This Most Familiar Chain: Tale of Spirit and Magician

19. Hold on Let me Write This Down


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Ask her about her nose! No, her hands! Her collarbone! What other human parts are there...her skeleton! Hey Ariela, how's your skeleton doing?! Wait, do humans have skeletons?! This is a serious matter! You know precisely what to ask her now.​

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(Just ask her about her family).

Right. Family. Not skeletons. Family. That's a good one to ask. She has a family. Probably. Does she? Yes. She has a brother and a painting of her mother...but her mother was not a painting, she just was painted. Well, there was a painting of her. Ugh, phrasing! How do you put this into normal terms. You need some starch to get through this articulation problem. You reach into your sleeve for a pocket tuber, and a few seconds later, the potato is gone. You had forgotten just how lovely that variety could taste; you had been saving it for a very special occasion, such as having to sit through a conversation with someone (I suppose for us that is a very special occasion). The creamy goodness of that variety simply cannot be beat. But then, just as you're about to ask her, Ariela cuts in.

"Fascinating," Ariela says with a curious air, like she's just discovered a new property of some specimen. She is leaning in a bit too closely over the table, her eyes narrowed, and you grip the bottom of your seat and shift it back a little bit.

"What?" You say with confusion. What could possibly have caught her attention now?

"The potato," Ariela says as if it's obvious (oh no she caught us).

"What potato," you say, flatly denying it, as a bit of red forms on your cheeks.

"Oh, come on. I don't think it's odd, I just think it's fascinating," Ariela says with a reassuring tone. "It just reminded me of something."

"What reminded you of what," you say, not breaking eye contact as you bunch up your skirts under the table and furrow your brow. "I didn't do anything."

"Okay," Ariela concedes, "that's fine. You didn't eat the potato. How was the potato you didn't eat?"

"It was delicious! I've never had a potato quite like that one-" You say in a chipper voice, and then immediately put your hands over your mouth. A smirk forms on Ariela's face and you glare at her, utterly dejected. Why does it always have to go like this! Everyone's always asking you questions about potatoes, why you eat potatoes. Your mother never understood. Grandma Snow once tried to trick you by giving you a sack of potatoes that was actually spiders. That was not funny. That was not funny at all.

"...Fine, I ate a potato."

"You didn't really eat it, I'd say you kind of..." Ariela corrects you as she tilts her head to the side, in a way that you feel is almost mocking you (Starfall I think she's just joking around). "liquefied it."

That does it. That's enough. You will not allow your magician to join in the carrot gallery of people who are constantly insulting you for your preference towards spud (Starfall, please, she wasn't even-)

"And what of it! I like potatoes! And you know what!" You stand up and point an accusatory finger at her. "I eat a lot of potatoes! There, I confessed it! What are you going to do about it, huh?! I have been eating them since I was very young and very small, and I have never found them displeasing in any way! What? Are you some kind of freak who thinks it's okay to denigrate others on the basis of their culinary choices?! Do you want to know why I like the potato so much? Do you think it's because when i was four years old or something my best friend who was a potato died in a horrible accident and it made me very sad and I eat them to honor him? No, that would be stupid, and would spoil the flavor! I like them because they are good, and I am not apologizing for it, and I am going to keep eating them!" You shout, before retrieving another potato from your sleeve and eating it right then and there, chewing aggressively.

Ariela pushes herself back up against her seat and puts a hand on her chest, breathing in and out, before releasing a sigh. "Right. I won't- wasn't making fun of the potatoes. But I'll keep that in mind. Can you sit down now, please?"

Satisfied, you push up your frilly skirt and plop yourself right back down across from her as she gazes off into the distance, strangely shaken. What, was she afraid? Why on earth would you be scary to anyone, you're incredibly charming (oh honey). What? (At least apologize). What for? (You don't seem to understand how fragile humans are, do you? You could blow them over with a stiff breeze if you weren't careful. Look at her. She just had her life flash before her eyes because she apparently triggered your innate sense of potato-themed justice). And indeed, when you see the way she's staring at you now, it's a little bit more wary, a little more tight-lipped, the way she keeps her hands to herself, her ears flushed red from embarrassment.

And then you try to imagine it from her perspective and it makes so much sense. You, the awesome, enormous starfall, thousands of feet higher than her, towering over her as you proclaim your eternal love for spud, and there she is, the puny, sad, fragile, human, who has done everything to please you until now, who has worked so very hard to apologize for her past transgressions to you, with whom you thought you had devised an excellent rapport, nay, a companionship, has now had her will crumble to dust. How cruel you are! How utterly cruel (okay, don't overstate it).

"I'm sorry," you say, "I didn't mean to scare you. I am just very passionate on potatoes. They are my favorite food out of all..." you tally them in your head, "all five. Out of all five foods. I spend a lot of time thinking about them. And people often say, 'Starfall, she's so crazy, all she does is eat potatoes'. But it's not true. I do more than just eat them. Potatoes can be cooked, or hand-broiled, right in your palm. You can put them into salads. You can slice them up, or fry them into individual little bits, or make the bits a little bigger and have shredded potato oiled patties."

Ariela's posture softens and she relaxes a little. "I...I understand. I'll take your-"

"Stuff potatoes with other kinds of potatoes to create a particular kind of repeating potato dish. Create a potato pie, using potato slices, and mashed potato for the actual contents. Fry the slices till golden brown, then lay them down-"

"Starfall," Ariela says, putting up a hand and interrupting your recipes, but gently. "I think I get it. I think I do. You like potatoes. Potatoes calm you down. Are you nervous about talking to me?"

You hesitate to answer, but after a pause, you nod your head.

"It's nothing to be ashamed of. You didn't have many opportunities to socialize, did you? It's okay. I was like that too, when I was younger. I'd hide behind my mother when she met people I didn't recognize. Oh, she had to pry me off her trouser leg," she says with a wistful laugh. "But I got better. She helped me fight my fears, and I got better. It takes time, though. So let's take it slow?"

You nod your head again, this time very slowly.

"It's a metaphor."

Compensating, you nod your head again, this time very fast.

"Just- at your own pace, Starfall. Your own pace. I'm going to try and approach this not as a problem with you..." she trails off as she tries to find the words, "but as a puzzle we can solve. The puzzle of how to talk to people. Do you like puzzles, Starfall?"

Oh, that sets you right off. "I liked puzzles, but they got boring. I used to get riddles from Dea-from a friend, but they were always super morbid and had some horrible ending so I stopped asking for them. Very annoying! I'd always ask her, hey, can you give me something that doesn't end in murder, and she'd say, well I have this one that ends in mass murder, and I'd just sigh."

Ariela smiles weakly at that, standing up and going to make another kettle of tea. You don't want to be the only one talking, so you clear your throat.

"So, um, your mother. What was she like?" You ask. You have a hard time imagining mothers other than your mother. You have a few grandmothers, it's true, but they behave very differently from your mother. For one thing, you assume at the least that every mother has a firebreathing component to their parenting repertoire.

Ariela walks over to the samovar, surrounded as the urn is by steel and metal lest it catch the wooden barge ablaze, and refills the kettle with steaming hot water. As she retrieves more of the tea leaves from the cupboard (I just realized we're probably stealing all of this expensive tea but frankly they owe us anyways, and anyways, as you would say, who cares about money anyway) she talks. "Ah, Mum. I was actually thinking about her when you were eating those potatoes. The story of the strawberry-addicted sword. You see- before she had me, Mum used to be a tiler. She'd hunt magical beings, because sometimes spirits would go mad or else just start attacking humans, and they'd send the tilers after them."

"Tilers?" You ask, imagine a person who's job it is to lay down floor tiles. "Did the spirits ruin the floor?" No wonder they needed to be punished...a poorly made floor could cause you to stub your toe or worse!

"No, no." She says with a hint of bemusement as she steeps the tea in the kettle. "But not far off. In the olden days, houses would need to be warded against wandering spirits. The magicians who warded it were called Tilers because they'd often have to fix some hole in the roof that was letting spirits in. So they'd put down magical tiles. Obviously we don't really need house wards anymore. Nowadays, the tilers are just the army. They protect the frontier and the countryside. So Mum joined a unit of them for a while because they were the most exciting, and they gave her an enchanted sword. But as it turns out, the sword they gave her was cursed, because they wanted to haze her."

"Cursed...?" You think back to a story that Death told you. "Did the sword contain the souls of the damned?" (all the stories about curses contain the souls of the damned).

Ariela pours the tea into two separate mugs. "No, the sword did not contain the souls of the damned. But it did have a particular penchant for strawberry jam. They're a type of fruit that was brought from abroad, and this sword had gotten utterly hooked on the taste. When it wouldn't get strawberry jam it'd go crazy. The Tilers thought it would be hilarious- prank the young countess with a sword that didn't work. But mum wouldn't have it. She found out about it, and asked for permission to 'fix' the sword. Her superior officer, the one who had given her the sword, snorted and gave her permission, telling her she could fix the sword by any means necessary, because he knew she'd never be able to. Of course, they expected her to go running to a library, or off on a wild hunt for the leshy who had cursed it. But she didn't do that. No, she just calmly brought the sword with her to a giant patch of strawberries, unsheathed it, and just hacked right through it. There was strawberry juice everywhere, and the sword said it was happy, but she just kept going. And she'd ask the sword, do you like strawberries now? How about now? And she'd just drown it in strawberry jam. And it'd beg her to stop, and she'd ask it again, how about now? And by the third hour it said it didn't like strawberries anymore and she came back to her officer painted red from head to toe by the fruity carnage, and she just told him, 'I fixed it'.

She carries the tea over, putting one at your seat and one for herself. "Now, as it turns out, she had hacked through the officer's prized strawberry field. Entirely coincidentally, I'm sure. So he tried to get her thrown out of the Tilers, but the Black Baron, the general who had presided over it, just asked who had given her the order to fix it by any means necessary, and when the officer sheepishly said it was him, the Black Baron apparently laughed so hard he accidentally resurrected a local wizard and it took them a week to exorcise it. But anyways, she got off easy, and they let her keep the sword, which promised never to pine for strawberries ever again."
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Ariela has taken to drawing using drops of tea on the table to represent individual family members, with streaks of tea to represent connections. "So if I am to get this entirely straight, to summarize, you are the daughter of Astera, a fallen star, and through Astera your grandparents are the Sun and the Moon. The sun wants you to play tuba with him and has a hatred for mankind, and the Moon is, in your own words, 'very scary, but also very fun'. All of the stars are your aunts but you've only met Ursa Minor, who you describe as a tiny bear with big dreams, which I'm not sure I fully understand as a descriptor but- okay, okay, I'll accept it. Your adoptive mother is Kreska, whose parenting style you describe as 'nurture & napalm' and through her your adoptive grandparents are Frost and Snow, the respective spirits of winter and frozen water, respectively. You describe them as 'trick and treat', but both can take either designation at any time. Your adoptive father is Maugus, who is 'very boring', but also 'good at math', which you say is enough to redeem some of his boring qualities. You are also friends with a horse of the apocalypse. Am I getting everything?"

"Yup!"

Ariela takes stock of the tea-soaked tapestry she's made on the table of interlocking familial relations, some of them attached to question marks and others just wandering off into nothingness. She puts a hand to her chin. "This is insane," then, "and I still don't understand the part with the micro-drama in the middle." You smile at that, though, because you know from the way she talks that her mood is raised and she's distracted from your earlier discussion. That's enough for you.

To her question, you can offer nothing but a shrug. "I got nervous!"

"So you narrated, from memory, the entire tale of the sleeping princess in her tower, word by word, without interruption or even taking a breath, with proper poetic metre, because you got nervous." Ariela asks, eyes affixed to the complicated streaks of tea she has made on the table.

"Is...that not what people do when they get nervous! I always blurt something out!" You say, defending yourself against her slander. Poetic metre is the easy stuff. What else were you supposed to do when you got bored for days and weeks, with nothing to do? It was a fun word game. Now the hard stuff was the languages you made up.

"Well, something is usually a word or two, but alright. I'll accept it." Ariela says, and then qualifies it. "I think I have to. I don't think I have a choice. It's a little odd that you knew that tale, given it's so recent and pertains very specifically to the Grand Duchess' miraculous awakening, but- yeah. Yeah. You did it." She says the last part like someone who has accepted her defeat and now revels in the peace it has brought. You are glad that your magician is so accepting of the realities of spirit life, in all its intricacies.

"I didn't know it was about the Grand Duchess," you admit. It was just something Death told you when you finally demanded that she give you a proper story at once or you would stop talking to her. She begged and begged for you not to do that, but in the end, she had to tell the story! Such is the mercilessness of Starfall! (You cried for like two days afterwards because you felt bad about being mean to her). Such is the guiltiness of Starfall! (Fair). "...Wait, who's the Grand Duchess? I should have asked earlier but I forgot." (YES STARFALL FINALLY ASKING SOME GOOD QUESTIONS).

Ariela thinks for a moment and then explains, "The Grand Duchess is the heir to the throne. She was cursed almost fifty years ago to an eternal sleep until she would find her true love. Apparently she said, 'that's stupid', and at one point killed the witch who cursed her, because when she woke up five years ago she said the only true love she found was music, and that the whole idea was ridiculous anyways. So she forced everyone to change the stories that they told about her and banished one poet when he continued to refer to her as 'the poor princess' because she said that the only person who would end up poor was whoever got her ire, because she'd banish them. Now she's the..." she makes a hand motion. "Second most powerful person in the empire? Probably. No one ever sees the Grand Hatter anyways so she's the one that matters."

You take it all in like a particularly prickly sponge, absorbing the knowledge happily. Unfortunately, you appear to have the memory of a sponge as well, because you almost forget until Parentheses gathers all of the notes up and stores them away (about half my work here is maintaining your memory, honestly).

"It's a good story!" You say. "I like the part where she breaks out of the tower and beats the witch to death with a violin. That's a good part."

"It is," Ariela agrees. "She's not...a bad person. I met her a few years ago and she...didn't look down at me at all. Well, she's pretty tall, so she did look down at me but- but in a status way. Honestly, if it was up to the Grand Duchess, I'm sure we'd get a pardon easily...but the empress and the Treasurers won't be so forgiving. The Duchess isn't in the city and I almost wonder if it's intentional..." she trails off. "But anyway! Anyway. Don't let my mind wandering off distract us from this examination into my fascinating familiar's life! I do have one more question."

"Oh?" You say, delighted at the questioning and attention she's giving and very happy that she finds you 'fascinating'. That's a new one that you haven't heard before! Starfall the Fascinating Familiar! You could get that put up on a wall somewhere. Preferably a really big one. Maybe you and Ariela could, you don't know, maybe escape on a journey somewhere, to a distant mystical land, and on the cart that takes you there, it could say STARFALL THE FASCINATING FAMILIAR & HER MAGICIAN SIDEKICK ARIELA THE FLATTERING. Yeah. That'd be pretty great.

She taps an empty spot near one of the drips of tea."If Astera is your...birth mother, then who is your birth father?"
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The captain tries to give you your quarters later that night, but he seems very flustered for some reason and keeps hiccuping and falling over, so you just wander off to sleep in a storage closet. You try to sleep there, but find it deeply uncomfortable, and so decide to fall asleep outside Ariela's room instead. You ought to be in close proximity to your magician anyway, and maybe someone will attack her! You have to make sure that no rascal is ever allowed the chance! (of course, Starfall. Of course we do). But although you try to get to sleep, something keeps cycling through your head, one of the last things from your conversation.

...then who is your birth father?

You never really even thought you had a birth father. No one ever mentioned it. It was not a matter of conversation. But you suppose it does make some sense. It's odd, actually. No one has even mentioned Astera much at all. You know she existed, you know that the Moon and Sun cared about her, but they haven't really spoken to you about her behavior or what she was like. Everything around her death and your birth is submerged in a fog that you can't seem to break through.

Well, your father is in Tishrei, and Ariela said before she went to bed for the night that although she dreaded the very idea of looking for the 'worst fraudster in the city's history', she would try her best to stay civil while looking for him, because after all he was your father, and only you can insult his stupid money obsession, and his banks, and his businesses, and his stocks and all the rest of that awful, horrid stuff. Then she told you to take care of yourself and leaned the broken door against the wall. You thought maybe to ask her if you could sleep in her quarters that night, but Parentheses said that it was better not to tamper with the sanctum of cleanliness that Ariela had built within the barge after you had already broken her door (seriously that girl's hands were rubbed raw when we ran over to tell her everything). Pariya passes you by and says hello, but she seems afflicted by the same madness as much of the crew and keeps walking into walls and almost tripping over. While she does, she hums a song to herself and disappears down the hallway until you can't hear her anymore.

You'll have to ask Papa about your birth father when you meet him. You have a lot of things to talk about with him, actually. Mum said she'll find you no matter what...so maybe you'll be able to see her soon too. Despite everything, there's a pang in your gut when you think about the fact that you haven't seen him or her for so long. Sure, you'd sometimes not see him for months in the tower, but time felt different there. Here, with everything moving all the time, you want so much more for a chance to sit down and take a break. Everything has been so hectic and chaotic, so much happening in so little time, so many new names and new people and new places and new concepts to grasp. And maybe...a friend, as well.

It has given you a terrible headache, just thinking about it all (time for a good night's sleep). Yes. But still, you can't quite manage it, the events of the past few days running through your mind. The barge, sensing your mental restlessness, hums a soothing song of thanks, a throaty lullaby that only you can hear. It whispers to you that even spirits deserve a good night's nap. Your Parasol bids you good night as well, humming in unison with the barge, welcoming good dreams and warding away bad ones. At last, leaning up against the wall beside Ariela's quarters, you fall asleep, and dream of gently twinkling stars above a peaceful painted plain, a little spectral bear perched atop the sky smiling down upon it all.
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END ARC 2

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Article:

Throughout the last few days you have had the opportunity to get your first taste of life in the human world. As it turns out, it is delicious, with potentially at least four foods to explore. Better yet, you have established a good rapport with your magician, which you assume is very important to any familiar. With that settled and the barge calmed, you have completed your first mission as magician and familiar. You have remembered that your father is still in Tishrei and Ariela seems eager to return back home so you can begin planning what you will do next. Everything is going to be just fine from now on!

Just kidding. But before machinations beyond your grasp begin to break this tranquil breathing space you have managed to make for yourself, you begin to notice something odd going on with the behavior of both you and your magician.

In the coming days after your conversation with Ariela, you begin to exhibit a strange connection with her, manifesting as...

[] Intrusive Thoughts. Normally, you are used to having someone talking inside your head (hi), but recently when you're near Ariela you have been getting odd thoughts in a mental voice you can only recognize as your magician's...

[] Random Empathy Bursts. You admit that you don't have full control over your emotional state, but lately you've been even more erratic, with odd feelings and bursts of foreign emotions that you get only when you're near her...

[] Shared Habits. For whatever reason, lately you have developed a strange and inconsistent impulse to look proper and clean, along with a sudden rush of adrenaline when someone mentions the word 'coffee', and you don't know why...

Note: These effects are, one way or another, mutual...

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