Welcome to Gaia! ::

The sensation, in its sloppiest description, was of pulling. It was a little like someone was suddenly twining their fingers among his intestines and dragging him sideways by them: his center of gravity not dislodged but offset. That half-heartbeat of sensation, of movement before the actual movement, was Lazarus's warning that he was being summoned. Within that half-heartbeat, there was time to do three things.

The first thing was to school the emotion off his face: from the first moment to the last, the mask must be a perfect thing for it to be believed. It must be the only personality he presented, like an actor taking on a character in the moments before he stepped out of the wings; an immersive experience must be created for an audience to accept it as true. That, before everything else. The facial expression had to go.

The second thing was to assess his surroundings. Was he under immediate threat, or no? Was he in the Dark Kingdom, or Stroud's apartment, or some godforsaken ******** in the woods, or facing a sailor scout firing squad? A glance, well-trained, could assess this in nanoseconds. His reaction time had been steadily improving.

The third thing, which really ended up being contingent on the second thing, was either to fight or to kneel. If he was being summoned, he was being summoned by a superior officer, and that meant whatever he'd been pulled from, there was a chain of command to respect. Enemy combatants? Take guard. His general in all her regalia? Take a proper knee.

Three things. Prepare; assess; respond.

Even having been summoned away from a moving seat on a bus (I'd already paid the fare, he thought miserably, remembering the bottom of his wallet), he was on the ground straight away, with his head bowed in what he felt certain was a beautiful genuflection, senses attuned to his surroundings to the best of his ability, and expression politely neutral.

All of that, that was the easy part. Lazarus had an excellent muscle memory; his body took to physical tasks well and after little repetition. He'd learned to identify noises, smells, colors, by Stroud's instruction; he could bow with grace and nobility. He could even act 45% more sober than his actual blood alcohol level suggested. The flesh was willing.

The spirit -- the moral compass, the mind, the soul -- the heart -- was weak. Still.

A soul was a hard thing to kill by brute force; it resisted blunt trauma. Lazarus's preferred method of execution was, therefore, to drown it. Ahead of him, Schörl was waiting for an answer. Had asked a question. Quartz stayed kneeling near her boots.

His brain was at least learning faster than his heart, these days. Both of them were working their way up to muster. He was a survivor, after all. And he was getting better at understanding the hedge mazes of her speech patterns, turning sideways to navigate between references he knew and those he didn't.

If she gave him half a piece of information, she expected him to either know or divine the other half.

In this case, at least, he did. Not so obscure for an opening sally this time.

I'm one of the ten, he thought ruefully, not moving from his position. Ten shouldn't even be there.

"One could scarcely presume to be on the level of Christina Aguilera, making the battle," he said drolly. "But targets have a notoriously brief shelf life; we must all dare higher. All children grow up, except one."

What child were you, Stroud? Were you always a warrior, always this great and terrible world-devouring singularity? Did you ever blow the heads off dandelions and wish for ice cream?

Did I?

If it could be said that Quartz had no particular affection for Captain Cinnabar, well, neither did he have any for General Schörl. Had he lived in a world where he thought he could get away with lying and letting either of them deal with the consequences, Quartz's only great struggle here would be in finding a way to answer this question that would somehow screw over both Cinnabar and Schörl at the same time.

He did not live in such a world, however. Quartz was reasonably confident that Schörl's stance on lying was much the same as her apparent stance on everything else: you may do as you like if you can get away with it; but on your head be it if you cannot. Such was what he'd gleaned of her behavioral code: the consequences of sin need not be feared, only the consequences of failure. All else was permissible.

Getting away with it was the hard part. She could detect a lie within the merest bat of an eyelash, Quartz suspected -- and was clever enough to know he'd tested his skill at them on little things already, to see what he could get away with.

Some lies she caught right away. One or two he thought might've gotten past her. Others he was fairly certain or at least reasonably suspicious that she let slide, just to make sure he couldn't read her responses too easily. Schörl was a creature of endless guile and shrewd acumen in all things.

So he told the truth. "Sublime and ridiculous," he assessed Cinnabar mildly, eyes downcast. "But not without use. She has plenty of expertise to offer, but she teaches what would be useful to her, not what would be useful to me. Captain Cinnabar might have done better with a more advanced student. Or at least one she disliked less."

Quartz's heartbeat picked up under the General's hand, her fingertips so close to where she'd picked him apart before. There was life beneath her fingers, both heart and soul -- and though his soul maintained its silence, uncalled by her touch, his thudding heart was his betrayal.

It took so little effort on her part to command his fear. It seemed an emotion he would never be rid of.

. . . You remember the first we met?

He tried not to. Quartz had mostly tried to put it out of mind -- a fragmented trauma he could barely stand to revisit, and had no desire to. His recollections were confused by fear and pain, clouded by so many missing pieces. Alcohol was his only medication during the day, sleep an uncertain refuge: too often he woke tearful and shivering, the memory of a scream on his lips. Too often, Stroud's merest laugh made him feel ill.

He was always better when he didn't think about it. Better when he kept moving forward, instead. He didn't want to go back to where she was asking.

Tears pricked at his eyes, and he obeyed anyway -- his voice as thin as skim milk.

You remember the pain?

"You were using a knout, then," he started, looking for where it might be best to unwind the thread of his answer. "I had my silk scarf for a weapon, and the cuff on the end. You caught around it with the knout . . . I remember thinking -- it would be the wrong choice, trying to make a disarming strike, because -- I thought I had to have been stronger than you, pound for pound. It was the wrong play. I thought it had to be easy to turn your move, disarm you instead, so I pulled back . . . "

Stupid, he thought. You were stupid as hell. You didn't think to wonder why someone with that much experience would do something so dumb? No wonder you let this happen to you.

Quartz cleared his throat. "You anticipated that. Stepped into it. I didn't understand what you'd done, at the time -- I could feel this horrible, cold stabbing pain at the center of my chest -- but outside, I couldn't feel my body properly, like everything had gotten rewired to the wrong places and was having a tough time telling my brain what was going on. It felt like I couldn't move. Then, I don't know . . . I blacked out. Maybe you did something, or maybe it was just too much, too long -- I don't know. Time had passed when I woke again. Probably not much -- the police hadn't come yet. I was tied up."

He frowned, biting his lip to keep the quaver out of his voice. "The other time, with the General-Queen . . . " He shook his head, dark hair shimmering around his face. "She put her hand on my chest -- I remember that. Most of the rest of it's gone -- I -- I think I powered down?" He glanced up briefly, looking for some confirmation. "I remember I was going to -- to get my hands free." He let out a short breath that felt very long. "The pain was different. I felt like I was breaking. I still couldn't move -- it was pain, like before, but worse -- but I only remember a second of it, at the end. Maybe it only lasted a second. I remember thinking it was like being filled with tar."

He awaited her verdict, wondering -- as he always wondered -- if he'd answered the right question, or in the right way, and if he'd remembered not to leave anything out. She liked detail. Detail showed thought.

Good, Quartz.

It was the barest, simplest of approvals, compared to what had felt like torture to have to try and revisit. His eyelashes were clumped together wetly, and his cheeks itched to be wiped as they made the transition from damp back to dry. He hated himself for crying even a little, and for the trembling in his hands -- but he hated himself most of all for how much better 'Good, Quartz' made him feel.

One part of him -- the part that sometimes still liked to insist it was human and had the capability to treat other people like a decent human being -- chafed and rebelled at the clinical way she delivered her lesson. There was no sense of compassion or of shame in the way she described removing someone's soul and thereby killing them: she may as well have been excerpting a user's manual for The Sims. 'Can my Sims die? Yes, there are many ways your Sims can die! Sims are industrious little people and they generally won't purposely seek out death, but care for them carefully or you may find that the Reaper pays them a visit . . . '

The problem with this part of him, other than the fact that it didn't help him in life at all, was that the moment he understood what she was implying, his vestigial sense of decency at once induced in him a flood of very powerful, very negative emotions (most of them resembling horror) and also began to look for ways to absent itself safely from Schörl and from the world.

The swift retreat of whatever remained of his superego resulted in a cognitive deficit that was quickly rebalanced. His rational mind continued to provide function -- it had learned to compensate fairly well in the absence of his once-better nature, if flatly and mechanically -- and his fearful mind, his hateful, terrified, self-protecting and self-justifying id, provided direction.

The desire for survival was a powerful argument: I want to live. It smothered all the lingering echoes of his moral objections, and left him afterwards safely and perfectly hollow. Even his indulgent little hind-brain seemed to whisper only ever-so-quietly.

It's not your fault. Refusing won't help anything. You're lucky, in a way, to have a General pay personal attention to training you. This is the best way. A thousand little lies that weren't true and didn't help. He swept them all aside and tried to focus his dulled, emptied-out mind on what would earn him more Good, Quartzes.

Four minutes. In this outfit, this body. That was always the hardest part, the most difficult piece to work around. It would be completely impossible to blend in here, to look like he was a normal part of the white-collar lunch hour. Even in a club, it took concentrated effort of personal charm to overcome the inherent stranger danger of looking like he could easily overpower someone -- here, there was no amount of charm that would get him over his current hurdles. No one here was looking to be chatted up by a stranger. No one here would let his weird clothing pass without notice or without question. Definitely no one would just walk off with him.

Four minutes at most before a security officer intervenes and makes this inefficient.

Quartz finished his blankly-staring assessment of the crowd, eyes coming into more outwardly obvious focus as he refined his scan of the crowd to look for something more particular.

No . . . . no . . . not that one either . . .

There. That one.

He considered the terrain again, trying to plan it out now that he'd settled on a reasonable way to pick off just one person. It was difficult, though, if he had to come back to where they stood now, whatever way he looked at it. Their position was too exposed, and people would be watching.

"Can I meet you up there?" he asked, flattening the palm of one hand experimentally against one of the broad columns, to test out how much of a textured grit there was to its surface. "Or does it have to be back here first?"

Permission granted. Well, no time like the present, then.

Rather than being costly marble or anything like it, the column under Quartz's fingers proved to be cheaply made, catching at his fingertips with sand and stucco. Nothing worth writing home about, but very suitable for his purposes. He took a half-step back, then a full step forward -- shoving his bare shoulder and the side of his face against the column's rough surface hard enough to feel it scrape at his skin.

There was a little clink of metal as the delicate chains across his arm gave and snapped, the ends dangling down the front of his shirt. He gave the fabric a good tear against the side seam, so it fell mostly over itself, obscuring the majority of the very identifiable gold bandolier, then yanked off each of the cuffs with their trailing sashes and chucked them into a bush a few feet away. Quartz frizzed a hand through his hair on one side to muss it -- cheekbone already stinging keenly enough to assure him it was nicely scratched up and rose red -- then took off from his place at a hard run, heading not toward the square but momentarily away from it.

His path didn't take him far -- just down a slimy old alley, ten or fifteen degrees cooler in its perpetual shade, and around two more shadowy corners, rounding out a loop around the back of a building so he could reenter the square from down a narrow alley path at a dead run.

He remained in good physical shape these days, despite some of his own contrary intentions, so it was too much to hope that such a short jaunt would leave him sweaty or winded -- but what acting couldn't accomplish in perspiration, it was more than capable of accomplishing in labored breathing. He popped out of the alleyway panting, at a very athletically inefficient run, and looking like he was struggling to overcome his hysterics.

"Officer!" he shrieked, making a perfunctory pretense of looking around before locking on the security guard he'd picked out earlier. "Officer!" He raced over, flailing more than slightly in a way that he supposed might be suited to someone who couldn't tell the difference between a security guard and a cop. "You've got to come quickly -- they -- they attacked my photographer, they stole all his equipment -- ! It's worth, like, tens of thousands -- !!!"

The security guard -- a hapless-looking guy with uneven sideburns and cheap hair plugs -- did not, unfortunately, immediately jump to follow. People, as Quartz had expected, were looking. "Calm down a minute, buddy -- " the guy was saying.

Then again, people were looking. That had its advantages. "Please," he yowled, cupping his hands over his mouth nervously before returning to frantic pointing back toward the alleyway. "He's bleeding, I -- I think he's unconscious! Please hurry, officer, please!"

That got the guy moving. Quartz wasted no time for the security guard to get indecisive again, but darted ahead, back down the alleyway, pointing around the next corner. "This way, this way! He's over here!"

Quartz was pretty young, in good shape, and had a lieutenant's enhanced speed -- it was easy to round the corner before the security guard caught him up. Hair Plugs had already taken out a walkie-talkie by then, presumably to radio in something about the emergency -- but Quartz was waiting for him at the turn, and jabbed the flat of his hand forward to bash the walkie-talkie into the man's face: crushing his nose and leaving him to drop the walkie-talkie, startled.

Quartz was already back in motion, though, spinning low to take the guard's feet out from under him, and on the way to grab the walkie-talkie to use as a cudgel. That was when the guard went for his taser.

This part seemed sort of like slow motion.

He heard himself say, "No."

Not in an affronted way, or an alarmed shout -- it was nothing sudden or sharp. It was 'no' more like an owner scolding a puppy, 'no' like a teacher rejecting a student's wrong answer, 'no' like a parent rejecting a request to stay out past curfew. It was a very calm, very idle 'no' -- and accompanied by an equally slow-seeming, equally automatic grab outward to take the guard's wrist and turn it till he dropped the taser, consigning it to the alleyway dirt next to them.

They were all on the ground, now, Quartz, and the guard, and the walkie-talkie, and the taser. That made it easy -- he could see himself while he finished it out: pinning the guard with one knee and one arm while he scooped up the taser and pressed it to the join of the subdued man's shoulder and collarbone, then squeezing the trigger.

It was ugly and surreal, like watching a movie. The security guard squiggled and convulsed under Quartz's hold for several long seconds, until the taser finally stopped on its own.

After a second fired charge, the security guard wasn't in a very good state to fight back.

Somehow, getting up to the roof with his captive seemed more difficult than the initial struggle had been -- which a very distant, very muffled part of his brain whispered was a sick thing to think. He made it, though -- albeit with one near miss where the fire escape was weakly anchored and nearly gave out beneath the weight of his impact onto it, and having to toss the only mostly-dead-weight body of the security guard up overhead to the roof ahead of him. It was not a very pretty throw, all flailing limbs and the man's faint, strangled gasp -- but Quartz heard the low thump of his safe landing, and hopped up to boost himself the rest of the way after. He had a good grip on the lip of the roof, and pulled himself up there -- hefting his way over the side of the roof and onto it like a swimmer popping out of the pool after a few laps.

He grabbed the guard by the collar and looked around for Schörl. The guard gave a quiet groan that indicated he probably had a broken bone or two.

There was no such thing as downtime, with Schörl. Everything that was presumably entertaining or diverting was always bound to be in some way improving. That had been a lesson of its own that he'd had to learn -- just because many of the things she said sounded like idle chit-chat didn't mean they weren't worth trying to retain: what she taught, she expected to be learned. This was a struggle for someone who had no particular familiarity with the workings of his own memory -- it was like trying to furnish an empty house one piece of furniture at a time, not knowing what the next piece would be that was brought in. He didn't have to know Eli Bell very well to know that Stroud Marinus was smarter than he was, and smarter by far than whatever creature Lazarus Klein passed for. He was long past the part of his rebellious phase where he'd been laboring under the delusion he could choose to learn the things that interested him and somehow be exempted from the rest. If Stroud thought it should be learned, Lazarus gave it at least whatever half-competent effort he was capable of. He didn't have to see the shape of the syllabus -- he trusted that it was there.

(It was a terrifying thing, to live in a house with one's own personal God: to have the constant experience of having a role in that God's plan but to be too small and too human to comprehend the vastness of it. He'd stopped thinking of either of them as human -- her something greater than, him something lesser. A Nephil and a Golem living together.)

Quartz tried to take what he'd learned from previous instruction and apply it here. Some of it, as she'd apparently been grooming him towards, came with a little mental application ; he could hold the sensation, the presence of his hand in his mind -- each nail, each fingertip, each knuckle in their sequence -- with some thought he could envision the stretch of ligaments too, the bundling of muscle.

The other part was more mystifying. No, more properly -- the other part raised in him some tension, some subconscious feeling of discomfort. Memories of his starseed, associations with it, were painful. His only awareness of it had been stabbing, searing agony -- a huge bundle of nerves seated near his heart that had only ever been overstimulated, only sent powerfully negative feedback to his brain that had had the intended aversion effect.

He ghosted mentally around the notion, gingerly -- trying to find a way to locate his inner energy and interact with it without doing any harm, using the lightest touch possible -- so light that maybe he wouldn't feel it, focusing instead mainly on the object of his hand and what it was doing.

Little surprise, then, that his first attempt failed: his fingers held against the security guard's chest and made a connection, but not the correct one -- instead of any give, any sensation of tar as he'd been promised, he felt the familiar magnetic pull of energy drawing up into his fingers, the beginnings of an energy sphere forming.

Quartz took his hand away, a quaint little marble of energy tumbling into the center of his palm and rolling around there. He frowned.

If you can't succeed, explain why you failed. A willing student is a runner-up for a successful one. Never waste a lesson by not trying to learn. Not when you've come this far.

Quartz looked up from where he was still kneeling over the body that he'd lowered to the ground. The sun was over Schörl's shoulder, casting her face in shadow and her pale mane of hair in a bright halo.

"It isn't -- I'm having trouble with my starseed," he admitted, looking up at Schörl with a kind of silent faith that she could solve the problem he could not. "I'm afraid it's going to hurt me like before."

It will not hurt you.

Her promise, repeated over again to instill it in his being, might as well have been a mathematical proof. If Schörl said it was so, it was so; Quartz could feel a sequence of muscles relaxing from the top of his neck down through the base of his spine. This was what he had to focus on -- not the ghosts of old memories, not the fear of pain, not the morality of what he was doing or the, the, the body beneath his hand. (Not a person, don't think of it as a person, don't think of it at all -- ) Focus on the lesson.

Schörl's hand was sure and even over his, her palm to the back of his hand. There was a thrumming feeling there, just as she'd described, of energy -- slid over her hand and tingling against his skin as sure as if she'd slipped her fingers into a tailored glove. It was a demonstration, useful and considerate where Cinnabar had failed to provide one at all. Quartz thought he understood, and nodded.

He made himself focus on that sensation, echoing against his fingers, and followed the notion of it up, up through his tendons and veins, up around the corner of his elbow, up so that he could imagine the feeling of his own heartbeat, picture the energy pulsing from it. Quartz brought up his other hand and settled two fingers under his chin, finding the soft movement of his own jugular vein, and used that to steady himself. The heart may not have been the starseed, but it sufficed as a concept: the power at his center.

There was warm energy there -- he felt more sure of it now, mapping and remapping it back to the energy his General was so competently projecting. He thought of it spinning like a cotton candy machine, and tried, with heavy focus, to draw a thread of it out and direct it toward his right hand side.

It was slow, compared with the immediacy with which Schörl seemed to be able to do it, and a few times he lost his mental grasp and had to start over -- but eventually he could feel the movement of it, heavy Chaos energy, drawn all the way out to his hand. He could feel sweat starting to stand on the back of his neck, beneath his hair.

Schörl's energy coated her hand with smooth expertise -- it was smooth and even like a cake done up in perfect fondant. Quartz's, by contrast, may as well have been Pillsbury frosting scooped out of a can and spackled on by an enthusiastic five-year-old, thick and uneven and almost certainly deeply wasteful.

Even so -- crappy as his infantile attempt was -- he could feel that the cloth and skin of the body beneath his hand began to give like plasma when he touched them. His fingers oozed through the space, half-there and half-not.

The starseed felt so incredibly alive when he located it with one slow fingtertip. It was vivid in the wash of Quartz's projected energy, practically begging to be touched. Slowly, unsure -- wary of using too much force -- he scooped his hand down under it and curled his fingers into a curve, catching and lifting beneath it without his thumb to avoid applying any pressure.

The body of the security guard shuddered periodically. Quartz fought the urge to close his eyes, biting his lip through the last of the extraction till his entire hand and the starseed were both free.

He could already tell the effort had been more than even a lieutenant was expected to need in order to accomplish the task. His difficulty, his slowness, had cost in excess output -- he closed his eyes briefly to avoid fatigue giving way to full-scale dizziness.

The starseed in his hand was practically begging him to . . . to do something with it. Quartz declined to think about what.