#he stayed and faced the furies for pythagoras

[girlwhowasntthere]

[imjustthemechanic]

Natalie Jones and the Golden Ship

Part 1/? - A Meeting at the Palace Part 2/? - Curry Talk Part 3/? - Princess Sitamun Part 4/? - Not At Rest Part 5/? - Dead Men Tell no Tales Part 6/? - Sitamun Rises Again Part 7/? - The Curse of Madame Desrosiers Part 8/? - Sabotage at Guedelon Part 9/? - A Miracle Part 10/? - Desrosiers’ Elixir Part 11/? - Athens in October Part 12/? - The Man in Black Part 13/? - Mr. Neustadt Part 14/? - The Other Side of the Story Part 15/? - A Favour Part 16/? - A Knock on the Window Part 17/? - Sir Stephen and Buckeye Part 18/? - Books of Alchemy Part 19/? - The Answers Part 20/? - A Gift Left Behind

Desrosiers apparently isn’t all bad.  Jury’s still out on Neustadt.

“I will be back in two hours.”  Desrosiers checked her watch.  “At ten past two in the afternoon, local time.  Wait here.”  She appeared to set an alarm, and then hurried out.  The door shut behind her.

Sir Stephen shook his head as he watched her go.  “We’ll never see her again, either,” he noted.

Natasha looked down at the French passport in her hands.  “Maybe not,” she admitted. 

“Do you think anything she told us is the truth?” asked Sam.

“I don’t know.  I think probably part of what she said was true, and part of what Neus… what Newton said, as well.”  The idea that she’d actually spoken to Sir Isaac Newton was going to take a while to digest.  Was she even sure that was true?  Was Desrosiers trying to turn them against her rival, suspecting they would have read his strange writings?  Was Neustadt, with his apartment in Neapoli, just a coincidence?

“So what do we do?” asked Sharon.

“I say we leave at once,” said Sir Stephen.  “Kotor is most likely a trap – we cannot go there.  We must go, I think, to Santorini, to find these other writings of Newton’s.  They may contain some information we can use to have him or Desrosiers arrested.  And we must do it quickly, before either of them leaves the European Union and can no longer be extradited.”  His distaste for the rules he was having to follow was plainly audible in his voice.

“Maybe we can also figure out what Desrosiers thought were signs that the Philosopher’s Stone had been made there,” Nat said thoughtfully.

“Wait,” Jim protested.  “What if she comes back?”

Sir Stephen paused.  “I do not believe she will.”

“What if she does?” Jim insisted.

“She said she would be back at ten past two,” said Nat.  “We can wait that long, right?”

“What if she’s late?” asked Jim.

He looked so unhappy, Nat almost wanted to hug him.  Here was this thing he desperately needed and probably wasn’t going to get, and yet he clung to it.

“Twenty to three, then,” Nat said.  “We’ll give her an extra half-hour.  But if Newton’s going to end up blowing something up…”

“I understand.”  Jim sighed heavily.  “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one.”

“That’s from Star Trek,” Nat observed.  Another tidbit of cultural information that Newton probably wouldn’t have told him, and which he knew nevertheless… as if he’d somehow absorbed it through osmosis.

Jim shrugged.  “Please don’t,” he said.  “I don’t know how I know it.  It’s like you know how to speak English, I guess… I just know.”

“Buckeye’s mind would have contained the knowledge of English,” said Sir Stephen.

“But it would be English like yours,” said Nat.  “Or even proper Old English, Anglo-Saxon or maybe old Cornish.  He would at least have an accent.  He speaks colloquial American English.”

Sharon cleared her throat.  “I’m just saying, since the ratio of Brits to Americans here is two to one, technically you’re the one with the accent.”

“Of course I have an accent, I’m Rrrrussian,” said Natasha, in the most exaggerated stage Russian she could manage.  “Anyway, I’m definitely thinking that he’s absorbed some kind of general knowledge from his creator, possibly at the same time as he absorbed the language.”  Maybe things that weren’t personal enough for him to understand Newton’s notes, but a general background of stuff everybody knows.  Things Newton didn’t even mean to transmit.  “I hope Desrosiers does come back.  If she does, we can ask her.”

Desrosiers did not come back.  At ten past two, they heard a telephone ring in the kitchen.  Sir Stephen ran to snatch it up, while the rest followed, crowding into the narrow room.

“Hello?” Sir Stephen asked.

Nat reached out and hit the speakerphone button.

“Good afternoon,” said the voice of Helene Desrosiers.  “It is I, as I’m sure you can tell.  I hate to break my word, but I cannot stay.  I must find Neustadt before he can do anything rash.  But if you go to room 909 in the Pythagoras hotel, you will find the door unlocked, and three flasks of elixir in the bathroom.  Have your friend consume one flask in the morning on the fifth day since his creation, the second on the tenth, and the third on the fifteenth.  It will extend his life by replacing the cells that are dying.  Beyond that I’m afraid there’s very little I can do for him.  He was never meant to be permanent.”

There was a click.  It had been a recording.

Sir Stephen put the phone back in its cradle with enough force to make the whole machine bounce.  “I knew it!” he said.  “Did I not tell you so?”

“Yeah, you did,” Natasha was forced to agree.  Of course Desrosiers had run off… she probably had a dozen fake passports sitting around, under a dozen different names.  She was probably already out of Greece and on her way to wherever she was going next.

They could still take advantage of her kindness, though… assuming that was even a good idea.  Nat looked at Jim.

“Do you want them?” she asked.  “Or if you’d rather not drag it out…”  Desrosiers had said it was cruel to create him, but it might be crueler still to let him linger longer as he stewed over his mortality.

He shook his head.  “I want them,” he said.

The Pythagoras Hotel was a very ordinary Best Western, located just a couple of blocks from the green oval of Karaiskaki Park.  By the time they arrived, Helene Desrosiers had already checked out, but the clerk told them they were expected, and directed them up to her room.  Lying on the bed were three metal flasks, the kind people carried liquor in.

Jim picked one up as if afraid it would explode, and unscrewed the top to sniff the contents.  He made a face, but then gathered up all three, and held them against himself as if afraid somebody would steal them.

“Now what?” he asked.

“Well, if Neustadt is really Sir Isaac Newton, then we need the rest of his writings,” said Nat.  “That means we go to Santorini.  I’ll call Fury.”

Fury did not sound impressed when Nat called him from the airport and told him what they were planning.

“Where are you gonna stay?” he asked.  “I can’t get you any hotel reservations on Santorini.  Every room on the island is booked at least a year in advance.”

“Then we’ll have to hope Mr. Maslanka is hospitable,” Natasha said.  “If he’s not, we’ll improvise.”  Finding safe places to sleep had been part of her training, and the island’s dry climate would help.

“Are you guys sure you’re not just making excuses to take a vacation?” Fury asked.  “Her Majesty told me you were planning on sightseeing in Cairo, and Athens and Santorini are two of the most popular tourist destinations in Greece.”

“You can’t see me, but I’m rolling my eyes right now,” said Nat.  “When we’re finished with this, whatever we end up doing with it, we’re going to need a vacation to recover.”

“As long as the taxpayers aren’t funding it,” Fury told her.  “I’ll get your tickets.  Keep me informed.”

“Will do.”  Nat disconnected, and returned to the rest of the group.

They’d bought Jim a backpack to carry his flasks of elixir, but instead he had them in his lap, sitting on one of the uncomfortable metal benches in a waiting area and staring off into space.  Allen was sitting on one side of him, and Clint on the other, and this time it was Clint who was trying to reassure him.

“I can think of a least one advantage to being an amnesiac,” said Clint.

“An amnesiac is somebody who has memories but forgot them,” Jim said distantly.  “I just don’t have any.”

“Either way,” Clint told him.  “You’ll never have to lie awake at night remembering stupid things you did when you were fifteen.”

Jim blinked a couple of times.  “What?” he asked.

“My brother used to know this girl whose father owned a seafood restaurant in West Bridgford,” Clint explained.  “One night when we’d all been doing some drinking, we decided to go hang out there after hours – she had a key, so she let us in, and we had this brilliant idea that we were going to have lobster races.  So we pulled the lobsters out of the tank and drew some lines on the floor, and you put those little buggers down and they run like hell on ten legs.  Except we never got around to putting them back in the tank, so in the morning the girl’s dad arrived and we’re all passed out under the tables surrounded by free-range lobsters.”

Jim just stared at him.  Sam and Allen did, too.

“Sometimes I still think about that when I’m awake in the middle of the night and it’s like my whole body just goes ugh,” Clint concluded.  “So at least you don’t have to do that.”

“No,” said Jim.  “No, I’m gonna be lying awake at night thinking I’ve got two weeks to live and I’m spending it with these people.”

“Did the lobsters survive?” asked Nat.

Clint shook his head.  “Barney and I had to ring our parents and tell them we weren’t going to be home that day because we had to wash six lobsters’ worth of dishes.”  He looked like he wanted to cringe just thinking about it.

Natasha sat down across from the three.  “Well, Fury’s going to send us to Santorini,” she said, “but he wants us to know that this isn’t a vacation, so we’re not allowed to have any fun.”  She wagged a finger.

“We’re totally sending him tourist selfies, aren’t we?” said Sharon with a smile.

“As amusing as that would be, probably not,” Natasha decided.  “We don’t know how much more travelling we’ll have to do and we don’t want our funding cut before we can do it.”

Clint looked astonished.  “We have funding?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Nat said.  “Who knew?”

There were chuckles from various other members of the group, but Jim, with his flasks still in his hands, just turned to look out a window at the planes taxiing past.  Natasha knew exactly how he felt, she thought… he was there in body, but also outside it watching from a mile away, invisible to the people all around him.  She had dissociations like that, when she found herself in the middle of a faculty dinner or something, carrying on a conversation at the same time as she was somewhere else entirely, marveling at how not one of these people had the faintest idea that she wasn’t who she’d told them she was.  In that moment, she felt very sorry for him indeed.

Then Allen patted him on the back and she bristled again, the sympathy gone.  Before she could get too far into stewing, however, an airport employee approached them.

“You are the UK Committee for the Appraisal of Archaeological Peril?” the man asked.

“That’s us,” said Nat.

“You’re on Aegean Airlines flight 361,” he told them.  “This way please.”

[knowledgebeyondbooks]

Angel drabble 2

No one knew anything about her. What she represented, how old she was, who she served, why she continued to walk on the blade’s edge of total corruption. The heat she bore within her was hotter than any forge, as bright if not brighter than the sun. Perhaps she had been one of the sun deity’s servants, perhaps she was a representative of one of the stars, burning hot and bright amongst the night sky and retained the great plasmatic glory within the fur and muscle of her physical form. No one dared to ask, though, as a piercing glare that peered over the cracked, blackened mask that formed more as a muzzle now than a full-faced cover put fear into the hearts of anyone who tried to question her- combative or otherwise.

There were no records of her within the Sphere of Knowledge. Or, at least in the sense of her being. There was a single sentence that described of a prisoner, a seraph in chains who was locked away in the very early stages of angelic existence. The truth was that she had been chained a dozen times, the cuffs around her neck, her wrists, around the ankles of her massive pawed legs. She continued to break free, let loose her rage and cracking grace with fury that no one knew for certain why. They couldn’t return her to the magic flow, her own presence corrupting far beyond any that they had seen. They couldn’t get close, and she wouldn’t let them.

But the near-feral, rogue angel who hadn’t been anything but a single, brief sentence in one tome appeared in the Sphere of Knowledge one day, a familiar tuft of orange and speckled grey peeking out from the concaved scruff between her first set of muscled legged shoulders, tucked in and tuckered out for a well-deserved nap.

She was called ‘Valhalla’, or at least that’s what Virgil said, but everyone knew that this name was a new addition, not her original call. The symbol of her mask was too degraded to pinpoint, so they simply accepted that this was how she was called now and left it at that. She was definitely unruly, when she wasn’t lazying about, breaking things and causing chaos just by being sour and grumpy. She wouldn’t listen to any of the seraphs- she wouldn’t listen to anyone, not angels, nor deities, not even Pythagoras. The only one she listened to was the tiny, fluffy angel who happily nattered on about the books he surrounded himself with, sitting on her front paws as if she wasn’t at least fifty times his size on a good day for both of them.

Her very presence was unsettling, a churning mass of pent up fury and corruptness that crept up the backs of everyone’s necks and sent chills down their spine. She was just a breath away of becoming a similar feeling noted to belonging to demons, although she was both as close to them and as far away as them as she could in a single instance. An angel couldn’t become a demon as much as a demon could become an angel, but there was that sense of wrongness that settled into their cores that was all just the same.

Virgil seemed entirely unaffected by it all, either deaf to the sense or ignorant of it. He easily and more effectively used this seraph in chains as a very comfortable bed. The others couldn’t exactly argue- at least the small, odd angel was finally sleeping without having to get Pythagoras to come and get him. He even let her fix his mask- or rather, she took it off his face and warped it to where it would actually fit him rather than constantly slide off.  This was a bit more unnerving to the other angels, as now Virgil’s mask sported a ring of tarnished black around the edges, positively leaking with the foreboding wrongness that was Valhalla. He even took on the dark color, his winged arms taking on the same hue that matched the shade of her mane-like hair. He seemed quite pleased with it all, and Valhalla just simply snorted and ruffled the tiny angel’s fluff with a single finger with enough force to knock him to a sitting position on the ground.

Still, no harm came to anyone, and while this Valhalla kept from physically attacking them, they all collectively decided to just let her stay. Even if she did kept breaking their work when she was in a foul mood. At least the tiny Virgil had a friend to talk to that wasn’t a book.