The Exquisite Melancholy of Jen’Alliah Starlight – Part 2
I have absolutely no idea what I’m going to do with this story.
This is not a new problem for me. For the most part, I only have the vaguest ideas of where I’m going with any particular tale. For the most part, I’m just making things up as I go based on something which has caught my fancy.
Most of the time, however, I tend to stay within genres that I’m comfortable with.
This is different however. I don’t really have a ton of experience with YA-style writing. My wife is the High School teacher, not I. When I write, I tend to stick with adult content minus the swearing and the dangling bits. I find it more comfortable to write that way. I’m not much of a romance author. I wrote one story which contained such intimacy, but at it’s core it was a story about bears fighting robots. The romance was just a chance to test my limits, and I think I pulled it off with grace.
With this, however, that’s right out. I’ll leave that to the men and the women of this world like my wife, who have innate understanding of teenagers that I don’t. I was a teenager myself, but my experience was such a drastic deviation from the norm that it may as well not have happened.
I’m thinking that I need to give Jen’Alliah more purpose than usual. She needs to have a reason to stick out as she does for me to work with her. I’m not yet at the level where I can create a subtle drama without unnaturally high stakes. Some authors could make a grocery list into the central plot core of a story. I’m not one of them.
So come with me, as we both explore the warp and the weave of…
The Exquisite Melancholy of Jen’Alliah Starlight – Part 2
Mysti hounded Jen all day long. She pestered her in the hallways between classes. She prodded during lunch, wheedled at their locker, and by the time they had reached the door to Ancient Mathematics, Jen finally caved.
“Alright Mysti! I’ll go ahead and make you the outfit I drew this morning. Now quit harping on me about it.”
Mysti wore a huge pout, eyes rounded with a shimmer of tears appearing at the bottom of each deep amber orb. Her ears drooped, and she held herself together with a fragile strength which practically demanded comfort.
Mysti had vulnerable down to an art form.
Jen rolled her eyes, but no amount of staunch realism was a match for a pity bombardment of that magnitude. She bent down, raising Mysti’s hand and gave it a brief (but still affectionate) nuzzle with her cheek.
Mysti squealed in delighted victory, turned about, and strutted with unrestrained gloating to their accustomed chairs in the back of the class. Jen muttered darkly under her breath, but there wasn’t any heat in it. Truth be told, Jen enjoyed the game just as much as Mysti.
Well, maybe not quite as much, she thought as she sat down next to a statuesque elf doing her best to radiate her victory without saying anything.
Ancient Mathematics was Jen’s best subject by far. She’d been doing advanced equations almost before she lost her bottom shell. When your most abiding passion was for humans, you couldn’t help but become proficient in their Math.
It was fascinating to study what the humans had been capable of. Enormous devices which used electricity to function, fantastic devices of cunning construction which allowed them to communicate with one another across the whole of Gaia. They could even heat and cool their home without the use of alchemix. If alchemix was Elven kinds greatest gift, electricity had been humanities crowning achievement.
Shame about them destroying their home with it, but Jen hadn’t let that bother her. Without the rise in temperatures and the changes in atmospheric composition, the first clutch of Elves would never have been laid.
Besides, to hear Loremaster Vaquah’allah tell it, it was the Elves who had truly mastered the language of numbers. How else could you explain the continued growth of alchemix and the benefits to all of Elvenkind?
Jen had some ideas on that front, but after expressing them to her mothers, they had quickly forbade her from using most of the words involved in public. They weren’t ardent Alchemixists, but they knew which way the wind blew through the branches. Through much coaxing and bribes, they had managed to quell the opinionated beast within, and so long as Jen continued to receive her oblations in the form of books, she allowed the arrangement to continue.
Loremaster Vaquah’allah was pushing the limits of her tolerance, however.
Jen’s unspoken agreement with the school (to be left alone to sketch and journal about her study of humans) did not sit well with Loremaster Vaquah’allah. She was taller than most elves, stocky and solid with no love of the general displays of her fellow elves. She also tried everything within her power to catch Jen out, peppering her with questions far outside of the normal range for high school students.
The fact that Jen never got an answer wrong, no matter how complex, might also have something to do with it.
Ten minutes into class, Jen was thinking that today would be a day of brooding silence and offended looks. She had no idea how sorely she was mistaken. As she stood, and Vaquah’allah hurled the question at her, Jen’s aura of purposeful aloofness was interrupted by a furrowed brow.
Upon the bark of the central pillar, the Loremaster had written out a series of equations. They practically stunk of ancient human knowledge. None of the alchemix proofs were present, and as Jen finished studying them, the question she had been asked made her eyebrows shoot up.
“Jen’Alliah, can you help the rest of the class understand these equations? I understand if you’re not capable of doing so.”
The subtle emphasis on capable put Jen’s teeth on edge. Of course she was capable. And of course she could understand the equations. She’d been forced to write them down from memory after her mothers had burned the book in abject terror. It was like they had found a pythadder in their fruit basket. They hadn’t ever burned another book since then, but they also stopped buying them in bulk, sight unseen, as well.
They were the equations necessary to create and harness nuclear fission. The study of these equations… Hades, even being caught in possession of books which contained them was an act which would get you brought up before The Canopy. The weapons man had crafted with these equations had created the Blight which still covered half of Gaia all these centuries later. The Fallen had crawled out of the twisted womb of the Blight, and it was they who filled the bedtime stories of elflings.
Jen was trapped. Loremaster Vaquah’allah knew Jen’s innate pride would prevent her from failing to answer a question she knew the answer to. But this… this was different. If she admitted what the equations were, she would be in front of The Canopy before dusk. If she said she didn’t know, then Loremaster Vaquah’allah would be able to justifiably invalidate her longstanding arrangement with the other Loremasters.
Sweat beaded her brow as the tried furiously to think her way out of danger.
To be continued…
Fissionfully,
The Unsheathed Quill
