Chapter Text
A dream, and a vivid one. It was to be expected — certain psychal compounds lingered in the body until the next sleep cycle could render them easier to metabolize.
The world was glassed over and she sifted through its shards with her bare hands. There was no pain to pierce her detached and dazzled melancholy. Gradually, through the clinking, steady rhythm of her purpose, she sensed where the dream had placed her. Structures beneath the glass around her lay in freshly-familiar orientations. That nameless ruin in the Moon Stair, lost to history and memory, resurrected itself through her unconscious imaginings. If it had to be anywhere, it may as well have been here.
The purpose of her excavation still eluded her — but then, where purpose and logic defined Agate’s waking life, the same did not always translate into her dreams. Often, as tonight, she merely guided her dream-self from a core of hazy sense and reaction. At times, it was liberating. Tonight, it was as dreary as it was vexing. Until, of course, she uncovered something.
Beneath the glass she glimpsed a splash of white fur. Beneath the white fur, the skin of a cheek, tattooed in circuitry. Perched on the cheek, the pane of a pair of goggles, protecting from the heaped and shifting glass an eye she knew. The eye swiveled to meet her.
Vexation evaporated into a stinging dread. Agate sent herself the directive to reverse her efforts. She slid the glass from the tenuous, excavated piles back into the depression she’d made to bury again what she’d found. To bury the conversation she knew was coming. The impulse came too late.
Q Girl, beloved pupil of the Barathrumites, acclaimed author and tinker, former research partner of Agate Severance Star, sat up from the earth and shook herself off. Glass tinkled from the quills across her back. Her hair shone in the half-light of the ruins, a rainbow in every violet of the spectrum. She turned her ursine face to follow as Agate lurched upright and stepped back.
“What’s gotten into you lately?” asked Q Girl.
“Be more specific,” Agate replied, helplessly. How many times had this exchange played itself out in her memories, her dreams?
The servos of her exoskeletal bracing hummed softly as Q Girl opened her palms. “This is dangerous stuff, Agate. The penumbra calculus? If the Eaters banned it, I don’t have to tell you—”
“Then don’t,” said Agate. “You know as well as I.” She turned. She left the glass-flooded clearing. Perhaps she could pre-empt the inevitable course of this conversation.
She passed beneath sheer crystal faces, sky-glass shattering softly underhoof. The sky was dark and empty. She ducked under a marble archway. Across its threshold, she found herself once more in the clearing, in the company of a half-buried Q Girl. This dream was toying with her.
“I thought,” Q Girl began, “I thought a little vacation would be good for you! Would be good for — us. Would get you interested in something else.”
Here it was. That old headstrong rebuke, its sharpness amber-frozen on her tongue. Nowhere to direct it but outwards.
“I never took you for a coward,” said Agate.
“A coward?” Q Girl replied. Though the dream had changed the venue, her tone was as muted as it ever had been.
“What else am I to call it?” asked Agate. “This is the calculus by which the Eaters broke the world. Barathrum would have us avert our eyes from the fracture lines. I should have known you would take his side in this.”
“That’s caution, Agate,” said Q Girl, her anger working past its internal delay. “Caution, not cowardice. You know as much as I do about that calculus. You aren’t scared?”
The crystalline canyons and their glassy ruins sank into inchoate rainbow smears in her periphery. The distant, churning howl of broken spacetime bubbled up into audibility. Every faculty she kept within the dream sought to claw her way out of it. It was far too slow a process.
“If we cannot master our fears, we may as well be beasts,” Agate plunged on, talking in spite of the hurt spreading across the expression of her conversational counterpoint. In spite of her own desire to be done with this exchange’s endless retreads. In spite of the dream-land’s fast-approaching sundering. “From our shared base of knowledge, then, you conclude that I should abandon this course of inquiry?”
“Yes!” said Q Girl. “I can’t help you with this, Agate. Nothing good will come of it!”
“I see,” said Agate. The rainbow blur of the land flowed up into the empty sky in a prismatic slurry. Sucking vortices yawned, ringing the horizon with whirling, hungry glimpses of elsewhere, filling her ears with their roar. Flickering through the gaps, as though animated in shifting mosaic, was the impression of great, staring eyes. She could no longer tell whether she was sinking or floating. None of this stilled her tongue. “You would have me wallow in fear. Then our conclusions are irreconcilable.”
Q Girl’s eyes shone with the onset of tears. A billowing rainbow curtain of light swallowed her next words. A small mercy, before the rest of that bitter exchange played out.
Agate woke.
This was her bed in the Chrome Ward. The quiet hum of electricity and the appetizing scent of her overnight stew suffused the atmosphere around her. Her body was a touch sore, but rested. The prototype clock across the room suggested by its burnished face that it was afternoon.
The dream already sluiced itself from her mind — vivid, but fleeting. Judging from the cocktail of unsettled regret and irritation within her, she had a good idea what it was about. That conversation again, most likely. No failed line of inquiry clung to her quite like that one. She rubbed a finger along the fabric of her blanket.
She needed to talk to Mokou.
She hadn’t thought the simple statement of a boundary would lead to such an adverse reaction. It betrayed an alarming lack of patience for someone who was ostensibly immortal. Had Agate been unclear? It was already enough she had to keep Mokou from being devoured in the wilds — did she have to be shepherd to the immortal’s volatile emotions, too? Was it even worth treating someone better whose response to a “no” was to lash out at nearby structures? What words would have kept her back from that extreme while still leaving room for Agate to sleep?
But such considerations could wait until they next spoke. A number of other tasks demanded her attention today. Repairs, reports, resupply, and perhaps a bit of cleaning when time permitted. She had been abroad long enough for a thin layer of dust to accumulate across the surfaces of her workspace. She slipped out from beneath the covers and set her hooves on the stone floor.
From her wardrobe she selected a clean dress shirt and buttoned herself into it. She rolled up the cuffs of her sleeves to prepare herself her afternoon repast. Moving to the open kitchen, she dispensed a bit of hot water for tea, then checked her stew. Before she had gone to bed, she had started the neutron cooker on an old recipe. It centered around spark tick chitin for the electrical convenience, starapples for the sake of recuperating her bruises, and aloe volta leaves to unify the other ingredients. It was hot, tender, and ready. She served herself a portion of the voltscht.
She was just settling down to enjoy it when there came a knock at the door. It was a quiet knock, polite in volume and intensity if not in timing. Agate rose and weaved past her dining table, down the entry hall to unlock the front door. E’Beth stood outside, sporting her customary blindfold and a fresh shawl over her red robes.
“Chef,” the esper nodded in greeting.
“Chef,” Agate nodded back.
“May I come in?” asked E’Beth.
“Certainly,” said Agate. She turned away from the open door and returned to the kitchen. “Would you care for some voltscht? I was just sitting down to it myself.”
“I’ve already eaten, but I’d love a taste,” E’Beth replied. She slipped out of her boots and joined Agate in the kitchen to serve herself a smaller portion.
“You are here for an ecological report, presumably,” said Agate.
“If you have one ready, yes,” said E’Beth. “But that wasn’t the primary purpose of this call.”
Agate sipped her tea. It had steeped a tad overlong, but the bitterness made for a good contrast to her sour-sweet voltscht. “The immortal, then.”
E’Beth nodded and sampled her own bite of stew.
“I can’t tell you much of certainty or specificity,” Agate continued. “She seems to have outlived both such considerations. She predates the Sultanate, which gives us a minimum bound of roughly eight thousand years. I am inclined to place it higher.”
“How much higher?” asked E’Beth. A touch of awe slipped through the esper’s composure.
“Let’s call it, conservatively, a margin of two to six thousand years higher.” Agate paused to allow the weight of her calculation to reach E’Beth. She took another bite of stew. “But higher still would not terribly surprise me. She talks of places and cultures lost to the historical record.”
“Could she be from offworld?” asked E’Beth. She had finished her own portion of voltscht and now sat with her chin resting on her clasped fists, elbows on the table in a posture of unbridled attention.
“It’s within the realm of possibility,” Agate tilted her head in acknowledgment. “One such lost culture she mentions is a lunar empire, which… on our moon? Strikes me as unlikely. But if it were another moon, and she a terrestrial transplant, then perhaps…”
“You don’t suppose it’s…” E’Beth trailed off in concern.
“Moon King Fever? She claims her condition renders her impervious to disease, but I have not verified this, and thus I cannot discount the possibility.” Agate set aside her finished stew bowl and opened her palm in a gesture of admission. “With that said, from my other observations, I’m inclined to believe her claim of immunity.”
E’Beth’s head sank into a contemplative nod as she slackened her wrists slightly. “Where did you find her?”
“Irula’s kitchen, of all places,” said Agate. If all had gone according to plan, she’d still be there, perhaps with another polemic to her name by now. The last week had gone anything but planned.
“Oh, how are they keeping?” E’Beth smiled.
“As well as ever,” Agate answered, pleasantry for pleasantry. “They brought in Mokou from the desert several days before my arrival. She’d evidently been fobbing around the Sunderlies for some time before setting herself towards crossing the Moghra’yi.”
“Goodness,” said E’Beth. “Why?”
Agate sipped her tea. “A fringe hypothesis. You can ask her the specifics yourself. I take it you delivered her to the Moondrop Inn?”
“I did,” E’Beth nodded. She rested her arms on the table and leaned back in her stool. She sighed, then turned her head back to the doorway. “You left her in a bit of a state, you know. You could have—”
“I could have done any number of things, yes,” Agate preempted her moralizing. “Sleep deprivation tends to rob one of niceties. She’s suffered worse than refusal. I’ve picked up something of a masochistic streak in her.”
The esper winced. “Agate, there’s masochistic and there’s suicidal. And even then — if it was refusal that would be one matter. What happened between you before your arrival?”
Agate ran a finger along the rim of her mug and sighed. “We had an altercation. One I intend not to leave unsettled.”
“An altercation,” E’Beth echoed, flatly. “I stayed out of the details, but I can tell you that, on top of everything else, she felt you were leading her on.”
“I’ve led her all the way from the Six-Day Stilt,” Agate replied. Her heart subtly sped to recall their bodies pressed together, her hands tight around her wrists, the scrape of her teeth against her lips. She stood from the table and bused her dishes and E’Beth’s empty bowl to the sink. “It was a heated altercation. If we’ve no further matters to discuss, I’ll see to her shortly.”
She had felt the shift within herself, within her regard towards Mokou, back in the canyons. There was space and potential for it to grow into something new, something mutual. In order for those feelings to come to fruition, it was necessary that misconceptions be cleared away. That task was sensitive enough to take priority today.
“That was all I came by to ensure,” E’Beth nodded. “Thank you for your time. And the stew. It was delicious, as always.”
“Thank you for your diligence,” Agate replied.
The esper stood and pushed in her stool. She paused briefly on the workspace floor, halfway between the kitchen and the entrance. There was, indeed, one more thing snagging at Agate’s thoughts. It seemed the esper sensed it as well.
“Go ahead, Agate.”
“E’Beth,” Agate replied. She turned from the wash basin, cleaning her hands upon a cloth. “Have you heard of magic?”
“Magic?”
Agate sighed. “Not psionics, nor genetics, nor thin world manipulation. Spontaneous effects in flagrant disregard of any known natural law. Magic. Wizardry.”
E’Beth tilted her chin up in consideration. “I’d be willing to say some of the Chefs Oth’s dishes apply, but I don’t know that they’d agree with me. Other than that, only really in folklore. Why?”
Agate set the cloth aside and crossed her arms in front of her chest. “She’s magic, E’Beth. I intend to find out what that means.”