Somehow I Now Live Half My Life on Cactuar

I had a very tidy idea of where my life in Eorzea happened. Halicarnassus. The Lavender Beds, the tap room, the Shire lot turning Free Company chat into a nightly derailment, the bench by the water that is technically mine and never once free. It was, and is, everything. I was not looking for anywhere else at all, which is of course precisely when Eorzea starts making introductions.

─── ✦ ───Eorzea Does the Introducing

It is never a plan, is it. Nobody sits down on a Tuesday and decides to go and make friends on another world. What happens is a party finder that runs long, or somebody's alt in a roulette, or one of those conversations that opens with nice glam and somehow ends two hours later with everyone still standing in the same spot in Limsa, nobody having logged off, nobody quite admitting they do not want to.

Mine came out of exactly that kind of nothing. A few names. A few laughs. A come over sometime, which I said yes to the way you say yes to things you are fairly sure will never actually happen.

Reader, it happened. It has kept happening. I have made the trip to Cactuar more times than I can count, and I have stopped pretending that I am counting.

─── ✦ ───El Santuario

Ahurent, Siban, Zyprexa and the rest of the gang had just founded their own Free Company, and they called it El Santuario. The Sanctuary. I loved it immediately, and it took me a while to work out why.

It is because most Free Company names tell you what the group does. Clears, ranks, a roster. This one tells you what the room is for. And it turns out they meant it. It is the kind of place where somebody logs in having had a genuinely rough day, says so, and four people quietly decide the evening is now about that instead.

❝They did not name it after what they do. They named it after what it is for.

─── ✦ ───The Ledger

What we have actually done with all those trips, in no particular order:

• ✦Laughed on Discord until somebody had to mute themselves to recover. Usually me.
• ✦Lost in PvP. Gloriously. Then queued again immediately, which is the whole sport really.
• ✦Told stories. The long kind, the ones that begin with okay so in Heavensward and end forty minutes later with nobody having moved.
• ✦Talked housing, at length, with diagrams. There are always diagrams.
• ✦Posed. Endlessly. We will come back to this.
• ✦Run content of every shape, and then crafted a genuinely silly amount of nonsense afterwards to celebrate.

─── ✦ ───The Lottery Conversation

Every group has one topic it simply cannot leave alone, and ours is the housing lottery. We have theories. We have strategies. We have at least one person who maintains there is a best moment to put your name in, and the rest of us who have never once managed to disprove it and have therefore quietly started doing what he says.

I have won a plot exactly once, as entry number three, and I have been dining out on it ever since. I am told this is insufferable. I intend to continue.

But there is a reason the topic will not die, and it is that they are hunting. Properly hunting. El Santuario wants a home on Cactuar, a real one, the kind with room for everybody and a view worth standing around in, and they are gambling their luck on it cycle after cycle. I have watched them scout wards at genuinely unreasonable hours. I have watched a result land wrong, and watched them shrug and enter again the same evening.

I hope they get it. Not a plot, the plot, the one they have already decorated in their heads. And when it happens I would like it noted in advance that I intend to be completely insufferable about it on their behalf, because somebody has to be and I have the experience.

─── ✦ ───Posing Is a Team Sport

Here is what nobody warns you about a group that likes to glam. You cannot take one picture. You take forty. Somebody's hat clips through somebody's wing. Somebody wanders off mid-count to go and look at a flower. Somebody changes their entire outfit between takes and expects nobody to notice, and we all notice, and we all say nothing, because it is better.

And then you get one like the picture up there. Everybody accidentally standing exactly where they should be, under a sky doing absolutely the most, and every single reset was worth it.

And then there is the thing they do that I was genuinely not ready for. When I cannot be there at all, because real life has opinions and mornings exist, they put me in the picture anyway. A small white Lalafell appears in the gap where I would have been standing, hat and plume and all, and it goes up without comment, as though I had simply been there the whole time and everyone had forgotten to mention it.

It is the least subtle way anybody has ever told me I matter to them, and it works every single time. They are making very sure I understand that I am special to them. So, on the record, in writing, where the whole lot of them can see it: so are they. Every one of them.

─── ✦ ───Barely Started

I do not think I have properly said this to them, so I am going to say it here, where it is slightly less embarrassing and they may not scroll this far: thank you for the door. For leaving it open, and for not making a thing of it when I kept walking through.

Eorzea is enormous, and it is very good at making the corner you love feel like the whole of it. It is not. There is a completely different sky over Cactuar, and underneath it there is a Free Company with a name that means sanctuary and a group of people who turned out to mean it.

And before anyone in my own Free Company chat starts sharpening something: none of this is a trade. The Shire is home, the fire is still lit, and I am still the one leaving the Starlight tree up until February. It turns out you are simply allowed more than one door.

Our stories together are barely starting. I have the fare, no self-control, and a standing invitation I fully intend to abuse.