ꙮ What else could be at the heart of the annex but a room from which to observe, dedicated specifically to that act? It’s as you left it - people have passed through, certainly. Also, when you entered the library, something gave the Awoken a godawful sneezing fit for a moment. Very dignified.
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- Yazhn Ravhi, the Hierophant
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#awoken
#saint
is seated on the person-and-a-half seat of the telescope, one leg up and bent, himself hunched forward in his usual attire, a hand draped over his face his hair bracketing even that.
thinks that you certainly would the poetry of that, silmät. A room from which to observe, dedicated to that act, central to the rest of the annex.
: “Salme. Oh, sweet sparrow Salme. Truly, we are fools of astronomers.”
strides into the central chamber. “Yeah. We forgot to look at the fucking moons.”
ꙮ Rather, say that you had so many wonders to look at that some had to wait until the second go-round.
: “Well, that’s a cute way to word it.”
ꙮ It’s also true!
: “It IS true, that we were so preoccupied with turning the pages of our existence together, that we forgot the namesake of the Moon’s Inn.”
: “But this day we will falter no longer!” He dramatically whips his hand to the side, to reveal that his other is tending to his nose with a silk handkerchief.
blushes a little at Awa’s words and hops up next to him. “Are you … okay?”
: “Sorry, ‘scuse me.” He turns and blows his nose into the handkerchief.
: “Bit of the… whatever it was, still lingered.”
: “The whatever it was?” Doesn’t think she noticed anything when she popped into the library?
: “I’m not really sure, something just really tickled my nose fierce upon entering the Library.”
: “And I’d rather not sneeze upon the viewport, so…”
ꙮ Allergy season in the Library, apparently.
doesn’t think the library should be producing allergens? But. Well. Who the fuck knows? She peeks at the Awoken’s handkerchief. Don’t suppose it’s monogrammed, is it?
’s handkerchief does not have initials, it just has a small bluejay.
: “That’s cute,” she says, reaching out to brush her finger over the bluejay, and careful to avoid any snot in the handkerchief.
: “You’re cute.” He subtly folds and pockets the handkerchief, throwing an arm around Salme.
: “Let’s have a peek at those moons, now.”
snuggles in closer.
: “Do you want me to link us?” She takes his hand anyway, because I mean. She can.
: “Please do! Ten senses are better than five!”
reaches out and takes his hand, twining thick threads of flourishing gnosis around his fingers, inviting him in.
links up with Salme, snuggling shoulders together, before leaning in on the viewport, reaching for the telescope controls with his other hand.
: “Now, those remaining moons…”
ꙮ Your minds and senses tangle along with your bodies as you sit together on the viewing platform; at some point you set the room and telescope to point back to the Beast, possibly right now.
is absolutely on that right now. He gets all of the moons in frame, but then starts at the top, zooming in on it.
closes her eyes, instead letting her vision be his vision through the scope.
ꙮ A smooth, almost perfectly featureless whitish orb, or so it seems. No craters, no crenellations to be seen.
leans back from the viewport, a little stunned.
: “…I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it wasn’t that.”
: “I’m guessing that’s … abnormal?” She can feel his shock through the link, so, yeah. Probably.
: “Well, I mean, you look at the Beast, and it’s got all these rocky outcroppings and mountains and cities, and then you look at this moon, and…”
: “Still, we should check the rest, to be thorough.”
nods, which he probably doesn’t see, but he can probably feel her nodding?
basically IS Salme at this point, and was also considering nodding. And then she did, and all was right with the world. Except for this smooth-ass moon.
ꙮ Just hanging in the air like the cueball from the pool table next door.
adjusts the telescope to zoom in on the next moon in sequence.
kind of wants to smack it with a cuestick and get some fucking answers but. That seems like it might exacerbate the Critical Moon Shortage.
ꙮ It’s also very far away.
ꙮ You’d need a stick of remarkable length.
ꙮ Anyways, the next moon… is as perfectly smooth and featureless as the last one was.
: “Moon number two… also smooth.”
: “I have a wild guess about the other three.”
: “We love wild guesses here in the annex!”
: “I have a wild mind-reading techne that tells me your wild guesses.”
wildly guesses that they’re all going to be cueball-smooth and featureless.
shifts the telescope to the third moon! Surprise me!
ꙮ Maybe the moons that vanished were picked first because they had interesting craters and blemishes on them, and these five are spotless and so were saved for last…? There’s no knowing. Anyways, moon three… and four, and five, all look identical to the first you looked at through the telescope.
looks, as the Awoken, at the areas above and below where the current moons are. The empty spaces where, if those lost moons hadn’t been lost, those moons would be. Anything there?
ꙮ Nothing there. Just a clear view of stars.
: “Hmm…” He focuses in on one of the moons again, and tries to read its gnosis signature.
tries not to let her irritation spill over into the link, but the Awoken is probably finding himself Oddly Frustrated At The Lack Of Answers when usually he’s a pretty chill guy.
has a bit of the bunch in his funch, yes.
focuses, at least, on the fact that he’s cute and warm and she likes being like this, nestled together on the seat with methexis linking them.
ꙮ The gnosis signature is… both oddly familiar, and slightly dodgy, and it’s only because the two of you are in methexis and so familiar with the contours of one others’ souls that you pick up that it’s– when you try to focus on it, it’s doing some kind of optical-illusion trick. Not a mirror, exactly - but feeding you a reflected, upside-down, version of your own gnosis, overlaid over a consistent pattern of stars.
reaches out with her-their-his own gnosis, trying to understand more about the contours of the gnosis, about the trick to the moons.
ꙮ Give me Pellucid? You both may contribute.
- Salme, The Sword-Saint invoked their 🔵pellucid gnosis [d6] -> 2.
- The Awoken Prince invoked their 🔵pellucid gnosis [d4] -> 1.
- Salme, The Sword-Saint has gained 1 Arete, and now has 7.
- The Awoken Prince has gained 1 Arete, and now has 3.
: “Well don’t that just beat all.”
ꙮ You each catch the other’s – your own – reflection, or something like it - the glint of an eye, limned in starlight. You could never mistake it for anyone else’s.
: “I’m never going to get my Scholar’s Crest at this rate.”
: “So… why would it be showing us such a reflection…”
: “Could we also be staring at ourselves, elsewhere, elsewhen?”
blinks. “Perhaps? Or they’re … that was a weird description, right? About the oddly-familiar and slightly-dodgy gnosis signature? And ‘a consistent pattern of stars’?”
: “…yup, I got nothin’!”
doesn’t suppose they recognized the pattern of stars?
ꙮ Oh, absolutely. It’s the same pattern as the stars visible if you look up from any point on the Beast.
: “I thiiiiiiiink… we should keep this in mind, but keep going. Nothing is immediately leaping out at me, other than the weirdness of it all.”
nods. “Maybe the others might have helpful input?” She doesn’t sound hopeful, but.
sniffs, reluctantly zooming out the telescope. “Next…” He rebounds quickly though, swiveling the telescope around. “…the space equidistant between Almachadta, and the Beast, should be right… around… here.” He stops the telescope, and slowly begins to scan with their eyes, up up, down down, left right, left right, becoming aware of selected space.
[Empyrian Intuition]
ꙮ Have you ever felt, in your life, like you were looking at something that didn’t want to be seen? Your intuition tells you where it must be - and then you see the light of a distant star curve, and twist, and bend, and dodge, lensing around– something.
: “Hey… what’s up with that?”
gently and ever-so-slightly shifts the telescope left, right, like he’s purposefully trying to catch the contours of hiding.
gently, almost like a prayer or a plea, says, “Tell me the truth!”
ꙮ And as you turn the telescope, you keep seeing light lens around a point, twisting into a disc around an ink-black sphere.
is definitely trying to read the gnosis signature of that. It’s gotta either be incredibly busy or weirdly empty. What’s it gonna be?
ꙮ Any invocation, any information sent out questing towards it is swallowed, never to return. A light-eater, a thing turned in on itself, a thing so dense and weighty that neither light nor gnosis can escape its clutches.
: “…huh.“
: “Now that’s interesting.”
nods sagely. It is interesting!
: “Why is it interesting?”
: “I mean… it’s eating everything! Sort of! Maybe! Is it even explainable in a sufficiently true way?*
: “Why is it there?”
mutters, “I wonder if that’s what finds Almachadta delicious.”
: “I’m not sure we’d be able to tell, I didn’t get any sense of emotion from it. It’s a big ball of nothing, but like, fully emphasizing Nothing, capital-N.”
: “Or, well, maybe that’s not accurate either…”
: “But whatever it is, it’s not telling its secrets.”
: “Yes that is. A pattern.” She very carefully focuses on his hand in hers, in her hand in his, on the fact she is alive and here with him right now, and that she loves him, and not that she wants to turn the universe upside down and shake it for answers.
: “We’re absolutely sending something into that thing. We gotta let Aury know about this’n, for sure.”
is still with her on this!! They’re alive, and here, together, but actually, they BOTH really want to shake down the universe for answers and its lunch money.
leans back from the viewport. “It’s interesting that we got some reflections from the moon, considering this next experiment. Sweet sparrow, you’re in charge of the telescope. I’ll head back down to the Beast and fire the tracer- zoom in on it and watch for the Reflection Fiend.”
nods. “Okay.”
squeezes his hand briefly before letting it go.
gives her a kiss on the cheek, before bravely dropping off of the seat, and heading his way out of the annex and library- being sure to cover his nose before reaching the exit.
holds the link open but also takes out her tomestone and starts typing while her bluejay does his work.
pops out into their room in the Five Moon’s Inn, and he does a completely unnecessary vertical leap from their balcony to grab onto the edge of the roof, and pulls himself up. On the rooftop awaits a Fiend of red and black construction- with four wings and six legs, its headstalk in the center is very widely-brimmed. Were one to inspect the Fiend from above, it would see that the top of the brim is polished to a complete mirror shine.
ꙮ It’s not completely unnecessary, you’re showing off! That’s important! Anyways, the mirror-fiend tips its mirror-hat to you, politely.
sends warmth and love and admiration at his necessary vertical leap.
: “It’s time to take flight, hombre. Our gal’s waitin’ to see ya’, and she’ll be right… there.” He looks to the sky, and like he’s always known she’s there, he points.
[Empyrian Intuition]
: “Bang.” He fires off a thin, violet strand of gnosis, aimed directly where the feeling of the annex should be.
: “Follow that shiny, violet, wire of hope, and keep your head steady.”
reaches out with nothing in particular—no gnosis or power, just a thread spun from her heart, reaching out to grasp the gnosis he’s sending straight toward her.
ꙮ The strand of gnosis fires off straight and true up into the sky, a bolt launched into starlight from the Awoken’s fingers–
ꙮ It trails off higher and higher into the sky, to the point where it’s almost out of sight, moving swiftly –
ꙮ – and then it impacts something, in the sky, and -ceases to be-. It doesn’t fizzle dramatically, it doesn’t CLANG BONK off anything– it just stops and isn’t, any more.
: “What the fuck?”
: “…eh?~”
: “Hombre, hold off on the takeoff.”
wonders … since their vision is overlapping, watching the same phenomenon from different angles, if she saw the exact same thing from her vantage.
ꙮ The mirror-fiend looks Unsettled and Displeased and sort of fluffs its feathers indignantly. Not at the Awoken, of course. At the Situation.
ꙮ Salme: Looking at the Beast through the telescope?
is, yes, looking at the Beast, looking specifically at where she knows Awoken to be, through the telescope.
ꙮ Well, either way - it’s a good telescope, but it’s not quite good enough to pick out one specific Awoken Prince on a rooftop in Queenstown, but you could sense his tracer, and it did abruptly vanish.
wasn’t trying to see her prince through the telescope, just watch the space where she knew he was. But, thank you, that’s informative.
hops down from the seat and paces—just a bit—to blow off some steam.
: “Hmm… well, we’re still going to see about getting something out there. It’ll just be through a different method.” He lashes a finger out, and from it is about a meter’s worth of burning gnosis. He estimates the size of the telescope’s optical tube, and begins tracing a very shallow circle into the roof of the inn, of roughly the same size. Or smaller, even, if the scope is particularly large.
checks his tomestone, and briefly types.
does a couple cartwheels in the middle of the observatory while she’s waiting, so the Awoken Prince has a moment of briefly being upside-down while trying to do his work.
stops, because she realizes that’s probably not very helpful.
has to stop and blink a bit as all of a sudden he wants to tip over… he rights himself.
contents herself with pacing and sends a bit of apologetic chagrin through the link.
: “Hmm… I think she’ll get the idea…” He sends a feeling out to his beloved- the telescope, the end of the telescope, from end-to-end, the rooftop circle, the circle…
focuses liminal gnosis along the traced circle on the rooftop.
ꙮ You’re pretty sure this’ll work.
hops back onto the viewing platform and mirrors the careful tracing of the end of the telescope, of liminal gnosis collapsing boundaries, opening new ways, finds a new direction when every other direction has failed.
’s heart beats in exact, precise time with his.
lights the gnosis in time with her. Open, strange path.
: “Safe, strange journey, hombre. Hold steady, and we’ll pull you out after we get a good look.”
ꙮ And the expanse contracts, here and there become, so very briefly, a single here– the fiend establishes a homing signal via the Awoken’s link to Salme, and then spins up and -jets- through the momentary hole in reality into the depths of space! ⁂
ꙮ It is very, very confused, for a few moments - caught between facing in two different directions, it eventually picks one at random - it goes incoherent, briefly, from Salme’s perspective, but then it turns to face her, and lowers its mirror-hat deferentially towards the telescope. ⁂
ꙮ She sees… nothing, at first. The emptiness of the Empty Space in the Sky. But, as the telescope resonates with gnosis - within that empty space, there’s a shimmering sigil, the faint suggestion of the rose-window on the doors of the Kinder, Gentler Paths, a rainbowed cross made of fractally-inverted, bright, vivid eyes, gazing out from the Empty Space. 🙧
sucks in a soft, surprised breath that echoes through the link, and reaches out to take the Awoken’s hand though the Awoken is not there with her. “Hello,” she says, softly, either to herself or to the fiend or to the fractal gaze of the empty space.
then adds, a bit more loudly, a bit more intentionally, out into the Empty Space itself, borne on liminal gnosis. “Hello!”
: “Hello…” His voice is quiet, witnessing the cross, entirely amazed.
ꙮ The fiend is quietly and politely glowing error-message red, but it’s holding steady in position.
: “Okay, time to come back through.” He reopens the hole, and casually reaches liminal gnosis through, pulling the fiend back through the scope-portal, and onto the roof-portal.
ꙮ The fiend nyooms through the portal, head ducked, a little dazed and unsteady. A little tiny silver bell set into it is ringing frantically.
: “Welcome back!” He’s carefully inspecting the fiend, and that bell- huh, did he install a bell on it? He’s looking to see if the fiend has picked up any extra gnosis trailing off of itself, but…
ꙮ The bell is for if there are baffling errors in the fiend’s telemetry!
ꙮ Or, well, errors in general, really.
echoes the feeling of welcoming the little fiend back.
: “Yeah, I bet that felt weird, huh.” He carefully reaches out to touch the fiend, though he’ll hesitate if it feels like it’s going to be especially hot.
ꙮ You touch it, and it relays its flight data to you– including, bafflingly, that it detected Salme’s homing signal coming from two locations simultaneously. Which must have been why it was confused as to which way to orient itself…
asks the Awoken to try to get information about where both signals were coming from.
estimates both signals’ location. One should be where he estimates the annex is, but the other…?
[Empyrean Intuition]
ꙮ One vector, pointing straight at the annex. The other?
ꙮ Points towards the space around which the Beast and Almachadta orbit.
: “Wow…”
: “I guess there’s a lot about that lil’ space that we don’t know about!”
wonders if we have any sense of whether we saw the refracted eyes in the Empty Space or in the black hole?
concedes that might be asking a lot of the little guy though.
ꙮ In half of all possible worlds, it pointed towards the Empty Space. In the other half of all possible worlds, it pointed towards the middle of the system; the fiend seems confused about which half it found itself in… BUT, you know you saw the blackness of the Empty Space behind the shimmering lens-sigil, and not stars or Almachadta or the Beast in the far distance.
: “That’s incredibly interesting.”
closes her eyes. Is she existing, right now, caught between multiple possibilities? Is that possible to know at all?
: “Space is already folding in on itself, so much so that one could exist twice.”
ꙮ What’s clear to you is that you’re in the Annex.
is aware of that. She’d like to know more about what’s unclear to her.
ꙮ If she were capable of observing that, it would not be unclear!
: “But why there… and why does it also radiate from the annex…” His voice trails off, eyes looking up and rapidly darting from star to star, even though he knows it’s a pattern he’s being shown.
nods. You have a good point. She draws her knees up to her chest, and wraps her arms around them.
is silent for several moments. Then, he reaches out to pat the fiend. “Good job, hombre.”
ꙮ It warbles, pleasantly. Now that its flight telemetry has been passed along the bell stopped ringing!
, out of curiosity, tries, once again, to send out a flare of gnosis, of pure, burning starlight, this time imagining it sparking directly through the lens of the telescope, singing out into the cosmos. She knows, with the way the Beast’s sky works, her prince will not see it, but she wonders if he might feel it, might use his [Empyrean Intuition] to know a flare of her soul is singing out into the emptiness of space.
ꙮ Well, you can see the Empty Space from the Beast – and the Awoken, and Salme through his eyes, sees what looks like a brief, faint shooting star lighting the Empty Space for just a moment.
gives a small, brief little laugh.
: “I think I’m coming back up, sweet sparrow.”
: “Please.”
, once the Awoken has returned to her, spares a moment to fall into his arms, to rest her head against his shoulder. “It’s amazing, but I don’t understand any of this.”
relieves the fiend of its duty, and hops back over the edge of the roof, swinging into their open balcony door with an unnecessary somersault. He’s back in the Library, and the annex, and back to the observatory…
nuzzles Salme, rubbing temples together.
: “It’s a weird one!”
: “I… I think there’s some things that might make sense. The ‘why’s are definitely out to lunch.”
laughs a bit, and nuzzles back. “They always are. Did you have any other things you wanted to try, beloved?” She reaches up to run a hand through his hair.
: “Hmm… well…”
: “I’m not sure about looking directly, but…” He inspects the various controls on the telescope. There’s been gimbals and yaw and pitch and roll, and measurements taken in radials, degrees, minutes, seconds… but how about hours, days, months, years, millennia?
ꙮ There doesn’t seem to be anything like that, no. But it was worth taking a look!
: “Ah, well.”
: “Just one more curious bit to inspect, I think.”
reaches into a pocket, and produces a small slab of Ra’kaznar metal, no bigger than his palm.
: “Oh. To see if the gnosis signature might lead … somewhere? Anywhere?”
: “Yeah, or maybe there’s a large hunk of it floating around in space.”
: “Huh.” Well, pretty much anything seems possible when it comes to space!
: “It’s got that weird mix of radiant and tenebrous, so…” He unfocuses his eyes, setting his other senses onto the gnosis pattern of the metal.
then turns to seat himself and Salme back onto the telescope seating, zooming way out, casually looking for matching waves. They’ve got nowhere in specific to look. They’re just overly scanning, while (rotating) the possibilities in their minds.
just curls into him, anchoring him while he looks through possibilities and stars.
ꙮ You find… nothing. Nothing, in all of what you can see through the telescope, whirling gently through every angle and arc, that matches the signature of the rakaznar slab.
: “It’s… a really special piece of metal!”
laughs a little, and kisses his temple. “True.”
: “Not a blip. After the Septentrione was practically just ice and Ra’kaznar, I wondered if we’d get something from Samudra… maybe the clouds are interfering with it.”
: “Or we’re at a really unfortunate angle.”
leaaaaaaaaaans into Salme. “This has been a looooooooooooooot.” He attempts to stifle a yawn, and fails.
: “It’s really amazing…”
runs her fingers through his hair, and then kisses the top of his head. “It has been a lot. I think,” she begins to scritch his scalp. “I think that we’re not going to be able to find out anymore unless we do have a … satellite-fiend we can launch from where we are right now, into space, and look at things externally.”
: “Though I think we discovered a lot right now.”
: “That sounds like a ‘tomorrow’ problem to me!”
laughs. “Well, yeah. Or an ‘after the Deepforge’ problem.”
: “We’ll make Aurelius help us. He likes projects.”
nods into her hand. “I know he will. And we love him for it.”
: “Yeah. We do, don’t we?”