jade ☃ harley (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
basslines) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
bakerstreet2016-09-08 02:14 pm
basslines) wrote in bakerstreet2016-09-08 02:14 pm
thursday pic prompt
the picture prompt meme
i. COMMENT WITH CHARACTER
ii. OTHERS LEAVE A PICTURE (OR TWO OR THREE....)
iii. REPLY TO THEM WITH A SETTING BASED ON THE IMAGES.
THIS POST WILL BE IMAGE HEAVY.
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A few hands went up among the group and more children were coming over as it was getting spotted by others coming by in or outside. The boy nearly pitched forward when the tablet proved to be completely insubstanial, which got a bunch of giggles out of people as he caught himself, blinking, before he swiped his hand through it several more times to try and figure out what was going on! The girl who had spoken up about making one walked around it partially, her nose wrinkling a little, before she put her hand to the ground. There was a few seconds of her concentrating, the tip of her tongue sticking out, before she pulled her hand up sharply. From the ground rose a stone about as long as Aurus' hand and very much a shape similar to that of the tablet! That made her grin as she caught it, holding it up.
Several crowded closer, but it was the older girl who spoke. "So who are you?" She sat herself down near him, pushing very straight black hair from her eyes. "I'm Suzanne. Are you friends of Professor Xavier?"
Aurus certainly had his audience as the students were hanging on every word (well the ones not peering over at what the blonde had done or staring at the tablet as they came close) wanting to know more about this new comer.
"What kind of power is this?" Asked a boy, pointing to the tablet in confusion.
"Illusions?" Another called over. "Danielle can do those, right?"
"I guess..."
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"That's very good," Aurus acknowledged the girl's tablet replica with a smile, and then added a very gentle bit of teasing: "But yours doesn't have anything written on it."
Turning back to Suzanne and the others for whom she was momentarily the spokesperson, he said, "My name is Aurus. And yes, I think I can fairly say that I am a friend of Professor Xavier's, though I must admit that we only met for the first time when I arrived here--quite by accident--last night." Certainly Aurus considered Charles to be his friend already regardless.
"And it's not an illusion. It's a projection, a channeling of power from a place you won't have heard of before--a place called the Mists."
That, he suspected, would garner a barrage of questions, so he prepared himself to field them as they came.
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Er but point being, I'm lucky to have friends to are all playing Pokemon Sun and Moon along side of me, who watch Marvel movies, who do Drunken Fingerpainting Nights (seriously, get drunk watching horrible movie then fingerpaint your drunken feelings about the movie. It is the best), who table top and RP.]
Well that clearly was a challenge! The girl blinked at him before grinning, then squinted at the tablet as she was trying to figure out the writing and how to add it to her miniature version of it. Several of her friends gathered around and were trying to help to whatever degree they could.
Suzanne though raised her brows, surprised, and of course Aurus ended up getting a dozen questions from curious students. What do you mean, by accident? What are the mists? Is projection your power, then? Are you an alien? Where did you come from? Where were you trying to go?
Charles, sitting tucked up to a window at the side of the school facing where Aurus was, looked amused as he heard the excited questions (though unable to pick out precisely what was being said) through the cracked-open panes.
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Aurus watched the girl with the miniature tablet out of the corner of his eye, actually very interested to see what she'd manage to create. He rather thought he approved of her. Beyond a smile, though, he gave no outward sign just yet. (In his mind, he could feel Ventari's growing interest in what this student and her team of advisors might make. But then the centaur was inevitably quite eager for someone to get to the point of actually reading the tablet.)
As to this deluge of questions he was getting, Aurus was actually pretty ready with answers:
"Projection isn't my power because actually I'm not a mutant. So I don't have powers in the same sense as all of you. I do, however, have the ability to channel certain forms of energy--magical energy, broadly speaking.
"The Mists, which is also where I came from last night, is a proto-reality, a mystical space between worlds. Every time and every place is connected in some way through the Mists, like islands in a sea. I went there to wander, to explore. And last night I happened to arrive here.
"Do you think that makes me an alien?" He posed the question back like he hadn't quite settled on what answer he'd prefer to give it. "Personally I'm more inclined just to say that I'm a sylvari. But this is your world."
Of course if every answer Aurus gave spawned another five questions he's soon be swimming under an exponential flood, but he still preferred giving these children answers that left something to be puzzled out (actually, he preferred giving most people answers that left something to be puzzled out). And of course he equally did not know Charles was watching him from the window, but he would have been very pleased to know that he was, however far away.
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It meant the young ones trying to replicate the tablet were reading it in the process of attempting to make the writing correct. Aurus would hear a quiet question from the youngest one there to the blond ('what's a bloo-sum?') and a whispered answer in return ('it's a flower!') but there were students around that were sitting in silence as they read it, listening to what Aurus was saying. Of course some had missed the point entirely and were purely more interested in their blue visitor.
And of course there was an avalanche of questions that would keep coming from the children in general, as curious and excited as children tended to be. Watching from afar, Charles put his chin on his palm, frowning as he watched Aurus speak to his students. There had been a deep desire to reach out to Hank's mind and find out what had happened after he had left the two of them alone, given that Hank hadn't been seen since, but he tried to respect his friend's mental privacy. What did they talk about? What did they do? What the hell happened?
He breathed out hard and closed his eyes. What he couldn't keep himself from was a sweep of the area, but without touching any specific minds. At least he could feel their excitement, bright as sunshine.
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Aurus took the barrage of questions pretty well in stride, over all. He described the Mists and the lands he'd seen within them, and he took the tactic of telling the children the story of his race and where sylvari came from--of Ronan and Ventari, the growing of the Pale Tree.
"That's what this tablet is," he explained. "Before Ventari died, he inscribed his core teachings and beliefs on it as these seven tenets. They are the foundation of my race's ethics, our moral beliefs. The real tablet hangs suspended in the Grove. This projection channels Ventari's power from within the Mists. It is him that allows me to do this--he's with me," he tapped a finger against his temple to indicate, "here."
And, so that no one would miss or mistake any of the content, he read:
"-Live life well and fully, and waste nothing.
-Do not fear difficulty. Hard ground makes stronger roots.
-The only lasting peace is the peace within your own soul.
-All things have a right to grow. The blossom is brother to the weed.
-Never leave a wrong to ripen into evil or sorrow.
-Act with wisdom, but act.
-From the smallest blade of grass to the largest mountain, where life goes—so, too, should you.
"All sylvari awaken with a knowledge of these seven tenets, but we spend long hours studying and discussing them to really understand what they mean. What do you think?"
Actually, as he posed this question, Aurus was also thinking of Hank: he would have liked Hank to be here for this, to know that these were things that Aurus believed and maybe to see how these beliefs shaped his conviction that what was growing between himself and Charles was not something to be feared. If there was risk, it was a worthy risk. Hard ground makes stronger roots.
He would have liked for Hank to feel the calming, healing energy that radiated from the tablet, and maybe to let himself be soothed by it. His disagreement with the man still weighed on his mind, and (being quite influenced by Ventari's teachings himself), he rather believed that Hank might benefit from what Ventari had to say.
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It probably was something Hank needed. No one completely understood what the man was going through, even though Charles tried to do his best to help without going too far. He fought against that other side of him, but Raven's words had tried to convince him otherwise. Some part of him was still angry with her because she could look normal of her own choice, didn't stand out in the world and it wasn't because of her own mistakes she was like she was. It had been his own stupid, fool pride that had changed him forever. Looking in the mirror and seeing that furred monster looking back... it took something away from him. His goal had become getting Charles on his feet, and Aurus unconsciously felt like a very possible threat to that work.
While Charles... perhaps he could have used it to, a little of that healing calm, but right now his heart and mind were racing too much for it to have been fully appreciated. The children, however, were all around it, watching and listening. Aurus' question got several of them to start talking to each other about it, then one finally asked, "if everything has the right to grow... does that even mean things that kill?"
Which quickly got someone to add, "like a murderer?"
"What about criminals?" Someone else piped up.
I hit preview and realized my ooc remark is practically longer than the tag! lol
One way or another, Charles would probably learn about Ventari's tablet in time--if not here, then perhaps in the Dream, or just as he and Aurus continued to talk. As for Hank, however...Aurus did hope that he might still turn up to join them as he'd said he would, but he wouldn't be surprised if the man stayed away. Hank, he felt, was in his way even harder to reach than Charles was.
All of that was less immediate than the questions that the children were now posing, though, questions which pleased Aurus very much. "These are precisely the sorts of things that my people have been discussing since the first of us awoke more than twenty-five years ago," he told them.
"Ventari's pacifism was absolute. When he and his disciples were attacked in their grove, he sat down and resolved to die rather than raise a sword. But we must remember that Ventari had been a warrior in his youth, and his choice was made in the context of his life and all he'd experienced. We should not presume that he would demand of us that we do as he did." In his mind, Aurus could feel Ventari's approval of this remark--the old sage would be no means want a group of children to believe he was teaching them that they ought not to live. He valued life far too much for that, and Aurus both knew him and understood his teachings well enough to be a confident emissary for them.
"You might think of this like scales weighing two things in balance. In many cases, plants called weeds may be very beautiful, but often their growth is aggressive--they choke out the other plants that grow around them. If all things have a right to grow, then it is no more right to let the weed choke the life from his brother than it is to yank the weed out before it has ever had a chance to sprout.
"Creatures kill for many reasons; they disobey laws for many reasons. We must read Ventari's words here in the context of his other teachings: when he tells us to act with wisdom, but act, he is telling us that we must assess each situation as its own. We cannot apply any one universal rule across all instances, but must instead use the wisdom of our judgments to try to keep the scales from tipping out of balance too far. That is something we must do every day.
"And if something threatens that balance--threatens the right to grow for the blossom or for the weed--then we must choose the actions that seem wisest to stop it. Do you understand?" Some of the children, he anticipated, would have a harder time with this philosophy than others--there were always those who wanted a clearer rule, less ambiguity, moral lines in the sand.
From what he had been hearing about this world so far, however, the conflicts between mutants and humans might be very well described by these words of Ventari's, and he wondered if the students might pick up on that.
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Aurus' keen ears might have picked up something in particular as one of the older students leaned over and murmured to his friend, "this guy sounds like Professor Xavier." Charles advocated very much against the sorts of things that Erik had chosen to do, even if he never brought up Erik's name as the center of it. Not only for his own heart's sake but to defocus the entire thing from a single man. It didn't stop the conversations from happening from time to time - nearly everyone had seen or heard about the mutant that attacked Washington D.C., saw him on the telly, and it had to be discussed for them to be able to process it as much as know why it had not been the way to handle things.
Yet Erik would have said, on hearing such things, that the weeds of humanity did everything in their power to choke the flowers of the mutants, leaving them to wither and die because of their fear of their betters. Charles would have said that they were all flowers, competing in the same garden, but that the mutants had to learn to grow in the same patterns that the other flowers did so they all could survive and thrive.
Two very different men and two very different ways of thinking.
Aurus' words were having the desired effect on the children there, as many of them had the expression of thinking heavily on his words. At least the older children. The youngest were either a little confused and it looked it, focused on what the young blonde was doing, or defocusing quickly. It wasn't always easy to keep young ones focused for any length of time.
One girl raised her hand, clearly used to the whole school thing, before she spoke up. "How do you live like that when other people don't live like that?"
Which made the boy next to her frown. "A lot of people don't like us just because we're different." He held up his hand and when he flexed his palm, fire sprang up. It was a little flame, like a candle, but when he rolled his hand the flame moved like a little orb that he could play with across his fingers.
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There were far far worse comparison's that could be made than between himself and Charles, in Aurus's opinion. Ironically, though, if the topic of Erik ever did come up directly--and if Aurus ever learned the particulars of the whole story surrounding him--it might well turn out that some of the differences between himself and Charles would really come to light: Aurus would not think that Erik was wholly in the wrong, nor that Charles was wholly in the right.
He would have agreed with Erik, that yes, humanity's weeds did try to choke out the mutants. But he would have rejected the oversimplification that humans therefore are weeds, and equally have pointed out that the tactic of becoming weeds among the mutants could never solve the problem. At best it could make the pendulum swing, but only to swap an uneven balance, not produce equilibrium.
To Charles, meanwhile, he would have said that any mandate of conformity was not balance either. What both men needed to learn, it would seem to him, was that humanity had its weeds and its blossoms both, and that mutants did as well, so they'd best both learn to make their assessments differently if they ever wanted to get anywhere.
As far as the question as it was being posed to him directly by the children, Aurus did take it quite seriously. He looked at the girl with the raised hand and the boy with the fire both attentively in turn, though he was sure the question wasn't only theirs alone.
"As I understand it," he told them, "your situation is made more difficult by the fact that this is a world where humans long supposed themselves to be the only sentient species on the planet. The same is not true where I come from. Humans have never been alone there, and no single race has ascendancy over the others. That does not mean it has always been easy for us, however.
"The other races all share something that we do not: they are all animals, while we are plants. For some, particularly when sylvari first appeared in the world, that made it hard to accept us as sentient beings at all. Some of my brothers and sisters were experimented on, vivisected by those who saw nothing wrong in their actions. And it's still not uncommon to find people who see us as lesser than them--they call us things like 'talking cabbage,' 'walking fern,' or act like we cannot be trusted with sensitive information because they misunderstand the mental connection we have in the Dream.
"When I first went abroad in the world, my whole race was less than five years old. I was the first sylvari many people had ever seen, so I encountered a lot of that. But I was also learning to understand a split that had formed among my own people: even among sylvari not everyone believes in the wisdom of Ventari's teachings.
"Not long after my generation--the secondborn--awoke, some of my brothers and sisters formed something they call the Nightmare Court. The Court believes that Ventari's teachings are a dupe, that we are shackled from the freedom of our true natures by following him. For members of this group, the truth of life is bitter suffering and cruelty; they thus believe that pain and cruelty will open the eyes of other sylvari to the truth of the world. They use kidnapping and a system of torture to 'convert' their members, and if they could bend our whole race to their way of thinking, they would."
Here his eyes traveled back from surveying the group to the girl who had raised her hand, "I suppose, in a sense, when I went out into the world it was because I wanted to find answers to the same sort of question you are asking--answers beyond those I felt I could find in the Grove.
"Now I would say that you must always be careful how you draw the lines of similarity and difference. Even people who are 'like you' might not live as you believe it is right to live. There are people in the world--in every world, I think--who would be tyrants. They are people for whom it is unbearable to see that other people are different and live differently. What we must do is to fight those who would be tyrants but always without ourselves becoming tyrants over others. Each of us has the force of our will, our determination. We must never be careless of how we use that force in our encounters with the people around us."
Letting them absorb this speech for a moment, Aurus cocked his head to look at the young blond girl with her replica tablet--a project that increasingly pleased him. "How's it coming?" he asked her and her cohort with a smile.
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Some of the younger children looked very upset about Aurus talking about the Nightmare Court. Aurus wouldn't know that mutants knew well that some children were still being tortured, expertimented on, locked away because their parents didn't know what to do with them, because of cults brainwashing people, because of the hate and fear in the air. One or two of the older children put hands on shoulders or scooped up a younger, making sure they were okay. Aurus did earn a slight glare from one of the older boys who wasn't keen on that, but he got smacked by another one sitting beside him.
There was a whole lot of whispering going on now as people leaned in, discussing what Aurus had said. It was obvious there was more questions, but they managed to hold back while they were waiting for the children to respond. The blonde looked up, blinking at Aurus, before tucking the stone she was working in to her chest. "Not yet!" She grinned before going back to her whispering, the writing on the stone turned so only they would be able to see it.
Suzanne spoke up first, "there's talk about making people who are mutants register if they're mutants or not. It's gotten a lot of people angry because there was a war in our world that people they considered different had to register that they were and a lot of them ended up being killed." The most simple summary of the horrors of not that many years ago in history. "But a lot of other people say its for their protection. Like you need a license to have a gun, you shouldn't have a weapon that people don't know about. What do you think is right to do?"
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This, perhaps, was where Aurus's lack of experience with children would become clear. The torture that he had spoken of was something that sylvari had to come to terms with when they were saplings, only months, or weeks, or sometimes even days old. The secondborn who had been killed in asuran experiments had been taken within hours of their awakening. The ones who were kidnapped or seduced by Nightmare Courtiers were often just as inexperienced, just as naive.
It was upsetting, enraging, but it was a truth that ought not to be prettified or disguised. Sylvari who survived their imprisonment by the Court, who were freed and returned to the Grove without having turned to Nightmare, knew better than anyone that the Court's wrongs were more than a mere rumor or scary story. To him it seemed wrong to diminish that sort of truth...but to him it was also hard to understand the way children were with fear.
Looking from the girl with her miniature tablet back to the group, he registered the shifts in body language, the troubled expressions, making mental note of how his remarks had unsettled the younger students in particular. He would have to learn from that.
For now, he let Suzanne be a spokesperson for their larger concerns. He had to admit that he was a little lacking in context, a little out of his depths here. "Register? With whom?" he looked at her with obvious confusion, plainly not understanding how the whole concept was even meant to work.
"I'm sorry, I think I might need to know a little bit more before I can answer you--you...license your guns? And what of other weapons--swords and staves and axes and the like?" Was this why Charles had made sure that Aurus was not carrying his weapons around the school and grounds today? The idea hadn't even occurred to him before now.
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Suzanne would explain as much as she knew - registering guns so it was known who had weaponry and who didn't, but it wasn't as heavily enforced as it would be in decades to come. Guns were more deadly than a sword and far more common and more easy for anyone to pick up and use. There was an uncomfortable look between some of the older children who had learned about the second world war already and confusion in the younger.
"...there was a... tyrant who decided that only his people were worthy of living, and there was a war that encompassed the whole world between the people who agreed with him and the people who didn't. A lot of innocent people were killed in the process and a whole lot more military. Some of those people were forced to register themselves as a people and eventually, they were taken into camps and killed by the thousands." It was clearly not an easy topic, not only emotionally but to describe to someone in such a short manner who spoke of being from another world all together. The children seemed to take it better than Charles and Hank did, more in stride, but they didn't exactly know what to do with it, either.
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And OMG NOT YET but I have an old friend from Potter fandom who loved it and is recommending it strongly, so I want to go soooon! Did you see it? Was it great?]
Aurus’s frown grew deep. To really understand this history he knew he would need to ask Charles to explain it. Suzanne was trying, but he felt he should not push her farther. For the moment, though, it was Glint who most helped him put what he was hearing into context:
"Aurus, remember the Chosen," her voice sounded in his mind, and a moment later his expression changed, realizing that if he thought of it that way then perhaps, yes, he could understand.
The Chosen were, some centuries in Kryta's past, human common folk identified each year by a theocratic military order called the White Mantle, an order that had ruled the nation and was beloved by its people. Selected by a magical ritual seeing that identified them, the Chosen were told that they would go for training to become Grand Masters within the order--it was meant to be a great honor. In truth, though it was only discovered years later, they were taken deep into the Maguuma Jungle and sacrificed upon a bloodstone—sacrificed because the White Mantle knew what no one else then did: that the Chosen had been prophesied to bring about their downfall.
It did not seem particularly wise to share this story with children already troubled by his descriptions of the Nightmare Court, so Aurus skipped explaining it to them. He did, however, think Glint was right: it certainly could help him to judge the situation that was being described to him.
"I think by the sounds of it I ought to learn more of this war if I want to better understand your world. Perhaps, in a way, I understand the idea already though. And my first thought is this: it seems to me that identifying yourselves to those who construe you as a threat..." he shook his head. "No, that I would not trust. Not here and not in my own world either.
"It matters not whether you truly threaten anyone. People in power will often go to any lengths to assure their power is maintained. They will speak with silver tongues and promise benefits of any kind, but you cannot know the truth of their minds or their real intentions in advance." He paused a beat here and then amended slightly to try and lighten the mood: "Well, at least those of you without telepathic abilities cannot.
“Even if the events of the war you describe could never be repeated, I still would say that it is not wise to put your trust in powers that see you as a threat. It is not a concession that will win their trust anyway. That must be done in other ways."
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"...so do we fight to protect ourselves?"
That came from a young man, maybe late teens, who looked very serious about his statement. None of these children knew about the X-Men that had once been, whose deaths had hurt Charles and Hank so badly as to keep it quiet since everything had gone down. It was a few years before the children would get their chance to learn about it, about the chance there was to actually fight back. Charles didn't want more children hurt. Not again. That didn't mean they didn't need an outlet and would possibly find it without his guidance otherwise.
The young man's statment brought more murmuring, some agreement, some not. From the look Suzanne gave him, she clearly didn't agree. "Fighting doesn't solve anything except make them scared of us."
"So you'd rather lay down and die like this Ventari guy?!" He snapped back.
"They're not going to kill us!"
Which was getting more people involved as they either agreed, disagreed, or were trying to calm the two down. Elsewhere, Charles frowned as he felt the general sensation of the crowd turning towards something less than pleasant.
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"The question is not 'do you fight,'" Aurus said, raising his voice loud enough for it to cut through the bickering before it could gain too much steam.
The sylvari could, when he wanted to, have quite a commanding presence--he was, after all, a person of some seniority and authority, and he could present himself as precisely that when he wished to do so. So he was absolutely not going to let this discussion devolve into a back-and-forth between two sides in a debate that was obviously already well entrenched.
When he had the children's attention again, he continued: "The question you need to be asking is how you can fight so that your actions do not inadvertently undermine your goals. If the fighting that has been done so far has made the non-mutants fear you more, then it is fighting of poor tactics, poor strategy, poor vision.
"That does not mean, however, that fighting itself is wrong."
Given the very mixed audience he had before him, Aurus was aware that he needed to speak carefully here, but he also believed in being honest and frank. The older students in the group were easily the age that Hakkyuu had been when Aurus began to teach him. They were very well old enough to hear things said bluntly which would likely upset their younger peers.
"I have no wish to frighten you when I say this, but Suzanne, your faith in the safety of your lives is clearly not so self-evident to everyone here. That does not make you wrong, but it does tell me that there is a seed of doubt. I suspect," he looked around the assembled group, "that it is there within you all.
"You must be very careful of that seed. When it germinates, when it ripens, it can grow a fear which can strangle your heart. You begin to feel certain that your enemies are bent on destroying you and that your only option is to destroy them first. If that happens, the seed of doubt becomes a seed which grows the tyrants we were speaking of before.
"But that seed can also be cultivated into something insightful, something sharp. It can help you learn to stay alert and aware. That is a skill you will need to see the real threats evolving early on, to differentiate them from the distractions, the chimeras. There may be times when you will fight with your bodies, with your powers, but you can also fight with your wits.
"'Never leave a wrong to ripen into evil' does not mean that you scorch the earth. And it does not mean that you ignore how wrongs might ripen to evil or sorrow within your own hearts. These are dangers of which you must be mindful. Remember them in all your actions."
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Aurus' words did cut through the rising tension, leaving both initial parties to look at him. They had their respect for their elders, either learned or forced into their heads by teachers and parents, and they stayed silent as he spoke. The boy's fingers curled into fists in his lap, his knuckles almost white, before in the end, when Aurus was finished, he said quietly, "I don't want it to be too late for us to realize something's coming for us." He stood up, walking away from the group and standing there, clearly trying to calm down.
"Andrew..." One of the girls said, biting her lip before she went to follow him, sighing.
Suzanne, though, looked thoughtful about everything Aurus had just said. "I think you're right, for what it's worth. I don't want to fight. ...I don't want others hurt, either. I'd rather fight than letting anyone here get hurt. Professor Xavier tells us that we're supposed to stand up for our beliefs without treading on the beliefs of others."
"...I don't want to fight anyone!" A very young girl from nearby, frowning up towards Suzanne.
"That's why we'll fight, so you don't have to."
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Aurus followed the boy's retreat from the group with his eyes, not moving his head but still tracking him closely. He couldn't tell if the reaction was a willful misunderstanding of what he'd said or simply an expression of a frustration that had no place to go.
This Andrew, he thought, was someone who he should speak to further--speak to without his peers around. It would have to be Charles' decision if that meeting took place, of course. Aurus was not nearly so presumptuous as to interfere without his permission. But he already had it in his mind to speak to ask him about the boy. From Hakkyuu, Aurus had gained a fair bit of experience dealing with angry young men, but his tactics in no small part involved utilizing the anger rather than trying to mollify or defuse it, and admittedly some of his strategies were a little...unorthodox. Charles might not approve of that. Asking the man to trust Aurus with himself was one thing; asking him to trust him with one of his students could be something completely different.
For the moment, though, he still had the rest of the assembled group to focus on.
"Professor Xavier is right," he answered Suzanne, presently shifting his gaze back towards her and the others.
"Where I come from there is a group with a saying: 'Some must fight so that all may be free.' It's not a bad adage. In my world, it's the elder dragons against which free people must come together and fight. There is no ambiguity about the elder dragons: they awaken to consume and destroy all life in the world.
"Here, your foes are much less straightforward, and your 'fighting' may never need to be with armies. I hope that it is not. Wars are terrible things."
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Suzanne, though, was leaning in and talking with some of the older children quietly, a frown on her lips at whatever was being discussed. Finally, she nodded and sat back, leaning on her hands. It seemed like she was done with her questions, but had a thoughtful expression in her eyes. Maybe done with questions, but Aurus had definitely given them all something to think about.
More children began to come over as time passed, with the ones who had been there telling the new ones about what they had heard. In one of the lulls, it would be the little blonde girl who would come up to Aurus, the only one brave enough to get in touching distance, and in that way of young ones tugged on a bit of his clothing without fear to get his attention. "This one's for you," she said with a fierce little expression of pride, both hands coming out and holding a miniature version of the tablet, including the vines and the writing, all done in stone. It wasn't absolutely perfect, but it showed that she would be quite the artist when she got more skilled.
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Elder dragons were enormous, he told them, explaining how Kralkatorrik had been mistaken for a mountain during the years of its last slumber. These elder dragons had their dragon lieutenants and their champions which, though a fraction of their size, were still massively large. Save possibly for Primordus, who was not currently awake so no one really knew, they did not breathe fire per se, but their breath was powerful nonetheless. It could corrupt or freeze or entomb. And as for whether any were good, as a rule, no. Dragon lieutenants shared their elder dragon's will--all except for one.
Then he told them about Glint, about how she'd been freed from her master's hold by a powerful ritual and how she used her powers of seeing and perception to become a great prophet and an ally to the peoples of Tyria. He told them how she was the only dragon he had ever seen in person, and that was only after her death.
Would they like to see her? It wasn't something that Aurus had planned, but the topic seemed to captivate so many of them.
"Everyone sit down here," he told the few who were standing, knowing that anyone who remained on their feet for this demonstration would risk being knocked right over backwards. Then he dispelled the tablet with a wave of his hand and moved to a spot a few yards away.
Invoking Glint's power made the ground around Aurus's feet glow in a pinkish-purple halo, and the Facet of Chaos which he summoned gave off a sparkling bluish orbit around him. But it was the release of this facet that came closest to showing Glint's body in the world, like a summoning of her being (albeit on a much smaller scale than she had been in life). Her head reared back above Aurus's body, and her wings spread out in spectral blue, an echo of the motion of his arms. With one mighty flap of her wings, the specter sent out a rush of wind--a gust that momentarily flattened the grass and whipped through the hair of the assembled children, and then, like the image of the dragon itself was gone.
In its wake, all those the wind had touched would feel momentarily faster, lighter, quicker on their feet. It was a fleeting sensation though, and presently everything settled back to the calm quiet of the lawn in the moments before.
Aurus returned to his seat, once more projecting the tablet into its previous spot on the grass, satisfied that even a shadow of Glint was still adequately impressive.
And so he was seated just as he had been before when the little blonde girl with her miniature tablet came over to him. He didn't tease her at all this time, but took the proffered gift with great care, looking at it and then giving her a very genuine smile. "I don't think that the great sculptor Malchor himself could have done better," he said. "Ventari is very pleased with it as well. I have no way to make him visible to you, but I hear him speaking in my head and you have made him very happy.
"Are you sure you wish to give it to me? You've worked on it diligently."
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"Tell Mister Ventari I said thank you," she said, her smile growing. "I made that one for you. I can make a second one! If you have to go back to your world, you'll be able to remember being here. It's always nice to have a little piece of a place to remember it." Her fingers crept up to her neck where a pendant that looked like a small seashell hung.
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Aurus would have felt a little embarrassed for showing off if he'd thought about Charles watching just then. Actually, he could very well imagine Hakkyuu's voice accusing him of being a show off--Aurus did miss his former student from time to time.
At the moment, however, thinking of Hakkyuu (or at least of how Hakkyuu had been when Aurus first met him) served to remind him of the other angry young man he'd lately encountered, and though he was smiling and chuckling at the group's reactions, his eyes scanned the assembled students to see whether Andrew was still there, whether he'd simply left or whether he'd stayed and what reaction the specter of Glint had drawn from him.
To the others he patiently answered every question put to him--yes, that was how her crystalline body really looked; yes, she talked, in fact she spoke to him often and was listening to them all right now; no, in reality she was much bigger than the specter had been. He explained as much as he could about the ritual that had cleansed her corruption, though he had to admit that the precise mechanisms were now obscure, the city where the altar had been now smashed to ruins. And he asked them to tell him what stories of dragons were known in their world in return.
But with the little blonde girl he felt a special caring, not just because of what she'd made, but because of what Ventari's teachings meant to him, what they meant to all of his people. Glint might have been spectacular, but Ventari was in the sylvari's marrow. "I hope you will make one for yourself as well," he told her. "I am already sure I will never forget my time here, and your gift will help me feel closer, even when I am far away. I would like you to remember my time here as well--remember Ventari's words and the peace they can bring. You have a rare and wonderful gift.
"Here," he placed a hand on the ground and grew a single flower for her--a bright white daisy which he plucked and presented to her. "It won't last as long as your sculpture, of course. Tell me, what's your name?"
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While the other children started commenting to each other about dragons, trying to figure out what to even tell him (do we tell him stories about dragons? They're not REAL after all!), the girl beside him was much more focused on their own discussion.
The girl's eyes lit up with his display of his magic, a bright smile coming to her lips as she took the flower in return, promptly tucking it behind her ear so it sat vibrant against her hair. "Petra. You haven't even seen the best part! Watch this!" With both hands she covered as much of the mini-tablet as she could with her hands and concentrated. At first, nothing happened, but Aurus would feel the mini-tablet start to warm in his hands. Eventually, he would see the otherwise grey stone slowly start to crystalize, inch by inch, until it was no longer a piece of granite in his palms but one piece of elegant crystal, still designed and etched as it had been before.
When she lifted her hands and saw it had worked, she laughed, picking her gaze up with pride. See, muuuuuch better.
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Did I post in a meme lately? My brain is clearly total rubbish atm since I can't even remember. orz]Of everything he'd seen thus far, Aurus had to admit that this child's power amazed him more than almost all the rest. Not the power itself, perhaps, but the will and the spirit behind how she wielded it. His lips parted as he watched the miniature tablet becoming crystal in his hands, felt the heat of the energy Petra must be sending through it to make this change take place.
Letting the rest of the children and their tête-à-tête over dragon stories fade into the background, Aurus let his full focus narrow to this little piece of stone and the girl who manipulated it. "It's splendid," he told her with a broad smile when the work was complete. "Like Ventari and the spirit of Glint drawn together into one."
All that really remained then was for him to have an appropriate place to carry it with him. And for this, he had one more thing that he could show her, because as it turned out, his clothes didn't just look like leaves grown from his own body. They really were leaves grown from his own body. And this meant that he could grow more, or in this case, that he could grow a large dark purplish frond-type leaf that folded itself into a kind of bag--a sort of belt pouch, as it were, just the right size to hold her gift.
Where exactly within his clothes the leaf-bag stemmed from was a little unclear, but at the end of the minute or two it took to complete, it was its own independent object. He let her hold it open for him while he placed the crystal tablet within, and then he hooked it securely onto the leaves that formed the belt at his waist.
"Any time you wish to see Ventari's tablet again," he told Petra with a slight shift of his eyes to indicate the real tablet floating a few feet away from them, "you just come and tell me."
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Petra watched all of this with silent awe, gingerly tucking the now crystal tablet into the newly grown belt pouch before looking up to Aurus' eyes. "You really are a plant," she whispered, then grinned wide. "I wonder if Andrew could make you grow like he does the gardens." Then her grin fell, looking back in the direction the young man had gone. "Um, if he wasn't mad right now..." She frowned, then leaned in as if confiding, "he's always been kind of a grumpy gus. Don't let him make you mad."
With that she stepped back, looking back towards the mansion. "I've got to go meet Jess but I'm not hard to find, Mister Aurus." She smiled up to him, and with a wave, headed in the direction of the main building. Which left Aurus with the other children, some who seemed to have agreed on telling him about 'dragons', though that seemed to range from characters in stories to very real to this world lizards who definitely weren't dragons.
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Actual ambient dialog from the game in here
(ROFL)
:D
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GAG TAG
LMAO I woke up to this in my inbox first thing
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Cattlepult: a real GW2 thing...into which you must climb and get shot out of. No lie.
I LOVE IT.
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