Hair sticks to Thalia's face as she starts upright, head coming up from her hands in the cafeteria seat. She looks around, a selection of stalls selling food from carts and contraptions, their scents mixing into that nebulous food court smell. She rubs her face, wondering if the dream should tell her of something troubling her, even as her mind slides away from it like the waking brain does, until all she is left is with the sensation of deja-vu.
She reaches to the end of the table to bring up another instance of Br1n, checking to see if Yarrow received her message. "Your message to friend Yarrow has been vocalised, and they have started moving in this direction." Br1n gives a breath and her image flickers neon green. <You should drink some water and set yourself right> displays in text beneath Br1n's face.
Thalia reads the text and nods, accepting the wisdom of the ghost in the machine, pulling her ponytail back and retying it as she rubs her face and checks herself for pressure marks. It would be unsightly to seem overtired.
Soon Yarrow sits before her, tray laden with food - both cooked and raw snacks, and a ration of fish, magically inscribed with the tracking data from its catch this morning.
"You donated your garden's yield to the Academy again?" Thalia asks Yarrow, tilting her head in curiousity at the other's laziness at cooking.
"You give and you take, it is how life is, and I give my energy in other ways - I don't have time at the end of the day to meal prep like you do. If the Academy uses my garden space to grow more for the community and I get free food for a month, seems like an easy trade."
Thalia picks at her small tray, having traded her yield of beans picked this morning for a small fruit salad. "They gave me a new project."
"That's great, you've been hating all the nonsense they've been piling on your plate." Yarrow says, curly white hair flopping about those forest green cheeks.
"I'll tell you later how bad the nonsense has even more gotten, but needless to say, I have a box without seams. Screams artificial, but they are claiming it was old and deep. I don't see it, there's no sign of wear or damage."
"Could it be those fossil things some of the historians talk about?" Yarrow says, munching into a long stalk of celery. They're a messy eater, like you'd see from the monster-kin up in Brambleberry.
"Heard those are more bones and imprints, this is as big as a small teen." Thalia counters, skewering a piece of sweet-melon.
"Have you tried throwing an architect at it? You know those freaks have weird materials magic. Half the study they do should be its own discipline. Builders maybe? Either way, they might know what that thing could be made of."
Thalia bites on her lower lip, thinking about it. "Would you join me on a trip to the desert if nothing comes up this week? I could use the support."
"I've a trial this week, but start of next one and I'll help with whatever you need. They've not set you up with a stupid deadline have they?" Yarrow is chewing the cooked fish from their bare hands, juices dripping between their knuckles as they talk.
"How's your training going anyways?" Thalia asks, finishing her fruit salad and leaning back to watch her best friend.
"Pretty well, you should watch one of our obstacle courses. Plus the eye candy isn't bad."
"I still can't believe you're single with all the hot young things surrounding you." She teases them, punching their shoulder gently. It's easier with them, after all the effort she has to do with others.
"You wasted Secundus life. You could have been the life of the party with how many of the others wanted you."
She rolls her eyes - they was easily an ass in this, especially with all the free and easy flirting they had done back in the days with anyone with a pulse. Thalia envied Yarrow that. Strike that. Thalia envied Yarrow's confidence and the desire to act on what they wanted, not the lust in the system that was explored by this genderfluid marvel.
She focuses, returning to the here and now to try to be present in her friend's life. "And what does the best trainee combat magician have planned for the weekend?"
Talk slides into harmless things, important things, but things more important than dreams or the dangers of the thing in the case, and for a moment Thalia is herself.
Mrs Vesperine, the older, was a witch. From the spooky bookstore that moves (curated that way), filled with artefacts from explorers and preserved remains of creatures best left sent back to the soil, to books and bindings both magicly holographic and ancient and woven parchment; to the long flowing robes and familiar - a large black creature of corvid descent, with rhumy white eyes and a sharp beak.
Today she was running her many ringed fingers along a shelf, waiting for a certain customer to come into her lair as had been divined. She had divined great fortune in her future should she cause a small mischief in the customer's life.
The chime rings as the membrane to her shop opens, letting in curly white hair above the tops of her shelves. She let's the darkness deepen around her as she weaves her magic to make the step stool sink back into the building. She hums briefly to prepare her voice before starting up her act. Motes of light tinted red swirl around her, infused with her joy and malicious intent.
"Who dares come to an old crone's home?" She casts the movements and projects her voice into a deep and wisened growl, even as her magic brings age lines to her matronly face and maybe a wart for added flair.
The voice that returns to her is noble and hopeful. "The sign outside said you were Decadencey, 'bookstore of the forbidden'. I'm looking for something for a friend"
Noble people were so easy to fool, Vesperine had found, even better when they had people to protect. She could give him something ancient but worthless, or something cooked up by the Convergence or maybe something from the sack of an explorer long forgotten. "What do you seek, child?" She teases, assessing him for weakness.
"I'm not a child." The man snaps back, a mouth with too many teeth flashing for an instant before he is normal again.
Shocking but not something she could not handle. She collects herself with a deep cackle. "Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Someone has the need to prove himself a maaaan."
She could see him bristle at that too, but the more he was off balance the more she could entirely get done. Her hand swiped at a few vials and a small binding, something on the history of something called mining. The word seemed foreign and nasty, but anything to get the mischief into the hands it needed to.
"What can the daughter of Aranthme do for a poor little traveller?"
She watches his face contort in confusion over the invoking of the name of the patron of poets, for her visage was nothing like as such. Or maybe the old ways had just faded from the mind of this young thing.
"I am looking for something that would help a friend with a communication relic. Something from Old Natare time or before."
He pulls out a small satchel sack, rifling through its contents for something. Good. It would make the chaos easier.
She places her mischief in a pocket inside her cloak, a large sweeping movement hiding her real actions as she plays to theatrics. With that out of the way she scans her mind back, trying to think which of her front room books or bindings would have what he needs.
With a toothy grin she starts towards it as she watches the lad look between pickled eyeballs and taxidermy birds, even as her corvid watches him. He even might find a rodent skull if he is not careful, but all he looks is uncomfortable, scared, like he wants to flee. With each start and shock, his nose seems to elongate into a muzzle, his eyes growing yellow and his fingers lengthening into claws. He would need to control that with that the divinations had shown her. Lest he be confused for the monster-kin he was not.
She stops watching him from the shadows, coming back with the tome as she let's out a toothy grin, making the gestures to bring a sense of calm to him before he erupted in feathers or fur. "I think I have found your binding. Call this a trade in. You'll take this one, and another and we will call it square, hm? Yes?"
The one whose satchel marks him as Yarrow looks sceptical, but she has him in her trap - social niceness won't let him offer money and he has no knowledge of what he can offer her.
Slowly he nods, opening his satchel to allow her to place both books into its waiting grasp. It's a nice quilted thing - borruk-hair she guesses but either way, as she slides the book and binding into the satchel, her fingers pluck the vials and deposit them inside with some slight of hand for the journey beyond.
"Now you just get back to your academy, and you get your book to your friend and we will call this square little twinform." Vesperine chuckles darkly and watches as he pulls his satchel closed and goes scurrying from her shop, her home, her den.
She is back at the library, was, is will be. In her hands is a large enclosed bowl like structure - like a terrestrial pumpkin, but with a large silver veined leaf. This is a power cell, and as Thalia sets it down, she rummages around for the 'wires' that would connect it to the case.
She has cajoled Br1n into playing a recording of one of the local bards, Deluna Vesperine, and her soft lilting voice and lyre waft through the library - talking about love lost and difficult journeys. Thalia zones it out, Deluna is coming from a place Thalia cannot understand, plus she needs to concentrate else she electrocute herself.
She connects an end of each of the fluid filled tubes to the cell's base first, watching the creatures inside each tube to glow - illuminating swimming worms that symbiosis with the case they are in. Next she applies the input end to the case, breathing deep and trying to stay calm.
Breathe. She has called the pyromages and they are in the area to suppress any negative effects. She is wearing insulated gloves made of some white fibrous material, she is there, she is prepared - this should not be a.
Contact.
The recording goes silent. No. That's not accurate, because all sound around the case disappears too as a high pitched ringing sound fills the air and Thalia goes flying. She crashes into one of the book cases with enough force to make something pop or snap in her arm in soundless screams.
Someone helps her up, as scorch marks lightning their way over the surface of the case. Br1n's scans have told her it is something called a metal, platinum specifically, but Br1n has indicated that usually occurs in some sort of inperfect rock thing. Under the ground is not specifically touched by the foliad people - except those as mad as her and her historical and archaeological kind.
Something is broken within her. Her arm is damaged too, and her eyes trace to see if there is anything new other than the cosmetic damage.
"Br1n. Could you scan the case for any visual changes, and any alterations to the pulse." It is not a request, but it does nice to be nice to those around you, even if they are device bound.
This cannot all be for nothing, at least attempt has to have formed something to change.
"Pulse is steady at 3 per minute." Br1n says, dashing her hope. Thalia cracks, slamming her palm against the case, tears threatening to spill her cheeks. She curls her hand against the metal case, taking one, two, three shuddering breaths.
"Ok, from the top. Br1n, turn change the bard, please."
She rubs her hand along her face as she feels a thrum in the air. There is an audible pulse from the case in time with the bard. "Br1n, please play a bard with a faster beat."
The music changes and the air drums with that unearthly untz, a vibration that rattles the coloured membranes above and sends shockwaves through the water vessels around the library tables.
People look up at her, and towards her experiment, annoyance and anger flashing the faces nearby. But still she needs to press on - she needs this success for her - and she can feel something beginning to make sense.
"Br1n, a faster song please, make it up if you have to." Her voice is tinted with that drive, an edge of mania taking her towards understanding. Ripples seem to pulse along the solid surface of the metal case but some instinct tells her not to touch it yet. People clutch their ears at the noise Br1n plays and even though she feels a touch of blood leak from her nose, Thalia cannot look away from her experiment - this artefact that holds so much of her future.
The edges peel out and with the sound of rending stone, a tear appears in the air, a hole from each angle you could look at it. Pressure fills the air around it and that ringing in Thalia's ears returns, and the pain in her arm becomes more noticeable. She swears, something foreign to her tongue, but fitting to the madness that is her success.
