Conversation Space I.

[powersthatbe]

The room is small, intimate. You are alone. There is no sign of a way in or out. Ping-pong balls crunch underfoot, and empty giftboxes, meticulously wrapped and ribboned, are lined up against one wall, while a humming wall of server blades are racked on the opposite wall. A high-backed, gilt chair with red velvet cushions faces an ornate, full-length mirror, and beside the chair is a mug of steaming hot chocolate on a tiny side table, steaming invitingly from beneath a layer of fifteen half-melted marshmallows.

What do you do?

Comments

[amadine]

Search for traps.

Which is to say, if she isn't interrupted, Sabetha spends some time investigating the entire room for hidden objects, hidden doors, or hidden dangers, down to feeling along the walls and mirrors for hidden catches her eyes can't spot.

[powersthatare]

As she's working on the mirror, it fogs up, as if breathed on, and almost immediately, two spots are rubbed through the condensation, just the right spacing for eyes behind the mirror to look through at her.

[amadine]

Sabetha jerks back as the fog spreads across the mirror, then stiffens, drawing herself up straight as though she can erase the moment of obvious unease if only she summons a thick enough mantle of dignity. She doesn't lean in again, though she does stare hard at the clear spots, trying to catch a flicker of movement, or a change in the environment reflected in the glass.

[powersthatare]

There are indeed eyes there, yellow and catlike, side-pupiled, studying her.

"We meet again," a voice says, in purring contralto.

[amadine]

"That may be overstating the matter a little," Sabetha replies dryly, ignoring the prickle at the back of her neck as she studies those eyes in return. She reaches out to tap the surface of the mirror, slightly to the left of her watcher, half-expecting the surface to ripple like a disturbed pond.

[powersthatare]

"Well. Here we are again, presence to presence. The other meeting was maybe a little less personal, from your perspective. But intimate, from mine."

[amadine]

"An open door is an invitation," Sabetha says. "A hidden one doubly so. What would have happened, if I'd opened the hutch?"

[powersthatare]

The mirror is solid to the touch- but not hard. Its consistency is gauzy.

"I dwell in the question, not the answer," the voice says, amused, and the eyes sparkle.

[amadine]

"Riddles," Sabetha says, mouth twisting in a grimace. "I should have expected that, from the trap you set. Will you at least tell me why you branded me? Or is that too much to ask?"

[powersthatare]

"If you wish for any answer that is not a riddle, O Keeper of Secrets and Mistress of Mysteries, you direct your wishes to the wrong being. Try the ring instead of the lamp."

[amadine]

"You speak as though I've been offered a choice in the matter." She rolls her shoulders uncomfortably, in lieu of touching the mark that rests along one shoulderblade. "If you wish for someone who's inclined to believe they're complicit in their own bondage, you've chosen the wrong Traveler."

[powersthatare]

"Yes. Our sister has represented this difficulty to us."

[amadine]

Sabetha's eyebrows lift slightly at that. "And here I would have thought such lofty beings as yourselves would consider familial ties beneath you."

[powersthatare]

"We do not easily define ourselves in speech - that much is true. But 'sister' suffices. And, besides, it pleases her."

[amadine]

"And what pleases you?" she asks, head canting slightly, as she watches the mirror to see if the eyes move with her, or stay fixed where they are. "Riddles and ritual I know, but there must be more to it than that."

[powersthatare]

They move with her, looking at her directly.

"I am knowingness, intuition. Looking inwards, and looking far without. I am that which does not belong in your understanding. I am love, in my way - that tendency within the self to reach, whether inward or outward. I am the feeling the moment before you breathe. And if you ask questions of me and expect to receive an answer that can be held in the palm of your hand, then you do not know who I am."

[amadine]

"And whose fault is that?" Sabetha snaps. "You steal your slaves from a hundred worlds, a thousand times, hide yourselves away - and then expect us to know you? As though your names and designs mean a gods-damned thing to anyone not born to a few highly specific places and eras? If I don't know you, it's because you've made less than no effort to make yourself known, or to know any of us in turn."

[powersthatare]

There's a few moments of silence, then a sigh. The eyes vanish from the mirror, and the glass unfogs, revealing a glass empty of Sabetha's reflection but in all other ways identical to the room she stands in.

"Obscurity is our greatest shield, and my favorite tool," Priestess's voice says, measured and thoughtful, cool - perhaps a little sad. "But at times, epiphany is called for. Would you know me, Sabetha Belacoros? If so, step through, and see me for what I am. I will endeavor to be sure your mind survives the experience."

[amadine]

The skin on the back of her neck prickles at the sight of the empty mirror; it strikes her as wrong in a way the alien eyes had not.

(How hard would it be to erase her entirely, as though she'd never been?)

She hesitates for a moment, belated instinct for self-preservation warring with the need to know, at least in some small measure, the nature of her patron, of some part of the game they're playing. And in the end, it's the latter that wins out.

She steps into the mirror.

[powersthatbe]

There is no other side to the mirror. Or there are a hundred thousand sides. Sabetha is alone, she is not alone, there is a presence at her shoulder, whispering in her ear. She is standing, always, in the shadows. Behind a curtain. Within a priest-hole. Under a veil. She is observing, yet unobserved. She sees children born, kings killed, prisoners escape, lovers united, treachery plotted, not in sequence but all at once, a hundred species, a hundred eras, each event played out a dozen ways, with shifts in the cast, the outcome, the set dressing, until everything she sees falls into a fractal shape, a geometry sensed, not seen; felt, not calculated, but unmistakable at a glance.

A martial artist sitting beneath a waterfall breathes in, and understands, in a tremor of muscle, how sifu mastered a technique that a thousand katas and years of practice never revealed the secret of. A queen looks across a room and sees, in the sullen thunder of a knight's gaze, the unquenched passion for her she never suspected, and never dreamed she would return, but the transformation of that unlocking moment will mean it was ever thus, coloring every memory before, every future that follows. Two siblings hang from a harness made of liquid light, chiseling at an obscured pattern on a cliffside, and each one always knows when the other is about to blow the dust away and begin a new line. Neither could say where that knowledge comes from. A blue-fleshed creature runs fingers back through her cranial tentacles, watching a foolish apprentice plot to out-smart her, and wonders if she was ever so transparent in her guile - and knows she was, and that likeness is the only reason she's discovered it now. A tired man lifts a chicken from its coop. A woman in a dark cave, headphones over her ears, learns how to subtract the sound of her own breathing from her awareness, and wonders when the next ping on the line will come, and what it will mean. A man in a fussy, comfortable hat watches a little pile of ash collapse, and the detritus spells to him in letters of dust the name and method of a killer. A boy in a room swathed in heavy curtains watches the tick of a metronome, and the sound of summer flowers unspools like a film with each tick, painted through the precise motion of his fingers in the medium of sound. A man in a spare, almost monastic room lays a vinyl disk on a turntable, closes his eyes, and sees the yellow, pollen-laden meadow the composer envisioned four hundred years, four thousand miles, and two languages apart. A green-glowing, sexless figure turns a black ring slowly in its hands, examining in infinitesimal detail every variable in the eight-thousand lines of code recorded by a split-second decision, and wonders if it will ever comprehend the whole at once, and understand how it came to be where it is. A sharp-eared young elfling flicks dragonfly wings and watches the whorls and curlicues of the mist, the dew shaking off the tops of toadstools, and sees the prism reflected in every dewdrop, a moment of pure clarity.

Mystery and unveiling. Obscurity and clarity. Resonance. Every breath, every note, every glint of light pours into her, laden with significance, until her mind bends, imagining a face in each reflected light, a biography in each shed mote of dust, all the wonder in all the worlds in every hitched breath and interrupted moment of unthought, cascading in endless perfection through the world around her, a spider-web ringing with the answers to cosmic questions half a universe away, in a tonal alphabet understood only by a key enciphered in the flicker of stars through a neon atmosphere.

Sabetha will find herself back in Liminal Space, looking down at the empty space in her hands where she doesn't hold a black ring, portions of her mind shuttering to contain the vastness of the years she experienced since the last time she inhaled - but from time to time, for just a moment, she will glimpse the macrocosm in the microcosm again, and be lost in it.