Compos Mentis

Part 2: Soren

Since I heard something about the length of the previous post, this is merely a selection of what I've got now. If you're lost, you either should realize that I have left some parts out that happen between the end of part 1 and this, or you should actually read what I put up before. Cheers!

The street had become darker. Suddenly a loud blast exploded out of the darkness, and Paul-Luc ducked down and covered his head with his arms reflexively. He felt shards of something rain down on him for a second, but after it passed, he stood up, and started looking around, trying to see the cause of the explosion. He saw where the dust was clearing from; it was just an alley across the street. He started to cross to see if he could help anyone down there, but was stopped as someone grabbed his arm. He jerked his head around to see a young woman with bright red hair stopping him from crossing.
“Don’t” she said, quietly, with a glance at the alley. “You don’t want any part of that, trust me.” She shook her head, as if to clear it, and Paul-Luc realized the ringing in his ears: he realized that whoever had used that bomb (or what he now thought was a bomb) had also used sonic refractors to send the sound into higher wavelengths: whoever did this was a professional.
While he was thinking this, the woman quickly looked around. “You had better get out of here. It won’t be too long until the militia arrives and…oh, shivut. They’re already here. Come on,” She started to drag him by the arm as he realized he was hearing sirens, and that that was a bad thing.
He allowed her to drag him a few blocks, before shaking her loose. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Who are you? Why are you doing this? What’s going on?”
“You idiot,” she said. “We can’t stop here. They’re looking for you, and if they find you here you’re in deeper trouble than you could possibly imagine. I’ll tell you everything when we get out of here.”
“But why,” he started, but before he could say anything else she had suddenly grabbed him, pushed him against the wall behind, and locked his mouth in a kiss.
H would have protested, and he moved his hands to push her away, but she grabbed them quickly, and pushed them around her back to make the theatrics look more natural. Then he heard the sirens move towards them, then slow as they passed, and then go roaring off again, towards the explosions, and he remembered how worried he had been that his Uncle had been out to detain him, and the thought kind of hovered in the back of his mind that it might have been a good idea to have stayed in what looked more and more like safe and secure walls, rather than constricting and imprisoning. As soon as the transports had passed, the woman broke away from him to look at where security had gone. She said, “See! Look at how close that was! Do you realize the danger you are in now?” And she had again grabbed him and was pulling him, oddly enough, he was noticing, toward the sound that he had been aiming for before. Wouldn’t that be funny, if she were taking me there, he thought. He was too surprised, confused, and filled with the sense of the ridiculousness of the situation he was in to have any, more coherent thoughts.
They had been running for several minutes when they saw the secutrans vehicles pass them again. This time, there were no sirens, and they were moving much slower. Paul-Luc turned away from the woman and went over to them, joining a small crowd that had gathered to take a gander at the sight.
He peered over the crowd, but almost immediately turned away. Those people…had just been obliterated. They must have been standing right next to the blasts to have been shredded like that, he thought. He wondered at all the training he had been given with the sword, from Rainer and earlier; hell, he thought, I grew up with a sword in my hand. How is that different from using a bomb? I can just kill people one person at a time, rather than in numbers. And he remembered a tall man with a large wound of his own, and he wondered if it was better to die from one cut or a thousand.
The woman was again at his side. “What are you doing?” she hissed. Paul-Luc shook her off.
“Listen, my lady,” he said, letting only the barest hint of sarcasm through his polite shell, “I don’t know who you are, for whom you are working, or why you are so interested in my welfare, for good or bad. But you are fortunate, because at this junction of my life, I do not care. Take me where you are going to take me, or do not, but do not pretend that you are in charge of me, or part of how I decide what I choose to do or not do. You have, for one thing, not given me any particular reason why I should trust you in the least. In fact, if I were more sensible, I probably wouldn’t trust you at all. But, again, it must be your good fortune that you decided to kidnap me today.” He gave her a twisted smile.
“I’m not kidnapping you, you arrogant swine.” She spat, “and your act is certainly not fooling anyone if it’s not fooling me. You want a reason you should trust me? If it hadn’t been for me you would be looking like those poor slitted saps who just passed us by. Would you prefer that, eto? I could leave you right now and let you fend for yourself; would you like that, eto? If not, then shut up and come with me.” She turned from him and started striding down the street, quickly but not unobtrusively. Paul-Luc shook his head, but started to follow, wondering again what he had gotten himself into.
As they moved, (still, Paul-Luc noted, still towards the sound which seemed more and more like music, now that he thought about it), he saw more people who touched his heart. One man was sitting in the stairwell with ragged clothes, coughing a droning, hacking, irregular cough. Hack, hack…hack…hack hack hack. It grated on Paul-Luc’s ears like two rough stones rubbed together.
Then he saw a woman lying on the side of the road, sleeping. Her clothes, looked, if anything, worse than the man’s. Her skin was torn and bruised, and she looked like she had never seen or felt any comfort. Both of these times, he wanted to stop, to see, to do something; but the woman in front did not even glance as she passed them. He thought, why do I keep following her? It can’t possibly be as bad as she says. And yet she sounded so real; wouldn’t someone trying to con me give me a more sugarcoated act.
He wondered at his teachers. Why had they overlooked this part of his education? Surely it was important for a Duke’s son to know whom to trust, and when to trust them. This thought rattled around in his mind for several long minutes, and kept him so preoccupied he almost ran over his…what? Companion? Abductor? Acquaintance? He almost ran over his new friend when she stopped.
“We’re here” she said, unnecessarily. It seemed obvious that this was the place that anyone, going anywhere in Kyrie, would head for. It was…Paul-Luc had trouble coming up with exactly what it was. He would have to guess that it was some kind of…club, perhaps. It was big, filling a big hole in the ground and obviously going many stories underground. The part that was above ground was bright red. Loud music of a kind Paul-Luc couldn’t identify was being blasted out of it. It had a heavy rhythm and an unusual beat.
“Come on,” his new friend said, and started toward the door.
“Wait,” he said, grabbing her arm. “We’re here, and you have to know that I am not stupid enough to walk into a strange building without more than what you have told me. You think you’re in charge, but I will turn around and walk away right here if you don’t fill me in to what is going on.”
She turned her head and exhaled vehemently in exasperation, but seemed to consider his request. He took this opportunity to finally take a good look at her. Her most striking characteristic was her flaming red hair, but now he noticed her pale brown skin and sharp brown eyes. He was also able to notice, now that she was standing still, how small she actually was; before she was so full of energy she had seemed to look at him eye to eye. Considering her now, he reckoned she didn’t even make it to his shoulders. At this point she twisted her head back around to look at him, saying, “Fine, I’ll fill you in.”
She took a breath. “I am Machida. My employer found out about your father’s death, and became interested in you after finding out something about the nature of your recent study, and some of the events that led to your leaving home. He has some information that you may be unaware of regarding the origin of your father’s death, and other information regarding your Uncle, both of which you may be interested in.” She looked at him impatiently.
“Wait a moment,” Paul-Luc stuttered, “…who is your employer?”
“You fool!” she said, grabbing his arm and dragging him again toward the red building. “You don’t think we can be overheard out here? Your Uncle has ears all over this city; how do you think the militia got there so fast? Now come on!”
The doors glided open with a slight ‘woosh’ as Machida swiped a white plastic card across a scanner by the side. Inside it was quite dark, but in a short time Paul-Luc was able to discern some things. He and Machida were standing on a kind of platform high above a large room that held what looked like thousands of people, but he figured that it was actually a trick of the darkness that disguised a few hundred as much more. As he looked down to see the people more clearly, he began to notice that they were all, generally, covered in paint. He asked Machida about this, thinking that she might be calmer now that they had entered this place.
“Yes: they are wearing a kind of reflective paint called ‘glow’ that mixes easily and gives off…pleasurable fumes. As they dance, the paint gets spread around from person to person and creates amazing color patterns that can only be seen well from the floor.” She grabbed his arm again, more gently this time, and motioned that they should go down to the dancers.
As they descended the stairs, Paul-Luc wondered at this set up. What kind of ‘employer’ with the kind of resources he must have in order to know the things he knew sets up shop in a dance club?
On the floor, though, all other thoughts drifted away as he realized that Machida had not been exaggerating. He saw people mingling and touching as they danced, bouncing off of each other and moving and touching each other as they danced very close. But that was not what caught his eye. From this angle, the colors created by the ‘glow’ were…just absolutely stunning. The dance floor was a moving, living painting: growing and stretching in place, twisting and reveling, with colors expanding and contracting as they flowed in and out of various hues, always moving, always keeping to the same pulsing beat.
“Wow,” Paul-Luc said stupidly, but Machida didn’t seem to hear him as she moved right in to the pulsing mass of living color. He began to follow her, but then a whiff of a sudden odor caught his nose and he stopped to breathe it in, fully. It was so fresh, so alive, just like flowers or a day right after it rained, and he couldn’t stop breathing it in, breathing it in.
Machida was long gone, and the crowd had come back together in her wake. Suddenly he was in the middle of the living colors and the living smell, and suddenly he wasn’t thinking again it was good for him to be here and that music was just so much to bear that he could only start to bounce around
and now he wasn’t part of the crowd he had the crowd and was it, he had a thousand hands and fingers and eyes and the colors were not just for him they were seen by all of him all of his bodyness that permeated the room and gave him this chance to revel in notthought not real absolute real in its ness
For a long time it seemed like no time had passed or perhaps that for no time that all times had passed simultaneously like a museum of paintings all at once or a symphony and now bodies that were his bodyness but were not him were coming up and feeling him as he felt them motion on motion on body and bodyness and he was moving and moving and feeling and moving and feeling and moving. It was incredibly and utterly and fantastically unreal in how real it was.
He felt something that was not the bodyness that he was such a part of now. He felt motion that was neither part of himself nor again part of the whole. Then time started to rear its ugly head again. He felt things; some kind of heartbeat…beat…beat, it was so slow, so impossibly slow. Now he was breathing and not taking in the aroma. Breath……breath. Slow.
Machida was pushing him out of the crowd, out of the intoxicating effects of the glow. She was talking, but he still couldn’t understand her, it just seemed like babble. Babbling on and on. He kept trying to resist her but now that he was outside the bodyness he found he had no strength left, none at all. He was far back there, far back to where he was part of the body, part of the whole.
She got him to the edge of the room, and made him sit down. She was absolutely furious. How could he be such an idiot! Hadn’t she warned him about the glow? Why hadn’t he listened, the fool? She looked at him as he began to breathe normally again. He had come so close to losing himself in the crowd. She knew people who had been caught up by the drug and never disconnected from the crowd. They were just so excited to be part of the whole rather than just themselves, which turned out to be more scary than they might have realized, coming in to the world. She bit her lip. She knew how close he had come, she realized, because she had walked that line before.
He began to come around some more. She saw this, and said, “you foolish boy, why didn’t you listen to what I said? Come on, let’s go see my boss. He’s very interested in seeing you.”
“Why?” Paul-Luc asked, groggily. “What did I do?”
“You’ll see.”

More is on it's way!

posted by Emmett @ 16:24