[ After some mistletoe-induced spilling of truths he'd rather have kept to himself, Joshua has paused his mischief making to ask his traditional new years slash birthday question to the village. ]

Do you think you look for different qualities in the friends you have here as compared to the friends you have back in your own world?

[ Another year has passed. Funny enough, doing requests for the elf kick-started Oosouji for Joshua, so for once he had it done on time. It's another empty new year in the house he once shared with the man he'd been closer to than anyone else. Another convenient excuse for a birthday. Nothing more.

He's almost convinced himself it doesn't hurt. ]

How has your time here changed you?

[ While leaving out a mug of coffee, mostly-filled, might seem to be a weird thing to do in remembrance, regardless it's what Joshua does as he goes about cleaning the downstairs floor of his house, the space previously known as Kat's Kradle.

Without any real reason to keep more than the cooking area clean, he hadn't. Dust coats many of the tables and forms sometimes-impressive piles in the corners. Today, despite the rain, Joshua has the front door of House 38 wide open, and he can occasionally be seen sweeping piles of dirt outside.

It's rather cold, but Joshua doesn't seem to mind it. At least it's keeping him from working up a sweat. It's a bit late for a new year cleaning, but at least he's getting around to it at all, right?

Every so often he takes breaks to check on his journal, which he left the following question on earlier in the day: ]

How many of you learned things here that you're not looking forward to having to learn again when you go back to your own worlds? Your own death might be the obvious one, but I mean things like, say, some truth about your world, or friends, or family as well. Anything you'll need to find out again if you forget this place.

I've gathered that some of you out there are rather old. I'd think if you were immortal, individual years would start to lose their meaning with time. So, what do you think constitutes a memorable birthday? Every ten years? Every one hundred? How old do you get before you stop taking notice of single years?

[ If you happen to be celebrating the new year with some coffee or pastries or... whatever else Hanekoma feeds people at Kat's Kradle, then you might hear the sound of someone tuning a violin coming from the second story.

It starts off quite out of tune, but within a minute or two, it sounds fine. Then, Joshua starts up a piece of music: fast-paced, somewhat frantic, somewhat chaotic, without chorus or verse, but it has an overall feel to it of life, of progress, of change.

Or maybe you just missed the whole performance.

Either way, a little later, the following goes out over the journal. ]

Why do you want to go home? [ And then, after a short pause, ]

Why do you want to stay?