InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "I love you, Laura."

Mabel approached the house with a skip in her step, belying the number of rocks she had stuffed into the pockets of her winter smock. Since Milk the Magical Cat had told her that if she found the crystal, she had been searching high and low for any special looking rock she could find. She’d bought some off the new age pop up stand near the boardwalk, scoured the sand for any important looking bits of debris, rooted through her grandparents’ garden, and even picked through her old jewelry collection to remove all the most likely stones and add them to her pile. If nothing else, by the end of this venture, she would have a treasure trove of gems.

She knew Kaveh’s house well by now, after Secret Santa, and she had no hesitation about walking straight through the garden to knock at his door. She didn’t want to annoy Milk with too many duds, but Kaveh had always struck her as an easy going type (well, less so in the brainstorm meetings; there, he seemed entirely uncomfortable and wary), so she thought he wouldn’t mind going over her cache. She stopped at the front door, patted down her smock to ensure it was tidy, and then gave a hearty knock.

“Professor Rock, I have questions!” she called.

With no grading or planning to do and Nacho working late, Kaveh had some time to himself. He sat in front of his TV set, game controller in hand playing and Sasha in his lap purring, his pug at his feet and his golden lab next to him on the couch. He could turn his brain off for a little bit before he had to go back to reality.

Because everything didn’t feel real still. He hung by a thread.

At the knock at the door, Prince ruffed and trotted towards the door followed closely by the lab who barked.

Kaveh sighed and put his game on pause. He placed Sasha gently on the ground, as she meowed indignant. Then he heard a familiar voice shouting Professor Rock. He smiled a little to himself. He could be known as something worse.

Opening the door, he gestured for her to come in. It would only be proper manners, “Mabel. Come in! I’ll do my best. Would you like anything to drink? Anything to eat?”

“What do you have to eat?” Mabel asked, tilting her head. The pockets of her smock bulged oddly with her varying rocks. She bent down to let the lab sniff her before stepping inside and patting its head lightly. She was not really a dog person or a cat person, though she had no ill feeling towards either. She had always preferred smaller animals, like frogs and birds and snakes and mice. In general, she was not so interested in any one animal at all, even though her parents were “famous” for their frog. If anyone ever asked, she always said frogs were her favorite, but it wasn’t really true. It was just a convenient thing to reply with.

She stepped inside, breathing in the air. She thought you could tell a lot about a person by how their house smelt, and she could detect in this one the comfort of animal friends, but, too, maybe a hint of turmeric and mint. Homecooking, perhaps? She was not one for it, though often her budget required it, and so she subsisted on as simple fare as she could get by with—as simple a dish as could be prepared in under 30 minutes—most of the time. She hoped that one day, when she had a wife, her wife might know how to cook and enjoy it. That, though, seemed many years from today, and far less important than becoming a super hero.

“How have you been, Professor?” she asked, remembering her manners, the rocks in her pockets making a soft, rough sound as she sifted through them with her fingers. “We live in such odd times.”

Kaveh smiled and nodded, “Yes, I never thought in my wildest dreams that something like this would be happening.” He looked at his animals, “Why don’t you talk like that very smart cat at the bakery, eh?” The dogs didn’t respond. They were smelling the newcomer to make sure she was safe.

“I’m okay, though. How about you? Would you like some chai? I can make it the Persian way. As for food, I think we have some cookies that Nacho made a couple days ago. I think I have a bunch of ingredients to make some quesadillas….”

He tapped his chin, trying to ponder what occupied his cabinets. “Make yourself comfortable!”

“Do you think we will also get special animal companions?” Mabel asked, watching Kaveh chat to his dogs. “I hope not. I don’t think I’m responsible enough for a pet. Maybe if it were a hermit crab…” A talking hermit crab could be fun!

“But probably that’s just for the special ones. The Chosen.” She sighed. It was hard to resent them, seeing as how Wren and Juliet were Chosen, and she loved them. But she did wish that she was even more special than the special she apparently was. Perhaps she had a bit more ambition than anyone had ever expected of her!

“I love chai. I have never had it the Persian way. How is it different?” she asked, trailing after him and looking around. “Chai and cookies!” she brightly suggested. “I’m still eating cookies from Christmas. They’re all terrible, but they’re an easy breakfast.” She looked around and sat herself on the nearest chair. “What do you think will happen when we find all the Crystals, Professor? Will we be able to go back to Elysium?”

Kaveh was used to getting questions. It is par for the territory as a professor. He didn’t mind it because he knew his topic. He knew geology so well. But questions about this weird world that he knew but didn’t knew. Like how do you describe walking or breathing?

“I think the animals are special for the chosen,” he inwardly winced at his answer. How he could even make such a judgment based on so little. “You know, you can take a rock as a pet. All you have to do is dust it every once in a while.” He gave her a wink as he began to rummage through his cabinets to find the right plates and the right kettle.

“Hmm…” Well, she supposed if she had a magical rock, calling it a pet wouldn’t be too underwhelming. But first she had to identify one…

“Oh, chai is what we call tea. And it is similar to other chai, just a different mix of spices,” Kaveh explained as he put the kettle on. With that done, he took the cookies from the tupperware and arranged it on the plate. Was cookies enough? Mabel was a growing girl. Maybe he should cut some fruit for her too. He opened the fridge and grabbed some chilling berries and placed them in a bowl.

Her eyes widened with delight as he pulled out cookies and fruits. What a lovely afternoon!

“I don’t know what will happen with all the crystals found. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to go back. I’m content with my life here,” he looked up and gave her a smile. Serenitas reminded him way too much of a theocratic authoritarian government to his liking.

Mabel considered. “I don’t hate it here,” she replied, slowly, “but what I have here is perhaps no more of value than what I could find there. That is to say, my parents have always been busy in the field, my abuelas may not be here so much longer, and…being a wedding photographer is lucrative, but it certainly isn’t thrilling. I would rather go on grand adventures. Fight bad guys with magic and find treasure.” She shrugged. “I suppose it’s because in most ways, in my head, I’m still just a kid. I suppose when you have more to lose, the idea of adventure is not so appealing.” She glanced around, at the little signs that Kaveh did not live alone, at the little hints and evidences of Nacho’s itineracy.

“Well, I hope that if some big magical doorway opens, then we’ll have a choice to stay or go.”

She began to divest her little hoard, first dumping them on a counter and then putting them in some kind of order. It probably was an intuition only known to Mabel, but typically, they were arranged in straight lines.

“What do you think?”

Kaveh listened to Mabel and had a tiny bit of envy. How to grow up in seemingly boring times and seek excitement. All he wanted was a quiet, uneventful, content life. He wanted to grow old surrounded by loved ones, adorable animals, great books, video games, and intellectual pursuits. How much he related to Bilbo Baggins in the Hobbit. This whole Elysium thing was yet another chapter of his dinner being interrupted by dwarves and wizards.

But he didn’t invalidate Mabel’s feelings. He got it. It just wasn’t for him.

Just as he turned around with a plate of cookies and fruit to give to her, he noticed the pile of rocks dumped out. His dark eyes widened. He knew Mabel was charmingly unconventional but even this he didn’t expect. He placed the plate on the side table and examined the collection.

“Well, you got a few solid examples of quartz,” he pointed out the white crystals. “This smooth one is basalt which is what this island is mostly made of. But that is a nice smooth sample of it.” He pointed out the greenish stone, “Looks like this is Chert. Sedimentary rock made of bio material…”

She nodded as he identified her various rocks…as rocks. None of them, however, seemed to be magical rocks, and her expression fell. “Not even this one?” she asked, looking up at him with big doe eyes and pointing to what actually might have been a piece of ceramic from a stand that sold incense and draperies and things that were supposed to be Buddhist down by the beach. “I thought for certain…”

But then, if it was a simple matter to locate magic among the mundane, they probably would all already have found the crystals. A quest was meant to be difficult, and so after a moment she nodded to herself, deciding that it would have been anticlimactic if she had discovered something first try.

“I recall Juliet and Wren being very special in the old world. It is probably silly, wanting to be special too. But I have always been very ordinary.” She shrugged. “Even when I am whimsical, it is because I have chosen to be. There are people who would say it’s a luxury to be bored, but being bored is also frustrating in its way. So I want to go on a hero’s journey. I want to leave a mark on the world—a legacy.”

Kaveh looked at the piece of clay with a degree of sadness before he suddenly smiled, “It is regular clay, melted down into something new and beautiful. But it was humans doing what the earth does on its own.”

He took a deep breath to answer her but then the teapot whistled. He retreated to the kitchen and poured a couple glasses, using his tea mixture perfected by his mother. A flagrant scent began to waft throughout the house, the smell of roses, cardamom, saffron, and cinnamon.

Coming back in, he set the tea next to Mabel and took a seat on the couch. He looked down at his glass as he tried to find the right Spanish words to say to her, “I think you’re pretty special. I have never met anyone quite like you and you do it by the force of your personality. Not only that, it is a loving personality. And I think you will leave a mark and you don’t need to be a chosen to do that.”

He smiled a little before taking a sip.

Mabel closed her eyes, breathing in the lovely scent now spreading through the house. She would have to ask what exactly his blend was, because it was heavenly on the nose, and she needed that in her everyday life. She picked up a cookie, leaning forward to view the tea as it was set beside her, admiring its hue. It looked pretty, just like the cookies and the fruit. She thought that Kaveh was living a pretty charmed life here. She had no idea what he had gone through in his life before this, but she suspected that everything had finally gone well for him in this moment, from the lovely house to the lovely boyfriend. She couldn’t fault him for wanting to keep it.

He was, after all, lovely himself.

She smiled up at him, her face warming happily at the compliment. She cupped her fingers around her tea and then took a sip.

“This is the best tea I’ve ever had,” she said, her eyes shooting open. “Why is it so good?” She sat up, pulling her chair up closer. “It’s too bad all the stones were regular, but I believe in next times and also third times, which are especially charmed.” She turned her gaze up at Kaveh. “If you do find a magic stone…what will happen? You don’t seem like you want any of this craziness pervading your life…”

Kaveh laughed and smiled at the compliment, “Thank you very much! It is actually my mother’s recipe.” Every time he made it, he believed she made it too for those she loved. It was a comforting thought. “It had some rose in it. And other tea staples.”

As she questioned about magic stones, Kaveh thought of his own that he had found. Or rather, he felt certain found him. He hummed a little, “I think you will just know it is yours. I … found mine. Still figuring it out though. But I just found it and I knew. It’s obsidian, not super common around here so I thought that was odd.”

At the latter half of her question, Kaveh sighed before taking a sip of tea, “To be frank, I don’t. But I have come to realize that sometimes upheavals are a part of life and you just gotta roll with the punches.”

Mabel blinked in surprise, sitting up straighter as she regarded Kaveh. So he had actually found one of the pieces of that Otherworld magic already… He didn’t seem very happy about it, but based on their conversation so far, she thought that made sense. He had been trying to live an ordinary life, and somehow the extraordinary had found him anyway. Distracted, she sipped her tea, considering whether or not she believed that he really believed that the pitfalls were necessary. They were, at the very least, unavoidable, so there was that. But he didn’t seem very happy about any of it.

Momentarily, she looked down into her tea, licking her lips. “So you are going to become a magical warrior then? Even though you don’t want to?”

Kaveh shrugged a little, “I still have questions. I still don’t know why we have been made aware of these other selves. Or how we’re gaining their abilities. If I’m needed, I will take up the staff and do what I need to do. Otherwise, I will still continue to explore and ask questions.” He took another sip of his tea.

“There is a quote – life happens when you prepare for other things,” Kaveh said. “I need to remember that. We all do.” He grabbed a cookie. “What do you know about your other self?”

Mabel smiled into her tea. “She came from a village in Guren, and her mother was a great hunter. It seems her mother rescued some kind of nobleman, and he wound up deciding to repay them by having her sent to the school. My feeling is…Ode hated that. But she was a really curious person, so even though she was far away from home, she enjoyed her classes and the city. She was always very entertained at least, though she thought most of the people around her were odd, and she didn’t like the noble or royal students very much. She was a firecracker. I think my personality is actually really different, but watching her is a lot of fun. I might have turned out like that!”

She, too, grabbed a cookie. “And did you remember anything more about yourself from then?”

Kaveh smiled a little at the thought of just being a rebellious teenager in Elysium who was exploring the world. That sounded simple and nice. He could get behind that, he thought, “Sometimes it is fun to think about how you would be different if brought up in a different family or world, being informed by different events and such. To think how you would be different.”

He tilted his head to the side at her question to him. “I… was a teacher at the school. Magic teacher. But I also fought in a war. That sits heavy on the brain, I found. Otherwise, we’re pretty similar. Maybe Seneca is more… pragmatic and capricious than me. But that comes from events and families shaping who we are.”

Mabel thought Kaveh was pretty pragmatic, but he didn’t seem very capricious. She closed her eyes and tried to draw up memories of Seneca the professor. She thought he seemed very solitary and sometimes he did have a kind of hardness to him. That made sense, though; he’d fought in a war and probably seen things that no one wanted to see. He did not have Nacho, or any of the other people that seemed to form a family around him here. Though she had never thought Seneca unkind. Strange sometimes, but never unkind.

“I think…” But she could not really remember a lot. Parties and classes mostly. The fragments of some kind of field training. A distant hum of alarms—like she had not heard before, not on Earth. She shook her head. “I think,” she started again, “maybe we are going to be in a war. Hopefully not here, but maybe there. The meetings, the patrols, indicate we have adversaries. I guess this means we might not have won that war, either,” she said, frowning at her knuckles, protruding from around the cup.

“Ooooh, but this suddenly got dark,” she sighed. “I really just want to be a superhero or an adventurer and treasure hunter.” And maybe, too, though Mabel had not allowed herself to verbalize it, just as she hadn’t allowed herself to point out any of the darker avenues they must have come to get here, she wanted to be powerful, to protect herself. Because what was regular old everyday Mabel going to do against evil knights and reapers?

She shook her head. “Well, Professor. Thank you for the cookies and the expertise. Too bad none of these worked, but I’m going to bring more soon, and maybe I’ll bring some treats, so you don’t always have to treat me!”