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Nex del Vida -> RE: Institution: Revised (4/3/2009 8:55:14)
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Divortium Tria
I am not looking forward to my next class, Arcane History. It is widely agreed to be the most boring class, and the worst part is I am at least mildly skeptical of all the information the teacher gives us, not being entirely in thrall of the Archmage. Tutelary Kerrim essentially teaches that the world after the eradication of the Mundane will be a utopia free of cares and worries. And that may be so… for us. But I doubt it will be carefree and happy for the Mundane, either serving as “our” slaves or being murdered.
Everyone in this place, seemingly excluding myself and only myself, take everything every Tutelary says as gospel. It sickens me, but of course there’s nothing I can do about it. Face it, I’m not the Archmage. I can’t transmute everyone around me into gas.
I walk for the second time that day down the stairway to the Class Floor, into the Main Hall, and through the branch leading to History. Entering the room, I take my seat and stare at Tutelary Kerrim in amazement. His profile never ceases to amaze me—he is thin as a rail and balding, with a slightly prominent upper jaw, but he has the most incredibly low, charismatic voice I have ever heard. I promptly doze off, his soothing baritone lulling me into sleep—he has already started droning about the wonders of a purely Arcane society, or Arctopia, as he calls it.
In my half-conscious drowse, I look forward to Monday morning at 5:00. The words echo in my head: Bring no one. It is fairly obvious that Mikael wants me to come, but the question remains: why?
The spoken word “…rebellion…” enters my subconscious, and I jerk my head up out of my hands. On the blackboard at the front of the room, Kerrim has drawn a complicated network of lines and labels. At the center is the word Arctopia, which does not surprise me—Kerrim’s lessons always center on his imaginary world.
Branching from the center were lines leading to the words “Mundane,” “Magi,” as the Book of Magi is abbreviated to, “March,” and “Rebellion.” Apparently he has just added the last of the four to the list, because that is what he is lecturing about now. I tune back in, and Kerrim’s deep, throaty voice enters my ears.
“In the year 1,176 AA, a small group of Privates and one First Officer attempted to mutiny against Our Righteous Cause. They took offense to the fact that we were taking Mundane, filthy creatures that they are, and using them for Tactics practice. They set up a meeting place and times, and had an encoded messaging system to communicate to each other with. All of their abilities had to do with sound mutation and other ventriloquisms. They would speak to each other in seemingly ordinary terms—‘Dinner was good last night, no?’ or ‘Slept well?’ Things that would not arouse anyone’s attention, and yet were slightly strangely worded. Perhaps they would mix up the syntax of their sentences, saying ‘Soft pillows on this couch’ instead of ‘This couch has soft pillows.’ In these barely off-sounding sentences would be hidden a secret meaning that only those who the code was meant for could decrypt by utilizing their powers.
“They were really quite ingenious, but our Archmage, in all of his infinite wisdom, found out about it and punished the rebels.” A not-at-all subtle note of admiration comes into his voice whenever he mentions the Archmage, and frankly it is quite annoying, but I keep listening. After all, I am not as fanatically infatuated with the Archmage as everyone else here is, and any chance to hear about others like me is welcome.
“The rebels were Vaporized by Our Glorious Leader, and since then no one has ever tried to rebel against us.
“Do not take this to mean that I do not admire these rebels. I cannot, as a member of Our Righteous Cause, say that I esteem the scumbags who would oppose our leader, but I do admit their intellect. After all, their rebellion continued for three years before it was stopped, gathering almost one hundred members. Of course, their numbers had to be limited because there were not, and still are not, a large number of people with corresponding abilities. That was their main flaw. Without that—ahem.” Kerrim coughed, and added, “Ah. I… I don’t want to be giving any… ahem… future rebels… not, of course, that there are any in this class…don’t want to be giving ideas.” I stiffen and swallow nervously and hopefully not noticeably, but I could swear that his eyes land on me for a fraction of a second longer than on anyone else, and that he squints at me.
I shake my head as the bell rings for the end of class, and as I am getting up I accidentally knock over my chair. Rushing to hoist it back up to my desk, a light hand on my shoulder apprehends me. Glancing up, I see Kerrim standing above me. He is not a short man, and he is made all the more tall-looking by his unnatural thinness. Although I am nearly six feet tall, he towers over me. I start shaking. He clears his throat. “Ahem. Fairweather.”
Trying to keep the anxiety out of my voice, my mouth stumbles over the words. “Yersis? Ah. Hm. Yes, Sir?” I blink repeatedly. Deor! I curse to myself. Since when am I a nervous wreck?
Kerrim looks at me strangely, and inquires, “You looked very tired in class today. Are you getting enough sleep? You’re even knocking things over.”
Sighing audibly, I breathe, “Ah! Yes, Sir! Of course, Sir. That’s it. I am overtired. Studying, you know.”
Kerrim smiles. “Ah, yes! You students are just designing your battle outfits, aren’t you? Well, I shall tell your—who is your Regiment Leader? Ah yes, Emerald. I shall tell Emerald not to give you so much homework.”
I am taken aback. This is possibly the first time a Tutelary has been nice to me. Not coldly respectful of a job well done, but outright amiable. I smile, and respond, “Thank you, Sir!”
While it is not true that I am tired, nor that I had been up studying, Emerald has been giving a lot of homework lately. There is a small screen embedded in the underside of the bunk above me—for people in the top bunk it is embedded in the ceiling—that gives assignments at precisely nine o’clock every night. Curfew is 9:00 and lights-out is at midnight, but if need be there are reading lamps attached to the wall to study with. Every night, at nine o’clock, Louis’s face crackles onto the screen and says, “Arcane Soldier Unit 42. Your assignment:…” and then he reels off a list of tactical exercises to be performed and mastered before the next class. A small ticket edges its way out of a slot in the side of the screen. That ticket is the only way any student can get into the halls after curfew. Every night, I tear the ticket from the slit and make my way to the Training Room, flashing the ticket at any patrolling Tutelaries along the way. There I would meet up with Lily, Mikael, and Kramer—due to some administrative privilege, Louis is not required to join in our after-curfew training sessions.
I never could fathom why we didn’t train like this in the day, but it was only one of the institution’s many seemingly pointless rules.
I realize that I am walking down the hallway towards my next class. Well, that’s one thing solved, I think. At least I don’t stop dead when I’m thinking anymore.
~ ~ ~
I climb into my bed and stare at the screen, thinking about the horrific mess of dinner an hour earlier. Thankfully, the irritating beep of the assignment screen interrupts my nauseating memory. I stare up at it and listen as it and the three others in my bunk crackle to life. I hear Tomàs’s screen saying, “Hello, Arcane Soldier Unit 96. You have no assignments today. That will be all.”
And then Louis’s face buzzes into view. He purses his lips—I smile—and whines, “Arcane Soldier Unit 42. Come to the Training Room for a special seminar. Be there as soon as possible.” I rip the ticket from the screen and sigh. A seminar… sounds disgustingly boring.
Mikael and I walk down the halls toward the stairs. We descend them, and I become aware of the bizarre silence of the institution at night. In the daytime it is filled with a profusion of sounds, children and adults rushing to get to classes or lectures, talking to friends, finishing assignments, brushing up on training techniques… and now, there is not a single sound in the entire place but our footsteps.
Although I am alone with Mikael, I decide not to question him about the slip of paper. He has been quite obviously not talking to me about anything, so I assume that he wants to explain it to me at the 5:00 meeting in three days.
Turning a corner, Lily comes into view. She resides across the floor from us, in the Girl’s Sector. I accelerate and stride up next to her. She smiles at me, and then rolls her eyes. “What do you think Emerald has in store for us now? A lip-pursing lesson?” Lily cracks this joke almost every time we have a nightly seminar, but I don’t mind. She has several “traditions” that she never fails to enact.
“Do not make fun of Mr. Emerald, please.” Mikael rebukes Lily.
She rolls her eyes a second time, and recites, “Yes, Sir.” That is possibly the most overused phrase in this place… I think. I Right behind ‘Yes, Tutelary’ and ‘Sorry, Tutelary.’ All expressions of servitude. What a wonderful world.
As we pass the entrance to the Main Hall on our way to the stairway leading down to the Training Floor, I see the attractive blond woman from the Leader table gliding serenely past, to some unknown destination someplace else in the institution. She turns her head as she goes past and looks directly at me.
“Taking a fancy to Maybelle, eh, Martin?” Lily chides me. I laugh and look away, but my mind takes up where it left off, thinking about all of the strange stares I got in the cafeteria. Then I have a flash of inspiration. “They’re all working together!” I whisper.
“Hm?” says Lily.
“Ah… nothing, sorry. Just thinking out loud.”
And then we reach the door of our Training Room, marked with the number 42 in big black characters on the small window. I push open the door, and, as always, my breath is taken away by its sheer vastness. A Tutelary, a few thousand years ago, had the ability to conceal very large things in very small things. This came in handy in quite a few situations. He could, for example, conceal a whole regiment of Arcane in a handbag if the need arose. He used this ability to enlarge the Training Rooms. Before him they were small white cubicles with a few punching bags and pop-up Arcsteel dummies. Now, however, they are forests.
He managed to make every Training Room a four mile square patch of trees and swamp and brush, complete with insects and even a few birds floating lackadaisically through the air. This was and is very useful in the common practice of using Mundane as hunting game.
While I hate and detest the idea of killing innocent people merely for a tutorial—don’t get me wrong, I hate and detest the idea of killing innocent people for any reason, but this especially—I must admit there is a certain thrill to stalking prey through the growth. I do not like it when I am forced to kill Mundane, but occasionally a machine or two is brought from the Arcsteel Laboratories, on the other side of the world, for us to hunt. I look forward to those times, to being able to destroy the spawn of the great and horrific Arcane empire.
Although… when they run… when they cry in fear… I do get a certain thrill. Perhaps today we’ll get to—
No, Martin! Stop that! Killing helpless people is never entertaining.
Although it greatly disturbs me, occasionally I get flashes of anticipation when I think about having to kill Mundane. I try to suppress these flashes, but they come completely unbidden, and I have never completely mastered them.
Today, however, no hunting of any sort will take place. This is a seminar in which Louis sits us all down on the fertile ground and lectures us, for an hour at the least. The longest seminar I have ever attended reached four and a half hours, but only because a former member of our Unit was an hour late… that is why he was dismissed.
As soon as I step off of the small elevator platform and into the small grove at its base, Louis instructs me to sit down, although I do not need to be told. There has never been a seminar held while standing up, nor will there ever be one. Louis believes that it is imperative to our learning process that we remain sitting while he talks at us.
Sighing, I flop down on the grass with my back against a tree. At least it’s nice out here. Or… in here… ah well. I never can figure out whether to refer to the Training Rooms as outdoors or indoors. They are certainly not in the institution; leastwise, not a definition of “in” that is used commonly. There is no roof above our heads, or else the roof is painted like a sky, and painted very, very well. There is nothing to indicate whether it is real or not.
Lily sits down at the base of a tree a few feet away from mine. She flicks her hair over her shoulder, and curses under her breath when it gets caught on the bark of the tree. Her hair is always getting caught in things, as hair as long as that is bound to do. It falls halfway down her back, and she is constantly twirling it and playing with it. As if she is picking up on my thoughts, she takes a lock of hair and starts weaving it through her fingers.
Mikael has already taken a seat against a large boulder, his black hair hanging down in front of his eyes. Looking at him, I can see his resemblance to his nephew. They have the same round face, slender nose, and small mouth, along with wanly pale skin. The only difference between the uncle and nephew is that Mikael has very dark eyes, while Aleks’ are pale blue. Prehist taught that humans have changed drastically over the three thousand years since the Nucleocaust. When the scientists let the people come out from under the poles, it took quite a while for them to spread out over the planet again. Transportation devices had to be reinvented, so there were a few hundred years in which the people were only living in the small area of the Arctic and Antarctic. People bred in ways that had been uncommon before the Nucleocaust, since all racial and national boundaries had been broken. Many people became polyglots because their parents came from two different countries (different languages have been rendered obsolete by Lingfra, a shortening of lingua franca, which all countries have now adopted). Now there are very few who know the languages of old.
When ships were recreated, people crammed themselves onto the vessels and sailed to different continents where they reproduced, resulting in an amalgam of ethnic groups in every country. There is no longer a standard of what people are “supposed” to look like in any given area.
Kramer walks into the clearing from the elevator. He dwarfs everyone in our Regiment and, in fact, almost everyone in the institution. He stands at six feet three inches tall. I have always thought that the private has a dominance issue, because he remains standing whenever possible. I assume that he resents his low rank as private, so he seeks to look down on people in any way he can, be it literal or figurative. He chooses literal, and leans against a tree while remaining upright.
Of course, however, he is no match for Louis’s contemptuous stare, which has been perfected over years of being a Regiment Leader. Emerald stares Kramer down to the ground, where he sulks insolently.
Now that everyone is here, Louis begins to speak. “I have called you all here tonight for a seminar.” I shift into a more comfortable position among the roots of the tree. “However, a seminar is not what I will be delivering.” My eyes quirk up and look at Louis of their own accord, and I can feel the eyes of the others in the room doing the same. He smiles strangely. “No. Tonight we will be having a practice session. You will notice the wall to your left, please.” We all turn our heads and look in that direction. There is, just as Louis said, a wall among the trees that could be mistaken for thick vines if one was not looking for it. Louis walks over to the wall and we follow. He touches what appears to be a leaf, and a segment slides open. Inside it, there is an array of objects, seemingly random, bathed in bright white light. Then, however, my eyes adjust to the brilliance and I gasp: I am looking at four disks in a diagonal row, suspended by what are revealed to be magnets as I tug one of the disks off of the wall with some effort. The others have done the same with objects they recognize. I run my hands over the blade-edged, reflective circle I am holding. The disk spins. There it is! The memory! I furiously think back to my childhood, try to remember where it’s from… Spin. Throw. Spin. The disk spins. Innocence. So innocent.
That’s new, I think to myself. Innocence? Strange… these blades aren't innocent.
Louis is trying to order us to put our weapons back, but we pay no heed. I glance up and see Lily pointing a small dagger at a tree. Suddenly, a minute but extremely bright beam of red light shoots from the tip of the dagger and strikes the tree.
Louis has stopped trying to make us put anything away, and has taken his own weapon from its sheath at his waist, which I had failed to notice when I came into the room. It is a sword to match Louis’s stature—that is to say, short and stocky. He is holding it flat in his palms, but it looks like it could be wielded using only one hand. I notice a small triangle at the base of the blade that looks like a button. Louis touches the triangle, and I realize that I was right in my assumption.
The entire blade lights up with an incredibly vivid shade of turquoise, before shifting to a tawny gold color, and then moving to deep purple. Louis is gazing at the sword, smiling slightly, looking almost dreamy. I too stare in awe at the vivid spectacle.
Remembering something, I turn to Mikael. Louis thought that his idea was too complicated, so I am wondering what, if anything, Mikael took from the rack. At first I see nothing, but then Mikael brings his hand up to his ear. I see that he is holding a small speaker on a wire. At the other end of the wire is a circular earpiece. He fits the piece into his ear and positions the speaker near his mouth. I walk up to him and ask him what the device is. He smiles at me, and responds, “I do not know, as of yet. But I think it must have something to do with the sound-waves I suggested to Louis. May I have a… practice?”
I look at him. He wouldn’t kill me off just yet—not right before he wanted to meet me at the café. I nod quickly, before I change my mind.
He smiles. His eyes narrow and I feel him probing at the outer walls of my mind.
Suddenly, my mind’s barriers rupture. I hear a voice whimpering and realize that it must be mine. Mikael is rooting through my memories, pulling them out and throwing them away. But then—
The woman hugs the infant and her husband closer as the chill winds penetrate the thin blanket they use for shelter. The child wails for sustenance, and the woman attempts to nurse it. The long months of cold and hunger have sapped her dry, however, and she has no milk to give her three-month-old baby. He cries louder. The man under the blanket shifts in his uneasy sleep and a frown crosses his face. The baby sobs harder still. His mother begins to weep softly as well, and bends her head down to warm his small one.
A small boy watches a scruffy white dog as it prances next to him on the gray sidewalk. He throws the stick in his hand across the road, and the dog fetches it and brings it back. The boy laughs and races off down the street towards his home. The faithful dog follows. When the boy gets to the dirty gray building he and his parents live in, his mother calls him into the house. The boy knows the rules of the household, so he leaves the dog outside. He notices his father, thin and gaunt from hunger, doing something with the pistol he keeps in a drawer in his bedroom and walking out the door, but the boy takes no notice. He enters the kitchen. His mother talks to him about how times are hard, and desperate measures must be taken, but the boy tunes out midway through—he finds more than enough food in the trash disposals throughout the city. He is wondering what the loud bang he just heard was when his father comes back into the room, and gives his mother a bag filled with something the boy cannot see. Uncaring, the boy walks to his room to play with his toys, dirty stones and a cats-eye marble he had found on the street, his prized possession. A short time later, his mother’s quavering voice calls him to the kitchen. The boy goes down the stairs and sits down at the table for dinner.
The boy is laughing. The disk spins. His father is—
“Stop!” I scream. I realize that Mikael’s headset is emitting an eerie noise, a sort of purr and moan combined, but I am too horrified at what Mikael has done to think about that. I find that I am curled up in a ball and am shivering. I climb cautiously to my feet, steadying myself on a low tree branch. Mikael’s eyes are sympathetic and joyful at the same time. At first I attribute the joy to sadism—I should never have trusted him—but then I realize that his weapon must work extremely well, despite not actually being a weapon, and he is happy about that. Deor! No wonder he’s the First Officer. He puts his hand on my shoulder.
“Martin. I am so sorry. I did not realize how potent this little device was. If there is anything I can do for you, just let me know.” The joy is gone now, and I can see that he is realizing what he put me through. I swallow the bile that has risen in my throat and push his hand off of me.
“It-it’s fine. Thank you.” I manage to whisper. My voice comes out harsh and gravelly. I turn around and see that everyone in the clearing is staring at me. Lily runs up and gives Mikael a nasty look. She takes my arm and leads me to her tree. Louis is advancing on Mikael, obviously about to lecture—no, rant—at him, but I can see that Emerald is also impressed with the effectiveness of this contraption.
I lean against Lily and close my eyes. Of course I hadn’t remembered the first vision Mikael had conjured up, but I have always known that my parents were extremely poor for a short while after I was born. I do, however, remember the incident with the dog. I still try to tell myself that it was not the dog I ate, that he ran away, that my father was shooting birds… I even managed to partially convince myself of these excuses for memories. But now Mikael has brought it all rushing back.
Should I go to the café? Now that Mikael has violated me so horribly, I do not know if I trust him enough to accept his invitation.
But I think about the emotion on his face, the one that was crowded out by the temporary joy. He really was sorry. I will go.
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