Scene Archives

folds up Aurelius’ map and tucks it away. She’s three or so minutes early, which means Archie should be here and she should have about half an hour or so before Caion makes his way as well. She squares her shoulders and gives a sharp rap on the door.

stands up from the workbench, stretching and unfurling his spine on the way up, before walking over to the door and opening it. He smiles warmly. “Come in, come in! Have a look around!”

walks in, looking at the all the instruments in wonder. She doesn’t know what most of them are for, but from the way Archie seems at home here, she can tell he knows exactly how to use all of them. “Thank you for making time for me, Emissary-Archivist,” she says, with a bit of a smile. “I appreciate it. I’ve been wondering what here, in Samudra, you and Caion might be able to help me find out about the deeper truths hidden in the Mask.” She takes a deep breath. “Though, before that, I was wondering if we could talk in a less … academic? Sense?”

laughs a little at the unexpected formality and gives an exaggerated imitation of an Academy bow in return. “Of course! Though just so you know, it’s Scholar-Archivist. That would be like calling you Wolf-Saint. Same world, different jobs.” He smiles a little at his own joke, pedantic as it may be, before settling his expression and posture into thoughtful receptiveness.

blinks, and thinks for a moment, and then laughs. “So it is. I’ve been trying to learn so many words and I forgot. Thank you.” Her smile goes a bit wry. “I was trying to be cute, believe it or not.” She seems relaxed, but her left hand goes to grasp at the irrica bracelet around her right wrist. She loops two fingers through the bracelet and and uses the the grip to pull her arm close to her body. “I wanted—hmm. I’ve been trying to think a lot about what I want. Not just in terms of world-altering stakes, but in small ones. Since we’ve been here, I’ve seen a warmer, brighter side of you. I’ve also seen glimpses of the colder side of you as well. And I’d like.” She swallows, and laughs again, a little awkwardly, and forces herself to meet his eyes. “I want to ask how we can be the kind of companions you can be your full self with.”

returns her gaze with a wry smile that doesn’t quite reach his dull eyes. “If you find out, let me know,” he says with a chuckle. “I asked Caion to help me remember some of the things about myself that I’d forgotten. The life he told me about seems like a lonely one, always feeling too Kushtaka for the Academy and too influenced by the Academy for my Whisker-Clan relatives. I get the feeling I haven’t been able to be my full self with anyone but Caion for a long time, and while I’ve already been through so much with our group, that doesn’t change the fact that we’ve known each other for a matter of weeks. I don’t think that’s a kind of relationship you can rush or force.”

slowly, so he can decline it if he wants, she reaches out one arm in a hug. If he accepts, she gives him a quick squeeze. “I’m … different. I don’t know how to not love someone or hate them if I can’t hold them at a distance. It’s … a little embarrassing for me, actually.” She mirrors his chuckle. “You’d have been a great Sword-Saint. You play the role very well—Kushtaka or Academy member. I couldn’t tell.” She takes a breath. “I don’t want to force it, and you can take the time you need, but. Maybe we could think about how to start taking those steps intentionally? Like.” ⁂

accepts the hug, coming in for the squeeze, before taking a step back to be able to continue to meet her eye contact as she continues.

starts moving, a little more animated. “I want to know, Archie. I want to know everything. I read your Virtues, I’m horrible at half of them, but I always want to know. I can’t promise I’ll ever—I’m not Samudran. I don’t think I could be. But you can tell me, too, and—“ she blushes, but starts pacing faster. “I’m also not patient, and that, I will note, is not an enumerated virtue, but. I also was so lonely on Almachadta. When I had the opportunity to take the Mask, I took it, even though I knew the secret was terrible, even when Badri—I could see how it had hurt Badri. It was the only way I could think to matter to anyone at all. And so meeting you all, who’ve also never fit, who’ve lost so much, who want something different than the very shape of the worlds we’ve been born into, it’s been—“ she turns, skirt flaring, stopping mid-step. She reaches for her bracelet again. “Aurelius and Unua use the term ‘clan’ and I. It feels like I’ve been waiting for that my whole life.” ⁂

looks down, blushing again. “So. You don’t have to rush it. But. I want you to be part of that. I want Caion to be part of that. And I’m willing to work for it,” she tells the lab floor. 🙧

nods carefully. “Knowing is drawing-near,” he says with the slightest trace of a smile nagging at the corners of his lips as he remembers a certain band performance. “For what it’s worth, I want to be part of it, too. One of the things I hope to build for myself is the ability to feel more able to share different sides of myself with different people. It’s part of why I’m excited to go visit Aunt Ksenija in her exploration of the anchored island - it’s a chance to blend my life here at the Academy with the things my family get up to. I get the feeling I’m not really used to letting my walls down, both as a Samudran and as… well, me. But I’ll try.”

: “And drawing-near is danger, but so’s life. So’s anything worth doing,” she says it kindly, though. “I understand walls. I tend to favor masks as a metaphor myself, but. I think most of us have some form of defense. I think, for me, on Almachadta—the Sword-Saint carries a terrible secret, but every other memory in the Mask is meant to be shared. How to till the land, or smelt metal, or which plants to cultivate, which berries to eat—those are for us all. So I have a very different approach. We all do.” She smiles at him, and she looks young, a little shy. “Help me understand you, and I’ll meet you however I can, and we’ll figure it out. Does that sound fair?”

nods gratefully. “Well, if you want to understand me with the goal of helping me, I do have one thing in mind that I think you may be able to lend me a hand with…” He lets the thought trail off into a playful smile.

tilts her head. “Oh?”

: “Oh yes,” he says, his smile growing as he grabs a slate tablet out of one of the workbench’s drawers. “It was very fun seeing the effect you had on Aurelius and Awoken at lunch the other day. It’s my understanding that Caion helped you, yes? Well, I think fair’s only fair - you should help me get him back.” His grin takes on an impish quality. “After all, he’ll be joining us down here soon enough anyway. Seems like a prime opportunity to surprise him a little.”

laughs brightly. “Oh. Oh. I like how you think. What can I do to help?”

brings the tablet over to her and beckons for her to put her hands on the tablet as well. “When we first got you set with your new clothes, you came up with an idea and I helped filter it through my understandings of what would be appropriate on Samudra. Now, I’d like your help with the reverse. I have a design in mind, but some of the intricate details and textiles I’m imagining are more inspired by what I saw when you took me to the Almachadta markets - the silks, the sheer linens, the heavier and more sculpted fabrics - and I could use your familiarity with those materials to help guide my concept towards reality.”

: “I can do that. Absolutely. Silks, sheer linens, heavy and sculpted … yes. I can help with that.”

smiles. “Oh, this’ll be so much fun. I just realized I’ve been wearing Academy clothes this whole time - nobody’s ever seen me in anything else, much less a take on Samudran formalwear. Okay, ready to snap with me?” He closes his eyes in focus, imagining the piece taking form. “One, two, THREE!” The slate breaks apart cleanly into pieces, and a garment takes form, lying across Archie’s arms. “It’s beautiful,” he says, looking at their combined handiwork with satisfaction.

grins at him. “How do you want to surprise him? Do you want to be doing work nonchalantly, or do you want to make a dramatic entrance?”

delicately tucks it under his arm. “First, I should ask - is there anything else we want to discuss before Caion joins us? If not,” he says, looking around the room thoughtfully, trying to remember the map to the nearest washroom, “perhaps I could take it with me, change elsewhere, and come back in once he’s arrived? You can tell him I went to go freshen up when he arrives, just so he knows I’ll be coming. Honestly, I’m not totally sure how long it might take me to put this on.”

: “Oh, I’ve got you. Aurelius is letting me borrow his map.” She pulls the map out of one of the small pockets somehow hidden in her clothes, and scans for the washroom. “And no. I’ve ambushed you with plenty as is. I’m satisfied if you are,” she says, tracing her finger over the paper until she spots the symbol for … hmm, well, that does look like a Samudran toilet, she’ll give the cartogrix that. “There. Just down the hall and to the left. I’ll stall.”

nods and moves quickly towards the exit, garment in tow, looking forward to seeing a certain Naiad’s reaction.

, left alone, lets out a long, slow exhale, reaching her arms up, up, up toward the ceiling and then back, resting her hands on the floor and arcing into a backwards bridge, careful and intentional to do this in the middle of the room where there’s nothing to possibly disturb, relishing the stretch of muscles.

, after a moment, kicks all the way up into a very slow and careful handstand, again taking care to make sure she’s nowhere near the sensitive instruments. She flexes her fingers, pushing herself up even higher, and then letting herself sink back to her palms, only able to think about the careful effort of keeping her body perfectly still and upside down.

: “Come in!” she calls, lowering her feet back down into the backwards bridge.

shit she wasn’t thinking. There’s no graceful way to get out of this one. She moves back up into the handstand, then brings her feet down on the other side of her, standing up gracefully. “Hello, Caion. Archie ran to the washroom, but he’ll be here in a moment.”

rolls her head around on her neck. “We talked, a little bit, without anything exploding. And you talked with Aury I hear, without anything exploding. Look at us. We’re almost functional people.”

gently opens the door and breezily enters. ⁂

notes, but does not comment on, the very interesting comment. She looks around the lab, and is about to ask about some instrument or another, when she sees the door open and she falls silent.

seems to glide into the room in an outfit that seems to defy easy explanation. There’s a wrap of brown fabric from below his collarbones all the way to the floor, seamlessly meshing with the color of his fur, with some parts sheer enough to see his body moving beneath and other parts tactfully opaque to avoid incident. From his shoulders to his knees, adornments of white coral embellish the garment, carefully shaped with the touch of a true master of gnosis-work into perfectly symmetrical shapes evoking the skeleton of a fish - the ribs over the chest, a symmetrical pair of coral details which suggest a spine running down either side of his midriff, then fanning out as if to suggest a tail towards the knees. Hanging from his shoulders is a delicate, sheer capelet which gains a sense of mass as it descends towards his waist, an impossible number of layers of sheer silk and organza layered together in hundreds of folds overlapping to create a silhouette reminiscent of fins, symmetrically hanging off either side of his arms, and the effect is replicated at the bottom of the garment, past the knees and to where it gently grazes the floor. The smoothness of his movement makes all the folds shake and shimmer, and for a moment, you could swear he’s floating on the air itself as he approaches. “Sorry to keep you waiting. Shall we continue?”

, since she is aware that neither of them are looking at her, smiles like a very, very satisfied cat.

turns to Caion with a coy smile. “What, this old thing?,” he teases playfully.

smile has widened this entire times, and when Caion sees the look on her face she can’t help laughing. “I think you beat me when it comes to boyfriend-flustering, Archie,” she says brightly. “Tragic. I’ll just have to try harder next time”

laughs. “Oh, I’m sure you’ll have plenty of opportunities to outdo me soon enough.” He grabs Caion’s hand and all but drags him to the workbench. “Not that this wasn’t incredibly worth it, but I really should have thought about the fact we’re actually trying to get work done before I decided to wear this in the lab. I’m sure it’ll be fine, though. Salme, you mentioned you had something you wanted us to look at?”

blinks, and remembers why she was here in the first place and hesitates. “I wanted to see if you could help me extract memories more clearly from the Mask,” she says. “But it’s … kind of a. Sad project. And you two—it could wait.”

shakes his head. “We’re here to help. And while I don’t want to dismiss your feelings around the memories kept in the Mask - I know they’ve been your burden to carry for far too long - I also want to let you know that there’s joy in it, too. The joy of working together, of investigating, of coming to know.”

takes a breath and squares her shoulders and approaches the bench. “Thank you,” she says, to both of them, but she holds Archie’s gaze for a moment. His words struck her. She produces the Mask. “What does the word ‘palimpsest’ mean to you either of you?”

nods. “Well, first and foremost, it reminds me of the Palimpsest-King on Almachadta. But my song also references them as one of the sources used in my research of the Septetrione.”

nods to Caion, a little embarrassed to have not thought of it beforehand.

: “It’s … on Almachadta, we write on paper, which is made from wood pulp, or sometimes on parchment. Parchment is made from animal skins—cows or goats, usually. It’s thicker, and it’s more durable. Our culture speaks or sings its most important stories, but even we write things down. But the technology—maybe it seems silly to call it technology, but it is—is at a premium. And so, you can sometimes erase what’s been written on parchment, or the right kind of paper. You can abraid it with the right kind of stone, and write something new. But the … impression of what is written there remains. If you look at it right, usually with the right kind of gnosis, you can make out the words.”

: “It’s not lost but it is buried. And you can do it a certain amount of times before the first thing that was ever written is buried completely. Does that make sense?”

: “The mask functions in a similar way. There have been 216 cycles, which,” she looks at Archie, “thank you for counting. I don’t think I could have, but knowing the tally makes it easier.” She turns back to them both. “216. There was someone who carved the Mask, in the beginning, and the Mask remembers that but the deeper in the cycles you go, the more information you lose. What each Sword-Saint thinks matters persists—science, poetry, histories, big-picture things—and the more consecutive Sword-Saints agree on the importance of memory, the brighter it shines. The rest? Buried.” ⁂

clenches her jaw. “I want their names. I want their stories. Most people who wear the Mask give up a part of themselves to it. There is joy. I have loved my time as the Sword-Saint and it has mattered, but I never once thought I mattered. And I could be wrong, but I suspect, if I dive back through the abrasions and the indentations of the Mask, I will find many, many Sword-Saints who thought the exact same thing. We each have our time on the stage and then we go to sit in the audience and we wait and who we were is. Not irrelevant. We change lives and each life changed matters, but.” ⁂

: “I intend to be the last Sword-Saint, and this is selfish. Being able to remember them, however many of them I can, won’t save anyone. But if I’m to be the last, I also want know them,” she laughs, a little. “This is the only way I know to love them.”

🙧

takes a deep breath. “Thank you for sharing this with us. I think I may at least have an idea about how to proceed.” He turns to Caion. “We’ve already developed a technique which allows us to use gnosis signatures to determine the age of an object. Aside from being something of a party trick, it’s how we got the information we have about the age of the nooplankton and of the Septetrione ice.” His brow furrows in concentration. “In this case, there’s a chronology to the information which has been etched into the Mask. To use your metaphor of the information being buried, I wonder if it might be possible to reverse engineer and elaborate on the date-identification process to allow us to wipe off a certain amount of dirt corresponding to a length of time, not unlike an archaeological dig. Some information might still be worn out or poorly maintained, much like how not everything that dies fossilizes, but it would at least help dial in to whatever information does remain.”

nods at both of them. “Aurelius and I were able to figure out, hmmm, let me.” She closes her eyes, furrowing her brow, trying to recall the sense of the words now that she knows that these were words, told directly to her. “Rhizomata of flourishing gnosis. Self-generating. Bound into a formal shape with pellucid and radiant gnosis. And within the Mask itself is—and I do not know how this makes any sense at all—a shard or a piece of the Duelist’s Mask constellation. And it is alive, though I don’t know in what sense.”

: “It … recognized them? It looked at them? I thought it was just because they were with me, but … no. It didn’t look at you, Caion, when I showed you that memory, did it? It didn’t look at Aury like that either.”

: “It recognized them. As a friend. As cousin. A sibling.” She frowns. “Do you think whoever made the Mask made Unua?”

watches Caion swirl around the room. “Do you have a method you would propose? We can put it under our scopes, though if the light is a property of the Duelist’s Mask, it may be difficult to discern by our usual methods.”

: “I think it was those words? The memory is there, I believe. Let me see if I can call it up exactly.”

brushes an index finger lightly across the Mask, calls up the memory. “Unua held my hand when I touched the Mask, and the Mask—it startled. It circled them, almost like a dog sniffing another dog, and welcomed them as cousin-sibling-friend-fellow. It had not recognized them when I sought any memories of the Endjinn before. It was not a memory it was a knowing. It was brief.”

: “You said there was light that binds the Pearls and comes from Unua? If there’s … a bit of the Duelist’s Mask in the Mask, could it be a constellation?”

nods thoughtfully. “That currently seems the most likely. I wonder if there’s any way we could use the Library’s access to the constellations to make this property of the Mask easier to observe.”

: “Aurelius had it last. I think it’s …” she reaches for something, and pulls, out of nowhere, ‘The Traveler’s Guide to Known Reality’ and frowns at it. “Oh. Well. That’s good to know? Thought for sure he’d make the tablet…” she disappears the ‘Traveler’s Guide,’ reappears it again, and sighs. “It’s probably in our room?”

looks at him. “Oh, I’ve no idea how to do that. It’s his pocket dimension. I just know anyone can reach for the guide. I thought for sure he’d made the tablet usable. Hm. Give me a second.” She flips to a page that is very purple with very small text, and scribbles something with her finger there. She tosses the pamphlet to Caion. “I’ll need to check that in a moment, but if you and Archie want to peek while I wait, I’m good with that.”

smiles a little at his resolve. “I feel comfortable speaking for both of us when I say we’d love to.” He approaches the Mask, looking at it carefully.

takes the pamphlet back and sets the Mask on the workbench between the two of them. “If you touch it without me I’m not sure what will happen,” she warns.

looks over to her. “Well, then! Ready to proceed?”

curses softly. “Shit,” as the tablet crunches against the pamphlet. She sets the tablet on the workbench next to the Mask, laughing. “Yeah. He’s a nightmare.”

: “Do you want to use any of the instruments before we go into the library?”

shrugs. “It’s at least worth a moment to confirm our theory that these instruments will have a hard time identifying what may be happening. Either we’re right or we’re wrong in a way that helps us.” He begins pulling scopes with different tinted lenses towards the center of the room, aligning them with one another around the Mask.

scrawls another quick line on that one page of the pamphlet—this is getting pretty ridiculous—and disappears it properly.

watches Archie work.

nods. “As expected. These scopes are designed to identify gnosis, but the light seems to be something else entirely.”

grabs something hefty and covered in a cloth off the shelf next to him and turns toward Caion, then Salme. “Well, without further ado…?” He reaches his hand out towards the tablet.

also reaches her hand out toward the tablet.

gently grabs his hand and similarly basks in the glow before turning his attention to the other constellations.

looks at the newly-mirrored wall, and then at the other wall that she can’t quite focus on, and mutters, “(that’s two walls),” before frowning up at the sun for a brief moment.

then goes over to look at the Duelist’s Mask.

: “Hmm.” She holds the Mask in her hands. “Two thoughts. See what you can see here. Then I wear it. And then I call out to the constellation, and see if I can get an answer.”

: “Shit, wait, that’s three.”

nods. “Caion, shall you do the honors?” He presents him with the Attuner, still covered in a cloth.

joins Caion in the circle. “I know this is a little premature in our suggested order of operations, and I’m not even sure how we might do this, but… I have an intuitive feeling that we should try including the Duelist’s Mask in the Circle itself. I know it sounds ridiculous, but we can always try to just…” He trails off, focusing his attention towards the Duelist’s Mask, imagining his aura expanding like when he made his new favorite pebble, stretching out ever so slightly in invitation.

holds the Mask still and thinks of nothing. Lets herself be an open vessel, an apparatus, an archive.

nods. “When you say the same type of light, to what degree of specificity? Do you believe that it’s specifically the Duelist’s Mask’s light in each case, or could it be that each is associated strongly with a constellation in general, potentially including different ones?”

: “Can that tool work on a human?”

catches her lip in her teeth. “If he agrees … there’s someone I might want you to take a look at.”

looks down at the Mask. “So starlight, huh?”

looks back up at the Duelist’s Mask constellation. “I think that’s a start, for now? Thank you both.”

shoots her a mischievous look as he allows himself to be gently escorted back to private chambers. “Seriously, any time. I’m grateful you trusted us to help you uncover the Mask’s secrets in full.”

: “Thank you for your help. Both of you,” and then, with a bit of a mischievous grin, “enjoy each other.”