Tales of MU

In Which Mackenzie Is Missing A Piece

It had been one hell of an intense hour from start to finish, and while most of the pain from my bouts with both the tiny giant and the tiny kobold had been magical illusions that ended when the fight did, I’d been physically slammed around enough to still feel a kind of lingering ache in the spaces between my bones. I wasn’t exactly limping on my way out of the athletic center, but neither was I light on my feet.

I’d let go of the elemental connection and come back down to earth metaphorically. I wanted to make a point ot spend some time outside of combat every day practicing moving and feeling, but I needed to clear some space in my head to focus on other things for a while.

As much as I needed to focus on how to fight Nae, there were things going on in my life that I couldn’t ignore… like the strangeness in the design building, and my missed class there. While I wasn’t due back in Professor Stone’s class until Wednesday, but I needed to sort out the problem and square things away with him before then. I would be fighting Nae before that, but I could afford to let myself get knocked around a bit in the first half of the week.

It might even be to my advantage to not go absolutely all-out right away. It would give me a chance to see where she was going. If we both ended up waiting for the other to make the first move, we’d probably both fail the exercise… Coach Callahan really hated people trying to game things based on the knowledge that the matches don’t have real consequences. Merely holding something back for later, though, probably wouldn’t tank my grade.

Since we went to the Arch for dinner anyway, I decide excuse myself to find Professor Stone’s office before I went into the dining area, just in case he happened to be in… though really it was so I wouldn’t have any surprises looking for it tomorrow if he wasn’t, which seemed more likely.

The basement showed a bit more of a dwarven flourish than the blended elven-dwarven style of the architecture above… though there were what looked like living vines twining around the visible support beams, fed by the sun globes that provided illumination.

The office was easy to find, but the door was closed. There was a dim light on inside… If it had been any earlier in the day I might have knocked, but the last thing I wanted to do was interrupt the professor at his dinner when I was going to be asking for favors.

I was just turning to leave when I spotted the burnished wood nameplate on the door opposite, which definitely would have qualified as a surprise, and not a pleasant one: “PROF. ARIADNE (EINHORN)“.

It made an unassailable kind of sense. The Archimedes Center had been a gesture of cooperation among the races, particularly elves and dwarves. No classes met in it and it wasn’t attached to any particular program, but having offices available for professors of elven and dwarven extraction would be part of the gesture.

Well, I couldn’t not talk to Professor Stone… but if Ariadne was in or around her office, there would be no way that she wouldn’t know I was there. Hell, there was probably a better than decent chance she’d know I’d come down the hallway where her office was and stopped right in front of the door while she was out… I didn’t think the elven sense of smell in particular was good, but if she was paranoid about demonbloods I couldn’t see her not having some passive detection wards.

Right then and there, I pulled out my mirror and sent Professor Stone an a-mail saying that I’d stopped by his office after my last class in case he’d been in, and since he wasn’t, I’d be stopping by during office hours to discuss the circumstances of my absence. Since I was using a university account, it would be logged at both ends in the school’s own cabinets. If she did register my presence now and complained about it, or we encountered each other tomorrow, I was covered.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” Amaranth asked when I joined the group at the table.

“Sort of,” I said. “I found Professor Stone’s office, but I don’t think he’s in… I also found Professor Ariadne’s office, which unfortunately I’m going to have to go right past to see him.”

“Normally I’d be happy that you’re deciding to deal with someone in person instead of remotely, baby, but is this something you could maybe handle with a reflection?” Amaranth asked. “You aren’t having problems in his class? I know you’ve never really thought much of a few of the students in the glamour program, but I had the impression you were enjoying his class.”

“I would love to do this in a mirror, but I really think this is going to need the personal touch,” I said. “I, uh, didn’t make it to his class today… there are extenuating circumstances, but I think I could maybe make the case for them better in person.”

“Meaning they’re typically bizarre,” Steff said. “Typically for you, I mean.”

“You weren’t attacked?” Amaranth said. “Were you?”

“Not exactly,” I said. “I mean, it might have been some kind of an attack… it would explain a lot if it was… but it’s not like somebody came up and started swinging at me, or throwing energy bolts. No, it was more like something was wrong with the Emily Center,” I said.

“What, like she’s sick or something?” Steff asked.

“The design center,” I clarified. “The Emily Dactyl Center For Design. There was a weird feeling going in, and then the hallway kept looping me back to the door or places like the janitor’s closet.”

“Wow, did you piss her off or what?” Steff said.

“Maybe she’s trying to tell you something?” Amaranth suggested, with a slight frown.

“The building,” I said. “Where the design classes are held.”

“We know who Emily is, baby,” Amaranth said. “I mean, we know who the building is. Presumably she was named after a person named Emily, though she… the building, that is… is too new to be in any of the really good history books. I’ve been meaning to read the revised edition of Magisterius University: A History, but there’s only one copy in the library, and some really inconsiderate person had it out all year last year.”

“She… the building?” I repeated.

“Yes,” Amaranth said, nodding.

“The building is a she?” I asked agian. There wasn’t much room to misunderstand her meaning, and in fact it felt a lot like an explanation for what I’d experienced… though the explanation required a few explanations.

“Maybe it’s Merovian,” Ian said. “She, I mean.”

“She is a she. You’re surprisingly resistant to this idea, for someone who’s dating a genius loci,” Amaranth said.

“I don’t know if I’d say ‘genius’,” Hazel said. “Quite gifted, to be sure, but genius would be going a bit far.”

“I meant me, Hazel,” Amaranth said.

“So did I.”

“The point is, baby,” Amaranth said, “that the idea of a living spirit that’s embodied in something other than a body… or more than just a body, in my case… shouldn’t be that odd to you. I’m pretty sure you know the rumors about Paradox Tower being semi-aware.”

“Yeah, and parts of the necromancy building are alive,” Steff said. “Well, I say ‘alive’, but…”

“Okay, yes, I know about Paradox,” I said. “And it’s not that I’m doubting about… Emily. But why didn’t anybody tell me about this? I have class there three times a week.”

“We… didn’t realize there was anything to tell,” Amaranth said. “I mean, I picked up on her the first time I got close to her…”

“And I just hear things, around campus,” Steff said, pointing to her pointed ears. “But it seemed like pretty common knowledge, in the glitter-and-glitz crowd. I think most people notice the first time they walk in?”

“What, because the halls play tricks on them?” I asked

“Except mostly, they don’t do that,” Amaranth said. “She usually introduces herself. Supposedly she’s usually pretty helpful. Maybe she felt like you were ignoring her?”

“But what is there to ignore?”

“Her presence?”

“I’ve never felt her presence before!”

“Never felt… or never noticed?” Amaranth asked.

“Ooh, see, this is starting to make sense,” Steff said. “She thought you were giving her the cold shoulder, so she’s been giving it back… and today’s the first time you reacted.”

“So why didn’t ‘she’ realize I just haven’t been hearing her or whatever and cut me some slack?”

“You’re expecting her to understand what was happening from your point of view, baby,” Amaranth said. “If she had no reason to think you weren’t hearing her before, why would that be the first thing that popped into her… uh, head?”

“Because it’s the truth,” I said.

“But she doesn’t know that,” Steff said. “She just knows you, what? Stopped in her threshold and looked annoyed, or what?”

“It was a bit like walking into a spiderweb,” I said.

“Well, if you looked like that was how you felt just stepping inside her, it’s no surprise she took it personally,” Steff said. “No offense, Dee.”

“I would imagine I would enjoy the realization that I have walked into a spider’s web even less than you would, so I take none,” Dee said.

“Hang on, though,” I said. “A building with a living spirit, I can grasp… but this… it was terrorizing me, looping me around and diverting me into abandoned halls and things. How can they have a building that’s allowed to do that? I mean, okay, in the delving program, maybe… but the design program is full of people who aren’t competent enough to be illusionists.”

“And your very good friend Nicki,” Two said.

“You know what I mean,” I said.

“Yes,” Two agreed, and that didn’t make me feel at all better.

“Okay, my point isn’t about the difficulty or relative usefulness of glamour, per se, it’s that they’re… non-combatants,” I said.

“Well… I would imagine that Emily probably likes glamour students as a whole more than you do,” Amaranth said. “I mean, if she shared your sensibilities they’d probably just use her for enchantment classes.”

“And public spankings,” Steff said.

“I do not like public spankings,” I said.

“Private but surprisingly well-attended ones, then,” Steff said.

“How does this entity communicate?” Dee asked.

“Empathically,” Amaranth said. “Like nymphs in the wild. Like this.”

She must have “said” something to Dee, who nodded slidhtly.

“Mackenzie… you said you were terrified,” Dee said.

“I said I was terrorized,” I said. “As in, it… she… was terrorizing me. I was pretty freaked out, by the end.”

“Do you recall of what in particular you were scared?” she asked.

“Well, the whole situation,” I said.

“What about it, exactly?”

My first impulse was to say that I’d been afraid of being trapped, but I realized that was an after-the-fact rationalization… and a pretty irrational one, considering how Emily had literally shown me the door. The next object my brain cast its gaze upon was the building itself, but I’d never once thought anything like “Wow, this place is scary.”

Even though I’d felt a strong unwillingness to re-enter the premises again, there was no sense of menace about the building.

I’d just felt a sense of general apprehension that had built towards panic the longer I stayed.

“…I wasn’t afraid,” I reasoned. “She was afraid of me, and was basically screaming that fear at me.”

“It seems plausible, given the limited information available,” Dee said.

“I know one of the reasons people love her classes is that they feel good inside her,” Amaranth said. “‘An infectious good mood’ is how it’s described. She’s not the kind of intelligence that can think in words, otherwise I would go and talk to her more often, but she’s always been very… welcoming? I guess what I’m saying is that it makes sense that you would be able to feel her fear, but I don’t understand where it would have been coming from.”

“The question is, why would she be afraid now if she wasn’t before?” Ian asked. “Because I don’t think Mackenzie would have needed to notice her for her to try to spit her out, or whatever.”

“…I was kind of thinking some not vey kind thoughts about the building,” I said. “But in my defense, I didn’t know she was alive or could pick up on how I felt about her.”

“Was that anything new, though?” Amaranth said.

“Not really, no,” I said.

“Imagine two persons who do not like each other,” Dee said. “Imagine they each… mutter to themselves about the other, as they pass each other from time to time, but they never hear each other clearly because one of them has both very poor hearing and a very weak voice… or simply does not speak or understand the language of the other.”

“You’re saying my psychic exercises have made it suddenly impossible for Emly to ignore me and vice-versa?” I said. “Like, she might have been throwing up the barrier at the door for me… or giving me the cold shoulder, which feels like a slight barrier… the whole time, but today was the first time I noticed?”

“Well, the ‘whole time’ since you missed her warm welcome the first time,” Amaranth said. “We shouldn’t assume she just decided to snub you out of the blue, even if it is a misunderstanding… we might have an easier time clearing things up if we take her point of view into account.”

“It seems to be a partial explanation, at least,” Dee said. “I cannot say that it fully accounts for terror, though certainly shock and outrage… it might be that a certain proportion of the populace is deaf to her calls and this is the first time one of them has suddenly been able to ‘hear’ and respond. It could be that this alarmed her. I am sorry, this is getting rather tenuous.”

I nodded. Dee had been speaking with no more than her customary care, but I still got the feeling she wasn’t sure she believed herself once we got to the “might be” and “could be” parts. She had more of an answer than anyone else, but it bothered me that we couldn’t fill in all the blanks… I felt like there was a big piece still missing

. Even taking the basic premises about the… premises… as fact, it wasn’t adding up.

“So, um…” Ian said. “Maybe this is just too obvious and the reason nobody is saying it is because you all see some even more obvious flaw in it, but if we want to know her point of view… and you can communicate on her level… shouldn’t we be getting her in on this conversation? So to speak? Or so to empathically broadcast?”

“Seems sensible enough to me,” Hazel said.

“Well, like I said, she doesn’t really think in words,” Amaranth said. “I mean, that’s not a problem for me communciating with her, but it can be hard to translate specifics… I could get a general idea of what she was thinking, and I could probably put across the idea that you’re harmless and simply didn’t know…”

“Yeah, I’m still a little hung up on that, though” I said. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to interrupt, but this is just bothering me: the people who go through her doors probably don’t all have more telepathic potential than I do, and I know damn well that I haven’t been subconsciously using mine to shield myself or anything like that because I’ve been told I basically have a mind like a sieve, literally. So why didn’t I pick up on her?”

“Well… you are pretty good at ignoring things,” Amaranth said.

“Things outside my mind,” I said. “Because I live too much in my head, which I’m guessing is where I should have felt this. Am I wrong, Dee?”

“…you are not,” Dee said. “I would expect that between your nascent potential and the previously unguarded state of your mind, you would have been more aware of her rather than less.”

“Dee,” Hazel said, “you once told me that sometimes someone with an… undeveloped gift that they don’t understand… just gets used to ignoring what it tells them. If average folks who don’t deal with that suddenly have a building’s notions popping into their head, they might have no inkling it would be anything other than real and less of an idea that it should be swept under the rug, so they’d react to it, where someone who was used to ignoring those messages wouldn’t. You know?”

The conversation she referred to was one that I hadn’t been privy to, and I doubted anyone else had been, either, except for maybe Two. I knew that there was a strain of precognition and second sight in Hazel’s family, on her mother’s side. She worried about developing it herself, though as far as I knew she’d showed no signs.

“It is a well-considered point,” Dee said. “But you will recall I assured you that such things come under the heading of ‘active denial’, even though though they may become reflexive in time… even if Mackenize were not aware of every individual thing she so ignored, she would be aware that she was ignoring things in general.”

“Yeah, no, I don’t really have to go through life trying to shut voices out of my head,” I said.

“Then it is a mystery that is perhaps beyond our ability to solve gathered around the dinner table,” Dee said. “Perhaps something specific to the nature of this particular empathic entity would explain things.”

“Yeah, so I’m going to assume that Professor Stone knows more about Emily than we do, or that he’ll know who does,” I said. “I think we should hold off on anybody approaching her until then… even if we need you to translate eventually anyway, Amaranth, I think there’s just too much unknown here for us to just jump in and try to fix things.”

“I believe you’re right, baby,” Amaranth said. “Keeping your professor in the loop is going to be the right move all around. I have to imagine he has a good relationship with the building, since he works there.”

“Which just means I’ll have to get past Professor Ariadne,” I said.

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Characters: Amaranth, Dee, Hazel, Ian, Mackenzie, Steff