Re: dining area
"That isn't what they said," she protested, but she had no idea who they were. She only knew that real was supposed to not hurt ever again. Becoming real hurt, but after everything was perfect. She forgot all about not sucking on the end of her ear, and she tugged it between her lips and worried it wet. What if it had all been a lie? What if there was only this, and nothing more? Or worse, what if becoming real hurt more than everything else did? She could barely let herself think about it. "I'm alone now, and I need someone to love me, so I can be real," she explained again. Maybe she hadn't done a very good of explaining the first time. Maybe that was why things were wrong. "Maybe you're still becoming real. Maybe that's why it hurts still."
She didn't want to think about what it meant that she was filled with fluff, because she was almost positive he was lying to her about being filled with fluff himself. "Does someone love you?" she asked, because that was the most important thing when it came to becoming real. She remembered very clearly that they had told her that. She remembered too, in a fuzzy and cottony way, that the people who were supposed to love her were all gone now. They'd all gone away. Did that mean she'd been real once, and she just wasn't real now? She had no idea whatsoever how that would work, and she missed him raising the bladefingers to his face, while she was thinking about it.
She had moved onto the other ear, which she never sucked on, but which was now tucked into her mouth with the ear that was faded and perpetually damp.
"Oh!" she exclaimed, because she knew about bleeding. Somehow, she knew people who bled died. That clashed with her entire concept of being real. It clashed loudly, like cymbals. She'd known someone who had bled, she realized, but she couldn't remember at all. Had that person made her real? But his bleeding was more important, and she moved closer to him when he lied. "Keep your hands down." She sounded unsure about the word hands (shouldn't they be paws?), but she kept on. She tugged and tugged fluff from her sliced finger, and when she had a nice little ball of fluff built up, she pressed it to the cut on his face.
"You bleed. That means you're real," she told him. There was awe and sadness in her voice. "You don't remember how it happened?"