Hay everyoneee.
This chapter was supposed to be longer than it is, but I decided to cut it off there because it seemed like a good place to stop, and if I had continued to the next "cutoff point" it would have been 20 plus pages in length. So, here's chapter 1.
Enjoy~!
Rikku obediently severed all ties to her chance of escape and slipped into the dimly lit vehicle, and sat in the middle seat, wedged between two of them. Her heart hammered away at her chest like an exhausted smith with a deadline, and her limbs trembled with useless adrenaline as her thoughts raced around escaping, even though she knew, undoubtedly, that escape was impossible now.
Now that they were in uncomfortably close proximity, Rikku could smell the thick stench of men that her captors wore, and the disgusting scent slithered its way into her sinuses, working its wonders on her already unstable consciousness. The sound of the vehicle roaring to life at her feet, and the feel of it stealing her away from home forever, followed by a tiny prick of pain on her forearm, were the very last memories she could recall of her home. After that, entirely, lay darkness.
When she woke, her body didn't seem to belong to her anymore. She was a consciousness inside a shell, certainly unconnected to it, because the sensations that she experienced were so alien that they could not possibly belong to Rikku—to Rikku's body. What she first noticed was the sharp but pleasant taste that filled her mouth, and that, upon further exploration, her teeth were smooth, like the vase that her mother had left behind as her only material possession. Her eyes ached vividly, as if both of them had been stuck with a needle, and harsh cramps spread across her body in the sorts of impressions that a novice puppetmaster had carelessly flung his avatar's limbs in every direction.
Her skin could sense every miniscule movement in the air, and her hair was weightless about her skull, and soft against her cheeks and shoulders. A scent of cleanliness filled the air around her, and when she lifted a hand and laid it across her forehead, the self-contact allowed her to feel the lack of dirt and grime on her body, and enabled her to realize that the clean thing that she sensed was not the air, but herself. And the air was clean as well; when she inhaled, her lungs took in their full capacity, and there was no metal scent or smog to impair the intake. Upon doing so, however, the dearth of pollution in the air triggered a coughing fit so ruthless that Rikku, despite the painful protests of her body, leaned over and coughed to her side until she began to gag on her own convulsions. From then on, she remembered to breathe as she would in an airtight room.
A voice, speaking in Al Bhed, cut through her attempts to recover from the wheezing cycle. "Are you okay?"
Rikku's awareness spread to the rest of the brightly lit room. People, who had been newly cleaned and dressed in orange and white uniforms, and appeared to be as disoriented as she was, filled the tiny space, and chattered with curious expressions and frightened tones. She glanced around, unable to locate the voice that had addressed her.
"Right here." An Al Bhed man in his thirties or so touched her shoulder. Unable to speak, Rikku turned and met his eyes, and hoped that the answers to each of her numerous questions would appear in them.
"You're in Upper Home," he said. "This is the place where they find out how much you're worth."
"How much I'm worth? What—"
If the murmur of voices in the room manifested itself in the form of one person, its assassin, who had just entered by the cruel flourish of throwing the door open and allowing it to slam into a nearby woman, had taken it by the hair and drawn a silencing knife across its throat. Rikku finally noticed, when the hooded man's eyes immediately fixed on her, that the colors of her new clothes were blue and white, unlike the orange and white uniforms that populated the room.
"Come with me, girl," they ordered. Rikku glanced around frantically, eventually locking eyes with the Al Bhed at her side again, until he looked away and took her shoulder, helping her up from her seat. In the sympathetic and stricken looks of those that followed Rikku with their eyes as she traversed the room, a kinship unlike any other, formed through fear and the anticipation of hardships to come, could be found. He and Rikku exited, and those left in their wake gathered like water to fill the space that had been vacated.
Rikku resisted the overwhelming urge to tear herself from his grip and flee, and as they traveled through several lengthy hallways and took several turns, noticed just how lengthy they really were, and how mazelike. Indeed, this place, to a newcomer, was an endless maze, and a trap that had already sprung for those who planned on escape; later, she would congratulate herself for so strategically resisting her instincts.
"There is a meeting today," said he, "between the Nelr Uhac. You will serve at this meeting, and follow every order. Understood?"
A swift punch to the stomach rewarded Rikku's silence. "Am I understood, tnitka?" he demanded. At length, she was able to breathe an affirmative while she blinked back tears.
They had reached a door, which he reached out and opened, and with a strong shove he sent Rikku sprawling into the room beyond. "Work," he called after her, "worthless tnitka!" The door slammed into its frame and shook on its hinges.
Rikku remained squatting on the floor, embracing herself as she beat back sobs that threatened to spill through the cracks in her resolve. A kind hand helped her to a stool in the corner. "Settle down, hush…" they said, and it was then that Rikku discovered herself and her location all at once for a second time. She steadied her breathing, and observed the pots and pans and various other cooking materials hanging everywhere that, at home, were both a known convenience and a scarcity, and drew the conclusion that this was a kitchen, and it was nearly the size of the entire apartment in which Rikku had once lived.
She lost the will to breathe properly, and new tears assaulted her, and left her convulsing and choking on waves of dismay. The losing battle against physical sickness reached the home front at Rikku's heart, and to produce the means to stop it, she laid her head upon her knees and heaved heavy breaths until the march of despair had lost its morale.
When she re-exposed the damp skin of her face, the woman who had helped her to the stool touched a cloth to the poor girl's cheeks, and wiped the dried tears away. The gesture sent a shudder of self-pity down Rikku's spine, and sobs might have renewed her suffering if feelings of gratitude, born from unknown origins and motives within her, did not swarm like disturbed insects in her breast.
"Come on, let's soak your face a little bit." The stranger led Rikku to a faucet, and she turned one of the knobs next to it; to Rikku's astonishment, water began to gush from the curved silver pipe and drift, unused, into the open drain.
"What are you doing?!" Rikku gripped the knob and turned it, attempting to stop the flow of water as quickly as possible. She only succeeded in increasing the rate at which the precious liquid gushed from the pipe and a spray of droplets, each one a priceless sapphire to the helpless Al Bhed, shot straight into the abyss. She yelped and yanked the knob in the opposite direction, and the flow slowed and stopped.
"Why would you waste water like that?" she angrily asked her comforter.
The woman only smiled, and said, "Water doesn't mean as much up here as it does down there."
Down there. The walls of Rikku's head became the boundaries of a canyon, and the term echoed like a shout voiced from its center. This time Rikku made no move to intervene as her helper switched on the faucet, and then she leaned down and splashed some of the cool substance across her face, and to her, every drop that failed to soak into her skin was a personal insult. She used the towel that she was handed to dry her face, and blinked away the dampness of her eyelashes. The woman placed a white tray with several glasses of water and tiny brown tea bags for each in Rikku's hands.
"Through that door there is the meeting room," said she, pointing to the other side of the kitchen. "Give these glasses to each of the people in there. Be extremely polite, and don't say anything to them."
Rikku could only nod, and her feet autonomously carried her forward, towards and through the plain double doors at the edge of the room.
Passing from the kitchen to the large conference hall was the same as traveling from one world to another, and just as breathtaking. Rikku crossed the portal and entered a universe of gilded chairs and decorations, smooth cerulean carpeting, and chattering mouths all seated around a table that was as wide as twice Rikku was tall, and longer still. Arched glass windows comprised most of the walls of the egg-shaped room, and the light of the immature sunrise filtered through them and sprayed across the table, creating a glittering surface on which the members of the assembly rested their arms and hands, over which they prattled in low tones.
Some of them were not Al Bhed, Rikku noticed, but seated there were men and women alike, and all shared a common, dazzling quality: the girls were as beautiful as the convoluted carvings that covered the chairs, and the men were more handsome than the girls were beautiful, and when Rikku looked at them, she felt absolutely filthy; their faces were clean, and their skin boasted a luminosity that shifted their elegance to that of an ethereal sort. Physically, they seemed to be the angels that Rikku's mother had once recited stories about to her at her bedside, and they simply hid their snowy wings in their silky embroidered attire. Her eyes met those of a man sitting on the opposite end of the table, and her knees began to shake.
"Ohhh!" crooned one of the girls, "This one is so pretty! She must be selling for a lot."
Rikku blushed furiously, with a burning ferocity for that objectifying remark. The man who had met her eyes gestured, calling the poor girl towards him, and Rikku approached, assuming that he wanted a beverage that she carried. She gently set the tray on the table in front of him. While her back was bent, the man sneered and reached forward, and through the thin cloth of the uniform she felt a large hand hungrily groping her breasts. She recoiled and covered her chest with her hands, and the fatal blush deepened as the men of the room—its majority—laughed heartily at the interaction.
"And modest, too," remarked the offender. "The buyer's got to be a man. I swear, I wish I was getting some of the drudges that come through here." Warm tears threatened to mount a fresh assault, but they were graciously interrupted by an order.
One of the women, flipping her glossy black hair back over her shoulder, said, "Come over here, darling, I want some of that tea you've got."
He reached at her again, but she grabbed the tray and stepped away before he could so much as brush her with the tips of his fingers, and she ignored the snickers that the men cast on her as she circled the table and offered the tray's contents to the raven-haired woman. "Set it here, and go stand by them." She waved to the other Al Bhed in the same blue uniforms, whom, until then, Rikku had not noticed; they had been so still. She hastily obeyed both commands.
"Now that all of the purchased are present, let us begin," said the coarse-voiced Al Bhed at the head of the table, placing his hand on a nearby small stack of envelopes, and drawing one from the pile as a pretentious magician would draw his participant's chosen card.
Purchased, Rikku repeated inwardly, with a rotten dread that contaminated her as quickly as the tea bags' color spread through the water that she had just served. With a rare sentimental maturity, lasting only moments, she observed that most of the "purchased" were either girls about her age or men with large frames and burly forms.
The meeting progressed along the lines of a profiling. One by one, the host called forth each of the unhappy Al Bhed, and he delivered the contents of their respective envelopes aloud, naming every piece of information about the buyers—anonymous because of their wealth, as he had reminded them all before beginning—that could be named without disturbing that rule. When the destinations of her peers were mentioned, Rikku could only interpret that they were the names of distant places that she had never heard of, and would never visit; but the despondent girl failed to remember that she was among these miserable people, and would be sent somewhere far away, herself. Such a lack of situational comprehension led her to be startled upon the gruff utterance of her name. She stepped forward, jarred by the sudden address.
"Ahh—purchased by one of the gracious Lords of Bevelle," said the nameless host. "The next in a long line, to be sure." That remark was followed by a bout of low chuckling from the men, which moved Rikku to plant her feet more solidly together, and seal her legs at their joints, for she was warm and disturbed down below, as if she sensed danger in that regard.
The host had just begun to list her contractual details when a nervous sweaty man erupted into the room, crossed the threshold with two blind steps, and presented a very white envelope that was sealed with scarlet wax and imprinted with a regally crafted letter "M".
"What—what is it? What the hell is this all about?"
"One of my assistants gave it to me," he explained, eyes rolling, words spilling out in an almost uproarious mess, "He said that it had been buried under a bunch of new documents that had been delivered on the same day—about one week ago!"
"And what about it?" Without examining it, the host snatched the letter from the man's hands so angrily that it almost tore between them. "Last week's papers are last week's business. It probably isn't important, so throw it in a fire."
He prepared to separate it into two halves with a swift jerk, but the newcomer flung his arms into the air (flinging sweat everywhere with them) and cried, "No, don't!"
"What is wrong with you?!"
"Look at the letter!" he entreated. "Look at the letter, please!"
By "the letter" he did not mean the actual document itself, but the character that stared so commandingly forward from its wax canyon: the "M". The host examined the envelope for several moments before a revelation seized him; his eyes bulged, and his breath seemed to leave him in one fell swoop, just as the blood drained from his face, and when the first fit had passed, he stood and howled several vulgar curses.
"This is Methuselah's symbol," he roared, "Lord Methuselah's symbol! Kill that assistant of yours, I want him dead!—no, torture him first!"
The raven-haired woman interrupted his path of rage. "Now, wait a minute." She gestured to the now wrinkled envelope. "Read the document first, and then you can decide whether or not you should go around killing anyone."
The president of the anxious convention lowered himself back into his throne and, with trembling fingers, discarded the wax and drew the letter from its package, unfolded it, and read its contents aloud.
To whom it may concern,
It has recently come to my attention that a Bevellian Lord has made the purchase of a young Al Bhed girl by the name of Rikku.
He stopped.
Rikku had never been present in a room in which every pair of scrutinizing eyes had simultaneously turned to one subject, much less had she ever been present in an instance in which the subject was herself. Suddenly, she was the center of attention, and in such a gathering, the title could only attract maliciousness; she felt it in the astonished and curious gazes of her onlookers.
At length, the host continued.
I request that she and her contracts be delivered to me instead of the original consumer, free of charge (disregarding, of course, the flight and fuel fees). Respond within one to two weeks' time if you wish to contest my demands, and I will gladly appear before you in person. I expect our negotiation to be a smooth one.
Methuselah
"Kill him," said the host. "When I'm not busy today, take him down to the furnaces and throw him in one of them. I want to watch him burn."
"He wants us to give her over for free, just because he asked us to?" muttered one of the men.
"Sir, we'll be losing over a quarter of a million gil if we comply with Lord Methuselah's demands," said another, adjusting his spectacles and licking his lips over the small list-size slip of paper he held.
The host dropped the letter on the table and gripped his head in his large hands. "We don't have much of a choice," said the unhappy man, "because of that damn assistant of yours! We let him wait a week without responding and now he probably wants us all dead." The sweaty man apologized profusely.
The raven-haired woman grinned. "Oh, Lord Methuselah's not like that. I've met him myself. Still, I would recommend heeding him…he probably has a good reason for demanding a change of plans like this. The buyer's identity might give you a clue."
Upon reexamining Rikku's papers, the host nodded at the woman. "Yes, you're right. This changes a lot." He suddenly cast a suspicious glare at her, and growled, "Hold on. Did you know who the buyer was?"
"I figured it out when you said something earlier. 'The next in a long line, to be sure.' You could only be talking about one man—in Bevelle, that is. To be honest, I think we all knew."
The host snarled something nasty to himself about the anonymity rule, and roughly exchanged Rikku's contracts for the offending letter to read it over again, and all the while he nodded to himself with a bitter air of resolution that agitated the greedy attitudes seated around the table.
"We have no choice," he grumbled as a response to their protests. "We won't be in danger, since this is between him and Lord Methuselah. Please, Belgemine, get her out of here."
The raven-haired woman gracefully departed from her seat and touched Rikku's shoulder with a tenderness that served to snatch the poor girl from her previously inescapable trance of confusion. "Come with me, darling." She numbly left the room with the angelic woman, a dazed kitten following the mother cat.
Circumstances soon found the pair in a tiny room that lacked everything but a single prepared bed, a chair, and a large window that allowed the morning sunlight to perform its environmentally effervescent function.
Belgemine quietly closed the door behind them and seated herself on the small chair in the corner. She drew a small device from her pocket, and when she switched it on it cast a pale glow on her face; she composed a message: "She's on her way."
After punching in and sending out several orders, she received a response from her first message not half a minute later (from either Pmylg or Freda, she supposed). It read, "Go with her, and teach her."
"What are you doing?" the girl asked softly, having seated herself on the bed. Belgemine paused and looked up, and a motherly and comforting smile crossed her crimson lips.
"I'm ordering better clothes and dresses for you, and preparing a ship to fly you to Bevelle as soon as possible." She dismissed the reply, and resumed her business doing exactly that. "We can't have you delivered to Lord Methuselah in the dirty uniform of a tnitka. I am sure he would not mind, but courtesy is something that he respects."
At length, Rikku asked, "Who is he?"
"What do you mean?" Belgemine, finished with her digital order-barking, returned the device to her purse, and folded her hands on her lap while regarding Rikku with a curious expression.
"Uh…" Rikku didn't know where to begin. "Like, I know he's important and all, and…?"
"You mean to tell me—" Belgemine leaned forward with a wryly astonished expression, covering one cheek with a gloved hand, "—that you have never heard of the Wishmaker?"
Rikku shook her head, and Belgemine muttered, "That's unbelievable. How can the drudges be so sheltered?" and after a sigh, met the unanswered question in Rikku's eyes with, "It would be better for you to learn for yourself, then. When you meet him."
That the distance between Rikku and her home would only grow wider was a painful truth, and it showed in the girl's watering eyes. "Are you gonna come with me?" she asked.
"Yes." Belgemine relaxed in her seat and spoke with a soothing voice that, if put into visual form, would have been the sight of syrup running down a glass slope. "There are things that you need to learn that will help you adjust to your new life."
"Like what?"
"Oh, little things," said Belgemine, folding her arms. "Things like hygienic habits that you couldn't practice frequently in Lower Home. Bathing, for instance. Washing your hair and body." She smiled slyly. "There are also feminine things that we need to talk about."
"Pops gave me that talk a long time ago," Rikku told her with an awkward laugh, and thoughts of her father brought tears to her eyes.
"Yes, but does he know the workings of a woman like a woman does?" It was a question with an obvious answer, and Rikku met it with silence. Belgemine rose from her chair and knelt before her, and placed a comforting hand on the Al Bhed's cheek. "I know what happened to your real mother. She was gone long before you reached the age where serious questions need to be answered. On the way to Bevelle, allow me to be your mother for a day—don't be afraid to ask me anything; there is no question that I won't answer to the best of my ability." She gently stroked Rikku's hair—the locks were still dirty, though she had been bathed and perfumed. "Do you have any questions related to things like that now?"
"Not really," Rikku answered eventually.
"Then rest," she suggested. "Our ship won't be ready for a while, and I know that the daytimes are your sleeping hours. That will be one of your most difficult adjustments, I believe."
The sort of sleepiness that comes to most at midnight had indeed begun to settle into the little Al Bhed's bones, and it compelled her to burrow under the thin sheets and curl into a miserable ball with her face half-submerged in the stale pillow. However, her eyes refused to close, and she cast their green gaze about until it locked on the general area of the dust cloud made visible by the ray of morning light that filtered through the window; she watched the acrobatic display of loops and twirls that the particles took part in, and sometimes pictured them forming together to craft grainy portraits of her loved ones—first her father, then Kyla, and then the foggy image of her mother—and soon they collaborated to form the silhouette of the mysterious Methuselah, whom she knew nothing about and could form no concrete image of.
She held close one concrete feeling associated with the vague idea of the "Wishmaker": hate.
She hated him for pulling her away from home. She hated him for being so friggen important that he just had to go and change her entire life. Who did he think he was, anyway? She didn't care about what she didn't know; all she knew then was that two people had "bought" her—because, apparently, she was worth an exact amount in money, and people owned her and could sell her—and this man had won the short dispute over her with his authority, like she was equal in value as a person to the machines over which she had once toiled. She hated him, and she would let him know that when she met him.
With those burning thoughts in her heart, fading like a fire that smolders to its last breath of heat, she slid into slumber.
The next update will be in a couple of weeks if I get some writebunny breeding going on. In the meantime, hit that review button!
...But not hard. Like, don't smack it upside the head. That would be mean.
Just give it a little love tap. :D
-Ari