(Canon?) Interlude: Beyond the Veil
"Morning."
Jiraiya looked up to see Elias standing over him, his pipe in his teeth. The old man's clothes ('overalls', he called them) looked just as strange as they had the first time the Sannin saw them. The fact that he still looked like an old man was astounding. He had been here for at least ninety kiloglasses according to some of the other residents but had barely de-aged.
"Morning yourself. Come to join me?"
Elias flicked his pipe from one side of his mouth to another, considering.
Jiraiya was sitting seiza on the closest approximation of a tatami mat that he had been able to produce. An indistinct reddish lump sat on the grass before him and one of the afterlife's unchanging and eternal silverbark trees spread itself above him. Back in the Before, it would have been a pleasant scene, especially during a warm summer with a yellow sun smiling down, the occasional white fluffy cloud, and perhaps a bit of breeze. In a meadow such as this, there would likely have been small furry critters lolloping around being adorable.
There was no sun here. The temperature never varied. There was no wind, and definitely no adorable furry creatures. Not this close to a settlement.
"The mat looks good," Elias grunted. "Nice texture. Very crisp."
Jiraiya's face split in a smile. "Thank you. You're a good teacher."
"When did it come from?"
Jiraiya looked down, running his fingers thoughtfully across the tight weave of the mat. "A chat with Sensei in his private study when I was fifteen." He touched a faintly darker spot. "I spilled my tea there. Black tea, bitter and sharp."
Elias grunted. "Good, but bring it forward next time. Kid memories are the easiest to hold onto. You need to focus on your adulthood."
"That's my current project, actually." He gestured to the reddish lump.
The old man grunted. It might have been an invitation to continue.
"When I was forty-three, I was prepping for a mission to Cloud. My cover was a potter, so I learned pottery. I'm making some clay so that I can sculpt Ma and Pa."
"Them those frog people you mentioned?"
"Toads, but yes. They were my teachers for decades, and some of my best friends. I'm not willing to lose them yet. I'm going to sculpt their likenesses."
Elias nodded. "Yep. Firsties always go for the physical appearance. That's backwards. It's not the faces that are important, it's the emotions. The times you shared, things you did. Still, you're in your first decade. Do it your way."
"Are you sure I'm in my first decade? How can I know how long I was in the Wild?"
"No way to know. Time gets slippery, further out you go. I've had friends show up out of order—Sarai and Bartholomew, both of 'em said they arrived right near here, weren't in the Wild long. He said he died three days after me, she said she died six years after me. She was in town four kays before he arrived."
Even after living—heh—in the settlement for two hundred glasses, Jiraiya still needed to translate the time units. Four kays, four kiloglasses, a kiloglass was theoretically a thousand days or about three years, so...twelve years? Of course, the Normative Glass contained an arbitrary amount of sand, so there was no actual way to know if one glass was even remotely close to twenty-four hours on the Human Path, so the whole thing was something of a farce. Also, 'Normative Glass' was a very pretentious name chosen by the founder of the settlement, about whom little was still remembered.
"Your friends have weird names." It was better than continuing to talk about the nightmare that was his time in the Wild.
Elias grunted. "Dunno about that, sandal-boy. Seem pretty normal to me, but 'Jiraiya' sounds like somethin' my grandson would have come up with. Dreamy little kid, always scribbling stories. Said he had too many in his head, needed to get them out. Tried to read some of 'em a few times, but they were too wild for me. All 'bout wizards and dragons and stuff. Not righteous."
The older man's bizarre accent only came out when he decided to play it up in order to tease Jiraiya.
"Yeah, don't get started on your whole 'righteous' bullshit," Jiraiya said. "Bunch of twaddle, you ask me. You get
one medic-nin walking around your backwards little mudhole and boom! Everyone loses their mind for thousands of years." He sniffed dismissively. "Assuming it was actually thousands of years. Sounds like you're yanking my chain, you ask me."
"He weren't nowhere near me," Elias said, his tone more serious. "And he weren't one of those medic types you keep talkin' about. He was the son of God, come to save us all."
Jiraiya made a point of looking pointedly around at the afterlife scenery, then back to his teacher. "How's that working out for you?"
Elias snorted and flicked his pipe from side to side. He lifted a hand to it and inhaled deeply, then breathed out. A ring of smoke drifted to Jiraiya, shifting and wobbling in the still air as smoke was wont to do. It puffed against his face and dispersed, but not before he smelled its earthy musk and was briefly transported back to days past, when he was twenty and Beth was nineteen and they would sit on a haystack in Pa's fields to watch the fireflies come out as night was falling.
He blinked, snapping back to his current reality with wide eyes. "Elias, what are you doing? You didn't reclaim it!"
Elias's wrinkled and sun-weathered face crinkled into a smile that was more in his eyes than on his lips.
"S'all good, boy. I've got plenty of smoking times in the old noggin, I can afford to spare one, and now you can remember it too. Might could help you bring up some memories of your own but it'll for sure give you a piece of me to hold onto."
"You're not Leaving, are you?" Jiraiya asked, hitting the capital letter hard the way everyone else did. His heart would have pounded if he had still had a pulse, but the afterlife took even that from you.
"Nah. Maybe someday, but not yet. The Lord is patient and there's still plenty of people to help." He raised an eyebrow at the indistinct reddish lump sitting in front of Jiraiya. "Including a certain sandal-boy who can't seem to remember what clay looks like."
Jiraiya looked down at the construct that he was struggling to reify. He looked back up at his teacher.
"I'm working on it, okay?"
Elias's eyes twinkled and he flicked the pipe from side to side.
