Years Since You Were Born
{{ | date=05/04/2018 | time=20:00 EST | summary=None calls Alma for a visit. | cast=
| st=The Undisputed Truth | place_name=A graveyard in Ann Arbor, MI | log=Alma is overcome with questions about privacy and protection. Here is the mindstorm of texts she sent to None one day.
Alma: I met someone who had been possessed a long time ago. I care about them so I came up with a ritual so that I can recognize almost all of a person
Alma: (I have to learn more to recognize more, it's homework).
Alma: does this mean if someone posses them or controls them that I will be able to tell if I redo the ritual?
Alma: you know how you can use mind to guard yourself? I want to know if people can see in time on a person to overhear conversations this person has had throughout the day whereever they go.
Alma: Can I use time or something else to shield from that? And could I turn it off and on?
Alma: Like someone made the city a different way that it had always been and maybe someone could make it have always been another way but who knows. that.
Alma: you know how you can use entropy to get insight in to a person? can I reverse that insight or move it by like a rock in a stream would have the water go around it instead of smashing it?
Alma: you know how we can learn about people's spirits? can my spirit be private?
Alma: also can I make a place like this?
About a week after Alma sends that barrage of text - after total radio silence from the mentor - they text back: Come visit, shravaka."
Alma tells Maria that she needs to go to Ann Arbor and makes sure Maria is set with emergency contact information.
Alma: "I'll come. Expect me soon." and then she gets bus tickets to Ann Arbor to go the grounds where her mentor works. She mounts her bike on the bus and rides to Ann Arbor. Note leads out in advance.
Somewhere between the bus station and the cemetery, Note dips down out of the sky, taking an uncharacteristically long swoop to light on Alma's shoulder as she pedals. The little crow can't stay there while she rides without dramatically unfolding her wings, little talons clinging into the shoulder of her shirt; it's hard to say if the gesture is itself a communication, or if she returned to Alma for comfort.
Alma pulls off to the side to take a breather. She greets Note with a beakrub and finger strokes along her back. She 'hey girls' and makes clicky noises.
Note responds by burrowing, seeking twigs and debris at the nape of Alma's neck where they aren't often found. "None is different," she observes.
Alma pulls out a twig from her pocket to set partway down her collar to give Note something to grab, and unbands her hair so that Note can have a little cave in the back of her neck, under the hair if she wants. "How so," she asks.
Oh yes: a twig, a collar, a tunnel for a crow; Note avails herself. "Cracked," she croaks, the word more affected by the corvid shape than many. "Gray-feathered." Old, maybe? None is old, was always old.
"Hurting?" Alma asks. "Do they need help?"
That, Note doesn't answer, though does unburrow, fly-hop to Alma's handlebar to head-tilt study her; then she takes wing again, and flies off, presumably back toward the cemetery. It's getting late, though; Note is hard to track in the dusk hour.
Alma binds up her hair again, and takes off for the cemetery, wary and extra vigilant.
At the cemetery, Note is perched on the gate when Alma arrives; the figure of None is crooked over a rake three rows in, up where the hill crests. It's a typical posture. They pause, then, and reach in a pocket, and whatever they've got in it - they leave it upon the headstone there.
There's no prickle of gooseflesh across Alma's arms, no foreboding doom (aside from Note's bit of ominous warning). There's no trash here to read; None keeps the grounds immaculately, almost a form of worship. But there is a breeze that catches a scatter of buds or petals or leaves from a tree, caught in silhouette by the wan remnants of the day; it recalls fall more than spring, everything in its last season, and Alma is sure Note is right: None is old in some ineffable way that does not correspond to the raw passage of time, even before she lays eyes on them.
"None," Alma says as she reaches the gate. She opens it and starts toward them in a funeral pace, fingers trailing over headstones as she goes.
None turns; the two coins they left there on that headstone will be gone by morning, no doubt. They smile, face lines giving Note's 'cracked' descriptor an anchor. Everything about them is even more inscrutable than the last time Alma saw them. "Alma, beti. What have you."
None is hard to read. Like a stone.
"Acarya, I am here." She nods her head and bows, holding it a while. "I come to you with my will and my trust, in humbleness... and care." That last is lingering. She sets Icelandic spar on a headstone.
"Aja, and look," says None, who crouches until eyes are level with the spar to study it. "You also have brought me a scattered mind as a stone. Would you calm it?" If Alma were making some commentary on None's state, well. Look at that sail right past.
There is a small sigh at herself. When will things just make sense? There is so much to know."Yes, Acarya, I will try." She takes a standing meditation pose, relaxed, in a stance like someone is pulling a string at the top of her head that her body falls naturally from. She focuses on her breathng, following it, and allows her monkey brain to go elsewhere. She doesn't need to follow it. It will be there again when she needs it.
None turns their eyes on the headstone; the scatter of light through the spar, the two coins, and watches them closely as if they were dancing, not just sitting there lending a dull sparkle to the roughened stone-top. "You wish to make a shield," they say, after a period of silence.
Alma nods. "I met someone who shields their mind daily. After listening to them, I realized I should take more care. Do you want to hear what I've found so far?" She looks a little timid because she uncertain with her mentor. She doesn't know what is going on, and she is unsettled. Her version of mindshield became a safetynet, and None was a part of it.
None... doesn't smile, not precisely. More, something about their face deepens. "You think it is wise to tie a protection to the turning of the day?" she asks. "But manas outlasts the day, and cit outlasts both. You might shroud yourself in time; these are the sum of your words."
"Arcaya, I have to sleep, and it is hard to maintain a continual focus on my self while I wake. I put it on like clothes and hope they stay together until I put them on again? homework, I know. I practice. I do walk the city and try to ride all the edges and that's like a continual prayer in my day. Maybe that terrain is easier to feel than my own. But! I learned how to see someone elses terroir, like a terrain and even more. Maybe I should have turned this on myself!!" Alma gets excited, thinking that maybe she understands a little more.
<<OOC>> Alma says, "sometimes I think of her walking the city like it's someone who spins a prayer wheel, (though that is not int he same religious tradition, right?)" <<OOC>> Alma says, "anyway, she keeps the spin going, learning."
"Prayer continues to the end of voices," None says, which is a creepy thing to say. The light is falling out of the stone as it disappears from the sky behind. "Alma, listen: your friend. You have the gift of sight; surely you can see if ever the wheel has been mis-turned. Look through all the days of his being; a man possessed will sit beside himself instead of within, and you will know the demon that wears his skin." Patient, but tired.
"Arcaya, why are you so different?"
Now None does smile - the shape of it is more than just a deepening of their parched face. "I have spent a precious coin, beti." They don't look at the coins on the stone; this is different coin, something metaphorical, like maybe they paid Persephone off with all their remaining winters. "Do you seek those suffering?"
"Yes." Her eyes tear up.
"Who do you find?" None glances at Alma's eyes; the emotion shown there doesn't appear to bother them.
"The abandoned. The shunned. People whose ties are fraying. Someone greaving someone who never existed now. The missing habitats. A sick ecology. You?"
None picks up the spar, now, as the last sliver of refracted light leaves it; it reappears within when they lift it far enough between themself and Alma. "Someone who never existed," they say, diverting eyes to Alma again.
"Someone who existed, but now, they never existed. Life in the ground and trees. parts of it lived, and now those never existed. I don't think it would want that, but I don't know what it wants and I try to hear it. And I follow the edges so that I know and remember. Maybe I can patch it, or keep it from fraying. Maybe I'll be able to suggest to it that it remember itself. That /it/ shield itself."
<<OOC>> Alma says, "from a poem "Your job is to find out what the world is trying to be"" <<OOC>> Alma says, "http://allyourprettywords.tumblr.com/post/40501318774/vocation-william-stafford" <<OOC>> Alma says, "I don't think the life she wants to ask would necessarily even like humans or want humans on it or part of it, but that doesn't matter so much to her. she wants to hear it and give a chance to express a preference" <<OOC>> Alma says, "but it suffers, or doesn't. and it could be a mage too, like any person could be" <<OOC>> Alma says, "why privilege humans over other people who aren't hominids"
Here, Note lifts their off-hand to take Alma's chin; this is in a way gentle, but with an intimation of subtle strength that suggests something not-at-all gentle lives in her mentor, too. They study her for five, ten long seconds. "Repair what is torn," they say, after that study. An affirmation, or a command?
Alma nods with the force and freedom available to her. There is a resolute and firmness about her, like the feeling she has when she gives her second wind. Can't None understand she wants this thing?
That might be -how- None understands. They let go, and there's a similar nod in return. "Walk me to the mausoleum, beti. I will sup."
"Acarya." She walks with None.
They've no more turned to walk and gone ten yards before there is a cold swirl of air; even Note is on alert, and caws from where she circles above. The coins, behind, are gone, and None's steps stop, false-start, like they have to willfully press on. "Tell me, Alma. What whisper the dead in the city?"
"They're so quiet, None. I don't know why. I tend to people, I look at the way things break and the chaos they make and how it goes backward and forward in time and how it could have gone forward a different way, like if I didn't break it, or maybe like when it was made, if the crafting had a stress there instead of here. But no one talks to me the same way. It's quiet. Not like last year."
Steps are stopped, and for a moment None resembles a sort of menacing tree, planted there in the lawn. "The dead are quiet when they've gone on." A pause, then: Or gone elsewhere." They start walking again. "Seek them out, Alma. Call through the shroud, though their beings menace you. And if your call goes unanswered -" None stops, doesn't finish that sentence.
"Acarya, if they don't answer, that's terrifying." Some things that are terrifying just make Alma want to work harder. That's expressed in her avatar like the raven with neophobia who watches and then is able to explore, or the vulture who just digs right in to JFDI swallow the mess. None can probably see this in her reaction. It's not the terror of something she'd retreat from. It's her fight.
There's just sort of a 'mm,' from None, a sound too breathy to quite be a grunt. They reach the mausoleum, and None opens the door; that they stay in there is... also creepy. "Beti," they say, and reach for something kept in there - an envelope, yellowed and crispy-feeling. "If you are unanswered, take a match to this; and if still you're unanswered, phone me with haste."
"Acarya?" She says questing for answers. They said they would sup. Maybe she can pour the tea? "Arcarya, shall I pour the tea for you?"
"I am weary," None says, and inside the mausoleum they go to fold legs under themself. "Yes, pour the tea; but perhaps I will sleep."
Alma prepares tea for None. Alma and None doesn't always take on this role with Alma, before it had been more like, not exactly collegues but more like with her advisor. Sometimes she'd bring the coffee to a meeting, sometimes everyone would bring their own. "Acarya, she says turning around to bring the tea. Shouldn't I read your letter before burning it?"
"Hmm?" None says. "No, no. It isn't mine."
Alma nods.
"Alma," says None, and their voice is very distant, like their thoughts got left in the next room. "I will sleep." Pause. "Take the letter."
Alma reaches out and takes the letter. }}
