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kasihya~~*~~*~~*~~*~~*~~
the mountains in between
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Reed has seen many things in her thirty three years of life. She has seen men get blown up by their own stupidity. She has seen her best friend disappear into a whirl of red lace, only to reappear a moment later with a gigantic rubber ducky on his head. She has seen comrades in arms who have been killed in the line of duty, swept off their feet by a ghost in the machine and hurled against a rock to have their brains come oozing out of a crack in their skulls. She’s been moved from the twenty-second century to the seventeenth with the movement of one foot, and transported back in the next instant, only to hear Jack shouting at her to stand completely still until he had finished absorbing the offending ghost.
She came prepared for this, she thought.
She’d been prepared to carry around her backpack of supplies for however long it took, until she was either sure that she was going to be allowed to stay in this dull, quiet village, or else be whirled off to a further new place. I don’t know what to write. Reed thought she was prepared for this eventuality, and her heart still stopped when Ƈhatma disappeared. That had been stupid, foolish. It had happened so suddenly, the first time, that she hadn’t had any time to analyze it. One moment she had been in her apartment, and the next, she had been in another world. And the second time, it had happened so slowly, that she hadn’t even known it was there to analyze.
None of this matters. The point is that she sees their surroundings, and recognizes the plain northern temperate forests from a few days prior. Her heart sinks.
“Shit,” she mutters, and then remembers that she is in the company of children. She points at Marat. “Don’t repeat that, mind you.”
Marat holds up one hand and tips it from side to side. “I hear it all the time at work,” he says. “I ain’t’ supposed to say it at home, but there’s plenty as use it at the drop of a pin.”
And then there’s that. She isn’t even working with normal people. Reed isn’t’ good with children on the best of days, and now she has to stick with a boy whose body is half-metal, and the half that isn’t is the body of an eight year old, and everything else is a strange combination of eight years old and at least the same age as her. She has seen things, she knows, that would horrify some of her nieces and nephews; but then again, she thinks, so has this boy.
There doesn’t seem to be anything to do but walk, after that. Reed had been planning on leaving her bag at home for once, just once, but then she’d thought that perhaps she would have something to barter with, if need be. Now, she doesn’t think she will ever take it off, even when she goes to sleep.
The hill that they just came down seems to be the same one that they saw when they first arrived in the village of color. Reed looks up at it, and thinks about going back up to the forest. Ahead of them is plains, flat and empty again as though they had never left them. There are blue mountains in the distance, low-lying and useless.
“I submit that we ought to keep on moving forward,” Ƈhatma says. “I am all out of trees and forests for the time being.”
“They’re safe,” Kephri says, with the solidity of finality. Reed thinks that he means to say something more along the lines of, “I’d like to go back to those places, because we know those, and they provide cover, what does everyone else think?” and it just doesn’t come out of his mouth like that, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t irritating, doesn’t rub her the wrong way all the same. She tries to remind herself that it’s just a cultural thing. Perhaps his people don’t have a way of asking questions. Perhaps they are built into the spoken language, and it just doesn’t translate through whatever mechanism allows them to speak to each other.
Or perhaps he’s just rude.
“They’re also home to mysterious forces that can pull us to and from different worlds at the drop of a hat,” Reed points out.
“They’re the same place?” Marat asks, doubt dripping from his words.
[They argue. Because Marat is nervous about the plains, and Kephri just wants to go back to the woods because it's more familiar and less exposed than the plains. It's cold, and there's still a plain, purely cloudy sky. Everyone is tired. They eat some of the supplies that Reed picked up while they were on the island of color and put in her bag; a heavy loaf of bread and a whole lot of jerky.]
“I’m sorry,” Ƈhatma says. He has changed back into a human form, what he calls his “small form”; Reed has no idea how to categorize him, and is pretty sure that to do so would be to violate some sort of social boundary, so she doesn’t argue with it when he tells her that it wastes energy, but it’s also a lot more energy-efficient and anyway this way he won’t be able to leave them by accident again. “What if you hadn’t been able to find me again?” he says, eyes meeting hers with earnest concern filling them.
“For what?” asks Tlazohtzin. She seems to be doing all right. Reed’s only exposure to pregnancy has been through the occasional emails that her older sister had sent her during hers, but Tlazohtzin seems to be doing well enough for now.
[This is the part where they recover each other. I don’t know what needs to happen. If they’re gradually powering up, without noticing it very much, I wanted to do a sort of Diana Wynne Jones thing. It’s not fire and brimstone, and fearsome acts of magic at the drop of a hat. There are more subtle clues. Tlazohtzin really wants a place to rest. Shortly thereafter, they come across an inn that has rooms close enough to each other that they can stay. It’s not super-convenient, but it’s good. That’s just the beginning. In the middle, things start to come easier to them, to the point that they can start to influence the world around them more directly. This happens throughout the second half of the second part, and the whole of the third. By the time they get to the end of the third, they’ve incorporated that into their lifestyle. A bit. But that doesn’t make sense, because — no, see, I really liked the idea of having the choice of hitting the reset button.]
[For the Evening Paths, they don’t start out in their own dead worlds. First, they go to a few dead worlds. Then, they go to one of the previous worlds, and that’s dead, too. Then, for the final world, they go to one of their own. Or they all split up, and go to their own, but the narrative only follows one character to theirs. The final section of that is all of them meeting back up, and being shaken.]
[But would that really make sense? What if they survive the apocalypse of their own world, and then as they are traveling through that wasteland, they end up meeting each other, and finding out that the worlds have collided? So they’re going through an amalgamation wasteland. It would make it easier to survive, certainly.]
[Goddamn. So, try to write as much of the other world parts as you can. Those are staying, and it’s just the context that matters.]
[What if the apocalypse is the result of various iterations of earth all being drawn in too close, until they collide and go out like melting putty? The result is a single plane containing a mosaic of different worlds, all of them ruined and abandoned. Or not even abandoned — just empty. Because everyone are doppelgangers of other versions of themselves, so the only ones that can survive singly are only ones.]
[Maybe they are the epicenter of the apocalypse. The other iterations are slowly — or quickly — being absorbed into the plane. Strange shifting geographies, or ghosts in the machine who don’t yet realize that they are no longer allowed to exist. The third act twist is that they come to a far-ff series that is nearly identical to their own world. And the impetus to keep moving on is that they wake up and everyone in the world has gone.]
[In the evening paths, they come to the end of the worlds. It’s just darkness, and they are the only ones. Or, no. In the evening paths, the worlds around them start to fade, fainter and less real than the ones before them. The midnight paths are the total darkness, and mainly consist of philosophy and trying to fix things. They take place several years after the first part.]
[This is when the reset or continue part comes in. I don’t quite know how yet. And then there can be a seventh section, the dawn paths, about whatever happens next. It only needs to be one chapter long, because they are one now. I just want everything to bundle together neatly, and to keep making sense in an orderly fashion — the way that the structure of a neuron mirrors the structure of the known universe.]
[With this in mind, I am going to rewrite the end of the last chapter, in order to make it make more sense and stay in line with this new one. In that version, they walk down to the town, and find that everyone else is gone. I’m also going to have to restructure the first two parts, in order to bring them into line with what I’ve envisioned, but that’s okay, that’s fine, it’s not that difficult a change to make. I’m just going to skip straight ahead to the world that I have planned out, and that is the city that is at war.]
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the city at war
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They leave the deserted plains behind them, for which Marat is glad. There isn’t anything to be gained by standing around in an open field, waiting for food to drop from the sky. Marat’s stomach grumbles. He starts to sing to cover up the sound, for fear that someone might hear. He doesn’t think that Reed will be upset with him, but other people, he isn’t so sure about. Eiji is nice, but there’s nice and then there’s nice, and he isn’t sure which category the man falls into yet.
Anyway, the place they’re going to now looks nice. He can hear bells and voices up ahead, which means people, and people usually means places to buy food. Not just here, anywhere. Marat is wandering around alongside Violet, who hides frightening things behind her clothing and behind her eyes, but who hasn’t shown her teeth yet. Marat figures that if he just keeps on doing what he’s doing, then nothing can go wrong. Right?
Marat snorts to himself softly. He isn’t that stupid.
“What’s so funny?” Violet asks.
Marat smiles up at her. “I was just thinking about what my sisters would say, if they saw me now,” he says. “I ain’t never been outside of Albion in all my life before this, and now, now look. Now look at me in the grass, and sitting with cows. And with all of the strange people in the world, meaning no disrespect to anyone here.”
Violet bobbed her head, as if to say, yes, well, why not. She hooked her thumbs into the loops of her backpack. It looks strange against her back. “Do you miss your sisters?” she asks.
Marat scowls at her. She’s talking down to him again, talking the way that Reed and Ƈhatma do. As much as he likes them, thinks that they’re all right for adults, he’s still annoyed by it. He isn’t a little kid. He isn’t four or something. “No,” he lies, and then decides that wasn’t convincing enough, amending it to, “Not that much. I didn’t get to see them so much, anyway. One or the other of us was always working. If we wasn’t working, we was sleeping.” Which is true, in its own way. It doesn’t change the fact that when he went out to eat lunch, Claire could sneak across the streets from her work and they could have lunch together, or the fact that sometimes all three of their breaks would line up and for fifteen minutes every day, they could all congregate at the open end of the yard of the thread factory where Marat and Jaime worked, and annoy each other if they weren’t eating with friends.
Violet narrows her eyes. “You didn’t play with them after work?”
Marat shakes his head vigorously. Stupid girl, does she think that he’s a sissy or something? “Me and Claire helped our ma with the washing up, yeah. And then we’d go to sleep. It’d be too tired for dinner, anyway.” He casts about for something different to talk about, so that she won’t look at him with that combination of pity and revulsion. He knows it when he sees it, and why does everyone think he’s so stupid all of the time? “What’d you do?” he asks. “Reed says she was a superhero, and Tlazohtzin was a princess.”
“Queen,” Tlazohtzin interrupts, voice low. Marat reaches up to tip his hat to her to apologize, remembers that he left it in the factory the day that he left.
“Sorry, miss,” he says.
Violet looks contemplative. She doesn’t answer at first. She reaches around him to pull him away from a hole that someone dug in the ground, from somewhere else. Marat doesn’t know when, and he doesn’t know why. He hopes that they reach the distant houses soon, so that he can go exploring. Or, no, Reed is going to make sure that they all stick together, so that they don’t get lost.
[They arrive in the town. Colonial Massachusetts, with mutants. They meet people, and they find lodgings at an inn — together this time, as Reed insists — and there is arguing because Eiji wants to not be bound to them, and Violet doesn’t either in particular — but they get that, and then they break off to go exploring.]
The town is bustling. That’s the only way that Marat can think of to describe it. It isn’t the way that London is when he’s in the town, the way that it does with the crowds of people pushing through the filth and the streets piled with horse shit and dog shit and human shit and people sleeping in the shit, yelling at him because he uses those words; there is elbow room here, and there aren’t nearly so many children. In fact, when Marat looks around, it’s mostly men.
Ƈhatma is in his small form, human form, because he says that there are no huge people around, and that would be unsettling. Marat is glad for it, because Ƈhatma is a wonderful, huge, ebullient presence when he’s a human, but when he’s a giant bird who says that he’s from a foreign place and has two wives and a husband and herds sheep up and down mountains for a living, then Marat starts to get afraid. He’s also wearing the clothing that they picked up from the last place that they stayed at, so he sort of fits in with the rest of them.
None of them fit in with the town, though. Marat sticks close to Eiji after the first man stares at him and openly points to his mechanical arm and legs. “What’s the matter with you, boy?” he bellows, raucous laughter coming form him and his friends by the fish market. They all think that this is a great joke, that is until they see Eiji. Then their eyes open wide as Eiji holds up a hand to them. “Peace and greetings,” he says, over the noise.
They are in the middle of a street. The town is cooler than the place that they just left, but sunnier, bright sun that streaks everything in gold. The air is clean here, too, but tinged with enough smoke that Marat feels at home, rather than smothered and overwhelmed by all of the scents of the wood and the field vying for his attention. The town, such as it is, is located — okay, breaking character here. They’re in a New England port town in the late seventeenth century. It’s been established as a port town and a point of commerce, so that there are even some women here, and people from other colonies who travel, so it has an economy. However, most of the occupants are men. There are a lot of fishermen and trappers here, and there are some people who are natives of the region, who look more like Tlazohtzin except not really — to everyone else, they do, and to her, they look just as different as she does from Eiji. Or she would if he had skin. This place is a place that is fairly populous as far as the seventeenth century goes, but for most people, it’s going to look like a tiny town. There’s a wide dirt road with wheel ruts in it, and there are a number of other roads branching off of that, with houses and buildings — it looks a bit like Williamsburg, but less dry and more green because they decided, foolishly, to build it on a recently filled-in piece of swampland.
Now, I did say that this was a mutant town. That is to say, there are mutants here. They are usually of the partially-animal variety, possessing extra limbs or differently colored patches of fur, and at first glance, they look like Kephri. Except that they can’t change themselves. Then there are also those who are possessed of powers that look like Reed, and there’s a huge war going on between different factions, which has spilled over into the New World. Instead of having them be outcasts like in X-Men, they are in fact the ruling class. The leader of the town is a mutant, and his name is John Smith, because I can, and it’s a fairly common name, right? So he’s a mutant. And mutants command great respect, or fear — it’s probably a relationship of fear, rather than one of respect, now that I think about it. They came to rise up at the beginning of the fourteenth century, after the Spanish flu, when mutants became more populous.
That’s the basic structure of the society. And in this manner, the town has been formed. They are used to people who look like Kephri, and Eiji, but not necessarily anyone else, and definitely not Marat. He’s a purely Victorian steam punk type of invention.
Marat pulls closer to Eiji, who glares at the men.
When they see him, their expressions change. “How do you do, sir?” they say.
Eiji nods at them. “How do you do?” he repeats. Marat looks up at him, amazed at the change which comes over his whole demeanor. It’s almost like he turned into one of them.
“Where do you be hailing from?” the first man asks, the bigburly one who laughed at Marat and stared.
Eiji looks around at their members of their party. Marat tugs on Reed’s sleeve, because it’s a loud town and no one else is paying attention. She looks down at him; he points over at the men, to whom Eiji is still talking. Reed’s eyes widen comically, and she stops everyone else with a wave of her hand that halts their progress.
“We’re coming from the east,” Eiji says.
The men look at each other. “You mean over the seas, or up to the northeast, where the Injuns are?” asks one man. He squints at Eiji. “You ain’t an Injun, are you?”
Eiji lifts his chin. “I don’t have any idea what you mean.”
Marat runs back over to stand beside him and watch him talk to the men. It seems the thing to do; no one else is taking the initiative. Then Kephri steps up. He abandoned his goat legs for now, which Marat is pleased about because he doesn’t like how they feel. They’re rough to the touch, and dirty. Today, he is a lizard, covered from nose to the tip of his tail in flexible green plates: it’s warm, he says, so cold blood is better. Marat doesn’t know what that means; lizard scales look mighty hot to him, and he knows that his metal parts sometimes get hot to touch when he’s working in the factory in the summer, especially if he stands in the sun that comes in through the windows for too long — that is beside the point. The point is that Kephri emerges to stand next to Eiji, and the men’s expressions change again. They immediately switch their attention from Eiji to Kephri.
“Sir Aaron?” says the bulky one. He’s the kind, Marat knows from experience, who looks more useless than he actually is. Mr. Nathanson’s partner, Mr. Hess, is like that, too. He’s big and bulky on the outside, and it looks like fat but underneath the fat, there’s muscle to bolster it up.
Kephri looks from Eiji to the bulky one, but Marat is fairly certain that he’s talking about Kephri.
“No,” says Kephri.
The two men exchange glances. The first one shrugs, and the bulky one crosses his arms. “You sure? You look an awful lot like Sir Aaron to me, sir.”
Violet puts a hand on Kephri’s shoulder. “Are you questioning him?” she asks. Marat shivers at the icicles in her voice. There are her teeth, he thinks to himself.
The bulky man scoffs at her. “I beg your pardon, little miss vran djevojka.“ He leans forward and licks his fat pale lips. “I’ll have you apologizing to me now for your insolence. It don’t matter to me who your master is.”
Violet, very slowly, lets her hand slide down Kephri’s arm until both of her arms hang at her sides. Marat steps quietly away, back towards Ƈhatma. He would like no part in this. “What did you call me?” she asks.
“Violet.” Reed’s tall, stocky figure crosses Marat’s path, blocking his view of the proceedings. He can see her grabbing Violet’s arm. “Please don’t.”
Violet looks over her shoulder and gives Reed a death glare that would have cowed Marat if he had been on the receiving end — cows him even though he isn’t — but Reed is having none of it. She drags Violet away, and Eiji takes her other side to help them. Kephri waves to the men as they walk away. The men respond with jeers that would make Marat’s mother sigh and click her tongue if he ever said them in private.
[There are slurs here about the color of Violet’s skin, and what she is wearing, and how she’s lucky that her mother is there to teach her about her proper place.]
Marat shuffles along next to Eiji. He reflexively reaches out to take his hand with his own good one. Eiji’s hand is a funny combination of cool and flexible, glass but with all of the movement of skin. He looks down at Marat with surprise, eyebrows arching. “What are you doing?” he asks.
Marat feels embarrassed and slips his hand away. “It’s easy to get lost if you’re not holding hands,” he explains. When he says the words aloud, he realizes how foolish and small he sounds.
Eiji’s face remains as it was, eyebrows raised but nothing else moving. He lifts his gaze to look around at the people around them, and then returns to Marat. Marat thinks that he might be frowning now, but it’s hard to be sure because of the way that the light reflects off of his face. At any rate, he touches the tips of his fingers to Marat’s shoulder, and it looks as though he’s about to say something else when they are interrupted by sudden movement in front of them. Marat jumps as Violet drags herself away from Reed and presses her back against the wall of a house on the side of the road where they are.
Violet argues with Reed that she doesn’t want to be told what to do, and she can’t be held responsible for her actions. “Did you see what they were calling me? Did you?” she grinds out.
Reed scowls and looks back over her shoulder. Marat looks around, cautious of people who might be watching them and seeing them and paying too much attention. He feels very exposed, out where there are people without any clockwork bits to them, so many whole people. It makes him uncomfortable, because these people are the upper-class, and they are the ones who can afford to get whole repairs, or better yet, who don’t have jobs that endanger them in the first place, put them in the position of having lost limbs. When they do, it’s adventuring or something, and it’s a mark of prestige to not need to have them replaced the way that he and his friends do. When he’s around his friends and his siblings, there are often a great number of them who have missing limbs, replaced by cheap brass clockwork.
The Great Post-Apocalyptic Pub Crawl — City at War
The first place that they come to that looks like a public service place, Violet determinedly steps through the door. Marat hesitates to follow her because he’s afraid of what Reed might say. Reed stops at the door and makes a show of reading the menu and the sign posted outside, which just is a blur of squiggles to Marat. Then she turns around and signals that everyone ought to come inside. The building is made of wood, like most of the places around here, wood that is held together with lighter colored slats, and covered with thatch as opposed to the finer wood on some of the other buildings. The inside is dark and noisy and smells of beer, and the floor is made of dirt. Marat is careful to avoid a dark, sticky-looking patch, for fear of getting more tarnish on his foot.
“I doubt this place,” Tlazohtzin says. “It’s the kind of, when I would travel with my family, we’d call it a zamyeha mud hole, and wouldn’t let my younger cousins look inside.” She glances down significantly at Marat.
Marat pretends not to hear her. He looks for the skuzzy people with half of their bodies or more replaced by metal, but even though the people here are ragged and sad-looking, they are still fully human. He doesn’t like it.
They leave this place.
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the sugar fields
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“Come on, Ƈhatma. We’re leaving,” Tlazohtzin calls.
Ƈhatma sticks his head out of the second-floor window of the house he’s been investigating. “There’s blankets in here. Don’t blankets seem like a good idea? We don’t know where we’re going. We might need to spend the night outside. It might be cold.” He reaches over to the bed and picks off the top layer of blankets, gripping a fistful and walking backwards towards the window. The blankets get caught on the bed for a moment, but then they pull free, and Ƈhatma stumbles backwards until he nearly falls out of the window.
[This is the grief and the avoidance thereof part of the story, shown through the archetypal Ƈhatma. Ƈhatma is sad because he’s had time to catch his breath now. It happens when they’re sitting down to eat dinner at a tavern, and he realizes that it’s been a week since he saw his family. He’s sad, but he’s trying to hide it because there’s no point. So he tries to be happy with the people that he has now, because he adapts, right? That’s his thing, is that he can make the best of any situation. So he tries to do the best that he can, and try to talk to everyone and make them into his own family. He gets disappointed because he sees that that’s not going to happen, and that everyone else is trying to deal with their grief, too. He ends up trying to help them through that, in the hopes that that will help them and calm them down and then they can please not talk about this, never talk about this again.]
They end up eating at a place that is nice enough, he supposes. The lights are as bright as anything in this part of the world, and the man who greets them at the door has one arm that is a wing, a bat’s wing that stretches down to the side and folds up tightly. Ƈhatma beams at him, and spreads his own wings a little in acknowledgement. Flight apparatus are flight apparatus, regardless of the means by which they have it, and the man acknowledges this a bit with a small smile.
“I’m pleased to serve you today,” he says. “Are you looking for a family table?”
Ƈhatma feels a sick prickling that starts in his stomach and works its way up and out to the tips of his fingers. He tries to shrink into the background, and ends up bumping into Eiji. Eiji doesn’t acknowledge it, too busy waiting.
Reed is the one who speaks. “Yes, I think so. There are seven of us,” she says.
The man nods. “Very good. This way, please.” He gestures with the claw protruding from the tip of his wing to an area far in the back of the inn. Reed glances back over her shoulder as she follows him, waiting for them all to listen. One by one, they straggle after her. They are led to a place against the wall, with rough-hewn wooden seats ringed around a rough-hewn wooden table with a bench backed against the corner of the wall. There is some shuffling as they get settled down. Reed assumes the corner seat, eyes darting everywhere so fast and paranoid that it’s almost comical, though Ƈhatma doesn’t feel inclined to laugh. He feels dizzy, prickly, on edge. Family. He knows that it’s just a word that the man used to figure out where they ought to be put, together or separate, but that’s the word, family? Not group? Why?
Violet sits down at the short end of the table, against the wall, and Kephri joins her, sitting on one of the stools. Ƈhatma looks at the space between the wall and the chairs, and decides that it is nowhere near enough to give him room to spread his wings. He opts to sit down next to Kephri. This leaves Tlazohtzin to sit against the wall by Reed, at right angles to Violet. Eiji seats himself next to Ƈhatma, back so straight that it makes Ƈhatma’s spine ache with sympathy, and Marat plunks himself down next to Tlazohtzin with a rattling of metal against the wood that makes Tlazohtzin wince.
The place where they have found themselves is quiet, for the number of people who are there. Ƈhatma has been in places this large, eaten at them with his family group, and the whole of his kin, but then there are lots of them, and they are only all together for certain occasions of the year, so he supposes that they ought to be more excited. These people all seem to not know each other as well, but even within tables, they are speaking to each other in animated, but quiet, tones that do not disturb anyone else. At the bar, where there are bottles and colored bottles and more colored bottles arranged and poured by a man whose clothing is slightly finer than that of other people, there are a number of men who sit there, talking to each other and drinking from glass pitchers. Something about the whole atmosphere strikes Ƈhatma as off, but aside from making him feel achingly homesick, he doesn’t know what.
At their own table, everyone is silent. The man with the one bat wing comes back. In his human hand, he has seven small glass pitchers of a golden liquid poured and curled in various configurations to prevent them from falling over. He hooks each one with his bat claw and uses it to set them down in front of everyone. Then he reads out a list of foods. None of them sound familiar to Ƈhatma, to his disappointment, although Violet hisses with glee at one of them. “I’ll have the Pot Pie,” she says.
They go around the table from there, asking him for food. It seems a very strange custom to Ƈhatma, but he assumes that this is because it’s a different country. He assumes that this is analogous to the longhouse where everyone in his altepetl eats. He assumes that it’s supposed to recreate that atmosphere of family for people who might not necessarily have one, or who aren’t necessarily related. He thinks that it’s a family operation that isn’t a business, and that the people who are serving them are giving them food and then they will repay them with services, or take their own turn making food the next night. That’s how his altepetl does it. They take turns: one sedoretu will make food for one night for the whole clan, and then for the next, they’ll pass it on to on or more groups of married people. That’s what he thinks. The idea of simply paying someone for food hasn’t occurred to him, because he does not live under an empire with currency.
By the time these thoughts have finished going through his head, he realizes that the man is waiting for him to answer. He is tempted to ask if they have any of this ethnic indigenous food that he really likes, but he can’t be picky and he can’t choose what he is being served by the people who are making it for him. So he picks something at random. “The same thing as her,” he says, pointing at Reed. It had sounded vaguely interesting, when she brought it up.
The man nods and goes away.
And still there is silence.
They are all looking down at the wood. Eiji has taken to examining the woodwork of the wall behind Tlazohtzin and Reed. Tlazohtzin has her eyes shut, and is sitting with her head leaning back against the wall. Violet has a faraway look on her face that means that she is thinking about something else entirely, something which Ƈhatma thinks he probably doesn’t want to know. Marat has a blank face on, as though he has shut off his brain. Ƈhatma thinks about kicking him under the table, and asking him, but he doesn’t know how Marat will react to that. Maybe he is asleep, as impossible as it seems in this place of noises and smells and people.
He turns to his right, where Kephri sits. He intends to engage him in conversation, of something, anything, but Kephri is contemplating his hands. He has feathers along the back of his hand and wrist, and claws at the ends of his fingers. As Ƈhatma watches, the feathers on his hand change from orange to red, to a rich blue that nearly matches the hue of Ƈhatma’s own. Ƈhatma spreads his wings a little more, until they have come partially unfurled and the edges brush the back of Kephri’s shoulders.
Kephri starts up and looks at him with such accusation in his face that Ƈhatma withdraws his wings at once. “Sorry,” he says.
Kephri blinks, nods, and goes back to contemplating colors for feathers.
Ƈhatma sits at the table by himself, surrounded by people, and feels sick to his stomach. No one will speak; no one will look at each other. In this boisterous, noisy place so similar to the longhouse where he grew up, they have created a corner of silence.
Ƈhatma’s major malfunction is that there’s a lot of things that are going on, that remind him very strongly of his hometown. Despite the fact that they are dressed differently, and speak differently, and arranged differently, it’s still a lot of people meeting in one place to eat food and talk to each other, and it makes him sad because he hasn’t seen his family in seven days.
As soon as that thought enters his head, a slew more follow it. He hasn’t seen his family in seven days. He hasn’t seen his alpacas in seven days. He and Huayna were going to meet Ophelia at the base camp and they were going to have fun. They were going to get to see Ƈhatma’s nieces and nephews, and cook dinner, and they would have spent time as a group, alone together, and there would have been no one to disturb them, and they would have gotten to know each other. Ƈhatma would have gotten to know where that scar on Wendy’s neck came from, and he would have, in turn, learned how to be patient when she started singing with her scratchy voice that wasn’t quite deep enough to do throat singing.
Ƈhatma finds himself blinking back tears. He looks around at the people at the table, and thinks, no. He will not let them see him like this. “I don’t know what any of that food is that he talked about,” he announces to the table at large. To Reed, he says, “Do you know what we are going to be eating?”
Reed snorts, and smiles. “I haven’t the faintest idea. It could be chicken feet, for all I know. Or worse.”
Violet makes a face. She seems to come back out of herself. “Chicken feet?” she asks, sticking out her tongue.
“Didn’t you eat the hearts of newborn babes in your world for breakfast every day?” Eiji asks coolly. “One would think that the foot of a fowl once at dinner would not be too off-putting.”
Ƈhatma’s breath catches in his throat. He turns to look at Violet, expecting her to deny it, or to make a joke about it. Instead, she sighs heavily and twists at the end of one of her braids. “Hearts are still meat. They’re smooth muscle, but they’re meat. Chicken feet are just … eugh.”
Tlazohtzin laughs. She does not sound terribly amused.
Ƈhatma still doesn’t know what they’re talking about. “What are chickens?” Ƈhatma asks.
<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>
The Great Post-Apocalyptic Pub Crawl — The Sugar Fields
[The focus character for this chapter is Ƈhatma. After having left the other place with some of the hierarchical order settled in, they are also approaching this movement more deliberately.]
“How long do you think we have this time?" Tlazohtzin asks Ƈhatma, as they are walking down the street. It’s the three of them — Ƈhatma, Tlazohtzin, and Eiji. Kephri went off on his own with Violet, doing god knows what. Ƈhatma assumes that it’s one of those weird things that he doesn’t yet understand. Some people just form instant bonds, and then no one else will ever be able to get into that relationship in quite the same way, and he supposes that one of those has formed, sometime between when Kephri was mistaken for a local governor and publicly “freed” Violet from slavery in front of a whole bunch of important people. Things like that have a way of changing a man, he knows, and he’s not going to begrudge them that. He’s just going to have to have some bonding experiences of his own, and fast, or else he’ll get left behind. This is why he suggested that, now that they know they’re not going to get passed out of this world individually — that’s what they assume, anyway, but who knows? Not Ƈhatma, although he’s willing to make a few educated guesses — they ought to go about and have bit of fun with the time that they have in this particular place.
“I don’t know,” Tlazohtzin says. “I’d rather not take that risk quite yet. I don’t know many of you yet, but you’re the closest thing to a family group that I have, or even to friends here, really. I’d rather not get stuck in a world alone where I’m the only one who’s really … you know.” She looks around at their surroundings, which are frosted and cold and smell faintly of something that Reed tells Ƈhatma is mint. He doesn’t know, but it was pleasant the first few hours and then quickly got annoying, although by now he can barely smell it.
“It’s not only that. I’d rather know what’s going on, in case a crisis arises,” Reed adds.
“If you’re talking about me and Kephri,” Violet starts in, and Reed cuts her off.
“that is not,’ she says. “I was thinking more, ‘what if someone decides that Eiji is really made of ice, and that it’s okay to take a chip off of him for their drink, like I just saw someone do across the street?”
Eiji looks highly offended. Ƈhatma puts a hand on his shoulder to reassure him. “They would quickly learn their mistake,” he says, and he sounds threatening when he says it, but then he adds, in exactly the same tone of voice, “I would beg into bleed to death on the street, and I do not think that my blood bears any resemblance to sugar confections of any sort.”
Ƈhatma refuses to be subdued by this. “You aren’t going to die,” he insists.
Eiji raises an eyebrow. “You don’t know that. It could happen.”
Ƈhatma shakes his head. “We’re the ones who don’t die. It’s like our signature move now.”
“Are you terribly sure? I knew those who were not supposed to die, and yet here they are not,” Violet says, folding her arms across her chest.
“Care to elaborate?” Reed says.
Violet shrugs and looks carelessly over her shoulder. They are standing on the corner outside of their inn, in furs and coats snagged from the last town over — they stand out like bleeding stumps of limbs on a battlefield, especially Kephri with his thick coat of white fur that puffs him up to about twice his usual width and breadth, but they are warm — and there are people milling around them, casting curious glances over at them. Ƈhatma wonders if maybe there is some sort of protective field around them that keeps them from being noticed, because he knows that if one of these candy types of people walked into his alteplano, he sure as hell would notice beyond a casual glance. A group of people whose frosted faces have been dyed purple and yellow in delicate swirling patterns hurls confectioner’s sugar at each other in powdery balls that fall apart before they can reach each other, laughing. They have no idea that there is any world outside of this one, as far as Ƈhatma can tell, and it unnerves him.
Around them, the sea of people swirls.
“I knew the High Old Ones,” Violet says. “They were the ones in charge of the realm.”
“I thought you were,” says Eiji.
She gives him a disparaging look. From someone so small, it doesn’t have the effect that she probably intended. “I’m a local ruler. I was only alive for a thousand years, you don’t get promoted that quickly even if you are one of the chosen living ones.” Get with the program.
“I think we’re missing the essential thing here, which is that we stand out,” Marat says, although of course he says it in a way that is age-appropriate and consistent with previous characterization.
Everyone turns to look at him, considering. Ƈhatma thinks that this is a fantastic suggestion, and that in fact they should probably listen to the babe more often, although yesterday he thought that trees were partially mythological, so perhaps not. Regardless. “Yes!” Ƈhatma says. “I think we should definitely take that into account, especially considering that despite the staggering breadth of diversity of color and form and shape and substance of the people residing in this good City of New Yorkshire, there are plenty of things that, ah, define us as a separate group.”
“Like the fact that one of us is a gigantic fucking raptor,” says Violet.
Ƈhatma feels the hackles rise on his back, and he whips his tail until he accidentally floors a passing old woman made out of sugar and snow cones. “Sorry,” he says to her, and wraps his tail around her to lift her back up again. It works part of the way, but then she faints and he is forced to sweep her aside so that she won’t get trampled by the resultant stampede. “I beg your pardon,” he says to Violet. “I don’t often take exception to people labeling me as things because those labels are so weird — you called me a bird the other day,” he says, directing this last comment at Eiji. Eiji lifts one shoulder, as if to say what could I do, these things do happen regrettably. “But there are raptors in my world, and they are disgusting. They are the lowest form of sentient life, and I do not want to be called one of them. It’s just that it’s cold here, so there’s no point in being a tiny little thing that sheds heat like anything. I don’t even have feathers when I’m small.”
“You should learn to grow them. They’re very warm,’ Kephri says, voice muffled by the fur covering his face.
Ƈhatma shakes his head, and starts to answer, but Reed cuts him off.
“All right! Enough. Fine. We’ll go out — but we need a time to meet back, and we need a place, and we need a system if one of us doesn’t get back in time, so that we don’t go leaving each other willy-nilly, do you understand?”
Violet looks sullen — Ƈhatma suspects it’s because she wanted to be the one to give the orders — but nods. Tlazohtzin follows her lead with enthusiasm. “That sounds like what my family and I used to do,” she says. “We’d split up — usually it was my brother and my cousin and me, and then my aunt would take my two younger cousins, and the youngest two would stay at the camp with our grandparents or go out with their own parents — anyway, what we’d do is set up a camp, and a sort of signal time. In most of the cities we went to, the local people had a specific time that they used for prayers, and when they were about to pray, they’d ring this huge gong that they had hanging in the main temple set up at the center of the city. So we’d use the gong as a signal, and head back by then.” Absurdly, she looks up and around, as though expecting to find a single cohesive signal in this ridiculous sprawling city.
[They agree to use a clock, and Reed shows them what that means, and makes sure that they all understand the concept of ten o’clock or something like that.]
Ƈhatma shrugs and pulls his coat tighter about him. In the interest of not standing out too much, he has elected to be human one agin, but it bothers him because he is still cold, and they still stand out. “I don’t know,” he says. “We had, what, a week last time? Seven days?”
“Six,” says Eiji.
“Right. So I don’t know, I have no idea. And the time before that, it was only three or four. I don’t know what the factors are.”
[Each time they stay, it gets a little longer, because they’re waiting — or, no, I suppose that it could be completely arbitrary. Sometimes it’s as long as a month, and other times, it’s only for a day or even for a few hours until they get silent. Maybe the last few are only an hour or so.]
The street is filled with so many people that they travel quite slowly, taking the time to stop and stare at everyone. Ƈhatma would feel bad, but they’re freaks and he’s perfectly all right with being stared back at, if anyone else would be so inclined. As they are not, he takes the liberties. He gawks at a woman nearly seven feet tall, with broad shoulders and flared hips that spin out into a frozen mint skirt striped in white and red.
The downside is, of course, that he gets hungry sooner. His stomach growls and makes itself known with its displeasure. “Hey, are either of you hungry? I’m hungry. I think we should find somewhere to eat. There’s got to be a building around here that would have food for us to eat, right?” he says.
Eiji looks around at the multitude of buildings pressed together along the length of the street, one on top of the other with billboards flashing in frosted colors over the rest of the crowd while the snow falls down in confectionary heaps. “I think it would be more difficult to find a place where there was no food,” he says.
“I saw a strip club a few streets back,” Tlazohtzin announces. “I don’t think they serve food at those.”
Ƈhatma blinks. “What’s a strip club?”
Tlazohtzin rolls her eyes. “Don’t tell me that you have — no.” She looks scandalized, because apparently I cannot do anything besides talk about their fucking facial expressions and nothing else, not the fact that they are walking through a damn city.
Eiji has never heard of a strip club, either, so Tlazohtzin explains it to him and Ƈhatma, who says that he would rather eat right now, anyway. They settle on a place to eat, which is called the Highwayman Tavern. It’s full of business people shouting on their cell phones, as incongruous as that is for candy world. Whatever, that’s what makes it cool.
The three of them walk in underneath the handsomely carved sugar doorway, or whatever it is. Can’t it be ice? Handsomely carved ice lintel. The room is bigger than Ƈhatma would have thought possible from the way it looked on the outside; narrow, but with ceilings tall enough that even in his bigger form, he could still have fit in here. Might not have been able to spread his wings without knocking into the walls, but then again, there were few places that could fit him regardless of where he was.
They stand at the entrance for a moment, looking around. Eiji pretends not to be as interested as he is. Ƈhatma nudges him. “What do you think, sour face?” he asks.
Eiji looks straight ahead, hands at his sides. “I don’t think I should be in here,” he says. “I’m fairly certain that I am violating at least one rule concerning proper behavior and courtesy of my order.”
Tlazohtzin bumps him on the shoulder. “And? Your order is dead, Eiji. You’re the only one left. Who’s going to know if you don’t follow every single little rule?”
Eiji scowls at her. His face settles into a mask, and he refuses to look at her. He turns around and starts to leave, but Ƈhatma grabs him by the arm. “Where are you going?” he asks.
Eiji tries to pull his arm out of Ƈhatma’s grip, unsuccessfully. Ƈhatma is very strong, and Eiji sits at desks in chairs and reads books for the majority of his time. “Let go of me,” he says. “I should not be here, and I will not stand for staying here.”
A woman walks up to them. She is small, compact, and dark, with licorice eyes that Ƈhatma finds he can’t quite meet comfortably. “Are you waiting for a table?” she asks.
“Three,” Tlazohtzin says, without acknowledging the struggle going on behind her.
“I’m just leaving,” Eiji snarls. Ƈhatma doesn’t want him going out into the city by himself. It’s dangerous for him, and besides, he’ll spoil the fun time that Ƈhatma wants to have. It’ll be fun. He’ll enjoy it. And if he leaves now, then he might get kidnapped, or have someone try to chip him open for ice to keep their drinks cold because maybe the snow just isn’t enough.
“He’s staying. He’s just having a moment of doubt,” Tlazohtzin informs the woman.
The woman looks between them uncertainly. “Do you want another moment? I can come back.”
Ƈhatma takes his attention away from Eiji for a moment, to reassure her that they’ll be fine. In that moment, Eiji takes advantage of his distraction to wrench his arm out of his grip and go stomping back out into the street. Ƈhatma taps Tlazohtzin on the shoulder and points out the door. When she sees Eiji’s retreating back, her lips thin.
“Yes, actually,” she says to the woman. “That’d be fantastic.”
The woman nods, candy-colored face concerned for a moment before she slides on another mask and goes back to serving the group of small green men behind them. “Sounds good.”
Ƈhatma and Tlazohtzin hurry back through the crowd, out onto the street. “What is he thinking,” Tlazohtzin grumbles.
Ƈhatma doesn’t answer. He scans the street for Eiji. For someone who looks so different from everyone else here — if not flesh and blood in the same way that he and Tlazohtzin are, then at least not made of sugar cane — Eiji is surprisingly difficult to locate. The night is only partially alleviated by the bright neon signs lining the street, and the colors of the lights mix with the colors of the people mix with the shadows to create a confusing patchwork in which Ƈhatma cannot tell the difference between one human being and the next. They were only separate for a very short amount of time, and Eiji moves slowly, but he still can’t find him. Beside him, Tlazohtzin looks about equally as frantically.
They find him standing behind them, right at the door, because he asn’t sure where he was going to go, and he was just going to wait for them after he was done because he doesn’t actually want to be by himself. Ƈhatma and Tlazohtzin go over to him and ask what’s wrong. He tells them that it’s that he doesn’t want to be disrespectful of his order, and he still hasn’t given up hope that maybe they’ve just moved on. He’s reluctant to tell them at first.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” he says.
“Bullshit,” Tlazohtzin says. “If you really didn’t want to talk about it, you would make up an excuse and move on with the conversation.” Eiji shoots her an evil look. “That’s what I’d do,” she explains.
~~*~~*~~*~~*~~*~~*~~
[What is going to happen now is their dinner there, where they meet Kephri and Violet.]
The waitress raises her eyebrows when she sees them all come in again, but she manages to control her expression by the tie that they get to the front of the line. “All sorted out?” she asks.
Eiji nods. “Please find us a table for three,” he says. “Preferably away from the bar.” \He glances disapprovingly at the men who are seated there, candy coated phones pressed to their ears, wait, does Ƈhatma even know what a phone is? He wouldn’t would he. Never mind, they are holding devices up to their ears and shouting down them, wearing dove gray confections that look stiff and uncomfortable.
The waitress picks up three shiny sheets of honey and leads them through the crowd. They pass through tables crammed against the slim wall space between wall and bar, and around up to a huge dark staircase. The stairs are black and sticky, and Ƈhatma keeps his hand off the railing. He can’t tell whether the stairs are sticky because of the material out of which they are made, in which case, maybe here it’s customary for the decorations and the walls to be sticky; on other hand, maybe it’s just that this isn’t a very clean place to eat, and they should probably turn around and leave. He doesn’t know.
They reach the top of the stairs. At the top of the stairs is a landing, smaller and slightly less crowded than the disaster downstairs. It’s brighter, too; part of one wall is cut away, revealing a kitchen of sorts for food preparation that is bright and white and clean looking. The waitress leads them over to a small round table at the far corner, right up against the railing. Tlazohtzin gives the height, and the drop over it, an uneasy glance, but Ƈhatma relishes it. Heights are his friend, and while this one isnt’ quite enough for a liftoff if he were to transform and were he to have the air open above him, it still gives him comfort. HE takes the saet closest to that. Eiji sits down on one side of him, and Tlazohtzin on the other. The waitress places sheets of honey in front of them. To Ƈhatma’s horror, there are little dark amber swirls and spikes printed onto the honey, translucent and easier to read if he holds them up to the light of the kitchen so that it shines through them.
“Can I get you anything to drink?” the woman asks, pushing candy-floss hair behind her ear.
Ƈhatma looks at Eiji and Tlazohtzin. He can feel his own eyes widening in response to both of theirs. “Um,” he says. “What are the drinks that we can choose from?”
The waitress points to the top of the menu, where there are a few small, delicate lines of text written there. Eiji glances at Ƈhatma. His face is blank, as it usually is, and in the dark it’s hard to tell, but Ƈhatma thinks that he can see a more controlled sort of fear there. Ƈhatma is confused, because he thought that Eiji could read, but then again, maybe he was wrong. After all, the people in the other place, the first place, the fields of colors, they had books and scholarly works, and they did not have written language in the same way that, say, Violet or Reed thought of it.
Tlazohtzin clears her throat. “Do you have water?” she asks.
The waitress smiles at her. She pulls out another slab of honey, this one small enough to fit in the front pocket of her dress, and writes something down with a green stick. Ƈhatma is impressed. He grins at Tlazohtzin, who lifts her chin.
“I would also like water,” Eiji announces, with the air of one making a grave statement.
“Me three,” Ƈhatma says.
The waitress writes this down, too, and then she goes away. As soon as she is out of earshot, Ƈhatma leans in. “What are we supposed to do?” he asks. “I can’t read. I thought you could, Eiji, what are you doing?”
Eiji purses his lips. “I can. I can read perfectly well, in three different written tongues of man.”
“Then what is your problem?” Tlazohtzin asks.
“These are not men,” Eiji says.
Ƈhatma is considering this problem. He’s never encountered it before — in the last two worlds they were in, it hadn’t been a problem. In the last world they were in, no one could read, and since he had been lumped into the “slave” category, he wasn’t supposed to be able to, anyway. As he considers how to ask the woman what they are supposed to be reading on their honey slabs when she clearly expected them all to be able to read, he sees a pale hand reach over to tap Tlazohtzin on the shoulder from behind her.
Tlazohtzin jumps. She slams her piece of honey on the table so hard that Ƈhatma fully expects it to break, and several people around them look up in surprise and irritation. She whips around. [Someone is sitting behind her, leaning back in his chair to get her attention, and that someone is Kephri.] It takes Ƈhatma a moment to place him, he is so surprised, and then he is annoyed when he looks over and sees that Kephri is joined by Violet, who has contrived to look much older than she actually is.
“Kephri!” Tlazohtzin snaps. “I am going to murder you, dismember your body, and bury your bones at the six corners of the earth.”
Kephri gives her a level look. “I was to help you with your menus,” he says.
“We don’t need help,” Ƈhatma says quickly.
Eiji frowns. “Yes, we do.”
~~*~~*~~*~~*~~
the mountains in between
~~*~~*~~*~~*~~*~~
Reed has seen many things in her thirty three years of life. She has seen men get blown up by their own stupidity. She has seen her best friend disappear into a whirl of red lace, only to reappear a moment later with a gigantic rubber ducky on his head. She has seen comrades in arms who have been killed in the line of duty, swept off their feet by a ghost in the machine and hurled against a rock to have their brains come oozing out of a crack in their skulls. She’s been moved from the twenty-second century to the seventeenth with the movement of one foot, and transported back in the next instant, only to hear Jack shouting at her to stand completely still until he had finished absorbing the offending ghost.
She came prepared for this, she thought.
She’d been prepared to carry around her backpack of supplies for however long it took, until she was either sure that she was going to be allowed to stay in this dull, quiet village, or else be whirled off to a further new place. I don’t know what to write. Reed thought she was prepared for this eventuality, and her heart still stopped when Ƈhatma disappeared. That had been stupid, foolish. It had happened so suddenly, the first time, that she hadn’t had any time to analyze it. One moment she had been in her apartment, and the next, she had been in another world. And the second time, it had happened so slowly, that she hadn’t even known it was there to analyze.
None of this matters. The point is that she sees their surroundings, and recognizes the plain northern temperate forests from a few days prior. Her heart sinks.
“Shit,” she mutters, and then remembers that she is in the company of children. She points at Marat. “Don’t repeat that, mind you.”
Marat holds up one hand and tips it from side to side. “I hear it all the time at work,” he says. “I ain’t’ supposed to say it at home, but there’s plenty as use it at the drop of a pin.”
And then there’s that. She isn’t even working with normal people. Reed isn’t’ good with children on the best of days, and now she has to stick with a boy whose body is half-metal, and the half that isn’t is the body of an eight year old, and everything else is a strange combination of eight years old and at least the same age as her. She has seen things, she knows, that would horrify some of her nieces and nephews; but then again, she thinks, so has this boy.
There doesn’t seem to be anything to do but walk, after that. Reed had been planning on leaving her bag at home for once, just once, but then she’d thought that perhaps she would have something to barter with, if need be. Now, she doesn’t think she will ever take it off, even when she goes to sleep.
The hill that they just came down seems to be the same one that they saw when they first arrived in the village of color. Reed looks up at it, and thinks about going back up to the forest. Ahead of them is plains, flat and empty again as though they had never left them. There are blue mountains in the distance, low-lying and useless.
“I submit that we ought to keep on moving forward,” Ƈhatma says. “I am all out of trees and forests for the time being.”
“They’re safe,” Kephri says, with the solidity of finality. Reed thinks that he means to say something more along the lines of, “I’d like to go back to those places, because we know those, and they provide cover, what does everyone else think?” and it just doesn’t come out of his mouth like that, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t irritating, doesn’t rub her the wrong way all the same. She tries to remind herself that it’s just a cultural thing. Perhaps his people don’t have a way of asking questions. Perhaps they are built into the spoken language, and it just doesn’t translate through whatever mechanism allows them to speak to each other.
Or perhaps he’s just rude.
“They’re also home to mysterious forces that can pull us to and from different worlds at the drop of a hat,” Reed points out.
“They’re the same place?” Marat asks, doubt dripping from his words.
[They argue. Because Marat is nervous about the plains, and Kephri just wants to go back to the woods because it's more familiar and less exposed than the plains. It's cold, and there's still a plain, purely cloudy sky. Everyone is tired. They eat some of the supplies that Reed picked up while they were on the island of color and put in her bag; a heavy loaf of bread and a whole lot of jerky.]
“I’m sorry,” Ƈhatma says. He has changed back into a human form, what he calls his “small form”; Reed has no idea how to categorize him, and is pretty sure that to do so would be to violate some sort of social boundary, so she doesn’t argue with it when he tells her that it wastes energy, but it’s also a lot more energy-efficient and anyway this way he won’t be able to leave them by accident again. “What if you hadn’t been able to find me again?” he says, eyes meeting hers with earnest concern filling them.
“For what?” asks Tlazohtzin. She seems to be doing all right. Reed’s only exposure to pregnancy has been through the occasional emails that her older sister had sent her during hers, but Tlazohtzin seems to be doing well enough for now.
[This is the part where they recover each other. I don’t know what needs to happen. If they’re gradually powering up, without noticing it very much, I wanted to do a sort of Diana Wynne Jones thing. It’s not fire and brimstone, and fearsome acts of magic at the drop of a hat. There are more subtle clues. Tlazohtzin really wants a place to rest. Shortly thereafter, they come across an inn that has rooms close enough to each other that they can stay. It’s not super-convenient, but it’s good. That’s just the beginning. In the middle, things start to come easier to them, to the point that they can start to influence the world around them more directly. This happens throughout the second half of the second part, and the whole of the third. By the time they get to the end of the third, they’ve incorporated that into their lifestyle. A bit. But that doesn’t make sense, because — no, see, I really liked the idea of having the choice of hitting the reset button.]
[For the Evening Paths, they don’t start out in their own dead worlds. First, they go to a few dead worlds. Then, they go to one of the previous worlds, and that’s dead, too. Then, for the final world, they go to one of their own. Or they all split up, and go to their own, but the narrative only follows one character to theirs. The final section of that is all of them meeting back up, and being shaken.]
[But would that really make sense? What if they survive the apocalypse of their own world, and then as they are traveling through that wasteland, they end up meeting each other, and finding out that the worlds have collided? So they’re going through an amalgamation wasteland. It would make it easier to survive, certainly.]
[Goddamn. So, try to write as much of the other world parts as you can. Those are staying, and it’s just the context that matters.]
[What if the apocalypse is the result of various iterations of earth all being drawn in too close, until they collide and go out like melting putty? The result is a single plane containing a mosaic of different worlds, all of them ruined and abandoned. Or not even abandoned — just empty. Because everyone are doppelgangers of other versions of themselves, so the only ones that can survive singly are only ones.]
[Maybe they are the epicenter of the apocalypse. The other iterations are slowly — or quickly — being absorbed into the plane. Strange shifting geographies, or ghosts in the machine who don’t yet realize that they are no longer allowed to exist. The third act twist is that they come to a far-ff series that is nearly identical to their own world. And the impetus to keep moving on is that they wake up and everyone in the world has gone.]
[In the evening paths, they come to the end of the worlds. It’s just darkness, and they are the only ones. Or, no. In the evening paths, the worlds around them start to fade, fainter and less real than the ones before them. The midnight paths are the total darkness, and mainly consist of philosophy and trying to fix things. They take place several years after the first part.]
[This is when the reset or continue part comes in. I don’t quite know how yet. And then there can be a seventh section, the dawn paths, about whatever happens next. It only needs to be one chapter long, because they are one now. I just want everything to bundle together neatly, and to keep making sense in an orderly fashion — the way that the structure of a neuron mirrors the structure of the known universe.]
[With this in mind, I am going to rewrite the end of the last chapter, in order to make it make more sense and stay in line with this new one. In that version, they walk down to the town, and find that everyone else is gone. I’m also going to have to restructure the first two parts, in order to bring them into line with what I’ve envisioned, but that’s okay, that’s fine, it’s not that difficult a change to make. I’m just going to skip straight ahead to the world that I have planned out, and that is the city that is at war.]
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the city at war
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They leave the deserted plains behind them, for which Marat is glad. There isn’t anything to be gained by standing around in an open field, waiting for food to drop from the sky. Marat’s stomach grumbles. He starts to sing to cover up the sound, for fear that someone might hear. He doesn’t think that Reed will be upset with him, but other people, he isn’t so sure about. Eiji is nice, but there’s nice and then there’s nice, and he isn’t sure which category the man falls into yet.
Anyway, the place they’re going to now looks nice. He can hear bells and voices up ahead, which means people, and people usually means places to buy food. Not just here, anywhere. Marat is wandering around alongside Violet, who hides frightening things behind her clothing and behind her eyes, but who hasn’t shown her teeth yet. Marat figures that if he just keeps on doing what he’s doing, then nothing can go wrong. Right?
Marat snorts to himself softly. He isn’t that stupid.
“What’s so funny?” Violet asks.
Marat smiles up at her. “I was just thinking about what my sisters would say, if they saw me now,” he says. “I ain’t never been outside of Albion in all my life before this, and now, now look. Now look at me in the grass, and sitting with cows. And with all of the strange people in the world, meaning no disrespect to anyone here.”
Violet bobbed her head, as if to say, yes, well, why not. She hooked her thumbs into the loops of her backpack. It looks strange against her back. “Do you miss your sisters?” she asks.
Marat scowls at her. She’s talking down to him again, talking the way that Reed and Ƈhatma do. As much as he likes them, thinks that they’re all right for adults, he’s still annoyed by it. He isn’t a little kid. He isn’t four or something. “No,” he lies, and then decides that wasn’t convincing enough, amending it to, “Not that much. I didn’t get to see them so much, anyway. One or the other of us was always working. If we wasn’t working, we was sleeping.” Which is true, in its own way. It doesn’t change the fact that when he went out to eat lunch, Claire could sneak across the streets from her work and they could have lunch together, or the fact that sometimes all three of their breaks would line up and for fifteen minutes every day, they could all congregate at the open end of the yard of the thread factory where Marat and Jaime worked, and annoy each other if they weren’t eating with friends.
Violet narrows her eyes. “You didn’t play with them after work?”
Marat shakes his head vigorously. Stupid girl, does she think that he’s a sissy or something? “Me and Claire helped our ma with the washing up, yeah. And then we’d go to sleep. It’d be too tired for dinner, anyway.” He casts about for something different to talk about, so that she won’t look at him with that combination of pity and revulsion. He knows it when he sees it, and why does everyone think he’s so stupid all of the time? “What’d you do?” he asks. “Reed says she was a superhero, and Tlazohtzin was a princess.”
“Queen,” Tlazohtzin interrupts, voice low. Marat reaches up to tip his hat to her to apologize, remembers that he left it in the factory the day that he left.
“Sorry, miss,” he says.
Violet looks contemplative. She doesn’t answer at first. She reaches around him to pull him away from a hole that someone dug in the ground, from somewhere else. Marat doesn’t know when, and he doesn’t know why. He hopes that they reach the distant houses soon, so that he can go exploring. Or, no, Reed is going to make sure that they all stick together, so that they don’t get lost.
[They arrive in the town. Colonial Massachusetts, with mutants. They meet people, and they find lodgings at an inn — together this time, as Reed insists — and there is arguing because Eiji wants to not be bound to them, and Violet doesn’t either in particular — but they get that, and then they break off to go exploring.]
The town is bustling. That’s the only way that Marat can think of to describe it. It isn’t the way that London is when he’s in the town, the way that it does with the crowds of people pushing through the filth and the streets piled with horse shit and dog shit and human shit and people sleeping in the shit, yelling at him because he uses those words; there is elbow room here, and there aren’t nearly so many children. In fact, when Marat looks around, it’s mostly men.
Ƈhatma is in his small form, human form, because he says that there are no huge people around, and that would be unsettling. Marat is glad for it, because Ƈhatma is a wonderful, huge, ebullient presence when he’s a human, but when he’s a giant bird who says that he’s from a foreign place and has two wives and a husband and herds sheep up and down mountains for a living, then Marat starts to get afraid. He’s also wearing the clothing that they picked up from the last place that they stayed at, so he sort of fits in with the rest of them.
None of them fit in with the town, though. Marat sticks close to Eiji after the first man stares at him and openly points to his mechanical arm and legs. “What’s the matter with you, boy?” he bellows, raucous laughter coming form him and his friends by the fish market. They all think that this is a great joke, that is until they see Eiji. Then their eyes open wide as Eiji holds up a hand to them. “Peace and greetings,” he says, over the noise.
They are in the middle of a street. The town is cooler than the place that they just left, but sunnier, bright sun that streaks everything in gold. The air is clean here, too, but tinged with enough smoke that Marat feels at home, rather than smothered and overwhelmed by all of the scents of the wood and the field vying for his attention. The town, such as it is, is located — okay, breaking character here. They’re in a New England port town in the late seventeenth century. It’s been established as a port town and a point of commerce, so that there are even some women here, and people from other colonies who travel, so it has an economy. However, most of the occupants are men. There are a lot of fishermen and trappers here, and there are some people who are natives of the region, who look more like Tlazohtzin except not really — to everyone else, they do, and to her, they look just as different as she does from Eiji. Or she would if he had skin. This place is a place that is fairly populous as far as the seventeenth century goes, but for most people, it’s going to look like a tiny town. There’s a wide dirt road with wheel ruts in it, and there are a number of other roads branching off of that, with houses and buildings — it looks a bit like Williamsburg, but less dry and more green because they decided, foolishly, to build it on a recently filled-in piece of swampland.
Now, I did say that this was a mutant town. That is to say, there are mutants here. They are usually of the partially-animal variety, possessing extra limbs or differently colored patches of fur, and at first glance, they look like Kephri. Except that they can’t change themselves. Then there are also those who are possessed of powers that look like Reed, and there’s a huge war going on between different factions, which has spilled over into the New World. Instead of having them be outcasts like in X-Men, they are in fact the ruling class. The leader of the town is a mutant, and his name is John Smith, because I can, and it’s a fairly common name, right? So he’s a mutant. And mutants command great respect, or fear — it’s probably a relationship of fear, rather than one of respect, now that I think about it. They came to rise up at the beginning of the fourteenth century, after the Spanish flu, when mutants became more populous.
That’s the basic structure of the society. And in this manner, the town has been formed. They are used to people who look like Kephri, and Eiji, but not necessarily anyone else, and definitely not Marat. He’s a purely Victorian steam punk type of invention.
Marat pulls closer to Eiji, who glares at the men.
When they see him, their expressions change. “How do you do, sir?” they say.
Eiji nods at them. “How do you do?” he repeats. Marat looks up at him, amazed at the change which comes over his whole demeanor. It’s almost like he turned into one of them.
“Where do you be hailing from?” the first man asks, the bigburly one who laughed at Marat and stared.
Eiji looks around at their members of their party. Marat tugs on Reed’s sleeve, because it’s a loud town and no one else is paying attention. She looks down at him; he points over at the men, to whom Eiji is still talking. Reed’s eyes widen comically, and she stops everyone else with a wave of her hand that halts their progress.
“We’re coming from the east,” Eiji says.
The men look at each other. “You mean over the seas, or up to the northeast, where the Injuns are?” asks one man. He squints at Eiji. “You ain’t an Injun, are you?”
Eiji lifts his chin. “I don’t have any idea what you mean.”
Marat runs back over to stand beside him and watch him talk to the men. It seems the thing to do; no one else is taking the initiative. Then Kephri steps up. He abandoned his goat legs for now, which Marat is pleased about because he doesn’t like how they feel. They’re rough to the touch, and dirty. Today, he is a lizard, covered from nose to the tip of his tail in flexible green plates: it’s warm, he says, so cold blood is better. Marat doesn’t know what that means; lizard scales look mighty hot to him, and he knows that his metal parts sometimes get hot to touch when he’s working in the factory in the summer, especially if he stands in the sun that comes in through the windows for too long — that is beside the point. The point is that Kephri emerges to stand next to Eiji, and the men’s expressions change again. They immediately switch their attention from Eiji to Kephri.
“Sir Aaron?” says the bulky one. He’s the kind, Marat knows from experience, who looks more useless than he actually is. Mr. Nathanson’s partner, Mr. Hess, is like that, too. He’s big and bulky on the outside, and it looks like fat but underneath the fat, there’s muscle to bolster it up.
Kephri looks from Eiji to the bulky one, but Marat is fairly certain that he’s talking about Kephri.
“No,” says Kephri.
The two men exchange glances. The first one shrugs, and the bulky one crosses his arms. “You sure? You look an awful lot like Sir Aaron to me, sir.”
Violet puts a hand on Kephri’s shoulder. “Are you questioning him?” she asks. Marat shivers at the icicles in her voice. There are her teeth, he thinks to himself.
The bulky man scoffs at her. “I beg your pardon, little miss vran djevojka.“ He leans forward and licks his fat pale lips. “I’ll have you apologizing to me now for your insolence. It don’t matter to me who your master is.”
Violet, very slowly, lets her hand slide down Kephri’s arm until both of her arms hang at her sides. Marat steps quietly away, back towards Ƈhatma. He would like no part in this. “What did you call me?” she asks.
“Violet.” Reed’s tall, stocky figure crosses Marat’s path, blocking his view of the proceedings. He can see her grabbing Violet’s arm. “Please don’t.”
Violet looks over her shoulder and gives Reed a death glare that would have cowed Marat if he had been on the receiving end — cows him even though he isn’t — but Reed is having none of it. She drags Violet away, and Eiji takes her other side to help them. Kephri waves to the men as they walk away. The men respond with jeers that would make Marat’s mother sigh and click her tongue if he ever said them in private.
[There are slurs here about the color of Violet’s skin, and what she is wearing, and how she’s lucky that her mother is there to teach her about her proper place.]
Marat shuffles along next to Eiji. He reflexively reaches out to take his hand with his own good one. Eiji’s hand is a funny combination of cool and flexible, glass but with all of the movement of skin. He looks down at Marat with surprise, eyebrows arching. “What are you doing?” he asks.
Marat feels embarrassed and slips his hand away. “It’s easy to get lost if you’re not holding hands,” he explains. When he says the words aloud, he realizes how foolish and small he sounds.
Eiji’s face remains as it was, eyebrows raised but nothing else moving. He lifts his gaze to look around at the people around them, and then returns to Marat. Marat thinks that he might be frowning now, but it’s hard to be sure because of the way that the light reflects off of his face. At any rate, he touches the tips of his fingers to Marat’s shoulder, and it looks as though he’s about to say something else when they are interrupted by sudden movement in front of them. Marat jumps as Violet drags herself away from Reed and presses her back against the wall of a house on the side of the road where they are.
Violet argues with Reed that she doesn’t want to be told what to do, and she can’t be held responsible for her actions. “Did you see what they were calling me? Did you?” she grinds out.
Reed scowls and looks back over her shoulder. Marat looks around, cautious of people who might be watching them and seeing them and paying too much attention. He feels very exposed, out where there are people without any clockwork bits to them, so many whole people. It makes him uncomfortable, because these people are the upper-class, and they are the ones who can afford to get whole repairs, or better yet, who don’t have jobs that endanger them in the first place, put them in the position of having lost limbs. When they do, it’s adventuring or something, and it’s a mark of prestige to not need to have them replaced the way that he and his friends do. When he’s around his friends and his siblings, there are often a great number of them who have missing limbs, replaced by cheap brass clockwork.
The Great Post-Apocalyptic Pub Crawl — City at War
The first place that they come to that looks like a public service place, Violet determinedly steps through the door. Marat hesitates to follow her because he’s afraid of what Reed might say. Reed stops at the door and makes a show of reading the menu and the sign posted outside, which just is a blur of squiggles to Marat. Then she turns around and signals that everyone ought to come inside. The building is made of wood, like most of the places around here, wood that is held together with lighter colored slats, and covered with thatch as opposed to the finer wood on some of the other buildings. The inside is dark and noisy and smells of beer, and the floor is made of dirt. Marat is careful to avoid a dark, sticky-looking patch, for fear of getting more tarnish on his foot.
“I doubt this place,” Tlazohtzin says. “It’s the kind of, when I would travel with my family, we’d call it a zamyeha mud hole, and wouldn’t let my younger cousins look inside.” She glances down significantly at Marat.
Marat pretends not to hear her. He looks for the skuzzy people with half of their bodies or more replaced by metal, but even though the people here are ragged and sad-looking, they are still fully human. He doesn’t like it.
They leave this place.
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the sugar fields
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“Come on, Ƈhatma. We’re leaving,” Tlazohtzin calls.
Ƈhatma sticks his head out of the second-floor window of the house he’s been investigating. “There’s blankets in here. Don’t blankets seem like a good idea? We don’t know where we’re going. We might need to spend the night outside. It might be cold.” He reaches over to the bed and picks off the top layer of blankets, gripping a fistful and walking backwards towards the window. The blankets get caught on the bed for a moment, but then they pull free, and Ƈhatma stumbles backwards until he nearly falls out of the window.
[This is the grief and the avoidance thereof part of the story, shown through the archetypal Ƈhatma. Ƈhatma is sad because he’s had time to catch his breath now. It happens when they’re sitting down to eat dinner at a tavern, and he realizes that it’s been a week since he saw his family. He’s sad, but he’s trying to hide it because there’s no point. So he tries to be happy with the people that he has now, because he adapts, right? That’s his thing, is that he can make the best of any situation. So he tries to do the best that he can, and try to talk to everyone and make them into his own family. He gets disappointed because he sees that that’s not going to happen, and that everyone else is trying to deal with their grief, too. He ends up trying to help them through that, in the hopes that that will help them and calm them down and then they can please not talk about this, never talk about this again.]
They end up eating at a place that is nice enough, he supposes. The lights are as bright as anything in this part of the world, and the man who greets them at the door has one arm that is a wing, a bat’s wing that stretches down to the side and folds up tightly. Ƈhatma beams at him, and spreads his own wings a little in acknowledgement. Flight apparatus are flight apparatus, regardless of the means by which they have it, and the man acknowledges this a bit with a small smile.
“I’m pleased to serve you today,” he says. “Are you looking for a family table?”
Ƈhatma feels a sick prickling that starts in his stomach and works its way up and out to the tips of his fingers. He tries to shrink into the background, and ends up bumping into Eiji. Eiji doesn’t acknowledge it, too busy waiting.
Reed is the one who speaks. “Yes, I think so. There are seven of us,” she says.
The man nods. “Very good. This way, please.” He gestures with the claw protruding from the tip of his wing to an area far in the back of the inn. Reed glances back over her shoulder as she follows him, waiting for them all to listen. One by one, they straggle after her. They are led to a place against the wall, with rough-hewn wooden seats ringed around a rough-hewn wooden table with a bench backed against the corner of the wall. There is some shuffling as they get settled down. Reed assumes the corner seat, eyes darting everywhere so fast and paranoid that it’s almost comical, though Ƈhatma doesn’t feel inclined to laugh. He feels dizzy, prickly, on edge. Family. He knows that it’s just a word that the man used to figure out where they ought to be put, together or separate, but that’s the word, family? Not group? Why?
Violet sits down at the short end of the table, against the wall, and Kephri joins her, sitting on one of the stools. Ƈhatma looks at the space between the wall and the chairs, and decides that it is nowhere near enough to give him room to spread his wings. He opts to sit down next to Kephri. This leaves Tlazohtzin to sit against the wall by Reed, at right angles to Violet. Eiji seats himself next to Ƈhatma, back so straight that it makes Ƈhatma’s spine ache with sympathy, and Marat plunks himself down next to Tlazohtzin with a rattling of metal against the wood that makes Tlazohtzin wince.
The place where they have found themselves is quiet, for the number of people who are there. Ƈhatma has been in places this large, eaten at them with his family group, and the whole of his kin, but then there are lots of them, and they are only all together for certain occasions of the year, so he supposes that they ought to be more excited. These people all seem to not know each other as well, but even within tables, they are speaking to each other in animated, but quiet, tones that do not disturb anyone else. At the bar, where there are bottles and colored bottles and more colored bottles arranged and poured by a man whose clothing is slightly finer than that of other people, there are a number of men who sit there, talking to each other and drinking from glass pitchers. Something about the whole atmosphere strikes Ƈhatma as off, but aside from making him feel achingly homesick, he doesn’t know what.
At their own table, everyone is silent. The man with the one bat wing comes back. In his human hand, he has seven small glass pitchers of a golden liquid poured and curled in various configurations to prevent them from falling over. He hooks each one with his bat claw and uses it to set them down in front of everyone. Then he reads out a list of foods. None of them sound familiar to Ƈhatma, to his disappointment, although Violet hisses with glee at one of them. “I’ll have the Pot Pie,” she says.
They go around the table from there, asking him for food. It seems a very strange custom to Ƈhatma, but he assumes that this is because it’s a different country. He assumes that this is analogous to the longhouse where everyone in his altepetl eats. He assumes that it’s supposed to recreate that atmosphere of family for people who might not necessarily have one, or who aren’t necessarily related. He thinks that it’s a family operation that isn’t a business, and that the people who are serving them are giving them food and then they will repay them with services, or take their own turn making food the next night. That’s how his altepetl does it. They take turns: one sedoretu will make food for one night for the whole clan, and then for the next, they’ll pass it on to on or more groups of married people. That’s what he thinks. The idea of simply paying someone for food hasn’t occurred to him, because he does not live under an empire with currency.
By the time these thoughts have finished going through his head, he realizes that the man is waiting for him to answer. He is tempted to ask if they have any of this ethnic indigenous food that he really likes, but he can’t be picky and he can’t choose what he is being served by the people who are making it for him. So he picks something at random. “The same thing as her,” he says, pointing at Reed. It had sounded vaguely interesting, when she brought it up.
The man nods and goes away.
And still there is silence.
They are all looking down at the wood. Eiji has taken to examining the woodwork of the wall behind Tlazohtzin and Reed. Tlazohtzin has her eyes shut, and is sitting with her head leaning back against the wall. Violet has a faraway look on her face that means that she is thinking about something else entirely, something which Ƈhatma thinks he probably doesn’t want to know. Marat has a blank face on, as though he has shut off his brain. Ƈhatma thinks about kicking him under the table, and asking him, but he doesn’t know how Marat will react to that. Maybe he is asleep, as impossible as it seems in this place of noises and smells and people.
He turns to his right, where Kephri sits. He intends to engage him in conversation, of something, anything, but Kephri is contemplating his hands. He has feathers along the back of his hand and wrist, and claws at the ends of his fingers. As Ƈhatma watches, the feathers on his hand change from orange to red, to a rich blue that nearly matches the hue of Ƈhatma’s own. Ƈhatma spreads his wings a little more, until they have come partially unfurled and the edges brush the back of Kephri’s shoulders.
Kephri starts up and looks at him with such accusation in his face that Ƈhatma withdraws his wings at once. “Sorry,” he says.
Kephri blinks, nods, and goes back to contemplating colors for feathers.
Ƈhatma sits at the table by himself, surrounded by people, and feels sick to his stomach. No one will speak; no one will look at each other. In this boisterous, noisy place so similar to the longhouse where he grew up, they have created a corner of silence.
Ƈhatma’s major malfunction is that there’s a lot of things that are going on, that remind him very strongly of his hometown. Despite the fact that they are dressed differently, and speak differently, and arranged differently, it’s still a lot of people meeting in one place to eat food and talk to each other, and it makes him sad because he hasn’t seen his family in seven days.
As soon as that thought enters his head, a slew more follow it. He hasn’t seen his family in seven days. He hasn’t seen his alpacas in seven days. He and Huayna were going to meet Ophelia at the base camp and they were going to have fun. They were going to get to see Ƈhatma’s nieces and nephews, and cook dinner, and they would have spent time as a group, alone together, and there would have been no one to disturb them, and they would have gotten to know each other. Ƈhatma would have gotten to know where that scar on Wendy’s neck came from, and he would have, in turn, learned how to be patient when she started singing with her scratchy voice that wasn’t quite deep enough to do throat singing.
Ƈhatma finds himself blinking back tears. He looks around at the people at the table, and thinks, no. He will not let them see him like this. “I don’t know what any of that food is that he talked about,” he announces to the table at large. To Reed, he says, “Do you know what we are going to be eating?”
Reed snorts, and smiles. “I haven’t the faintest idea. It could be chicken feet, for all I know. Or worse.”
Violet makes a face. She seems to come back out of herself. “Chicken feet?” she asks, sticking out her tongue.
“Didn’t you eat the hearts of newborn babes in your world for breakfast every day?” Eiji asks coolly. “One would think that the foot of a fowl once at dinner would not be too off-putting.”
Ƈhatma’s breath catches in his throat. He turns to look at Violet, expecting her to deny it, or to make a joke about it. Instead, she sighs heavily and twists at the end of one of her braids. “Hearts are still meat. They’re smooth muscle, but they’re meat. Chicken feet are just … eugh.”
Tlazohtzin laughs. She does not sound terribly amused.
Ƈhatma still doesn’t know what they’re talking about. “What are chickens?” Ƈhatma asks.
<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>
The Great Post-Apocalyptic Pub Crawl — The Sugar Fields
[The focus character for this chapter is Ƈhatma. After having left the other place with some of the hierarchical order settled in, they are also approaching this movement more deliberately.]
“How long do you think we have this time?" Tlazohtzin asks Ƈhatma, as they are walking down the street. It’s the three of them — Ƈhatma, Tlazohtzin, and Eiji. Kephri went off on his own with Violet, doing god knows what. Ƈhatma assumes that it’s one of those weird things that he doesn’t yet understand. Some people just form instant bonds, and then no one else will ever be able to get into that relationship in quite the same way, and he supposes that one of those has formed, sometime between when Kephri was mistaken for a local governor and publicly “freed” Violet from slavery in front of a whole bunch of important people. Things like that have a way of changing a man, he knows, and he’s not going to begrudge them that. He’s just going to have to have some bonding experiences of his own, and fast, or else he’ll get left behind. This is why he suggested that, now that they know they’re not going to get passed out of this world individually — that’s what they assume, anyway, but who knows? Not Ƈhatma, although he’s willing to make a few educated guesses — they ought to go about and have bit of fun with the time that they have in this particular place.
“I don’t know,” Tlazohtzin says. “I’d rather not take that risk quite yet. I don’t know many of you yet, but you’re the closest thing to a family group that I have, or even to friends here, really. I’d rather not get stuck in a world alone where I’m the only one who’s really … you know.” She looks around at their surroundings, which are frosted and cold and smell faintly of something that Reed tells Ƈhatma is mint. He doesn’t know, but it was pleasant the first few hours and then quickly got annoying, although by now he can barely smell it.
“It’s not only that. I’d rather know what’s going on, in case a crisis arises,” Reed adds.
“If you’re talking about me and Kephri,” Violet starts in, and Reed cuts her off.
“that is not,’ she says. “I was thinking more, ‘what if someone decides that Eiji is really made of ice, and that it’s okay to take a chip off of him for their drink, like I just saw someone do across the street?”
Eiji looks highly offended. Ƈhatma puts a hand on his shoulder to reassure him. “They would quickly learn their mistake,” he says, and he sounds threatening when he says it, but then he adds, in exactly the same tone of voice, “I would beg into bleed to death on the street, and I do not think that my blood bears any resemblance to sugar confections of any sort.”
Ƈhatma refuses to be subdued by this. “You aren’t going to die,” he insists.
Eiji raises an eyebrow. “You don’t know that. It could happen.”
Ƈhatma shakes his head. “We’re the ones who don’t die. It’s like our signature move now.”
“Are you terribly sure? I knew those who were not supposed to die, and yet here they are not,” Violet says, folding her arms across her chest.
“Care to elaborate?” Reed says.
Violet shrugs and looks carelessly over her shoulder. They are standing on the corner outside of their inn, in furs and coats snagged from the last town over — they stand out like bleeding stumps of limbs on a battlefield, especially Kephri with his thick coat of white fur that puffs him up to about twice his usual width and breadth, but they are warm — and there are people milling around them, casting curious glances over at them. Ƈhatma wonders if maybe there is some sort of protective field around them that keeps them from being noticed, because he knows that if one of these candy types of people walked into his alteplano, he sure as hell would notice beyond a casual glance. A group of people whose frosted faces have been dyed purple and yellow in delicate swirling patterns hurls confectioner’s sugar at each other in powdery balls that fall apart before they can reach each other, laughing. They have no idea that there is any world outside of this one, as far as Ƈhatma can tell, and it unnerves him.
Around them, the sea of people swirls.
“I knew the High Old Ones,” Violet says. “They were the ones in charge of the realm.”
“I thought you were,” says Eiji.
She gives him a disparaging look. From someone so small, it doesn’t have the effect that she probably intended. “I’m a local ruler. I was only alive for a thousand years, you don’t get promoted that quickly even if you are one of the chosen living ones.” Get with the program.
“I think we’re missing the essential thing here, which is that we stand out,” Marat says, although of course he says it in a way that is age-appropriate and consistent with previous characterization.
Everyone turns to look at him, considering. Ƈhatma thinks that this is a fantastic suggestion, and that in fact they should probably listen to the babe more often, although yesterday he thought that trees were partially mythological, so perhaps not. Regardless. “Yes!” Ƈhatma says. “I think we should definitely take that into account, especially considering that despite the staggering breadth of diversity of color and form and shape and substance of the people residing in this good City of New Yorkshire, there are plenty of things that, ah, define us as a separate group.”
“Like the fact that one of us is a gigantic fucking raptor,” says Violet.
Ƈhatma feels the hackles rise on his back, and he whips his tail until he accidentally floors a passing old woman made out of sugar and snow cones. “Sorry,” he says to her, and wraps his tail around her to lift her back up again. It works part of the way, but then she faints and he is forced to sweep her aside so that she won’t get trampled by the resultant stampede. “I beg your pardon,” he says to Violet. “I don’t often take exception to people labeling me as things because those labels are so weird — you called me a bird the other day,” he says, directing this last comment at Eiji. Eiji lifts one shoulder, as if to say what could I do, these things do happen regrettably. “But there are raptors in my world, and they are disgusting. They are the lowest form of sentient life, and I do not want to be called one of them. It’s just that it’s cold here, so there’s no point in being a tiny little thing that sheds heat like anything. I don’t even have feathers when I’m small.”
“You should learn to grow them. They’re very warm,’ Kephri says, voice muffled by the fur covering his face.
Ƈhatma shakes his head, and starts to answer, but Reed cuts him off.
“All right! Enough. Fine. We’ll go out — but we need a time to meet back, and we need a place, and we need a system if one of us doesn’t get back in time, so that we don’t go leaving each other willy-nilly, do you understand?”
Violet looks sullen — Ƈhatma suspects it’s because she wanted to be the one to give the orders — but nods. Tlazohtzin follows her lead with enthusiasm. “That sounds like what my family and I used to do,” she says. “We’d split up — usually it was my brother and my cousin and me, and then my aunt would take my two younger cousins, and the youngest two would stay at the camp with our grandparents or go out with their own parents — anyway, what we’d do is set up a camp, and a sort of signal time. In most of the cities we went to, the local people had a specific time that they used for prayers, and when they were about to pray, they’d ring this huge gong that they had hanging in the main temple set up at the center of the city. So we’d use the gong as a signal, and head back by then.” Absurdly, she looks up and around, as though expecting to find a single cohesive signal in this ridiculous sprawling city.
[They agree to use a clock, and Reed shows them what that means, and makes sure that they all understand the concept of ten o’clock or something like that.]
Ƈhatma shrugs and pulls his coat tighter about him. In the interest of not standing out too much, he has elected to be human one agin, but it bothers him because he is still cold, and they still stand out. “I don’t know,” he says. “We had, what, a week last time? Seven days?”
“Six,” says Eiji.
“Right. So I don’t know, I have no idea. And the time before that, it was only three or four. I don’t know what the factors are.”
[Each time they stay, it gets a little longer, because they’re waiting — or, no, I suppose that it could be completely arbitrary. Sometimes it’s as long as a month, and other times, it’s only for a day or even for a few hours until they get silent. Maybe the last few are only an hour or so.]
The street is filled with so many people that they travel quite slowly, taking the time to stop and stare at everyone. Ƈhatma would feel bad, but they’re freaks and he’s perfectly all right with being stared back at, if anyone else would be so inclined. As they are not, he takes the liberties. He gawks at a woman nearly seven feet tall, with broad shoulders and flared hips that spin out into a frozen mint skirt striped in white and red.
The downside is, of course, that he gets hungry sooner. His stomach growls and makes itself known with its displeasure. “Hey, are either of you hungry? I’m hungry. I think we should find somewhere to eat. There’s got to be a building around here that would have food for us to eat, right?” he says.
Eiji looks around at the multitude of buildings pressed together along the length of the street, one on top of the other with billboards flashing in frosted colors over the rest of the crowd while the snow falls down in confectionary heaps. “I think it would be more difficult to find a place where there was no food,” he says.
“I saw a strip club a few streets back,” Tlazohtzin announces. “I don’t think they serve food at those.”
Ƈhatma blinks. “What’s a strip club?”
Tlazohtzin rolls her eyes. “Don’t tell me that you have — no.” She looks scandalized, because apparently I cannot do anything besides talk about their fucking facial expressions and nothing else, not the fact that they are walking through a damn city.
Eiji has never heard of a strip club, either, so Tlazohtzin explains it to him and Ƈhatma, who says that he would rather eat right now, anyway. They settle on a place to eat, which is called the Highwayman Tavern. It’s full of business people shouting on their cell phones, as incongruous as that is for candy world. Whatever, that’s what makes it cool.
The three of them walk in underneath the handsomely carved sugar doorway, or whatever it is. Can’t it be ice? Handsomely carved ice lintel. The room is bigger than Ƈhatma would have thought possible from the way it looked on the outside; narrow, but with ceilings tall enough that even in his bigger form, he could still have fit in here. Might not have been able to spread his wings without knocking into the walls, but then again, there were few places that could fit him regardless of where he was.
They stand at the entrance for a moment, looking around. Eiji pretends not to be as interested as he is. Ƈhatma nudges him. “What do you think, sour face?” he asks.
Eiji looks straight ahead, hands at his sides. “I don’t think I should be in here,” he says. “I’m fairly certain that I am violating at least one rule concerning proper behavior and courtesy of my order.”
Tlazohtzin bumps him on the shoulder. “And? Your order is dead, Eiji. You’re the only one left. Who’s going to know if you don’t follow every single little rule?”
Eiji scowls at her. His face settles into a mask, and he refuses to look at her. He turns around and starts to leave, but Ƈhatma grabs him by the arm. “Where are you going?” he asks.
Eiji tries to pull his arm out of Ƈhatma’s grip, unsuccessfully. Ƈhatma is very strong, and Eiji sits at desks in chairs and reads books for the majority of his time. “Let go of me,” he says. “I should not be here, and I will not stand for staying here.”
A woman walks up to them. She is small, compact, and dark, with licorice eyes that Ƈhatma finds he can’t quite meet comfortably. “Are you waiting for a table?” she asks.
“Three,” Tlazohtzin says, without acknowledging the struggle going on behind her.
“I’m just leaving,” Eiji snarls. Ƈhatma doesn’t want him going out into the city by himself. It’s dangerous for him, and besides, he’ll spoil the fun time that Ƈhatma wants to have. It’ll be fun. He’ll enjoy it. And if he leaves now, then he might get kidnapped, or have someone try to chip him open for ice to keep their drinks cold because maybe the snow just isn’t enough.
“He’s staying. He’s just having a moment of doubt,” Tlazohtzin informs the woman.
The woman looks between them uncertainly. “Do you want another moment? I can come back.”
Ƈhatma takes his attention away from Eiji for a moment, to reassure her that they’ll be fine. In that moment, Eiji takes advantage of his distraction to wrench his arm out of his grip and go stomping back out into the street. Ƈhatma taps Tlazohtzin on the shoulder and points out the door. When she sees Eiji’s retreating back, her lips thin.
“Yes, actually,” she says to the woman. “That’d be fantastic.”
The woman nods, candy-colored face concerned for a moment before she slides on another mask and goes back to serving the group of small green men behind them. “Sounds good.”
Ƈhatma and Tlazohtzin hurry back through the crowd, out onto the street. “What is he thinking,” Tlazohtzin grumbles.
Ƈhatma doesn’t answer. He scans the street for Eiji. For someone who looks so different from everyone else here — if not flesh and blood in the same way that he and Tlazohtzin are, then at least not made of sugar cane — Eiji is surprisingly difficult to locate. The night is only partially alleviated by the bright neon signs lining the street, and the colors of the lights mix with the colors of the people mix with the shadows to create a confusing patchwork in which Ƈhatma cannot tell the difference between one human being and the next. They were only separate for a very short amount of time, and Eiji moves slowly, but he still can’t find him. Beside him, Tlazohtzin looks about equally as frantically.
They find him standing behind them, right at the door, because he asn’t sure where he was going to go, and he was just going to wait for them after he was done because he doesn’t actually want to be by himself. Ƈhatma and Tlazohtzin go over to him and ask what’s wrong. He tells them that it’s that he doesn’t want to be disrespectful of his order, and he still hasn’t given up hope that maybe they’ve just moved on. He’s reluctant to tell them at first.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” he says.
“Bullshit,” Tlazohtzin says. “If you really didn’t want to talk about it, you would make up an excuse and move on with the conversation.” Eiji shoots her an evil look. “That’s what I’d do,” she explains.
~~*~~*~~*~~*~~*~~*~~
[What is going to happen now is their dinner there, where they meet Kephri and Violet.]
The waitress raises her eyebrows when she sees them all come in again, but she manages to control her expression by the tie that they get to the front of the line. “All sorted out?” she asks.
Eiji nods. “Please find us a table for three,” he says. “Preferably away from the bar.” \He glances disapprovingly at the men who are seated there, candy coated phones pressed to their ears, wait, does Ƈhatma even know what a phone is? He wouldn’t would he. Never mind, they are holding devices up to their ears and shouting down them, wearing dove gray confections that look stiff and uncomfortable.
The waitress picks up three shiny sheets of honey and leads them through the crowd. They pass through tables crammed against the slim wall space between wall and bar, and around up to a huge dark staircase. The stairs are black and sticky, and Ƈhatma keeps his hand off the railing. He can’t tell whether the stairs are sticky because of the material out of which they are made, in which case, maybe here it’s customary for the decorations and the walls to be sticky; on other hand, maybe it’s just that this isn’t a very clean place to eat, and they should probably turn around and leave. He doesn’t know.
They reach the top of the stairs. At the top of the stairs is a landing, smaller and slightly less crowded than the disaster downstairs. It’s brighter, too; part of one wall is cut away, revealing a kitchen of sorts for food preparation that is bright and white and clean looking. The waitress leads them over to a small round table at the far corner, right up against the railing. Tlazohtzin gives the height, and the drop over it, an uneasy glance, but Ƈhatma relishes it. Heights are his friend, and while this one isnt’ quite enough for a liftoff if he were to transform and were he to have the air open above him, it still gives him comfort. HE takes the saet closest to that. Eiji sits down on one side of him, and Tlazohtzin on the other. The waitress places sheets of honey in front of them. To Ƈhatma’s horror, there are little dark amber swirls and spikes printed onto the honey, translucent and easier to read if he holds them up to the light of the kitchen so that it shines through them.
“Can I get you anything to drink?” the woman asks, pushing candy-floss hair behind her ear.
Ƈhatma looks at Eiji and Tlazohtzin. He can feel his own eyes widening in response to both of theirs. “Um,” he says. “What are the drinks that we can choose from?”
The waitress points to the top of the menu, where there are a few small, delicate lines of text written there. Eiji glances at Ƈhatma. His face is blank, as it usually is, and in the dark it’s hard to tell, but Ƈhatma thinks that he can see a more controlled sort of fear there. Ƈhatma is confused, because he thought that Eiji could read, but then again, maybe he was wrong. After all, the people in the other place, the first place, the fields of colors, they had books and scholarly works, and they did not have written language in the same way that, say, Violet or Reed thought of it.
Tlazohtzin clears her throat. “Do you have water?” she asks.
The waitress smiles at her. She pulls out another slab of honey, this one small enough to fit in the front pocket of her dress, and writes something down with a green stick. Ƈhatma is impressed. He grins at Tlazohtzin, who lifts her chin.
“I would also like water,” Eiji announces, with the air of one making a grave statement.
“Me three,” Ƈhatma says.
The waitress writes this down, too, and then she goes away. As soon as she is out of earshot, Ƈhatma leans in. “What are we supposed to do?” he asks. “I can’t read. I thought you could, Eiji, what are you doing?”
Eiji purses his lips. “I can. I can read perfectly well, in three different written tongues of man.”
“Then what is your problem?” Tlazohtzin asks.
“These are not men,” Eiji says.
Ƈhatma is considering this problem. He’s never encountered it before — in the last two worlds they were in, it hadn’t been a problem. In the last world they were in, no one could read, and since he had been lumped into the “slave” category, he wasn’t supposed to be able to, anyway. As he considers how to ask the woman what they are supposed to be reading on their honey slabs when she clearly expected them all to be able to read, he sees a pale hand reach over to tap Tlazohtzin on the shoulder from behind her.
Tlazohtzin jumps. She slams her piece of honey on the table so hard that Ƈhatma fully expects it to break, and several people around them look up in surprise and irritation. She whips around. [Someone is sitting behind her, leaning back in his chair to get her attention, and that someone is Kephri.] It takes Ƈhatma a moment to place him, he is so surprised, and then he is annoyed when he looks over and sees that Kephri is joined by Violet, who has contrived to look much older than she actually is.
“Kephri!” Tlazohtzin snaps. “I am going to murder you, dismember your body, and bury your bones at the six corners of the earth.”
Kephri gives her a level look. “I was to help you with your menus,” he says.
“We don’t need help,” Ƈhatma says quickly.
Eiji frowns. “Yes, we do.”
~~*~~*~~*~~*~~
