Forward:
Dear reader,
As I mentioned in the summary, this fic takes place near the end of R2, so if you haven't seen the end, GO WATCH IT, AND THEN READ THIS.
If you're like me and don't mind spoilers, go ahead and read it anyway.
You have been warned.
Beth Nottingham
Note: Since Pendragon was destroyed by the F.L.E.I.J.A., I figured that while it was being rebuilt he made each of the government bureaus in the old colonized nations into imperial cities. Thus, there's an imperial city in many different countries, and the one mentioned most often in the story is in Japan.
I'd like to thank my friend FMA Human Starter Kit for all of her input and constructive criticism, so arigato gozaimasu, Starter Kit-san!
I'll stop rambling now, except to say this: Yoroshiku Onegaishimasu! (Please look favorably on me!)
m(_._)m
^^ Bow ^^
Prologue: What does it Look Like I'm doing?
The first thing you need to know about me, if you're going to read this story with any degree of interest, is that I am in both senses of the word curious.
Curious is typically synonymous with "inquisitive," or "nosy," and I am proud to announce that if there's something even remotely interesting around, I will be the first one who's dying to know more about it. Curious can also mean "peculiar," or "bizarre," which I will admit to with equal if not greater pride than the first definition. My way of thinking about it can be expressed as "sane people never have any fun."
The second thing you'll need to know about me is that I am circumlocutory. Circumlocution is the use of many words when few would do; in essence, rambling. As a consequence of these two traits: wordiness and curiosity, I am something of a walking thesaurus, or just a walking arsenal of facts. I like that about myself; it's certainly a more fun identity than a senior in highschool who works at a five-hundred yen shop and doesn't like soft-serve ice cream.
I say senior because that is when my story begins, in the late spring of my senior year. The weather had done that irritating thing is always does around this time of year; the late frost had been broiled away by the sudden glare of the sun so that the temperature outside was in the nineties, and the humidity was five hundred percent or thereabouts. Naturally, the air conditioning unit I had paid so much to have installed in my tiny apartment was malfunctioning, and naturally I would suffocate if I shut myself in the refrigerator, so I did the only thing I could think of to get cooled off.
My car hadn't had air conditioning since it was my father's years ago; I inherited it in full knowledge that it was a temporary measure for while I was living away from home and before I had enough saved up to buy my own vehicle. That was why, with the music turned up so loud that the beat seemed to miss my ears and course through my body and with all four windows cranked down as far as they would go, I tore along the highway at speeds I will not admit to in writing, enjoying the stiff wind my irresponsible conduct was creating.
I drove for over an hour, not really paying attention to where I was going. The cooling breeze was too delicious to slow down even enough to look for a street sign. It wasn't until I glanced at my fuel gauge and discovered that half a tank had shrunk to less than a quarter that I began to look for a good place to turn around. The road I was on cut through a rather boring grassy plane on one side, but on the other, there was a high white stone wall that stretched out ridiculously far before finally reaching its corner and vanishing from sight. There was a small unmarked door of the kind used primarily for service entrances set in it at one point, and as I pulled over to hunt for a local road map, my eyes lit upon the keypad for its lock.
I couldn't be quite sure if it was my imagination or not, but that code lock looked a rather lot like the kind my family markets. My father founded his own company, selling burglar alarms and security cameras and other such things, and unless I was mistaken, the lock on that door was one of his new models.
I turned my car off and fanned myself as I stepped out into the blazing, stagnant air on the roadside. My pseudo-wind was created entirely by driving, and now that I was standing still, the atmosphere felt heavy and sticky as it pressed against me. I had to fight to get it into my lungs as I made my way up the ten or twelve meter slope to the door.
The lock was indeed the one I had thought it was. I patted myself on the back a bit for recognizing my dad's latest product, and leaned closer to examine it. There was no handle on the outside; the door could only be opened by one who had the code, and that code required changing every week. This piece of equipment had been developed for high-security establishments, like jewelry shops and government offices and the like. My dad had once told me that the biggest problem with locks like this where the code was often changed was that the owners themselves would forget it and be locked out of their buildings and vaults. He had made this thing with a utility code that only those in top positions at his company knew about, and that was almost impossible to break, because it changed every sixty seconds.
I found myself snickering as my hand opened up my cell phone of its own accord and scrolled through the applications to the calculator. I wasn't planning on going into wherever the white wall encircled. I just wanted to try out the override system. I had never tried it, even though I had saved it in my phone just in case.
"The first three digits of the square root of the date," I murmured, "Plus three times the hour, minus the minute, divided by twelve, multiplied by three-hundred and sixty-five and one quarter, minus…" It was a long string of calculations, so I made sure to use the figures for three forty-eight, even though it was only forty-three when I started. I wasn't going to actually break in, of course. I just wanted to try the lock.
Who did I think I was kidding?
The door sprung open exactly as it was supposed to, with a heavy muffled click from the mechanism. I peeped inside, and caught my breath.
Inside the white wall was an immense garden. There were fruit trees and flowers and all sorts of exotic shrubs, interspersed with rock formations and statues and fountains. Multicolored birds preened themselves on the banks of a little man-made pond lined with marble and stocked with koi as long as my foot, and butterflies and hummingbirds were flitting around everywhere I looked. Some of the trees must have been shaped as saplings, because there were trunks that looked like they were braided together, and there was even a living gazebo of maples growing out of the soft earth, roofed by a thick layer of luscious green leaves.
It was paradise. It was also shady.
I barely even debated the wisdom of my idea as I hauled some homework and a sketchbook out of my car and slung my trusty picnic blanket across the insulated bag of pop I had brought along on my flight from the heat. The place was enormous, and the buildings inside the wall were so far away that there was no way anyone was going to come all the way across that vast expanse of cultivated jungle and catch me. I was just going to sit right inside the door for a little while and work on my homework, and maybe sketch or take some notes for a story idea. I wasn't underfoot or anything.
I found a nice cool spot where I was still in sight of the door and spread out my blanket. Then, utterly disregarding my homework, I lounged back and tapped the end of a pencil against the spiral binding of my sketchbook. The place was a dead ringer for fairyland or an elven kingdom, and it reminded me of a plot bunny I had been ignoring due to lack of inspiration. I giggled a little as I began to storyboard my ideas.
Some time went by, perhaps half an hour, before I heard a small rustling of the grass to my right and began thinking just how perfect it would be if a fluffy rabbit came hopping into sight. I strained my eyes, and to my surprise I found myself gazing at the next best thing.
A brown and black spotted cat sauntered into view, eyeing me not unkindly but with a measure of distrust. I loved cats, so I extended a hand and waited to see if it would come over to me. We stared each other down, and I tried to look as non-threatening as I could, in hopes he would let me pet him. After about a minute of padding back and forth between a pair of bushes a few meters away, he finally deigned to come over to me and let me stroke his ears. His fur was soft and well-groomed, and he was wearing a collar with a little metal charm on it that read "A-ru-sa," in Katakana.
"Arthur, huh?" I mused softly, inspecting the collar. "You must belong to the folks who live in this gigantic mansion then, huh?"
Just then, I heard a louder footstep, and then someone called out from close by.
"Arthur!" the voice shouted, "Where are you?"
It was a man's voice, and apparently Arthur did not consider him high enough on the food chain to pay attention to, because he chose that moment to curl up in my lap. I would have been okay with that, but the human footsteps were getting closer, and I really wasn't supposed to be there. I didn't have time to decode the lock again, so I scanned the wall for a tree tall enough to climb over. It was just as I located a suitable one that the owner of the voice came into view.
He was reasonably tall, though not as tall as others I knew, and had curly brown hair and soft green eyes. He was looking around with such a cute expression of exasperation on his face that before I was even aware of scrapping my escape plan, I had stood up and gathered the cat in my arms, laughing from deep in my throat.
The man noticed me within a few seconds, and the mixture of relief (probably at seeing his cat) and anger (probably at seeing me) was so comical that my chuckles morphed into paroxysms of laughter, and I was forces to clamp a hand over my mouth to try and act like I had at least a shred of courtesy.
"What are you doing here?" He demanded. His voice was nice; angry, but nice.
"Playing with your cat, it seems," I replied after subduing my mirth enough to speak coherently. "Arthur is yours, right?"
"Yes," he replied slowly, probably debating over whether I was mad or just stupid. Arthur climbed onto my shoulder and wrapped himself over my neck like a boa, tapping my face with his tail for no apparent reason.
"He seems to like me," I commented happily. I loved cats, but they usually lost interest in me quickly and wandered off.
"Yeah," the man replied, obviously still trying to read me. His hand drifted towards his hip where a long, highly decorated sword hung from an expensive-looking belt. That was a danger sign. I unwrapped Arthur and trotted over, plopping the cat into his owner's arms, from which he promptly sprang to the ground and sat at the man's feet, licking himself and looking heartily bored.
"What are you doing in here?" he snapped, closing his hand around his sword hilt. No luck on filling his hands. I turned and started gathering up my things.
"Trespassing," I replied as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, which frankly it was. "What does it look like I'm doing?" I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye. To my immense gratification, he looked taken aback, exactly as I wished. Trying once more to discourage him from drawing his sword and slicing me up, I shoved my pile of stuff into his arms.
"Make yourself useful, will you?" I requested, and marched over to the tree by the wall, where I proceeded to swing myself up into the lower branches without too much difficulty. I did not plan to let him know that I knew about the manufacturer's override on the door lock; that would be tantamount to telling him my name and handing him an opportunity to have me arrested.
He seemed about to protest, but I interrupted him with a "don't peek!" Wearing a skirt that day was a better idea than I had realized when I put it on this morning. Just as I had hoped, he turned his face aside with a blush, and I was able to pluck my things out of his arms and toss them onto the top of the wall before he quite caught on to my scheme.
"Which is worse," I asked him as I sat on the wall with my legs dangling over the other side, "saying something that is almost certainly unwise, or telling a lie instead?" He paused in his attempts to scramble up the tree after me as he pondered his answer. I smirked. He was so easy to read it was almost sad: the nice friendly guy who doesn't really want to arrest the crazy lady, or see her panties, apparently, and who would of course try and come up with an answer to a question, even if it let his prey escape.
"It is worse to lie," he replied, looking up at me with narrowed eyes which were nonetheless a little interested.
"I'm glad we feel the same," I chirped, flinging my stuff in the general direction of my car. "I won't say I'm sorry then. You have a pretty garden though!" I turned around so that I was supporting all of my weight by my arms pressed against the wall and the rest of my body hanging into space the same way I would have if I was climbing out of a swimming pool.
The man was shouting something, probably, "come back here, you criminal!" but I had already propelled myself off into the air. It was as my eyes came level with the edge of the wall that I glanced at the building in the distance, and if I had not already been falling, I would have almost certainly slipped off of my perch.
On the side of the building, painted in vibrant colors and surrounded by what was probably a real gold border, was the royal coat of arms of Brittania.
The place I had just broken into and out of was the royal palace grounds.
Uh-oh.
Tsuzuku!*
Next time in Of Curiosity and Cats:
Do the ends justify the means? Is it right to gaze into someone's heart without his permission? Am I being manipulative? These are questions that have plagues civilized man since the dawn of time.
But mine is much simpler. Why in the name of all that's purple am I making this comedic story sound so serious?
Chapter 1) Enter Pandora; Don't Underestimate Me!
* Tsuzuku: Japanese for, "to be continued." (Literally: "it continues/will continue.")