#( that and having the instinct to guess that she might've gone somewhere to be alone )

[widaugast]

            PERCEPTION CHECK: 21  ----  @sapphiretrickster!

        He should be asleep, really.  It's  ----  it's been a long road that has led them this far, right back to where they began.  The journey to Trostenwald is largely as they remember it, yet the group that has returned has been marked  (irreversably changed)  since they last entered, kissed by unfortunate circumstances and unlikely meetings, dealings with criminals and surprising reuniting.  There is a death that weighs new on their shoulders, a gravity of passing time that Caleb recognizes.  It's bittersweet, now, their brief return to the city where they all met, and it surprised him that it feels so  ----  this attachment to a place, though fleeting in its own way, is strange.  For a man who has spent so much of recent years running, so many before unaware of place, unaware of time, to be so present in both now is...  different.

        It's not unlike Caleb to be lost to thought, to be uncomfortably familiar with the workings of his own mind, yet this quiet contemplation is something new  ----  something like turning the dodecahedron over in his palms, finding a quiet fragment of possibility in its delicately contained expanse.  It's perhaps also this awareness of time (and its passage) that brings to mind the conversation with Beauregard and Fjord before they had left Zadash, the dance with which Jester had faced their night in the Evening Nip, the happiness that Caleb had felt so sure was something other than it appeared.  She had seemed, at least on first glance, to be everything he'd seen as they first had met  ----  eager and energetic, bold and very much assured  ----  but he's not so sure now.  What certainty had been pushed under the rug then, that it was an act, comes again to the surface of his mind, bumps gently into the back of his memory and lodges itself firmly into the present.

        He should be asleep, but Caleb rises anyway  ----  breaking the quiet of the protective magical bubble with a soft stirring.  Sure enough, out of the order of sleeping bodies piled within is the absence of Jester.  Picking his way over the sleeping form of Nott, curled up none too far away with her new cloak wrapped around her, the wall of protective energy softly nudges against Caleb's body as he steps through it, falling as he steps away.  It makes him wary, but the silver thread of the alarm spell still rests within eyeshot, and the ritual can be replaced.  Outside, framed in the full-moon night, is Jester, sketchbook balanced on her knees.  Unsure what to do at first, Caleb pauses, certain she can hear him against the quiet.  A gentle snap of his fingers and he sends Frumpkin out first, familiar padding out to the tiefling to sniff his nose against the book's edge.