#maitos

Maitos (Cobweb)

Canonically, Maitos is a trans guy. In his culture, trans masculinity is not necessarily freely undertaken, but rather a result of various social pressures. For Maitos, like many others, this was a case of 'our family needs a male person to interface with the world', and Maitos was deemed the suitable option. Socially, the community accepts that this person is now male, and treats him accordingly. Although Maitos had little to no choice in becoming male, he also has negligible desire to revert to being female; he prefers to exist as male (possibly due to his circumstances). We might classify him as either trans male or agender with preference for male pronouns.

In the Cardhouse, Maitos remains male as he is in reality. (In my second attempt at ficlet #5, I actually attempted to include some of his gender history, but it wound up being too much about Maitos and not enough about Avinlor.) Anemone's precision boy-dar does not err in its assessment of him.

Avinlor (Yrgenzol)

Avinlor was raised female. When she began knocking about on her own, she was variously identified as female or male (usually, amongst a given culture, with a distinctly higher incidence of one or the other); she has probably been places where she has been identified as some form of third gender. Avinlor has never once challenged anything she has been gendered as. This is partly personality quirk, and partly that she really could not care less. Avinlor's culture of origin only conceives of binary gender, and insofar as Avinlor possesses the degree of introspection and interest to consider the matter, she believes that she is what she was raised as, and cannot be anything else. We, however, would probably recognize her as agender.

Canonically, Maitos is introduced to Avinlor by a third party, who identifies her as female; lacking that introduction, Maitos would have gendered Avinlor as male. Hence, the Cobweb identifies denizen!Avinlor as male, and his (third person) narration handles Yrgenzol accordingly. For one brief moment at the end, Maitos perceives Yrgenzol as female, but the moment passes, and Yrgenzol-as-male resumes.

Anemone's boy-dar reads Yrgenzol as not-male (correct), and places Yrgenzol as really-a-woman (debatable); the rest of Anemone's coterie adopt her declaration, whatever thoughts and conclusions they had reached themselves (if any). Collectively, Maitos' own coterie regards Yrgenzol's true gender as one of the great mysteries of the Cardhouse; individually, we see that Maitos and one of the others lean toward male, while the Mustard Seed inclines towards female, but will swap pronouns rather than holding out for any specific interpretation. If there are gendered bathrooms in the Cardhouse, probably at least one of Yrgenzol's stars has tried to stake them out, waiting to see which one Yrgenzol goes into (because they’re jerks like that).

Tsefida (Mustard Seed)

Tsefida, canonically, was born into an upper class family (in a culture very crudely resembling something somewhere between Jane Austen and P. G. Wodehouse, inclusive, although probably with less default homophobia), where she was very much required to conform to upper-class-girl gender roles. She wanders off to play with fairies, and is last seen by her family at some point before she irritates a fairy who decides to retaliate by hitting her with a sex-change curse. Tsefida's reference pool for 'people who suddenly become male/female' consists of stories from mythology and folklore (and, let's be real, at least one porn novel that circulated surreptitiously at her school (though it was inspired by folklore - yes, Tsefida researched this)). Accordingly, Tsefida decides that since she is now a dude, she must carry on accordingly: she masculinizes her name (Tseiffedaa?), and undertakes to Be A Man™. There are some rough spots (socially and psychologically), but he settles into it. I think that later on he might start occasionally presenting more feminine, but he would need a lot more critical thought capabilities, or else new examples of how gender can be done, to reach the conclusion that he could be something other than Male. Anyway, Tsfd is the one other human trans character I have running around, and therefore got dragged into being one of Avinlor's stars (see what I did there? I thought that was very clever ;P ).

For 'Yrgenzol', Tsefida wandering off to play with fairies becomes Tsefida being picked up by Yrgenzol and the Cardhouse. Consequently, she does not get hit by hardware-altering magic. What Tsefida does have, however, is her mythology / folklore / porn background on one hand, and the real live inspirational ambiguity that is Yrgenzol on the other. She starts experimenting, and grows into what we would probably term being gender-fluid.

Maitos considered the extra jacket in his pack again, but decided that the walking alone would soon be warm enough. Avinlor had finally made a sound that was probably a huff (though it might have been a final parting comment to the rain) and resumed walking. Maitos trudged along behind her.

The snow soon ceased to melt on the ground, and began piling up with the oppressive heaviness of not-noise that came from thin, fluffy ice bricks falling into place upon more of the same. Somehow, the sound seemed heavier than usual, though no louder. Maitos gave his own huff and focused on ignoring the fantasies of his undoubtedly soggy ears.

The cold, curiously, seemed to stay with him. Snow might require colder temperatures than rain, Maitos reasoned, but not indefinitely so: there was such a thing as it being too cold to snow. Then, it was harder to walk through so he should be expending more energy and making himself warmer in the process. Finally, he no longer had liquid water constantly landing on him and running off, taking more heat with each rolling drop. He held out one arm to study the snow that had fallen on his sleeve. Some of it melted, very slowly, but most of the ice just slid off. He shook his sleeves off and hugged himself. He had not grown colder, but neither had he warmed up.

Either the persistent cold or the persistent effort of ignoring the sound of thudding snowflakes had so occupied Maitos that he had failed to notice when they had entered the tunnel. He looked up and out of his thoughts to find deliberately shaped walls rising on either side and arching overhead. He studied them, trying to figure out what made him think they were formed with intention, rather than merely by chance. It was difficult to make out features in the dim light, but he thought he might have glimpsed a corner of brickwork peeking out from behind a drift of snow. Not long after, his foot kicked something that felt like wood---an old support beam, maybe. He tried to recall if he had seen anything more distinct back at the beginning, whether inside or out, that suggested what sort of tunnel it was, or why it had been built, but he could not even recall if they had slipped in while he was not listening to the sounds of the snow, or while he was lamenting the continued cold, or---perhaps more likely---in the grey study in between.

Maitos still had not gotten warm. Also, the snow was still falling.

He looked up to the ceiling of the tunnel, and saw the flakes drifting down through it. He looked to the sides, and saw flakes drifting in and out of them. Either it was snowing inside, or they were in two places at once, again. He could ask Avinlor about it, but then he would have to admit that he had only just noticed what was going on. He kept quiet and trudged on through the growing drifts.

Maitos was no longer easy to astonish. Walking through two different places at the same time should not have been any more remarkable than walking through sleet, and usually not at all as uncomfortable. Moreover, like the sleet, one or the other would eventually win out and the two contradictory surroundings would resolve into one reasonably consistent sort of place. It usually happened quicker than this though.

What if they had gotten stuck between the snowy place and the tunnel place, halfway from one to the next, but not in either? Suppose they just walked around between the two of them until the snow filled up the tunnels and they could no longer move, or even breathe. Then, months later, or even years, the snow would melt, and their corpses would be swept to who knew what end in subterranean rivers that were not even properly underground. They would probably batter apart on the rock and seep down through the soil, and then at least maybe they would be in only one real place.

‘Avinlor?' he finally ventured. ‘I don't much care for this.'

‘No harm in tunnelling,' she said, or maybe, ‘No harm in tunnels,' given how the snow deadened the sound, and the stone echoed it. ‘We're only passing through,' she added more clearly. Maitos decided to interpret the present progressive as reassurance that they existed in a continuously changing state and were making forward progress. This did not comfort him as he had hoped, a little like how he still had not managed to generate more body heat. The simplest explanation was that he had already died and been buried, and was now being buried a second time, in his grave, under the snow.

Maitos walked directly into Avinlor, who had stopped to examine a fork in the tunnel. Why had he been buried with her? He had always supposed one of them would substantially outlive the other, probably with Avinlor being the survivor. How old had he made it to in the end?

Avinlor looked down both new tunnels, then picked up a handful of snow, and held it and blew on it until it melted. Unfortunately, it had nothing more to say to her than either wet or Winter, and in (or maybe that was out), none of which was news.

If it is Winter, who said it had to be snow? she asked.

The snow rumbled, and the tunnel blew about in a sudden gust, and when it had settled again, the lefthand passage had gone and the drifts of snow were drifts of brown, wet leaves, and just the edges of the very top layer were rimmed with frost. Avinlor set off along the only direction remaining with a new briskness, or perhaps merely a degree of vigor that her companion was finding increasingly difficult to emulate.

Maitos, who knew better than to deliberately brush off the leaves from his shoulders and hat, followed resignedly. The cold had settled further into him while they had stood still, and he could not see how the new arrangement was improvement. Now, if anything went wrong, they had lost their power of choice; as for the leaves, they would not only be wet, but also dirty. He stumbled over something wooden and when he had steadied himself and looked to see what was the matter, he found it had been a tree root. Indeed, the entire tunnel was no longer stone, but a pathway bounded on either side by dense, grey trees, whose bare branches reached over their heads, interlocking in a wooden net. A glance to the side again showed that the trees grew so closely together, Maitos doubted he would be able to slip between them. Even if he did find a wide enough gap, he felt sure they would not let him.

Avinlor was standing some ways ahead, looking back at him. He hurried to catch up, and muttered, ‘Sorry,' when he reached her. She set off again, making the hum that meant he was forgiven, and that she hoped he would look after himself better---for his own sake. It meant, more generally, that she was concerned for him, and at least somewhat sympathetic, though she was unlikely to admit as much in so few words.

Up ahead, the trees gave way on their left, and faded sunlight cascaded into the tunnel. ‘Sunlets,' Avinlor said in a measured voice. According to most people, children of the sun were a good thing, which was why Avinlor almost never rolled her eyes, huffed in exasperation, or twitched a finger when speaking of them. In any case, her opinions were clear enough from the word alone to those who were familiar with it. Maitos, for his part, had never yet heard that any of the children of the sun went in for cold and decay and withering, but he still had not heard of a lot of things as yet. A click and a finger flutter from ahead showed that Avinlor had her own doubts, though she did not share her revised assessment. Maitos tried to interpret the click and the hand gesture, but could only refine it as far as bad Sunlet imitators, and even that was partly guesswork. A correct identification was probably absolutely crucial for more reasons than the obvious, but Maitos really wanted out of the tunnel. As long as the opening did not connect them to a mountain of dust with trees of bone, or a ravening horde with eyeless heads and gnashing teeth, he would take it over more tunnel.

In fact, when they reached it, it showed them nothing alarming at all. It looked out merely over a field of sunflowers, a little past their prime and beginning to wilt, though their seeds probably would not be ripe yet. Admittedly, the shriveled sunflower in the sky---in place of a sun---was a little odd, with its limp rays like boney fingers, and its brittle calyx a circular mouth of so many jagged teeth waiting to consume it once again. But it cast light, and Maitos had seen stranger pseudo-suns than this.

Avinlor, meanwhile, had knelt down to touch a shrunken ray that had fallen or been blown into the tunnel. She jerked back, as if burned, and stood quickly.

‘Come on, Maitos,' she said, and held out her hand to him. He stared blankly at it, no more certain of grasping it than of taking hold of one of the flowers in the field. ‘Come on,' she repeated. Still he stared at her, frozen like a frost-touched leaf. ‘You were right, Maitos,' she said. And, yes, that admission was enough to rouse him into motion again. He reached out to her, and she smiled. ‘We're going to get out of here.'

Their hands clasped, and she pulled him to the far side of the tunnel, away from the gap in the trees. Avinlor made to continue forward then, and Maitos stumbled and managed a sort of squashed meep of protest at going past something evidently so dangerous, and then onward still to who knew what, but Avinlor simply said, ‘Forwards is just as good as back, now. No harm in passing through.' They crept by the opening, pressed up against the tree trunks as close as they could while still navigating over the roots---one-handed, each of them---until the ground was shadowed once more, untouched by the sunflower-sunlight. In the shadows, they stepped down into the middle of the tunnel again, where the going was easier, though Avinlor still kept hold of his hand. She led them on at a good pace then, a little bit hurrying but mostly purposeful. Maitos looked back behind them every so often, not entirely sure what he expected to see, except perhaps a throng of sunflower zombies lumbering after them. The tunnel remained empty, though, and even the lighted opening disappeared around a bend eventually, and Maitos never heard anything besides the crunch and slide of wet leaves, and the stumping of their own feet.

A long time later (probably), they were walking through a rainy forest, full of trees spaced at nice, normal distances, and covered over with moss and draping lichens. Only a few were bare of leaves; most were heavy with needles and, where they were low enough to see, bright orange cones; here and there Maitos saw an occasional scaly-leafed tree, much smaller than most of the needle ones, and with stringier-looking bark.

They had dropped hands a little while back, and Maitos finally gathered the courage to ask, ‘What was that?'

‘Old,' Avinlor answered.

Maitos had been hoping for something more definite, but would settle for pursuing whatever aspect Avinlor was willing to discuss. ‘How old?'

‘Old as balls.' Which told Maitos that there were things Avinlor still did not know either, and that she was probably happy to not know some of them.