#eleblog

[stellaralchemist]

Safe

Elenia always dressed in front of a full length mirror, to better assess how everything fit. It was tricky with the fake leg, everything always seemed to lay wrong. That was probably just her imagination though.

She smoothed out the black leggings and the black turtleneck and that was already better. They were so thick the vitalus didn’t even glow out from under them. Elenia brushed some lint off of the shoulder and straightened up, examining herself. Same body shape as before, with clothes on she almost couldn’t tell there was anything wrong with her; as long as she didn’t look at the face. The face was where it always showed.

But that was fine, everyone else was just as poorly off.

As Elenia pulled on her red coat and her high boots for the day she paused and looked at the case where she kept her syringes. There were the two in her gloves, of course, but she was in the habit of keeping a few in her boots and a few more over her thigh. Those were in the case, ready to be put on… just in case the Valley wasn’t as safe as it seemed and nowhere was really safe, was it?

Nowhere was really safe, but here… here was safe enough.

[stellaralchemist]

What You Missed

Part One of Elenia’s side adventures on her return to Grismara. The Setting: A Little Summer Home Beyond the Enclave, Pallasova. Some time in the early evening. The house smelled of mildew. It smelled of rain. It smelled profoundly of death.

Elenia didn’t know what she was expecting, really, on opening the doors. Her key still worked, of course, and perhaps she expected some relief from the rain and the cold when she took the first steps into the formerly beautiful summer home. They had moved permanently when Elenia was a child. She had been in school at the time, and instead of returning to the stone townhouse on holiday, they had come out here to the summer home. 

Father had upset someone in his capacity as a Prosecutor. They had retreated from the Enclave. But that was fine. She hadn’t minded the dacha. Previously, the entryway might have had a fire and the kind housekeeper to take a coat and offer tea. It lay empty now. To the right was the conservatory, once glass enclosed but now torn apart by wind. In front of her, there were stairs up to the second story and down to the cellar. To the left, a twisting hallway with rooms added sporadically. The kitchen was down there, the sitting room and dining room, Father’s study… the music room.

Her boots echoed on the dingy tile floor, which had once colorfully depicted birds in flight. They were covered with dust and grime now, forgotten. The ceiling had once been painted like the sky, and that did remain, though water had gotten in and bubbled the paint. Still, Father’s study was nearly clean, the shutters pulled. She ran her fingers over the ancient books that populated its shelves, opened drawers in the desk that held a long-defunct computer and a box of cigars that had acquired a foul smell.

She locked it behind her, and her mother’s music room, though not before she had tried to extract a few sour notes from the piano keys. They echoed through the hallways on the still, humid air. On the way out, she collected a few pieces of sheet music without realizing it, and eventually set them down on the kitchen counter where Maritska, the cook, used to bake bread and tell stories of wolves and ghosts and hooded crows. 

It was in the kitchen where she first heard the noises, the ones that confirmed her suspicions. Shuffling, footsteps, and a shaking doorway. The doors here were thick wood. She expected that, once the news stories had worked through, they had locked themselves away for safety. Only they hadn’t been safe. 

The rattling was coming from the bedroom. Had they begun to feel sick and gone to lie down, locking the door behind them for safety’s sake? Had Maritska fled, or would she be in there, too? They hadn’t eaten in decades. They would nearly be dust now, dry and weak. If she moved fast, she could get them easily. She extracted the syringes from her boot, checked them over, and balanced them both in one hand as she turned the key in the lock.

Opening the door sent Mother flying back. She struggled to get up, one leg shattered. Father was there, the tattered remains of a tailcoat hanging loose and wretched over his bony arms and shoulders. She dealt with him first. The needle went in his neck, and in a moment he was ash and dust. For Mother, she took her arm, wrenched it out of reach and away from biting teeth. And then, like father, she was gone, too. 

The house was silent and she was alone. 

She sat on the tilework floor in silence, staring at the scraps of cloth that had adorned narrow, dead bodies. An hour passed, a second hour passed, on her wrist a watch ticked slow beats.

Finally, she raised her head and looked around her parents’ room. They had torn it up in their attempts to escape. The furniture was tattered and scratched, the carefully laid jewelry scattered. She gathered some up and pocketed it, all gold--Mother’s funeral jewelry. Each one the alchemically repurposed ashes of some family member, turned to gold and then cast into some lovely piece. She sighed and locked the door of the bedroom behind her. One final stop.

She left the house with a canvas bag filled to bursting with trophies. Winning an Academic Decathlon four years in a row was no small feat, and it was good to have something to show for a trip like this.

[stellaralchemist]

What You Missed 2

Day Two of Elenia’s adventures on Grismara.  The Setting: An enormous office-building in the center of the enclave Pallasova, now decayed. Just after noon.

The building was just as they had left it when the blockade was broken and they were rescued. Elenia took the stairs carefully down, gun out, and keyed in the access code for the offices. For the first time in a long time, she felt like she was at home.

She used her datachron to illuminate the quiet offices. The empty desks in the center of the room were still covered in the debris of what they had been doing. Three desks were arrayed around an office that had been torn to pieces. They had kept Leonid there. Poor Lyonya. But she had a task to do, no time to reminisce.

Down another floor to the servers, sitting dark and grey now. The transfer would take fifteen minutes. She had planned it all perfectly. The power source went in, a little box the size of her hand that started up the old servers and sent them whirring. Next, into a slot near the top, an antennae to transmit this data across the vastness of space to its new home, a server somewhere safe in Fantastic Enterprises.

They had worked so hard to transfer company data before the infrastructure collapsed, but there had been so much that… Well, the research data from Cassus, the human trials, the preliminary work for…

The antennae beeped. She had fifteen minutes. With a deep breath, Elenia Volescu walked back up to the offices and collected a photograph from the wall. She carried it back to her office, and sat in her old chair in the half-light.

In the center of the photograph, she stood holding a little placard with a date on it, her long dark hair wrapped up around her head, her high collared dress made her look severe… But she was smiling in the picture and behind her one of her partners, Peter Soveski, was smiling too. To the left was Mikhail Kessler. Misha, he had leapt from the roof on the third day, when he couldn’t taste anything. There was a date in pencil under his feet, his memorial. Renata Zabelina and Raisa Yusupova stood beside each other, linked arm in arm holding beakers. There had been a joke there, at the time,that they intended to fill the beakers a little more each year they were there. Squinting a little showed the beakers had an inch of something within them. Beneath them both, the first day of the sickness.

Arseny Sechenov had been on the team the longest. His long hair was tied back in a ponytail Elenia had often said was inappropriate, but that had been the joke. That had always been the joke. Arseny had died the first day, probably. He had left with Renata to go find Raisa, who was trapped in her little flat.

Leonid stood beside him, all beaming with excitement. He had just joined the week before, and would be the first to succumb visibly to sickness. In the front, sitting down, Vadim, who was too tall for the photograph and too goofy looking anyway. His collar was starched up like an Alchemist. Then Fedosiya, who always wore bright scarfs the moment the weather allowed it, and who had died in a fire for her sins; for those dead aurin and for all those other dreadful things, for her cruelty.

“We are two now,” Elenia said to the empty room, to Misha, who used to sit in the desk at the doorway typing notes and chewing on pencils. As she dug for a pen, she found the half-bottle of whiskey she had left behind, and a few loose cigarettes. They tasted stale, but she lit one anyway, and took a slug off the bottle.

She had been someone once, in this office. As important as anyone could be in the great cosmic scheme of things. But in those days, it had really felt like something. It had felt powerful and grand, and now, if things hadn’t gone so wrong, she would have long since retired, gone to live on the Dacha with Marko, his grey hairs making him look distinguished as he tottered around. And it wasn’t fair, was it?

Beneath Leonid and Fedosiya, she added a new date. Her pencil hovered beneath her own feet for a moment.

There was syringe in her glove. Wasn’t it better to be here? Wasn’t this where she was meant to be?

Her datachron beeped. The transmission had completed. She framed the picture once more, and collected her things. She smoked another cigarette as she walked up the dark staircase of Pallasova’s Kondrashov Building.

In an empty office, illuminated by the grey sky above, a photograph hung. Nine dead faces smiled where no one could see.

[stellaralchemist]

The Void

The world shifted around her. She wasn’t where she had been anymore. The syringe stuck in her hand, and she pulled it away. Thick, shadowed vines coiled around the remains of the lab she had just been in. It was dirty now, covered in some foul grey dust, surrounded by those vines that seemed to eat into the metal of the ship’s hull and then slink into the electronics and the rotting piles of nothing. Her eyes turned abruptly to the center of the room, to the source of light amid these shadows.

It looked like an Aurin, or it was shaped like an Aurin, and it crackled with energy. Her first thought was to tell it she didn’t believe in ghosts, like it would stop existing once she informed it of her disagreement. No, that wouldn’t do. It stared at her, and she stared back, trying to get it into focus. It moved all wrong. Its eyes were all wrong. Her false eye couldn’t seem to track it and her real one, poor as it was, couldn’t seem to make it out entirely. It shook its head at her, and a voice that didn’t come from anywhere sounded somewhere far away.

Wrong one.

“What! Take me back, you little shit!” she shouted at it. “Take me-”

It was gone then, as though it had never been, and the room plunged into darkness.

“Fuck.”

-

None of the electronics worked. Their batteries were decayed beyond use. Elenia wrapped a mouldering blanket around herself against the cold, and squinted out into the valley. She thought for a few moments she had seen Jeremy and Jenny, but they had gone too quickly, before she could shout again. There and gone in an instant. That was all wrong. No one was even looking for her.

“Typical,” she said aloud into the cold, heavy air. Without a means of telling time, she was unsure how long she had been here. A few hours perhaps and nothing. Guy would work something out though. He probably was even now. He needed her to be alive. She sat down on the gangway to the ship, and watched the dead trees move without wind.

-

She had often joked about being happiest in a world where she never needed to eat or sleep. She would currently count those as positives in her situation. She also didn’t seem to need to clean out her vitalus, which was certainly good, as the supply in the Medbay was entirely non-existent. The real problem was that she was starting to get bored.

Elenia had never really dealt well with being alone. She liked having people around, if only to be rude to them. The silence was starting to make her antsy. Every little while, a dark shape passed over the exterior of the ship from somewhere above, and she didn’t much fancy dying in this annoying place. She had retreated back to her lab. A dark insect with too many legs scuttled by, and she went to crush it with her hand. It zapped her with a little electricity. She smashed it harder than she would have otherwise.

“Fucker,” she muttered, and reached for a cigarette she didn’t have. She would have killed for a cigarette.

-

Sand from beneath the sludgy water of the stream, two funnels from the kitchen, and a bit of discovered adhesive made an hourglass. Barring a difference of a few seconds, she now had a means to tell time--or at least indicate time had passed. Every creak and every sound meant a possible intruder. She suspected that the creatures in this Nothing World intended her harm if they intended anything.

She drew another formula on the wall in chalk, and pulled her blanket closer. It was too cold here to get any real work done. It was too hard to focus. Sometimes, the world drifted in and out, and she had begun to wonder whether she was dreaming.

Or perhaps she was dead. But surely if she was not someone must have been coming soon.

-

She recited poetry to keep herself sane, muttering low as she watched the shadows move.

My mournful friend, with his wings stretching wide, Is picking at bloody food right by my side.

She was quite sure it had been five days, or at least five sets of twenty-four hour periods, as measured by her hourglass. She agreed that she wasn’t very nice to people, wasn’t very sociable, but that was no reason to leave her here.

He’s picking and looking at me through the bars, Like having a thought that is common to us,

It was only the Void, after all. She wasn’t dead. She was very sure she wasn’t dead. Another little insect skittered across the floor, and she hesitated before crushing it.

Like calling to me with a glance and a sight, And wanting to say, "Let us fly outside!”

-

“You know, Marko is right,” she said to the insects in her trap. Too many legs and too many eyes and they lit up a little before they were going to zap you. There were five of them now, skittering around. She had dismantled the bed and used the drier parts of it to build a little fire while she worked. First, she had invented time, and now fire, and soon electricity; to think people had spent millennia in caves.

“I used to have a wonderful social network back home. We need these safety nets to stay sane. I love him, but really it’s too much for one person to deal with. I acknowledge that.” She tapped the cage and the disgusting little insects all electrified at once. The light bulb at the top stayed on, casting a better glow than the fire. “You are all happier together, aren’t you? The same really does hold to higher life forms. Anyway, it’s not their fault they’re idiots, really. Love makes people do idiotic things.”

She set the insect-powered battery and the light up on the top of a divider. It cast its light in strange directions.

“But I still hold less than a year is a ridiculous schedule to Pledge on. No one was ever hurt by a long engagement.”

-

Tapping sounds like rain touched the ship’s hull, and she tried not to breathe. It was bigger than she was, and it knew the rules of this place. Could it tear the metal apart like tissue? Could it sense her somehow?

Slow, shallow breaths. Something clicked against steel. Her eyes closed. Don’t look at it, just wait. Being alone was hardly ideal, but she couldn’t bear this infernal clicking, attracted by the light that leaked from the holes in the hull.

Just go. Just go away.

She caught sight of a broken steel rod, salvaged from the valley a few days earlier. The tapping passed to a side and she waited.

-

“It’s just not sensible,” she was explaining to the creature she had named the gryphon. Like the electrical bugs inside, its resemblance to anything real was passing at best. She was quite sure it was not dying, just stuck now to the ship, unable to pull away thanks to the steel rod lodged somewhere inside it. That was a lucky break. It was putting off more energy than the insects were. She dug wires attached to rusted needles into its unpleasant flesh.

Her fingers brushed against things like scabs, against flesh that moved in ways flesh shouldn’t. It had wisps of something like feathers but thinner, like hair but firmer.

“It’s not sensible to expect to be a special case just because you do not like the contract. The contract works for me, and I am the one doing the work. Other people are happy with the contracts as written. If it were a friendly relationship, it might be a whole other matter, but I have so much work to do.”

The creature let out a miserable noise, a shrieking moan that set her teeth on edge and made the world shimmer. At first, she thought it had been calling to its friends and had waited, but the gryphon had no friends. Maybe it was doing the same, talking to the world around it out of boredom.

“Now, obviously I am going to need to be more sensible about taking jobs once I’ve lost Guy--Lost Guy, that’s a funny way of saying it.” She uncoiled a length of copper wire, hooking it up to an odd little contraption she had been working on in the rotting lab. “You know, I really don’t know what I’ll do if I can’t help him. I just can’t lose another one. I hope he’s still all right. It’s been weeks.” The contraption sparked and whirred to life. She disconnected it again and walked it along the odd, sludgy stream, her breath misting in front of her.

-

She pulled the wiring out of her eye. The tweezers she had found were all right for the job, but this was the last thing she needed. The wires and this lens. That should do it. This bit was tricky though; she couldn’t see very well without it, and was nearly touching it with her nose to get the wiring out correctly. She ought to just replace the biological eye as well. It wasn’t doing any good.

She’d replaced her fingers, so why not both eyes? She fixed the lens to the little contraption, and said a prayer to Kemos, hands contorting in the proper motions. Perhaps he was not real. Perhaps he could not hear her here. But there was always hope.

But really, there was no sense waiting for the idiots to get her out of this mess. Elenia hated waiting on other people’s schedules. She carried it outside to that mess of fallen trees near the gate. Up here, she could sometimes hear sounds like the voices of people, and she thought there might be some kind of gap or thin spot. It was certainly worth a try.

She plugged in the wires, and watched the machine click to zero.

-

Elenia hit the ground with a thud. The world faded in and out, but she could see the blue sky.

That was lucky.

[stellaralchemist]

Gold

She had not gone to many funerals, the only one she remembered clearly was her grandmother’s. The Alchemists had taken her body and burnt it down. Elenia had been young, but not very young, she remembered missing a week of school for the proceedings; Grandmother had lived out in the countryside. 

She had been young enough to hold her father’s hand on the way through the great, lofted halls. The black stone had arched overhead and light had streamed through, illuminating the slender figures of the Alchemists in their elaborate robes and the funeral party dressed in stiff black. They had travelled down a set of stairs and there found a room to watch emerald and blue flames devour the body.

Afterwards, they had gone to dinner while the alchemists worked. Elenia had swung her legs over the side of the chair, watching the adults smoke and drink and do whatever implacable and mysterious things adults did. Her mother had departed midway through along with the two uncles she rarely saw and returned with a box of gold. Those golden ashes had been scattered, returned to the earth, perhaps someday they would be of use. In the old days, she understood they had been scattered on crops. 

From that day her mother had worn a pair of delicate gold earrings. All of their gold had come from the Alchemists, one way or the other.

Elenia took the day off and went into Thayd and there she found an alchemist from Pallasova. He took the hair she had retrieved from that painting and held it to the light.

“There won’t be much here,” he explained.

“But there will be some.”

“Would you like to watch?”

“No, thank you.”

She went to a restaurant and had dinner alone, smoking her way through a pack of cigarettes as she worked her way through a bottle of wine and then another one. By the time the second one was empty she had a text message and had returned to the Alchemist. He had a minute fleck of gold in a glass jar.

That was more than enough.