Chapter 91: Always Changing Probably

on June 2, 2012 in Volume 2 Book 3: Figments & Fragments, Volume 2: Sophomore Effort

In Which Everything New Is Old Again

We said goodbye to Nicki after getting off the coach. There was a definite sense that the party was breaking up, even though everybody else was going to the same place… or at least, I’d thought we were. Steff looked like she was heading back to Harlowe.

I thought that could be a good thing, if she’d worked through the things that were keeping her so uncomfortable around others and so attached to me… or a less good thing, if she thought maybe she’d used up her allotment of welcome for the weekend. If she felt self-conscious about it, then going out of my way to reassure her that she was still welcome would probably have the opposite effect.

“Aren’t you coming back to the suite with me?” I asked.

“Oh… I don’t want to clutter up the place,” she said, holding up the bag with her purchases. “And I should probably check in with Viktor and stuff, you know?”

“Okay,” I said.

“I’ll be back over tonight, though,” she said. “Don’t worry!”

I probably would have worried about her, anyway, but I had other things on my mind.

I’d felt a sense of impending awkwardness about my new look the whole way back to campus, but it never actually materialized.

I’d expected to feel awkward because I was going from the wild, wide world of Enwich… where I was mostly passing people I’d never seen before and wouldn’t see again… back to what had become, for all intents and purposes, my home turf.

The people here on campus knew me. Even if they’d just seen me around, they knew I wasn’t the sort of person who wore big stompy boots… or even moderately sized stompy boots… and a leather riding jacket. They’d seen me fall on my face. They’d seen me fall on my ass. They’d seen me falling on just about everything that a person can fall on, and a few things that are probably technically impossible to fall on. There was no way that I could get away with pulling off a change of look this radical in front of them. There was no way that it could work.

And yet, it did… or if it didn’t, nobody said anything.

It was like one of those time where the sky hangs low and threatening over the ground all day but then it never actually rains. The clouds gather, the sky darkens, and then the whole thing blows over.

Nobody laughed. Nobody pointed at me, or even stopped to stare… and believe me, I was looking, though it didn’t actually take long before I was no longer really expecting anything.

I didn’t actually feel natural or casual in the leather jacket yet, but it didn’t feel unnatural. It hadn’t become my new normal yet, but I didn’t feel like a total fraud walking around in it.

The belt was also impossible to ignore, because of the lines of silver mesh… they made me aware of my own energy field in a way that I normally wasn’t. I could almost feel them waiting to accept an enchantment.

I’d been thinking about putting their capacity to wizardly or professional uses, but the fact that Coach Callahan was going to have me fighting giants and the like in a few days was giving me other thoughts… I knew that the whole point of her bringing in unusual opponents was to level the playing field a bit for me, but I wasn’t sure that a fight of me against Pala could be exactly level, even if we were given different goals.

She wasn’t just big and strong, she was also a much more capable fighter. Her weapon of choice was a spear, which would have matched the advantage of my staff in reach… if she hadn’t been more than twice my size to begin with.

So, yes, I was thinking of other ways to even things up.

Doing that got my mind back off of how I looked, and also got me thinking about my new accessories as mine… nothing said that something belonged to you like weaving your own spells into it, leaving a bit of your energy in it.

Amaranth was in the room when I got upstairs. She was sitting on the bed, which she’d made. The bed curtains were tied up around the posts. It looked really nice. We mostly didn’t bother making the bed so much as making sure that the top parts of all the blankets and sheets were near the head of the bed and the bottom parts were by the foot.

“Hello, baby… that’s a nice jacket,” she said as I came in through the door. “Is it magic?”

“Thank you,” I said. “Not yet, but it will be.”

She got up off the bed and strode towards me, then walked a slow circle around me to get a look from every angle. It was still occasionally strange to me that a nymph who wouldn’t eat animal products didn’t mind leather, but she didn’t have a problem with other people eating meat… and cows weren’t raised and killed specifically for their hides, anyway.

“It really does suit you,” she said. “I guess you had a good time in town?”

“It was… productive,” I said. “And expensive… but fun. Steff had a good time, which she needed, and I think Hazel… I don’t know. I feel like we’re closer friends now? Maybe. I know more about her, anyway, but maybe she reminisces in front of anybody.”

“And how about Nicki?”

“Nicki… didn’t say much, really,” I said.

“Really? She didn’t strike me as tight-lipped. I hope you made her feel welcome.”

“As welcome as I know how to make someone,” I said. Well, she talked the whole time, now that I’m thinking about it. But she mostly wanted to know about other people and stuff… I guess she’s more inquisitive than anything. I think we all had fun, though… even with Mercy still putting out her feelers for me.”

“I suppose it was too much to hope that she’d have given up on you at some point, isn’t it?” Amaranth said.

“She’s had centuries to learn patience,” I said.

“Patience is fine,” Amaranth said. “I’m more concerned about how much impatience she’s managed to learn in her lifetime. As long as she’s content to wait, she can want whatever she wants… but what happens if she does something rash?”

“She loses her legal enterprises and her cozy little empire,” I said.

“That might be some kind of justice,” Amaranth said, “but even if she loses everything, it could still be too late for you.”

“She might not be the most… balanced… individual, but she wouldn’t have been able to operate on the razor’s edge for as long as she has if she had it in her to throw it all away on an impulse,” I said. I sighed, though, because I’d had the same doubts as she had. “It’s not that I don’t know what Mercy is capable of… or at least, I know she’s capable of more than putting up some posters and throwing around a reward. But what’s the alternative, that I never leave campus? Or that I drop out of MU and go somewhere else? I don’t want to leave this school and I don’t want to leave you.”

“I don’t want you to leave, either,” she said. “And I don’t want you to hide from her, or from the world. I guess I just want to know that you’re careful… it’s important that you live you life, but…”

“I need to live it carefully,” I said.

“Be safe,” she said. “As long as we’re talking about people to watch out for, though… didn’t you forget something, today?”

That brought me up short. It seemed like there was a pretty decent chance in general that I would have forgotten something anyway, and even though she hadn’t said it in a really pointed way, the fact that Amaranth was asking me made it seem like a foregone conclusion.

But nothing was jumping out at me. There was no moment realization or horror dawning upon me. If I’d forgotten something, it was content to stay forgotten.

Amaranth was still looking at me, patiently but expectantly awaiting an answer.

Finally, I decided for a straightforward approach.

“Possibly,” I said. “But if so, I don’t remember.”

She produced an envelope with a shiny… shimmering, even… silver seal on it. I stared at it for a few moments without comprehending how I could have forgotten something I had never seen before, and then it hit me what I was looking at.

“Acantha’s letter,” I said. “Or rather, Ariadne’s letter to Acantha… I’d meant to drop that off for Lee to look at.”

She nodded.

“It was in the mailbox today,” she said. “It probably would have been there this morning, if you’d checked.”

“I completely forgot about it,” I said. “I’m sorry… so much on my mind. Not all of it’s bad, but enough stuff total for things to start getting pushed off into the void around the edges.”

“I know, sweetie,” Amaranth said, nodding. “It happens. I just don’t want you to get in the habit of forgetting things again. You were doing so well by the end of last year, but I remember you having a tendency to let things get a little… fragmented?”

“I prefer the term ‘compartmentalized’,” I said. “My life wouldn’t work if all the pieces were touching all the time.”

“Well, I suppose that’s not exactly a bad thing, necessarily… just as long as you don’t have too many pieces to keep track of,” Amaranth said. “Or let them get too small to see. Anyway, it’s not that bad. I mean, you weren’t going to do more than drop it off, anyway, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s not like I blew an appointment or anything. It’s just, the campus post is kind of… open… until it gets out and joins with the imperial post, and I just felt better about the idea of hand-delivering it than leaving it sitting behind the desk downstairs. Honestly, it’s more about the added sense of security than any totally rational impulse… I don’t think I would have gone out of my way to take it into town if I hadn’t been going already.”

“So, you’ll just have to put it into the actual mailbox in front of the union on Monday… or we can have it couriered over,” Amaranth said. “Same extra sense of security, small expense… problem solved. Now enough about that… let’s see what you’ve got for me!”

Amaranth really liked it when I got new clothes… or when anyone else around her did, for that matter. She liked dressing me up as much as the next person, when the next person was Steff or Two, but there was an added vicarious thrill for her.

I suspected that her divine mother’s injunction against clothing for nymphs was neither as absolute nor as dire as Amaranth personally believed it to be, but she held to the reverse nudity taboo like it was part of the instructions for breathing.

This wouldn’t have been an issue, but she had a thing for breath play… metaphorically, I mean. She found the idea of stepping over the line too exciting for her to leave it completely alone.

So she hedged and she fudged things. She’d had a bathrobe at some point, which she’d disposed of after deciding it was too daring and replaced with a big wrap-around towel that had shoulder straps to help it stay on. Every once in a while I found part of the packaging for pantyhose or tights in what looked to be her size, though I never glimpsed her wearing it.

I couldn’t imagine the goddess of the winds and the tides, the mistress of the beasts and plants, actually caring if one her more domesticated nymphs put on hosiery or even a little lingerie behind closed doors… but Amaranth couldn’t bring herself to believe Mother Khaele wouldn’t care. She obeyed the injunction as perfectly as she could for as long as she could, and quietly rebelled when she couldn’t.

“So, how many times did you trip walking around in those boots?” she asked.

“None, yet!” I said, and I probably sounded way too proud of that fact. “I mean, they’re heavier than I’m used to, but they’d have to be a lot heavier for me to notice. The soles are thicker, and I could see that tripping me up on the stairs… but since we don’t have to use the stairs here, that’s not such an issue. Also… the weird thing is that I actually feel taller in them. I mean, I know that they’re bigger than my sneakers, but I feel a lot more taller than I should.”

“Well, baby, you’re also standing up a lot straighter,” Amaranth said. “I mean, you’re holding your head up.”

“Oh,” I said, and felt my body deflating slightly and curling up on itself as she pointed this out… I realized this, though, and stopped it. It wasn’t a bad thing.

“Let’s take a look at what else you got,” she said, and she began to look through the bags. She started with the morning’s purchases. “You got two fall jackets?” she said when she pulled out the first one.

“Well, I can’t wear leather everywhere, probably,” I said. “And anyway, we took a kind of long way around to the second one.”

“I wasn’t saying it was a bad thing,” Amaranth said. “More of a… surprising but welcome sign that
you’re growing a bit.”

“Growing in wardrobe, anyway,” I said.

“In sophistication,” she said. “I’m not saying that everyone should have multiples of everything, and you can definitely take the idea to excess… some people could probably stand trying to live with one jacket and one pair of shoes for a while… but it’s not too long ago you would have called the idea of having two of something like this redundant.”

“I still kind of feel that way,” I said. “But I like them both for different reasons. I’d say the denim jacket is more practical and this one is for style, but leather has its practical points, too… and I’m not really entirely comfortable saying that I have style. Or even a style.”

“Well, you have your own style, definitely,” Amaranth said. She pulled out one of my new pairs of jeans. “It’s not quite what I’d expected, maybe, but that’s not a bad thing.”

“What were you expecting?” I asked.

“I don’t know, really,” she said. “Something halfway between what you usually wear and the things that Two wears… but this is more like a point that’s maybe still equidistant to both, but is way off to the side?”

“Well, I think we realized that something different is better than something that makes both of us halfway happy,” I said. “If that makes sense.”

“It makes perfect sense,” Amaranth said. “There’s probably a good lesson about compromise there… that it’s not always as simple as averaging things out. Sometimes meeting in the middle… it’s just not a point that makes anyone happy.” She pulled out a pair of the dark cargo pants. “Though now that I look at it, I’m not sure the ‘equidistant’ thing applies… this is much more you, but with a willingness to try new things that isn’t exactly you.”

“I feel like it’s me,” I said. “Or that it could be… I mean, you’ve all put me in things like tiny skirts and slinky dresses and things before, and I can look at those things and think, I wish I could pull that off… but I don’t, really. That’s like wishing I was someone cooler, not wishing that I was cooler myself.”

“I understand what you mean… but I think you pull off tiny skirts much better than you think you do,” Amaranth said.

I couldn’t help glancing at the door, half-expecting Steff to glide into the room right at that moment… a line about me and the pulling off of clothes seemed like a tailor-made set-up line. When she didn’t appear, I felt a twinge of worry… but maybe she was getting along better with Viktor than she’d expected and wanted to enjoy it.

“Baby?” Amaranth said.

“I think I’d have to be a completely different person to believe that,” I said.

“Maybe not completely different,” Amaranth said. She reached out and touched the edge of my jacket. “I mean, a year ago, could you have imagined this? You’ve changed so much…”

“I have,” I said. “And I haven’t… I mean, I came to school with this whole big plan about leaving who I’d been behind me and starting over from scratch, but that didn’t work. But then there was the whole weird lesbian demon girl thing, but even then… I was still me. It was just all this stuff that was put on me by other people… but…”

“But you really have changed,” Amaranth said. “You’ve grown.”

“I have,” I said. “And it’s come from the inside, even when it’s in response to external things… like, for instance, enemies. But I’m still basically the same old me.”

“And still changing,” Amaranth said.

“Yes,” I said. “Still changing, still me. And I’ve been paying enough attention to it that I feel like I have sort of a handle on it now… I mean, I think I have a realistic notion of who I am and where I’m going, or at least a more realistic idea than I started out with. I’m not going to say I saw this coming, but it makes sense for me now that it’s here in a way that dresses and skirts really doesn’t.”

“So, you really think this is the new you, then?” Amaranth asked me.

“Insofar as I can be new,” I said. “I don’t think it’s where I am, exactly, but it might be where I’m heading.”

“A new destination?”

“More like a new road to head down,” I said. Then, thinking of Hazel, I added, “Or maybe a new river.”


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20 Responses to “Chapter 91: Always Changing Probably”

  1. hueloovoo says:

    I love the philosophical conversations. I just… do.

    Current score: 1
  2. Sapphite says:

    I’d missed Amaranth, nice homecoming.

    Missing quote mark at the ***:
    “As welcome as I know how to make someone,” I said. ***Well, she talked the whole time,…

    Current score: 1
    • Lunaroki says:

      Typo Report

      It was like one of those time where the sky hangs low and threatening over the ground all day

      Needs an “s” on the end of “time”.

      “I suppose it was too much to hope that she’d have given up on you at some point, isn’t it?” Amaranth said.

      Verb tense disagreement between “was” and “isn’t”. I’d recommend changing the “isn’t” to “wasn’t”.

      “I wasn’t saying it was a bad thing,” Amaranth said. “More of a… surprising but welcome sign that
      you’re growing a bit.”

      Unnecessary line break after “that” splitting the sentence in half.

      Current score: 0
  3. Krey says:

    it’s important that you live youR life, but…”

    that R should be there.

    Current score: 0
  4. Month says:

    And this, my friends, is the precise point in time that we can pinpoint and begin the whole cursing Murphy and his law. She just doomed herself, again, to go through interesting times.

    Current score: 1
    • Lunaroki says:

      Nah, it doesn’t feel that way to me. More of a pause to humbly reflect and maybe feel a little justified self-approval for how she’s been growing of late. She wasn’t being cocky in the least, nor stating that it wasn’t possible for things to go wrong. Mack didn’t rack up any Murphy karma that I can detect in this chapter.

      Current score: 0
      • Month says:

        Doesn’t matter if you are humble or not. You utter words like that, and you are in a mountain of trouble.

        Current score: 0
        • pedestrian says:

          especially with Alexandra for the author…..

          Current score: 0
  5. Readaholic says:

    “So, how many times did you trip walking around in those boots?” she asked.

    “None, yet!” I said, and I probably sounded way too proud of that fact. ”

    Lol, that’s our Mack. Her proudest moment of the day is not tripping in her new boots.

    “Well, baby, you’re also standing up a lot straighter,” Amaranth said. “I mean, you’re holding your head up.”

    “Oh,” I said, and felt my body deflating slightly and curling up on itself as she pointed this out… I realized this, though, and stopped it. It wasn’t a bad thing.”

    A sad reminder of the fear Mack used to live in, and a nice sign of her improving confidence, when she corrects it.

    Current score: 0
    • bangle says:

      Well, in my experience big stompy boots and a leather jacket can go a long way in making you feel safer and more confident. I can really empathize with Mack there; I don’t know how I would have gotten through high school without mine.

      In fact, I’m really relating to Mack a lot in this chapter. This is where I was in my life a couple years ago (though sometimes I feel like I’m still there with the whole “I probably sounded way too proud of that fact”, but for me it’s whenever I don’t have a panic attack and completely screw up everyday normal stuff – but, you know, it’s progress, right?).

      Current score: 0
  6. pedestrian says:

    With this chapter, AE has got me back again, wiggling in my seat with tension, my fevered imagination working overtime as she tantalizes us with with another pre-orgasmic buildup to the denouement of this storyline.

    Current score: 0
  7. Erm says:

    I think you pull off tiny skirts much better than you think you do

    Bartender! One entendre please, and make it a double.

    Current score: 0
    • pedestrian says:

      score two points for team erm!

      i’m so jealous that i hadn’t thought of this line

      Current score: 0
      • Mickey Phoenix says:

        A woman walks into a bar, and says, “bartender! Give me an entendre, and make it a double!”

        So, the bartender gives it to her.

        Current score: 0
  8. Zathras IX says:

    Mack has a real knack
    For putting the “mental” in
    “Compartmentalized”

    Current score: 0
    • pedestrian says:

      As much as Our Mack lives in her head
      could she be called a ‘Mentat’?

      Current score: 0
      • Month says:

        Nope. She is not trained to use her brain functions in a way that resemble a logic machine…

        Current score: 0
        • pedestrian says:

          What if TWO puts on purple lipstick?

          Current score: 0
  9. anon y mouse says:

    “As welcome as I know how to make someone,” – add feel, maybe?

    “There was no moment realization or horror dawning upon me.” – moment of realization?

    Current score: 0
  10. tjhairball says:

    “She got up off the bed and strode towards me, then walked a slow circle around me to get a look from every angle. It was still occasionally strange to me that a nymph who wouldn’t eat animal products didn’t mind leather, but she didn’t have a problem with other people eating meat… and cows weren’t raised and killed specifically for their hides, anyway.”

    Such a realistic touch! I can’t say how many times during my undergraduate career I had people ask me about how it was that I was a vegetarian, yet often wore a leather jacket.

    Current score: 0