the vast waters and little land that was often overpowered by the liquid.
They used water for most of their life processes so needed to be able to filter it out of the concentrated mixture available.
The methane was important for them too, it acted as a valuable nutrient and sometimes as a substitute for water, but just like salt, too much of a good thing could be bad.
Tuña wasn't a male or a female, it was nothing like either either.
Once the true male and female had copulated, the fertilised...eggs? Were fed into Tuña's kind where they developed till they took over the body, fed on its nutrients and divided into multiple.
Tuña's voice sounded more high-pitched than low, somehow like white noise, but smoother.
Anyway, Tuña had been thinking about Portia's family when it went to bed.
Since it didn't have eyes but had light sensitive cells all-over its body, it just had to shut off most of its brain's functions in order to go into a stasis and then experienced one of the few things it had in common with humans, a dream.
There were five different visions; the first was of Portia saying the words,' inter dimensional ', then the second followed suit, which was of a movie it once watched where someone yelled the word,' murder '.
The third was of certain loop like threads which seemed to change in size as they oscillated numerous times per second, then it showed a human stabbing another several times in the chest, before twisting the blade and pulling it out, then showed a phantom like being on a throne lifting its arms before a surge went over and made a person disappear.
It woke up abruptly and yelled,"Inter dimensional murder!"
***
"Inter dimensional murder, massacre, genocide, realmal death, all these are but semantics of the same term..."Carna said,"...you know how a single being occurs in different forms throughout the Multiverse due to the different possibilities of events that could have occurred to it, right? Well this means they may be the same person or thing, but can be very different, this difference could be personality, choices, experiences and or or even the day of death. What you saw in that vision explained everything, a powerful being on a throne causing an inter dimensional murder, which is when every single possible version of a single person across the Multiverse is erased from existence possibly even removed from all memory and with no records of birth whatsoever, but like in the the vision someone will have to be extremely powerful in order to achieve a feat like that, but..."
"Portia could..."Tuña said.
"What? These are her own parents we're talking about, how on earth would she gather the courage and even more importantly, stupidity to do something like that?"
"Think about it, she hates her parents more than anyone or anything and has a gem which can manipulate space, time and any and every other dimension in anyway she sees fit."
"She would never do something like that."
"Maybe not, but her gem could. The void crystal only listens to her and tries its best to do whatever pleases her by acting in accordance with her emotions and wishes, since she hated her parents so much and wanted them to disappear, maybe the gem did just that and erased all records of them, but she was immune to the after effects as the very wielder of the gem."
"It couldn't be, I'll search in my library for information about them but until then, say this to no one, understood?"
"Why not? It's pretty intriguing."
The two focused their attention on Portia, who had been standing not far away.
"How much did you hear?"Carna asked.
"Just enough to know you were talking about my parents...~sigh~... and I guess you wouldn't give up very easily, it's time to come clean."
She touched Tuña's head and Tuña made a vision visible by the three of them, it was an unending matrix of all the visions Portia had ever had concerning her parents over the years.
Carna saw all of them then looked at Portia and from behind the latter, saw Tuña struggling to keep its mouth shut.
Carna gave all sorts of death glares, but Tuña blabbed the entire secret.
"We think you killed your parents!"
"Unbelievable!"
"What?"
"Well I had this dream which told me your parents had been wiped out from the entire Multiverse by something called an..."
"Inter dimensional massacre."Portia continued.
"...yes, how do you know?"
"... it's a long story, but why would you think it was me?"
"I don't know and we're sorry."
"We?!"Carna yelled.
"It's okay, I kinda deserve it due to how I've been acting, thanks for caring anyway."
She walked away.
The two looked at each other and Carna frowned at Tuña before walking back and through an open door that led to her library, and Tuña followed.