Welcome to Gaia! ::

The musician was startled slightly by the applause she was receiving, startled enough to drop her composition book into her lap. There wasn't a doubt in her mind about her suspicions anymore.

The girl turned around to see two people unlike anyone she'd ever seen before. One was a man and the other was a woman. They were tall, with dark skin and pointed ears; the first thing that crossed the girl's mind was the word "elves". But most of all, the two exuded powerful auras and they were both quite beautiful. They made her a bit nervous, but they seemed friendly enough. She vaguely remembered seeing them during her somewhat brief stint at the party.

She cleared her throat.

"Thank you," she said. She spoke in a clear voice. "I must say, I'm...quite surprised to have an audience...but no matter." She smiled, running her index finger along the keys of the organ.

"Yeah, no thanks to them...err..." Nestor started, jerking his thumb to the now-empty Main Hall. He turned back to see the strange-haired person putting a hand over his brother's injury, but didn't have time to react before the healing was complete.

"Wait...what's...hey, Nestor, my head doesn't hurt anymore, what did you do?" questioned the now-better child.

"I didn't do nothing, she did! Thank her for her magic, Julian!"

Julian looked up to see an odd-looking hairdo above slightly reddish eyes. "Oh...uhh, thanks miss! Really! We should probably get home, right Nestor?"

"Uhh, yeah, Mar's probably waiting for us. Thanks for helping my brother, miss, have a nice day!" Nestor said cheerily as he and his brother scampered away as kids are apt to do, most likely leaving Lacine stunned at the sudden disappearance.

[On the path Home]

"Hey Nestor....what did she do exactly to fix my head?"

"I dunno, she put her hand on it, and your head was fixed. Musta been magic or something."

"I wonder if I could learn how to do that..."

"But they don't really teach us magic in school or anything. You can't learn it there."

"What if I took classes at the Temple?"

Nestor stopped suddenly at this and started angrily "BECAUSE....wait a minute, that's actually a good idea. Mar only wants us to stay away because things happen there all the time, but if you're pretty much going to school..."

"Do ya think she'd let me go?"

"Probably, Julian, but you're going to need to be extra good before you bring it up, just in case. And we need to stop at Hal's on the way back to wash up"

"We could always say that there was a really big mosquito, and we smacked it and it got blood all over?"

"Nah, let's go to Hal's, but we can use that as a backup"

"Alright!"

The two children then resumed their trip at a more leisurely walking pace. The robes had to be thrown away, as they couldn't get the bloodstains out by themselves. Thankfully, Hal had borrowed some of Nestor's clothes a while back due to his being torn to shreds, and at this time Nestor took them back. Julian, meanwhile, was stuffed into an old overcoat that none of the three liked, although it served its purpose well. Once they got home, they found that Marsia had gone out to get some food, and thus were not caught red-handed (literally, in Julian's case). The rest of the day, both children were unusually helpful, as Nestor had decided that if Julian was going to try getting into the Temple, he would too.

"Uhh... you're welcome! Take care, kids!" Lacine said bemusedly as they scampered away. Hopefully they wouldn't get into any more trouble that day. She looked around. Sure enough, there was nobody else downstairs. It was a good thing she'd come along to help, then.

She climbed the stairs back up and retrieved the tray she'd ben carrying from the waiting room table. Then, she bounded up the second flight of stairs and came up to the closed hatch on the alchemy center. She rapped on it loudly. "Hey, Thomas! You awake in there?"

"Of course I am," a hollow male voice replied. The hatch opened to reveal a young man with dark hair, who could easily have been handsome if he didn't look so unkempt. His hair couldn't've been washed in quite a while, and had taken on the appropriately dirty-looking stringy quality, and his eyes looked sunken and puffy from lack of sleep. Like a plant kept in a dark, dark cupboard. "You think I had much chance to sleep with that dreadful noise booming all night?"

"Don't make excuses. You would've been up all night anyway," she chastised, climbing up over the hatch and into the room beyond.

"I didn't say you could come in," Thomas said sullenly.

"You never do! Here. I brought you your breakfast, as usual."

She placed the tray of food down on the only bare patch of table on his worksurface. Thomas had long given up arguing with Lacine, so he sat down and began to eat without a word. Aside from Steff, the priestess was the closest thing he had to a friend.

"I just saw these weird little kids on the stairs," Lacine said, sitting up on the counter and swinging her legs.

"Mm?"

"Yeah. One of 'em hit his head on something. I dunno what they were doing, but they left pretty quick. Must've been up to no good."

"Mm. Where's everyone else?"

"I dunno. Must be busy. Asleep. People're starting to wake up now, though. Everyone's tired after last night. You should've come to the party."

"Hm. I'm not a party person."

"You're not an ANYTHING person. It'd do you good to get outside of this room. You haven't even been downstairs in days, have you?"

"It's none of your business what I do or don't do," he snapped, like a barbed cactus. He fiddled with a little bit of toast. "I can do what I like."

"And you like what you do, I know, but it might be an idea to branch out a little bit."

"I don't want to," he replied with acid, poking a little bit of egg around his plate like a stubborn child. After a few seconds, he sighed. "Why do you care anyway? You don't even like boys. Why do you keep wasting your time trying to 'help' me?"

Lacine hopped down off the counter and approached his chair. She crouched down, putting an arm around his shoulder. "You're right - I don't like boys," she said, "But I like you. You're my friend. And I'm gonna keep making sure you don't starve, and prodding you to get out and meet more people, until one day I see you looking happy, not sad or angry or full of hate. Got it?"

If anything, Thomas just looked even more depressed at this.

After he finished his meal, Lacine swung herself back over the counter, taking the tray with her. "One day, you'll be grateful," she laughed.

Thomas didn't reply. Her footsteps receded away, across the room and down the stairs. He stared at the books in front of him, vision a little bit blurry.

"...I'm grateful," he whispered, pulling one of the books closer and resolutely staring at it, wishing the words to make sense to his tired eyes. When it didn't, he gave up and buried his head in his arms, and was very quickly asleep.

[I think this post will bring Lorika and Atlae into alignment time-wise with Cressa, Jessie & Forte]

After showing Atlae all of the Temple and its wonders, Lorika led him down into the basement. She was taking him to her room, where she kept the papers for initiation. The only place he hadn't seen was the chamber on the second floor, just outside of the throne room. This was where the priestesses took their rites of initiation, but normal members got a much more ordinary ritual.

The second floor had an eerie sense of power about it. The priestesses who spent a lot of time in the environment were part of it. They hardly felt it. Thomas, the alchemy master who worked nearby, enjoyed the thrum of energy. His work benefitted from it. But this was part of the reason Lorika hadn't shown it to Atlae. He'd already seen a lot that day, and she didn't want to overexpose him to the unknown and overwhelming.

She was just explaining all of this to him herself when they passed Gloria, coming back out from the direction of her room. "Oh, hey!" she greeted as their paths crossed.

"Good morning, Gloria," the priestess smiled. "That was the combat master's assistant," she explained as they moved further away, "I suppose you'll be seeing quite a bit of each other."

"Oooh, can you play Mendelssohn's wedding march?" Cressa enthused.

As the loud, striking but sweet sound of the pipe organ filled the room, Cressa sighed and curled both her arms around one of Jessie's, leaning on him like a drooping sunflower. With their heads together, their hair was one long, thick, snowy waterfall.

He looked at her oddly out of the corner of his eye. "Cressa," he said, with the tone of one telling off a small, naughty child, "Get those silly ideas out of your head this instant."

"NEVER. My whole life is built on silly ideas."

"Yes, well, mine isn't. Mine is built on ideals."

"Silly ideals."

"Not silly."

"Silly."

"No, you are silly."

"No, you."

"You're being silly right now."

"You started it~"

Both of the elves seemed surprised by this totally reasonable assumption. They both jumped to correct it at once. "No, no-"

"-He's not my brother, we're just-"

"-Friends."

Cressa smiled. The pace of the conversation slowed down again. "Yes. Just friends."

"Very old friends," Jessie corrected her.

After a pause, Cressa asked the obvious question. "You're new here, I suppose?"

"I think we would've noticed such a talented musician long before now."