#adelaide 01

He catches a glimpse of her on the pier at first. His gaze lingers a moment, because she is stunning, though later he wonders if his intuition was somehow at work as well. The people at this place (the Sea of Nectar?) have so many varied and outlandish outfits that hers should hardly stand out, but somehow it seems the closest to familiar.

Of course, that's only a moment. Alyosha looks away, and the woman passes by. He's distracted by exhaustion and pain and the light tablet he now knows is called a holophone, so when he decides finally to try and make his way back to his floor, he doesn't see that at some point she had passed by again. He doesn't see even as he passes into the strange room that moves between floors instead of stairs. It is not until he looks up to press the correct number that he sees her there.

"Oh! Excuse me," he says.

He looks around himself. There is clearly enough room for multiple people. Then he looks back to the woman.

“I’m looking for the city of Velas. Near the ocean,” he’d told the bear shopkeep, miming waves. The bear looked a little insulted, but answered him nonetheless, telling him to try boarding the train to Mare Nectaris. How was he supposed to know bears understood him? Most of his other powers aren’t working.

Samothes is gone. No matter how hard Hadrian concentrates, he cannot feel anything. For someone who is used to having three different deities’ guidance at any given time, it’s… lonely, like coming unmoored and drifting without a rudder or a sail.

Velas might be gone by now, too, crushed beneath Ordennan steel. At least Rosana and Ben are safe.

Hadrian emerges from the train station to a fresh wave of despair. Of course it’s not Velas. The ride took only a short time, and wherever he woke up is far from anywhere he knows. Last thing he remembers is falling, the swords piercing him and water overflowing. Maybe he landed in a different strata?

He sees the woman in a blue dress sitting at a cafe, and he recognizes her from… somewhere. He makes his way over to her. 

It’s an ingenious building. He has to concede at least that much. It reminds him of Jindosh’s work: the architectural equivalent of champagne on the tongue, effortless yet inscrutable. He could hardly pull his eyes away from the endless glass walls, glimmering cyan, and the depth of the sea gazing back at him.

The Outsider has had a great deal too much time to himself to think about the world in terms of eternities. But if he had to be somewhere for a very long time, this would do.

His room in Bì Xiù is on the first floor-- the uppermost, just below the lobby open to the sky and the surface-- and he has already spent some uncounted minutes watching the light play among the shallow waters like a litter of kittens. His curiosity pulls him down, to spy on deeper waters. (Even the elevator is a marvel, although it only will allow him to go down a handful of floors. He tries Suite 200.)

The Outsider is very nearly shocked to see someone there when the elevator doors roll open, but he could not explain why. His face is a mask, some narrow-eyed mixture of emotions, and he opens his mouth to speak without being sure-- what a strange feeling!-- what he intends to say.

The sound of waves in the distance is both a comfort and a weight at her throat, an discomforting mix of home/not home. Jaina lingers by the station, restless and anxious, taking in the strange inhabitants of this place as they go about their business, cheerful crowing and cawing and colorful plumage and a staggering lack of guards or visible weapons. There was a war going on, before she was pulled into the dead lands — somehow it’s this that feels the strangest since waking up here. That carelessness, this lack of tension. The only heaviness in the air here are the thunderstorms roiling on the horizon.

She doesn’t trust it for a moment. But if she stops too long to think her thoughts twist and gnaw onto themselves like writhing serpents, and so she makes herself step forward, past buildings made of glass, onto paths drawn in the sand. But something catches her eye: another woman, tall and stark against the cloudy skies. Part of Jaina, raw and tired and wild, wants only to hide, but she needs information, she needs to know more about this place and the people in it.

It goes like this for you. You wake up in an unfriendly house in an unfriendly city and you leave. The streets twist and wind but you know that if you track the sun through the sky and never let yourself be distracted by the skittering of clawed feet or shadows in the doorways you will make it out to somewhere else. And you do--you make it to the indistinct edge of a sealed dome and to a train, which you have heard about once from Samot, talking about what the City of First Light turned into after he was chased away.

It takes you to a sea, waves lapping gently against sand, a horizon dotted with summer islands. You stand there for a moment on the shore, statue-still, and you are a breath away from letting it get to you before you see someone else. Dark skin, pearls in a chain at her throat, and something about her that draws you in (something familiar, something aching).

"There you go," she said handing the bottle towards the other girl as she got back to their booth and then popped down onto her seat and took a sip from her own. "Do you think we will have some customers until the end of our shift, or this one will be yet another quiet night?"

[ @adelaidexarcher ]