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 Posted: Sun Apr 21, 2024 8:41 am
"Avoiding your superhero job because you don't want to half-commit to it," Amaris Mallette told her reflection in the mirror, "is normal, and, like, understandable," and she thought she sounded pretty convinced and certain when she said it. Which, uh, she was not! She knew full well she was neither of those things, and that this was probably another long coping scheme in the long list of 'I'm awful at time management and I keep putting one entire category of things off for months if it won't have any apparent consequences'. On the plus side, this latest streak hadn't included her ignoring any of her responsibilities to other people, like her band or her job or her blog!!
It had, however, included ignoring all of her Knightly duties for ages and ages, and in retrospect maybe she'd ******** that right up. She'd really been meaning to go back to Anakeion sometime! Really! She'd be doing it right as soon as she felt like she could really make a day of it! And then gap days had turned into weeks into months, and on the rare occasion Zinnia asked about going out as Cepheus, Amaris had just fobbed her sister off on someone from the Bells. It turned out 'she's very quiet and very polite' did a lot of legwork when it came to convincing people to babysit? chaperone? a teenage girl.
But, like, what was she supposed to do when she literally got a note from the Code that read 'Please return to your Wonder at your earliest convenience. To stabilize your magic and your Wonder, you will need to resonate with the Code piece there. If you have not located it, I will do what I can to assist. This is a priority. Do not delay.'? That was kinda an omega-one red alert crisis, probably, and the kind of thing she needed to go do literally right now; so she pulled out her phone, messaged her groupchat that she'd had an errand come up really spontaneously that she couldn't have her phone out for, and then went through the old routine of pledging her life and loyalty, yada yada. Easy. She'd been able to do this for years, not that she did it as much as she should've. Always worked!
--And then that didn't work.
So she did it a second time, and then that actually worked. Okay! So! s**t was ********> She had to be going! So -- without a flash of light, without sparkles, without anything at all -- Anakeion Squire of Castor was gone away.
The thing was, okay, that Anakeion had never actually really exactly found her Code piece? She'd been pretty sure she had a general idea of where it was, maybe, but she'd always ended up getting super absorbed in doing the mundane busywork and also always ended up deciding that maybe she didn't actually want to disturb millennium-old dust. She liked her lungs as they were! (And also she never actually remembered to bring a face mask, either, which would've made it an easy decision. Classic Amaris. Sometimes she wished she had a stupid little sitcom laughtrack soundboard just to reflect what the consequences of her decisions felt like, but that was too far to commit to a bit, even for her.)
This meant that arriving at her Wonder's doorstep (inasmuch as it had doors) (it wasn't huge on doors) (it had a few, but it was kind of an open-air floorplan, right?) and seeing that the place looked like it'd been hit by a hurricane had her physically, actively, cringing in a way that was all reflex and horror as she tentatively nudged what might've been the remnants of a chair with her foot. Ohhhh god she'd ******** up so so bad, huh. The cringe only lasted about as long as it took a shimmering silvery-white trail of magic to manifest in front of her feet, something just distinctly different enough from her own icy-cold magic for it to make her brain go full !!! -- this place was big but it wasn't, like, that big, so... Okay! She could do this! Anakeion had played enough video games in her life to understand how a magic trail leading you to your objective worked!!
And then she tripped over the rest of the chair, barely caught herself with her hands before faceplanting ignobly into the cold stone floor, and resolved to follow the trail while also making sure to actually look at the ground. That would probably help.
[wc 752, continuing in a second post/solo later!]
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Posted: Fri May 17, 2024 10:48 am
It didn't need to be hard. It really didn't. She was pretty sure it was all going to be simple, and maybe if she kept repeating that to herself in her head, and also out loud, it would actually come true? Not that Anakeion really had a lot of faith in any of that, but she liked to try and have hope, although she wasn't great about fooling herself into it.
--Anyway! Okay! Code piece to be located. Sparkly intangible magic trail leading her somewhere. Every time her life worked on fiction rules Anakeion did a little internal fistpump of validation, and this was one of those times. Keeping an eye on the floor so that she didn't trip over something and brain herself on the marble floor, which would've been both horribly embarrassing and potentially causing lasting damage, she made her way steadily and slowly through the halls -- with appropriate divergences to move rubble out of the way every other minute or so, and a half-formed plan to carry it all back outside on her return trip. This was a way she didn't remember having gone, or at least she hadn't gone this way in some time; the hallways grew thinner around here, showing signs of repair over long years on the walls, and if it was getting dark she only had to grab a glowstick out of her subspace pocket. It was probably a little weak, as options go, but it was the most foresight she'd ever had about anything, ever.
Trails grew more and more winding, hallways grew thinner and taller, there was one specific deep groove cut into the floor that seemed to be the exact path the trail of magic was following; and eventually, after enough time, Anakeion found herself in an immensely tall room.
There was a single large pillar, in this chamber, at least twice as tall as Anakeion herself was. Three times? She wasn't exactly good at judging height. The spiraling stairs and platforms set into the wall looked like they were there as scaffolding, giving people some way to reach the top of the room -- the very, very tall room -- if they couldn't, uh, fly. Which she couldn't. She was pretty sure Amynta hadn't been able to fly, either, and Castor hadn't really been able to get actual airtime and vertical lift with his wings, so probably that was what these were for. The floor was inset with intricate carvings, mixings of stone she didn't have a clue how to name, some geometric design or massive mosaic she couldn't really make sense of from ground level. Interesting! Maybe later.
Looking up, tipping her head back so far her neck started to hurt (because she wasn't about to go scrambling up stairs that broken and damaged, she'd break an ankle at best, ******** that), Anakeion noticed -- writing, on the top of the pillar, and on the middle, and on the bottom. Scattered throughout. Carved into the stone, forming the grooves and ridges, were... she couldn't read them. But she was pretty sure they were names. People, memorialized for any number of reasons, in a way that would be crazy hard to fully destroy.
She'd remembered something like this, once, something about engravings. Not in this room, of course, but it'd been something about graduations, and trainees becoming Knights in and of themselves, and deaths, and instructors moving on to other things. They had been here, impactful, and they would be remembered. Or they should've been, but this modern Anakeion couldn't read Castorian (and she was pretty sure this was in, like, the equivalent of cursive?? Ridiculous??), and it wasn't exactly on the top of her bucket list at the moment.
There was still the trail of magic at her feet, though, and instead of leading her up any of those curving paths set on and into the walls it only led her forward, straight to the base of the pillar and inside; there was an entryway just the right size for a standard humanoid, an opening carved into the pillar, and a hollow space in its center. Not all the way up, there was definitely ceiling less than six feet above her, but, like, it was definitely enough to move in. And inset into a hole in the wall at the back of that hollow space, there was her Code Piece.
Or, well, Anakeion was pretty sure that was what it was?? It was a floating glowing ball of light. She hadn't exactly seen a lot of glowing things on her Wonder, ever, so it made sense to her.
And she needed to... resonate? With it? Okay. That was, like, meditation, right? She could maybe kind of theoretically do that. If she tried really hard. She reached both hands out to touch it, tried very resolutely to think about how silly she probably looked grabbing a magical glowing barely-tangible orb in a hole in the wall, closed her eyes, and tried to clear her mind --
This Amynta was younger than she'd typically been remembered; most of her recovered memories had been of her forties, or at least an age old enough for it to show on her face, in intermittent grey hairs spread throughout the brown in her hair. Younger even than Anakeion now; barely old enough to be into adulthood. She was in civilian garb, tracing a finger over the names at the top of the pillar, sitting on the edge of a platform with her legs hanging over the side.
The "How are you settling in?" from behind her did surprise her; she twisted and inelegantly flung her legs back up onto a flat surface, eyes wide, taking a deep breath.
"Really," Amynta said, almost defensive, "I'm well, it's just --"
Diope laughed ruefully, clasping her hands behind her back. "It's overwhelming, yes. Stjarna spent far more time administrating and keeping everything in order than she ever did on a battlefield." She was an older woman, with lines on her face and a curving tattoo on one cheek, long indigo hair cinched at multiple points by metal bands. "I know. It's a lot that you'll be responsible for, isn't it? You don't have to take full responsibility at once; your predecessor knew she was ill, so much of it's been delegated to instructors. There's no immediate gaps you'll have to fill on your own. And I'll be advising you until you're fully comfortable."
Amynta's tentative hope and relief was almost painful. She hadn't wanted to believe it; had wanted to assume the worst, telling herself she was capable enough, but she really didn't think she would've been. Perhaps she should've turned Diope down, given the woman was surely still grieving her wife - the previous Anakeion's - death, but... being busy always made Amynta feel better. Diope was clear-eyed enough, and Amynta needed every bit of help she could take, even if just to maintain appearances as her being a confident bright-eyed upstart until she could inherit her responsibilities in full.
She slipped a hand into the pouch at her side and thumbed over the small stone bird in there, its edges worn smooth by years of worrying at it. She'd been selected to inherit Anakeion for a reason. She was going to live up to what had been expected of her, even if it took her some time.
"Can you -- can you give me another walkthrough? I keep getting lost trying to find anything specific."
"Surely. And we'll take a lunch at the end of it."
"That's --"
"You've been in here since this morning; I won't believe that you had enough foresight to bring food with you and finish it without leaving a trace."
--and the memory faded, leaving Anakeion Squire pulling her hands back from the Code, shining so much more brightly than it had before. Something about the air of the place seemed calmer, gentler; maybe she was imagining it, but hopefully that had been what she'd been supposed to do, right? That line of silver magic had disappeared, so hopefully, maybe, yes.
It wasn't as if she was going to go home immediately, anyway. She was here -- she might as well make some actual progress on clearing those hallways.
...Again.
[wc 1371]
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