An Ironic Name [Anton]

[Vanessa Quill]

"Not just a known place. Don't run back towards a safe haven. Sail off in a random direction, and double back once they've lost sight of you. Fly in the clouds, or above them." Vanessa explained. "Even if the folk don't mean to tail you, they'll tell the authorities what direction you flew off in when they get back to port. Got them jumping at shadows then if you broke off in a random direction instead of back towards safety." when Vanessa spoke like this, it was clear that Anton was right to insist she was not a fool. She spoke with authority, but without condescension. She liked that she could share a part of her life with Anton, simple though it was.

She liked it far more than trying to read, which felt like assembling a puzzle without a picture to reference. Her aura dampened further when Anton corrected her. Vanessa hated being wrong, but she hated being publicly wrong worst of all. There was no one she would have wanted to see her failure less than Anton, but it was for that reason that she also endured. "There." Vanessa repeated, sounding the word out slowly as she read over the page. She focused on the letters, and their order, before committing them to memory.

Then Anton told her the sentence she was reading, and Vanessa pursed her lips. She studied the page, and slowly could see the words come into focus. Each word was separated by a small space, which Vanessa used her index finger to keep track of. This way, she could intuit where one word began and another ended, but she still did not understand most of them. She could make them out because Anton had given her the answer key, but only understood a select few.

"Girl." Vanessa pointed to the word, and then dragged her finger across. "Love" She pointed again. "Sky." The last one was easy for her, as she recognized the letters, and also knew that it was the last word of the sentence. "I can... put the sentence together around those words, because you told me what the other ones are, but that's not how you're supposed to do it, I don't think?" Vanessa seemed genuinely unsure, which was a rarity among rarities. Vanessa was always sure, even when she could not be more wrong.

[Anton]

Anton was relieved that Vanessa had something to hold onto to take confidence in while they talked, because he knew just how much she disliked admitting she was wrong. It wasn't exactly subtle of her, and while he had no desire to taunt her for it, it was a problem that they would have to work through if they were going to get anywhere. She might have gotten this far in life being an illiterate rapscallion, but her liege lord only needed the rapscallion for his own plans.

Every flutter in her aura caused a sympathetic change in his own, the mage being able to notice all too well how her inability tormented her. While he hoped that soon enough they'd be able to change that into the pride of accomplishment, but that would take time and effort. "You're correct, it's not. You know more than you let on that you do though," he pointed out, genuine praise. It was good that she already knew her letters, more or less, now it was just a matter of pouring vocabulary into her. Easier said than done, true, but easier still than the work of teaching her everything from scratch. He wasn't entirely confident he could teach letters anyway.

"I want you to read as much as you can of the first page, and tell me what you think it says. We can work from there," he said gently, while certain that she would have preferred that he had instead ordered her to kill every single Warder in the Order of Reconciliation with a rusty cutlass. Turning the book towards her, he watched and waited.

There once was a girl who loved the sky. Every day she dreamed of flying through it and touch the clouds. Even though the girl had no wings, she wanted to fly. She knew that huge ships floated with the clouds she loved, and decided she would have one for herself, so much did she love the sky.

[Vanessa Quill]

Vanessa stared at the page, hard eyes focused on the symbols both familiar and foreign. She had encountered the written word before, and through exposure had learned to recognize select words, but her grasp of them was similar to someone just beginning to learn a foreign language. The words were a collection of symbols, but she lacked a clear understanding of how those symbols collectively created the whole.

Despite her discomfort, Vanessa's scowl did fade slightly when Anton spoke to her. Her expression did not turn positive, but she did at least look less inclined to destroy the book for daring to be incomprehensible to her. He needed her to know how to read, it was as simple as that. She would not let her inability in any area endanger Anton's safety. "You learn enough to get by, I s'pose." She replied, not swelling at the praise nor shrinking herself from it. Even still, it was impossible for her to hide the flicker of light that returned to her aura when he assured her that she was not utterly hopeless.

That warmth lasted right up until she was told to read an entire damned page from the book. Her fingers twitched, nearly balling into fists before Vanessa restrained herself. After setting her jaw, Vanessa pulled the book closer and offered an almost defeated "Alright,".

Her eyes fixed on the image first, hesitant to actually confront the unknown. After a few perilously long seconds, Vanessa dragged her eyes over the words, and a wave of unease sluiced over her. The words were not immediately clear to her, and instead were an assortment of semi-recognizable shapes in unfamiliar patterns. Determined as she was though, Vanessa pressed on past the initial deluge of discomfort and studied the page intently.

Slowly, the words began to come into focus. It was not a quick process, and Vanessa had to cobble together the unfamiliar words by using the ones she recognized as a blueprint. By taking the words she knew, and trying to isolate the letters to specific sounds, Vanessa was able to brute force her way through most of the words on the page. While it had all of the finesse of using a firearm to pick a lock, it was progress.

"There once was a girl who loved the sky." Vanessa began, repeating the sentence that Anton had already told her. She was less sure after that, the words coming more slowly, with more quick glances to Anton to see if she was on the right track. "Every day, she... I don't know that one, of flying... something, it and touch the clouds." Vanessa reached over to her scrap sheet of paper and took initiative to write down the words she did not know as she came across them.

By the time she was finished, the list was shorter than she expected, thought it was still the very first page of a book for children. She struggled most with the silent letters, her method of brute force ineffective against something defined by its absence. She turned the paper over towards Anton. 'Through', 'Though', 'Huge' 'Dreamed' 'Knew' were written on it, the letters blocky and oddly spaced. "Are these different letters?" Vanessa then asked, dragging her finger between W and V. "The words don't make sense with a V sound." she added quickly, as if trying to prove that she had tried to figure it out on her own.

[Anton]

"There once was a girl who loved the sky. Every day she dreamed of flying through it and touch the clouds. Even though the girl had no wings, she wanted to fly. She knew that huge ships floated with the clouds she loved, and decided she would have one for herself, so much did she love the sky," Anton repeated after Vanessa was done, taking note of how much she already knew and had gotten correct. "Very good. You know how to read much more than you like to think you do." He resisted the urge to tell her that he had told her so as well, but only just.

Looking over her list, he nodded in response to her question. "Loved has a v, in the middle of the word. Knew ends in a w. They might look similar," Anton guessed, "but they are quite different. The letter w is closer to u than v," he explained. At least, as best he could without being able to actually see the letters. It was more difficult than he liked to admit, but he had the advantage of having an exceptionally bright student.

"As far as these words though... Through and though are kind of strange, aren't they? As is knew, come to think of it. Whenever the pompous asses met in their expensive manner to decide how words were spelled, one of them thought it'd be funny if they added some letters that you didn't actually say. I'll try to see if I can figure out why they did that the next time there's a meeting, pretty sure we're hosting the next one. Oh, and that one, that's huge," Anton explained in a self deprecating air, the lordling still somewhat out of sorts about the idea of being a teacher and doing his best not to put on airs.

And then he turned the page.

The girl was very poor, and her mother and father always working. When she was old enough, she started to work too. She worked as close as she could to the airships that touched the sky. She swept and cleaned and brought things for their crews. She knew them and they knew her. And they all knew how one day she swore she'd touch the sky.

[Vanessa Quill]

Vanessa sat forward, mind as focused as it could be. Once the book was out of her immediate vision, she could feel the familiarity of the letters begin to fade. She scrambled to commit them to memory, but could feel herself forgetting. Confidence drained from her, and she placed her head in one hand, propped up by her elbow. "I..." She trailed off. For an instant, she had considered contradicting him, insisting that she couldn't do this. That defiance died unsaid in her throat. No, she wouldn't quit. For as much as she hated this foggy feeling of unease, and she did hate it, she knew that Anton wouldn't be standing beside her and trying to teach her if she had been anyone else.

"It's hard." She finally finished. "When I go letter by letter, I can figure it out. But it doesn't-" She tapped her temple. "Stick." She tried to explain. She had never been adept at explaining what occurred in her thought-cage, but still she tried. "I'm still not rememberin' the letters too good. Feels like I'm starting over each time."

Then she listened to him explain the words, and she couldn't keep from grinning. "Through... Though." She repeated, looking down at her paper. "If you find the guy who's responsible for that, make sure to bump into him so I've got a reason to lay him on his ass." And Vanessa laughed. A true laugh, loud and rich with mirth. She leaned back in her chair, one hand on her stomach. "Speakin' of, did you learn to read before... y'know?" She still did not dare speak the full truth aloud. "Or did that come after?"

But she did not wait for him to answer before she looked back down at the page. Again she used the few words she knew as a sort of cipher to decode the rest. It began as well as it could, each word still requiring her to verify each letter independently of the whole. At times she was silent, but mostly she opted to sound out each letter aloud. "The girl was very poor." she put emphasis on the 'W' sound, committing to memory its difference from the first letter of her own name. "And her..." A long word followed, and Vanessa's eyes scanned it. There was an almost dizzying minute of silence as the bodyguard tried to understand the word. "Mother." she finally, finally letting out a breath she hadn't noticed she was holding. "And-" she paused again, another long word, so soon? That hardly seemed fair. But after she recognized the first letter, Vanessa felt awfully smart when she simply said. "Father." She hadn't truly read the word, but instead simply presumed that you would refer to both a mother and a father. It almost felt like cheating on a test, but others might more correctly note it as pattern recognition.

On she went, before she pointed to the word 'enough'. "Now what's this one trying to do?" she asked, as though she was accusing the word itself of sedition. "If through and though are spelled like that, then this is..." She shook her head. "Not a fucking word, that's for sure."

She skipped it for now, moving on. The other words were small, and she was able to more easily approximate them. She was even starting to recognize a few of the smaller words, the pauses between them only a few seconds long as she made sure that she was right.

She finished the page and sat back. She still struggled with a few words like 'brought' and 'knew', though the latter had become easier once she had heard Anton say it aloud and she now knew to simply ignore the first letter. "Sounds more n' a bit like me. Can see why you picked this one."

[Anton]

"Thank Amelia," he admitted, finally daring to take the plunge. "She's a very driven girl, very ambitious. Broke father's heart when she swore to join the Air Defense Corps instead of fighting on the ground. Relieved him at the same time too though, his face was a sight to see," Anton said with a slight smile at the memory. Poor Franz had never quite gotten over the mixture of branch rivalry and desire to not see his daughter down in the mud. "Insisted that we get every last book there was with an airship. We bought ten, which seemed about right for what a four year old would think counted as all of them."

And so they settled in to their work, Anton only turning the page to the next in the young girl's adventure after being satisfied that Vanessa understood each and every word. It wasn't a particularly novel tale, when all was said and done, and the censoring required for it to be printed in Zaichaer shortened it significantly. Reading between the lines, it was clear that one day she ran away from home and sneaked her way aboard an airship, discovering too late that it was actually a pirate vessel.

Of course, glorifying such could not be tolerated for children's literature, and the hasty edits had her accidentally stay aboard while making one of her deliveries, but the fact that she didn't ask to go back to her home stayed the same in both versions. In time, the pirates came to respect her, and ultimately consider her part of the crew and at last she touched the sky. To Vanessa's great consternation, even in the original there was no actual piracy on the page - it was a children's book after all.

[Anton]

Review

Anton

Lore: 13
Points: 10, may be used for Semblance
Injuries/Ailments: None
Loot: None

Vanessa

Lore: 13
Points: 10, may not be used for Magic
Injuries/Ailments: None
Loot: None

Notes: I actually really liked this one