Astoreth descended down a sharply declining street. An old street, the sorts of streets the humans had when Astoreth first began to fight. She was surrounded by houses, the small sort of houses where most people survived until the Red Plague wiped them out. It was dark, the sort of dark that blew in as a nightly blizzard off of a bitterly cold inland sea. The streets were bleakly lit thanks to the constant, heavy falling snow. Something was robbing her of her ability to see regardless of lighting but she accepted that as part of the construct. She’d never been here before but the tone of the dream filled her with a sense of isolation she knew intimately. She walked down the cold and empty, dimly lit street and the dark and closed up houses faded from sight. She should have reached the edge of the cold manmade channel by now, in fact she’d descended down far enough she should be under the water.
There was a cabin up ahead. A cabin too crudely built to keep out any cold drafts and too small to house anyone but a lone occupant. It was further down, and someone was leaning against the door. It was Isaac’s projection, the puppet he held up in this realm for the benefit of the others. It meant he was lucid, as she suspected. She had been wandering about imagining herself in her reduced form, so she trotted up to the luminescent being and wrapped herself in his arms. The warmth was a nice change. “Why is it so cold?”
“It was a cold place. Dark and windy a lot of the time too. I had this dream a few years after I lived there, though.”
“How do you remember all of this?”
“The memory just has that all built into it. I’d never had a dream this intense before and the only time I had one after was a bad reaction to medication.” There was a glacial crack and the scene split in two and started to fracture further and sink beyond the black plane that the two of them stood upon. “How are you here?”
“I just followed the bond here instinctively. I’m taking a nap on the sofa in my office right now and won’t remember enough of this experience to satisfy my waking mind.” She sulked childishly, causing the other aspect of the creature that was Isaac to laugh. She quickly joined in. The moments where they could be emotionally synchronized like this so easily were what she held onto tightest when the dream inevitably ended. “How are you here?”
“It’s something that’s connected to memories that have been surfacing because of associations being formed right now. There’s this dread that ties them all together that I’ll be here again.”
“I hope I get to see one of these memories surface someday.” Black water rushed between them and created a rapidly rising flood with a current tearing them away in opposite directions. “I miss you. Nel and Candi miss you too.”
She only perceived the last three words he sent her way. “...you three too.”
The infernal rose naked save for pantyhose and stretched to the limits of the height of her imposing form before lifting a lace satin bra up off the floor with her toes and dropping her hand to pick it up to begin redressing. Her jacket and dress skirt were carefully hung up and waiting for her to awaken from her late afternoon nap. She ran her fingers through her frizzy mess of hair and a smokey red shimmer ran from the roots down, smoothing and taming the strands into luscious, thick raven black curls that held itself to always be falling back behind her crown. The effectively true black of her hair contrasted with the blue of her horns, making them more pronounced.
All of this was done habitually as she purposely strutted across the stained hardwood floor of her office to push aside the stained hardwood wall panel that seamlessly opened into a closet she had temporarily converted into a dark room. She closed the door behind her, reconnecting the paper talismans she had requested Candi provide her. She picked up a stack of papers treated with silver halide and quickly cycled through the images she’d been holding in immediate memory while periodically casting a cantrip she had developed specifically to interact with her psychic abilities.
She dipped the stack of photoreactive papers into a tub of developer fluid. Her spell had essentially exposed the layer of emulsion containing the silver salts to a light pattern reverse engineered from the image held in her visual memory. Where the salts had been exposed to light, they had shed some silver atoms. Heavier silver deposits where the image was brightest, unreacted silver halide where the image was darkest.
Exposure to various chemical baths would amplify this accumulation of silver, neutralize the amplification, make any remaining silver salt crystals inert in a different form which was then washed away by being left to soak in a tub constantly overflowing with water.
She would need to repeat the process to yield a positive image from the negatives she’d just printed. Then they’d be stored away in her personal safe.
-
“You’re into him, he’s into you, you’re just going to talk to him over dinner. Go, go.” Isaac wasn’t sure he understood why Jin was so excited, but then again he realized he had always been similarly adoring of the prospect of lesbians. He couldn’t deny that he was intrigued as well, but felt surprised that his blunder was accepted so graciously.
“I’m just not sure if it’s the right thing to do.” Isaac protested as his Witch practically bounced around him.
“What do you mean, the right thing to do? It’s just like a date, right?”
“Well... “ Isaac looked around. No one to overhear him. “Like I’m not sure if I’m really attracted to-” Jin cut him off as she started laughing.
“Isaac, you are very attracted to him. You can’t stop staring at him. His face, his shoulders and chest, his butt.” Jin’s eyes danced and she moistened a dry spot on her lips with a small lick while she locked eyes with her tamer.
“Right, right.” Isaac’s ears felt hot. “But it could be he’s just really good looking. I just… I just never really explored… Before Sasha.” Isaac sighed and looked off into the unseen distance. “It’s really a hard thing to figure out. I didn’t think about it in my, my past life?” Isaac couldn’t come up with a better phrase in the moment, but the usage implied he had died and he wasn’t sure that was correct. “I was an outcast and I remember being picked on. When I first encountered the idea of homosexuality, well. I wasn’t sure about dating at all. I wanted to get married and have a family. I had that reproductive drive. So I needed to date women. That and the idea that they’d have another thing to use against me…”
“Who are they?” Jin asked in a quiet voice. Her usual level of energy was dampered as she listened to Isaac talk about his nebulous past.
“I don’t even remember anymore. People my age that were just mean. All the time it seemed like. There was this idea that people were born gay, and there was science that backed the idea up, but for me... That was all figured out later and… I didn’t really consider it for myself until I was… broken. I didn’t know if my friends would have still been my friends and I needed my friends more than I needed to know if I liked guys.” Jin almost knocked him over with how hard she threw herself at him to wrap her arms around his upper waist.
“I won’t leave you, Isaac.” She hastily muttered into his collar bone. Isaac returned the embrace and soaked up the comfort of it for a few seconds.
“Thanks Jin.” He pulled himself away and looked into her eyes that were nearly black except for a deep ring of gold mixed with red on the edges of the iris. “Thank you.”
She nodded and grunted a reply before spinning him around and herding him towards the door to Vardan’s yurt. “Now, boyfriend. Go get him!”
Isaac took a breath to steady himself and stopped to examine the wider and taller yurt with a panel door that latched rather than the heavy flap on yurts provided to the freshmen cadets. Given the repetition of the iconography depicting a man and a sphinx standing to either side of a shield, it was likely provided to Vardan by his family rather than the academy. It seemed rather obvious to Isaac seeing it again that it was the Paza family crest. Isaac lightly knocked the knuckle of his index finger against the top half of the engraved shield.
The door was pulled open by a Pumara who Isaac did not recognize since she wasn’t drenched in Rhynodame blood. She had earthy brown skin mostly covered by extremely fine light hair and her facial bone structure was a bit more feline than an ordinary human. Her hair became far coarser and grew long from her scalp, around her ears, and down to the nape of her neck. The ash blonde mess of curls had everything from the bangs and crown pulled into a high ponytail while the back spilled behind her shoulders. A heavy and bushy tail was held out behind her, slightly raised from a neutral position to aid with balance, and the tip slowly flicked as she studied the faces of the young man and pokegirl at her master’s door. “Master Paza, Cadet Markiyan and his Witch at the door.” Her feline features and cool, tense demeanor reminded Isaac of the sort of cats humans always anthropomorphically projected anger onto.
“Let them in please.” The Pumara bowed her head and stepped aside. “Forgive Andreea’s manners,” Vardan rose from where he was standing over a pot on the stovetop of a small camping oven. He crossed the room and wrapped his arms around her middle from behind. “We’re relaxing, remember?” He said in a low soothing voice spoken close to her ear.
“She’s from a Pumara my father kept as a bodyguard and most of her littermates were all trained to be the same. She’s also five years older than me and gets frustrated by some of my more impulsive decisions. She’s an excellent companion though, once she can relax around you.” Andreea’s frostiness melted slightly in the embrace of the younger man who was a few hairs taller than her.
A Vixxen with nearly the exact same skin tone as the Pumara but rosey crimson hair ducked through an opening in Vardan’s embrace and pushed and squirmed so she was in the arms of both the Junior cadet and the Pumara. “Hi there…” she purred with an accent that sounded foreign to Isaac even though he’d been living among native Ukranian speakers for quite a while now. Her attitude came across as both enticing and guarded, like she’d spring away as soon as you took a step in response to her beckoning.
“And this is Sabina,” Vardan chuckled. “She also has poor manners for nearly the opposite reason.” Sabina’s eyes filled with laughter and Andreea started to pull free from both people holding her. “Relaxezi.” He patted both on their hips and Andreea padded over to a rug covered in pillows and Sabina dove into the Pumara’s lap as soon as she was settled.
“Good evening, Isaac.” Vardan gently took Isaac by the shoulders and leaned in to tap his lips against both of Isaac’s cheeks. He let the stunned freshman cadet go. The same greeting wasn’t extended to Jin. It didn’t bother her. She had been fighting back fits of giggles the entire time as she focused mostly on the dumbstruck awe of her tamer. It was so funny to her how shy he became.
The gears in Isaac’s head all started turning together once more and he recognized that he’d been spoken to. He played back the words in his memory, “Ah- good evening,” Isaac warred with his fluttering nerves and played back what was said one more time to make sure he responded correctly. “Cornelius,” he tacked on quickly before the pause extended too painfully long.
“Vardan, please. There’s too many Corneliuses in my family.” Isaac nodded and didn’t break free of his transfixed state leaving his Witch unintroduced.
“Joh-eun bam-ibnida,” Jin said with a rare deferential tone. It wasn’t as melodic as Japanese nor as punctuated as Chinese, so it must have been Korean. Her parents had traveled all over the league while she was young and were fluent in every major language spoken along the mainland coast touching the Sea of Japan.
“I am master Isaac’s Witch. He asks that you call me Jin-Yun.” Jin offered on the behalf of her fawning master, who broke free of his befuddlement to direct fresh disbelief at his impeccably behaved pokegirl. Jin ever so briefly stuck out her tongue at him. Isaac didn’t really perceive who laughed first, but they quickly all were laughing together.
“Well, with introductions out of the way, shall we?” Vardan gestured to a low table with two suitably low stools that raised the person seated on them a bit higher than if they knelt. Right beside it was another table that was essentially as high as the stools placed for the two humans, meaning anyone eating off of that one would do so seated on the floor. It was longer. Isaac identified that it was the furniture that would allow him to sit at the same table as Jin so he dropped down cross legged in front of the low table and Jin followed suit. Vardan fought to conceal his shock at the faux pas but then laughed it off as Andreea’s tail started to bottle up. “Well girls, I guess you two get to sit at the high table tonight.” Andreea’s ears canted in uncertainty but she was grabbed at the wrists and pulled to the seats by a giggling Sabina.
Jin was staring intently at Isaac and Isaac was looking at her in total helplessness as she tried to guide her tamer to the correct message by pointing with exaggerated gazes. She whispered something sharply into his ear. “Jin wants to know what is on the stove and if you made it.” Isaac relayed.
“Ah, they’re sarmale and there’s also mamaliga. And yes and no. A catering company my family hires sent them to me to store in my pokepack after preparing too many for a wedding. I only followed their instructions to finish things up. I wanted to share something from my cultural heritage, Romanian. These are always made for celebrations.”
The sarmale were seasoned meat, rice, and onion filling wrapped in cabbage leaves and boiled in a rather bitter tasting mixture. Isaac sometimes struggled to enjoy new foods but the work out he’d been under meant his hunger overrode his finicky acquired tastes. Or did he really even have them anymore?
His thoughts returned to Vardan when he noticed the older cadet was studying his reactions. “They’re good.” Easy enough to say convincingly, they were really no more than stronger flavored grape leaves. The other part of the meal, the mamaliga, was a warm grain porridge. It was made from corn so it reminded Isaac of grits. “Can I ask-” Isaac cut himself off as he was suddenly unsure if what he was going to ask was acceptable. He was locked onto those hazel eyes though and they projected such a relaxed and genuinely accepting ethos that Isaac resolved to continue before half a breath.
“Why I asked you to this dinner?” It was close to what Isaac was genuinely wondering.
“Y-yeah. I guess.”
“I have a soft spot for guys who seem like they’re struggling with, well, attractions.” Vardan shifted to lean against his Pumara’s side. His eyes fixed on an intersection of two poles in the frame of his yurt. “My first time was a disaster. I was young and rebellious. He was working for my father. I noticed him watching me. I went to him to win an argument with my father and it nearly ruined his life.” Vardan paused for a while as his mouth moved almost like he was chewing on something.
“My mother convinced me to come forward about my blood trait. We had been keeping it a secret even though I was the son of a pokewoman. I was not eligible to succeed my father anyway. It was enough to spare him from the worst of it. He moved to Ruby shortly after and he since married.
“So if nothing else I guess I want to let you know it’s okay to be confused and uncertain.” Vardan had turned his head to look Isaac in the eyes. Isaac got the sense he had more he wanted to say but there was an unspoken question here, or some other reason he stopped.
“Thank you.” Vardan had shared so Isaac looked within himself for something to share as well. “Struggling with attractions, yeah… I always had this sense that I was a weird kid. I don’t think it was a sexuality thing, I just noticed from the way people interacted with me. Not in a way that was wrong either, just really different.
“That was until my oldest classmates became teenagers, anyway. I never felt safe exploring anything social after that because I was just… a weird kid. Trying to figure out dating girls was bad enough and I saw how mean everyone was to the openly gay guys so I knew I didn’t want that.”
The room was so quiet the noises made by the other two freshmen cadets setting up their campsites and preparing their meals penetrated the fabric walls of the yurt. Vardan cleared his throat and adjusted the position of the short, approximately 30cm, stool he was sitting in. “I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, Isaac, but you sounded like an old man.”
“I guess maybe I was born with an old soul?” Isaac offered. “It felt like a long time to be stuck like that. With no good answers. But now, I mean I have Jin no matter what, right?” Isaac could see Jin’s hands fidgeting under the table as she fought to mirror the cool distant attitudes of Vardan’s pokegirls. She was tilting her head away to hide how bright red all of her visible skin exposed above the collar of her shirt had become.
“I suppose, yes. That brings me to another thing, well the thing, you see. I am betrothed. She is a good woman, I respect her. I love her. I intend to honor her request for exclusivity when we’re married, once my diplomatic enrollment here ends.” Vardan looked at Isaac whose attention had turned towards Andreea and Sabina, “Human exclusivity, anyway. She has her own pokegirls and doesn’t mind them but as for other men… This won’t be a long term thing. It can’t be.”
“Well, maybe since I’m still not sure of this whole thing that’s probably for the best.” Isaac shared his rationalization.
“Maybe,” the older cadet said with a musing tone. Vardan’s eyebrows started to raise inquiringly and his charismatic smile returned. “So I’d be your first boyfriend?”
“I had a boyfriend. One. For a couple weeks.”
“I see.” Vardan rose and so Isaac stood up as well just to follow along. “Well then, Isaac,” Vardan stepped around the table and put a hand on the smaller cadet’s shoulder, “will you be my boyfriend?”
Isaac froze as he searched his upperclassman’s eyes. He didn’t know what he was even searching for in them, he just knew he couldn’t think straight because his head was swimming with emotion. Joy was what bubbled to the surface though so Isaac answered with an affirmative. He didn’t remember which one specifically.
Vardan kissed him. Cradling the back of his neck and gently pushing against his lips against Isaac’s. The other arm held the small of Isaac’s back and helped hold him up against Vardan’s body even more. Isaac opened his eyes when he heard the deep, throaty chuckle of the older youth. “Did you and your other boyfriend not kiss?”
“We kissed. Well… He kissed me, I guess.”
“Then I’m even, and I’ll teach you how to actually kiss next time. I think I’m supposed to go inspect the tents now, though.”
Vardan led him to the door and there was a serious looking Whoretortle in a Vorona sergeant’s uniform standing in the midst of all the tents. “Junior Cadet Paza, fraternizing with the underclassmen already?”
“Yes sir, Sergeant Skvertityi. Strictly during meals and periods of leave, sir.” The serious expression on the Whoretortle almost broke with her snort.
“Carry on, cadets.”
(-[|]-) End 3.3 (-[|]-)
“What was it like?” Jin asked as soon as Vardan was likely out of earshot after walking Isaac to his tent.
“What was what like?”
“The kiss? How did he kiss?”
“I- I don’t know. More than we kiss.”
“Kiss me like he did it!” Isaac tried his best to mimic the entire display. Jin’s eyes were unfocused and fluttery as he pulled away. She had let a tiny moan escape but when their lips broke away it turned into a gasp, “Wow. You two should kiss more.” Isaac’s ears started burning like forge coals.