in places (in place)
Chapter 01: for those with the eyes to see
Chapter 02: young man, there's no need to feel
Chapter 03: mentally absent without taking leave
Chapter 04: no one, no one, no one left to keep
Chapter 05: fit to dance with the stars
First true Driver's influence! they cry so gleefully. Look, her long-awaited transition from a Common Blade!
Were Minoth not exactly the person he was, he would have no founded reason to call that estimation of Haze a load of bunk. But Minoth, the transgenic Flesh Eater, came from the Praetorium, and so Minoth knows that Haze is, for all intents and purposes, the Designer Child version of Lora - complete with eradication of Lora's arthritis and limited attention span. Even, an elimination of the intersex dilemma Lora had experienced, for surely that's all it is or ever was?
Haze, indeed, comes complete with all the numerous desirable traits her model donor had offered: a sprightly personality, an affable demeanor, a lithe and ready figure, an appreciation for nature, an absolute instinct toward protection and devotion, and a full head of strong red hair.
They treat it as happy happenstance. They act as if none of this was premeditated alteration, bordering on a form of eugenics. Better, they say! Of course we'll make her better. It's innovation, perspiration, invenication.
Sure, there's nothing to complain about, per se, but there are plenty of things to be suspicious and wary of. Luckily Minoth is great at stowing the complaints and keeping a watchful eye.
"Switch places with me."
Ziggy awoke to a drone buzzing in the very back of his head, behind where all of the nerves had died and been reignited.
It was a small sound, but there was a depth to its infinitesimal timbre that registered as the miniaturization of something much, much larger.
As if a piccolo trumpet produced the sound of a contrabassoon, from a conical bore far, far away.
And of course, Ziggy had had quite enough of switching places with the natural order for one lifetime, and a half again.
But the voice communicating through the buzz spoke again.
"Jan Sauer. I know you do not wish to live. Take my hand. Take my place."
Ziggy said nothing, swallowed into the vacuum.
"Fuse your latent life with the knowledge of M.O.M.O. Mizrahi. She is not a demon, but she will act as one."
How could this be anything of merit? This was a hallucination, a last-ditch halo grid cast into the mind of a cadaver. Talk of demons, angels, knowledge.
Angels?
"This MOMO. She's in peril?"
"She will die due to a failure of her synthetic organs if you do not act."
The voice said this neutrally, unsympathetically and unjudgementally at once.
"I'll do it."
When the voice's owner grasped his hydraulic hand, Ziggy felt a confidence stripped of all emotion; as if it had never been there, had no place.
And yet, there was gratitude. There was a kind of awe.
Hm. Well, then the feeling was mutual.
"You're looking for who? Mia?"
"You mean MIA?" Seer intones, hiding its disappointment at the fact that Al didn't pick up on the easy pun. Well, two's together, so the hero'll get his due credit anyway. In Seer's book.
"Is she? Huh."
A telltale grin stretches across Al's face as he puts the pieces together: Mia is in the business of being looked for, actually, but apparently doesn't get too too bothered about it.
"And where does one usually find an individual such as Mia?"
"Wherever one's least expecting to." Some ant's nest, devil's colony, antropolis of torture devices and empty containers should usually suffice. Or on top of the Leaning Ring. Or anywhere else.
Al muses some more. "Expect the unexpected, huh?"
Then he closes his eyes, cracks his middle knuckles, and spins around in a circle, some three hundred-plus degrees.
"I sure don't think Miss Mia would be...here!"
"CHIEF!"
Actually, Seer would prefer to be called Little Master, but it's alright, whatever works for her.
Right now, he's too busy being dumbfounded by Al's seemingly unreal luck.
"Just like that?!"
Al shrugs, then shakes his head, while Mia greets a horde of Nopon nearby as they pile out of Armory Alley to swarm onto this distant outcropping of the administrative district for the shiny sight of the most reward-savvy operative in the force.
"Don't tell anyone, bud," he whispers, "but I saw her in the rift. I think she even talked to me."
Flora imagines that she can hear the sound of the waves on the sand more distinctly in Leftheria than she could in Aletta, in Torna. As if some water, weakly, laps out from within the cotton-ball clouds to be merged with the purple shades of the shore.
They're very stiff, for cotton balls. Very forbidding. Not very wet.
That's what Flora's always found, anyway. Maybe it's not true. Maybe she was always just afraid to touch.
That other Titan where the world thinks Addam sowed his royal oats, so to speak, is submerged beneath the severity of the sea, some twenty years, now.
Flora is older than she ever thought she'd live to be. She had no concept of her mature self, simply because the Aegis War came to pause them all indefinitely in post-adolescence right when she might have gotten to be considering it.
But age lines mark her face, many and fine. Her freckles are mixed with spots of age.
Children grow up to be farmers and salvagers, here. No one's clamoring for a Hero's Rest schoolhouse. Maybe they should. Maybe it should be Flora.
She has no children, no grandchildren. She sits at the seaside alone.
Sometimes there are travelers, curious folks who want to know about the place where the sword is buried, but usually they keep away, thinking of the danger inherent in visiting any place where the Aegis has been.
What happened to the Praetorium, to the golden country? What happened to Coeia, to Spessia even if it wasn't sunk?
Flora sits at the bench that Addam built, folding her fingers in her lap because she doesn't have anyone to knit socks for, anymore. She's got more pairs than she'll ever need. No point in reforming the cotton branches, to unravel them.
And then a Blade that really does look like cotton candy courted a lightning strike walks onto the secluded little beach, ostensibly approaching from the direction of the harbor.
There's something awkward about their gait, as if they mean to be much more deliberate and theatrical, but they don't know how. As if they have been not stunted but stilted, overwhelmed, by the ether flow made manifest when the turtle-shaped Titan sunk purposefully under the sea.
Flora watches them trudge nearer, twinkling bulbs dotting their slow feet in purple boots. She'd make eye contact, but the thick glasses - almost like the goggles of a researcher, mad scientist - covering the top half of their face make that difficult.
Then, "Pardon me." It's a sprightly sound. "I'm looking for Lady Origo."
Ah. It's been a while since she'd heard that name. They don't call her Old Lady Origo, because she's not, yet, but mostly the world just knows her faintly as Flora, the matriarch of the Leftherian holdings who has about as much right to preside as the Tornan royal family ever did, their vacation territory and all.
She wonders, sometimes, what Addam's mother thought of it, when the king came and made his dual conquests. What would Odette think now, then?
"I am she," Flora replies, to the Blade's patient, quizzical stare. Once upon a time, I was.
Of course, she knew them for a Blade because of the lightbulbs and the tail. Otherwise, one wouldn't usually expect a Blade traveling solo, especially not now.
The Blade grins, now, though. She seems to light up, just slightly. "Oh, awesome. I'm Pandoria."
"Pandoria." Flora nods at her, but doesn't pat the bench to invite. Maybe she sits up a little straighter. Maybe she doesn't feel like it.
"I'm a Blade of Tantal - the Titan, and the people."
"Lord Addam's descendents," says Flora faintly, because it's expected.
"Riiight," says Pandoria. But Flora really doesn't wish to get into it now. "I got a request from a Marena, among the refugees."
Flora blinks, startled into really correcting her posture and leaning forward at that. She survived?
But then she lets the drowsiness of half a century overtake her once more. "That's kind of you to take the message. What can I do?"
Pandoria seems to squirm, fingers twisted together. Behind her, her tail fidgets, flickering up and down indecisively. "She just...wanted to know that you're well, and okay and stuff."
Flora nods. "Of course. Mustn't I be, if Lord Addam's descendents yet live?"
So maybe she did want to get into it. Or maybe she just wanted, actually, to see Pandoria crack a smile.
It works, of course. She hasn't lost her charm.
"I'll tell her that," says Pandoria, nudging her glasses down with the pinch of gloved fingers and offering a huge, gratuitous wink.
Marena won't tell anybody. Freja won't truly remember. Pandoria will die, and forget.
Flora stands and silently requests Pandoria's arm for a promenade. A Blade of Tantal is a Blade of Torna, after all.
And still, the sea laps weakly, ashamed of all its white mass.
It's perhaps a perverse little secret, but it's Flora's, now. She's got no one and nothing else left to keep.
"I think I get it now."
"Huh?"
Rex turned, hiccuping as his voice crack betrayed him, to take in Mythra's cool, satisfied face.
"I think I get it, Rex. The point of life."
"Of life?" he echoed again.
Five hundred years, incorporating the Yggdrasil's journey, and she was deciding that now of all times was the right opportunity to declare that she'd figured it out?
Rex wasn't offended. He was just confused.
"Well," conceded Mythra, spinning her fingers over an invisible cube as she prepared to reshape her statement and its argument, "relationships, I mean. Life with other people."
"Oh," said Rex, like he understood. Right. Which, as he had argued, was the crux of life itself. People. I like myself, and I'm people.
Did Mythra like herself? Was she people?
"The point," Mythra began, readying her declaration, "is to look good."
Vanity, then? The Light Aegis had often been accused of such. Her Dark counterpart...not so much, but there were those minds who had known the destroyer of the Holy Grail that knew him to possess a great quantity of the same regardless.
"Like, when you get married."
So she would deign to elucidate.
"Sure, you can gather everybody you know to celebrate your big decision, and everybody politely pretends to ignore the fact that you're going to have sex, babies, all that, as soon as you can, if you're the kind of couple the church-state likes..."
Rex wondered if maybe Mythra had been reading a little bit too far into Cole's treatises on individual liberties, lost among the clutter of fantasy being much more profitable and stealthy. These words he understood, certainly, but they belonged to Morytha more than they did to Alrest, to Elysium.
Also, it was the kind of thought that Nia would catch onto. So Rex was pleased to hear that.
"But the best part," and this must have been informed by the recent and varied weddings held by Mòrag and Brighid, Pandoria and Zeke, Dromarch and Azurda, with crossovers of officiant and party all throughout the ranks, "is when you stand up there in your tux looking at everybody who thought you were worth dressing up to see. That's the best part, Rex."
Rex should have been so attentive to Mythra's concluding imploration. Instead, he was imagining his best friend in an updo and an electric green bow tie, fit to dance with the stars.