trans_9 | Untangling [Open]

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Untangling [Open]

With Celena and Aibghalien's help, Thom looked better than he had since he'd arrived on the ship. The dark circles under his eyes weren't as pronounced, and his fever had cooled slightly.

But there was still a long way to go before he had his Gift under control again, and Roger's magic still raved at the back of his mind, pressing on his temper. He had taken to the less used parts of the ship, trying to keep himself away from any people who might try his patience.

Hydroponics remained his favorite spot for meditation, near Alastirra's garden. He and the draenei had formed a cautious friendship of sorts - the kind where they mostly left each other alone, with the occasional conversation about magical theories between their disciplines. More often than not, Thom spent his time in deep meditation, dropped into his center of magic and slowly pulling his and Roger's magic away from each other.

Sweat dripped down his forehead as he worked, and suddenly he jumped up from his customary seat on a stump and whirled around, throwing out his hand. A ball of orange flame leapt from his fingertips and scorched a blackened groove in the wood.

"Damn."

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"If you like," Thom said stiffly. Whether he meant healing him or missing him should he happen to explode wasn't clear, but he looked away from the draenei like he was embarrassed. The last person who had told him she would honestly miss him should something happen to him was his twin.

People liked Alanna. Thom didn't inspire the same kind of friendship.

"I have a question for you, actually," he said. He'd been putting this off for far too long. Drawing the omnicomm from inside his sleeve, he held it out in front of him. "I don't understand this, but I've come to realize that it's the only way to spread news aboard this ship. Do you know how it works?"

"I do, as a matter of fact." She rose, dusting her hands off on the cloth covering her mail leggings, and trotted over casually, a hand out for his omnicomm. Even then, she brought hers out as well, and held them together for a comparison.

"Yours has a keyboard like mine, yes? But it is in your language?" She hoped. Alastirra still wasn't certain how the translators worked on Stacy. "Well, you type your words in, and it will come up here, and then when you hit this button it will post. It is like a message board of sorts but with no paper, really."

Good enough for a first, brief lesson. Alastirra hoped.

Thom looked down at the screen where she had indicated. Yes, he'd tried pressing the buttons before and had figured out how to take down memos and notes - his satchel of note-taking materials was a thing of the past - but he'd never gone to the screen Alastirra indicated.

Now that he was there, he tried typing a message - erasing it before he sent it, of course. "It's simpler than I expected," he said. "The whole ship reads this?"

"Yes. When you simply type and send, everyone can see it. You can lock it to people by doing this--there are ways to lock it to specific departments from what I have heard, and I know there are ways to lock it to specific people." Alastirra indicated the fields with a fingernail to direct Thom's attention to it.

"So you could lock a post to me, or to Aibghalien, or whomever you like, really. And then only the person you had locked it to should be able to read it. Most people do not try to interfere with others' posts, though sometimes, it is possible. Though I do not know how to do that," the Draenei admitted.

"Fascinating," Thom said. He scrolled through some notices on the front page - flesh-eating monsters, assault, Council-

"Ah, the Council - I still cannot believe that they would be elected."

Alastirra chuckled. "Power or blood is how those of your world attain their leadership? You would be very surprised at my world as well, then. It is very, very common that the Exarchs and higher are elected to their posts. Velen leads us because he is a seer of great wisdom."

Though her familiarity with other ways spoke at least of mild knowledge of other cultures on her home world.

"The King's blood is blessed by the Gods," Thom said. "And when the King no longer fulfills his station to the benefit of his people, the Gods dethrone him."

It hadn't happened in at least a few thousand years on his world. No, the Gods had set in motion certain chosen people to prevent a failing of the Conté blood.

"Ruling a country is no matter to be left to someone who may or may not have been spending his entire life learning how to do it. There's a reason why lands and titles and kingdoms are passed through blood."

"Well, Velen does not rule a country, I would say. Just my people. We have had to run for a long time." But Thom didn't need to know the entire history of the Draenei.

"If that is what works for your people, then it is a good thing. I am not sure the council works here, yet, but I have not been awake so long. I am sure that if there is a clear way it does not work, there will be another discussion about how the ship should be run."

Even if it was boring and Alastirra would probably skip it.

"But you said yourself he is a seer," Thom said. "Is sight of the future so valued among your people, then? It is blood and sorcery among mine, and chivalry and noblility."

He might have signed Trebond over to Alanna if the crown had permitted it, but the pride in his birthplace was still there.

The Draenei nodded. "It is, truly. We would not even exist as a race--and such as we are, myself and Nehaalista, here--without Velen's sight and gifts of prophecy. We would all have been cast down to become demons, every single one of us."

There were plenty of man'ari Eredar as it were, after all.

"My foresight and far sight is not so strong, but as a shaman, my gifts are valued so amongst my people as well. And I have benefited others, here."

Thom turned his eyes to the garden. He had dreamed for years of coming to Court and serving the crown, taking them all by storm after his sister had swept through and done the same.

But his past was the last thing he wanted to talk about. "How is the garden coming?"

"Good! Very good! As you may have surmised since I have been trying to press blackberries on you." She chuckled. "I should try to learn how to make jam, so they don't go to waste. Though it seems that some of the animals around here enjoy them and my strawberries as much as the humanoids of the ship do."

Alastirra tapped a finger against her lips. "I have no idea when we shall have another shore leave, but have you any more suggestions as to what you would like to see in it?"

More plants would probably not be a bad thing, after all. At least not to her mind.

"I confess I have little idea of things of a mundane nature," Thom said. "I was much more interested in sharpening my power."

He was impressed with how much Alastirra accomplished here, on this strange ship in the middle of nothingness.

"At Feif Trebond we had an excellent gardener - the cook left something to be desired, but not because of lack of ability." Thom stared into the garden, remembering despite himself. "My twin and I sent ghost lions to follow him when he vexed us. He wasn't very fond of magic."

"What were the sort of things you had in your garden there, then? Do you remember? I had to learn to cook, in my travels on Azeroth alone, there was no guarantee that an outpost you were passing through would have a provider of victuals, but I could usually manage to hunt something edible, as it were."

Alastirra chuckled quietly at that. "I am not certain my cooking would be up to what you were used to at your home, but it is better than the slop. I eat it when I must, but...I definitely do not prefer it!"

She had to clap a hand over her mouth and giggle at the thought of ghost lions chasing a cook. "I have never done that with my spirit wolves--only sent them after those who deserved it. Though I suppose if he vexed you, he did!"

"The cook made excellent tarts," Thom said. "Alanna and I ate them. Cook threatened to tell Father." He coughed, embarrassed. "It was a long time ago. You can summon spirit wolves?"

He changed the subject quickly. Talking about his childhood escapades... it seemed pointless and silly.

She chuckled to herself again, eyes widening. Some good-natured ribbing couldn't hurt, could it? "Oh my, you were a normal human boy, with a normal human sister. Who would have thought?"

Alastirra went on to nod, and actually invoke the gestures that called the beasts to her. The large, blue-and-white translucent wolves practically leapt into existence, and circled around her once before sitting beside her and panting.

"You have to forgive them, it has been a while since I last called them. This is Akil, and this is Kurii," she said, gesturing first to the wolf on her left, then to the one on her right.

"This is my friend Thom," she said to the wolves, before gesturing to the mage. "If you want you can let them sniff you. They are very real, for all that they are supposed to be spirits."

While some people might have hesitated when confronted with wolves of such a prodigious size - and apparent insubstantiality - Thom did not hesitate to extend his hands, letting the wolves sniff him. Their breath puffed over his hands and he raised his eyebrows. "They look like they would be merely spirits, but they are quite solid aren't they?"

He reached out to the wolves - slowly, since he did like his hands attached to his wrists - attempting to rest his hands on their shoulders.

"At times, yes. I think it has something to do with the summoning. I empower them through magic and they feed off that and become solid. The spell does not last long, though, I am afraid. A few minutes at best."

Eventually, Thom would feel the wolves going less substantial beneath his hands--but not before Kurii licked him once.

"Well, at least they seem to like you. Mostly, I ask them to defend me from danger. They are very stalwart companions."

"The lions were merely illusion," Thom said, watching in fascination as his hands slowly began to go through the wolves' skins. They had felt perfectly solid a moment earlier. "And any fool versed in the Gift would have known it was so, since lions are hardly amethyst in color."

Wolves were hardly blue, but Alastirra's wolves were real enough. "Where do you summon them from?"

"They are spirits. They stay with me, unseen, so I can call them when I need them." Though there was a span of time in which the spell could not be cast. Not in rapid succession, for example.

"Which means they are still here, but disembodied. No throats with which to howl. Probably a good thing. Because Kurii probably would howl, then, and no one would ever get much sleep. I do not go about trying to anger people!" Alastirra chuckled to herself at that.

Thom fell silent for a moment at her last sentence. Comparatively, he was less than pleasant to be around. It made him wonder why Alastirra bothered with him at all.

"The Immortals on my world were all imprisoned in the Divine Realms hundreds of years ago," he said, picking up on their last thread of conversation. "We have no spirits or other such things, not anymore."

Alastirra frowned a little. She was better than some at picking up human facial expressions, and she was only getting better with practice.

"What did I say?" she asked, rolling right over his comment about spirits. Not that it wouldn't have been very disturbing to her to be in a world with no spirits at all, but that was neither here, nor there.

"Nothing," Thom said quickly, and tried for his old charming smile, the one that had gotten his former friends at Court to leave him be during the first stages of his fever. "Merely wondering what such a world would be like - demons, spirits, elementals... never a dull moment, I would suppose."

Alastirra narrowed her eyes. "Thom. I am female. I do know that when we say 'Nothing', that it usually means a very great something. And now, you are trying to pull this on me. You may pull the other leg. I am not buying it."

She gave a little smirk that broaded into a smile. "But as for my world? True. The moments there were never very dull."

Thom speared her with a calculating gaze - not only was she good-natured, but she was adept at picking up the nature of others. "It's not worth discussing," he said. "Just... thinking."

Alanna would tell him he was being pig-headed and stubborn, but his own insecurities were his business.

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