11: The Easily Lead
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_oOo_
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When Rita closed her eyes, all she saw was stars.
It wasn't her field of research. Astronomy was dry and over-documented and, if the bed of charts she had pinned to the deck of the Fiertia meant anything, pretty much done. All the stars in the Terca Lumereis sky had been mapped out years ago. A few aspiring scholars had begun studying orbital courses and function, but it wasn't exactly a glamorous topic.
Not like blastia, anyway.
Rita rubbed her stinging eyes and browsed over her notes for what felt like the hundredeth time. She'd already made adjustments to a few of the astronomers' bungled physics. She definitely had to rewrite most of everything written about Brave Vesperia, as every researcher seemed to think it was a very, very large entity seen at some unspecified, but immense, distance. It wasn't either of those things. The blastia had done a good job of hiding its elliptical orbit from amateurish eyes.
Rita blinked, saw stars, and then decided to take a break.
She had been lying on her stomach over the southern hemisphere's nautical starchart, and she lifted herself up on aching arms to ease herself into a cross-legged sit. Someone had put a cup of coffee on one corner of the map. It was cold when she drank from it, but she'd swallowed worse.
No-one had noticed her stir aside from Tokunaga. He waved at her with a big toothy grin from behind the wheel, and Rita wondered how long he had been watching her. She waved back awkwardly until she realised it was a stupid thing to do and then flapped a hand instead. He laughed.
Karol was sitting against the redundant ceres blastia with elbows on his knees and his head bowed deeply. He was snoring loud enough to be heard over the wind. Rita grudgingly allowed him the noise-pollution; she knew how close he had come to checking in permanently, even if he didn't. And even if she had been heartless enough to kick him out of his snore, there was Estelle to get through first.
The princess was sitting primly beside Karol, looking pleased, relieved and very much like a mother.
Rita shifted her gaze. Sure enough, Yuri wasn't too far away. He was propped against the ship's railing casually, Repede at his crossed feet and arms folded loosely over his chest. He probably thought that no one could tell that he was watching Estelle from underneath his lashes. Moron.
Rita took another gulp of her cold coffee and swivelled where she sat. Off to port, Brave Vesperia was a big purple bruise in the blue sky that was perfectly visible in the morning light. Rita's eyes slid off it, too weary to deal with what it might mean.
She rotated again, this time to face the prow. Judith was nowhere to be seen. What the genius mage could see was just a slither of purple past the cabin and over the bow. She knew that Raven liked being up high, sure, but lounging on the bowsprit? That was just his special brand of stupidity.
Rita choked down the dregs of her cold coffee and glared suspiciously at the distant figure.
She couldn't see much from her blanket of star-charts, but what she could see looked perfectly stupid and typically unkempt and utterly Raven. Nothing out of the ordinary there… But that was because couldn't see his face from where she sat. That's where it got weird. It was his face that was all wrong – a heavy shadow in his eyes when he bothered to meet her gaze - and how was it that no one else had noticed?
It couldn't have been more obvious to Rita. She'd seen it the minute she'd clapped her healed eyes on him. It was bad enough that she had been barely able to focus on the mystery of the hoplon core because of his weird change in attitude… But it annoyed her that Raven's face was distracting enough derail her study of the moving Brave Vesperia.
Rita narrowed her eyes. Problems, mysteries and puzzles were the pulse of her life's work and she loved them no matter how baffling… but this one sat all wrong even for her analytical mind.
She was glaring angrily into the empty recesses of her coffee mug when Judith descended down the ship harness in a series of impossibly elegant swings.
The krityan alighted on the wood with a dainty click of her heels and called, "We're here everyone."
Rita rubbed the frustration from her bleary eyes and began to fold her chart away. She had just stuffed the wad of paper into her journal when Karol was finally shaken awake. They congregated in unison by the guard-rail as Ba'ul began to descend.
Something was wrong with Zaude.
The forgotten remnants of the blastia frame curved up from the crater as it always had, an elegant ring upon the blue fingers of the ocean. But there was a translucent blue veil that smothered it from the tip of the broken blastia to the edges of the crater in a perfect dome, root like tendrils fanning out into jumbled patterns in the surf. Winking lights orbited the gargantuan device within like stars and planets on a complex orrery. No one could figure out what had happened to the ancient structure. They were looping around in their first circle when Ba'ul let out a thrumming moan that made the air shiver. To the shock of everyone present, the dome warbled back, stars trembling and tendrils stirring the ocean into momentary chaos.
Krones greeted them.
It took some time to find it, but eventually Ba'ul, the Fiertia and everyone on board managed to spot the tiny land shelf that had been the humble dock to Zaude. That Krones had to lift one hem of his translucent membrane for them to reach it was bizarre.
It was strange enough that the giant creature had draped itself over Zaude like a lampshade, but the confusion doubled when the guild stepped off the Fiertia's gangplank and heard the murmur of an enormous crowd.
Judith was the first to move away from the ship, all curiosity and no caution. She glanced upwards through the layers of Krones only briefly before taking a step forward and pushing open the Shrine's main entrance.
The sound of the festival was like a battering ram.
It was such a jumble of colour and movement and body inside that it took Rita a moment to realise what she was seeing. By then, the outskirts of the crowd had seen them.
"Child of the Full Moon!"
A cheer went up. Flowers and confetti were thrown. Strings of shells were tossed over their heads and suddenly there was a rush of krityans on all sides that tugged and pushed them away from the dock. Distantly, barely heard over the cheering masses, the Shrine's doors slammed shut.
Rita tried to turn to see, but the mob was too dense.
Laughing, a young krityan woman with a ceremonial headdress was hoisted up onto her comrades' shoulders and she raised a brightly painted conch-shell to her lips. A rumbling note blasted free with such passion that Repede yelped and skulked to the back of the crowd. It sounded like Ba'ul. It wasn't like they were deliberately being split up, but Rita quickly lost each of her friends into the swaying throng; she heard Karol shouting his objection to the crush, but the murmuring of hundreds of kritya eventually drowned him out.
Rita was still struggling free of the weird shell decorations when the crowd parted just wide enough for one final gift: a sudden cascade of clingy grey ash rained down on Estelle and the rest of them in a short puff of chaos.
A man in an elaborate robe advanced on them. His antennae were looped and bound in a bizarre knot at the back of his neck, and they bounced gaily when he snatched Estelle's hand up to shake it furiously.
"Welcome," he said, ignoring her polite attempts to snatch her hand back, "to the Enduring Shrine of Zaude! Welcome to the reborn Myorzo! That you came to us is remarkable luck… Fate, even! Welcome, Child of the Full Moon, to our Rite of Passing!"
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_oOo_
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Estelle could still hear the crowds. The sound was made hollow and bell-like by the curving walls of glass that swept up around them like frozen ripcurls. The underwater city was alive. It was a giant, come-one-come-all party that had been going on for some time. It sounded like such fun.
The muffled festival made the awkward silence within the apartment all the more choking. The quarters themselves were extravagant even by Estelle's cultured standards; the dark, gothic lines of Zaude had always been impressive, but now they were decorated and meshed with the intricate whorls of Myorzo's architecture. The entire back wall was a curved window out into the ocean depths. Expensive tapestries fell in panels over the deep blue.
Looking out into the ocean, Estelle could see that the people of Myorzo had dropped the city pods into the ocean and bridged them with the glass tunnels of Zaude. They looked like submerged Fabergé eggs in the depths, elegant and ethereal... When had this all happened?
She lifted her fine china teacup and took a polite sip. The blend was exquisite.
"I hope the rooms are to your liking," the krityan man said eagerly. He and two of his peers were hovering over the guild like avid fans, all smiles and fidgeting hands.
"Yes, thank you," Estelle replied when her companions said nothing.
"You'll have to excuse the good folk of Myorzo. They do not often have reason for celebration. They do our people a discredit with their... antics."
"What's the occasion?" Judith wondered aloud.
"We celebrate the passing of our Elder," was the enthusiastic response.
The sounds of the festival outside thrummed in through the closed door like joyous music.
"I'm so sorry," Estelle attempted, unsure if it was the correct response. Karol, still looking slightly drawn and pale, ran the back of his glove under his nose and sneezed when he accidentally breathed in the ash there.
"W-We're just here for the Zaude blastia," he sniffled. "We don't mean to intrude on your… funeral party."
The three kritya exchanged looks.
"That's quite impossible."
"Why?" Rita demanded. The first raised a bone-thin finger to point directly upwards.
The apartment's windows were so large they curved up into the ceiling; through it and the ocean, Krones was crushing down on the island and surf so heavily that the blastia was a vague shimmer in the blue. The pause that followed was a delicate one. Rita was clearly angry enough to say exactly what she thought of the entelexeia's choice of pit-stop, and Judith gently leant over and covered the mage's opening mouth with a glove.
"May we request that honourable Krones move? Our mission is important."
The man in the robes grinned suddenly, all good will and cheer.
"Oh, he won't have to move," he said happily. "After all, good fortune brought the Child of the Full Moon here to Zaude when we needed her the most!"
They were so eager and happy and hopeful that Estelle's stomach dropped with instant anxiety. There was nothing more she'd have liked than to simply direct Rita at the blastia and have all her problems solved… She tried not to squirm on the expensive couch she sat on. Nothing was ever so simple.
The second man rubbed two hands together enthusiastically.
"With the Elder gone," said he, "it is Krones' wish to become a spirit. We honoured his request by relocating our city here before he was to leave to find you. But here you are! Surely you can see how fortuitous this is?"
"Y-Yes of course… but…" Estelle attempted.
"You have time to enjoy the festivities," the third interrupted. "These customs and rites have only recently been distributed back to our people, so this is a bit new to us as well. We have much to prepare!"
The first nodded hurriedly.
"Naturally we'll need the Child of the Full Moon and… and I see miss Mordio and sister Judith is here also, what luck! Yes, so we'll need to prepare the ceremonial garb and go over the ancient customs before we convert Krones. I… I hope this is alright?"
He said it with such optimism that everyone but Yuri nodded seriously.
The kritya smiled at one another, pleased.
"We'll be back in an hour to discuss the arrangements then. Please settle in," the first man said, dipping a shallow bow before he began to make his way to the door.
"One last question, please," Judith said as they passed. She smiled her silkiest smile and dusted a small amount of ash from her bare thighs. "You mentioned customs. What was that grey dust thrown on us when we arrived?"
The three men couldn't have looked more cheerful.
"You mean the rediscovered Records from Temza! I'll go get my copy for you, sister. Um, the ash is very important, of course. We had the Elder cremated, so we could use his ashes to purify the unclean. I'm sure you were very soiled by the outside world, but that's alright. You're cleansed now." With that, he dipped another bow and swept from the room with his companions. The door closed with a sharp bang.
There was a pregnant silence.
"Gotta say, this is the first time I've been covered in dead guy," Raven declared conversationally. He swatted puffs of ash off his shoulder before adding, "Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think our charmin' folk of Myorzo have both oars in the water."
"They're crazy! Oh man, I sneezed the Elder all over the coffee table!" Karol realised with horror. He resumed blowing his nose noisily into a handkerchief, pulling faces of misery and disgust every time he lost too much breath to continue.
Into the silence, the delicate sound of rattling became louder. Estelle wondered what it was until Yuri very gently took her shaking tea-cup and saucer from her.
"A-Ah," was all she managed, not sure where to put her trembling hands.
"What a week," he mused to the room in general, though she had to lean away from him because the ash stood out like snow on his ebony hair.
Over by one of the many plush double beds, Rita was being quite calm about brushing and patting herself free of the cremation ashes; she had taken her goggles off to ruffle a hand quickly through her dusty hair, and it was from under the long fringe of auburn that she cast them all a look.
"Are we actually gonna do this?" she demanded starkly.
"I don't see why not," Judith replied.
"Are you stupid! These people are all kinds of insane, that's why not," Rita retorted. "And don't forget the reason we're here!"
"B-but we know the people of Myorzo, Rita," Estelle replied. "They are too nice to mean any real harm… And if Krones wants to go through his evolution into a spirit then it's our solemn duty to help him through the transition safely."
As if Krones had been eavesdropping, he pulsed above them, making the giant blastia disappear for a moment in a crush of baby blue. Rita frowned as she wiggled her goggles back into place.
"You need to look on the bright side," Judith suggested pleasantly.
"Bright sides can wait!" wailed Karol. "I've gotta have a bath!" Yuri hauled him back to the couch by the collar the second he leapt up.
"Hold on there, Captain. Ladies first."
He didn't look at her, but the smile on his lips was all hers. Estelle let out a shaky giggle.
She left them arguing to themselves and ducked into the apartment's lush bathroom before closing the door on the noise. She took a breath to steady herself. The showers were as resplendent as the room outside, and when Estelle leant over the porcelain bathtub to fill it, she let the hot water run until every mirror in the room had completely fogged up.
She had stripped down and was just about to step in when a thought occurred to her. Swathed in steam, Estelle knelt by the filling tub and, hands clasped to her chest, she reverently and respectfully recited the Elder of the Myorzian Kritya his last rites.
Feeling better immediately, she climbed into her first real bath in weeks.
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_oOo_
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What felt like years later (but was actually closer to three hours) Karol beat out his boredom on the porch with his heels, limbs sticking through the slats of the veranda's railing. He stared glumly through the pickets as if it were a gaol-cell. The festival looked awesome.
Thu-dump. His heels drummed out a plodding rhythm in the stuffy air. Yuri's impatient tap-tap-tap against the apartment wall with his scabbard gave it all a tempo that seemed to stretch the minutes into horrible hours.
The swordsman leant against the space of wall besides the apartment window, a dark slip of languid black against the shell-white. Karol could tell that even he was beginning to tire of the waiting game, because the tap-tap-tappingwas slowly getting faster. Repede's ears twitched at the sound so regularly that they were in a constant state of flicker. Raven was perfectly still on his perch atop the porch railing, but the slight frown of his face was stretched and strained.
The constant murmur of conversation within the apartment rose sharply, suddenly. They all turned to stare expectantly at the door.
There was a hinge-rattling thump and crash that sounded too much like Rita, followed by a long, delicate silence afterwards that was the very essence of Estelle. The smooth, surreal return of the murmured conversation felt very much like Judith, and then that was that.
Nothing else happened. Yuri heaved an exasperated sigh, gave the apartment wall a kick with his heel and then returned to the tap-tap-tapping. Karol resumed swinging his legs, subconsciously timing it to Yuri's footfalls.
"Oh fer cryin' out loud… Settle down already, you're makin' me nervous," Raven complained from his seat on the banister. Yuri grinned, mocking.
"I couldn't be more settled, Old Man," he replied. "Hell, I could keep this up for hours and hours, right Karol?"
"Leave me out of this," Karol mumbled, because he recognised when Yuri was picking fights out of boredom when he saw it.
"Right, forget I said anythin'," Raven muttered. Repede relocated his pipe to the other side of his jaw and spared them a disparaging snort.
The sound of their combined impatience was lost for a moment when a distant cheer went up. Karol leant forward, straining to see what had caused the excitement. The people of Myorzo had set up a large stage in the centre of the dome, wide and low and strung with lines of painted shells. It was bowing under the weight of the mass of dancing couples. Something good must have happened; they all stopped their graceful spinning and applauded instead. The crowds that flowed past the stage in a constant tide paused to cheer as well. Everyone seemed to be carrying food or prizes and there was a krityan kid over there with a stuffed toy the size of Karol's head.
Oh man, the festival looked awesome.
It was so bright and colourful and energetic and nice that Heliord felt like another world. The explosions and mad rush from Dahngrest could have been years ago, the poisoning at Heliord a bad dream, and the sight of the angry and enormous Vesperia was a distant memory. Karol tried to care that it was burning a strange route through the sky, but the only stars to be seen under the ocean were the glittering lanterns visible through the glass and blue water.
There was a collective groan of relief when the apartment door finally opened and the rest of the guild stepped out onto the porch. Rita was the last, and she still had a hand on the door-knob when one of the krityan men lingering in the apartment tried to call them back.
"Are you sure you understand? We can go over it one more ti-"
Rita slammed the door in his face.
"'Are you sure you understand'," she echoed venomously. "Who the hell does he think he is? Does he even know who he's talking to?"
"He was just trying to be helpful, Rita," Estelle said calmly, soothingly.
"He wasted three hours of my life, is what he did," she replied haughtily. There was a small pause when the mage began to tug at the little notebook dangling from her front. She was scowling down at her own jacket when she added, "And if he thinks I'm going to change my clothes just to run a damn formula, he can go ahead and die!"
"About time you guys were done," Yuri said expressively. Estelle smiled ruefully.
She didn't need to say anything; when all eyes turned to Judith, the krityan was holding a huge, elaborate scroll casing and had it partially open already. If it was a copy of the Records and customs that the people of Myorzo seem to be so obsessed with, Karol realised that three hours was a run down. The texts were huge.
Judith was so engrossed in the elaborate casing in her hands that she didn't notice their attention. Every so often, she would frown darkly and twist the strange contraption that unfurled the scroll a little further.
They waited, but it didn't look like she was coming up from her studies anytime soon.
"Okay, so can we go to the festival now?" Karol asked desperately. Rita had finally snapped the miniature notebook from its dangling chain when she shot a glare at him.
"Only you would think of having fun at a time like this," she said. "If these amateurs think I can't investigate the blastia from down here, they're wrong. Any idiot knows that the secondary systems on colossus scale blastia are in the basement. Come on, let's go."
Estelle had been edging towards the steps down from the apartment – her hands were an excited jumble at her chest - and she froze abruptly with one foot on the first step. Her face fell into a picture of guilt and disappointment. Through a pout, she mumbled, "Yes… yes, Rita is right. We have very serious things to attend to. We should investigate the blastia and solve the mystery of Brave Vesperia. F-Festivities can wait."
A loud ringing echoed in over the murmur of the crowd, bell-like and exultant; whatever had caused it made another wave of cheering rise up from the celebrating throng. Everyone squinted wistfully into the roving crowds. Rita was the only one that glared.
"They better not have moved anything important with their dumb celebration," she said with a threat in her voice. "It's going to be a pain trying to find anything in this mess!"
She was already stomping down the steps.
Karol remembered how weak he'd become when his attempt at getting up almost failed. When Raven hoisted him soundly to his feet by the back of the collar, he gave Karol's shoulder a fatherly pat before leaving it there to secretly steady him across the patio and down the steps.
Rita's determined stride was already bringing her towards the crowd. It was an effort to keep up.
"Man, why's Rita so ang... I mean, angrier than usual?" Karol mumbled.
Raven didn't reply despite the knowing expression on his face, and the archer's hand slowly tightened on Karol's shoulder until he had brought them both down to a snail's pace.
"Hey, we'll lose them in these crowds!"
"Perish the thought," was Raven's suddenly cheery reply. "They should know the sick and the elderly hafta take it slow."
It took a little longer than expected, but Karol watched the rest of his guild eventually disappear into the krityan crowds. It wasn't until a few more minutes after that that Raven finally dropped the hand from Karol's shoulder and gave him a hearty slap on the back instead.
"Well wouldja look at that, we got left behind. How cruel! …So, where to first, boss?"
Karol gaped up at his older friend, and then down to where he'd lost sight of the others. All he could see were happy, laughing people, and trying to remain guilty and indignant in the face of that was just too hard. The music from the dance stage changed from a breezy waltz to a bouncy foxtrot.
Karol faltered, but eventually managed a shamefaced grin.
"Uh, maybe down the west tunnel? I coulda sworn I saw a noodle eating competition back there and I'm starved."
The last of his guilt melted away the minute the crowd swept him up in a tide of energy and joy. Rita had everything under control anyway, right? And they'd probably given the people trying to kill them the slip back at Heliord.
When a drunk lady with flowers in her hair gave him a hug for no reason at all, Karol decided that there was no way anyone could be depressed in the reborn Myorzo.
Nothing bad could happen here, he thought, and with the smell of warm beer and flowers still in his nose, Karol believed it.
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A/N: Fiiinally at Zaude. Answers will have happened before we leave. Thank you for your patience (and reviews!).
In other news, I'm furiously trying to write ahead so as to go back to a weekly update, but I'm not so sure how that'll go. Wish me luck!