[Tales of Eternia] To Polish One's Arms
Mar. 21st, 2010 11:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
runicloreTitle: To Polish One's Arms
Author: Myaru
Rating: K
Warnings: n/a, see notes.
Word count: 2412
Prompt: March 20 - Tales of Eternia, Keele/Meredy: the unexpected - "You. Me. KABOOM."
Gauntlet theme: 28 - thick or thin, opening its lovely angles
Summary: n/a
A/N: so... I wanted to replay the game to get things right, but couldn't finish it in time; I ran into a wall at Mt. Celcius, and that brought me right up to the due date, so I apologize for any inaccuracies. To be safe, this is set a bit before the party reaches Peruti.
Also, I am not a linguist. And I'm really sorry for being late.
.........................................................
'Lights out' on the Van Eltia reminded Keele of the dormitories at the university in a way that made the space between his shoulder-blades itch. It was stupid - Mintche was quieter, for one, and didn't smell like burning pitch; Reid snored louder than a bugbear, and would have had his nose clipped closed by now; there wouldn't have been any light showing under the door, especially not such a steady white glow. The hall monitors carried candles whose illumination flickered and disappeared quickly.
Farah turned over in her sleep and muttered. Keele hunched over the crate in his corner, angled his craymel light so it faced away from the door, just in case Captain Chat was the type to enforce her curfew rules, and copied the next line from his book to the peculiarly thin, colorless parchment Meredy purchased for him when he started this project. He wanted to learn Melnics for real - he knew the letters, the rhymes that summoned craymels, and the words for 'Grand Fall,' 'help,' and 'destruction,' and nothing else. But what if the Orz Earrings were broken or lost - what then? What if the end of their insane quest depended on some kind of research or experiment Meredy couldn't do alone?
And if they all lived through this, instead of dying miserably on the frontiers of someone else's world, how did Reid and Farah expect to get by for the rest of their lives if they couldn't even read a sign or a menu? They probably hadn't even considered the problem. Typical, for them - especially Reid.
The ship lurched slightly to the left right in the middle of transcribing for victory comes to she who polishes her arms, and Keele's stomach tried to crawl into his throat and spew all over the paper. He swallowed hard, covered his mouth, the deck rumbling beneath his legs, vibrating until his teeth jarred while something thumped down behind him. Sitting on the floor helped - sort of. He couldn't fall over when he was already on his knees. The seconds until the engine rumbled down to standby again stretched so long he thought they might've made it to Peruti, and Chat had ratcheted them into gear to dock, but then it stopped, and the Van Eltia coasted up and down on the waves for a minute - at least, that's what it felt like to Keele - and then settled back into its normal rhythm. He took a deep, shaky breath.
There were times, since landing on Celestia, it seemed Meredy's people did everything better: irrigation, lights, trains-- everything. But even Celestia couldn't build a ship that wouldn't make him sick. Ha.
He was still cradling his head in his hands when he heard shuffling, and the hiss of the door. His head snapped up, and his throat seized-- but it was Meredy, her pale hair luminous in the hallway glow, hanging loose around the ruffled shoulders of her nightgown. The door slid shut. The room went dark again. Even when she crossed the room to his side, she was only a shadow.
"Keele needs to rest," she said softly. Her elara glinted when she sat down on her knees beside him. "Peruti is three hours from these coordinates. There is still time."
He scrubbed his bangs back, wiping cold sweat from his forehead. The storybook he was copying from slid forward a few inches; he pushed it back against the wall and flipped his dictionary closed, moving it in front of his reference to keep it standing up. "I can't sleep on ships."
She chewed on her lower lip. The shadows cast by his little light made it look like she was frowning. "Is Keele afraid?"
"What? No!" He said it louder than he intended; Reid sat up halfway, as if jolted out of a dream, and Keele grabbed his light and wrapped it in his sleeve. In the dim moments before Reid dropped down and flopped over again, this time facing away, Meredy reached for his reference book and held it open in her lap. Keele placed the light on his crate again and angled the glowing face toward his transcription. "I'm not afraid." It wasn't like ships could sink or anything, or ram into icebergs, or run into shoals. There were scholars on Inferia who swore krackens really existed, and they had the fossils to prove it, though he'd never seen any of them. "I'm just..."
Hmm. Meredy angled the book to catch some light. "You can't learn Melnics in one night. Not even a week." She looked up at him. "It will take a long time, but... you study so much, Reid and Farah will have to run to catch up someday."
Keele let out a long sigh and looked down at the glossy white pages, held flat by her long, dark fingers. They were perfect fingers, just right for manipulating a craymel cage - or copper wires and mechanical switches. They covered an illustration of the princess turned into a lion, painted in a style he'd thought messy and ugly until her fingers covered the shapes and showed him the gradient, the smooth, perfect bleed from yellow to orange to red, like a sunset.
Maybe he should give their art another chance. The story, too - the idea of a princess turning into a lion, even by the intervention of the gods, had seemed so ludicrous at first, but maybe-- maybe there was some secret in there about Celestian culture, just as the author's choices of words had proven the flexibility of Melnics to him. The story had revealed so much already; how Celestian forms of social stratification were tied in with how one addressed a person, why Meredy always referred to them by name, and never with pronouns if she could help it. That habit made her sound like a child on Inferia, but here--
"Why this book?" Meredy held it up to read, kneading the cover in her fingers. "It seems... like a strange choice."
"I asked the librarian in Imen for something to practice with," he said. She turned the page to the next story, faced with a dark, watercolor illustration of Nereid. Keele hadn't liked that story either; what was it with Celestians and themes of sacrifice? "I thought a childrens' tale would be easier than an essay."
Meredy's mouth stretched into a smile that she covered with one hand. "I didn't think Keele would like fairy stories." She fanned the pages, and stopped at another one, slanting the book so he could see it. "This was Meredy's favorite."
The Maiden's Sacrifice. That one had an illustration at the end, drawn so starkly and precisely in black, white, and red that even he couldn't be cynical about it. "Why?" He stared at the calligraphy of the title. "It has such a terrible ending." Those three words at the top of the page had wasted an hour of his time - first because he had to decipher the strange distortions of each letter, then because his Inferian dialect didn't have a direct translation for the little girl's title, and 'maiden' was the best his brain could come up with lacking a thesaurus. "They're all..."
Meredy fiddled with the page, flicking the edge with her nail. She was looking down at the page, but her eyes weren't moving, so she wasn't reading. Her lips worked, folding in, straightening out, turning from white to pink again. "Do Inferians always have happy endings?"
Well, of course, he started to say. The princess always married the prince - she didn't die after trying so hard to save her kingdom and spend the rest of eternity as a lion. Dark magicians always went down, and the heroes always won, never died. Of course they all got happy endings - what was the point of a fairy tale that ended in utter failure, or finished by punishing the hero for accomplishing his great deeds? That was life, not fiction: Reid and Farah, and himself, stranded on Celestia for the rest of their lives whether they succeeded or not. It could have been Meredy, stranded on Inferia where everyone hated her for no reason, a real 'maiden's sacrifice' that would have ended in blood if she were lucky - just like the story.
They were going to end badly. Reid was right. But they'd gotten Meredy home - maybe she would be okay, if they played their cards right.
"We try," he said, averting his gaze. Specks of gold leaf glinted in the letters embossed on the spine of his Melnics dictionary, all but rubbed away. "We aim high, and hope we meet all of our goals."
There was silence, aside from the hum of the engine and Reid's snores. From the bunk above him, Farah's arm was hanging over the edge, pale skin gathering the glow of his light and floating disembodied in the darkness. He remembered the mattresses feeling hard when he checked earlier, but those two could sleep on anything. Keele wished he could say the same. The best he could do was the library floor, and that sorry excuse for a cot at the observatory outside Mintche.
Keele pulled his ponytail out and tried to work the kinks out of the ribbon. It was blue, like the Inferian sky, and it used to be Meredy's. "What does 'polishing one's arms' mean?"
The book slipped. Meredy caught it with one hand, looking up. "Polishing...?" She rubbed her arm.
"No, no, this." He pulled the book away and turned the pages backward - to him it would have been the other direction, but reading books from right to left was only one of Celestia's irritating quirks - and traced a line under the phrase with his finger, turning the book back to her. Victory comes to she who polishes her arms.
"Oh, that means..." Meredy chewed on her lip again, and it flopped back into place looking redder than before. He jolted his eyes back up. "It means studying," she said. "Or-- like what Keele does, always trying to improve."
"But what does polishing your arms have to do with it?" Keele said. She giggled, muffling the sound with her hands, and he watched her eyes sparkle and glitter like the jewel of her elara, and saw her cheeks darken. He made himself look at the book again and felt heat creep into his face, and his hands jerked the pages a little too hard as he turned backward - no, forward - to another strange phrase he remembered. "What about this one? From the context, it looks like it means they fell in lo--" Wait, wait. He didn't want to bring that up. "Um." Now his face must be really red.
Mmmmm. Meredy's face scrunched as she stared down at the page. She wasn't even paying attention to him. "No, 'love' isn't good at all. Maybe..."
Keele leaned over the book to look at it from her angle. "What do you mean, it 'isn't good?' They're talking about getting married."
"But it's--" This time he thought she frowned, though it was hard to tell with just his peripheral vision. Long strands of her pale hair curled onto the page when she bent down. "It's not just love. This means it's like an explosion... maybe."
Maybe. Keele shoved his hair back, glancing around for the ribbon. He dropped it while flipping through the book, and couldn't find it. "Explosive love, huh. I guess this really is a fairy tale."
"No, it's real," she said, closing the book. "Definitely real."
He tried to look at her without appearing to turn his head. "Why do you say that?"
Meredy's fingers curled around the hard-bound cover. White lace cuffs cast odd shadows on the green binding, and her hands were smooth and dark, looking perfectly soft and velvety in the dimness. Every Celestian he'd met shared the same general characteristics - pale hair, dark skin, the mysterious elara - but she was always prettier. Her hair was softer and silkier, her face flawless. Sometimes he wanted to touch it. Keele tried not to think about it all the time.
She lifted her chin, caught him looking, and heat shot into his face again, but she only smiled. "You're funny, Keele."
He was about to retort - she was the funny one, he was anything but funny - when she grabbed his head with both hands and planted a kiss on his temple. Then-- "Good night!" Meredy popped up from her sitting position and ran back to the bunk they shared.
Keele watched her scamper up the ladder, his face burning yet again, and the spot she'd kissed tingling and feeling slightly damp. For once his heart was louder than the rumble of the Van Eltia, though not by much, and he was still trying to choke out a protest by the time she disappeared into the shadow cast by his light - presumably under her blankets, but she may as well be on the other side of the planet. He couldn't yell at her without waking everyone up.
He sat back against his crate; his shoulders jumped at the impact, even though he knew it was there. The book waited on the deck beside his leg, front cover up. The Melnics script looked like gibberish.
What was that? His mind tried to supply the obvious explanation - an explosion - and he cut that thought process off as soon as he recognized it. If anything around here was going to explode, it would be the ship's engine. Who knew what a whole night of strain could do to a concentration of craymel energy at levels like that? Who knew--
But Keele couldn't get it out of his head. He stared at his transcription, at page fifty seven, and saw only one word:
Boom.
...............................................................................
The title comes from the Japanese proverb "腕をみがく" (ude o migaku - to polish one's arms) which, as Meredy says, refers to the mastering of a craft.
.
Author: Myaru
Rating: K
Warnings: n/a, see notes.
Word count: 2412
Prompt: March 20 - Tales of Eternia, Keele/Meredy: the unexpected - "You. Me. KABOOM."
Gauntlet theme: 28 - thick or thin, opening its lovely angles
Summary: n/a
A/N: so... I wanted to replay the game to get things right, but couldn't finish it in time; I ran into a wall at Mt. Celcius, and that brought me right up to the due date, so I apologize for any inaccuracies. To be safe, this is set a bit before the party reaches Peruti.
Also, I am not a linguist. And I'm really sorry for being late.
.........................................................
'Lights out' on the Van Eltia reminded Keele of the dormitories at the university in a way that made the space between his shoulder-blades itch. It was stupid - Mintche was quieter, for one, and didn't smell like burning pitch; Reid snored louder than a bugbear, and would have had his nose clipped closed by now; there wouldn't have been any light showing under the door, especially not such a steady white glow. The hall monitors carried candles whose illumination flickered and disappeared quickly.
Farah turned over in her sleep and muttered. Keele hunched over the crate in his corner, angled his craymel light so it faced away from the door, just in case Captain Chat was the type to enforce her curfew rules, and copied the next line from his book to the peculiarly thin, colorless parchment Meredy purchased for him when he started this project. He wanted to learn Melnics for real - he knew the letters, the rhymes that summoned craymels, and the words for 'Grand Fall,' 'help,' and 'destruction,' and nothing else. But what if the Orz Earrings were broken or lost - what then? What if the end of their insane quest depended on some kind of research or experiment Meredy couldn't do alone?
And if they all lived through this, instead of dying miserably on the frontiers of someone else's world, how did Reid and Farah expect to get by for the rest of their lives if they couldn't even read a sign or a menu? They probably hadn't even considered the problem. Typical, for them - especially Reid.
The ship lurched slightly to the left right in the middle of transcribing for victory comes to she who polishes her arms, and Keele's stomach tried to crawl into his throat and spew all over the paper. He swallowed hard, covered his mouth, the deck rumbling beneath his legs, vibrating until his teeth jarred while something thumped down behind him. Sitting on the floor helped - sort of. He couldn't fall over when he was already on his knees. The seconds until the engine rumbled down to standby again stretched so long he thought they might've made it to Peruti, and Chat had ratcheted them into gear to dock, but then it stopped, and the Van Eltia coasted up and down on the waves for a minute - at least, that's what it felt like to Keele - and then settled back into its normal rhythm. He took a deep, shaky breath.
There were times, since landing on Celestia, it seemed Meredy's people did everything better: irrigation, lights, trains-- everything. But even Celestia couldn't build a ship that wouldn't make him sick. Ha.
He was still cradling his head in his hands when he heard shuffling, and the hiss of the door. His head snapped up, and his throat seized-- but it was Meredy, her pale hair luminous in the hallway glow, hanging loose around the ruffled shoulders of her nightgown. The door slid shut. The room went dark again. Even when she crossed the room to his side, she was only a shadow.
"Keele needs to rest," she said softly. Her elara glinted when she sat down on her knees beside him. "Peruti is three hours from these coordinates. There is still time."
He scrubbed his bangs back, wiping cold sweat from his forehead. The storybook he was copying from slid forward a few inches; he pushed it back against the wall and flipped his dictionary closed, moving it in front of his reference to keep it standing up. "I can't sleep on ships."
She chewed on her lower lip. The shadows cast by his little light made it look like she was frowning. "Is Keele afraid?"
"What? No!" He said it louder than he intended; Reid sat up halfway, as if jolted out of a dream, and Keele grabbed his light and wrapped it in his sleeve. In the dim moments before Reid dropped down and flopped over again, this time facing away, Meredy reached for his reference book and held it open in her lap. Keele placed the light on his crate again and angled the glowing face toward his transcription. "I'm not afraid." It wasn't like ships could sink or anything, or ram into icebergs, or run into shoals. There were scholars on Inferia who swore krackens really existed, and they had the fossils to prove it, though he'd never seen any of them. "I'm just..."
Hmm. Meredy angled the book to catch some light. "You can't learn Melnics in one night. Not even a week." She looked up at him. "It will take a long time, but... you study so much, Reid and Farah will have to run to catch up someday."
Keele let out a long sigh and looked down at the glossy white pages, held flat by her long, dark fingers. They were perfect fingers, just right for manipulating a craymel cage - or copper wires and mechanical switches. They covered an illustration of the princess turned into a lion, painted in a style he'd thought messy and ugly until her fingers covered the shapes and showed him the gradient, the smooth, perfect bleed from yellow to orange to red, like a sunset.
Maybe he should give their art another chance. The story, too - the idea of a princess turning into a lion, even by the intervention of the gods, had seemed so ludicrous at first, but maybe-- maybe there was some secret in there about Celestian culture, just as the author's choices of words had proven the flexibility of Melnics to him. The story had revealed so much already; how Celestian forms of social stratification were tied in with how one addressed a person, why Meredy always referred to them by name, and never with pronouns if she could help it. That habit made her sound like a child on Inferia, but here--
"Why this book?" Meredy held it up to read, kneading the cover in her fingers. "It seems... like a strange choice."
"I asked the librarian in Imen for something to practice with," he said. She turned the page to the next story, faced with a dark, watercolor illustration of Nereid. Keele hadn't liked that story either; what was it with Celestians and themes of sacrifice? "I thought a childrens' tale would be easier than an essay."
Meredy's mouth stretched into a smile that she covered with one hand. "I didn't think Keele would like fairy stories." She fanned the pages, and stopped at another one, slanting the book so he could see it. "This was Meredy's favorite."
The Maiden's Sacrifice. That one had an illustration at the end, drawn so starkly and precisely in black, white, and red that even he couldn't be cynical about it. "Why?" He stared at the calligraphy of the title. "It has such a terrible ending." Those three words at the top of the page had wasted an hour of his time - first because he had to decipher the strange distortions of each letter, then because his Inferian dialect didn't have a direct translation for the little girl's title, and 'maiden' was the best his brain could come up with lacking a thesaurus. "They're all..."
Meredy fiddled with the page, flicking the edge with her nail. She was looking down at the page, but her eyes weren't moving, so she wasn't reading. Her lips worked, folding in, straightening out, turning from white to pink again. "Do Inferians always have happy endings?"
Well, of course, he started to say. The princess always married the prince - she didn't die after trying so hard to save her kingdom and spend the rest of eternity as a lion. Dark magicians always went down, and the heroes always won, never died. Of course they all got happy endings - what was the point of a fairy tale that ended in utter failure, or finished by punishing the hero for accomplishing his great deeds? That was life, not fiction: Reid and Farah, and himself, stranded on Celestia for the rest of their lives whether they succeeded or not. It could have been Meredy, stranded on Inferia where everyone hated her for no reason, a real 'maiden's sacrifice' that would have ended in blood if she were lucky - just like the story.
They were going to end badly. Reid was right. But they'd gotten Meredy home - maybe she would be okay, if they played their cards right.
"We try," he said, averting his gaze. Specks of gold leaf glinted in the letters embossed on the spine of his Melnics dictionary, all but rubbed away. "We aim high, and hope we meet all of our goals."
There was silence, aside from the hum of the engine and Reid's snores. From the bunk above him, Farah's arm was hanging over the edge, pale skin gathering the glow of his light and floating disembodied in the darkness. He remembered the mattresses feeling hard when he checked earlier, but those two could sleep on anything. Keele wished he could say the same. The best he could do was the library floor, and that sorry excuse for a cot at the observatory outside Mintche.
Keele pulled his ponytail out and tried to work the kinks out of the ribbon. It was blue, like the Inferian sky, and it used to be Meredy's. "What does 'polishing one's arms' mean?"
The book slipped. Meredy caught it with one hand, looking up. "Polishing...?" She rubbed her arm.
"No, no, this." He pulled the book away and turned the pages backward - to him it would have been the other direction, but reading books from right to left was only one of Celestia's irritating quirks - and traced a line under the phrase with his finger, turning the book back to her. Victory comes to she who polishes her arms.
"Oh, that means..." Meredy chewed on her lip again, and it flopped back into place looking redder than before. He jolted his eyes back up. "It means studying," she said. "Or-- like what Keele does, always trying to improve."
"But what does polishing your arms have to do with it?" Keele said. She giggled, muffling the sound with her hands, and he watched her eyes sparkle and glitter like the jewel of her elara, and saw her cheeks darken. He made himself look at the book again and felt heat creep into his face, and his hands jerked the pages a little too hard as he turned backward - no, forward - to another strange phrase he remembered. "What about this one? From the context, it looks like it means they fell in lo--" Wait, wait. He didn't want to bring that up. "Um." Now his face must be really red.
Mmmmm. Meredy's face scrunched as she stared down at the page. She wasn't even paying attention to him. "No, 'love' isn't good at all. Maybe..."
Keele leaned over the book to look at it from her angle. "What do you mean, it 'isn't good?' They're talking about getting married."
"But it's--" This time he thought she frowned, though it was hard to tell with just his peripheral vision. Long strands of her pale hair curled onto the page when she bent down. "It's not just love. This means it's like an explosion... maybe."
Maybe. Keele shoved his hair back, glancing around for the ribbon. He dropped it while flipping through the book, and couldn't find it. "Explosive love, huh. I guess this really is a fairy tale."
"No, it's real," she said, closing the book. "Definitely real."
He tried to look at her without appearing to turn his head. "Why do you say that?"
Meredy's fingers curled around the hard-bound cover. White lace cuffs cast odd shadows on the green binding, and her hands were smooth and dark, looking perfectly soft and velvety in the dimness. Every Celestian he'd met shared the same general characteristics - pale hair, dark skin, the mysterious elara - but she was always prettier. Her hair was softer and silkier, her face flawless. Sometimes he wanted to touch it. Keele tried not to think about it all the time.
She lifted her chin, caught him looking, and heat shot into his face again, but she only smiled. "You're funny, Keele."
He was about to retort - she was the funny one, he was anything but funny - when she grabbed his head with both hands and planted a kiss on his temple. Then-- "Good night!" Meredy popped up from her sitting position and ran back to the bunk they shared.
Keele watched her scamper up the ladder, his face burning yet again, and the spot she'd kissed tingling and feeling slightly damp. For once his heart was louder than the rumble of the Van Eltia, though not by much, and he was still trying to choke out a protest by the time she disappeared into the shadow cast by his light - presumably under her blankets, but she may as well be on the other side of the planet. He couldn't yell at her without waking everyone up.
He sat back against his crate; his shoulders jumped at the impact, even though he knew it was there. The book waited on the deck beside his leg, front cover up. The Melnics script looked like gibberish.
What was that? His mind tried to supply the obvious explanation - an explosion - and he cut that thought process off as soon as he recognized it. If anything around here was going to explode, it would be the ship's engine. Who knew what a whole night of strain could do to a concentration of craymel energy at levels like that? Who knew--
But Keele couldn't get it out of his head. He stared at his transcription, at page fifty seven, and saw only one word:
Boom.
...............................................................................
The title comes from the Japanese proverb "腕をみがく" (ude o migaku - to polish one's arms) which, as Meredy says, refers to the mastering of a craft.
.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-07-07 02:18 pm (UTC)I haven't finished ToE up until now, but I have been able to play farther than you did. I think you did a great job with everything. I loved all the little details you put in too! ♥
This story definitely made my day! ♥
no subject
Date: 2010-07-11 10:06 am (UTC)Thank you for the comment! I'm glad you enjoyed the fic. Looks like it was a good thing I couldn't finish the game in time, if you were able to read it. ♥