trans_9 | Mmm, good Bible.

Entry tags:

Mmm, good Bible.

Daimon had chosen the location ahead of time. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was sacred, perhaps more so than the Vatican. It was the place where Jesus Christ was crucified and buried. It had also not been descrated.

Many months had passed since Daimon spoke before a group of people. His palms sweat and he wiped his brow. Silently, he asked God for the strength to not simply speak but to speak on behalf of the Lord.

When the time came, he walked up before the assembled, Bible in hand. While he was nervous, perhaps on the verge of a panic attack, his words were strong and passionate and grew surer the more he spoke.

“I recognize that the people on board this ship come from various walks of life. Some of you, perhaps, are not familiar with Christianity. If this is the case, you may ask whatever questions you have and offer me any comments or insights after I have spoken.” Daimon then gave what he called a “brief summary” of Christianity. It was, in fact, very lengthy and detailed and contained heavy praise of Jesus and the love of God. He then moved on to give a similarly “brief summary” of the context behind the Old Testament.

“Some of you are perhaps aware of the book of Job. Job was a prosperous man. He had seven sons and three daughters. He had herds of animals and acres of land. He was a devout worshipper of God. In the story, the Adversary speaks with God and tells him that Job only praises God because he has no reason to blame him. He says that if God takes away from Job all of his blessings, his animals, his land, even his children, then Job will curse God’s name. God answers that Job will retain his faith and permits the Adversary to strip away everything from Job save his health.”

“A series of disasters befall Job. He loses everything, his land, his herd, and even his children.” Daimon paused. “Job is distraught. Throwing himself upon the ground, he cries:

“‘Naked I came from the womb,
naked I shall return from whence I came.
The Lord gives and the Lord takes away;
Blessed be the name of the Lord.’

“The Adversary spoke with the Lord God again. He tells him that Job continues to praise God only because Job himself has not been afflicted. God allows the Adversary to take from Job his health.

“Robbed of his health, bereft of hope, Job laments. He cries out to God, begging for relief, begging for death, and questioning his justice. Each of Job’s friends berate him and encourage him to have faith but Job refuses. Job’s lament continues until God himself answers him. The Lord says:

“‘Brace yourself and stand up like a man;
I shall put questions to you, and you must answer.
Would you dare deny that I am just,
or put me in the wrong to prove yourself right?
Have you an arm like God’s arm;
can you thunder with a voice like his?
Deck yourself out, if you can, in pride and dignity,
array yourself in pomp and splendour.
Unleash the fury of your wrath,
look on all who are proud, and bring them low,
crush the wicked where they stand;
bury them in the earth together,
and shroud them in an unknown grave.
Then I in turn would acknowledge
that your own right hand could save you.’

“At these words, Job kneels and asks for forgiveness. The Lord grants it and Job prospers greater than ever before. He lives to see his grand children and his great grand children and his great great grandchildren. To the end of his days he sang the Lord’s praise.”

Daimon gazed into the eyes of the people before him. “You may ask, as I have, why the Lord would cause a blameless man such grief. You may, as I once did, come away with the sense that God is not just, that he is fickle and cares not for man but this could not be further from the truth. To ask why God could and does allow such horrible events to transpire to such good people would be folly, for it is as the Lord says: we cannot judge him. We cannot know why the Lord acts as he does, nor can we hope to know. We can only have, nay, we must have faith in his actions. For the Lord is greater than all of us. He sculpted us with his hands and breathed into us our souls. The Lord knows more than we can possibly imagine and has our best intentions in his heart, even if it seems to us that he has caused us nothing but misery.

“Why, you may ask, have I told you this story? ‘What meaning could it have on my life?’ And this, I shall tell you. Every one of us on this ship is lost. We have been stripped of our most precious comforts- our home, our friends, our family. We do not know what lies ahead of us. We may despair, we may weep, we may beg for the mercy and guidance of our Lord. On board this ship, even surrounded as we are by each other, we may still feel, as Job felt, alone and abandoned.

“But I tell you that this is not so. You are not alone. The Lord sees you. In your darkest hour, at the hardest time of your life, you must remember that you are loved. You must remember that there is hope, no matter how dire your future seems. Furthermore, I tell you that though you have listened to every word I said and still do not believe, I tell you this: you are still not alone. For though we come from different worlds, cultures, and beliefs, we stand before each other as equals. We stand here together and so I tell you: we are not alone.”

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Not quite," Roxie says, and she pats the stone behind her for Katara to sit. It might take a moment to realize she's smiling again, though this time it's small and beneficent. "It's more like an echo of what's moved on."

"Oh," Katara said sitting where Roxie beckoned. She was surprised to see a small smile on Roxie's face again. She felt she had to make a comment.

"You do like being in your own temple," she said. "It must feel like home. You know, you;'re really pretty when you smile."

And at the compliment, Roxie's head tilts away, and her glasses catch the dim light and glare bright, turning her face into a pair of glimmering discs against the dark. It's almost enough to distract from the faint, candid blush spread across her cheekbones.

Katara notices, but doesn't make mention. If there was anything she learned about Roxie, it was her unwillingness to show herself as anything but indifferent. It was like a shield in a way, but for all Katara knew, it might have come with the territory of what she was, and why the god had picked her in the first place.

"I want to understand your god a little," Katara said. "It's no shock to you, but your ways are very different from mine. I don't want to keep getting shocked and wonder how strange something is. I'd like to know what you see, what you feel when you're here."

"It's like coming home."

Roxie's face twists a little after the words escape, as if she hadn't even been consciously considering that answer, and then she slides back, lying back against the broad face of the sarcophagus.

And very softly, though there's nothing to interrupt her voice down here, she sings: "Try not to get worried (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkje4FiH9Qc), try not to turn on to problems that upset you, ohhh, don't you know, everything's alright, yes, everything's fine. And we want you to sleep well toniiight, let the world turn without you tonight... If we try, we'll get by, so forget all about us tonight..."

Her voice is lilting and gentle, though there seems like so much more emotional depth in it than when she normally talks...

"Yeah. I can see that."

Katara couldn't help but be captivated by Roxie. Every time they met up she was introduced to some new aspect about her, and even though it was different, it was also thrilling in its own way. The weirdness other people saw Katara was starting to understand, even love. They couldn't know what Roxie went through, what it was like to be her.

She walked over to her, the singing seeming to sprout a new kind of emotion. Roxie was a hard nut to crack, but at times like this, Katara saw that she didn't let herself be vulnerable unless you were in her world, unless you saw what she was about. Katara admired that: it was a huge contrast from herself, whose emotions she wore right on her sleeve.

"That was wonderful."

"... thanks," Roxie says, and just like that she's closed up again, emotionally and physically: sitting with her knees pulled up against her, her face flat. She really is childish, physically, Katara can easily see—femininely proportioned, but undeveloped. That and her lithe proportions make her seem so young...

"It's from a production I like," she adds.

Katara knew she was bound to go back to herself. It was comforting, really, that Roxie could be vulnerable when she needed to be, and honored she got to see it. In any case, she knew when to not harp on certain situations.

"A production. I think I might like to see that sometime. Who knows, maybe we can do that here. What else can we find here?"

That prompts another little hint of a smile.

"I was thinking this might be a good place, if you want to get an idea of what dreaming is like for me..."

Katara could never give a hint of a smile with Roxie. The girl always seemed to make her experience the unexpected, and that always tended to make her feel awe and interest.

"I'd love to know what that's like."

"... lay down," Roxie says, sliding off the sarcophagus and pointing at its surface. "The tombs like these are always for teachers, so we should have some help..."

Katara did as she was told, closing her eyes. Normally it was probably not a good idea to do this considering how foreign it all was to her, but she trusted Roxie.

As Katara's eyes close, Roxie fumbles at her neck, pulling a small silver bell on a chain from around it. But as she holds up the bell, it smoothly changes, becoming the size of a dinner plate. And the fingers of her other hand trace alog the side of it--

A pure tone rings out, rippling into registers beyond human hearing, weird-edged enough to induce instant goosebumps and nearly make the bones of Katara's spine and ribcage vibrate.

Katara heard the shuffling but kept her eyes closed, awaiting whta would happen next.

What followed was a feeling that made Katara's hair stand on end, but she couldn't place it. She trembled a little but stayed quiet, allowing it to resonate all over. Was this what Roxie fekt during sleep?

"You should start to feel sleepy. Don't fight it."

The sound of the bell's impossibly continuous tone verges in and out of hearing, turning almost into white noise. Roxie leans in a little closer, holding the bell in the air above Katara's ead. In the little chamber, the sound echoes around them, turning almost into a strange, formless music.

Katara didn't know what to expect, but she did start to feel drowsy. "Mmm," she said softly, heard eyelids starting to get heavy. With little more resistance to show, Katara turned her head and began to lightly doze, her breathing coming in slow inhales and exhales.

And Katara drifts down, down, down into darkling dreams...

"You're going to come to a staircase leading down into the earth," Roxie's voice chimes through the haze, "and every step will take you a league furher down, and there will be a thousand and one steps..."

It's all very logical and illogical at once, like most dreams.

Katara moved in the dream slowly, and it was a lot like moving undewater to her: it was like everything was going in slow motion, froze in time in a way. There were barely words to describe what was happening, like she was sliding into another dimension.

If that was what that felt like, of course. Katara wouldn't have known: she was having a lot of things happen to her lately Sokka would have written off as "Avatar stuff."

And she comes to the stairs: great broad endless stone ones they are, and they pierce down far into the world... The spiral stair is wide enough for ten, thirty, a hundred men abreast. There are no safety rails on the inward edge, and the outward edge is solid stone and earth; at the center of the stair is an empty shaft that runs far, far, far deep down, and there seems to be a dim red glow somewhere at the very bottom.

It's an amazing excavation: by any reasonable standards, something that it seems like it would take the entire course of human history to properly carve out of the ground.

Katara was struck by what she was seeing, but wasn't worried about having no safety rails: Katara had virtually perfect balance, something necessary for lwan expert Waterbender. She descended slowly at first, but after seeing how much she needed to descend, she glided down, anxious to see what the red glow was.

There was little time to admire the decour: there were a LOT of steps.

As Katara heads down the stairs, it seems like every step is ten or thirty or a hundred or a thousand, skipping every step in between in that smooth way that dreams ignore irrelevant details.

As she descends further, the red glow slowly starts to turn white, instead, though it doesn't yet seem any closer—and she gets the very strangest sense of going up, even though she's clearly still heading downwards.

And there was definitely a sense of vertigo here, a dizziness Katara had nevrer found herself facing before as she headed down, up, a direction that made little sense but kept going, trying to look for the answer in the question of where she was going and who she would meet. If she'd ever heard the story of Alice, she would have likened it to falling down a rabbot hole: except no rabbits.

Roxie's world was more than enough of a trip in and of itself.

"At the thousandth step," comes Roxie's voice, filtered in that same half-conscious, half-present way as before, "you'll come to a guardian who you'll have to defeat to continue on to the last step. The guardian always comes from yourself, so I can't help you with this one."

Katara has just passed the nine-hundred-ninety-ninth step, she retroactively realizes; with one more the stairwell will suddenly open into a vast hollow space carved out of the earth, neatly bisecting natural caves and small underground rivers. Though interrupted, the stairs continue downwards, but standing between the downwards path and Katara is...

Katara.

Well, not exactly. The example of herself standing before her is noticeably older, maybe even as much as middle-aged, though the other-Katara hasn't lost any of her natural beauty to age... of her body, at least, to judge by what her fine (royal?!) Fire Nation robes show. But her face is covered by a porcelain mask, though the always-familiar loops of her hair are visible.

"You," she hisses, and there's a rasping to her voice that exceeds what mere aggression could produce.

Katara nodded at the instruction and continued down, although her heart was beating fast. She had no idea what to expect as far as a guardian was concerned, so she readied herself quietly and took the last step to meet whoever was waiting for her. The space was a wonder to behold with its caves and rivers, and she would have happily lingered here if there wasn't an ominious figure blocking her path.

And there she was. She, as in her, a Katara she didn't know who sported a mask that made this all the more eerie. That wasn't as bothersome, however, as the fact she was wearing Fire Nation robes and looked older than her. What was she supposed to represent?

But that question could wait as Katara was not one to back down from a fight. "Me," Katara said, getting into stance.

The other-Katara moves her left hand, just a little twitch-sweep.

A roar of water slams up out of one of the natural streams and towards Katara, trying to wash her away. "You don't deserve to be here!" the other-Katara declares. "You're weak!"

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject