All art is at once surface and symbol

They do! Shaymin and a lot of characters I used to RP seem to talk to me sometimes. Novel cast, maybe not so much "talk to me" as much as I wonder what their lives would be like pre- and post-events of the book. Sometimes they show up in AU/RP scenarios ("What if Raggedy Ann & Andy met Karkat Vantas from Homestuck? What would their conversations be like?") It's like being given photographs or movies of someone else's life in the attic of my subconscious, in a way. And the more I flip through them, the more I try to understand them. Like we're slowly opening up for each other.