A Boy Named Mr. Me [Destyn]

[Imogen]

Yes, Destyn was justly concerned that his fingers might be caught by the crab's "pinchies", but this was simply a sacrifice which had to be made for the greater good, which is to say, dinner.

"Fear not, you will simply need to snatch with great speed and skill. The cra- the buggies have arms for pinching on the sides, yes? Well, let me tell you, I am an experienced warrior and their weakness is their own armor. For though they can attack you if you grab them from the side or the front, they can only reach there- if you snatch them by the leg or back, then they will be unable to pinch you however they might struggle."

Indeed, this was the moment that all of her years of faithful training had surely led to. Doubtless each of the old Sunsinger masters would be beaming now, basking in fulfilment of purpose to know that their techniques and advice and patient correction had led to Imogen on the beach, tying up a fae'thalen lad and giving him tips on how to grab crabs.

The witch paused for only a moment in her work, when Destyn mentioned horses. That... would truly have been a very useful totem animal to have acquired, and unbelievably easy to boot. Why in blazes had she never bothered to snip a few hairs from some steed's name on her way north from Sangen? Well, no worries, if she found her way back to Karnor in the near future she wouldn't neglect such a simple and useful form again!

"Okay, Destyn, I think I'm done with this. Let me just tie the staff to your back-"

Imogen willed the length of wood to cease floating and finished tying it loosely to the boy, humming the melody of an old tune she'd heard in the Pfenning (which, had she thought about it further, she'd have dropped; it was rather macabre to hum a tune about drowning sailors before dragging someone into the ocean). It took her only a moment to finish the contraption and she stood back, beaming at it.

"And here is the bag, as promised, with the vents that no buggie can penetrate. Now, I will return to the albatross-shape. When you are ready, simply swim out into the water, and I will be right above you."

[Destyn]

A Boy Named Mr. Me

35 Ash, 122

Destyn obviously took her at her word that she was an experienced warrior. He'd seen her in action against the fire marmoset hordes not so long ago, after all, and hadn't forgotten (though Imogen, who had a lean and hungry look, might have) that the goal in this entire endeavour was to acquire a suitable gift to offer the wee monkeys in exchange for his theft of their delicious boons.

Her strategy did seem sound. While it had occurred to Destyn that the outsidie bones of buggies were a disadvantage, as he'd broached in his oral treatise on their clumsiness when they were smushed together, he hadn't considered the limitations of the pinchie things. Most buggies he munched on didn't have pinchie things or, if they did, they were too small to concern himself with. But thinking on the smaller giant buggies that crawled at the bottom of the sea, he did recall them having rather limited range of motion with their pinchie things that correlated to Imogen's assertions. Fears of discomfort assuaged, he nodded firmly. He was resolute.

"I am now, you know, a hunter of the seas or whatever." He made his best approximation of a mean warrior face, which ended up being a narrow-eyed pout and let Imogen tend to her work. This must have been what it felt like a for a knight to be put into armour, he thought, as she bound his torso in camping rope.

"Tie away!" He encouraged, though he was squirming a bit under the itchy rope. It was tighter than was comfortable in a few places, and he was sure it would leave marks on his skin. But he was a tough warrior now, so this was to be expected.

After a few roundels of the tune, Destyn had picked it up and was humming along, bobbing his head and doing his best to keep the rest of himself still, as not to impede Imogen's work at the knots. As she stepped away, he glanced over his shoulder to find her expression was an encouraging one.

He turned to accept the bag, looking in side to assess the state of the holes.

"Looks good! I will just-..." He crouched, spreading his wings and jumped, but the way the ropes were situated impeded his wings from beating at their usual speed and he just landed back on the sand with an unimpressive plop.

"Oh." He frowned. "I... I guess I will just wade." Wrinkling his nose, he started toward the surf. His gait became a trudge as the water reached his calves and, once it was up to his waist, he took a great big deep breath, and ducked beneath the waves in search of their quarry.

A Boy Named Mr. Me

[Imogen]

Once Destyn waded into the water, Imogen began the process of changing into a bird anew.

As her body shifted, shrunk and bulged and changed in color and character of skin and feathers and talons, she was struck again by how much it felt like the Orkhan's natural power to erupt into scale and claw. She wondered idly if the feeling was worse-tolerated by those races which habitually remained in a single form. Perhaps if she could convince both Destyn and Carina to bear the rune of Animus at some future date, she would have sufficient data points to construct a theory. For the time being, she merely thought it odd that a process designed by Malgar and one (which Chief Oping, at any rate thought) was created by Aedrin should be so similar. Perhaps it was just the natural way in which shapeshifting could occur- or maybe the two Dragon Gods were brothers more than she'd thought.

Her idle musings on the levels of familitude among the pantheon were brought to a halt as she realized that she'd finished changing. She reckoned that she had gotten pretty good at the arts of Animus; before, when she'd confronted the captain of The Duck for the first time, it had taken her several minutes to complete the transformation. This felt like it had been done in a third of the time, even without utilizing the particularly exhausting instant-transformation technique she'd been taught.

The witch took a few experimental flaps, then ran a couple of steps forward and hopped lightly into the air, wings pumping to generate lift. She was airborne by the time she passed Destyn, preparing for the final submersion process.

(...perhaps she oughtn't use that terminology, it was decidedly more fatal-sounding than she wanted)

"Alright, Destyn, get ready! I'll start pulling once you're in the water."

Once Destyn's raven hair ducked below the seafoam, Imogen flapped a few more times to make sure she had the altitude to circle while blind... and shifted.

Projection was one of the more niche powers in the arsenal of any student of Reaving. The Dawnmartyr's Art was famous among different observers for different things. Tales among the common folk emphasized raw force; a warrior with five dancing blades could overwhelm a company of knights, the golden swords manifested from the soul of the wielder could (it was said) cleave lesser iron and steal in twain, and the power to call down a hundred blades at once was certainly the genesis of a legend or two. Refined audiences, such as swordsmen or masters of various training-houses or dojos liked to emphasize the subtler aspects of the rune, such as the power of morphosis, of the blades which bent or re-formed in their owner's hands, or the masters who changed sword for spear in the blink of an eye, mid-thrust. Inevitably, Reavers themselves liked to be known for such refined techniques.

(Though Imogen was personally fond of simply winning a fight in the first blow rather than subtle dances of skill. Saved a lot of time and injury in the long run.)

But even few Reavers focused on the power to place one's senses into the blade. There were specific schools of swordplay built around the concept, of course; even particular weapons which had been created with the concept in mind. Yet, invariably, it turned out that having one's sight and presence inside a weapon was less useful than having it in one's body, where it could--for example--react to threats. Projection was thus a trick favored by those mages who mastered throwing sais, or longbows, or other powers at a distance, where it could be useful to guide the projectiles. Master Gerhard had insisted that she learn it to a basic level for the purposes of spear-throwing, but if pressed he would admit that it was seldom all that useful.

But what was largely impractical for combat was excellent for aiming Destyn at crabs. When Albagen's eyes closed, her field of vision immediately shifted to the shallows, where she could easily direct the staff, a construct of her soul, to move. And move it did, accelerating immediately and leaving a trail of bubbles as it pulled Destyn down towards the murky depths. In a sudden fit of inspiration, Imogen lit the sunstone embedded in the staff, illuminating the shadowy sea-floor and immediately revealing several of the very crustaceans they sought.

With a will, the Sunsinger drove the fae snatcher towards the shellfish, who doubtlessly had never seen any sight quite so terrifying.

[Destyn]

A Boy Named Mr. Me

35 Ash, 122

Destyn didn't see any gianter giant buggies that crawled at the bottom of the sea when he first delved beneath the tides. His eyes caught sight of a few things, though, all of which took a moment to register. The first was seaweed floating in clumps which, upon closer inspection, was orbited by little fishes and very, very tiny buggies that crawled not at the bottom of the sea, but kicked their tiny legs and little wingy things quite rapidly to stay aloft in the water. It reminded him of his own wings and how he took to the air though, of course, these were far slower and on the whole inferior to his now-folded wings when they were about their aerial work.

He could also see larger fish a bit further out, which upon seeing him, elected to move farther still and out of sight. But one boon to Destyn's sight that would aid in the endeavour at hand, was his cryptochrome vision. It didn't augment his clarity of sight, but it did give him access to more information about his surroundings in terms of natural fields that were invisible to most, but crystal clear to his crystal blue eyes.

He only had a few moments to take in his surroundings, before his eyes widened as the staff at his back began to move of its own (or really Imogen's) volition, propelling him forward. He grinned through his puffy cheeks, and had to fight off the urge to giggle or exclaim his excitement, which would have expended breath he ought not waste. So he was just a smiley approximation of a pufferfish, darting the waves at a pace that would have been the envy of any actual specimen of the same.

The feeling of being whipped below the waves was fun! It felt like he was a kid, being tossed around by his Kineticist cousins before he'd surpassed the flying equivalent of toddling. A first foray into flight before he'd mastered that means of conveyance. This felt like a similar experience for swimming the sea. He was having so much fun, in fact, that he forgot why he was there, until he found himself hurdling toward a gianter giant buggy that crawled at the bottom of the sea.

The creature seemed as surprised as Destyn himself, but the Fae sprung to action grabbing it with one hand and sweeping it toward his holey sack.

"Mm!" He winced at the pinch of its claw. In the rush to action, he'd failed to take Imogen's advice about where to grab them and his hand was in range of a pincer, which was now digging into the meat between his thumb and index finger. The crustacean was half in the bag (literally, not euphemistically) and seemed disinclined to release its grip despite his efforts to shake it free. He was glad they'd secured the staff to his back rather than having him hold onto it, because with two free hands he was ultimately able to liberate himself and capture the vicious gianter giant buggie that crawled at the bottom of the sea no longer. Now it inhabited the bag and, though he was bleeding slightly, and it quite stung against the salt of the water around them, Destyn was victorious and Imogen was vindicated. For indeed these gianter giant buggies that crawled at the bottom of the sea were cruel creatures, designed to deal pain with fingies built to pinch. Pinching was famously a rude and vile act across all cultures of which Destyn was aware, so for nature to produce an entity for whom pinching was the default form of touch? It said a lot about such a creature. Destyn felt no remorse harvesting such creatures from the seabed, though as he was guided toward the next, he was more careful about the placement of his hand as he snatched it up.

A Boy Named Mr. Me

[Imogen]

This was working? Really?

Well, one couldn't argue with results. Destyn had successfully snatched up one of the bottom-feeders just as they'd drawn up the plans; though the crab had tried to dispute its fate, in the end all things had to be snatched by something. Truly, the two of them were just agents of a higher power, one which had observed the short nautical lives of these creatures and found them wanting. And delicious.

The method was... well, it wasn't elegant, per se, but as her inner eye swept the newly-sunlit seafloor for additional crabby prey, she thought it might be more effective than she'd expected. The crabs could scuttle across the seabed with alacrity, but they couldn't outpace her telekinetically-propelled staff, and their camouflage was worthless in the light of the dawnstone. No part of the evolutionary process had given them effective tools against suddenly being grabbed by an appendage longer than their entire bodies and stuffed into a sack, either.

She had to admit that it was a somewhat bizarre feeling, though. She could see the water moving past- although she would have been hard pressed to describe the vantage point her projection offered. Even conceptualizing the distinction between vision from the eyes and vision from the staff's surface was kind of difficult, the sort of effort which she wasn't convinced she had a suitable vocabulary for. Vision in mortal form, of course, came from light received by the eyes, but the eyes weren't a single point, they worked together to generate... something of a false tableau. Yet, they were distinctly located partway up the front of your face, and the field of vision was roughly congruent with that. The staff had no eyes, and her vision was more of a field about it, which was definitely convenient in how it provided her with a greater degree of vision, but quite confusing to think about.

Moreover, the sight of smooth wood moving through water while the ocean breeze and sunlight flowed over her feathers was giving her a fairly unpleasant disjoint sensation. (Though Imogen could not know it, she was currently fighting down a form of carsickness.)

Still, there was no time to indulge her tendency to wax curious into internal monologue right now. She needed to guide Destyn to new, even larger crabs! Probably a half-dozen would stuff full the little bag they'd created, and provide plenty of succulent seafood for all their purposes. That shouldn't take too long, but...

...well, perhaps this should have been something she thought of earlier, but how often did Destyn need to surface to breathe? She couldn't actually see his face from this angle. Maybe one more crab, and then back up?

He did say that his clan was all about hunting in the ocean. Imogen reasoned, I'll bet he can go a reaaallly long time. But we'll go a little less long than that, just to be totally sure.

Safety was the number one concern in crab fishing, after all.

She aimed Destyn for another crab, then prepared herself to aim back for the surface when something suddenly slammed into her. Her Projection faltered, and collapsed, and she opened her albatross-eyes to see that some manner of murder turkey had just raked her right down the side.

► Show Spoiler

Imogen flapped, struggling to get into the air and turn around on her attacker, her talons bursting with silver light.

~~~

Meanwhile, beneath the waves, the expedition was roughly three crabs in when the staff suddenly ceased moving, Imogen's connection to it momentarily broken. Then it began to move unpredictably, caught in the witch-girl's sudden surprise as she tried to drive off the horrible thing attacking her above.

[Destyn]

A Boy Named Mr. Me

35 Ash, 122

Destyn was invigorated by his present task. Not only was it fun and exciting to do something so different and new, but it also felt like a noble endeavour, now that Imogen had enlightened him to the vile monopoly pinched within the cruel claws of the gianter giant buggies that crawled at the bottom of the sea and oppressed their smaller counterparts. Having since been pinched himself, he was all the more resolute in the righteousness of their cause as he snatched another of their number and stuffed it unceremoniously into the perforated sack.

For some reason, he'd expected the creatures to be a bit more ubiquitous- all crawling over each other in a copious mass of deliciousness from which he could just sweep in and scoop up a sack's full. Upon further consideration, this didn't really jive with the description of a greedy, selfish breed of monopolists. They were territorial, after all. All this was to say the distance was greater from one to the next than he'd expected and, as enlivening as it was to dart like an arrow (or he supposed like a magically manipulated quarterstaff) through the water, he was not actually amphibious. He could just hold his breath at length, and he could feel that duration had surpassed its half life by the time he was sent on an approach vector toward his third crustacean mark. For this one, he actually tried to bypass the risky act of plucking them up with his fingies. He opened the draw string of the sack and tried to scoop it directly into the vessel to join its crustacean cohorts.

Success! He tightened the string and was about to extend his arm in a gesture of celebration, which was intended to be followed up by a gesture of 'please let me up now so I can breathe', but neither was to be. Instead, the rapid forward momentum he'd so enjoyed, gave way to a chaotic swirling and jerking. It was alarming enough that the startled Fae actually let out a yelp, and released yet more of the precious waning air yet in his lungs. Panicking and flailing, he didn't have the presence of mind to even think of what might be happening, he just knew he wanted out of the water. The overweening need to breathe became paramount and all else was insignificant. There wherefore didn't come into it as he fought the will of the staff, using all of his humanoid limbs and both sets of wings to defy the depths in favour of the surface. His wings still stung, too tight against the harness, but he fought through the pain to resist the whims of the aetheric engine that had so recently seemed like such a treat, before becoming treacherous.

A Boy Named Mr. Me

[Imogen]

In 1651, Thomas Hobbes published his treatise Leviathan, wherein he famously quipped that the state of nature is a "war of all against all", a zero-sum existence in which each man must worry that each other man will kill him for whatever advantage may accrue, in absence of some greater system to prevent it. Life in such a state, he wrote, would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

In a way, this reflects upon Imogen's hastily-conceived scheme. The crabs she had framed as capitalists, as feudal lords who forced their smaller brethren from the briny depths to the foamy shallows, and so conceived of her program of capture as valiant, revolutionary. They were the old guards of an unjust system, and she and Destyn were the spearheads of equity, operating outside the constraints of crab hierarchy and crab law (if indeed crustaceans may be said to have laws), a force of righteousness with the power to cast aside the perfidy of the ocean buggies and lay a new and benevolent peace upon the sea.

Yet in the hour they chose to strike, another power saw their own opportunity. And this is the crux of Hobbes' argument, that unconstrained force may be wielded by those with evil hearts as readily as those with pure hearts- and indeed, he might say, who could claim with objectivity that the petrels currently trying to drag Albagen from the sky were less righteous? She sought to eat, they sought to eat; one would eat and the other would be eaten. Was this not the state of nature she had wanted? Did the sudden realization that she might lose the war of all against all mean that she would now pray for the return of some Leviathan herself?

...

In another, more pertinent way, Leviathan is not an actual book in this setting and you probably shouldn't draw answers to complex moral issues from the fact that sometimes birds attack each other anyway.

And, anyway, this battle was not destined to be close. Giant Petrels, a name unknown to Imogen, who was certain these were some species of... exotic jungle turkey, are large birds and valiant fighters. They have powerful beaks, sharp talons, and a nasty habit of coming at their prey from blind spots. Evolution, to its great credit, had made them excel at every art needed to kill and eat small mammals and rodents and even seabirds. It had not, however, prepared them for magic spears.

Magic spears were certainly Imogen's first instinct, and so that's what she did. Silver light erupted in the air about her, as golden lances materialized in the sky and fired themselves backwards at the birds harassing the albatross witch. Frankly, the dozen or so which she launched was overkill. As soon as each Giant Petrel realized that some unseen force was chucking flaming spears at them, they veered away from Imogen, thoughts of prey forgotten. Two or three would have been enough to spook the entire flock, but restraint is easier when someone hasn't been startled all the way back into their body from the ocean.

As the spears plunged into the ocean and fizzled back into non-existence, however, she suddenly remembered Destyn's plight. Not bothering to take the seconds required to Project her consciousness back into the water, she flew back downward, mentally commanding her staff to surface. A moment later, faster than she would have thought, it breached the water's surface, carrying the fae'thalan lad.

"Destyn!" Imogen screamed, trying to get close enough to observe his face, "Destyn! Are you okay? Can you breathe?!"

[Destyn]

A Boy Named Mr. Me

35 Ash, 122

As Albagen waged her brief but rather literal war overhead, Destyn was battling no conscious combatant. Still, the danger was no less legitimate even if the force with which he reckoned was a mindless byproduct of the witch's panic about an unrelated ambush above. At a certain point, even the Fae himself became essentially a mindless reactionary as instinct kicked in and forced him to writhe and jerk with no real plan of action for how to free himself from the grip of the staff or the tides. He was beyond planning, as he started swallowing seawater.

By the time his comrade in arms against the crustacean menace willed her quarterstaff to rise, Destyn had lost consciousness. No longer fighting the will of the staff, he was just hung from the makeshift harness limply. As he emerged from the water, the sack of crabs came up with him as the drawstring somehow hooked itself to his wrist. But that boon was short lived and, in the open air, the pull of the water dragged the string down his arm and the sack of captured crustaceans tumbled back toward the water to sink beneath the waves as a chaotic, exoskeletal danse macabre poked at the canvas from within.

As Imogen drew closer, she would find Destyn's face discoloured. Though paler than usual, there was a background bluish hue replacing the sunkissed gold that typically tinted his complexion. His wings drooped behind him, and his arms and legs dangled like the limbs of a marionette. Thus did Destyn, in failing to respond to Imogen's question, answer it in the negative.

A Boy Named Mr. Me

[Imogen]

Imogen was not a doctor of any sort, and had little experience with the symptoms of drowning- people who fell into the Talacara either swam back out or were not found until the river dipped in high Searing, at which point they'd probably been dead for months. Nevertheless, she was familiar enough with the basic concepts to grasp that people really did need to breathe.

She neither registered the falling bag of agitated crabs, nor would she care about them if she had. The still pallor of Destyn's bright face was horror enough to drive all thoughts of mere lunch from her mind forever. Instead, she swam over to his drifting body and, acting on instinct, poured her aether into the Rune, shoving herself back into the body of an Orkhan woman via force of will and chrystalry alone. Birdflesh and feathers swelled and burst, blood splattering the water as she had neither the time nor the focus to properly prune them back into energy before tearing them off her own form.

Imogen floated there for a moment, totally nude, next to the staff carrying the drowned boy, before thought kicked in again. Thankfully, while she'd never been called on to deal with drowning, the arts of soldiering and witchcraft both demanded of practitioners the ability to maintain a cool head in a crisis.

What do I do? she thought furiously, He's not breathing. Is there anything I can do?

Air, that was it. His lungs were full of water- she needed to push the water out and get air in. She couldn't do that in the water, so she grabbed her staff and willed it to drag them both to the shore. It took more time--more agonizing time, where each second felt like an hour--but it got them there.

As soon as the magical conveyance dumped Imogen and Destyn on the wet sand, Imogen dismissed it, freeing the lifeless boy from the bonds she'd tied him with minutes ago. The Ork pulled Destyn onto his back, taking care (even now) not to tear his delicate wings, and threw herself against his chest, trying to pump it. She'd never seen the procedure actually performed, but took some heart from the fact that the force drove sticky slicks of water from his mouth.

There was something else too, right? To drive breath back into the drowned lungs? Mouth-to-mouth.

That was... probably not possible for an Ork, actually. Imogen's tusks were petite for an Orkhan, but they were still sharp enough to gore the fey boy's mouth. But, exhausting as it seemed, she had a work-around. She summoned up the rest of her aether, uncaring if she overstepped in the process, and invoked chrystalry again, this time intentionally. The process was easier, given the smaller difference in mass and shape, but repeated full-body transformation was tiring.

Nonetheless, moments later a small human woman stood where Imogen had, shorter now than Destyn. Carinagen inhaled deeply, trying to pull as much oxygen into her little human lungs as she could, then grabbed Destyn's mouth, forcing it open and locking lips so she could push it into his waterlogged lungs.

[Destyn]

A Boy Named Mr. Me

35 Ash, 122

In the dreamless dark of some void between worlds, Destyn hung as if harnessed to a standing quarterstaff. He might have hoped such an instance, being on the precipice of Death itself, would bring him closer to the shades of his lost kinsfolk. Oughtn't trauma be met with some sort of reward? Some modicum of catharsis? It wasn't. It was met with pitchy blackness and utter helplessness. Somehow aware that he was not dead, he wasn't certain through which veil he preferred to go.

He might return to the one he'd just breached. He had friends who loved him, a home and adventures still on his horizon. Or he might venture into the final frontier... Having whet his appetite for adventure with his exploits on the Duck, he knew a thing or two about casting oneself bodily into a sea of uncertainty. That was what had led him here and, through that veil, perhaps he might broach that which was missing from this purgatory- A reunion with the family he'd failed so utterly.

With nothing to do but think, he soon realised it was not up to him, truly. Standing on the bridge between Life and Death, his feet would not step nor his wings beat. He was at the mercy of forces outside this ream of in-between.

Suddenly the black turned red, and the world grew smaller. His eyes shot open and were unfocused to what lay before them as he started to cough. It would take a moment and the rearing back of the woman for him to realise that he'd just coughed some bilious seawater directly into the mouth of a stranger. He jerked over onto his side as more fluid came spewing out of him and onto the beach. After a few moments of uncontrollable coughing that exhausted his body, he lifted his weak head and regarded the woman who'd pulled him back from the abyss.

"But... who are you, though?" He rasped.

A Boy Named Mr. Me