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rainbowfic2025-01-23 07:01 pm
paradoxcase) wrote in rainbowfic2025-01-23 07:01 pm
Fresh Thyme #3, Ecru #7 [The Fulcrum]
Name: Clockwork and Heresy
Story: The Fulcrum
Colors: Fresh Thyme #3: Like Clockwork, Ecru #7: Examine
Styles and Supplies: Panorama
Word Count: 2968
Rating: PG
Warnings: None
Characters: Setsiana, Qhoroali
In-Universe Date: ????.7/8?.?.?
Summary: Some questions are answered.
Setsiana awoke and climbed out of the bed. After four years of rising an hour after dawn, it felt horribly late in the day, and the angle of the sunlight that came through the cracks in the shutter seemed wrong. The very first thing she did was to kneel down and check for the nurefye under the mattress; to her relief, it was still there.
There was another plate of food and glass of water on the table. Today, it appeared to be a piece of sándrev, a savory breakfast cornmeal bread. She noted that it was a slice out of a larger cake and not a serving made for one person; maybe Sapfita had been right, and it really wasn’t laced with anything. She was even hungrier now than she had been the night before, and she’d gotten her conversation with Sapfita (although belatedly she realized she’d never actually gotten an answer to the question of where or when she was). She resolved to eat this one.
First, though, she opened the window again. It was indeed at least late morning, maybe even close to mid-day by the angle of the light. The buildings on the other side of the street did not reveal much more than they had the night before, at least with regards to their location. A man exited the building with the horse on it carrying a bridle; the store beside it had a sketch of what Setsiana recognized as a T’arsi style pastry above the door. But this couldn’t be T’arse; none of the people who were now walking past in much greater numbers than the night before had a dark enough complexion for it, and no one had more than one or maybe two braids. Their clothing did incorporate the brighter colors of the more exotic and expensive dyes, but it wasn’t in the style of T’arsi clothing; the women did wear skirts with slits in them as was common for both genders in T’arse, but they were not as long and did not swing as freely, and the slits were in the front and the back, and not on the sides. Their blouses conformed closely to the bust, as had been common in Vrel, but they had a much more defined collar and the neckline dropped abruptly in a very narrow V, almost another slit, that went lower than anything that would have been considered decent in Setsiana’s experience. The men wore outfits that also clung to the body like a woman’s blouse would, again with defined collars and cuffs, often with a jacket or a vest. Many people carried small bags with them, possibly to avoid putting things in their pockets and interrupting the more defined outline of the clothes, and many wore longer, heavier jackets against the cold.
She sat at the table by the window, and watched the people for bit, but nothing new occurred to her. She turned her attention to the sándrev, and broke off a piece. It had the usual vegetables baked into it, but also… she picked the unexpected piece out, and remembering what Sapfita had told her, experimentally ate it. Yes, it was meat, possibly pork, nicely seasoned. In all her years she’d never known anyone to eat meat for breakfast, but as she cautiously ate some more, she found that the flavor went well with the sándrev and it wasn’t long until the whole serving was gone. Maybe someone had thought she needed something more than just the bread after skipping dinner the night before? Only, this piece had come from a larger serving; it hadn’t been made only for her.
She rose, and carefully tested the door that had been locked the previous night. The knob turned, and she pushed it open enough that she could see the other side before pulling it closed again. Had it been left unlocked by accident, or on purpose? She had no idea who or what might be waiting on the other side. On the chance that she had been let loose accidentally, she would want to put on her nurefye and flee immediately, but if she hadn’t, the nurefye would probably get taken away.
She decided to don one of the outfits she’d been provided, explore whatever was outside this room, and then return to get the nurefye if it seemed appropriate. She expected an imperfect fit, but the outfit was somehow exactly the right size, as if the person who had made it had done so using her specific measurements. Somehow this felt more unnerving than anything else that had happened to her so far.
Before she left, she thought to check the bottom drawer of the dresser, which she hadn’t looked in the night before; it contained the bag she’d been carrying when she was abducted. She looked through it several times, but curiously, nothing seemed to be missing, although she never carried anything really valuable or irreplaceable with her normally. She retrieved a rubber band from the bag and braided her hair as she normally did, and then approached the door.
Carefully, trying not to make any noise, she pushed the door to the room open. It led out into a what could either be termed a very short hallway, or a very long junction of four doors, one in each direction. The door she had opened was at one of the long ends, and at the other end was an open doorway with no door at all that led into a much larger room. Through this doorway, on the other side of the large room, she could see a set of double doors that might lead to the outside. However, before she attempted to use them, she wanted to verify that she was alone. She tried the door to her left, but found it locked. The door to her right opened into another bathing room, larger than the one attached to the room she’d been put in. Cautiously, she continued forward into the larger room beyond the open doorway.
In addition to the double doors, another open doorway led off to the left of the large room, on the far side of a hearth, and a closed door exited to the right. But she was not, in fact, alone; in front of a larger paned window on the right side of the room, not visible from hallway, was a large wooden desk covered with papers and one large box, with wide wings that wrapped around the chair that was pulled up to it, and in the chair, with her stocking feet propped up on the desk, was Qhoroali, looking slightly different but not unrecognizable with her hair hanging loose and long behind her back, rather than marshaled into a priestess’s braids. She was wearing what immediately struck Setsiana as a man’s outfit: a loose-fitting shirt and trousers, cuffed like some of the men’s clothing she’d seen from the window, but much more loosely, and none of the same effort had gone into the shape or outline of the clothing; for all that Setsiana could make out of the shape of the bust, she might as well be a man. The trousers were of an ordinary drab color, but the shirt was a brilliant green, one of the colors she’d seen from the window. Qhoroali was leafing through what appeared to be a short hand-bound book or journal and making notes with a pen of a style that Setsiana had never seen before, but after a moment, she looked up.
Qhoroali regarded her for a moment, as if unsure, and then ventured in QuCheanya: “Good morning, I hope?”
There was something in the room making a small but noticeable rhythmic snicking sound, and it was pulling at Setsiana’s awareness. She decided to go in search of it, rather than exchange pleasantries with Qhoroali that Qhoroali frankly wasn’t owed. The sound seemed to originate from near the closed door on the right side of the room; she thought the source might actually be on the other side of the door, but once she got close, she clearly saw that it was coming from a circular sculpture on a bookshelf next to the door. It appeared to be a replica of a sundial, or the clock face on one of the temples in Nwórza, mounted vertically on a wooden base, with the 18 hours marked starting from the middle of the right side, counting the six working hours of the morning up and over the top, followed by the six leisure hours of the afternoon down the left hand side, and then the six sleeping hours of the night right-wards across the bottom. Across the radial hour markings were three circular grooves, and from each groove extended a pin with a large flat head that was rounded on the interior side, but morphed into a precise point at the exterior; like one of the Nwórza temples’ clocks, there was a black head for the outermost pin, and a white head for the second outermost, but there was also a blue-headed pin on the innermost groove. Looking more closely, Setsiana could see that between the black pin’s groove and the white pin’s groove, there were the seven minute-marks between each hour mark, and between the white pin’s groove and the blue pin’s groove, there was just one additional mark between each hour, presumably for some impossibly small unit of time that was 1/36th of a minute. The source of the sound appeared to be the blue pin, which jumped from mark to mark autonomously with impeccable rhythm, although the thing was much too small for there to be a proper set of weights powering it. She watched for a complete cycle, 36 snicks, and saw the white pin move once; the black pin seemed to move too slowly to notice, and was currently positioned just after the 4 in the section for the morning hours. Was it so late already? It had been years since Setsiana had awoken more than two or three hours past dawn.
“Do you like the clock?” asked Qhoroali. “They use springs now, you know, a metal coil. You wind it tight each day to store the energy, and then it slowly uncoils over time to trigger the escapement.” She laughed, suddenly. “You don’t know how much I’ve wanted to talk to someone who’s new to them - they were invented 200 years ago and Li and Cyaru just take them for granted and don’t care about how they work. And most everyone else is from the future, because that’s just way more practically useful, and most of them don’t even use or care about real clocks anymore. I think they would have been invented around the time you would have died of old age in another timeline, but bad luck, they were invented somewhere in the Northern Kingdoms, where they all use the T’arsi clock, so for a while all we had were clocks that went the wrong way and had 30 hours on them, and everyone kept T’arsi time for a while. You’re lucky you got to miss that. I did, too, I wasn’t even born yet! We’re all lucky.”
That did give Setsiana some idea of the date. 200 years ago she would have died of old age… “So it’s what, 1900, right now?”
“1911.”
And she must still be somewhere in NoraCheanya, she realized. She was pretty sure that it was only in Shayansee that people used the 18-hour clock outside of their island, and out of all the people who had passed under her window this morning, there had not been a single blond, and very very few with pale enough skin.
Setsiana turned around to survey Qhoroali’s desk. They had been speaking in QuCheanya, but she could probably tell if the papers were written in the Capital Dialect, or Naychren, or Vrelian, even 250 years later. But to her dismay, she saw they were all written in QuCheanya - printed QuCheanya, in black and red ink. “You’re not a priestess,” Setsiana accused. She pointed at the papers. “Those came from a temple - you stole them.”
Irritatingly, Qhoroali seemed amused by this. “Oh, we replaced all the originals before we even stole them,” she said, airily. “These are copies.” Setsiana opened her mouth to point out that the “copies” weren’t handwritten and it would be ridiculous to set an entire page of type just to make one copy, but before she could say anything, Qhoroali continued. “And I was a priestess once. Well, a junior, so no less of a priestess than you are. It was in the Egalitarian heresy, though, so I imagine you think that doesn’t count.”
The Egalitarian heresy wasn’t quite as strange as the Personalists; the only quibble they had with mainstream practice was the exclusion of men. “Is that why your nurefye looks like that?” Setsiana had to ask. The Personalists had also included men, but they hadn’t worn nurefyes. At the time she’d been visiting them, they had only just gotten established, and were still in the process of having them made. She’d never wondered if the design would have been different.
“Oh? No.” Qhoroali looked surprised. “My mother was pretty strict about them being traditional, actually, for the men and women both. I modified mine because I liked it that way.” The corner of her mouth quirked. “It looks very good as long as I don’t move, doesn’t it? I worked hard on that. It took my mother almost three weeks to notice what I’d done, and she was smart enough to realize it would be a waste of money to have new ones made that I’d probably just modify again. That’s why I took them all with me when I left, I’d put too much effort into them to just leave them behind.”
Money… that was an interesting question. The Personalists hadn’t really had any money and several of the group had dedicated their own skills to making the nurefyes. All of the priesthood’s money came from the Emperor, who paid them (reluctantly) to run the pharmacy and the public school, and provide meals for the hungry and help for those in need, but no one was going to heretical temples for those services. “The Emperor funded you?” asked Setsiana doubtfully. “To have nurefyes made for heretics?”
“Of course not.” Qhoroali put down the book she’d been writing in and put her hands behind her head. “We sold qoire to laypeople illegally, it’s remarkably profitable. Oh, don’t tell me you’re surprised,” she added, as Setsiana opened her mouth. “It’s a plant. It grows in the woods. Did you really think the main branch could actually restrict access to it? Our customers didn’t know it was qoire, they had their own street names for it and had no idea it was the same stuff priestesses use. We only used it for dreamreader interpretation and some research ourselves, we didn’t have access to Mirrors and my mother and all the rest had the same idea the main branch has that using more than three drops is deadly poisonous… I figured out how to time travel with just qoire all on my own. And you know, you can get past the 2307 barrier that way. Can’t do that with a Mirror.”
“The world ends in 2307,” said Setsiana, uncertainly.
“No it doesn’t. What, did you think I made up that whole story I told you about it? I’m not that creative. I swear, that’s really what happens.”
She still wasn’t sure she was convinced. “What’s it like there?”
“Horrible, we won’t be going.” Qhoroali shifted some papers around the desk, revealing a teapot and teacup. “Here, have some tea. It’s still warm.”
Setsiana regarded the teapot with deep suspicion.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” Qhoroali retrieved a second teacup from the right wing of the desk, filled it from the teapot, and drank all of it in a single swallow. “It’s not poisoned. I’m not trying to kill you. You did eat something this morning, right? It won’t benefit you to die of starvation.”
“What are you trying to do with me? Why did you abduct me, and then offer me tea? You didn’t take my things. You made me clothes. I don’t understand.”
“You seemed to think we’d be friends later, and I doubt that happens because I mistreat you.”
“When did that happen, exactly?” Setsiana asked. She remembered something else. “And what did you mean earlier about what I’d supposedly told you? I’ve never seen you or spoken to you before in my life.”
“I don’t doubt it. I ran into you earlier this year, well, a version of you from a future time, I think - well, strictly speaking, this technically happened in 1904, but we’d both traveled there from some other time - anyway, you told me that I needed to kidnap you, and gave me the time and place and told me what to say. Oh, and your measurements, which came in handy with the clothes. Presumably you haven’t had that experience yet, but you eventually will in some timeline.”
This was even worse than the story about 2307. “Why would I tell you all that?”
“No idea. Like I said, you seemed to think we’d be friends eventually, and you told me that you were going to be essential for my goal in some way - that’s the main reason I came for you, if you must know.”
“Your goal,” Setsiana said, slowly. “What is this goal?”
“Oh,” said Qhoroali quite casually, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world, “We’re going to kill Sapfita.”
Setsiana had the brief sensation of the world closing in around her before her awareness dimmed and fell off into nothingness.
Story: The Fulcrum
Colors: Fresh Thyme #3: Like Clockwork, Ecru #7: Examine
Styles and Supplies: Panorama
Word Count: 2968
Rating: PG
Warnings: None
Characters: Setsiana, Qhoroali
In-Universe Date: ????.7/8?.?.?
Summary: Some questions are answered.
Setsiana awoke and climbed out of the bed. After four years of rising an hour after dawn, it felt horribly late in the day, and the angle of the sunlight that came through the cracks in the shutter seemed wrong. The very first thing she did was to kneel down and check for the nurefye under the mattress; to her relief, it was still there.
There was another plate of food and glass of water on the table. Today, it appeared to be a piece of sándrev, a savory breakfast cornmeal bread. She noted that it was a slice out of a larger cake and not a serving made for one person; maybe Sapfita had been right, and it really wasn’t laced with anything. She was even hungrier now than she had been the night before, and she’d gotten her conversation with Sapfita (although belatedly she realized she’d never actually gotten an answer to the question of where or when she was). She resolved to eat this one.
First, though, she opened the window again. It was indeed at least late morning, maybe even close to mid-day by the angle of the light. The buildings on the other side of the street did not reveal much more than they had the night before, at least with regards to their location. A man exited the building with the horse on it carrying a bridle; the store beside it had a sketch of what Setsiana recognized as a T’arsi style pastry above the door. But this couldn’t be T’arse; none of the people who were now walking past in much greater numbers than the night before had a dark enough complexion for it, and no one had more than one or maybe two braids. Their clothing did incorporate the brighter colors of the more exotic and expensive dyes, but it wasn’t in the style of T’arsi clothing; the women did wear skirts with slits in them as was common for both genders in T’arse, but they were not as long and did not swing as freely, and the slits were in the front and the back, and not on the sides. Their blouses conformed closely to the bust, as had been common in Vrel, but they had a much more defined collar and the neckline dropped abruptly in a very narrow V, almost another slit, that went lower than anything that would have been considered decent in Setsiana’s experience. The men wore outfits that also clung to the body like a woman’s blouse would, again with defined collars and cuffs, often with a jacket or a vest. Many people carried small bags with them, possibly to avoid putting things in their pockets and interrupting the more defined outline of the clothes, and many wore longer, heavier jackets against the cold.
She sat at the table by the window, and watched the people for bit, but nothing new occurred to her. She turned her attention to the sándrev, and broke off a piece. It had the usual vegetables baked into it, but also… she picked the unexpected piece out, and remembering what Sapfita had told her, experimentally ate it. Yes, it was meat, possibly pork, nicely seasoned. In all her years she’d never known anyone to eat meat for breakfast, but as she cautiously ate some more, she found that the flavor went well with the sándrev and it wasn’t long until the whole serving was gone. Maybe someone had thought she needed something more than just the bread after skipping dinner the night before? Only, this piece had come from a larger serving; it hadn’t been made only for her.
She rose, and carefully tested the door that had been locked the previous night. The knob turned, and she pushed it open enough that she could see the other side before pulling it closed again. Had it been left unlocked by accident, or on purpose? She had no idea who or what might be waiting on the other side. On the chance that she had been let loose accidentally, she would want to put on her nurefye and flee immediately, but if she hadn’t, the nurefye would probably get taken away.
She decided to don one of the outfits she’d been provided, explore whatever was outside this room, and then return to get the nurefye if it seemed appropriate. She expected an imperfect fit, but the outfit was somehow exactly the right size, as if the person who had made it had done so using her specific measurements. Somehow this felt more unnerving than anything else that had happened to her so far.
Before she left, she thought to check the bottom drawer of the dresser, which she hadn’t looked in the night before; it contained the bag she’d been carrying when she was abducted. She looked through it several times, but curiously, nothing seemed to be missing, although she never carried anything really valuable or irreplaceable with her normally. She retrieved a rubber band from the bag and braided her hair as she normally did, and then approached the door.
Carefully, trying not to make any noise, she pushed the door to the room open. It led out into a what could either be termed a very short hallway, or a very long junction of four doors, one in each direction. The door she had opened was at one of the long ends, and at the other end was an open doorway with no door at all that led into a much larger room. Through this doorway, on the other side of the large room, she could see a set of double doors that might lead to the outside. However, before she attempted to use them, she wanted to verify that she was alone. She tried the door to her left, but found it locked. The door to her right opened into another bathing room, larger than the one attached to the room she’d been put in. Cautiously, she continued forward into the larger room beyond the open doorway.
In addition to the double doors, another open doorway led off to the left of the large room, on the far side of a hearth, and a closed door exited to the right. But she was not, in fact, alone; in front of a larger paned window on the right side of the room, not visible from hallway, was a large wooden desk covered with papers and one large box, with wide wings that wrapped around the chair that was pulled up to it, and in the chair, with her stocking feet propped up on the desk, was Qhoroali, looking slightly different but not unrecognizable with her hair hanging loose and long behind her back, rather than marshaled into a priestess’s braids. She was wearing what immediately struck Setsiana as a man’s outfit: a loose-fitting shirt and trousers, cuffed like some of the men’s clothing she’d seen from the window, but much more loosely, and none of the same effort had gone into the shape or outline of the clothing; for all that Setsiana could make out of the shape of the bust, she might as well be a man. The trousers were of an ordinary drab color, but the shirt was a brilliant green, one of the colors she’d seen from the window. Qhoroali was leafing through what appeared to be a short hand-bound book or journal and making notes with a pen of a style that Setsiana had never seen before, but after a moment, she looked up.
Qhoroali regarded her for a moment, as if unsure, and then ventured in QuCheanya: “Good morning, I hope?”
There was something in the room making a small but noticeable rhythmic snicking sound, and it was pulling at Setsiana’s awareness. She decided to go in search of it, rather than exchange pleasantries with Qhoroali that Qhoroali frankly wasn’t owed. The sound seemed to originate from near the closed door on the right side of the room; she thought the source might actually be on the other side of the door, but once she got close, she clearly saw that it was coming from a circular sculpture on a bookshelf next to the door. It appeared to be a replica of a sundial, or the clock face on one of the temples in Nwórza, mounted vertically on a wooden base, with the 18 hours marked starting from the middle of the right side, counting the six working hours of the morning up and over the top, followed by the six leisure hours of the afternoon down the left hand side, and then the six sleeping hours of the night right-wards across the bottom. Across the radial hour markings were three circular grooves, and from each groove extended a pin with a large flat head that was rounded on the interior side, but morphed into a precise point at the exterior; like one of the Nwórza temples’ clocks, there was a black head for the outermost pin, and a white head for the second outermost, but there was also a blue-headed pin on the innermost groove. Looking more closely, Setsiana could see that between the black pin’s groove and the white pin’s groove, there were the seven minute-marks between each hour mark, and between the white pin’s groove and the blue pin’s groove, there was just one additional mark between each hour, presumably for some impossibly small unit of time that was 1/36th of a minute. The source of the sound appeared to be the blue pin, which jumped from mark to mark autonomously with impeccable rhythm, although the thing was much too small for there to be a proper set of weights powering it. She watched for a complete cycle, 36 snicks, and saw the white pin move once; the black pin seemed to move too slowly to notice, and was currently positioned just after the 4 in the section for the morning hours. Was it so late already? It had been years since Setsiana had awoken more than two or three hours past dawn.
“Do you like the clock?” asked Qhoroali. “They use springs now, you know, a metal coil. You wind it tight each day to store the energy, and then it slowly uncoils over time to trigger the escapement.” She laughed, suddenly. “You don’t know how much I’ve wanted to talk to someone who’s new to them - they were invented 200 years ago and Li and Cyaru just take them for granted and don’t care about how they work. And most everyone else is from the future, because that’s just way more practically useful, and most of them don’t even use or care about real clocks anymore. I think they would have been invented around the time you would have died of old age in another timeline, but bad luck, they were invented somewhere in the Northern Kingdoms, where they all use the T’arsi clock, so for a while all we had were clocks that went the wrong way and had 30 hours on them, and everyone kept T’arsi time for a while. You’re lucky you got to miss that. I did, too, I wasn’t even born yet! We’re all lucky.”
That did give Setsiana some idea of the date. 200 years ago she would have died of old age… “So it’s what, 1900, right now?”
“1911.”
And she must still be somewhere in NoraCheanya, she realized. She was pretty sure that it was only in Shayansee that people used the 18-hour clock outside of their island, and out of all the people who had passed under her window this morning, there had not been a single blond, and very very few with pale enough skin.
Setsiana turned around to survey Qhoroali’s desk. They had been speaking in QuCheanya, but she could probably tell if the papers were written in the Capital Dialect, or Naychren, or Vrelian, even 250 years later. But to her dismay, she saw they were all written in QuCheanya - printed QuCheanya, in black and red ink. “You’re not a priestess,” Setsiana accused. She pointed at the papers. “Those came from a temple - you stole them.”
Irritatingly, Qhoroali seemed amused by this. “Oh, we replaced all the originals before we even stole them,” she said, airily. “These are copies.” Setsiana opened her mouth to point out that the “copies” weren’t handwritten and it would be ridiculous to set an entire page of type just to make one copy, but before she could say anything, Qhoroali continued. “And I was a priestess once. Well, a junior, so no less of a priestess than you are. It was in the Egalitarian heresy, though, so I imagine you think that doesn’t count.”
The Egalitarian heresy wasn’t quite as strange as the Personalists; the only quibble they had with mainstream practice was the exclusion of men. “Is that why your nurefye looks like that?” Setsiana had to ask. The Personalists had also included men, but they hadn’t worn nurefyes. At the time she’d been visiting them, they had only just gotten established, and were still in the process of having them made. She’d never wondered if the design would have been different.
“Oh? No.” Qhoroali looked surprised. “My mother was pretty strict about them being traditional, actually, for the men and women both. I modified mine because I liked it that way.” The corner of her mouth quirked. “It looks very good as long as I don’t move, doesn’t it? I worked hard on that. It took my mother almost three weeks to notice what I’d done, and she was smart enough to realize it would be a waste of money to have new ones made that I’d probably just modify again. That’s why I took them all with me when I left, I’d put too much effort into them to just leave them behind.”
Money… that was an interesting question. The Personalists hadn’t really had any money and several of the group had dedicated their own skills to making the nurefyes. All of the priesthood’s money came from the Emperor, who paid them (reluctantly) to run the pharmacy and the public school, and provide meals for the hungry and help for those in need, but no one was going to heretical temples for those services. “The Emperor funded you?” asked Setsiana doubtfully. “To have nurefyes made for heretics?”
“Of course not.” Qhoroali put down the book she’d been writing in and put her hands behind her head. “We sold qoire to laypeople illegally, it’s remarkably profitable. Oh, don’t tell me you’re surprised,” she added, as Setsiana opened her mouth. “It’s a plant. It grows in the woods. Did you really think the main branch could actually restrict access to it? Our customers didn’t know it was qoire, they had their own street names for it and had no idea it was the same stuff priestesses use. We only used it for dreamreader interpretation and some research ourselves, we didn’t have access to Mirrors and my mother and all the rest had the same idea the main branch has that using more than three drops is deadly poisonous… I figured out how to time travel with just qoire all on my own. And you know, you can get past the 2307 barrier that way. Can’t do that with a Mirror.”
“The world ends in 2307,” said Setsiana, uncertainly.
“No it doesn’t. What, did you think I made up that whole story I told you about it? I’m not that creative. I swear, that’s really what happens.”
She still wasn’t sure she was convinced. “What’s it like there?”
“Horrible, we won’t be going.” Qhoroali shifted some papers around the desk, revealing a teapot and teacup. “Here, have some tea. It’s still warm.”
Setsiana regarded the teapot with deep suspicion.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” Qhoroali retrieved a second teacup from the right wing of the desk, filled it from the teapot, and drank all of it in a single swallow. “It’s not poisoned. I’m not trying to kill you. You did eat something this morning, right? It won’t benefit you to die of starvation.”
“What are you trying to do with me? Why did you abduct me, and then offer me tea? You didn’t take my things. You made me clothes. I don’t understand.”
“You seemed to think we’d be friends later, and I doubt that happens because I mistreat you.”
“When did that happen, exactly?” Setsiana asked. She remembered something else. “And what did you mean earlier about what I’d supposedly told you? I’ve never seen you or spoken to you before in my life.”
“I don’t doubt it. I ran into you earlier this year, well, a version of you from a future time, I think - well, strictly speaking, this technically happened in 1904, but we’d both traveled there from some other time - anyway, you told me that I needed to kidnap you, and gave me the time and place and told me what to say. Oh, and your measurements, which came in handy with the clothes. Presumably you haven’t had that experience yet, but you eventually will in some timeline.”
This was even worse than the story about 2307. “Why would I tell you all that?”
“No idea. Like I said, you seemed to think we’d be friends eventually, and you told me that you were going to be essential for my goal in some way - that’s the main reason I came for you, if you must know.”
“Your goal,” Setsiana said, slowly. “What is this goal?”
“Oh,” said Qhoroali quite casually, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world, “We’re going to kill Sapfita.”
Setsiana had the brief sensation of the world closing in around her before her awareness dimmed and fell off into nothingness.
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Thank you! It actually is pretty interesting the broader effects that the improvements in clock technology had during this period (or at any rate, a similar period in the real world).
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I had this whole thing about time travel and what it does to relationships but that line hits like a brick.
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Haha, thank you, I'm glad it was so effective! But hold onto that thought about time travel making relationships weird, because the story is going to keep coming back to that.