DokuWiki

This page is read only. You can view the source, but not change it. Ask your administrator if you think this is wrong.
The path that had crept up Thorn's side had given her no real clues as to where it was leading. The only indicator that had kept doubt in check was that it seemed to be the only well-defined path amongst the alien landscape, broader than it strictly had to be, like an unfinished road that had been abandoned to an indifferent nature. There was not much in the way of shrubs in the area - the landscape had been dominated by dust and rocks, some appearing precariously balanced atop steep natural sculptures as if they were waiting for the right moment to topple and crush an unsuspecting passerby.

But it had led her here. Taqnateh was two buildings that appeared to be trying to outdo each other in the degree to which they looked abandoned. Something that looked like a pokécenter sat sun-bleached, nestled against the rocks, but testing the door revealed it locked. The other resisted clean classification, balancing between the right to be called 'building' and having to put up with being declared 'ruins'. Much like the path that led here, it seemed plausible that it had never been completed - but it was clearly trying to be a cathedral.

The sign sitting a few metres away from the gates of the thing, reading 'Private property. No trespassing. Pokémon trainers only,' however, is a bright, obvious yellow. Someone evidently values their isolation to point of caricature.

The late afternoon light cast itself across the building's facade in hesitant shards - the shadows of Thorn were already laying claim to this niche, bringing a mundane chill with them that spoke of the arid weather. A stiff breeze occasionally nibbled at Damayanti, though it couldn't seem to decide what direction to nudge her into.

The obvious way forward was through the heavy doors, approximating thrice her height as they were, and looking solid enough that easing them open would probably take a chunk of her remaining strength with it.

<color #cc4444>Conventional wisdom had informed her in no uncertain terms that running the circuit would change her, that she would learn more about the world and about herself than she had ever known before. Couched as that conventional wisdom had been in folklore and gossip, it had taken until the first gym for Damayanti to believe it for more than platitude.</color>

<color #cc4444>That first gym had hammered home many lessons, the more helpful of which being that lessons can be heard but not learned. "Be careful what you wish for," for instance, that age-old idiom so applicable to all walks of life, she had heard many times, and yet until the circuit had she *felt* it, all of its edges and corners, most of them sharp and painful.</color>

<color #cc4444>Indeed, "be careful" in general was the first lesson, one she’d become more and more intimately familiar with, thanks to her journey so far. It felt as though Damayanti hadn’t been circuiting long enough to have habits ingrained into her psyche yet, but she didn’t even think about the cautious behavior now. Her eyes flicked back and forth across the cathedral, the mind replacing "what was" with the symbolic "what was meant to be." She looked for obvious traps, for signs, for things she was expected to pick up on and things she was expected to learn from the environment.</color>

<color #cc4444>It was only a few moments to steel herself, a brush of her hand across the smooth and comforting surface of the pokeball at her belt for comfort, a brief bit of time to work up the courage. Even that was too much time, Damayanti reminded herself harshly. Had there been a lurking trap, or if her actions were being observed as some kind of test, this moment of hesitation could have cost her.</color>

<color #cc4444>She took the handle of the huge doors and shouldered forward with all of her might, letting out a huff at the sheer amount of weight. It was the obvious path, which wasn't very careful of her, but she pushed the thought to the back of her mind.</color>

<color #cc4444>"Be careful," may have been the first lesson the circuit had taught her, but "being too careful can be dangerous" was another.</color>

For an instant it feels as if none of her attempts would make either of the doors budge, as if the weight of a mountain hid behind the solid wood, resisting her attempts. Then the gate begins to admit her into the building with a sluggish reluctance.

Like a ghostly presence, the rays of light from the withdrawing sun scattered through the rose window above the gates, losing themselves in the thin dust of the air inside. Only the barest, dim hint of light reached the bottom and the shadows seemed to stifle sound. It was like stepping into the bottom of a well.

It takes a few moments for her eyes to adjust to the relative darkness. This looks like it was once designed to be some sort of arena - a repurposed church room, later further repurposed into a dispassionate foyer. Nothing about the vast hall gives it an appearance of being in any use.

Her mind is about to designate the room empty when a slightly darker shadow with the sharper edges of a silhouette on one of the ranks tugs at her alert attention. Someone's sitting there. In the darkness it's hard to tell, but she could swear they're staring at her. If this isn't a clever decoy meant to creep out unsuspecting-

A soft pink light spills out in a confusing angle from the figure, then manifests as a lithe creature she's never seen before, hovering mid-air just beside the figure. Something much like a soft sigh - barely audible, perhaps imagined - issues from the not-a-decoy as he rises, setting both pale hands down on the railing immediately before him, casting his gaze into the arena toward her.

There were a few options as to who she was looking at. Most dishearteningly, it could be a fellow circuiter who had come up here earlier in the day and just given up on discovering anything interesting, taking her coming here as a firm sign that he had wasted his time.

It could also be who she came up here for.

<color #cc4444>Dayamanti rules out other options of coincidence or mistake that occur to her about who the man is as soon as the creature appears. Anyone but a gym leader or fellow circuiter having a pokemon she doesn't recognize strains belief. She squares her shoulders and steps forward, slipping the pokeball from her belt into her hand, again more for comfort than for utility. There were trainers who preferred the comfort of their pokemon at their side at all times, but this was by definition a dangerous place, and Dayamanti refused to subject Flitter to any danger for her own comfort.</color>

<color #cc4444>Subjecting Flitter to danger for the purpose of earning a badge, certainly... but the circuit had made her less and less confident in that decision as well. As it had for many weeks now, her subconscious whispered a word that sounded like "hypocrite" at her, but she pushed that thought aside. As often as those thoughts had been arising lately, thoughts like that wouldn't win her badges, and after coming *so close* she couldn't back down now, she simply couldn't.</color>

<color #cc4444>All of these thoughts flit through her head in the space of time it takes her to move across the half-scattered sunbeams, the sound of her own footsteps echoing and making her feel small. It feels as if she is the first human being to set foot in this place in millennium, as if the soft breaths she takes are the first to disturb the air in centuries, as if her own footsteps are the only sounds to break the silence in decades.</color>

<color #cc4444>It is a ludicrous thought, of course, she can *see* the evidence to the contrary standing ahead of her, looking down on her. She wished the physical evidence made the feeling any less stirring in her gut.</color>

<color #cc4444>Another ludicrous thought occurs to her as she approached the arena. This wasn't a place that started as a church, converted time and again over for utilitarian purposes. Just like from the outside it strained to become a cathedral, this room *was* a church, down in its bones. A church to something or someone else, originally, perhaps, but the reverence and gravity of the place thrums through her like a stringed instrument just outside of her range of hearing. Damayanti feels it in her bones, and it makes her uncomfortable.</color>

<color #cc4444>The circuit has ground down much of the bubbly and irreverent girl with no badges that had started this journey, but the seriousness of this place prickles at her stubbornness, urging her to fight discomfort with flippancy.</color>

<color #cc4444>"This place could use a bit of cleaning," her voice sounds small, "and maybe a few lamps?"</color>

<color #cc4444>She raises an eyebrow, wondering if she just mouthed off to a gym leader or a co-circuiter. Even if this man was a gym leader, she had given up on trying to ingratiate herself to them. There was no such thing as 'going easy on a friend' in this circuit, she hadn't needed a gym to teach her that.</color>

"Perhaps," he responds, bundling her criticism aside with that word as if they were a distracting blemish on the conversation. "I might feign surprise at your presence, but I have a hunch that wouldn't convince you," he comments, tone casual, straddling the line between friendly and aloof.

The words and their delivery don't want to fit the person she's looking at - he's young, with feathery black hair that somehow seems only temporarily well-behaved, wearing some kind of loose cloak across clothes too casual for one. He can't possibly have this place for more than five years. He can't possibly have the sort of life-experience that makes the sort of meta-conversation he's having appear like a reasonable first statement. He can't possibly know what he's doing - and yet there's a part of her mind, honed by the rest of the circuit so far, that begs her to be careful around this lanky character.

"Damayanti," he addresses her, inclining his head respectfully, his hands still on the railing for a moment, flexing in some unvoiced indecision - then he's straightening himself out. Tone politely distant, he asks: "You're here for your eighth badge, is that right?"

<color #cc4444>Damayanti had started unpacking the stranger from the second she caught sight of him, but the unpacking is made much easier when she can get a good look at him and hear how he speaks, what he says.</color>

<color #cc4444>The analysis is a simple one, as the man is almost more an archetype than a real person. Casual clothes covered by a more formal cloak speaks to ostentatiousness. A man that young speaking with such formality speaks to play-acting, attempting what sounds like the sort of layered conversation that is the realm of the very wise and the very mature. The aura of ownership he exudes over this place, a place which her mind keeps supplying the word "sacred" to describe, speaks to the kind of arrogance typical of the inexperienced when given a modicum power.</color>

<color #cc4444>As she takes in the impressions, Damayanti relaxes by small degrees ever-so-slightly. A mere boy, pretending to be the authoritarian, a child acting the king, too young to know that he was too ignorant to understand how callow and green he really was.</color>

<color #cc4444>The analysis is a simple one... and yet...</color>

<color #cc4444>Following fast on the heels of her first impression, another worms its way through her. From the very first gym, facing Cecile Madhukar, Damayanti had learned that *no one* became a gym leader without that they had the means to control and own said gym. Here she stood in the eighth and final gym of the circuit, was she really so arrogant as to believe the boy she had just outlined in her head could be here, in the position he occupied?</color>

<color #cc4444>The analysis had been a simple one, but it was dead wrong.</color>

<color #cc4444>For a second time Damayanti narrows her eyes and unpacks the man in front of her, this time looking past who he appears to be and trying to see who he was. A boy unaware of the state of disarray of his gym, or is he a man for whom matters of more importance weigh on his attention? A boy play-acting at conversation many levels of interaction above his comprehension, or is that casual tone an indication that he purposely dumbed his first comment down for her benefit? Is that meld of detached conceit and affable charm the mark of a child trying to act higher than her, or a man far higher than her trying to be sociable on her level?</color>

<color #cc4444>The new analysis is even simpler than the old. A boy so unabashed in his overselling of himself would not have lasted here, which meant that somehow this man was *downplaying* himself. That he was so very young didn't factor into her new analysis. She was in the eighth gym in the circuit, and she had seen far stranger than this thing her mind was trying to tell her was impossible.</color>

<color #cc4444>The trick now was to keep from being too intimidated. Ingratiating herself to the gym leaders didn't help her, but it *would* hurt to make them dislike her, she had learned that the hard way. Something told her that this leader wouldn't take kindly to cowering, although she couldn't quite bring herself to adopt the disrespectful tone that had been so easy a few minutes before.</color>

<color #cc4444>"Gaining all eight badges is my goal," she answered, her voice ironically stronger now that she was focused on not seeming frightened, "the Astral Badge is the only one I'm missing. Yes, I'm here for my eighth. Are you the one who will give it to me?"</color>

<color #cc4444>Dayamanti knew she wasn't nearly as adept at the many meta-layered conversation, but she phrased the question carefully to show that she was at least attempting to speak on that level.</color>

"The stakes are a bit different here, so that depends more on you than it does on me," he tells her, tone soft, temporarily stripped the professionalism it had clamoured for just a moment before, giving the comment something of the quality of an aside remark made, like an out-of-character observation nonetheless firmly relevant to the situation. He lets his gaze linger on her subtly past its welcome, then continues:

"You may freely consider this gym to be a test of... shall we say, dedication and confidence." His right hand sneaks up, for a moment seeming to have no cause for its motion - then the pink pokémon by his side swerves in an abrupt motion to coil its thin tail around his forearm, casting its tiny arms around his hand near the knuckles. His ring finger eases itself against the creature's chin absent-mindedly, his attention clearly still anchored on her, gaze and all.

"If you defeat my pokémon in battle, then the Astral badge is yours," he confirms her preconceptions. "However, should you lose, all that is yours is mine for the taking - including your life." He allows her just enough time to understand what he's saying, then adds, with a softness as if he hadn't just proposed the most outrageous possible fundamental rules, as if it were something to be solemn but conversational about: "Those are my terms, should you choose to submit to them."

**✘ ABANDONED**

{{tag>[raw]}}