Shrub Berry Is An Expert On Finding Home.

Shrub Berry is an expert on finding home.

For a time, she didn’t think this could be true. After all, you can only spend so many hours languishing over maps and asking wild animals if they’ve seen any ‘twisted mushroom people’ before you start to lose the plot.

She’d never considered herself an expert on anything before she washed up along the Undergrove. Back then it wasn’t a concern.

Of course, things change. Stepping through that portal in hopes of finding Home, she’d resigned herself to having no lead, no prayers— only hope. Just like she’d done all those years ago, fleeing from carnage.

Time is different in the nether. She doesn’t know how long it took for her to find her people once more, only that she felt older when she did. But maybe that was less of her age and more of a symptom of leaving.

It didn’t matter. She was home. It was time to rest and love and be with the people her heart had ached to find all this time. And yet, it still ached.

She wasn’t without love or health. There wasn’t a single ailment that besmirched her. For now until forever gave away, Shrub would be with her family, her people, her home.

So why did she still hurt?

It’s a predicament that she wrestles with near daily. That is, until she finds a lone traveller circling the outside of her portal long after nature has reclaimed it.

“Excuse me!” The traveller asks, twisting strands of pink hair between her fingertips, “I- I think I might be lost. I don’t know where I am.”

Shrub knows her. Despite the air of unfamiliarity, Shrub could never forget the face of a friend. Even if time and magic had snatched the most noticeable traits away.

“Of course,” She replies, “Where are you from?” It’s a damning question. Shrub remembers being asked it the first day she arrived on this continent. She remembers Lizzie asking it herself. The irony isn’t lost on her.

Lizzie-Not-Lizzie shakes her head, “I don’t know. I have this,” She holds out her palm to show a golden pair of rings glimmering in it’s center. When Shrub looks back up, the manic desperation in Lizzie-Not-Lizzie seems to have grown, “I think I lost something important. Forgot it.”

Shrub closes her hand around the rings, deep in thought. “It’ll be okay!” She smiles, banishing the guilt burning in her gut. It had no place here. “You might not know where you are right now, but I do. And this place is blessed!”

She gestures with a hand around her, “A really really long time ago, a gnome was lost and scared in these lands. Just like you. She got… frustrated a lot at the people around her. Because nature, the gods— No one could bring her home.”

“Did she find it?” Lizzie asks, blinking wide curious eyes.

Shrub grins, “It became one.”

Her grip readjusts, heart warm and full, to hold Lizzie’s hand securely in hers. She didn’t know how many of her friends had disappeared into the fog of unknown. Lost their memories—their lives.

But it would be okay. Because if time has proven anything, it’s that Shrub Berry is an expert at finding Home.