Sae envisioned her mind as a flat expanse of shallow water. Hung above her mental self-construct was a flat, grey expanse of what could resemble clouds, if not for the lack of essence discharge and utter uniformity.
She was vaguely aware of her cross-legged position against the railing of the Captain's boat, her chisel resting against the face of the thin purple stone slab. Her mental body was emulating it, though lacking her chisel and the stone. It was best for noticing how her instincts took over etching.
Plus, with the stone in her imagination, she got too caught up in figuring out how the etching was affecting the stone. Can't have that.
A rune was hanging in her mind. Getting started with this was always tricky: forcing her body to move without actually directing it, hoping habit would guide her hand instead of conscious thought. Slowly, she moved her mental hand in the same pattern as the inward slope of the intake rune.
Please work. she thought. A silent prayer.
A long second passed, then a second.
Then, with an titanic motion, she sensed her hand moving without her direction. She couldn't catch a whiff of what was driving it, but she had felt it!
After almost an hour of attempts, her concentration broken by the dockloaders filling their ship up for their next trip out, she had finally done it!
Sae cast her awareness far and wide through her perception of her mind. She couldn't call it looking, per se. Just sensing, trying to spot anything amiss in the endless placid expanse of her mind, anything pushing her body to move, because she sure wasn't doing it.
Time was hard to measure when she meditated like this. It could have been more seconds, or minutes. She searched methodically, cutting sections of her mind off into blocks and immersing herself in them.
It was on the seventy-third block she found an inkling of outside force. A pressure, pushing into the waters and causing a disturbance. She seized it, hungrily, examining it for any sign of the source. It fought against her, but this was her mind. She was not to be trifled with when she was this close to completing the first step.
Her hand had stopped moving, but it was a worthy sacrifice. The pressure was being pushed from an orthogonal direction to her mental space, diagonal somehow? She prepared her awareness to leap in that direction, but--
She was torn out of her meditations by a shout from the dockloaders behind her. She whipped around, and saw the scene:
The dockloader who was hoisting up one of their rations boxes was glaring at a group of dockloaders lounging on the walls from the Docks into the city proper.
Sae had to avoid the skyline of the city with her eyes: even a brief glimpse had given her more pain than she had expected.
She refocused on the lone dockloader. She held a glare, but settled the box against her chest and steadily walked towards the ship.
If she's been the only one loading the ship, I may have been meditating for longer than an hour...
Her hand didn't feel strained in the ways it used to, when she would overdo her meditations and try for so long her eyes would crust, as if she had slept. But she had lost her mental image, and she wasn't sure she could return to it. A flicker of frustration infiltrated her calmness, but she pushed it down. _This isn't the time for that_.
Sae only recognized the dockloader girl stepping onto the boat when it shifted slightly, and she shot the girl a wave. She had never dealt with the stress of coworkers: even on fishing trawls, any hired help rarely spoke to her.
A nod was given back from the girl, so she marked that as a successful social interaction with someone who wasn't the Captain, and conducted a small mental celebration.
She wiped the mirth out of her mind and focused on the slab of essence stone she had been trying to work with. Physical proof of esser instincts working instead of her own: the intake rune was constructed in a way she didn't prefer, and hadn't done since she had started learning.
It was a half-finished thing, a blight on the otherwise smooth deep purple surface of the stone. The channel the intake rune was funneling its essence into was cut out first, a slight incline indented into the stone. That's all the instincts had etched into the stone.
Sae sighed. She'd have to mark the details in her meditation notebook: she'd yet to identify a pattern in the pressures, when she could locate them, but there has to be an underlying theory. Has to be.
She judges the merits of another successful social interaction. She could go and chat with the dockloader girl while she was in the hold. Even if she wanted to stop talking to Sae, she couldn't exactly leave.
Yes, that sounded good. She made her way to the cabin, stretching her arms as she did. Meditating as she did made her arms stiff in a way nothing else did.
-
She stood above the trapdoor leading into the storage room of the boat. The girl was lost in thought, staring at the wall. Sae was about to say something when the girl finally turned and began up the ladder.
As soon as her head reached Sae's knee, the other girl froze and slowly looked up to meet her eyes. It was an assessing look, as far as Sae could tell. She was only really skilled at reading her Captain's expressions.
She was blonde. Her hair was cropped close to her neck, her face soft with an slanted, upturned smile.
The dockloader girl had grey eyes. That was rare in Sankhurst.
Sae had probably been looking at the girl's eyes for longer than was acceptable, has it? Was it her fault they looked like the sky in her mind?
She had to break the silence, fast. First thing that comes to your mind, Sae. Just say something.
"Why are you working alone?" escaped her mouth before she could think of a better way to say that. Damn it.
The dockloader girl's eyes widened. "My coworkers aren't pulling their weight." She shifted on the ladder. "Believe me, I'm going to the Docks rep after my shift."
Sae took that in. Maybe the Docks representative - the dockloader girl left off the rest of representative, evidence of an accent? - was better than the Commerce one she had dealt with, but she hadn't found them to be any help.
She constructed some well-wishes, but she was cut off by the rest of the sentence she didn't know was coming: "You guys probably need whatever's in the boxes too, right? Someone's gotta do it."
Sae nodded. "We do." She didn't know how far the Docks was from the Municipal zone, but... "You do know that you've taken so long to load it that going to the Docks representative, talking to him for fifteen minutes, and bringing him back would've taken less time than you've spent loading the boat?"
The loader girl flushed. Sae fought the rush of pleasure at not being the one to break first, and at being the cause of the break. Conversations aren't battles, but if they were, she would've won.
"Look! I'm not gonna leave a bunch of boxes on the dock. Sorry it's interrupting whatever you're doing, but I'd like to finish it up so I can report my terrible colleagues and even worse manager."
The pleasure froze in her veins. Ouch. She shuffled, and started to apologize before being interrupted. "Can I climb up now?"
Sae had forgotten she had chosen to talk to her here to block her in. "Oh! Yeah, sure." She stepped back to let the girl up.
"Not a problem. I'll see you in a second when I go and grab another ration box." She walked through the door of the cabin, giving Sae a wave as she did.
Sae stood in the room, not sure whether to chalk up the conversation as a success or not. "Yeah, sure."
She let herself collapse in her small desk's chair, cradling her face with her hands. The embarrassment trickled in, curling itself around her like a rigging rope. She pushed it down. No sense in lingering on the present, Sae. You've got the future to worry about.
A deep breath before she moves on, though. A clean break into a more orderly state of mind.
She reached underneath the desk and retrieved her bound notebook and charcoals from her compartment. It was a worn, beige thing, marked with small amounts of black residue from her fingers after writing.
She flipped it over, and opened it to the last page she had written in. Her scrawl looked back at her.
September 3rd, 2137
Meditation did not result in instinct takeover.
Glyph etched: bubbled gelid. Planning to use tonight, sleeping area overheating.
Why can't I just
Sae flipped to the next page. No need to stay with that! She twirled her charcoal, and pressed it against the blank page.
September 4th, 2137
Meditation resulted in instinct takeover finally.
Meditation broken by dockloader girl, but was able to locate the direction the instinct was coming from.
Next meditative session will be following that direction if possible.
-
Sae didn't see the dockloader girl again. She had retreated into the sleeping area on the aft after writing the day's events in the notebook, hoping the seclusion would help her meditations.
It didn't.
The hours were spent trying to sink into the mental space where she could begin her work, but it never came. The midday sun turned to dusk as she threw herself at her mind to no avail.
She only noticed how long it had been when the Captain conspicuously stepped outside the deck, breaking her from her focus. The first few trips she was on after joining him was fraught with tension: Sae would jump if she didn't know he was there, so he made himself known. It was kind, but it had been two years.
Sae was over her anxieties.
She swept her pants clean, though they weren't dirty, and stepped out of the sleeping area. The Captain was steadfast in every respect, including his appearance: a blue overcoat that he had had for as long as she had been around, salt and pepper hair cut close to his scalp.
"Captain." She interlaced her fingers, pushing them outwards and wincing at the pop. Not as cool as she hoped it would be.
"Sae." He inclined his head. "I've hired a new essence worker for our next trip out, though she may stick around."
That is not what she had expected him to say. He usually asked about her meditations, or if she wanted to break her rule of not going into the city.
"That's not how you usually break the news, Captain." She leaned, trying to get a look at the new esser. "Is she any good?"
He chuckled, a low sound. "No, not at all. I think you'll have to teach her a lot. Do you some good to get out of your head, though." He flicked her forehead with speed she forgot he was capable of, and she nearly lost her balance.
"Wait, are you joking?" She kept her voice at a soft tone, she didn't want the other worker hearing her. When she shook his head, she had to fight to keep herself quiet. "Why would you hire someone who can't do the job? This is serious!"
The Captain nodded, his expression turned pitying. "I know it's serious. I also know that if you keep pushing yourself, you're going to burn out, and then I won't have any essence workers on my boat. If you're busy teaching her, it'll keep you focused on the here and now."
Sae felt like she had been struck. "I-- you think I can't do both? You think I need some..." she searched for a word that wasn't derogatory.
She couldn't find one.
The Captain picked up the conversational slack that Sae had left sitting there. "Yes, you do. Believe it or not, I think you're capable..." the words were placed carefully, filled with care. "...but you're nineteen. That you're still here at all is a sign of your skill, not a sign of your failure." He rubbed his eyes. "Sae, I want you focused on the new girl. Geneviah."
Oh, and Sae could see it now. The trap he'd laid.
Sae wouldn't endanger the ship, and a useless essence worker was worse than being the only one. She'd have to not meditate just to make enough time to train her.
"Okay." was the only thing she could offer. He had thoroughly outplayed her, making the only option she could take being the one she didn't want. "I'll do it. I'll stop meditating just to train up this girl, for free --" She choked on the last syllable, bitterness tasting sour in her mouth. She hadn't noticed the anger until it was clawing for its own voice.
Tears prickled at the corner of her eyes. Deep breath, Sae. Come on, get it together...
Her vision shrank into a tunnel. The breath she took felt shallow, her chest tightening. She only had one recourse: she pushed it down, the vile anger, and locked it in a box. Locked it again, just to be safe. Cleared her mind, deep breath.
The Captain's voice was watery, cloudy in her state, but she focused on it. "... hear me? Sae?" His face was worried, and she only realized now that she had sunk to her knees.
"I can hear you." She said, measuring each word. "I'm okay." Sae's mind was clear. She was fine.
Doubt decorated his face. "Are you sure?"
"Yes. I'll go to Geneviah? Need to introduce myself." No emotion. She was fine.
"If you're ready for it. I'll head to the cabin. Come and get me when we're ready to leave." He held her eyes, waiting for her to acknowledge it. She nodded, and he left her sitting there.
What a mess. She stood up, brushed herself off again. She's fine. Just had a small collapse, happens to everyone.
She'd go to meet the new girl. Just once she felt steady enough.