"Aeg?"
Aegira woke up in a cold sweat with her head against the keys of her snaptop, the bright, luminescent screen making her wince in pain for a moment before her eyes adjusted to the audacious and harsh light. "Uuuugh," she moaned, pushing her body away from her desk before sighing.
"Yes?" she asked, a hushed and timid tone appearing in her voice. "What do you need?"
"It's time for your lesson. Your practice? Don't you remember?"
"Y-yes, of course…" Aegira replied, getting up and greeting her guardian with a strained and latently false smile. Her gray hands touched the shirt her guardian had put on for the day, and she followed him as he turned and walked into the next block- a gray one filled with candles and strung with beads; a white and clean bathtub standing as the centerpiece.
She sighed and sat down by the tub, the cold water making her nervous as her guardian sat down next to her, his visual plane directly lining up with hers. He patted her head gently, trying to calm her, as he was aware that she was very shaken and nervous by his sudden request. "Listen, I'm no one to talk about quadrants, but I'm certain you'll find someone better to pacify you- belie...ve me, I couldn't do it in my younger years."
"I understand, it's just… why?" she asked, her trembling continuing, although it was becoming slower and slower now.
"W-" The guardian stopped and smiled, as if he were trying to hold something back. "Well, I just … w…want you to understand the importance of keepin' a bloodline."
"But you already know I don't show those traits?" Aegira whined.
He slipped his hand against the back of her head, beneath her short locks of white hair. "Relax, I'm only double-checkin'."
Before she could answer, her guardian pushed her head into the water and held her in up to her shoulders. At first, she was tense, unable to move for fear of her life, but then, suddenly, she kicked. Her throat burned in fury of lack of sweet air, her lungs seemed to shrivel from malnourishment. The cycle she'd been going through for years- it happened again.
No, she thought. Not this time.
Her arm swung out from her side, striking him in the side of the face. His blood seemed to spill almost immediately, violet drops spilling onto the floor. He recoiled, pulling her out of the water as he fell to the floor, grasping his face in pain as he yelled.
Aegira pulled his hand off of him and stood up, shaking and quivering and coughing up bathwater. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry!" she yelled, running out into the hallway and closing the door to her respiteblock, locking it behind her and sighing as she slipped quickly into her recuperacoon and began to cry. Sopor surrounded her as she cuddled in, and her pores seemed to open and soak in all in all of the relaxing chemicals. Her eyes fluttered and shut as she forced herself to finally dream.
She dreamed of better days.
Of sunnier hills.
Of great, sweeping buildings of gold and glimmer.
"Aegira?"
She woke to her guardian entering the room, his slender fingers caressing her face as her eyes fluttered open. She saw the gash in his face, a series of three long marks of violet, and eyes widened in horror as she reached a hand out of the sopor to touch it. "I'm so sorry…" she said, beginning to cry yet again, stains of plum-colored tears running down her cheeks. "I didn't mean to… it was as though it-"
"W-" Her guardian paused again. "Were instinct?" He smiled. "Calm yourself-there is no need to…. worry. I am in charge of you, alright? I am takin' care of you…right?
Aegira dipped her head into the sopor and resurfaced, sighing as she sniffled. "It's just… why? Why do you do this? I'll never be a sea-dweller- I'm sure of it. Even if I have the proper means, I can never just-"
"Shhhh," the guardian said, raised a gray, quivering finger to his lips. "Listen, I understand… where you are comin' from. I still feel like I must punish the land d..wellers for their muck. I don't… want to hurt you too…" his voice was straining again, as though he were still holding something back. "I… I love you … very much, Aegira."
The troll girl quieted down and helped herself out of her recuperacoon. "Do you mind if… I read through your old books?"
The guardian smiled, his chest expanding and contracting in a slow and irregular pattern. The young troll touched his wounds again. "I'm sorry…" she said, sniffling softly as her tears hit the floor with a dull and near-silent thunk.
"No, don't bother. It's quite alright. I'll just go get bandages," he replied, taking Aegira's face in his hand and kissing her forehead. "Don't be too long, understand? I … want you to not… worry about me."
Aegira sighed and got up off her knees, wiping her excess tears from her grey face. White hair, an oddity and almost-nonexistence for her race, surrounded the innocent, round face she grew up with. Her eyes glowed like plums near an open fireplace. Her lips were slightly slimmed but still on the edge of being a bit full, if she were to pucker them in protestation or fear, and her horns, which create a short, waved motion, were gently hugging her head, as though they were saying that was where they belonged.
Her guardian was a rather odd individual. Firstly, and most importantly to this tale, was that he was not at all a luscus. Raised of rich Alternian heritage, he took pride in himself in his early years, but was quite unstable in terms of his emotions and his mental well-being. This took a toll on him around the time that Aegira came into perspective, into the big picture of his life. Already he'd managed to have himself socially isolated, but he was tormented now by this child's coming of age. He wondered what was going to happen. He predicted something awful, something sinister, and he knew in his slowly decaying heart that it would be sooner rather than later.
He had gone out of the room to bring her a book from the shelves: The Comprehensive Guide to the Medical and Psychological Sciences of Warfare. He knew it was a good read and he figured she'd enjoyed it. He'd read it to her a few times as a wriggler and it made her laugh, after all, so who knows? Maybe she'd smile, remembering it?
She received the book with a bit of caution, as it was very large and rather bulky. The pages were expansive, with small print and a cough of dust that spritzed its way into the air every time you flicked a page with a finger. She smiled, like he'd predicted- there was so much information to feed her young, seven-and-a-half-sweep old thinkpan and keep her busy.
He began walking towards the door, when he heard a slight noise, much like a quiet, restrained gasp. He quickly turned, the girl staring into the pages with a strong intensity that appeared to slowly overcome her. "Thank you so much!"
The adult troll smiled, blushing a deep violet as his ringed fingers slid past the threshold of the entryway to her respiteblock and into the hall. "You're… welcome, Aeg."
And then he was gone, breezing down the hall with his long cloak trailing behind to wave a last 'see you later' to her. She got up and closed the door, sighed, and relaxed at her desk with the massive book, staring at the object she'd spotted and easily hid from her guardian.
It was a yellowed sheet of paper, standard size and properly folded into threes. She plucked it from the binding where it was loosely lodged and unfolded it, humming in sudden inquiry as her hands skimmed across a large diagram of what appeared to be… a propeller engine. "Now, why would this be stuck in the pages?" she asked herself, her dark optical sphere quizzingly trying to vie for a solution. She looked at the text behind it, an article about the hemospectrum and its mutations. She sighed- he was always discussing her privileges as the highest of the land dwellers (even among indigo-blooded individuals), and how she was his 'perfect angel' and all of that.
Beneath the words were some very small fonts, which were actually quite surprising. The book must have been hundreds of sweeps old in order for the text to be that way, perhaps even thousands of sweeps. She hadn't seen the frail edges, and when she moved her hand, the junction of the page with the air ripped ever so slightly that it created a distilling snipping sound in the air, so short that had her guardian been there, he'd question whether or not he'd actually heard it.
What surprised her was that one of the words was underlined, but contained no information due to an angry but neatly blotted out description. It begged the question of what information had actually been there, and piqued her thinkpan like no other.
She sighed, setting the book aside and getting up, pinning the piece of paper she'd found to her bulletin which hug over her desk, where her snaptop was sitting, opened and full of its usual incandescence. Whatever it was, she planned to examine it later, but not while she went tooling around on Trollian. It was too late to be thinking too much of anything, especially with the incident that only seemed to transpire a couple minutes ago. Carefully, Aegira placed the book aside and found a small blanket in her closet, a soft thing that her guardian used to pacify her when she was only a wriggler.
She wrapped it around her now, the faint smell of lilacs and soap surrounding her and relaxing her into a much deeper state of calm than her recuperacoon ever was able to. Somedays, she wished she didn't HAVE to sleep in that thing, but it always came back to what was proper and improper, practical and practical, domestic to Alternian life and completely foreign.
"If there was a different alternative to sleeping, I'd take it at the first opportunity," she said, getting comfortable in her chair.
Before her 'training', she'd made sure to have set her chat to a sort of 'roaming' mode- that was to say, she could talk to anyone. She hadn't paid attention to it, because until now she'd not noticed and she'd had more of a care about what her guardian had been doing, but now that she was free from that stress for the moment, she began hearing a slight blip from the monitor, a tone that indicated someone was trying to get ahold of her.
She quickly sat down and opened up her Trollian to find that, indeed, someone had been messaging her.
…And they were STILL on.
She looked at their handle for a moment, noticing that it wasn't any of the few interweb communication buddies she had, and decided it was probably worth it to check this out.
heartyQuotation [HQ] has begun pestering sweetHarlequin [SH]
HQ: Hello?
HQ: Is anyone on here?
HQ: I am apparently not doing a very good job at this.
HQ: You're supposed to respond back when I say somethin'.
HQ: That's kind of how it works.
HQ: Do you-
SH: Yes, I uNderstaNd that. Gog, Must you be so iNsisteNt upoN writiN everyfiN aNd reMaiNiN oN when I aM cleary uNavailable?
HQ: I'm… sorry?
SH: Seriously, you try to reMaiN friendly aNd …
SH: Sorry, I'M haviN a really bad day here.
HQ: Oh, well, I'm sorry about that.
HQ: Anythin' I can do to help, lass?
SH: No, it's Not like you caN just teleport your way over here.
HQ: Maybe if I used my mutant think powers, I'd be able to do it.
SH: MutaNt powers?
SH: IsN't that a little… scaNdalous to say?
SH: ANd offeNsive too!
HQ: Well, I certainly didn't mean to bother you. I was just sayin'
HQ: If you're goin' ta use the brain god gave ya, why not use all 100% of it?
SH: …
SH: …brain?
HQ: Yes, that's what I said.
SH: What sort of terMiNology is that?
HQ: What are you talkin' about, lass?
HQ: Assumin' yer a lass, of course.
HQ: It would be rude of me if you were a man and I said the wrong pronoun.
SH: I'M a girl, thaNk you.
SH: ANywave, that wasN't what I MeaNt.
SH: What is a 'braiN'?
HQ: Ah HaHaHa!
SH: What is this? This too is aN odd terM for Me to coMpreheNd.
HQ: You're an odd one, lass!
HQ: What woman doesn't know what a brain is? Or laughter?
SH: What?
SH: No, you still MisuNderstaNd.
SH: Where the shell are you eveN froM?
SH: The WesterN Shores?
SH: My thiNkpaN is bewildered by your absurd and alMost iNterestiNg forM of speech.
HQ: Well, I live along the eastern shore of Ireland.
HQ: In Dublin, actually.
SH: ...?
SH: Where is IrelaNd? And DubliN?
HQ: Um... are you some American tryin' to troll me?
HQ: If you are, it's not very funny.
HQ: We aren't all Catholics drunkards over here, either.
HQ: That stereotype bullshit 'ain't-my-style-you-hear?'.
SH: AgaiN with the Massive aMouNts of iNcoMpreheNsible words.
SH: I doN't kNow what aN 'AmericaN' is. OR a Catholic.
SH: But aNswer My questioN-
SH: Where is IrelaNd?
HQ: Well...
HQ: It's in Europe, to be precise.
HQ: And where-
SH: Where's Europe?
HQ: Hm?
HQ: It's located in the Northwest Hemisphere of Earth.
HQ: Why are you asking this?
HQ: Are you some little kid online?
HQ: Because you clearly can't read a map if your aski-
SH: Wait, what is...
SH: 'Earth'?
HQ: Um...
HQ: A planet.
SH: ...
HQ: Is something the matter?
SH: Yes, soMethiNg is defiNitely 'the Matter'.
HQ: What's wrong then, lass?
SH: My Name is Not 'lass'.
SH: My Name is Aegira.
SH: ANd I have No idea how you got oN My TrolliaN.
HQ: Trollian? I have Trollslum, but...
SH: Whatever.
SH: UNless soME vast echo of tiMespace has called us to be together for soMe graNd and appareNtly iNexplicit purpose
SH: the oNly thiNg to uNderstaNd is that you do Not live on My plaNet.
HQ: You're planet?
HQ: You got to be trolling me.
HQ: There's no way aliens -ACTUALLY- exist.
SH: Well, appareNtly there is a way.
SH: ANd you've MaNaged to stuMble upoN it.
SH: Do you MiNd if I keep you tabbed?
HQ: Um... sure I guess.
SH: I just Need a Moment to Mull this over.
SH: My thiNkpaN is about to go berserk in Massive inquiry.
HQ: Whatever you say, Aegira.
HQ: I can call you that, right?
HQ: You can I call you 'Aeg'?
SH: NO.
SH: NOT THAT SECOND ONE.
SH: It's fiNe if you use the first oNe though.
HQ: Alright, Aegira, just make sure your 'thinkpan' doesn't sizzle while you're away.
HQ: It'd be awful to have someone as nice as you become a vegetable.
SH: *rolls eyes*
SH: Alright, Mr. Alien froM this 'Earth'.
HQ: We are called 'humans' on my planet.
HQ: And my name is Jeoffrey Higgins.
HQ: Or just 'Jeff'.
HQ: But not 'Mr. Alien'.
SH: Whatever, Jeoffrey.
sweetHarlequin [SH] has toggled into an idle mode.