Avishraa Reloaded

Puugwol had said something about speaking to her gods, but she had - rather characteristically - failed to mention exactly when and where this would occur. So when she failed to appear in the lab for further experiments with Shyriath, it was reasonable to guess that she had decided to undergo this… procedure, whatever it was. But where had she gone?

Someone peering into her room would have seen that the glowworm-lights had been turned down. This was not part of their usual behavior, so evidently it had been done on purpose. In the dim light, there was no immediate sign of anyone around, But there was a scent on the air, as of recently-cooked mushrooms; some of them, sliced, sat on a plate on one of the tables.

On the wall behind them was a… a decoration that, a few vigils ago, hadn't been there. Someone had painted, in ochre or something like it, a kind of design. It was hard to say exactly what it was meant to be; nothing came to mind if one just stared at it… but, when glimpsed out of the corner of the eye, it was hard not to see faces emerge briefly from the shapes, only to disappear when one tried to focus on them.

At last, one might hear, from the vicinity of the angle between the round bed and one of the walls, a faint noise: a panting, edged with whimpering. Puugwol lay there, or at least surely it must be her, but she seemed to be having difficulty holding her shape; colors and textures moved and clashes across her body like waves on the surface of a pool. But it was possible to make out that her antennae were flushed and her pupils were dilated. Her gaze was fixed on the design painted on the wall.

Einriss was certainly not the type to get concerned about people's voluntary self-poisonings, especially when the effect was not likely to be a lethal dose, but he'd come upon Puugwol mainly because of the not directly explained absence. If something else had happened to her and she needed help, it would certainly have been prudent to check. And so he gave a mildly annoyed exhale as he quietly entered Puugwol's abode, approaching to check on her without deliberately breaking her rapt attention on the image. If she'd taken too large a dose, he might need to help; it would serve no one if one of her organs shut down. Hopefully she was firmly this side of not-dying - if the situation was anything else, he would have to intervene, and she wouldn't like that, and it would make things awkward.

As he approached, his alchemist's sense clearly picked up on the psychoactive substances sloshing around in her body, and the chemical signatures of stress. Her eyes flicked to one side to glance at him, then fixed on him, or at least in his direction.

She said something in her own tongue, though it seemed to contain his name: “Duune ta nAjnris? Nkat al-” She stopped, slowly blinking as if something were trying to hold her eyelids back, and then reached out and gripped his ankle, since it was the only part of him she could reach. She said, concentrating desperately on the words: “Please do not leave me.”

He hadn't expected her to interact with him, much less want him to stay. Biologically, nothing life-threatening was happening to her, so he had been mentally gearing up to leave before she reached out for his ankle. For a moment, he simply stood there in a kind of stupor, then shrugged the lethargy off his thoughts and sat himself down beside Puugwol, offering a paw on her shoulder. “Okay,” he confirmed, softly, but made no effort to further insert himself into the scene, other than to exist for her. That part, at least, was easy.

Puugwol kept her gaze on Einriss. The image on the wall was a focus, something to look at while communing, but at this particular point she didn't need it; the faces loomed out of everything, the messages came from all around, and it was overwhelming. But around Einriss they were not quite so powerful, his color was soothing…

“The… the Lords are not gentle in their speech this time,” she whispered hoarsely. “They bellow; their laughter is loud…” She shuddered as her face twisted up in a shape-change, then slumped. “Were there a shaman here, I would have undertaken this with their guidance; but all the shamans are where I came from.”

“You'll be all right,” Einriss assured her. He couldn't comment on the spiritualism, even if he were so inclined - he simply didn't know enough about her religion to comment meaningfully. Besides, this was a biological event that was screaming itself at him; thinking about anything other than the way her organs were fluttering with stress and her nerves were firing exaggeratedly took concentration he might have been able to muster, but only just, and the lack of familiarity prevented him from giving it an honest try. He did, however, place both hands on her now - even if that worsened the feedback he was getting - and petted her shoulder and arm soothingly.

The touch seemed to lessen Puugwol's terror; at least, the whine faded out of her panting and her transformations became slower. She transferred her grip from Einriss' ankle to a wrist. “Thank you,” she managed, and then added, demonstrating an unusual insight: “I know… you were not raised in the ways of Mangukal. This must not have much meaning to you. Possibly you may find the biochemical effects interesting - at home some alchemists have said that tracing the movement of the products of bilaak-tesh ingestion proved to be an insightful exercise…”

She trailed off. The teal of Einriss' scales really was capitvating. Neither her conversational skills nor her current state of mind lent themselves to poetry, but she wished she could manage the words to convey the sheer depth of color there.

Instead, she said: “Also… also… from this place within the mist, your scales seem very luminous.”

If anyone was able to appreciate the effects of intoxication on a person's judgement calls, it was a lifegiver-alchemist. He tried not to be too visibly taken aback by the sudden compliment, cycling a little through a mild mental confusion that rattled around in between all the sensory input from the fascinating biological trainwreck he was witnessing, through a brief embarrassment, and landed on something that bundled the illicit interaction together into an emotion that had commonalities with an admission of guilt.

But even given that he was mentally occupied mostly with her biological state, he managed to shake it off, find his footing, put the whole thing into perspective, and say: “Mmm, I suspect that's from the added electrical activity in the nerves of your eyes. Your retinas may currently be more sensitive to the higher-energy wavelengths, like the blues.” At least he said it with a mild, friendly smile, and didn't break contact.

“Possibly. But there may also be contributing effects in, in the visual cortex - sensory artifacts are usual with bilaak-tesh ingestion…” She glanced aside, where a ghastly face grinned out at her from the wall. Her grip on him tightened momentarily “They show the faces and voices of the Lords to me. The things that the bilaak-tesh reveals are wondrous, they are gateways to meaning, but not always pleasant.”

Einriss wasn't convinced that there was much meaning to be found in bilaak-tesh, but he had enough tact not to say it to Puugwol's face. Since the conversation seemed to help stabilise her, he put some effort into continuing it: “What are your Lords telling you, then?”, he asked with a mild curiosity, though most of his attention remained on the chemical imbalances and the frantic efforts of her organs to correct it.

“Many things,” she whispered, “many things. They have many voices. One cannot listen to all of them at once. Some say I should examine again the possibility of visiting the Citadel, that I am limited in remaining in this world. Others say I learn more about life by remaining on an alien world than I would be going back. Others speak of the future, that back on Avishraa, there is coming war and blood; that there are a blade and a storm and a spark and that all unknowing they bring death behind them in pursuit. They speak of fire from the sky-”

She stopped, shivering, and then said, “Meaning, much meaning, but I cannot see what the meaning means.”

Very coherent, as expected. Einriss frowned mildly, only with some willpower resisting the urge to begin interfering in her little experiment by helping her body purge the toxins. Biologically speaking, the worst of it was well over, there was no need for him to meddle. “Perhaps once this… session is over, you can go over their arguments again and pick out the one that seems most fruitful,” he recommended, running a hand over her rippling skin carefully in a soothing gesture.

“Yes,” she murmured. “That is usual, in any case. The mortal mind can only see while within the mist, but can only translate what it sees once it comes back.” Her gaze turned back toward Einriss' face. “What is Oldstone like? I wanted to see it, but did not get to before the Oracle had me brought here.”

It was the first time Einriss had really been made aware of how little of Oldstone Puugwol had seen. That, perhaps, explained the voices in Puugwol's head suggesting she explore Avishraa. “It's… a place, I suppose.” Having spent his life there, it was simply normal to him, and he struggled for a moment to think what might be worth calling out.

“The natural landscape around Oldstone is quite a bit barren, but it does have the occasional hardy surprise,” he mused, a little haltingly. “Not a large amount of inspiration for work, but some of it, at least. The really interesting parts, of course, are what's been engineered.

“Specifically, you might like the subterranean caverns we use for temperature-controlled agriculture. Some of them are lined with crops that obtain their energy directly from silicate compounds - they grow very slowly, but steadily. It's quite a sight, really; some of them will grow practically anywhere if you let them, and since these don't do any photosynthesis, they don't reach toward light sources. Instead, the entire inner lining of the cavern is covered, bar the pathways maintained between the crops, like an inverse fluffy cushion.”