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Center of scholarly knowledge and shipwrighting, Zeltiva is a port city unlike any other in Mizahar. [Lore]
She slipped in silently and placed herself carefully in the chair opposite the old Nuit. He looked her over without moving. Short, lanky, odd eyes. In fact, all her features seemed slightly off, as though she had been assembled from the parts of various bodies, none of which quite matched. She also looked decidedly anemic. His curiosity was piqued.
“My dear,”he said.“I can answer any question you ask. But in many cases it will be an incorrect answer because I don't actually know everything there is to know.”He paused to let her unravel that before he continued.“Nor can I predict your future, a common mistake people make when they come to me to have their fortune read. What I can do is show you yourself. Do not underestimate the value of such a thing. Very few people are able to see themselves as they really are.”
Again he paused. Mostly for dramatic effect.
“Now, I have some questions for you before we begin. Three to be exact. First, what is your name? Second, What racial mix are you? Third, what is your first question?”
Ira’s lips twitched slightly it what could have either been a frown or a smile before speaking, her back stiffening slightly at his probing questions. She was here to have hers answered not the other way around. She spoke stiffly, her voice still muffled, “I need only get a mirror if seeing myself is what I need.”
Her words were sharp and a bit condescending though her face showed nothing of the sort; she was simply annoyed by his questioning of her heritage. She knew she was odd looking and it was a vanity she cursed. Especially for those who knew of her kind, most simply nodded, they were words and nothing more, beings that could climb walls like spiders didn’t exists in their eyes and neither did man-eating snakes. She was only an oddity to pass the time, telling tales as a child would.
All the same Ira answered his questions, “My name is Ira and my race is not important.”Here she faltered, it was her turn to ask the question but now she felt foolish and childish, lines pulling between her brows as she frowned. And her hands tightened to the point of pain before she muddled through her request.
“I need to know if there is…something following me.” Her nails dug into her flesh and her words began to slur together in a hurried rush“And if you can help me see inside a box. You say you can see a person, the person who made the box is naïve, childish, cruel and spiteful. He goes by the name Raga.”
As she spat out the name her lisp clamped tightly shut as if she had given away too much of herself simply by speaking the name. And maybe she had. That man had undoubtedly traveled to places in Mizahar she had never even dreamed of. Her nose crinkled and her lips pulled back in a faint snarl as she thought of doing unmentionable things to said man.
Taking a few mouthfuls of air she calmed herself, speaking deliberately, “If you can help me I will give you the horrid little box as well. It is valuable.”
It was almost painful to watch the young woman wrestling with herself as she squeezed out the words as though she was revealing her deepest, darkest secrets. Perhaps she was. In any case, she had managed to come up with three questions; or implied questions since nowhere in her little speech had she actually asked for anything.
“You appear to have asked several questions,”he said.“Three to be exact. First, you want to know if some thing – not some one – some thing is following you. I'm going to assume that you mean you fear something may have followed you to Zeltiva from wherever you have come.
“Second, you want to know what is in a certain box that I assume is in your possession. The obvious question would be, Why don't you open the box and find out? But I'm sure you thought of that and for some reason you cannot, or will not, open it.
“Third, you want to know something about someone named Raga, although it is not clear to me what you want to know about this person or what he has to do with the box.”
He paused for a few moments as though pondering the deeper meaning of these questions. The laughter of children at play could be heard somewhere nearby. And in the distance, the sounds of workers at the docks, the commercial life-blood of Zeltiva. He wondered briefly where Ira had come from and what had brought her to Zeltiva and who or what she was running from. Was it something outside of herself? Or something on the inside? The things on the inside were the most frightening things, and the most difficult to run away from. They had a way of pursuing you relentlessly.
“I think it unlikely that I can help you with any of these things. But one never knows what the oracle will reveal. Let us see what we shall see, shall we?”
He reached inside his cloak and withdrew a small cloth bag tied with a leather cord. He carefully untied the bag and poured its contents into his right hand, which he held out so that Ira could see what he had. What he had were eighteen tiny carved bones with complex designs etched into them. He quickly reached out with his left hand and placed two fingers gently on the back of her right hand. Anselm always wore thin cloth gloves when dealing with customers. This was to spare them the sometimes disconcerting feeling of touching cold, dead skin. He turned his right hand over and let the bones fall on to the table with a clatter. Ira probably did not notice, but he actually gave his hand a little twist as he did so, which caused the bones to fall into a roughly rectangular pattern. He stared at them for a moment as he did the mental calculation that would allow him to select the correct oracle from among the sixty-four oracles his master had taught him. Then he solemnly intoned the words of the oracle:
Mountain above, stillness. Fire below, luminous. Clear about where to rest, resting in what is clear, One naturally clarifies illuminations and rests in the highest good; Therefore it is called adornment.
The reason Anselm had reached out and put his fingers on the back of her hand was to touch her aura. Over the years he had come to the conclusion that the subconscious mind often knows more than the conscious mind. He had also learned that he could detect a small jump in the emotional layer of a person's aura when some part of the oracle resonated with the unconscious mind. He experienced it as a pulse of force that pushed against his own aura. It was this resonance that he was feeling for. Sometimes he would feel several pulses as different phrases resonated with the customer's unconscious mind. Other times he would feel none. In Ira's case there was one phrase that generated the telltale pulse.
He spoke slowly, as though savoring each word:“Resting … in … what ... is ... clear.”Then he was silent for a moment as he formulated the question that would lead either to epiphany or to confusion for the young woman. He had no way of knowing which it would be.
“You will not find rest until that which is unclear becomes clear. What is it, exactly, that keeps you from opening the box?”
OOC :
The 'oracle' comes from the I Ching or Book of Changes, an ancient Taoist text. See bibliography.
Last edited by Anselm on June 16th, 2012, 11:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.
She nearly laughed at the absurdity of it all, realizing she had done precisely what Raga had expected her to do. Stupid man. But as the words from the seer were spilt she found she couldn’t say much else. They held no grave importance but told her what she grudgingly excepted as the truth of herself. She would follow that hated man to the ends of Mizahar if she only could find him. She would waste her life in hopes to see him. So instead of answering Ira pulled her satchel from her back with a heavy sigh, it was a sigh that spoke of pure aggravation. From the bag she produced her jacket, bundle carefully around a small box.
It was truly a pretty little thing, not ornate but made panels of mirror that reflected the sun in a near rainbow. “The box has no key. No lock.” A hand ran over her face and she nearly slumped into the seat, “And inside is a small vial of water and parchment. If I shatter the box the water vial will break and the damnable parchment that petching bastard left will dissolve!”
Glaring at it she shoved it towards him. At this moment she would gladly be rid of it. Shoving the burden off on whoever would carry it but at the same moment she shoved her whole body twitched as if to take the box back. Clasping her hands tightly in her lap her sudden anger at not finding truly anything made her snap.
“If all you do is give out full of shyke words what use are you, old man?”
She sat tensely for a few moments before letting out a whoosh of air, her nerves still tingling with the urge to smash the box and an angry lump stuck in her throat. Clenching her teeth and hissing as her fang drew blood from her lips she let the words hiss through her teeth, “My apologies.”
Now what did she do? She would never be able to break the box and the tiny vial inside…she was lucky she had yet to break it. Flinching she wondered if her shove had finally done the trick. Swallowing thickly Ira looked up at the man once more. He hadn’t been wrong he was simply unable to give her what she wanted to hear. Her nails drummed on the table anxiously, he had warned her when she first entered.
“Who can?” she spoke without thinking but leaned forwards slightly, trying to keep any hopefulness off her face and out of her voice, “Is there someone that can tell me what is in the box?”
Time to bring this to a close, old man,he thought.You have read her fortune and asked the one question she needs to answer. Anything further will get you entangled in the twists and turns of her anguished little life.And if there was one thing Anselm did not need, it was entanglements in other peoples' lives. But, of course, there was a catch. The box presented a problem to be solved, a mystery to be unravelled. And that was one of two things Anselm found it hard to walk away from. It had a twisted history, a twisted present and a twisted future. His curiosity was piqued.Don't even look at it,he said to himself. Then he looked at it.
It was not very large and appeared to be made entirely of mirrors. It was not immediately obvious how one would go about opening it. It was not even clear which way was up and which way was down. Anselm shifted his visual focus slightly so that he was looking “past” the box. He was not really looking “past” it of course. He was looking at a different dimension or layer of it. He was, in fact, looking at its aura. Anselm saw auras as various shades of glowing color emanating from whatever he was looking at. Generally each object had its own shade and intensity. Living things tended to give of brighter and more intense colors. Non-living things tended to give of dimmer, pastel colors. The mirrored box gave off a pastel yellow with splotches of blue and muddy-gray. He shifted his view to Ira and observed a similar blue aura around her. But what to make of the muddy-gray splotches? Someone else had handled the box, and probably not long ago.
He shifted the focal point of his vision forward a bit so he could see inside it.Something white with a pale green glow,He thought.And something clear – glass, I think – with a silvery, feathery glow. It must be the vial.He shifted the focal point a little further forward to verify that the vial contained water, as Ira had said.Well now,he thought.Everything is not quite as it appears.He was starting to feel the strain as Djed flowed out of him to power his aural vision.But what's white and glows green? Paper. Must be the paper she mentioned.He channeled more Djed into his vision to “see” what was written on the paper. Letters came into view, appearing as moving squiggles. It took him a while to make sense out of them. Fortunately it was a brief message.
He snapped his aural vision off and realized that he was leaning over the box with his cloaked face just inches from its shiny surface. He pushed himself back into his chair. He reached out and touched the box with his left hand, letting his aura merge into the box's aura. Then he moved his fingers over one of the muddy-gray smudges.Cold. Angry. Hungry. Death but not death. Longing.He pulled his hand away and folded both hands together on the table in front of himself. His gaze returned to the young woman staring at him from across the table.
“I now know what is in the box,”he said in a tired-sounding voice.“And I can tell you that you are indeed being followed. Pursued to be more precise. I am not entirely sure what it is, but it wants something, either you or something in your possession.”
He paused for what must have seemed like a very long time to Ira, although it was really only a few seconds. Then he continued.
“On the sign outside this tent you will find the words, 'Be careful what you ask for'. Some might take that as a kind of disingenuous piece of mumble-jumble on my part. But it is meant to be taken seriously. Now you must decide. Do you want me to tell you what is in the box?”
Comments Rhetoric is for Anselm's delightful logic. I like lists... and numbers. But lists are great x)
I'm not sure what the deal is with the box, so let me know if it's supposed to be an item that you keep. At this point, since the thread is abandoned, all I'm currently doing is disregarding the continuity of the plot and simply liquidating the thread for XP.
Let me know if you have other plans and we can talk it out.
by Anselm on June 5th, 2012, 12:29 am 
