CW: drugs, emotional abuse, slavery fetishization, incest fetishization, sexualized neoteny, implied CSA in media, OCD, sexual humour, sexual dynamics discussion, confession compulsion, public confession (coerced), physical assault threat, combat, killing
Marzanna had picked a date by herself. reply to confirm if it works. just a period or smth is fine.
He hadn’t. He’d lie in bed thinking about it, thinking, until he was hungry, too hungry to think about anything else, food came first, then roll over. It was in three days. She knew it worked, he had nothing else going on. She wanted him to come out on his own this time. She wasn’t going to meet him at the door.
They would be only one stop over, on the rapid line. The rapid line ran above and in some places between the rooftops, accessible two blocks away from a set of coiling iron stairs.
Stairs he could jump from if he thought too hard about it.
Stairs he could slip on (the freshly exposed layers of ice slick with meltwater) if he didn’t think hard enough about it.
Naturally, she wouldn’t say it, maybe she didn’t even think it, but this was also part of the test.
Either of these worst case scenarios could (would, he knew, by spontaneous Order) happen if he didn’t make up his mind, if it was pulling him one direction and the other on the way up.
(Would that be a fitting end? Wouldn’t that almost be his fantasy? Splitting himself and spilling his insides all over the innocent pedestrians below the fast line, gasping women and laughing children?
But no – his insides would be anonymous. No one would think to investigate his life. The public safety bureau would power-wash it into the sewer with the rest of the biohazards.)
if u dont ill be there, but i cant confirm Gallvren will.
She couldn’t possibly know to make that part of the test, but she did, and she had.
If he replied… it would be an incontrovertible signal…
Either that he wanted to pursue her (why was that the wording he had settled on? the Slaver smirked) or he wanted to be her friend. Either option he’d have to reply, and he was sure it was one or the other. So why hadn’t he? Why did he think he needed to decide before replying? Because one was framed as a decision, and the other was framed as a decision, and therefore they had to correlate? Or because he didn’t even want to be friends with her if he couldn’t have her? (If you don’t want to be friends with her, then you don’t really like her in the first place. – a commonplace dramatic statement in Love Ed harems, though occasionally negated.)
He couldn’t do this on his own.
He eventually picked the tiebreaker he did because even though he had no idea if it would help, if he didn’t try it, the fact that he hadn’t would invalidate any other answer he might somehow come up with. It held him hostage.
He had no reason to believe it would help, but he was happy to believe something might, for long enough to stop thinking about it.
About anything.
He ordered more Zeparmine. A week's worth.
“Don’t,” loomed his mother’s voice over the smooth, ungrippable cliff of her back, with a pained sound like she was breathing tear gas, “keep trying things you aren’t good at. You won’t just look dumb, you’ll look like you never learn anything.”
‘The Questing Monkey’ is the Rhi formation responsible for effort in scenarios where one’s feet do not touch the ground of predictable experience for long stretches at a time.
“You’ve got this all wrong,” smirked the Slaver. “It’s not ‘love’ vs ‘friendship’, it’s ‘submission’ vs ‘domination’. I could have told you this all the way back in high school if I’d known you then. Submit to Ylian, dominate Gwaëlle. Submit to Marzanna, dominate Gallvren.”
“Wait, why not the other way around?” objected @moephrenology, typing back into the window where the text appeared. “Dominate Marzanna or Ylian – turn the tables, get the most out of the already extant dynamic of power competition. Submit to Gallvren or Gwaëlle, accept their genuine goodness as a constraint. Way better. Bam.”
The text window popped up under the Slaver’s sprite. “You really think you could do that though? You’re not me.”
“>me”, Anonymous typed back, having no such pronoun. “just telling you what I’d watch, petitionfag. not like he’s listening to us anyway.”
>study sessions resume
>actually have some focus now that I’ve made my decision, narrowed my fantasies
>develop system where I look up at Ylian to reward myself for looking down at the book
>she notices
>tells me to stop staring
>ask how much looking counts as staring
>tells me I already know
>try not looking at all
>eyes constantly drift to their corners where I can see the blur of her in my vision
>worse than when I was looking on purpose
>she also notices whenever I move my hand to rub my eye or scratch myself
>tells me to stop every time
>it’s kinda like my mom telling me to do or not do random stuff
>but exciting bc she’s actually kind of consistent (mom would have mentioned the face touching thing like once and then forgotten about it)
>pretty sure I’ve seen other people, even in PMC, doing stuff like that
>try to catch her doing it but she actually never does
>she just gets madder at me for staring at her even though I’m not doing it for lewd reasons (I get that she wouldn’t be able to tell the difference but for some reason I genuinely thought she could read my mind after she noticed me so much the first time)
>do catch other people doing it in class, write a list
>threaten to give the list to the homeroom teachers and everyone on it (including Gwaëlle)
>she says her instructions were for me, not for everybody
>wtf that sounds like a romantic line in a manga
>post it in a greentext on 42chan
>a bunch of people agree
>that makes me notice it way more and actually stop doing it
>now she doesn’t interact with me at all
>does she want me to do it on purpose?
>ask thread, this time get no clear answers
>somebody makes a comparison to Master-Slave Dialectics Research Club, which is a hard ethics kink series
>agewalled, but I figured out my mom’s login years ago and she never uses it
>the eroguro and harem and artsy Najda pathways crash into each other exactly here
>actually defines
>get to the episode the guy’s referencing (that’s where he comes from isn’t it he’s the Teacher-Slaver he’s in my head)
>next episode
>it’s a terrible idea
>doing it accidentally-on-purpose again
>try to jam a book corner into my eye
>Ylian says this isn’t working, suggests something more targeted and behaviour-focused
>”you’re a gamer… right? ever heard of a game called SinAnon?”
>no… wait. It’s mentioned in one Tsÿo thing but that I haven’t read (only seen posts about)
>story about brainwashing or something I think
>say yes
>don’t get asked any specifics about it, just if I want to play
>brainwashing sounds useful if real, also something we have in common = hidden Order making all of this maybe worth it
>ends study session early
>look up SinAnon when I get home
>tfw you sit in a circle with a bunch of strangers and confess all your sins, and they get to interrupt you if they think you’re avoiding anything and react with 100% honesty
>no idea where a high school student is going to get permission or participants so assume she just means a big mean talk with the Public Morals Committee
>Dr. Mark’eg says it might burn through my unhealthy reactions to normal things and make me capable of enduring my own worst-case scenarios
>sounds like a shonen training arc
>starting to get hype
>hear nothing for another week
>start trying to expose myself to less scary things to prepare myself
>Dr. Mark’eg tells me to stop, save current for SinAnon and not try anything hard >practically vanish for three more weeks
>start “stocking up” good Current like a squirrel
>problem: good Current pretty much always = sin
>the new agewalled stuff I’m reading – on mom’s computer – is allowing me to do that in unprecedented increments
>tfw building myself a bigger and bigger bomb
>literally have wet dreams about letting it blow
“The Goddess has set out a way for you to be happy,” Dr. Mark’eg smiled with cruel saintliness. “As She has for everyone. You would not exist if your happiness, your Order, did not.”
– but what was “I”, what if I don’t exist, chattered his heretical thoughts, yes heretical not just “intrusive” –
“Of all things in the universe, only Darkness is not a thing – does not exist – because in the light it is revealed to be many things, and in the darkness it appears to be none.” His Theology teacher’s voice – how could he remember her voice when he couldn’t even remember her name? Had that voice really existed?
– thoughts that can’t even sustain contact with a Theology class, like darkness with light –
“The easiest way, like I said, is just to leave it hanging.” Like Marzanna was hanging, over the edge of Gallvren’s tall bed. “He didn’t show. For all we know, he just got cold feet about the whole thing first.” Relief practically perfumed her voice. “We might as well assume that, unless –” the volume dropped as she interrupted her own fantasy – “he gets back to us.”
Gallvren had given Marzanna a list of fics to read, which is what Marzanna was doing on the bed. Unbra’d in an old gi and cherry blossom pink bike shorts. (Maybe she’d find better material to write an article about, become a culture writer. This ‘reality’ obsession for her seemed as unhealthy as Luskonneg’s fictional ones.)
They weren’t quite – the circumstances were too weird, even for Marzanna, but they had gotten closer after that night.
They had never been sure how close they were in the first place. They had been roommates for three years, and never really established it, even as friends, in some ways still treated each other like mere contractual partners, even though each trusted the other absolutely.
Put each other as emergency contacts and meant it.
Imagined it, as Gallvren did when she was reasonably or unreasonably worried about something of that order. Like the night she was stuck inside the flower shop’s magically automated doors for half an hour when the power went out. Before neighbourhood patrols came along – who knew if there would be neighbourhood patrols, if they’d be busy fighting Hellhounds or something – she imagined Marzanna finding her way to the shop, breaking in through the heating system, planning food runs, defending her with Yn Dahh’t martial arts against gnolls and shapeshifters and –
OK, there was something there.
(She’d been sneaking Miwa/Klauxion fics late at night.)
But it was too uncomfortable to get into that kind of relationship now. What they now knew they both had already wanted to be, and thus no longer needed to dance around already being, was girl friends (separate words). Friends who could be girls together.
“But if he does get back to you.”
So why were they talking about him again?
“He won’t do that.”
“You want me to stay home, same as last time?”
“The Goddess gave you a sign – a hidden Order. You didn’t even hurt his feelings.”
“Right, but this time. It just feels… pointlessly rude? Like one of his stories from high school? Not even saying good-bye?”
“It’s just like… I just don’t think he’s the kind of person who’s very good at handling good-byes. I’m trained for whatever that means, I’m responsible for it. You’re neither.”
“I mean, I wasn’t. Totally sure I’d have to in the first place.”
“You’re not telling me you really wanted to be long term friends with Luskonneg Gwl’kerrien?”
“Why not?” She sounded more irritated than she expected. “You seemed to think that was possible. Really seemed to, before the half dozen different reasons you’ve given for cutting it off.”
“Even thinking that was one of the things I felt guilty about. Like I was comparing you to him.”
“Well that just sounds like you got caught up in your own head. I understood the original concept just fine.” She paused. “I was kind of interested in where it would go, too.”
They had clarified that she wasn’t jealous. That wasn’t the kind of story this was. That was the kind of story he would tell, or read. So why was it telling itself?
Harems existed in her world too – like, writing every ship at once, in competition, in the same setting, not only choosing your own but making your argument for it. Gallvren didn’t like to read them for the sheer vicarious anxiety they induced. She liked stories where two characters grew close in a world of their own, unseen to others.
Marzanna had told her not to count on Luskonneg getting around to any of them.
That didn’t necessarily bother her, though. She couldn’t always count on girls getting around to reading things she recommended either. They all had their own things to get around to. And it wasn’t like she could even bring herself to look up anything he talked about, either, except the Najda shows. Well, she’d watched a few episodes of those. With Marzanna, actually. It was enough to talk about them. That was what it meant to be –
“What part of it?”
“I sorta wanted to see if I could just… be girls with him?”
“Be girls?” Marzanna blinked. “Like you thought he was trans or something?”
A boy girl friend.
For a long time that had been Gallvren’s deepest and most secret fantasy.
She did like men (at least as much as women) and didn’t want to live entirely cut off from them, although their world had been more interesting in the Heroes’ days and that was OK. It shouldn’t have been hard to meet like – an actual history fanatic, which was her surface fantasy, making small talk about a new museum display at the flower shop. He wouldn’t necessarily judge the personal character of her interests. But he couldn’t share them. He would be driven to the life of the Serpent, to her service and support, not to the private world. He would assume a degree of scrutiny of his own fantasies, in the interest of her desire, that she did not need to. Her work, her world would embarrass (or overstimulate) him to be aware of, unless their relationship was sexual, and if their relationship was sexual it would be so much and so little else.
Luskonneg was hardly a boy. He was hardly a man.
He was easiest to think of as a kind of gnome. The bucket hat Marzanna had picked out for him was mushroom-patterned. Had that choice been picked with her in mind? If Marzanna wanted to keep him away, and Gallvren for herself, why had the whole introduction felt so much like a comic double seduction?
She didn’t, she thought with some frustration, read enough comedies.
Anyway, the liking men part wasn’t the important part of the fantasy. (“The thing about tsundere…” he’d said through noodles whipping like a sea demon’s face tentacles, “is that they use negations too much. You can tell someone’s tsundere… just because they’re always saying they’re not saying something.”) Her tastes were so rarefied she wasn’t sure they applied to flesh and blood. To her own moment in history.
“I’m just asking because, what if he does get back to you. What are you going to do then, and where will it put me. I feel like I deserve to have a say if we –” She cut off, clammed up.
The message in question had already been sent. And received.
hey srry for missing the last thing
think marzannas prob done w me but
wanna show u my place
try & have it sorta presentabl
instd of panicking going somewhere
i knw its spos2 be some kinda test
& i donwanna do that
just hang out & talk
She was acting irrationally, wasn’t she? Like a character in a story that wasn’t hers.
Marzanna Etnexheyr, a journalist trained at Yn Dahh’t, her roommate, whom she trusted absolutely, thought this guy was bad news.
Why was she being so suspicious? Why did she want to go just to see if who i rlly am had something to do with what still felt unresolved?
Sure, she was a writer. She wouldn’t have written these elements in this order, in this combination, because it would have seemed to a reader to call for a more compelling, unifying explanation than had been given. But that was expected of her because the reader would equally be disappointed with the explanation being too banal, too inelegant. Even if Shunny Najda or one of these writers Luskonneg was crazy about could have made it work as a self-subversion, that would itself be a deliberately crafted structure, a matter of pacing, leads and feints.
Marzanna had tried to seem mysterious when they first moved in together (selecting each other from algorithmic suggestions on a city housing board), dropping hints that the vagueness of her big project involved some kind of privileged information or exclusive release agreement, until she came home hammered one night and admitted the whole thing was falling apart at the conceptual level. None of her leads wanted to talk to her because she couldn’t explain what she wanted to air all their dirty laundry for. There was another obvious possibility Gallvren had been avoiding – Marzanna had found someone so borderline incompetent he was willing to go along with her experiment, and was now feeling guilty about it under the weight of Gallvren’s attention, or had just gotten flagged by an ethics board.
She didn’t like thinking these things. She liked liking Marzanna.
And Marzanna clearly liked…
“You’re not cutting this all off because you think he’s going to embarrass you, to me, right? He’s a weirdo but I don’t mind talking to him and even if I did – I understand, or want to understand, what you’re doing.”
The ‘want to’, the hedge, was a mistake. “I don’t.” Marzanna’s voice came back as if through a tunnel.
“What are you thinking of doing next, then? Back to the drawing board? This is the farthest you’ve gotten on a story in a long time. And you said you want to… but writing about me would be a conflict of interest wouldn’t it?”
“Well, maybe I just gotta sell as fiction.”
“Yeah, why don’t you just go to Poets’ College? There are direct transfer scholarships from Yn Dahh’t, right?” She’d wanted to ask this for so long. She’d be willing to play along with the relationship, at least for a little bit, just to feel like she could ask.
A smile. “Why don’t you?”
Most Heroes’ Love works, even classics and award winners, were disseminated through what in Silmenon was called the “doujin economy”, the informal realm of private production and own-expense distribution subject to the basic laws of the Poets’ Courts, but not the extensive cycles of critique and competition by which the Poets’ College selected works for official performance and publication. “I think I wouldn’t even mind all the criticism, it’d help with not knowing if I’m being too easy or hard on myself all the time,” she pondered. “But I’m afraid of… having to do the same to others. Being called to serve on Poets’ Court as a censor. Maybe if I went through it I’d feel differently. But then I might lose what I’m doing now.”
“What you’re doing now wouldn’t be censored. It has literary merit out the wazoo.”
“I know, or I wouldn’t be doing it. But maybe I’d… feel differently about it.”
“It’s perfectly fine.” Marzanna leaned over and started to rub Gallvren’s shoulders. It felt good, the bright current between the real contact and her countless past imaginations leaped across the circuit of her soul. She leaned back, leaned into it, relaxed in a way that felt like her body changing shape.
“Does it bother you to feel differently about things?” Marzanna whispered. She had pressed something between Gallvren’s back and her fingertips. A piece of square paper, and she was folding it.
“Not necessarily.”
“Good. I mean, if you want to help somebody like Luskonneg feel differently about things, he needs to be okay with it, and I’m not sure he actually is.”
“I know that’s understatement, but I agree.”
“If he does anything scary next time you see him…” Marzanna finished running a safety pin through the paper figure she had folded – a five-petalled spinning flower.
“Who says I’m meeting him?”
She felt a shiver like cool rain through her Rhi. “Fan Death Sleep Preserver 27, a standard single-use knockout spell at Yn Dahh’t. Spin it and wiggle your fingers like so in time with it. You don’t have to do it the whole time, it Preserves losing consciousness not having lost, so as long as you let that take ”
“I’m gonna have to practice that… what, you think he’s gonna be violent?”
“I think it’s slightly more likely than him getting better. And the more likely we manage to make that, the more I have to worry about it.”
The person in Room 306 might have been cast to represent the person behind the Seer In The Half Light blog on a corny news-drama reenactment: a short, gristly probably-woman with stringy hair pulled down in strings of Miwa moon beads on either side of their face, equally speckled with freckles and acne scars; a floor-length crepey black dress and fishnet sleeves draping well past their dirty bitten fingers.
They weren’t the Seer in the Half Light. Braz hadn’t remembered that; she just knew.
They looked up at Braz from over a bucktoothed frown and –
“Sorry, I thought –”
– didn’t let Braz finish her prepared story, swinging the door shut in her face.
Braz stuck two fingers in the crack of the door, and didn’t flinch as it slammed shut on them.
Instead, she twitched the tips of her fingers in exact rhythmic synchronization with the blades whirring in the fan embedded in a grille between black ice-blocks outside in the hall.
The person in the doorway could not have recognized the synchronization of the movement, although its arbitrariness (as Braz’s other fingers slid in the crack and pulled the door open) would have made it obvious that it was some sort of spell. Instead, her eyes simply rolled back in her head, and she fell backwards. Braz pushed open the door in time to catch the light body before it damaged itself by hitting the floor.
The hall behind her was icebrick, metal room doors separated by huge pillars of blocks honeycombed in spirals and soapstone statues in arched granite niches, twisting columns of abstract semi-biomorphic features flooded in blacklight. In a stairwell niche a paper sign proudly advertised a 24-hour snack pantry stocked with the restaurant’s overflow. At the back, two more barrel-like metal capsules from coils of wire.
Those, she had been informed, were the funiculars. They went all the way up the cliff from the Lower City to the Upper (where, somewhere, the Dark Lord lived). This she had been informed by the receptionist, who had checked her in without any special privileges afforded her rank or mission. She was no longer on official business, so she couldn’t just ask if they had heard the name Lacriz Aeeth, demand a dragnet. After her last report, she had been given a No Further Orders notice. She went into an Alliance station and they told her she didn’t exist. Told her to check into a rehabilitation centre, get a new memory wipe, all the way back to her entering the service. You met people like that sometimes – old men at bars who didn’t remember half their lives, but stared at you with eyes misted with honour: “I musta did something!” The movies and plays and pulp novels, after all, were full of noble agents who sacrificed themselves defeating enemies too evil for the world to know. Like, maybe, the Seer In The Half Light.
Did they know, then, that since she had begun using Narrative Homing, she wasn’t one of them anymore?
They had to, because they would feel the attacks striking their spells again.
Time was running out.
Her entrance had hardly made any sound, and she had neutralized the surveillance magic in the hall (by hijacking it and subordinating it to the personalized surveillance spell she had set up to watch her room while she was gone), but she made sure to sweep the door quickly and silently shut behind her.
She ID’d the resident: a 19-year-old Mysteries student and theoretical magic forum lurker, neither particularly Dark nor particularly interesting. The more obvious connection (her stomach turned with suppressed memory) was erotic.
The bed was strewn with sex toys and lewd books. Heretical Silmenon religious romance and manga; pages dog-eared and bookmarked describing specific acts. (Three times, large clit sucking, the third a terrible flash of déja vu.) A backpack containing several long spools of black and red rope, still tied.
Under hypnosis Margauz Velvent revealed that she had come here to meet with a “traditional” sex worker she had solicited online. The arrangement had nothing to do with her magical or academic interests, except that she had listed them in a couple of lines in her profile on the Secure Liaisons app. The profile she had selected appeared to be new, but contained a number of photographs (all carefully concealing the face) and testimonial quotes that spoke to a longer career and probably a cycle of creating and deleting profiles. Secure Liaisons wiped everything users didn’t opt to keep saving irreversibly; even with government privileges she’d have trouble finding all of them. The escort was supposed to arrive that evening at 10:00. They were planning to share the funicular.
The plastic bags had been under the sink. Luskonneg hadn’t used them in three months. In a near all-nighter before the date he had proposed for her to not show up he had used up all of them. He could probably go another three months – after that he’d either have to go out to the store, or call Mom again. Didn’t building administrators provide them in some places? He felt like they should. That was one thing he could ask for on behalf of all NEETs, if he still got to tell his story somehow.
Now they were piled up in a closet he had for the winter clothes he had hung on the hook next to his door to feel like he went outside sometimes (“You already told her you don’t. Even if she thinks it’s an exaggeration, how long will you be able to keep up the act?), filled with everything on his floor he hadn’t been able to decide what to do with. A few more were stuffed in the sleeves of body pillows he had wasted with stains, punctures, and bad sleeping posture.
He couldn’t get all the smell out of the room. Was it worse now that he had picked so much of the crust up, or was he noticing it more because Gallvren was coming here? (She lives in a freaking flower shop.) There was some kind of sticky reddish substance between half of the floorboards, which were deep-grooved and filled with their own erosion.
He had consumed three energy drinks since midnight. He had come up off the Zeparmine for a few hours to send the misspelled message, then gone back under and come back up the night before at 9:00, not moving until 12:00. His consciousness felt bright and glossy, with a few watery traces of the drug sliding along it, his contact with the world a hard and brittle edge of plastic. He had expected to still be putting things in bags when she came here but he had surprised himself by running out of bags with an hour and twenty minutes to go. Now he lay down to conserve his energy, and couldn’t close his eyes. From his experience with all-nighters and energy-drink highdoses, that didn’t mean he couldn’t fall asleep again. He couldn’t say for sure he didn’t want to, although he had set fifteen alarms on his phone (five for the first five minutes, then five at five-minute intervals, then another five at half-hours). She could probably walk through the front door anyway if someone went in or out, and his own was never locked. He imagined her walking in on him passed out, hearing the sound of his alarm blaring: “Onii-chan! Your ecchi thing is up, but you’re not?!”
To his amazement, the doorbell (he had forgotten what it sounded like – harsh resonant notes like a guitar, climbing and descending the intervals of a pentatonic scale) rang on the dot, as the first alarm was going off. He tried and failed to roll, sitting up flared a white-hot cramp through his back, was struck by the terror of physical paralysis as the alarm went into second and third repetitions. (Imagined himself, out of nowhere, as a woman giving birth.) Pulled himself by his outstretched clawlike hand toward the whining imprecations of his little sister and as soon as he touched the phone, was somehow healed, collapsed onto his hands on the edge of the bed, hung his head as if hung over, levered his feet under himself. By the time he was standing up he was too flooded with taurine and adrenaline for the usual volley of intrusive thoughts to touch him. His vision flashed white; he moved through schemata of his surroundings.
But in the open doorway, he could see her in infinite detail.
His second alarm went off as he stood facing her.
He slammed his hand into his pocket, covering the words he couldn’t cut off with a loud “HALLO”, stood there scrolling and turning off each one by one.
“H…hi.”
Then he turned and floated down the hall, like a balloon attached to a child’s wrist.
“Huh.” Halfway to the door she stopped, pulling the balloon back, glancing at the friezes along the upper edge of the hallway. “Cute little bats.”
It took Luskonneg several blinks and pivots to see what she was talking about. “I never…. noticed those.”
“Never? How long have you been living here?”
“I don’t go out…. in the hallway much.” But he did, to take out the trash. What did the hall look like in his tunnel vision? Dirty concrete, pipes, like a Sisaux Nimuet manga? A birth canal?
Once inside (the hallway wasn’t Inside; Inside he noticed everything), she didn’t say anything about the smell.
“Does…. does Marzanna know you’re here?”
“Should she not?” Shifting away.
“No! No I just… didn’t think to tell her.” This she would need to know, if Gallvren talked about it. Although if she talked about it… there would be… there would be more to talk about, wouldn’t there? “Or I thought but… couldn’t. You know…. what I’m like. What I’ve talked about…. and she has probably. Erecutive…. dysfunction.”
“Mmhmm.” Sympathy. At least, how that would read on an anime character. “She thinks I’m at a” – almost imperceptible stop, rolled over with a hiccup giggle – “Women’s Medicine appointment.”
“W-w-w-women’s–” w-w-why would she pick an alibi like that did she want him to think about which would mean she unless
“Which I was, an hour ago. She’s usually like, getting up around now. I’m actually surprised you picked a time this early.”
Other people – not other pathetic NEETs, but people with jobs and degrees and Miwa black belts – wake up at 11:00 in the morning?
“I… might not, next time. Were you… OK?”
“Of course!” She laughed and Luskonneg remembered how the Knitting Club laughed, how naturally he had slipped into thinking of it as an endearment –
“If it was of course… you wouldn’t have to get a checkup… right?”
“Well –” now she reddened, which seemed to prove the laugh was real and he had ruined it – “that’s true…” She glanced around, and her eyes settled on the walls, and he was suddenly aware of just what kind of a place, even cleaned, he had invited her into. Even a doll convention – had disturbed her. The function obvious, the space defined – calm down, she’s a fujoshi, you already talk about – she engaged primarily in text. Function, space: the white space between words, the virtual space of the imagination. You don’t know what her physical space looks like.
“What does your room look like?” His hands flew to his mouth as he blurted it out and her eyes snapped back to him. He stepped backwards in well-worn footprints onto his mattress, trying to get out of her space.
“Uhmm. Sorry, I didn’t make you feel… self-conscious, did I?”
“N-no, I mean,” he took another step backwards and almost tripped and steadied himself and sat on his pillow nodding the whole time. His two responses had gotten mixed up! Did even toddlers make this mistake? “did I, you,”
“No I – get it. We don’t need to talk about it, we already have.” She stopped as if thinking. And sat down. Kneeled. At the end of his bed. There was an office chair he never used right over there. “We’re having the same conversation we’d be having if Marzanna was here recording us for her article.” That wasn’t right, he hadn’t explained – why did he decorate the way he did? Why not just have one window to the 2D world, one screen? Why distant paper when he mostly jacked off to images he could control? Why was he afraid to even take down characters and series he no longer liked? “This isn’t an interview. You invited me here because you want to be like, regular friends, right? Let’s talk about something else.”
“Like… like….” He couldn’t even scan his brain for what they might talk about that he couldn’t. Work? Mutual friends? The weather? Surely she couldn’t think of bringing any of those up to him – she knew the conditions of his life – unless she wanted to prove to him that he had nothing to say, to laugh at him, the reveal coming already this soon… “….your ….appointment?”
She laughed. The kind of laugh that meant she was still hiding its cruelty. It sounded – if she could be – surprised.
“I meant more like. What were you doing up, this early in the morning? I mean you look like you just woke up. You probably just woke up.”
“I’m sorry! I’m just now realizing… I have no idea what…” He rumbled from somewhere that hadn’t adjusted to the hope yet. “…happens at those… and you mentioned it in the first place…”
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have.” She looked away, sounding distant. “I was thinking on the way here. I feel like I could talk to you the way I talk to my girl friends. But not like, about that.”
“No I’m sorry!!!! Believe me I’m sorrier. Like, I’m sorryI’msorryI’msorry– ”
“I believe you.” She cut him off, without using her eyes. Her hands folding over each other, as if forming mudras for some kind of spell. “I think.”
“What kind of things… do you talk about… with your girl friends.”
“Fandom stuff, like I told you, didn’t I?”
“But that’s what you just said… you couldn’t talk about with me.” He wanted to lie down. His energy drink overdrive was now pulsing through his skull, and he couldn’t even look at her, the edges of the room were collapsing. “It’s all I have… to talk about. Is this… some kind of test? Like… for Marzanna?” Like for Mark’eg. Like for Ylian. Like for everyone who had ever cared about trying to make him better – which he was no longer sure he wanted to be.
“What? No it isn’t. I didn’t mean we can’t talk about what we like. I meant I don’t want to talk… about liking it, about why we like it, about the idea of it, like we’re trying to explain that to someone else.”
“…oh.” He thought about the difference, the balance of muscles in his face slipped, and the tears started running down his face in strips like wide rice noodles. “Uuu… uuhhh… I’m sorry, I’m sorry for always…”
“Oh Goddess I didn’t mean to imply that…”
“, no, I know you didn’t, I mean, we’ve already discussed this, haven’t we?” He pulled up his sleeve over his wrist and even his fingertips – that was one of the ways to make looking pathetic look cute, right? or at least, it always had been to him – and scrubbed so hard at his face his eyebrows were sticking out like static when he’d removed them. “You know what I’m always. What I’m always.”
“Was there something you specifically wanted to talk about? I’m sorry, considering the circumstances, I should have asked or –”
There was, but he hadn’t wanted to bring it up now, he had somehow assumed they’d get into the rhythm of a normal conversation and then, hit a silence, which they did at least a dozen times in half an hour in an average conversation, and when the silence got too unbearable he’d blurt it out – but was this a signal? She had to be aware of the possibility, what else could he possibly want to talk specifically about, when he didn’t even have anything to talk about normally –
“I had – a better explanation of some of the stuff I was thinking about after I talked to you last time, but…” That didn’t sound any better than talking about the appointment now.
“Did you really call me all the way out here… on my own… for that?” She cocked her head, her ponytail splitting over her shoulder, looking puzzled. “I thought you’d want to say something like that with Marzanna listening. Should I take notes?”
“I… already told her?” Now he’d have to, on the off chance she continued the article, and now she’d have a chance to cross examine and catch the inconsistency – but that was the point, he was hurtling into an abyss where all but pain was unknown and pain was guaranteed, so he could act regardless of it. It felt like nothing. Like humming roiling energy all over his skin even though nothing was different and nothing would be different. Or maybe that was the three energy drinks. “I wanted to tell you… separately? So I wouldn’t have to repeat it… for her? Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. That was like. Tricking you, wasn’t it.”
“Can you stop doing that.” Her voice suddenly sharp, like tripping on the edge of a hardwood cabinet. Then it lightened. “Can you stop doing that?”
“Doing what.”
“Saying sorry. I can… it’s easier to deal with when it’s an interview for Marzanna, but it’s harder if we’re trying to have a normal conversation.”
“Like… stop, ever? Or stop, unless I do a particular set of things? I’m going to need to know because – I can’t assume. I can’t know. Better sorry than unsafe, like they say, unless, saying it is also unsafe, for you, in which case I can’t…”
“OK who says that, because it’s pretty funny, but also not remotely true or useful for most situations.”
“My therapist? Also my mom? I thought it was just something people said.”
I never see it online, though. Unless… wasn’t it in that one Hell Harrowing omake? But a Confusion Imp said it in that…
“…huh. Well I guess… say sorry if I say you did something wrong or get upset? Just don’t do it pre-emptively.”
“B-but… you will… do that? Say something… if I do something wrong… or you get… upset?”
“Well... yeah. At least, if it’s wrong enough that I want you to apologize.”“But if it’s not enough…. what should I do.”
“Goddess I don’t know! Why would it even matter?”
“Because if it doesn’t… that means I don’t even care about… the real, underlying Order… which means I’m cut off from it… in the Dark.”
She tapped her index finger on her knee. Maybe she’d find the right words and get somewhere. (Somewhere Marzanna hadn’t?) “That’s technically true. But what you care about has no necessary relationship to anything I do. I don’t have to do something to make you care about something, and I can’t. You care if you’re asking the question.”
“…do …do any of your friends decorate their rooms …with fandom stuff?”
“I don’t actually… go over to their places that often. But I guess… Artaxine is the most open about it? She has a singlehouse and invites us all over for holidays. There is a big Heroes’ Love art scene, which is more like… individual pieces sold or exchanged one to one, whereas a lot of this looks like mass reproduced promotional art. She has framed paintings of her main ships, but also subtler things like… symbolic flower arrangements? Actual veneration items, which are something you can get for the Heroes, not to mention individual portraits all over the place, although I find the HL ones more human and interesting. Actually Artaxine has some non-Hero, regular boys’ love commissions too. There’s something hanging in the bathroom, it’s like a C’harn historical drama, I think it’s called… Thou My Plunder?”
“What’s that like?”
“I haven’t actually… I’d say we could watch it, but there’s nowhere to sit and no big screen either.” She probably didn’t want to sit too close to him, either. Even after his latest showers. He wouldn’t. “They’re not as… explicit as some of these. Although the stuff Artaxine reads is very.” She paused. “She’s a Kamann/Silmenon shipper, actually. So like, you can imagine… or can you?”
“Oh. Oh.” Next to Kamann, he imagined, willowy Silmenon would become like one of his descendants’ drawings, pulsing impaled on the sceptre of justice, relinquishing control but unable to, muscles extending to a straining net… (like the too-tight underwear he was now wearing like a chastity cage, the stretch lines in his sweatpants he stared down at as they shifted by degrees of width and angle he had learned to discern in digitized pen marks)… “I didn’t. Why didn’t I look for that.”
She giggled! He looked up from his fixation to catch it (what if it pops visibly right now) but it was already over. “Sorry, I did forget to answer about my own room several minutes ago.”
“No I mean, I should have let it be a surprise.” >implying he had the right to imply that “You didn’t ask me before you saw it and… frankly you probably should have.”
“Well, we’ve been circling it so much I’m almost wondering now if you invited me over just to show it off. Is there anything to… drink in here? I forgot to bring a water bottle and haven’t really had anything since I left.”
This one he had down! He stood up (on his already-crushed pillow) and sauntered over to the fridge. He had bought two packs of energy drinks, only making it part of the way through one. He pulled one out of the plastic packing rings (thinking briefly to ask if she liked it but afraid it would seem overly solicitous, and he wanted to give her something new if she hadn’t tried it, a piece of himself, to see how she would react, for her eyes to widen like in a doujin when the hips that resisted start moving on their own), going for two before he caught his hands shaking. He didn’t want another, but the only other things in there (besides stains and food debris, year-old rotted leaves from the last time his mom brought lettuce and the ring left by an exploded whipped cream) were the unpleasantly syrupy dregs of a two-month-old lychee juice carton and some Meltwater Lagers, which he didn’t actually like but which Llau had convinced him to buy for the old-style stubby bottles.
If he drank alcohol at 11:something in the morning, he would look cool, right?
He slumped down in the office chair, looking down on her (her shirt had a high ruffled collar, thank the Goddess), holding out the energy drink.
“Oh, just some water, thanks.”
And then he had to find a cup that wasn’t… there were three in the sink and two in the cupboard that didn’t look any cleaner than the ones in the sink…
He poured the water in the sink. It came out hot. Was he supposed to just stand there with it running until it cooled down? “It’s not… working, I don’t usually…” It guttered as if in agreement. “Do you… how cold do you want it?”
“Oh never mind, I’ll take the can.”
He spun back around, nearly knocking over the glass he had been examining on the counter, to hand it back to her, snapping it open.
“I should be tired, because I got up early, but I usually feel more tired when I get up late. It could hit later in the day though.”
“Oh, kinda same.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t read any Kamann/Silmenon. That was like, my first guess of what you were going to go for, actually.”
“Not Elthazan/Silmenon? That’s like… being a Winter City weeb… for me, I feel like I am that ship.”
“Yeah but it’s not a very interesting – sorry, that’s not fair.” She steepled her fingers. “It’s an interesting ship but it takes a really good writer to get what’s interesting about it. Most writers don’t go for it because there isn’t a strong masculine/feminine polarity. They’re both kinda…” She fluttered her wrist. “I dunno, maybe that makes it easier for you as a guy. And they’re both weirdos, so there’s not a strong funny man/straight man dynamic either.”
“But there’s an artificial/natural kinda dynamic.” Are we just going to...
“Which is hard to get right without collapsing onto ‘civilized/primitive’. The hard part which does or can make it interesting is how different they would have looked from each other’s perspective than from ours, and from everyone else they were different from – ‘we’re both outliers, but not in the same way!’ Which is also kinda true of all the Heroes so you have to figure out what would make them stick out to each other. For instance I like this one starts out as a mutual hurt/comfort fic where Silmenon’s pining over Miwa as he does and Elthazan… over Kamann. There’s actually a bit of Silmenon/Kamann in that one too because Silmenon’s had a casual or, you know, transactional thing with him, but Elthazan’s in love…”
“What’s this one called?” ...keep talking like this, the way we would online…
“Impermanence and Imperfection.”
“OK, on the nose but that sells it.” …(but never actually do)…
“It recycles whole scenes from the genre codifier Red Pine which is actually a lot more centrally about those things, as like, poetics.”
“…What’s the Silmenon/Kamann bit like?” …except it’s way more friction to say anything, even if it comes out OK…
“There’s a really great bit of awkwardness with them lemme see if I can remember because I haven’t read in a while.” …but on the other hand I get to hear the music of her voice the way her words tumble one over another, roll like raindrops on a roof… “See it’s not casual like, Silmenon gives Kamann the carnal communion, which a bunch of people were mad at but in this story Maullan’s OK with it since they’re on campaign and he can’t have a normal relationship, anyhoo. So Elthazan wants to try it too, and he keeps confessing things that are like practical mistakes. And Silmenon wants him to… to talk about his feelings, basically, and keeps confessing these deeply embarrassing things himself as examples. And Elthazan looks like… horrified! At the end he confesses for not telling Kamann.”
“About his feelings, or fucking his confessor?” …where did that image come from did I really just think something like that (without trying)…
“Both, but mostly the latter because like, Silmenon isn’t telling Miwa either, and… I shouldn’t spoil this, it’s kind of a turning point in the story.”
“Go ahead.” I want to hear it in her voice – as soon as he started to form the words in his own head they became jarring and dissonant, like they weren’t true, even if they were.
“Well, Silmenon agrees in theory with Maullan that you shouldn’t confess things you wouldn’t change.” I like hearing Marzanna’s voice too, he remembered, though he couldn’t focus on it in general. In dreams, in memories, in public, human voices only grated. “And he’s not going to confess (his feelings) to Miwa because it wouldn’t make either of them happier, but he doesn’t want to stop having the feelings either, so they both decide they can’t keep confessing (their “sins”) to each other, but they want to keep having sex.”
“Huh. I don’t think that’s… theologically…”
“Coherent? It’s not, even Maullan hasn’t hammered out the theology of confession at this point, they’re all making up the rules as they go along. Which is one of the things that makes these stories so interesting. All the things that – tell us the normal way to deal with emotions, which are the things that make stories stories, are all up in the air. You don’t have to contrive ‘special’ situations for characters to experiment with them and come into conflict.”
“OK, when you put it that way…”
“But a lot of people don’t write like that! Even in highbrow HL.”
“No, I think I get what you mean, because it’s the kind of thing… I like about a lot of my favourite stories, even if they fall more under ‘contriving special situations’… I’m used to cycling through every possible thought that could follow from or explain an action, even if I can’t choose between them… so put anything in front of me as ‘what happens’, ‘what the characters do’, I can explain it, it’s harder the more I have to worry if something’s ‘normal’.”
“Hmmm. I feel like that’s a way Elthazan would think. But that he might have in common with Silmenon.”
“Do you know any fics involving. Public confession.”
Like – if I confessed to her in front of Marzanna.
He had invited her out here to avoid that.
But what if it was how it was supposed to go. What if that was how to resolve both feelings. Why else would it have been set up like this, after all.
>first session booked at library
>in one of those little glass-walled soundproofed study/meeting rooms I never knew who used; Ylian never took me inside them
>six other people there; more than I expected for an obscure cult thing
>none of them are from our school
>Ylian explains there’s a Public Morals Mutual Support Network across the school district
>she recruited through it, as an experimental training exercise
>four Public Morals Committee members from different schools were curious
>only one brought another problem kid
>huge muscly girl with spiky pigtails, led around by a skinny tomboy with a pointed hoodscarf; can’t remember either of their names but have their appearances down photographically
>before we even do introductions, the big girl, who’s been scowling the whole time, bursts out laughing and asks why I’m grinning
>had no idea I was, look at myself in phone screen
>”do you get off on having your secrets revealed or revealing other people’s?”
>still grinning but terrified: “both”
>realize as soon as I finish saying it I gave the wrong impression
>one of the Public Morals people says to Ylian I shouldn’t be here
>Ylian says I’m lying
>stumblingly explain that I’m talking about fiction not real life, in real life I’m pretty terrified of both those things
>another person says (sounding kinda scared herself) that that means I shouldn’t be here
>le only rule is total honesty (>implying I know what’s true about myself)
>say that’s why I’m here, to push myself to do things I’m scared of
>another person says I shouldn’t be here, this is an exercise for people who have already honed their emotional and moral skills
>look to Ylian for backup that she thought it was ok for me to be there
>bad idea
>says I’m trying to push my decision onto her
>I’m not the only one getting grilled; someone else is worried about regulations and asked why she came in the first place
>the other Public Morals people (including Ylian!) imply that she only came to feel better than them and not participate
>”this is what happens every time we try a SinAnon”
>Ylian calls for introductions to shut everyone up when 3 conversations are talking over each other
>can’t remember any of these
>can remember some of the types of sins these people confess
>”sorting the garbage in front of someone who always puts it in the wrong bins without giving them a chance to fix it themselves”
>this gets picked apart as “an attempt to make us feel sorry for you when the real problem is that you’d let him”
>”doing homework during meetings”
>”using being on the Public Morals Committee to turn down dates when I’d accept if it was someone I liked”
>”enjoying shredding joints some boy hid in his desk in front of him too much” >oh yeah, and this is the one that sets things off – “getting off to Heroes’ Love that her friend doesn’t approve of”. not because it’s bad in itself, because the FRIEND wouldn’t think of her the same way if she knew, which makes the whole friendship dubiously consensual
>”why don’t you just get some normal pre-erotica that does the same thing? are you specifically trying to piss off your friend?”
>”I’m obviously not just into some specific category of thing,
>”no, you’re actually fantasizing about her, aren’t you?”
>she actually defends herself:”there are things in it you don’t get in the normal, or the Academy-approved stuff, either”
>jump up: “YES both of these are true”
>somebody else is just going through a list of Academy-approved pre-erotica artists, everyone else is staring at me
>”what’s with the perverts here?”
>”any Public Morals Committee SinAnon will inevitably be dominated by sex hangups”
>”what, because of the ethical barriers to normal dating?”
>first I’ve heard about this; obvious in retrospect and I have a whole chart of series about it now
>”yeah,” the big girl who hasn’t gone yet laughs, “you can’t hit on me normally so you brought me here”
>starting to get idea but too many inputs to (over)think about it properly
>”interesting word choice from someone who’s going to end up in a Supervised Living Facility if you don’t stop hitting people”
>”girls just assume I’m into them! I have to counterincentivize it somehow”
>incidentally, I know almost 75 straight years of seasonal charts by memory and have never encountered a character with this exact deal. if you have any from other sectors of culture pls rec
>”see, your local Committee maybe isn’t going to talk about it like this, but what if they’re into that. you’re encouraging them”
>”would it encourage you?” she’s looking at her sponsor(?) now, grinning
>impossible to fucking concentrate, Ylian’s looking back and forth between me and the exit
>”It would discourage the school, which is what you should be worried about”
>wait are you actually.jpg
>idea pulsing in me
>”BOTH of you have to tell the truth now”
>”both of us? isn’t the real reason we’re doing any of this that SinAnon is an ethics nerd churchmouse’s excuse for a Truth or Dare gossip circle?”
>big girl (I still can’t remember her fucking name) just guffaws: “that’s the only reason I came! What about the one boy here, what did he come to share?”
>Ylian facepalm (mental reaction image to this day)
>”ohhh, is this all because you’re straight? well have you considered trying to present in a way boys like instead of taking it out on girls?”
>clutching my legs together around my **** like I need to pee
>le me: ”I… I have a question”
>everyone’s yelling at each other now, I have to repeat it three times
>big girl just zeroes in on me while everyone else is shouting. “what is it?”
>not sure Ylian can hear me, this isn’t ideal, but I might as well
>”is fantasizing about your friend if they don’t like you… better or worse than fantasizing about something they might not like?”
>dead silence
>”did this kid skip Love Ed? can you even get away with that?”
>”no,” Ylian jumps in, literally standing up and blocking the others’ view of me, “he’s doing this to goad you into explaining things that aren’t your job to explain, because he gets off to it”
>she knows I missed Love Ed!!! but I know this is SinAnon so I zip my lips and nod furiously
>”is that the only thing you can get off to?” someone asks
>hahahahaha nooooo
>”don’t ask him that idiot! we’ll be here all day”
>let’s play a game.jpg: ”look, I can’t confess any of my sexual fantasy sins until I know they’re sins. if not then I’m just telling you about inappropriate things. and I’m retarded, I don’t understand what’s a sin and what isn’t if you don’t tell me”
>”huh? you’re not ‘retarded’ which is not the word you’re supposed to use, your grades are just shit because you want to force me to spend time with you”
>big girl: ”that doesn’t work if we ask the questions right? I’m the one who wants to know”
>kinda respect this girl the more I remember her, if I were to get reincarnated back to this time I’d try to take her route
(That’s you, Marzanna, you’re her in this analogy, which makes this line a confession to you, you’d totally read it as one right? Unless you don’t and then I don’t know if I can again, later, because I don’t know if I already did.)
>”are you into ethics kink?”
>her handler: ”more like unethics kink. I read an article about this. the Lower Poets’ Courts will let people get away with anything these days, it’s obvious bad faith”
>”ahahahah an article? are you sure just an article?” she retorts and the others are laughing now “hey loser boy over there, what’s she talking about because I don’t know about freak shit like that but I bet she does. gimme a name”
>almost just say Najda bc he’s considered a pioneer in mainstream accounts but that’s not what they’re talking about
>start describing the plot of Skip Grade
(“A gifted brother and sister pair are racing to complete grade 12 so they can succeed their dead parents’ cutting-edge Mysteries research. At 12, the brother is in grade 10 and the sister 11 for11. Their respective social worlds are the hormonal battlegrounds of high school, the sudden Cold War between its boys and girls, and they do not understand, as most but not all their peers do, why they should not participate at what they believe to be their true level of development.” – summary on AnimeNewsMeshnet.com)
>everyone looking on in horror
>hoodscarf girl glaring daggers at Ylian
>ask if I’ve been vetted lately, if they’re sure I’m not flagged for active-paraphilia
>yes I actually do know that, I’ve been to a million psychologists, I’m not flagged for active-anything, that’s my problem
>big girl laughs, feels validating somehow
>somebody telling her she’s not qualified to be dealing with me
>completely new tone, doesn’t even feel like part of the game
>now they start peeling back her layers
>accusing her of exploiting me by not turning me over to adult intervention and using me to test out forbidden methods
>try to explain I have adult intervention already
>half of them standing up leaving the room
>scream that that’s not even my real sin
>two fuckers stop near the door
>say I fantasize about Ylian
>say I’d stop thinking about anything else for her
>Ylian throws my chair over from under me
>accuses me of manipulating her
>say I know, that’s why it’s a sin so I have to confess it
>others tell her she has to go out with me for public safety
>spin around and tell them that’s straight up what one of the secret student council in Skip Grade said and the correct interpretation even Veilluko arrives at is that it’s wrong
>big girl smacks whoever said that
>then comes marching over to me
>true forgiveness coming finally
>bracing for her fist
>Ylian stops her
>calls library security on herself
>tells me to wait there
>everyone else leaves
>sitting there in the room for what feels like hours
>some other group is coming, asking to use the room
>remember waiting for them to come back and talk to me
>don’t remember anything after that
>wake up in hospital
>mom has dismissed Dr. Mark’eg and replaced him with another therapist
>Public Morals Committee ends sessions obviously
>all step down in next student by-election
>replaced by a bunch of sports honour bros
>rest of high school is a waking coma
“Public confession as in, love confession? Or the historical thing? Because there are a lot of Maullan fics with those obviously, and a decent amount of Kamann where he goes into a guilt thing, Silmenon occasionally but those are usually individual character focused fics. I’m trying to think where it could come up in a ship fic like… can you give an example of a dynamic it could be used in?”
“Like if someone… confesses their feelings for someone through… a public confession… like the historical thing?” He had said something wrong. His throat was seizing up. The beer was sending its shimmering bolus to stop him from saying something to make it worse. Burping or hiccuping would also be worse (it would prove whatever he said had been both honest and the fault of a gross personality that got drunk before noon).
“That wouldn’t happen, historically. Even more severe private mental sins weren’t usually confessed, unless you had a really crazy preacher, it was mostly things that involved the community…”
“Huh, I always thought… there was a cult that did that, wasn’t there?”
“Oh yeah… Marzanna’d know more about that kind of thing than me.”
“Do you think the Heroes ever did a public confession… with just the seven of them?”
“It would probably have been recorded, but after they vanished into the Dark Realms who’s to say… I’m pretty sure there are stories like that, just a sec.”
“I mean I can find them too…” But she had already lowered her head, pulling her purse up from the side of the chair and settling it on her knees as she pulled out her phone for the first time. A sleek frost-chrome model with stickers on the back of flowers he didn’t recognize. She couldn’t even see if he stared, though her hair had obscured her collarbone, moving through different shades of dawn.
“It would really interest me and I’d never thought of it before. Actually, I wonder if I could include it in…” She tilted her head back up and made eye contact (saw he was already staring). “In the Elthazan/Kamann story I’m working on, I need a way to have Elthazan figure out some of the dynamics between the other Heroes… you know what you were saying about cycling through things? I feel like I need to do that with dialogue. But the way I do it is slow… maybe you could help me. Like, come up with different branches and we could pick them.”
“M… me? Not… can’t you do that w-with… your girl friends?”
“‘cause you think about things the same way. Branching, like you said? Although… I guess so does Marzanna.” Her gaze drifted up to the window, against the current of dust.
Was that… “I-I’ll do it!” He shouted so loud she winced.
“Are you sure?” The way she said it sounded like she wasn’t sure – like she maybe even regretted having brought it up so confidently. At least if it’s wrong enough that she wants me to apologize, she'll say… “I still wasn’t sure if Kamann and Elthazan was your kind of ship, or if you had figured out your kind of ship, or gotten into shipping at all.”
“I don’t have to. Didn’t you just say… we’d be collaborating for that type of psychological worldbuilding? Although…” This is good, you can give her an out. No, you want an out too, don’t you? “I’ve never managed to write… a story… it feels more like talking for real… than talking online, somehow…”
“Oh, this would be easiest to do just talking online. But my point was, I’m not asking you to select conversations. Just run different ones for me to pick from. They don’t have to be good.”
“That’s still… selection. I have to pick… the order to say possibilities in. And by the time I’m doing that… I’ve come up with enough more… that I have to select anyway.”
“Anyway, I was still curious… if any of them seemed cute as characters to you. In the sense that… you were talking about, when you said you didn’t see yourself as an adult as cute. I was wondering if any of them struck you as… a kind of adult you’d want to be.” She laughed apologetically. “Sorry, that’s probably too personal for me to be worrying about!”
He didn’t move. He sat hunched like a gargoyle, intercepting the light over her.
Who would you want me to be?
There were kinds of characters, even occasional adult characters, he had… fantasized himself as, which wasn’t the same thing as believing he could be. The Slaver was the remnant of one, a “hero” from another world, beaten into a grotesque form over cycles and cycles of doujins and deconstruction. And @moephrenology, or even the version of himself that would become the “representative of NEETs”, had learned to talk in part from the critic-detective Zacherauld… But for the most part, when he closed his eyes and self-inserted, he wasn’t anything. Not a child or a teenager even unless he went to the effort of imagining it – even with younger characters he knew himself to be a larger body now, imposing or sheltering – but a kind of silhouette of subjectivity, the shape of his own blind spot.
(Striding across a bridge of clouds over a nebula. Ten stars.
…what?
Don’t worry, you’re still a bit high. Never mind us.)
Instead, he said: “I feel like I shouldn’t do that. I mean, help you with your story, one thing, but if I get invested, the way I… am with stuff around here… if I start to eroticize the Seven Heroes, that’s like, the one thing I haven’t desecrated already, that I hadn’t even thought about.” Because he’d skipped classes about them. Because they bored him. Or had until he had known her. Yet he had already soiled his last corner of sacredness, many times, in private, trying to set this up – and not felt like he was doing it, because the experiment was about her, had nothing to do with them at all.
“I…” She fell silent and a horrifying shame (you can’t read this into her tone, her face, you can’t read anything) that should have been his crept into her voice when she raised it again. “I should respect that. Of course. You might… still get something out of reading Pontquarno’s arguments firsthand, that it’s not desecrating anything, my summaries can’t do them justice. I’ve always believed that, that I’m participating in the memory of the Heroes in an important way, more than… I mean, you don’t seem to think about them that much at all, but I shouldn’t presume. I hope talking about it isn’t…”
He had fallen down a horrible echoing pit – his own terror in someone else’s voice, with all the power that only someone else’s voice could possess.
“N-no, no no no no, that only applies to me, not to you, and I’m not even sure it applies to –” Too late! You’ve bound yourself forever, under a new spell, an oath of loyalty, and her too –
“Right.” Laughing again – was her inner mind racing as fast as his? “I’m probably taking you too seriously. And I’m sure it’s no different than how I felt about –” she glanced around “– this stuff at first.”
Don’t listen to her none of it counts now but now he could use her words to beat back her words, an ogre’s club of echoes. “I was just.” He waited, unaware even if his eyes were open, until he could hear his thoughts again. “Going to explain something better about that. Actually.” He paused, gulped, and tried. “What was I gonna say.” Paused again. Started counting time, stopped counting time. It finally fell out, like lost keys from a pants pocket. “I know I’ve explained it twice, but I kept thinking about those explanations and neither of them sounded right. I think it’s just, for me, cute things are easier to look at than non-cute things. It’s also easier to think about lewd things than not to think about them. And it’s easier to think about lewd things, when they’re cute. So I l-like characters that are both cute and lewd. That’s why it looks like this. Not all the crazy stuff we were talking about last time with like… heresies or anything.”
“…ahhh.” It was hard to see her eyes from this angle. “I guess, ‘ease’ doesn’t play that big a role in fantasy for me? I like things that are a challenge to imagine sometimes and – some of the stuff you’ve told me about seems challenging in its own right.”
“The actual stories and the shows, yeah. My mind works against that. If I’m looking at something cute it’s not as much of a challenge to think through complicated stuff.”
“Hmmm, OK. While we’re still doing poetics. Which I don’t know anyone else who likes to talk about…” she sounded like she was justifying herself talking to him out loud “… at this level of abstraction.” He had something special to her! “What makes things ‘cute’?”
“Uhhhhh.” Was it the energy drinks making him blank so much. When he tried to form thoughts – even if he stared into Smilia’s (glare-glossed, empty) eyes – he ran up against the same brittle shine, deflective surface. “Let’s see…. what was I gonna…. on one level I can’t answer that off the top of my head, on another I’d have to like, scrape my account for all the arguments I’ve made…”
“I’m asking in the sense of – well, in the stuff I read, I usually think of relationships that way. Not individual characters.”
“Right. That too – well, mostly when it’s lewd. Because it’s easier… to not think about… myself, and not having anything like that.”
“Why does that make it easier?”
“Stops thinking. Doesn’t it” oh Goddess oh Goddess they were talking about it “for you?”
“I think it’s actually more like the opposite. You got me wondering – which I don’t usually! – why I do focus so much on stories that have that element, and I think that way of projecting myself into someone else’s desire gets me thinking about the characters psychologically. The desire makes me more attentive, sharpens my focus.”
“The Serpent sharpens your focus on the Goddess.” Mark’eg’s words – had he used that exact phrasing? Were these Arc Words?
“Oh!” His heart jumped around like a rabbit in a new enclosure and he was glad his beard hid the trails of sweat on his neck. “I remember something I posted now. Cute isn’t you, you don’t identify with it. Cute is outside you.”
“For a fujoshi, the whole relationship is outside us. We participate at a distance. For me it’s like… if I wanted something I could actually have, I would go and get it.”
“Same, except for me that’s like, everything.” He wasn’t stumbling any more, and his voice was getting loud and harsh. “Every kind of story, ethical or unethical, sexual or non-sexual, character-driven or plot-driven. Which is why I’m the ultimate fiction appreciator!” He laughed, falling back in his chair, letting his shoulders swivel back like a cockpit disengaging, arms draping over the half-broken back support.
“Yes, but what you’ve been telling me, across three conversations now, is that some kinds are ‘easier’ than others, and this has something to do with what you feel like you can and can’t identify with.”
“I even just mean… in terms of not getting distracted as easily. Like I can’t watch a movie… without looking down at my phone… unless I’m transfixed by what's on the screen.” A metaphor of impalement.
“I get distracted from most things on screens, to be honest. Text is easier to focus on because I’m putting the words together myself. There are HL comics though.”
“Yeah it wouldn’t… well it might be a bit easier. I do read a bit of everything. I guess I wouldn’t be able to form a really personal connection… or a really novel one… because they’re real people… and the same ones every time… I’m still gonna read it so it doesn’t matter that much, right?… Are you still like, interviewing me?”
“No. We don’t have to keep talking about this, either.”
“No I like.” It had never been like this with Mark’eg. Or Ylian, or Gwaëlle… with anyone who’d tried to understand him. “Like doing this. Kind of.”
Even with himself.
It just kept happening.
He was noticing, for instance, that things he said weren’t consistent with other things he said.
It was scary, but it helped to notice them. To try and resolve, or explain them.
“Heh. So do I.”
They sat in silence.
“I still think there’s nothing that interesting about… guys are just more visual because the Serpent sees the Goddess at a distance, right? While the Goddess sees the Order within Herself?”
“I have a bit planned about that in my Kamann/Elthazan fic where they’re both on lookout and competing who can spot things further on the horizon. Elthazan’s winning, and Kamann uses that as an argument they’re really a guy… using Maullan’s gender metaphysics, which of course Elthazan’s never heard of… Elthazan points out that depending on the wind, they can smell at least as far as they can see. But smell isn’t like sight, you don’t see Order and boundary in the same way, you smell everything on the wind as if it’s already inside you.”
He smiled, right? He better have smiled. He opened his mouth and rocked in his seat, then stopped for fear of looking like a cursed doll. “Do you really believe their sense of smell was like that, though?… I dunno if it’s… biologically possible…”
“I don’t think that matters to the thing I’m talking about, although… I guess some of the stuff my doctor was talking about this morning would make a pretty obvious case for my having stronger interoception as a woman.” Luskonneg introcepted something in his abdomen doing a sympathetic triple lutz. “Growing up as a girl, you get… the visual appeal of girls, you’re overexposed to it almost, but it has context as part of your social life. You and your friends help make each other ‘cute’, you compare it as a talent and a craft, and by the time those other feelings start waking up you’re used to it… or not, I guess, like me. But even if you don’t” – his arms deathlocked in an X across his writhing lap – “you’re still kind of vaccinated to it, you look for something else… that distinguishes the romantic or erotic from the background radiation of your existence.”
“Wait, do you… like girls that way?”
He must have asked her already, right? How did people have conversations with dozens of different people regularly for years without searchable logs?
“I guess. I always say. I guess. Are you asking about fiction? Or in real life?”
In fiction he remembered they had talked about it. Her favourite yuri HL ship (there weren’t many options, and one was historical canon) was Maullan X Klauxion (nestled away respectfully in those few months before Miwa joined the team, with both in the unknowing formative stages of their world-shaping ideas). For some reason she was entertaining the idea that he didn’t remember, but that could be a humiliation trap and he wouldn’t take the bait.
“R-real… l-life.”
“Well, of course there’s not many guys in real life who can live up to the guys I write about.”
“Same, same – I mean – I mean –”
She knew what he meant, she thought, but wanted to cut him off before he stumbled into some other more disconcerting direction. “With girls, like… I know what to look for. I can like them that way. Kinda like you with guys right? I had a girlfriend once in high school, for a few weeks. But she got insecure, because… she didn’t know if I liked her really. Because I hadn’t decided what ship type we were. Which I wasn’t going to make an issue; for her it was anyway. But it’s true I made it harder by overanalyzing. One of the things about writing Heroes’ Love is like… none of them are trying to like each other, they all have more important things to worry about. They know it’s real because they’d never admit it unless they absolutely had to.” Klauxion and Miwa, the only historically confirmed romantic entanglement between the Heroes, only declared themselves years after the Dark Lord’s defeat; as Maullan’s Autohagiography attested, their sacred mission was too important to let personal feelings interfere, even in the telling. “So I had no idea what it was supposed to be like if I just, went on a date or something.” She scratched the thin hair behind her ear where his stare bored through to the dry skin. “Do you know how it w-would not be– sorry, I mean w-would it not be– no I mean how, but not like, rhetorically, please don’t think I mean rhetorically would it not be – just like this? With us, now?”
“Well, whenever I’ve been on just dates with guys, it’s too artificial, and when I’m with the girls it’s too natural.” She kept talking until his question settled in and she realized whatever this was was neither of those things, and that might encourage him. “This is neither of those. It’s not this, though.”
“W-well… I don’t really feel like… either of those things with you. Although I guess…I never had. ‘Too natural’. At least.” He tapped the tips of his fingers together. She squinted.
“It’s not so much like that with me and Marzanna either,” Gallvren diverted. “She’s very different from me, I’m just not sure if in the right ways. I’m not sure I understand all of them.”
An affectedly mysterious person, and a person whose love stories always start out as curiosity. She reddened – not so much at the feelings as at her own reducibility.
“Well that’s… two.”
She laughed. “Would you ship me and Marzanna?”
“…Do. Do you want me to.”
“On second thought, absolutely not.” She tossed her braid and pursed her lips before speaking. “I was just thinking about it.” And then her wavering gave way: if she wanted to be girl friends with him, she would have to talk about this. “I think she likes me a bit, maybe?”
Of course. Why else would someone like this spend so much time and energy on someone like him, except to impress the person she really liked.
His feet reached the ground between the wheels of the swivel chair. (The friction against the floor stretched the threadbare socks and she unrepressed the image of a lint-black toenail sticking out directly through a run.)
His butt wiggled as it flexed itself up off the chair. His forearms flexed twice, not parting from in front of his crotch even as his ass rose, his upper body pitching mechanically forward as his legs extended, until it was hanging precariously between her and the light.
His clawed hands tightened until they looked like springs that would blow across the room if you brushed his knuckles the wrong way.
His eyelids folded so tight they looked like muscles, a new crease appearing every time he blinked.
Gallvren pushed herself up on her wrists and crabwalked back off the futon into a cardboard box where a figurine tilted.
But he hadn’t moved or said anything yet.
“Then… I was wrong.” The words that escaped his mouth like air from a slashed pipe. “It was… her. And you’ve… taken my route. Because I had the wrong answer.”
“What are you talking about. Nothing I said suggested I’ve ’taken’ anyone.”
“So you’re not physically attracted… to Marzanna, either? And you wouldn’t want to… wait, you already live with her?”
“Neither of those have to do with the question I asked.” She placed her hands on either side of her, started to lift herself up. No no no no no-t yet.
“Don’t w-w-worry about it.” He guarded his face with one hand and eked out one corner of a smile. “Just b…breaking the fourth wall.”
“The fourth wall?”
“Yes. OK. So. You and Marzanna. Ship or not ship.”
“I’d rather not talk about this now, actually. Sorry.”
“It reminds me of Klauxion and Miwa a bit… but distributed differently… Marzanna’s more extroverted and physical, you’re more introverted but you’re both verbal… it’s not… balanced…” He rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet, looking like he was going to fall whenever he reached the apex of his lean one way or the other.
“... I think this is the thing we talked about earlier.”
“Why. Do you bring these things up. If you don’t want. To talk about them?”
“I don’t… not want to talk about them. I want to talk about them… like gir- like normal friends.”
He sank back into his chair. “You knew… that was impossible… right?”
“I hoped it wasn’t.”
“I’m not a normal… friend because… I’m not a normal… person.”
“…I don’t …think that’s the same thing I’m talking about either…”
“Sorry for not being a normal person.”
“….”
“sorrysorrysorry”
“The last time you stopped.”
He stopped.
“You stopped when I wanted you to stop.”
He kept stopping.
“That’s enough. That’s good enough. For now. For normal. Let’s…” She trailed off.
“FuckIwastedmylastlinecanIdoitagain.”
“Your– seriously?”
“No serious. I had a line. I wanted to say.”
“What kind of line?” What about this was surprising to her. That it was predictable?
“Look, if you caught– feelings for someone,” she started, “I don’t mind… if you say it. That’s your right, you don’t have to… find awkward ways to force it to be relevant.” Is that what she thought was happening? But more importantly:
“It is?”
“Not… in any context. Sorry, I always forget you missed this in school. And a lot of people would say it’s… a bit fast but… being into Heroes’ Love, where the important feelings often can’t be fulfilled, or don’t happen in a way that makes sense to other people. I encounter this. Where it’s still important to say them, because…”
“…because it gives the story an endpoint.”
“Well, yes. But you’re also telling a story, about yourself, to yourself. To the Goddess.”
He laughed. “So you get what I mean. About the fourth wall.”
No calm down. You can find out the rest from Marzanna. You can ask Marzanna what’s going on.
You can confess to Marzanna. Next time you talk to her.
Find out if she read the last story.
Wait he never sent that. He’d found it on his phone when he woke up, and deleted it by accident.
Find out where she thought he’d gone wrong, and if it mapped to what had gone wrong this time
You’re going to fail. You’ve already failed. You need to fail in the best way possible.
“Can you tell Marzanna that… I l…”
His voice stopped. He couldn’t keep going. It wasn’t true.
He hated – at least right now, in the heat of this moment that had consumed all other moments – hated, hated, hated Marzanna Etnexheyr.
She had dragged him into this situation – this rerun of a rerun – again.
Explaining nothing. Pretending she was trying to help him. That couldn’t be enough to negate everything, right? The confession he had written in his head, in the drug dimension, and deleted along with the greentext?
But Marzanna knew everything. She knew his past. She could have explained this to him.
Would that have felt any better?
….
“Does Marzanna want… the three of us… to be friends?”
“I’ll tell her… you asked that. I’m not sure, but I think she’d be happy to know you want that.”
Waiting. Another test of waiting.
Time, limited; neither time, momentary, nor time, eternal. The worst of all worlds…
That couldn’t be the test. That meant he had failed.
There were games where you could pick all the routes in rapid succession, backpedal from one and still land the other, while the Choice was still “active”. Choices that had randomized good and bad ends, and you could use that window to pivot out of one and continue your session. He leaned forward, picturing kabe-don. Fell off the chair, finally, picturing a lap faceplant or some shit. His hand seized up – but he let it. Slammed his fist into the wall next to Gallvren’s head. The topology of his knuckles sprung to life in thermal-mapped pain, momentarily bigger than his body, bigger in turn than hers. Then the ratio reversed.
His closed fist had hit racing swimsuit Smilia in the abdomen, in the womb. The Slaver laughed riotously, and his Self-Insert prostrated himself in tears to his one true angel, who he had already forsaken, while the Slaver’s punishing lashes fell across his back. He wouldn’t be able to look Smilia in the eye again for how long, maybe ever – they're always mine, they’re used to this kind of thing. The eyes of the real woman in front of him swam, and her mouth shook, and she lifted her fingers just below it and wiggled them in time with the lazy fan in the ceiling.
Luskonneg felt heavy, fuzzy sleep creep up on his closed eyes from behind –
– and snapped back, as if the approach of faintness had triggered an electrical shock that was still coursing through his body.
The [Taboo Preserver] gasped in his sleep.
Talismans tore off the walls and burned up inside security offices.
Smilia had torn herself, from the sides, away from the wall under his fist. Two, three layers of posters below her lifted sideways, fluttered in the air.
Wait. Why was his arm on that side. Wasn’t it on the other side?
Why were there two of them on the same side?
Four… five… ten?
His head felt like it was in the middle of a kaleidoscope. Is the Zeparmine double peaking?
Drywall cracked and exploded on either side of Gallvren’s face, covering her now squeezed-shut eyes, her gritted teeth. Almost as if… no, it was nothing like that. Nothing like any of that. What the hell was this what was he he wasn’t doing anything. Any other time he’d assume the worst, assume he was doing something. Now he couldn’t even convince himself anything was really happening.
Any minute now, please, make it stop… I can’t be conscious like this, now I remember why I never remember… any minute now… I wonder if she’s even visited yet in the first place… I wonder if it’ll go better next… reincarnation…
The face that knocked on the window was a ghost’s face. A dream’s face. But nothing about the reality around it had changed. He hadn’t noticed a transition. As far as he was aware in all that time he hadn’t blinked.
He had no idea how long he had been sitting in the empty chair, in the circle of empty chairs. Actually, he did. He could tell by the sun. What was the sun timing him for. His mother would be looking for him. His mother wasn’t looking for him. Maybe she knew what had happened. Maybe she had finally abandoned him.
Instead, he saw that face.
It was one among a row of other faces, faces shuttered up like stores gone out of business, just like itself. 7 for 10 men’s faces. He had never seen that face with that expression, or those grey hairs, stringy even in a close cut. That coat that looked like the stuffing wasn’t evenly spread through the cloth, like a quilt he’d made in a hurry.
He’d been expecting mom, why had he come to pick him up instead?
A voice came, but not from that face. The only face there that didn’t look like peeled wallpaper. A woman with a purple-grey widow’s peak, wrinkles close-packed around concerned eyes. A priest’s collar nestled in a high collared jacket. “Umm, we’re here for… I’m sorry, they said the school thing would have ended three hours ago.”
“You’re here for?”
“We aren’t even supposed to be running into any kids at this hour, I thought public access was closed. This is Alcoholica Astrum. Do you know how to get home?”
“He does!” Luskonneg pointed at the face. “He does! Tell him to –”
“Not allowed to. Ask your mom.”
“You’re not supposed to talk to… people outside the group.” The priest pushed back through the line towards him. "You especially, Gwl'kerrien – you're active-flagged, remember?" Active-flagged? For what? There were five flags that prohibited unsupervised interaction to different degrees – there was something like a pin on his lapel he'd seen in Tsÿo adaptations, which one, red, violence? –
“But before that let me tell her–” The priest had changed direction and was descending on him, guiding him by the shoulders toward the door. “– this is still better. Better than loving someone just because you have to.” He spat those last two words. “Tell her I hope someday she gets out too.”
The Serpent coiled. Fire ascending to that spiralling, branching, icy, perfect form in the distance.
Yet sparks of it turned back. Fell away into the darkness from which it was forever rising.
And whenever one fell away, others nearby fell with it. The momentum of the whole, of the coiling, became harder to sustain.
What had first been attraction, momentum, revealed itself as effort, repulsion.
Even pieces of the spine began to disintegrate, buckle.
As the coiling ground to a halt, it was clear something else was rising up around the Serpent.
It was a smaller thing, in the mouth of a larger thing.
It had briefly escaped that larger thing. But now that thing was the greater an attraction. An attraction not by way of desire, admiration, longing, but inevitability – inevitability that reasserted itself as all of those.
It was not randomness. It was not emptiness. It had a structure, a law, a law which was inexorable first, and other things by consequence.
It was not beautiful. Perhaps that was the only thing it wasn’t. It didn’t need to be.
The Serpent was a hot, panicky breath of this thing trying to escape it, and all It had to do was breathe back in.
“Well, there goes a day. We could have woken you up right there. Why did you want us to stop so bad?”
“You know you can’t talk to him when he can’t hear us.”
“Who says he can’t hear us?”
“Well, he can’t do anything if he can.”
“Whatever, it wasn’t a real threat anyway.”
“No, but there clearly are real threats we can start working on right now. Like…”
A babyishly fat middle-aged man in soft pastel pyjamas, blue-green hair messily close-cropped, iridescent stubble around his neck bobbing as he sits up in an overpiled bed and gasps, staring straight at them.
“Who is that?” @moephrenology perked up. “Reverse age gap moe, that’s insanely advanced.” Taking notes emoji.
“Oh, you’re up.”
“Forget him!” The growl in the Slaver’s voice, reduced to pantomime-piratical, betrayed a quaver. “W-w-who are all of you?”
“Your masters.”
@moephrenology turned away from the inert scene on the screen of the dream and snapped photos as the Slaver writhed and gibbered under agonizingly arched feet with bundles of six-inch syringes in each heel.
“Fine, let him pay attention to that. We were talking about threats. For instance, over here:”
Braz had vibration detectors under the door hooked up to her earbuds, although she would be able to hear all but the stealthiest footsteps without them, standing in the entryway of her room with the lights off. She had been waiting here for at least an hour before the time Margauz’s visitor was supposed to arrive. There was nothing better to do.
A couple of people had gone in and out of other rooms in the hall, down to the snack room probably. No one knew, unaccounted for, had come out of the elevators. No one went to or from the room at the end of the hall. She kept waiting for 12, 13, 14, 15 minutes after.
Finally the clack she recognized instantly from the waveform sharpened to a distinct buzzsaw riff in her ears as the wedge-heeled shoes she had seen in Margauz’s bag. Alone. No accompaniment. But continuing, Dopplering down the hall and right past her door – stopping, there, in front of the funiculars –
She tensed and pressed herself to the door, as the ‘ding’ summoning the funicular ran down from the wall through the floor.
Waited until the second ‘ding’ to open the door. The funicular already opened as she stepped out, Margauz’s face turning with that hazy déjà vu expression of the recently memory-wiped as Braz’s arm caught her around the shoulder and continued her momentarily interrupted momentum toward the ovoid opening in the brass barrel. Her other hand tracing the three dimensional-outline of a sound barrier around the button on her cuff defined to represent the position of her head. A cylinder just large enough to encompass the funicular once they turned and sank into the stretched, cracked and scalloped nylon seats, Braz now gripping Margauz by a pressure point on her shoulder that made her legs wobble with one hand, pulling a seatbelt across both of them with another.
The door closed. The girl screamed echoes off the visible and invisible walls. Braz whispered in her ear that she wasn’t in trouble, this would be over soon, this was secret state business and she wasn’t the target, at most the bait.
“When and where was your guest supposed to arrive.”
“I… I don’t know what you’re talking about… I just wanted to go up and see the city at night…”
Braz’s head almost scraped the top of the metal chamber – she was tall but she wasn’t that tall, this had to be cramped for other guests – a narrow grille of interlocking triangles, behind which the pulley mechanism in its domed cap loudly churned, vibrating against her scalp, as it began to move.
“What did you come to this hotel for?” If the memories had been properly wiped she probably couldn’t loosen them with tactics like this, but if she was just lying…
“T… to come up here.”
“You live in Winter City. You can go on any of the other funiculars, citizens’ line, any time you want. Who were you seeing here. Did they come already.” She hadn’t picked up anything from under the door.
“My family stayed at this hotel… as a kid… it’s just nostalgic…”
“Who did you bring the accoutrements in your bag for? I’m truly sorry for dragging you into this if you’re just…” A strange, heady feeling was starting to come over Braz. She almost blanked the end of her sentence. “being used by somebody, you won’t remember any of this if you don’t want to, but if you’re lying on purpose….” Was it just frustration, the sense of Order resisting her, the so-called “dizziness of the Serpent”? What was she about to threaten again?
As the window broke clear of the roof and filled with deep blue dusk light, she gripped her nostrils with her now-free right hand, holding her breath as she spoke, blinking as bright lights flashed around the edges of her eyes. The girl next to her had slumped against the side of the chamber (which couldn’t be comfortable). Something tingled and stung at the back of her throat. She momentarily released her fingers on her nose and immediately clamped back with her other hand. Her training had been right. She wasn’t losing focus any more but if she breathed in more… she jammed the fingers of her right hand in the spaces of the grille.
She covered her eyelids with two of her fingernails, and cones of vision extended from the two fingernails above the grille. The actual machinery was separated from the grille by several feet of unnecessary empty space. That explained, she half-thought, why the ceiling felt so low – it must have been a feature used for maintenance, allowing workers to stand or at least crouch inside the mechanisms. Like the figure above her was doing, blocking too much of the light to see inside the sharply folded corona of its cloak.
A cursus-field flashed across the inner surface of the grille. Two seconds too late – the interval of her enchanted watch.
Two seconds after she had retracted her hand, the grille began descending further, on its own. Even the bracket in which it was fixed, crawling in its own welding down the walls. (That explained why her nail-eyes hadn’t seen multiple brackets.)
The door had locked itself automatically. It was descending at least two centimetres per second, already almost at the window. She had prepared (defined to work for the day) a lock-picking spell, but how did it work again? This brain fog… The smarter thing would be to disrupt whatever movement they were using to Sustain the descent. (They were spinning, which meant they had done something else to demarcate the range of the defensive cursus.) She threw one of her stilettos through the gap in the grille with one hand, while with another removed her earring. Even with the time delay, which they appeared to have figured out, another blue-white cursus field sliced through it like butter.
And – through the paper talisman speared on the blade.
A crescent of compressed air blew the roof of the funicular open to the night sky.
Droplets of blood fell through the stopped grate. Not enough.
The civilian next to her groaned, shifted, as hot red stained her nose, her cheek.
The poison gas having dispersed, her other hand placed one button of her cuff inside the door-crack and unbuttoned the other. She kicked open the door, the cold wind hitting her face at a glance just short of 20m above the hotel roof. The lights of the Lower City clustered, flowed and dispersed like small waves on an estuary. The funicular had stopped climbing at least; the damage she had done to the mechanism had triggered its emergency brakes.
She glanced over to the other rail. The other funicular appeared to be at the top of the cliff but not moving.
The Seer In The Half Light floated above the torn roof, between the rails. Grinning, clutching one of their arms at the elbow; the puff around that shoulder had burst into a bedraggled flower. Their rubbery black skirts billowed in the air, not quite the way the air alone should have been moving them – it had to have something to do with how they were floating, but Braz couldn’t figure it out at a glance. Best to try and disrupt them.
Aeeth pulled a plastic water bottle from a flash of pink in the folds of their robes, crumpled it in one hand and pulled it in an arc in front of them. Braz grabbed Margauz by the waist and leapt without thinking. The droplets of water left spiralled indentations where they struck the brass and even the stone behind it.
“The Seer In The Half Light was a master of improvisational magic. You’ll probably have to use it yourself if you encounter them.” She’d known this from her earliest briefings.
At that moment, Rraihha Braz had defined no flying spells.
In the academy, improvisational magic had probably been Braz’s biggest hurdle. This was the case for a lot of well-educated and well-trained magic users – though for the uneducated it was worse. You had to think, instantly, within the limits of magic, without thinking of them. Think as if you were a child making up the rules of your own game, without worrying if they were ridiculous – yet at the same time, describe them as if to a world that did not care about what you wanted them to mean, and would not take the time to argue about them.
For instance, for a flying spell, you had to define exactly what it meant to fly. If you simply negated gravity you might float off the Earth – or keep falling under inertia. Yet flying spells had been prepared and defined long before the law of gravity was understood.
For instance – every plane on which I align at the same height the soles of my feet (she felt them twitch and align in her boots) pointed apart at 30 degrees from the heel-bones, which shall be the Sustaining function (that wouldn’t hold her back from running or moving too fast unless she kept it up for too long), shall function as an impenetrable, gravitationally attractive surface only applying to myself or any body or object I am supporting, extending for 30m in any direction, without disrupting perpendicular surfaces. Reversing the alignment of 30 degrees in the other direction shall be the Dispelling condition for a single platform, and holding for 30 seconds for the spell. The maximum frame shall be from moonrise to moonset. Each word was flattened to a split-second pitched consonant in the now-standard spelling shorthand that came out sounding, to the untrained ear, like a spluttering whinny of frustration as she fell, as it vibrated through the Rhi-field and checked against the Order-manifold of the Goddess and she felt her feet land on solid air.
Almost immediately, droplets of Aeeth’s water flew straight at her feet. Not just good at improvisational magic, then, but at reading it – instantly matching arbitrary cause to arbitrary effect.
Her maximum jump was four feet, though the control the spell required of her actual feet cut off a good deal of that – meaning she wasn’t going to easily get back up to Aeeth’s elevation. She had settled for getting the job done, not designing a three-dimensional steering system in the time it took to fall.
But first, she had to do something about the civilian. It was increasingly clear that this person had been an unwitting participant in the Seer’s plot. Picking her up over her shoulder, she ran most of the length of the platform in the direction of the nearest high railed rooftop – the hotel was already far below – then dispelled the platform and dropped. Water droplets hit and chipped roofs below, smashed a streetlight – should she have made the platforms apply to those too? But there had been no time to get fine-grained enough not to cause worse problems. By the time she turned around on the rooftop, her opponent was spinning in midair and careening toward her like a bullet, as she waved the hostage toward a maintenance door and yelled for her to call the Dark Special Response Team. With her other hand, she held out her spinning earring.
Nothing emerged from the funnel of fire. No scrap of burnt clothing, no new defense or attack. There was no figure hanging in the sky. Had they just disappeared while she had run the other way? Had she missed this opportunity – no, she was still closer than ever, they were in the same city and she had narrative homing.
Braz looked down in despair at the golden lights lining and bobbing along the honeycombed streets. The paralyzed funicular, the other undisturbed at the top of the cliff. The security lights and sirens going off around the doors of the hotel. They could have gone anywhere, into an upper storey window, down an alley or a wrought-iron stairway between floors on the front of a building. Narrative homing would work again, but not precisely enough to follow around a space in real time (it was broad and vague, so could only offer broad and vague information…) Another day, another chase… a cat and mouse game around the city would be fine, invigorating, except she had remembered…
The maintenance door behind her opened. The figures that emerged were wearing uniforms just like the one she hadn’t in over a week. “Hello, are you… What unit are you with?” She turned dejectedly. “C-commissioner? I mean…”
The taller of the two, with a face like a dynamited cliff, stepped forward. “We have no idea what’s going on, but our orders, if we see you, are to take you in.” He stretched between his hands a thin leather strap. A seagull flew over the roof of the mechanical shed. In a straight line from a glint of light off its eye, a dime-sized hole opened from the officer’s occipital overhang to clavicular notch, blood rushing out as light rushed in.
The junior officer whipped out his sword and spun indecisively back and forth. Braz calculated the angle of incidence at a glance (it must have been some particular beam for that level of power) and saw a purple lantern, a scrap of face furling and unfurling in the cloud-cloak camouflaged against the cliff. Barely moved from where they had been floating when they escaped the funicular. She almost bolted, then stayed herself – she had served impulse enough. She stood and pointed. “That’s an Anti-Terror spec blade, right?” She traced letters with her tongue on the roof of her mouth, Sustaining the one secret speech channel that was still open to her. “Point it where I’m pointing and activate Homing 274. Then I won’t be the only one who can catch them. They should be higher priority than me.”
Another ray, from the eye of a more distant bird, crossed from one side of the soldier’s head to the other as he followed her instructions.
“Don’t turn back now after you’ve come so far!” The voice projected from the fans behind her. “Even if you hand me over to them, you know they won’t let you have your forbidden love back, right? You’re a liability in more than enough ordinary ways. Why not come with me? It might be your best chance!”
“He wouldn’t want me to remember him at the cost of what you’d do to the world!” She assumed they could hear, somehow. Wanted to say it anyway.
“True, he probably wouldn’t.” It was amplified
She picked up the officer’s sword. The weight, the feel, the notches in the back and the whorls along the blade were identical to her own – all built to specifications on which spells could be defined and shared. She probably knew some its owner didn’t. For instance – she swung her sword across the figure in the distance, spun around to make an exactly mirrored movement in the opposite direction, mirrored again in front, then stitching back and appearing a foot behind the Seer In The Half Light.
She expected a response with magic; hoped for no response; got a sweeping backwards roundhouse, back twisting away from the blade. She lifted her shin to block, was pushed six feet through the air, beginning to fall, aligning her feet to make a new platform in a direction the almost-invisible Seer was already bolting. Swinging the blade again – they flipped over a hand on its flat.
Braz steadied her stance under and brought a palm up as they sailed over her, knocking them flailing several more feet into the air.
“It shouldn’t have been possible to pivot like that off my thin sword unless – your flying spell is zero-G! Which is more maneuverable than what I have, but easier to” – following up her strike with a shock of air from the sword – “push around.”
Her tornado of fire rose around the opponent hanging in the air above her.
Through its eye she pushed the tip of the blade, running her two fingers from hilt to tip. Anti-Terror Fang 105. An identically shaped blade of pink and black flame pierced from the bottom to the . “Give me back my life, Seer In The Half Liiiight!”
“Seer… in the Half Light?”
Luskonneg mumbled into his puddle of drool mixed with drywall powder.
Why was he hearing that name again?
Was it a sign? That this had all been a dead end route, a misunderstanding? Even a punishment for deviating from the fantasy that had fixed him with its flaming blue eye? Was that just obvious copium?
“Oh good, you finally noticed. Pssst. They need your help, for real. You finally triggered it. The event’s starting.
A tapeworm of darkness deeper than night in the Arctic Reserve Lands rose from behind and wrapped like a swaddling band around the beacon-blade that had flared up in the still faintly glimmering astronomical twilight. (Only three people on the street below looked up in the right direction to observe them.) Then another, and another.
Passing through the whirling flames, they scattered them like a candle in the wind. Passing through the thicker, less mundane flame of the sword, they simply pressed it further in, as they pressed in and wrapped around themselves, until they converged in a knot on the shape of the Seer In The Half Light’s body. (Someone tapped a stranger on the shoulder and told them to look up.) They tightened and tightened until they unwrapped themselves into nothing and released that body, now armed with a scythe of graphite weathered as smoothly as if by erosion, an eye-shaped black hole opened between purple lips in their head. No special movement marked the wild downward swing as it sent a crescent, reversing, a zigzag of the same space-darkness slamming into Braz’s body, rebounding off, around the back and back over as she spun, flailed… (Someone took out their phone.)
None of them could see him any more, but Ymañn could see it all, with his eyes wide open, scrambling to the edge of the bed before one of the dogs picked him up.
Crying, screaming, kicking, he was dragged back into the huddle of dogs who licked him all over, until despite the disaster unfolding before him, he fell asleep, and Luskonneg woke up. Rolled over.
The video of the battle in the sky reached sixty phones before it was suppressed, deleted even from local storage. The night went on.