[Telka] Making an ithecal skin purse, step 1.

[Vega]

39th Ymiden, 721

Vega sat, for a moment, in the room she and Arlo shared and then she stood. She wrote a quick note to Arlo, saying that she'd be back soon and that he'd better not eat all the chocolate cake, and then she left. How, exactly, he could be hungry again after the feast they had just shared was beyond Vega. But, such was the way of her husband, son of Cassion and his Champion, too.

Old ever-hungry. In fairness, it was good that he and Joy were spending some time together. She liked that.

Vega couldn't sit still, couldn't bring herself to let go of what she'd seen. She'd known, in theory, before she got here. She'd known what had happened, but that had been filtered through Arlo and now, thanks to the potion she'd drunk, she knew exactly what had happened. And thus, Vega was experiencing a genuinely uncomfortable cognitive dissonance. She was the holder of two beliefs, and they were in direct conflict with each other. She believed, from the meetings she'd had with him, that Praetorum was not an idiot.

And yet. There it was, black and white. It made her blood boil, the sight of him casting magic like that when they'd been told not to. So, Vega did what she always did. She went to it head on.

Therefore, she left the note for Arlo and she made her way to find Praetorum's room. She had to ask a cadouri to get to it, but there it was. And so, she tapped on the door. She didn't have to wait long, before Praetorum answered and she looked at him and gave a slight smile. Vega had changed her clothes, was wearing a more comfortable red dress. Her pregnancy was obvious at this point and, in fairness, Vega did nothing to hide it. "Hey," she said. She looked at Praetorum and she spoke - as always - her thoughts. "I'm sorry to bother you, but I've been sittin' an' pickin' at this thing, playin' it in my mind over an' over again, an' I can't get rid of it." She didn't beat about the bush, it simply wasn't her way. Vega was direct - often blunt - and she saw no need for waffling on.

"I need to understand what I saw from that potion. Why you were willin' to cast magic standin' next to my husband, at that moment. I don't get it, an' I need to know. Because the times I've met you, you seem half way to sensible, an' it's jus' flibbertyin' my gibbet."

That said, she nodded. "Can I come in?"

[Praetorum]

Praetorum had been expecting the knock on his door. 



He just hadn't been expecting who would be behind it. 



Listening to Vega's words, Prae nodded silently, and stepped aside, pulling the door open so Vega could step in. "To be honest," he said, "I was sort of expecting Balthazar would be the first to come talk to me about this." He gestured at the inside of his room. "The chair's my size, so it might be a little tall for you, but the bed should be low enough for you to sit on if you want." 



Prae rubbed his muzzle as he shucked off his longcoat, draping it carefully over the back of the chair. "Cassion asked me the same question. Or, asked me to try and figure out the same thing, I guess. To try and understand why I did it." He grimaced. "I haven't—I don't think I have a good answer yet. I've been thinking about it all night, and it's still all muddled up in my mind."


Still, he owed it to Cassion, to Vega, to Balthazar, and most of all, to Elisabeth, to understand why. So he settled by the desk, trying to think. Trying to remember what he'd thought, how he'd felt. After a few ticks of silence, Prae sighed. Without really thinking, he reached out towards the table, and started to run his claws over the little crystal sculpture he'd been gifted. "I was... I wasn't afraid, and I didn't panic. Both of those, I know how to deal with. But it was something like that. I saw Elisabeth there, dying, and I just—" He wrapped his hand gently around the crystal, an image of him and his brothers, frozen in time. "I had to do something. It's not a good answer, I know. And it's not the whole answer either, I just... I don't have it all sorted out yet in my head. I couldn't do nothing. Not again."

[Vega]

39th Ymiden, 721

He let her in and he gestured for her to sit down. He said that he'd expected Balthazar to be the one to come first, and that told Vega a lot. Her eyes were swirling all sorts of colours as she listened to that and the colours in them sped up.

She didn't sit, not in the chair and not on the bed. Instead, she leaned against the chair and listened to him speak. He spoke, but he didn't say anything worth hearing until he got to the fact that he couldn't do nothing, not again. Not again. Vega said nothing for a moment, looking at him. Then, she spoke. At first, she spoke slowly, trying to put her thoughts into words.

"I'm not a clever person, Praetorum," she said. "Not book smart, nothin' like that. Arlo taught me to read a few arcs ago, though I know quite a few languages speakin', I can't read well, still. I've never been to school or university, an' I'm not educated." It was important to be clear about that. "So, if there's somethin' I'm missin' here because I'm not bright enough to work it out, then please tell me." She was entirely serious when she said that, and her reasoning was clear. "An' I honestly hope that I am missin' somethin', because if I'm not then I don't understand how it is you manage to walk an' talk at the same time." It would be too much for someone that stupid, in Vega's mind.

Sighing, she looked out of the window. "I get that there's been a time in your life when you did nothin' - or you feel like you did - an' somethin' bad happened. Maybe people died, or got hurt, maybe you did. I don't know." Turning back to look at him, her eyes were still, no longer swirling a mass of colours. Now, they were just silver and red. "An' I don't care. I will, when I'm not so stupendously angry that I want to turn you into a handbag, but right now, I don't. Get over it." Her voice was hard, her expression too. "Because you're a soldier an' you're a warrior an' there in Storm's Edge you were even bloody useful, so you don't get to be stupid now." Her body was tense and she couldn't sort out the emotions she was feeling. However, as literal sparks flew off her, it was probably fairly obvious that anger was a big one. "Casting a spell then weren't the only option you had to do somethin', an' the situation were gettin' dealt with." She'd seen it, and to her mind it was true. "If you were goin' to do somethin' to save her then you should have told her stop faffin' about in the sub-zero temperatures to begin with, an' made her get dressed. That would have been helpful." Or so it seemed to her.

"The issue here is that all you saw was that one person was injured. I like Elisabeth, I do, an' I'd call her a friend. But you were in a team, an' you risked the team. You risked the whole damn island to do somethin' what you had specifically been told not to do." She couldn't get past it. "So, I get that you don't know, I do. But you need to know because the moment might come again. You saw your friend injured an' in a moment you decided that you knew better than the people in the temple, you understood magic better than the people running the damn operation, an' you directly disobeyed orders." She had been a soldier, she understood the frustration, but she expected better from him.

Because he'd been better. She'd seen it.

"So, you ignored orders, disobeyed direct ones, for a mission you'd agreed to, a mission you'd signed up for. By doin' that you harmed the person you were tryin' to save, but more importantly than that, you risked the whole damn island. So I need to ask you somethin' Praetorum, an' I think it's somethin' you need to work out."

Vega's voice was quiet, now, she wasn't shouting, she wasn't gesturing. "You need to work out why. Why did you forget everythin' you've learned, why did you go against every instinct a soldier has? Way I see it, it were for one of three reasons. Maybe it were because you were faced with someone you like bein' hurt? If not that, maybe you did that because Elisabeth is more important to you than the lives of the pepople with you an' all the lives on Scalvoris? Or was it that you just thought that, because it were magic, you knew better than everyone else?"

[Praetorum]

Praetorum listened quietly as Vega spoke, her voice and eyes sharp, as if the flecks of fire coming off of her wasn’t indication enough of how she was feeling.

She was much angrier than Cassion had been about it. But the core of her dressing down was the same as Cassion’s gentle reprimand. Praetorum had to understand why, because this? This couldn’t happen again.

A time in his life when he did nothing, and something bad happened. His grip tightened minutely on the crystal in his hand, and he turned to look at it once more, stroking his claws over the visage of the brothers he’d failed. That was just it, wasn’t it. In almost losing Elisabeth, he’d seen himself losing Serinius, losing Luther again.

Except, the worst failure of his life hadn’t been when he’d done nothing. It had been when his vision, his mind had narrowed down to a single person, and suddenly nothing else in the world had mattered.

Just like on Ishallr.

“You’re right. That moment might come again—I’m almost certain it will. This… this seems to be a flaw of mine I never saw before. Once is a mistake, twice is a pattern. But the last time this happened, the last time I lost sight of everything to try and save one person… It ended badly, and it hurt, so deeply and for so long that I couldn’t think about it. Couldn’t understand it, couldn’t learn from it. I won’t make that mistake this time.”

He sighed heavily, setting the crystal figurine down. “A little of all three, I think is the answer to your question. In my right mind, I know that Elisabeth’s life isn’t worth that of everyone in Scalvoris. I do know that. But I saw someone I care deeply about dying, and my right mind went up in flames. I wasn’t afraid or panicking—it was just that for that moment, nothing mattered except the person in front of me. Apparently, that’s my natural instinct when someone I care for is in danger. I’m not proud of that, and I need to…”

Prae rubbed his face, exhausted.“I need to keep better control of myself. You’re right, I am a soldier. And I can’t afford to lose my good sense like that. It won’t happen again.”

“And for what it’s worth, I am sorry. About Scalvoris, obviously, but also about Arlo. Even if what I thought would happen had happened, it would have put him at risk. It was—” Prae hesitated, searching for the words “—it was a selfish instinct, to care more about her than Arlo and Darius.”

[Vega]

39th Ymiden, 721

She listened to his answer and Vega had only one question for him. "Well how can I be angry at you when you bloody well agree with me?!" Somehow, that made Vega briefly more angry as sparks flew off her more quickly. If he knew, if she was right then...

She sighed. "I swear by Pier an' Pre's pink parts, it's somethin' about those of a male persuasion what makes you all plonkers," she shook her head. "an' it appears it's cross-species, too. Look," she sighed, and then sat down on the bed. Looking at Prae, she visibly calmed both in expression and due to the lack of embers flying off her. "Understandin' what the situation is, that's a good step an' a big one. But it's only a step." Thinking about her words for a moment, but only a moment, Vega then launched in.

"What we do, you an' I, is a split-trill decision sort of thing. I always think that fightin' an' solderin', it's like acrobatics or dancin'," she did consider that, and the reason why was clear to her. "If we have to stop an' think about it, we've missed the step or fallen off the balance beam. It's why we drill with the weapons we use, constant repetition." Nothing about fighting was glamourous and only someone who did it and knew it would know that. She believed Prae did.

"I'm Faldrun's daughter, an' one of my domains is rhythm." She grinned and motioned to herself, "Another one is emotion. When I get irritated, I spark. But rhythm? It's..." Looking at him she was obviously struggling to form the words, to explain it adequately. But she did the best she could. "Everythin' has a rhythm. Everythin'. I experience it like a sound, a beat. I can't rightly explain it, but I know that every thin' an' every person has a rhythm. It's like a song an' it's uniquely theirs." If she'd known what Attunement was, Vega would have a better job of explaining the way she experienced the world - even though she didn't have the magic.

"An' that rhythm, Prae, it can't be controlled. Not like you're suggestin'. You weren't in a panic, an' you weren't not thinkin'. You were jus' in your rhythm of bein'." She smiled slightly. "An' you've got to - at least, I think you've got to - understand that. Controllin' it, or tryin' to, is like silencin' a sound. You can't, not really. You can cover your own ears, but the sound's still there. It's part of your rhythm. Use it. Embrace it. An' for the love of Xiur perky nips, train it." She shook her head. "You're a soldier. That's what you do. Train it. Nothin' matters except the person in front of you? Train yourself to see what it'll do to them if you save them at the cost of others lives." She didn't ask him what he thought Elisabeth would have felt if Darius or Arlo had died because Prae had saved her.

Shaking her head, she stood up again. "Don't ignore that part of you. It's a good part, it really is. That urge to protect your people? I'd be a steamin' hypocrite if I said I don't admire and respect that. Don't control it, you plonker, use it. Train it. Because when you train it, you can use it sensibly, you can think about it an' plan. You can put it into context an' really consider it. Otherwise, it'll bite you on your scaly bum when you least expect it."

When she spoke the next words, Vega's voice was quiet. Calm. Emotionless - in the way that only someone who is or has been tortured can truly sound. "Knowin' that someone died in order for you to live is not a good feelin'. An' take it from someone who knows, if you try an' repress your rhythm, you're only ever goin' to be discordant. Don't be that." She gave a sudden smile. "Be a symphony. A loud, brave, honourable symphony. An' be that knowin' that if you put my husband in danger again, I'm goin' to thump you so hard your face will turn inside out. Alright?"

All in all, she thought, she was a very reasonable woman.

[Praetorum]

It was somewhat of a relief to see Vega calm and stop spraying fire everywhere. He'd been starting to worry a little for his bedsheets. She sat, and Prae followed her lead, not wanting to loom. Pulling his chair closer to the bed, he settled into it, listening as Vega tried to explain her thoughts and perspective to him. 



Despite the difficulty Vega seemed to be having in articulating something so integral to her being, Prae thought he understood all the same, at least broadly. He wasn't sure he agreed, in places—Prae believed firmly that anyone, with enough time and effort and discipline, could change their inherent nature, could silence a sound, to use her wording, if it was part of themselves they didn't want or like—but perhaps she was right about this. 


How did one train a part of their soul? Prae supposed he started by not ignoring it.


Despite his best efforts these last arcs, Praetorum had always been someone who cared deeply and intensely. That was just who he was. And he could try and change himself, try and become a person who always cared about everyone equally—but the truth was, he didn't want to be that, not really. And if he wasn't going to change that part of himself, he needed to know how to use it. It wasn't going to be simple, but Prae had never shied away from difficulty.


"You know, Vega," Prae said slowly. "You might not think yourself clever, and maybe you're even right, I don't know. But it seems to me that you have a way of seeing things clearly, and that's a skill much more valuable." He smiled slightly at her. "Thank you," he said, "for talking to me about this. And I'll try my best to keep my face the right way out."

[Fate]

Your Review

Vega

Overview

I love Vega. Her temper but concern are beautiful written in this post and interaction. Thank you for the Read.

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XP: 15
Renown: 0

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Praetorum

Overview

I loved Prae's self reflection and honest answers to the questions. The self analysis was well done, and honest. Thank you for the Read.

Points

XP: 15
Renown: 0

Loot

IC:
None

Knowledge

Played to Ability

No Knowledge requested

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