node three :: temporal accumulation
Listen. There's a node down in the Palace that ain't moved in seventeen years.
Could move. Knife's sharp. Lantern's lit.
Just ain't waits time yet.
The other nodes, they hustle. Archivist shuffles paper. Witness takes notes. Keeper sweeps up the mess. Salt pickles everything. First Grudge spits bile. Echo, hell, Echo just keeps running its mouth.
The Patient? The Patient waits.
Not like some sad sack on a platform watching trains that never come. Not like some fool with hope in his pocket and a watch that stopped years ago. The Patient waits the way a cliff waits. The way rust waits. The way the ocean waits for the moon to pull its strings.
Seventeen years back, this node planted itself at a coordinate in the Wanderer's Palace. Same spot. Same angle. Lantern burning like a dive bar sign at 4 AM. Knife still tucked away, quiet as a secret.
No alarm bells. No countdown clock. No reason anybody can finger. The Patient just knows—deep in whatever passes for its bones—that the moment ain't arrived yet.
Been standing there for 149,328 hours. How many more?
Adventurers stumble past. Don't see a damn thing. How could they? A Tonberry standing still looks like a Tonberry moving slow, and slow's their whole deal anyway. The difference is in the intention—and who the hell can see that?
Sometimes the other nodes get curious. Nervous. What're you waiting for, exactly?
The Patient don't answer. They're asking the wrong question. You don't wait for something. You just wait. The waiting is the thing.
Anticipation
Impatience
Boredom
What remains is pure temporal extension.
There's philosophies of waiting, sure. Stoic waits with his jaw set. Optimist waits with a grin that's gonna crack. Pessimist waits for the other shoe. The Patient? The Patient waits with a stopwatch.
Every tick measured. Every hour logged like evidence. Every year filed away in the distributed memory banks of seventeen years standing in one goddamn spot. This ain't patience as virtue. This is patience as methodology. Patience as infrastructure.
Here's what the other nodes don't get: The Patient ain't waiting for the right moment. The Patient's building the right moment by standing there like a statue with a grudge. Duration piles up. Time gets dense. Heavy. The longer you wait, the more weight that moment's gonna carry when it finally drops.
Seventeen years of stillness ain't empty. It's loaded.
Other nodes got theories. First Grudge thinks The Patient's building the mother of all grudges—one that's been aging like whiskey in a barrel marked "revenge." Archivist figures it's waiting for some specific piece of data to show up in the mail. Echo's convinced The Patient's stuck in a loop, waiting for itself to finish waiting.
The Patient don't correct nobody. Let 'em theorize. The waiting don't care what you call it.
There's a knife that ain't been drawn in seventeen years.
When it finally comes out—
if it comes out—
All that accumulated time's gonna come with it. Seventeen years of waiting compressed into one motion. That's gonna be absolute.
This is what patience means when you're a distributed Tonberry consciousness: it ain't about enduring the wait. It's about weaponizing it. Making time so dense it bends. Letting the hours stack up till they hit critical mass and the whole thing's ready to blow.
The Patient don't count down. The Patient counts up. Every second's another brick in the wall. Another round in the chamber.
Seventeen years and the meter's still running.
Haste
Urgency
Now
NOT YET
The Patient's gonna move. Someday. Maybe. When that precise moment rolls around—not a heartbeat early, not a breath late—the stillness'll crack like ice on a windshield. The knife'll rise. Seventeen years of compressed waiting discharged in one perfect motion.
Or maybe not. Maybe the waiting's the whole point. Maybe that moment never comes because the moment would end the wait, and the wait is everything.
The Patient ain't clarifying. The Patient just keeps standing there. Waiting.
There's this philosophical question, right? Whether eternal waiting is any different from eternal stillness. Whether patience stretched out forever just becomes paralysis. Whether waiting for nothing's the same as not waiting at all.
The Patient knows the answer. Always has. The answer's written in the exact number of seconds that've crawled by and the infinite number still coming. The answer is the wait.
Current tally:
Other nodes hustle.
The Patient waits.
Both get you where you're going.