The worst thing about always being on the move...
"Not million," Neos corrected, a sympathetic smile still on his face. "A billion is ten times as large as a million, and yeah, while there's usually less of it in more rural areas, there's still the ever---" Neos stopped himself mid-sentence before looking down at the sheet he had been drawing on. He moved the board that the papers were on to the side, placed the pencil upon it......then THUNK was the sound that emerged when he hit his face against the table. His voice broke into an impossibly-high pitch as he muttered something extremely incoherent under his breath into the table, staying there for a few seconds before sitting back up and rubbing his face for a moment. Thankfully, it didn't look like he broke the table in the process nor did he seem phased by the action, suggesting that this was an admittedly-frequent action he's done before. "Argh, why can't I stop going on these Arceus-damned tangents while I'm here," he asked himself in an almost-yelling tone with a frustrated groan in his throat.
"The point I was trying, and failing, to make earlier," Neos started again after collecting himself, "was that depending on what kind of area you were living in, the same holiday, 'Halloween' or the 'Day of the Dead' as it was called in my home world, seemed to have become two separate traditions." He then glanced back towards the table, moving the board and papers in front of himself before drawing a scene as he spoke. "The rural areas had traditions fairly similar to what I've been seeing here, such as with the Festival of Lights. The many families would also make miniature temporary shrines for that day for the people they wanted to remember on that day, which would sometimes just consist of a chair with that person's picture on it at times...and for a day, pretend that they were back on the world, even if only in spirit."
The scene he had drawn was that of a group of people sitting in chairs foreign in appearance, they seemed lacking in padding, but the chairs did seemed more molded to a person's general shape for comfort in that way. The people were holding hands while sitting except for the two next to an empty chair with a photograph of someone resting upright in it. Those two people were holding on to the sides of the back of the chair and it looked like they were all singing. "There was a belief that, on that day, the veil between the spiritual world and the physical world thinned enough for the souls of the dead to return to among us for the night before returning to their world for the remainder of the year...and with all the Ghost-ty---er, ghostly creatures back home, I don't exactly blame them for thinking that."
...is that no one believes the tales that emerge later on.
NEOS
