In Which The Plot Is Advanced, If Not In Ways You* Personally Care About
I found myself wishing I’d known about Iona’s disappearance… and the weekend plans she’d made with Feejee… before lunch, so I could have talked about it with the others and made some kind of plans or arrangements. Now everybody was scattered to their afternoon classes, and I was the only one who carried a mirror.
I was glad at least that Steff shared my last class with me. I wouldn’t have to walk back to the dorms alone. I didn’t know… and didn’t really want to find out… if a mermaid on land could move and react faster than a half-elf, but I trusted Steff to see an attack coming and respond to it before I could.
After some debate about whether it would be worse to go out unprotected or stay in the dorm and miss it, I set out for my logic class alone. I reasoned that the dorm was not necessarily a place of safety, especially as it would be fairly empty during the height of the afternoon, whereas there would be many students out and about between classes. Spending an hour sitting in the middle of a room full of witnesses sounded like a better idea than spending it cooped up in my dorm room, jumping at noises. And if my scent had changed enough that Feejee couldn’t recognize it, then it seemed like a better idea to be moving around than to stay in a place that Iona might check first if she were looking for a trail.
I was also curious to see if Sooni would make an appearance in the flesh in our shared logic class… though it kind of pained me to think of Sooni and I sharing logic. Thus far she’d been attending remotely or by proxy.
Once I was thinking about Sooni, it occurred to me that I had some direct knowledge that Sooni was a technically competent magic blaster, at least when it came to cramming the impressive-looking off-the-shelf spells… and while Maliko lacked Pala or Dee’s looming presence, she was a trained fighter.
Assuming that Sooni’s television-influenced senses of friendship and heroism would hold out if she saw me being attacked by something recognizable as a monster… and that Maliko would either obey her or jump into a fray to protect her… then it was just possible that I’d find some protection if I were attacked close enough to the logic class, in time and space.
It was just the time and space between classes that I really had to worry about, then.
It really sucked to be looking at the world that way, blocking out my day in terms that amounted to darting from one piece of cover to another like a hunted animal. In a real sense, though, that’s what I was… the hunted part, at least. The fact that my predator had gone missing brought no real relief. All it really meant was that I didn’t know where she was.
The weird part was, it all felt slightly familiar. I’d spent all of high school wary and on edge. I hadn’t been constantly harrassed, but the harrassment had been consistent enough that I knew that the quiet periods when I was left alone weren’t a sign that it was all over.
And of course none of the people I went to school with had been out to kill me… but the thing was, when I saw teachers ignoring or excusing the things that were done, when I was the target of a thousand messages telling me that I was lucky to be alive,lucky to be tolerated, to be taken in and allowed to go to school with the good kids, the normal kids… well, there had been times when it had felt perfectly plausible that one of my fellow students could hate me enough to want to kill me, and that they would have felt confident enough that the world would take their side to actually do so.
And I’d felt the same way, of course, which was why that had managed to just feel normal to me after a while, when the threat from Iona felt new and wrong. It reminded me of the discussion we’d had in Hart’s class about the colonists feeling outraged at being denied their birthright as citizens of the old empire, and as humans. Many of them would have lacked several important privileges and the full protection of the law back in the Mother Isles, but they accepted their place in the larger society because it was normal. It was only when deprived of the protections they expected for accepting that place that they’d turned rebellious.
I couldn’t say that it didn’t bother me when human students referred to me like I was a monster or implied that I shouldn’t have… or didn’t have… the same rights that they did. But in a way, it felt like I was more offended, for lack of a better term, by Iona’s threat to me than I had been when the student delvers had been discussing my fate in the labyrinth. Humans dismissing my potential death… or even advocating for it… was something I objected to, but it was within the boundaries of what I’d learned to expect. What Iona was doing was out of bounds, even though I’d be dead either way.
Realistically, even if Iona were taken care of, I’d still need to be prepared for a life of feeling hunted, because even if I wasn’t being hunted at the moment it didn’t mean my ordeal was over… and even if I didn’t know about anyone hunting me, it didn’t mean it wasn’t happening.
The only thing worse than living a life like that, I decided, was living it halfway like that. Where Ian had arranged a bodyguard during what we’d assumed was the most dangerous time, when the whole campus had been on edge, I’d made no real provisions for my safety against the threat that I knew was targeting me personally.
There I was relying on the happenstance of sharing classes with people who would be better than I in a fight. I’d been learning how to use a staff to take down opponents and keep them away from me, but I hadn’t even thought to bring it with me on the walk between classes. At least I had spells ready for projecting elemental fire, and some limited experience with improvising elemental effects in combat.
I felt like maybe I should thank Sooni for that, but chances were excellent that she had already worked it around in her head until I’d expressed my gratitude to her for the magic brawl that had put me in the healing center.
I decided that if Iona attacked me, I would not hesitate to lash out with everything I had available. I was unarmed, but I could magically sharpen my nails and even my teeth if I had to. I was sure I could make some sort of ground-based eruption of earth, at least outside the protected paths. Though they would sadly do absolutely nothing to prevent another student from attacking me, I knew they would act out against me if I used magic in a way that would directly damage them.
Setting myself on fire would probably be more efficacious than trying to do the same to her directly. I was pretty sure that fire would hurt her, but sea life tended to be very low in fire quotient and possessing of a high balance of water, not surprisingly. It would be an uphill battle to pull fire out of her under stress, which I certainly would be.
I could surround myself with fire and throw that at her, but people didn’t burn very well, as a rule. She wouldn’t have clothes or even necessarily hair to catch on fire. Magically produced fire was a little better at burning things that were too stubborn to ignite for mundane fire, being closer to pure elemental fire and thus more of an embodiment of burningness than anything you could produce through mundane reactions, but that would again run into the problem of there not being a lot of fire in a mermaid’s body to release.
Thinking about fighting off Iona with fire was making me doubt my ability to actually follow through with it. It was one thing to coldly contemplate the best method of setting a living, thinking being on fire, but it was another to… well, it was actually another thing to coldly contemplate the best method of setting a living, thinking being on fire.
If the time came, I’d be prepared to act. That was probably the best I could do, since I didn’t know where or how she would end up coming after me, if she did. I couldn’t guess how she would arm herself, or if she’d think to find some kind of additional countermeasures against fire. Evey if that was outside her expertise… and I had no idea if it was… someone willing to kill for enjoyment wouldn’t balk at swiping some of the magical items that were lying around.
So I’d just be ready to fight, and I’d do more to be prepared in the future… I’d carry the borrowed staff with me to my next class, and I would make arrangements with my more capable friends to not be alone.
And I would not spend the time walking to classes lost in thought instead of paying attention to my surroundings, as I realized I’d just done when I arrived outside the building for my logic class.
At least it meant that nothing interesting had happened to me on the way, which could only be a good thing, I supposed.
Sooni was in fact back in class, wearing the same outfit her stand-in had worn, minus the veil… I was almost fooled into thinking otherwise, because an illusion had been inexpertly applied over her facial features. She looked normal, but when she moved her head, it kind of blurred out when viewed from the wrong angle.
It looked as though she’d tried to use it in place of a glamour, maybe to hide a blemish or enhance her appearance in some way. Glamours weren’t foolproof, but they didn’t fail in that way. I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if she’d used glamour regularly in the past to make herself look more… well… glamorous, and had to scramble to find a replacement when her father’s people cut her off from access to it.
It would have to have been an act of desperation of some kind, because while glamour could be expensive, it was simple and relatively easy to use glamour to subtly alter appearance than it was to affix an enduring illusion to something.
I was still pretty sure it was her, though, unless her double had spent the past two days learning to copy her swinging walk… and I only noticed the flickering because she turned around when I came in the room and started bouncing down the aisle towards me, tossing her braid-bedecked head in a way that made my neck ache.
Any doubts about her identity that I might have entertained vanished entirely when she opened her mouth. There was just no counterfeiting Sooni.
“I do not wish to brag or boast prematurely,” she said, “but I do believe that people have noticed my excellent and professional handling of the Case of the Killed Princess Of A Not Very Important Kingdom.”
“What in the world are you talking about now?” I asked. Between the fact that she’d been sequestered away from the rest of the campus and the one that she hadn’t actually done anything for anyone to notice, I kind of found this unlikely.
“Well, I mean… it’s not as though she was from a very large or powerful kingdom, with a big military or any industry to speak of,” Sooni said. “So while she was a princess, technically, when compared to the only daughter of an important man from a larger and more prosperous empire…”
I almost pointed out that this wasn’t what I’d been referring to… and maybe I should have. But the extent of her insensitivity and self-centeredness kind of caught me by surprise.
“Sooni… are you actually trying to pull rank on a dead girl?” I asked.
“I am just saying that if Yokano were as lawless and fractured a place as the Shift, my father would probably be a king, too,” Sooni said. “He is important! And a leader! It is only because he is wise and strong enough to yield to the rule of our just and powerful god-emperor that I am not a princess. But don’t you think the vassal of a god outranks any other mortal ruler?”
“So that’s a yes, then,” I said, out loud. That was my next mistake.
“You agree, then!”
“What? No,” I said. “My emperor is kind of pointedly mortal, and we kind of like it that way.”
Also, agents of one of the skeevier and less legally constrained agencies that ultimately answered to that imperial power may or may not have had me under surveillance, so it kind of behooved me to say a word or two in his defense.
“I do not see how you can venerate a mortal emperor,” Sooni said.
“We don’t,” I said. “That’s kind of the point of having a mortal ruler. We fought a couple of wars over it, actually. The Magisterian System holds that absolute temporal power is enough for one man. Anything more would be too much.”
“And it is no wonder you have so many problems,” Sooni said. “Racisms and murders and sexual deviancies and so on.”
“I don’t believe for one second that you don’t have all of those things in Yokano.”
“We do not,” she said. “There can be no racism when each race has its own honored place to be celebrated in turn.”
I had to imagine that some of the other yokai would bristle at that kind of talk the way Steff had at Dee’s talk of people’s place in her society… though I imagined they would do it quietly, considering how completely cowed Kai was around Sooni. I also had to wonder how long the nekos and other races whose honored place was below foxes had been waiting for their turns to celebrate.
I didn’t say any of this, of course.
“This is an interesting discussion, but I really meant was, what do you mean people noticed?”
“Oh!” she said. “Well, I’ve noticed that everywhere I go, people say things like ‘I’m glad that’s finished.’ or ‘I’m so glad that’s over with.’, when talking about the case. You see what that means?”
“…that they’re glad it’s over with?” I said.
She gave me a look like she was trying very hard not to hit me with her shoe.
“Why would they say it in front of me?” she said. “Think!”
“Sooni, you’re hearing people say it in front of you because it’s the sort of thing that’s going to be said all over the place,” I said. “You just don’t hear it in the places you aren’t because… well… you know. You aren’t there.”
“See? You want to argue because it is in your nature to be spiteful, but you cannot think of a good reason why it should be so,” Sooni said.
“I’m glad you’re back, Sooni,” I said.
It was the safest reply I could muster.
*For Certain Values Of You
Discuss this story on the Livejournal community.
It’s fun to be exposed to Sooni-ess again
Indeed. She’s at a the road of “violent insanity” that’s between the edges of “hahaha oh god” and “oh shit!”, and loves swerving around on it.
When in Sooni’s presence, Mack looks completely and totally together, as well as a selfless font of sweetness & light.
Well, Sooni’s back and sounds vaguely satisfied that she’s accomplished something. What the hell she did is something I’m half terrified to speculate on.
More importantly: FINALLY! THANK YOU! She finally realizes that she’s not going to be able to use her training if she doesn’t bring her weapon in the first place!
I’m kind of afraid to see what Sooni “did” as well.
As for realizing that weapons training requires a weapon it would help if the weapon being brought along actually happens and I’m thinking it might take a bit more for Mack to actually carry her staff.
Which she says she will do next opprotunity she has. Given her memory though only time will tell.
Hypothesis: Sooni is very dramatically minded and thinks in japanese media. Given “mystery solving” in anime usually involves some kind of direct confrontation and possibly some kind of fight, maybe it was SOONI who made Iona go away, and just sort of assumed everyone knew the instant she did what with being insane and all.
Probably untrue, but it WOULD be entertaining.
While Sooni’s shown herself to have a certain amount of power, I have trouble thinking that she’d be able to take on an experienced predator like Iona and survive unscathed, much less triumph.
More likely, I think she attacked an innocent bystander who GTFOed rather than confronting the obviously deranged college girl.
Ionas predatory experience amounts to attacking unarmed and expecting people with the element of surprise. An all out fight is a different matter altogether.
Sooni has no way of knowing it was Iona, in the first place. As was mentioned elsewhere, the obvious end to that train of thought is that she harassed some poor random, innocent bystander until that person walked away rather than dealing with the fountain of kitsune-crazy in front of them.
Woot! First comment! I…don’t…really have anything to say. Uhhh, good ol’ Sooni…so clueless.
D’oh!
“… I’d still need to be prepared for a life of feeling hunted, …”
“I decided that if Iona attacked me, I would not hesitate to lash out with everything I had available.”
Finally!
…If Sooni does not fail that class I will cry.
Actually, I’ll amend that: If Soonie does not fail that class WITHOUT CHEATING I will cry.
Don’t forget bribery it’s worked so well for her thus far.
Yeah, Sooni exists in a flux of insanity, measuring the levels of which at any one time would probably be hazardous to your health.
She is being, um, relatively less confrontational than she sometimes is, though, which may be a good sign. It also may be a sign that Mack is just getting better at learning how not to push Sooni’s crazybuttons.
“20 pounds of crazy in a 5 pound sack.”
gjvfrytftyurftigykhohuykftyd
rebooting
AUGH. AAURGHGH. *cough* *puke*
Fuckin… Sooni! I was hoping she’d have disappeared (yes yes I know, wishful thinking/joking). This… seriously, this… person. She makes me gibber. I am become rage personified at her appearances.
Whyyyyy does Mack continue to tolerate her whyyyy. She is INSANE and delusional ): I’m completely not in the pro-disablism camp, but she’s not… she’s not! She’s just a sad, sad, enraging little girl who didn’t have parents and who lives in a dangerous fantasy world.
Addendum: I’m not hatin’ on your writing btw, ms Erin, I’m just really enthusiastic about some characters 😛 Like all readers here, I suspect. This is wholly impotent howling at a character that drives me up the walls (and I get a perverse enjoyment out of it as well). I’m certain she has her purpose and something useful will come out of her one day?
I get the feeling Sooni wouldn’t take the hint. If there’s anything more unpredictably dangerous than an uncontrollable maniac in front of you, it’s an uncontrollable maniac RIGHT BEHIND YOU.
I am just glad Mack realizes that someone always WILL want to kill her. Moreover, she seems to realize that she doesn’t inherently deserve it. WAHOOOOO! Seriously. That’s pretty epic for her, actually.
Ohhhh, Sooni. I would kind of Iike to see an OT that describes what Sooni’s been up to– or what she thinks she’s been up to– but on the other hand, that much crazy might make readers’ heads explode.
On the topic of carrying weapons around campus – I know Mack has been notoriously flaky about bringing her staff around with her, but have all of the other characters we see wandering the campus actually been carrying their weaponry? I remember Mack getting into some serious trouble at the start of the semester for not having her knife on her, or at least not being able to readily access it, but I don’t recall any recent (re: past year or two) references to the other characters keeping their weapons on them outside of melee class or the arena. Is this me being as oblivious as Sooni, the armament of the average student just not being relevant to plot or Mack’s general observations, or have the school guards revised their mandatory weapon policy and I just forgot that it happened?
I just think that it doesn’t register with Mack because it’s taken as fact that other students are wearing them. She’d only mention them if they were giant, or obviously enchanted, or brandished at her.
If (nearly) everyone is always carrying a weapon, then it isn’t something that would be commented on.
Kind of like we aren’t constantly reminded that Ian is wearing pants.
Though we do get notice of him not wearing pants. So by the weapons analogy it would come up if it was somehow pertinent that a character was not carrying a weapon.
His wearing pants now? When did that happen?
Seriously though Mack has an exception now, but it’d be cool if she had Monkey’s staff that could shrink to the size of a matchstick or grow to absurd length and girth.
It’d be convenient to carry around and convenient if she needs a column to drop on Iona if she shows up.
..does this comic really need more Freudian subtext? 🙂
Well, OF COURSE it does! It’s part of what keeps us reading it!
I love Sooni.
She’s the blonde cheerleader we all hated and still worshipped in High School.
I’m soooo glad there’s ~nowhere~ in adult society where such idiocy continues to be rewarded.
My cheek? There’s something in it you say? Hmm!
[i]I’m soooo glad there’s ~nowhere~ in adult society where such idiocy continues to be rewarded.[/i]
Why does Sooni make me think of Sarah Palin? 😉
Come to think of it there are some similarities between the two.
Oh, come on.
Sooni’s not [I}that[/I] bad.
I have to compliment you on the subtitle of this story. I’m a big fan of humorous “in-your-face.”
Then I laughed some during the story, too.
JN
Er … I meant “this chapter.”
JN
Actually, the only thing so far that I’ve had any issues putting into 3.5 ed DnD was that I basically made up a new race to cover ‘demonblood’… even the concept of the 1/4 dragon was relatively simple to work with… now I’m just spending some time paying abit of extra attention to how your handling the magic to make sure my idea of a simple spellpoint system will work out in place of the standard so many of what level spells per day… I’ve found that the old acronym that applied to so much of my military experience is working out quite well in this… K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple, Stupid)
The FantasyCraft System from Crafty Games uses a skill based spell casting system for magic. Is that how you were thinking for the spell casting or is it more akin to the class based spell points system of Unearthed Arcana (the 3.5 supplement)
I was actually just gonna say that they have, per the class lists, that many spell LEVELS they can cast per day, and let them decide on the fly which spells, etc
Ahh, the Nutty Comic Relief returns. And in fine form too. I would dearly like to know exactly how Sooni thinks she solved the case. With a description of what really happened, so we can fully appreciate the crazy.
Well, I take a break from constantly watching the Queensland(Australia) floods on the news, to have a bit of a well-needed laugh.
Ta muchly. Nearly spat my coffee at the screen. Again. You’re good at that, Ms Erin.
And I hate to be a grammar nazi…eh, who am I kidding? Make that I try to be polite about being a grammar nazi: ‘Evey if that was outside her expertise… ‘ is probably ‘Even’ etc.
Also, before I get a flood of, well, flood enquiries – this is the comments for *this chapter*, so if you must ask and can’t look up the news websites yourself, bloody well make mermaid references.
Again, thanks for the good morning giggles AE!
So…
Did you see any?
Mermaids, that is.
I’d imagine they like living around the coast of Australia, what with all those reef-diving tourists; did any of them get caught up in the flooding as well? Or do you suspect that they’re enjoying the “missing” people?
I had to. You brought it up 😛
(Although that last comment makes me feel bad that I thought it up. My condolences to anyone in Australia who’s dealing with the flooding or who has lost loved ones.)
“Oh!” she said. “Well, I’ve noticed that everywhere I go, people say things like ‘I’m glad that’s finished.’ or ‘I’m so glad that’s over with.’, when talking about the case. You see what that means?”
Hmm. Seems Mack might have missed something while in class and/or waiting for the potion.
Or, all the people she’s talking about are the people who had to babysit her during this ‘lockdown’.
In which solving
For certain values of You
Is problematic
I don’t think Sooni is insane. If you’ve spent your entire life surrounded by people who flatter you and lie to you and don’t correct your misapprehensions, you’re going to have a lot of misapprehensions. The resulting behavior may be hard to distinguish from that of a person who misfiles, misuses, and misinterprets good inputs.
If Sooni starts butting heads with reality and losing badly, and she doesn’t change, then maybe she is insane. Until then, the jury is out.
Please, Sooni’s a Cloud Cuckoolander who occasionally veers into Ralph Wiggum or Ax Crazy territory.
She tosses around lethal levels of magic in a catfight that she started with no regard for, well, anything. She dresses up her servants as babies and has nearly killed one of them because she didn’t realize that throwing a heavy wooden shoe at someone’s head might hurt them.
We’re talking about a girl who put a Stop Payment Order on her reality check.
Dani, I agree with you about Sooni fundamental character flaw. If this was an analysis of a royal or aristocratic historical figure, I would use the term “The servant problem”.
People raised by servants/serfs/slaves wind up with the most twisted worldviews and extreme narcissist behavior.
As the joke goes: “They’ve got their heads stuck so far up their asses, they could do their own colonoscopy!”
AWESOME! very much loving not only the frequency of the updates, but the quality of them as well. i don’t know if i’m a minority around here or not but i love the “mundane” aspects of MU as much as the more spectacular moments, the classes fascinate me, because to me, thats where you really flesh out the world that MU exists in. we haven’t had a ton of classes lately, but we’ve had a lot of interaction with other characters to flesh things out really well. THANK YOU AE!!!
I love the title.
Especially the note: “*For Certain Values Of You”
that would again run into the problem of there not being a lot of fire in a mermaid’s body to release.
If a thing is defined by the amount of elements it has, what happens when you add/increase (vs release) an element in something? How much needs to be added before that thing becomes something else?
If mermaids are very watery (low fire), how much fire do you need to add before they become steam?
Or am I completely misunderstanding this?
I think your misreading it… if you remember back to her beginning Elements classes, imbuing earth with more water didn’t stop it from being earth… it just made it rather muddy
Just wanted to say that I’m really glad you’re writing again… or more, or however I should phrase that. You truly are a great storyteller.
Loved this. A lot!
Wasn’t there some kind of rule about having to be armed at all times?
P.S. You write what you want/need to write. People who want to read it will read it. If someone does not like it they know where the door is.
There was a rule, but Mack got an “inherently dangerous species” exception applied to her a while back so she didn’t have to carry a weapon.
Fierce Creature.
Just wanted to say that my husband and I laughed hard at the subtitle of this chapter. 😀
Also, keep up the good work–we look forward to reading more next week on date night. 🙂
Oh how I missed the bundle of coddled crazy that is Sooni. On the one hand you can’t help but see the massive GLEAMING pile of INSANE that is the inner processes of her brain, the utterly rhetorical, circular method to her ‘Logic’.
… but at the same time every word that comes out of her mouth shows a person who has been so utterly disconnected from the truth and reality that you can’t help but feel pity knowing that one day the ugly truth is going to somehow stick its head though her window and start nibbling her toes…
I can see why Mac thinks of and tries to get along with her, despite the insanity… Mac see’s her and thinks, here is someone who is kinda like me under my grandmother, controlled, restricted, and ignorant of the world.
(Doesn’t hurt also that she pretty with a nice pair ‘o’ boobs ^_^)
I realize Mac really needs HUMAN blood, but when she’s hungry enough… wouldn’t Sooni be an after school snack on legs?
I can suddenly see Mac going diablo and trying to nibble on Sooni.
And depending on which KIND of anime Sooni is into… she might think it’s part of her “script”.
And she probably is a Virgin.
Nothing probable about it. Remember Sooni and Mac’s date? Sooni hasn’t got the slightest idea what sex entails. She’s a virgin both physically and mentally a virgin.
But since she’s not even partially human, I’d guess her blood isn’t at all useful to Mac, though she probably tastes delicious.
I’m not sure, but I think “discussing” seems to be word you were looking for.
“Humans dismissing my potential death… or even advocating for it…”
Dismissing had dismissed my train of thought.
P.S.
Still loving the story, the ups and the downs are both appreciated.