81Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡT9qLUxQnbD
81Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡv6Ls0QuNph
Half-Haul Canal is a large island chain off the coast of Sun’s Beacon, in the Brutish Sea. Its principal city is called Cannath. Because of the location and shape of the islands, many consider them to be an extension of the High Mountains, and that the range merely extends underwater.
- Gem Trails of the Greater Continent
81Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡLei4bKbj28
Chapter 23:
A Disappointment
81Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡNS7JdJ8Z7O
#23.1 – Friday, the 18th day of the 10th month…
A week passed, and the consensus became solid: Scarlet Jusenkyou would go to the Citadel. And yes, it would be exactly as epic as it sounded: the sixteen-day journey would have her travel by airplane, boat, and train.
She would be doing it by herself.
Funded by her parents and supplied by the Antiquarian Society, but still: adventure!
It didn’t stay epic for long.
Before Scarlet even had the chance to announce her expedition, the family phone started ringing.
And didn’t stop.
“Where did you people get this number?” Scarlet asked. “I don’t even know this number!”
Dr. Druet Young, for his part, chose to ignore the phone entirely and show up at Scarlet’s home unannounced to deliver ultimatums.
“The Weevil,” Dr. Young said to Scarlet, as if the words should mean something. “Will perform this task to my and every other Antiquarian’s satisfaction. Count on it.”
The phone rang again and Scarlet gritted her teeth.
“Word has spread, yon creature,” Dr. Young told her. “It seems a few Antiquarians like to bypass the formal submission process, and are trying to contact you directly.”
“The phone calls are bad enough, but I get a stack of letters six inches high every single day,” Scarlet told him. “And my normal eighth grade homework. Which I’m not even doing.”
By now, school mutated into a nearly impossible challenge. The usual jabs and barbs about her hair, body, and complete unattractiveness to the opposite sex were flying as thick as usual. Somehow, word got out about Scarlet’s assistant membership in the Society, and the kids found ways to turn that into a insult. They told her she had a face only a blind grandparent could love, that she only read history books because she had no future; and bafflingly of all, that dead Pendragons* make the best boyfriends because they can’t say ‘no’. Scarlet couldn’t figure out how that last one worked, but it hurt anyway.
After another week of this, Scarlet felt ready to crumble. She’d just made it home from school(itself a harrowing trek fraught with much peril) only to find Dr. Young waiting outside her door with several people.
“I lost my house key,” Scarlet said to Dr. Young. “Wait here while I go crawl in through a window.”
“This key?” Dr. Young held up a small copper bit of metal. “I spotted it on the front walk when we arrived.”
Scarlet grabbed the key out of his hand and went to unlock the door, pausing only to glance at Young’s companions. They all looked to be in their early-to-mid twenties. One of them, a girl who had blue hair for no adequately explored reason, glared angrily at Young’s back. Scarlet locked eyes with her briefly, and she managed to wordlessly communicate that she found the key and Dr. Young wrongfully took credit. This, Scarlet surmised, was in line with everything she knew about him.
Scarlet shoved the door open and marched inside, angry that she would now need to ‘entertain’ on top of everything else. Couldn’t he just wait until my parents got home? Scarlet thought, but said “Come inside, please, and make yourselves comfortable. I’ll see what we have around to drink—”
“Ah, let me stop you there,” Dr. Young said.
Scarlet turned on her heel, still gripping her school books and large bag of other books, and watched a most unusual event. The five young people followed the doctor into the house, and he began directing them about as if he were a military drill sergeant.
“Robar, the kitchen,” Dr. Young snapped his fingers and pointed in that direction. “Triana, take Ms. Jusenkyou’s books to her room.”
The blue-haired girl approached Scarlet and meekly held out her hands. Scarlet pulled back. “I… don’t like anyone going in my room.”
Moving fast, Scarlet back-peddled towards the hall and turned around, narrowly missing an end-table as she retreated further into the house. Her books were hastily deposited on her desk, then she returned to the front sitting room where Dr. Young and his cadre waited.
“So, um, who are these people?” Scarlet asked, nearly jumping out of her skin when the one called Robar arrived with a glass of ice water for her.
“Graduate students, of course,” Dr. Young raised an arm and steadied himself on his crutch.
“And they are here for…?” Scarlet took the water.
“Anything and everything,” Young said. “Answer phones, sort letters, light typing. They’ll even do your laundry and feed your pets. No job is too demeaning.”
Scarlet took a long draft from her glass, surprised that Robar found the pitcher of filtered water in the refrigerator. The Jusenkyou house had notoriously foul tap water. “I am so confused,” she said to Dr. Young. “Just… so confused.”
“You told me when last we spoke you were feeling somewhat put upon,” Dr. Young said. “Perhaps not in so many words. This is… what is the collective-noun for a bunch of twenty-somethings?”
Scarlet twisted her chin. “Is there one?”
“I always liked ‘a disappointment’,” Dr. Young told her. “Yes, that will do. I’ve brought you a disappointment of twenty-somethings to carry the load. You can even have these five eager young graduate students drive you places and pick you up from school, I don’t care. They’ll do anything for a letter of recommendation—anything. And for the task of helping you prepare for your expedition, I have promised such a letter… to four of them.”
As if answering a call, Friar the duck strutted into the room. He stopped in the center, turned in a slow circle, and flapped his wings once before craning his neck to look expectantly at the blue-haired girl.
“I suggest you show Triana were the duck food is,” Dr. Young said. “I’ll get the rest of them to work sorting your mail.”
Scarlet felt her stomach clench as she walked through the kitchen with Triana in tow. “Can… is it ok for him to be doing this?” she whispered to the young woman.
“Oh, this isn’t actually that bad,” Triana replied. “Dr. Young never hands out recommendations, I expected to have to eat literal fire to get one. Like actual fire. And he said if we did well enough, he might introduce us to The Weevil.”
“The Weevil?” Scarlet asked.
“Yeah,” Triana said. “How do you not know about The Weevil?”
“I’m thirteen?”
Triana gave Scarlet an exasperated sigh. “The Weevil, you know, like a book weevil? Tiny little insect that burrows into books. Whenever one of us hit a problem that no one could solve—and I mean no one—Young would send it to this, like, legend in the Antiquarians. Dr. Thompson, One King rest his soul, and he’d be back a month or two later with some crazy obscure source. All Thompson would ever say is ‘I gave it to a friend to chew on’. So this mystery friend is The Weevil.”
Scarlet may have been failing math at that point, but she could still add two and two and get ten†. In terms of nicknames she’d been given behind her back, The Weevil was definitely the best.
She returned to the living room to find six large, ruggedized traveling cases wheeled in by another of the graduate students.
“I understand you’ll be going rather a long way,” Dr. Young said. “This should be more than adequate to carry your belongings.” He lifted one of his prosthetic legs and kicked the young man standing next to him, who stooped down and opened the nearest case. “This one has been pre-packed with equipment. Two high-quality video cameras, four digital still cameras, and four audio-recorders. All with extended-life batteries and a solar-charging plant in the exceedingly unlikely event electricity is unavailable. You’ve also got enough digital storage media to last you the next ten years. Everything is field-certified and of the highest quality.”
“Do… one media go with the cameras and the other with the… cameras?” Scarlet said.
“We’ll give you a lesson on how to use everything,” Dr. Young told her. “The other five cases are for your personal effects.” He leaned down and took a strange rectangle from the case. “We’ve also provided a laptop computer for making field notes.”
Scarlet nodded at the computer, silently swearing never to open it. The cameras could probably survive her tender ministrations, but the laptop was doomed if she laid a single finger upon it. While a modern girl in nearly every sense, Scarlet had an uncomfortable relationship with the digital age. Things with rechargeable batteries evoked in her a very special kind of anxiety. Her preference had and always would be hand-writing everything in her cribbed, crablike style, but in reality she stored most of her notes in her head.
“One more thing,” Young withdrew a small, blunted silver device from his coat pocket and held it out for Scarlet to take.
She grasped it with thumb and forefinger and held it up in front of her eyes. One end held a data port, the other a rubber button. Scarlet could tell by the sheen of the metal and lack of scratches she looked at no ordinary device.
She also had no clue what it did.
“A fellow researcher from the Gudersnipe Foundation+ gifted me that little toy,” Dr. Young said. “A digital voice recorder with an atomic battery. I want you to use it for your own personal log. Never know when a thought will strike you; it helps to have something that never runs out of power.”
81Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡSmJzFF1jqY
* * *
81Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡaaShmcyFAX
#23.2 – Friday, the 25th day of the 10th month…
Though not often particularly astute in the ways of human emotion, Scarlet thought that just maybe her mother might be having difficulty with the thought of her going away for most of a year. Her way of coping with the problem was to help Scarlet pack. Scarlet, who would have ended up wearing the same set of clothing day in and day out for six solid months if not for the intervention, felt grateful for the assistance.
For clothing, Scarlet(’s mother) budgeted two suitcases. Obviously packing six entire months’ worth was an impossibility, so they assumed there would be laundry service available. Scarlet’s mom could organize like one of the greats, and stuffed one suitcase entirely with various undergarments. This fact Scarlet chose not to include in her field notes.
For a travel bag, her Lancer backpack would hold everything she’d need on the sixteen-day journey. Since she wouldn’t have regular access to the rest of the cases, that meant cramming sixteen days worth of clothes, books, snacks, and other essentials into… well, a backpack that was designed to carry all that plus a rocket launcher. It didn’t pose a huge challenge.
The three remaining cases would hold her reference materials. This proved much harder than anything else. She needed as much as she could bring on the eras covering Naomi’s life and those around it, and Naomi was really old.
Academic reference books were too detail-heavy, she’d need a truck to carry enough. Lay-books tended to skimp on details*, but held denser practical information. Then of course there were the awkward stretches of the Long Night† where basically no one wrote anything down. Or the fact that historians were missing so much from the later portions of the Sixth Age…
It was hard. Having her mom take care of her clothing helped.
And one last detail still niggled at her.
“You’re going.”
“But—”
“Scarlet Amiko Jusenkyou.”
When they first began discussing the departure date, Scarlet’s mom held a lot of reservations. Initially she wanted Scarlet to get her grades up first, then she wanted to wait for winter break, and at last she’d settled on something simple: Scarlet could leave the day after the first middle school dance, which her therapist ordered her to attend+.
The pressure of it all manifested in unusual ways.
First, Scarlet found herself snapping at people; then picking verbal fights in school. She had one very unpleasant melt-down, before discovering that she did indeed have a very useful friend in this endeavor.
“I promised you I’d take care of it,” Esperanza said. “I had to go all the way out to Low MountainP to do it, but I got you covered.”
Reading through Emmerich’s folios calmed her down. The references were so vague, Scarlet didn’t know how Emmerich ever found it. Somehow, in the twilight of the last Age, Jason Bur’I had taken the sword to the Feast of Aeons.
And then he sent the Feast of Aeons away.
Whilst still trying to grapple with this concept, Scarlet was forced to stop researching, and get ready for a middle school dance.
Most magical quests were probably interrupted in a similar fashion.
81Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡWnqExHyI5L
End:
Chapter Twenty-Three81Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡrcBxIhMvVP
and then Add to home screen.