Deviation Actions
Literature Text
The blizzard had subsided within the hour, and the gatekeepers of the Obsa-ran were approved to begin the ritual.
“Status update—get me a status update!” called the plucky conductor of the procedure from atop his pedestal. The quiet start-up procedure had already been completed. It was now time for the good part.
“Approaching Stage F-W, gateway functional in fifteen,” came the loyal reply of the engineer.
“Right then. Chiming the bells I say! In three, in two…and, one!”
With the signal of the conductor’s finger and a tapping of his feet on the pedals, the bells rang out in magical chorus. The air itself reverberated with such intensity that sound became surges of sensation across the faces of all present. The Obsa-ran gate to Earth was being opened, and it was a glorious thing.
Avail was entranced and petrified by the swaying, vibrating bells that crowned the gateway. Three bells rang out in complete harmony; each bell nestled in its own arch, each arch on the shoulders of other arches. Bells in arches and arches on arches formed a pseudo-honeycomb structure with a central arch reaching thirty feet in the air, marking the actual gateway. At the very top of the stone structure, the golden Master Bell (the clever name coined by the conductor himself) swayed its girth to and fro on its yoke. It was frightening to be so closely underneath the writhing mass of instruments. The Master Bell gonged with a sound so rich that Avail could taste it in her involuntarily gaping mouth. She knew—through rumor or suggestion, or perhaps both—that the bells were Blessed by the High Rector, and that their holy sounds transmitted His Will.
Nobody ever really explained to her how this phenomenon was even possible. She’d always been curious of the science behind their faith. Just how did God pull miracles out of thin air? She’d asked Master again, during the nervous trip to the outskirts of the city, to the Down Tundra, on board the clacking cable car. He had sat opposite of her on the car, and smiled and peered at her from over his spectacles, the morning paper propped up in his lap—as if today were any normal day and the biggest concern on his mind was the afternoon tea—and told her not to worry about it either. She wasn’t worried, she had replied, she just wanted to know how. She’d wrung her hands in her lap and stared out the window for the rest of the ride.
But now that she was here on the front row of the terrifying show, gawking at the magnificent display of musical force, shivering from the reverberating air on her face, cringing from the excruciatingly deafening assault to her ears—especially her ears, of all present, she wouldn’t think twice about admitting fear, and she figured that even if the Bells weren’t directly blessed by God, he was certainly impressed by them. She didn’t understand miracles or science, but she knew deep down that this phenomenon was both. As a ceremony, it connected the heavens. As a procedure, it peered into the Interplane. And she was in the middle of it all.
“Approaching Stage F-W, all personnel free of the Event Horizon,” called the Obsa-ran engineer to the onlookers, teetering on the stairs that wrapped around the pedestal from which the conductor—the maestro of might himself—played his tune of Faith and Science. His job was to activate the bells via foot-pedals built into the platform and match the frequencies of such and such complicated things that Avail had no education to guess what they were. She stood at the foot of the gateway and watched with intensely fascinated eyes at the familiar site before her. Years ago, she had begged Master to take her with him for once. She remembered vividly her first voyage into the great white unknown, huddled closely to Master as the lights of the gate swallowed them up.
He had carried her then. Now she was heading on her first trip all alone, and her stomach was aflutter with excitement and anxiety for the upcoming mission. She watched as the air rippled in the vicinity of the main arch, and her heart jumped when a solid white line split the air from the top of the gate to the ground with a loud crack, briefly muffling the incessant song of the bells. The line flickered like a streak of lightning frozen in time.
“F-W stage reached and Event Horizon peaking reality,” the engineer raised his voice to be audible over the cacophony of sound, “all personnel need apply Blanka masks immediately!”
Snapping back to reality from the entrancement induced by the happenings in the gate, Avail heeded the words of the gate operators and brought the white mask she clutched in her hands to her face. It had no buckles or straps, it just stayed in place, completely concealing her features behind its solid white form. The time-still lightning bolt suddenly exploded into a wall of light, ripping away the veil between dimensions and opening the path to Earth.
“Obsa-ran gate operational I say,” the conductor sang gleefully, “all physics stable and ready for travel.” He nodded in Avail’s direction; a somber, respectful salutation. “Good luck, young Cartographer.”
Avail nodded in nervous thanks to the conductor, Mikle Symphos, one of the Master’s old friends. He’d come to their house before. He was a nice guy.
Only a few feet away from the turmoil of the gateway, Avail’s feet grew cold. She stared into the portal, the hair on her arms standing on end. Her tail was the closest it had ever been to being tucked between her legs. She turned to see Master one more time. They had already said their goodbyes, but the gravity of this whole ordeal deserved more than one. He stood forty meters away—safely out of the event horizon, and with a gentle smile he returned her wave. Avail involuntarily grinned under her mask, but forgot that he couldn’t see it, hidden though it was behind her mask. His attendance this snowy afternoon gave her the small boost she needed to take the leap. She turned back to face the gate…and yelped a curse when she met mask-to-mask with her Pria-kiun, Isachir Rak.
“Isachir?! Wh-what are you doing up here?” she snapped, her ears folded back in angry surprise. Isachir had always creeped her out with his quiet, placid disposition, but he sent a chill up her spine when she saw him with the expressionless Blanka mask over his features.
“Before you go,” he spoke low, intimately, and barely audible over the cacophony of bells, “would you sign this?”
It took a moment for the stunned Avail to put two and two together and realize that he meant the paper he held attached to the clipboard in his hands. She glanced down at the paper, and felt her heart jump once more. Isachir Rak held the finalization document for their Kiunship agreement. Her head spun.
“I suspect you are aware of the deadline,” he called a bit louder as the roar of the gateway surged. It was quickly destabilizing.
Avail found herself in an awkward situation. She was not at all in a place to make the decision right now. She hesitated, and glanced back at her Master. From the distance she could tell that he had an equally befuddled face, obviously unaware of Isachir’s planned interruption of her mission.
“I-I’m sorry Isachir,” she stumbled through her words, “u-um, we’ll pick this up when I get back, I have to go—now.” She was thankful for the mask; she didn’t want Isachir to see her flushed face, although he certainly must have picked it up in her voice. He was speaking to her—or trying to, at least, as she swiftly stepped past him. Without another word, and hardly another thought, she leapt through the white light of the gate.
***
Several yards away, General Gwaine stood in silence as he observed the events unfolding before him. His hands were folded into the bell-like sleeves of his Similitudu. He had regained his composure over Isachir’s brash move, and his mustache tipped diagonally across his face in a tucked frown. The great Cornerstone of Sanctus Urbs, the Immovable One, the Lion of God, was beginning to worry for his little daughter. He knew that she could handle herself on Earth. Maybe not gracefully, maybe without the confidence of experience, but she was a survivor; she would succeed in her mission. Of that he held no doubt. She’d tumble through if she had to—she probably would, but she understood hardship more than the average person; she could deal with it. It was her happiness that he was concerned about. She had never known much of it, but she took pleasure in her simple life with him. Under his protection, she was kept from the pressures of a world that didn’t understand her. At least her mission was temporary. She would return home when it was finished. But, with the finalization of her Kiunship with Rak, she would no doubt be dragged from her world for good, and she was completely unprepared for it.
Perhaps it was his own fault that she was so unprepared. He was never quite sensitive enough to the particulars of raising a daughter alone. He could live for centuries and still understand disappointingly little about the minds of women. Sonya would have been the perfect mother for her. Sonya would have known what to do. Avail had been getting to the age where this would be an issue, and he had completely neglected it. Now she was being forced to make a decision that she was obviously very uncomfortable with, and yet she was still willing to go through with it. Isachir’s prodding of the issue and his little stunt just now didn’t help matters any either. If only Sonya were here.
The bells lapsed in their song. The light captured between the stone of the Obsa-ran gateway began to slip away. It flickered at first, then coiled in on itself and was suddenly extinguished in a thunderous crash and a bright flash. The Master Bell stilled. The wind howled as the blizzard crept up the tundra once more. Isachir Rak huffed off of the pedestal in the stiff manner so attributed to him.
So Avail was off on her mission, and so the General retired to the cable car, weary from concern and feeling his age for the first time in years. Several miles away, at the southernmost point of the city, just barely audible to him, clacked the bell that marked the coming of six in the evening.
