Chapter XII09.V.2024
Tender warmth of sunlight and a constant chirring noise of what had to be the local version of grasshoppers was what welcomed Tayne into the material world. She opened her eyes - and immediately closed them back, as that warm sunlight blasted her sight.
Turns out, in reality a fourteen-hour sleep is not that good as it sounds. Though her head felt fresh and clear, the rest of her body was crumbling and she very much needed something to eat once again... Maybe it's the activities they did in her sleep that are to blame for her lack of energy?
Wait. The activities. These were a thing that happened, and realizing that turned all of Tayne's inner monologue into an incoherent stream of happy noises.
She sat down and patiently waited through the fuzziness that suddenly engulfed her vision. Looked around. Still the same beach, though it wasn't looking that magical in daylight, but the important part was this blessed celestial being named Lana, who was awake already and was back on her scroll, resting under a shadow of a nearby tree.
"Hey, Lana..." - Tayne quietly called.
"Oh!" - Lana immediately rolled up the scroll and looked at her, - "good morning, princess!"
Tayne blushed, recalling the context behind that casual princess, and crawled down from the mattress and towards Lana.
"Boop," - she said, accommodating herself on Lana's shoulder.
"Boop indeed," - Lana booped her on the knee, - "soo, how's your night?"
"You're asking?" - Tayne exclaimed, flustered, - "girl, that was, like, the most amazing thing that ever thinged!"
"The fingers thing?"
"The everything thing!" - Tayne hid her face in Lana's hair, - "sorry, I'm a bit out of words, but... uhm..."
"Mmm... I got you good, haven't I?" - Lana seductively inquired.
"Oh, stop it!" - Tayne booped her lovingly, "I'm still trying to grasp how was that all just a dream..."
"Except it wasn't! Metacosmos is just as real as this place," - Lana remarked. - "And, hmm, you're telling me you wanted all that to happen in materiality, princess?"
"Oh. No. No no no no no no," - Tayne recoiled from the idea, still holding by Lana though, - "not with my... current predicament."
"Riiight..." - Lana took a pause to carefully pick the following words. "You know, I just wanted to say that I empathize your struggles. I don't have experience with dysphoria, but I can see how it affects you and... I just hope I managed to arrange you a safespace this night."
"You did for sure," - Tayne hugged her tighter, - "I'll forever remember that taste of freedom..."
"How dramatic. Freedom, huh? I thought I subjected you to kinda the opposite..." - Lana drawled sweetly.
"You know what I mean! The body thing!"
"Well. You'll be basking in that freedom before you know it, won't you? Like, you told it will only take you how much..."
"Six months more," - grumbled Tayne. - "Because something something hormones something something body needs to adapt. I don't get it. They fixed my throat with a swipe of a magic wand, why can't they do this to my whole body?!" - she clenched her fists. Ranting about this issue always made her emotional. - "You're a biophysicist, right? Maybe you can explain this?"
"Well, I'm only a student, so I can't promise this will be the true reason" - Lana shrugged, - "but I do know organisms don't like abrupt changes, internal shock and all that, and that it's generally better to let them fix themselves if they can. For long-term stability."
Tayne muttered something akin to screw the long term stability, but wasn't really willing to argue further. After all, she'll have to say goodbye to Lana way sooner than any of this body stuff, so what's the matter... She sighed mournfully and hugged Lana again.
"What time is it even?" - she asked.
Lana booped her scroll once. "Half past eleven, why are you?.."
Tayne immediately sprang up. "Lana, the train!"
"... is four timezones behind," - she reminded. - "We still have four and a half hours. Haven't you set like a dozen alarms on your traveler's clock?"
"Oh. Right." - Tayne fidgeted with the clock: the small pendant resembling an hourglass with arcane carvings on both wooden bases readily spat out a blinking holographic inscription denoting seconds since first activation which... wasn't a very usable metric, honestly. Tayne still needed to teach it to convert to something readable. Setting her medical reminders yesterday to repeat every twelve hundred thousand seconds made her ponder on the concept of time for uncomfortably long.
"So... what do you want to do next?" - Lana asked.
Tricky question. Tayne mentally went through everything they planned to do. Most of this wasn't fitting into four hours, unfortunately...
"Oh! I wanted to revisit that master on Old Geese street," - she remembered. - "To bring some of street flowers home and drop to say goodbye. And uhm..."
That weird resemblance of the master to Mara Vim Rayne still haunted Tayne a bit. They decided with Lana that it was just a coincidence, but something in the whole ordeal still felt... not right. She browsed the Cosmarium once and found no pictures of Mara past their forties. Like the archon just vanished, even though Encyclopedia happily listed their occupations for a good half-century after that - ending with a grand journey to the Origin to receive the Jentel Prize, the highest conceivable award for a scientist. Tayne even dug up a recording of that ceremony, but of course Mara was dripping ritualistic white robes which concealed half of their face. Stars, the third decamillenium was weird.
They chatted a bit more while Lana was deflating and packing the air mattress, and wanted to embark back to Zakossos - but were interrupted by Tayne's scrollphone ringing. She was confused - who besides Lana would call for her on this planet? - but hastily unrolled anyway... to a very distressed hologram plunging out, who immediately statred talking with intense gesticulation.
"Tayne, quickly. There's a huge four-armed robot that somehow destroys my blades and..." - Naia paused, reassessing the situation. - "...and what happened here?"
Tayne gasped and fell upon them in embrace, which would've surely toppled them over were they of regular matter. "Mom, you're back! There's a lot to catch you up to..."
***
The final four hours were pretty discombobulated. Yes, they did visit the Old Geese street, where Naia took a vine cutting, which they immediately vanished into thin air - and then, looking very confused, conjured Tayne's old backpack, which she mourned long ago, out of the same air ("what is your stuff doing in my eigenspace, what happened on the battlefield?" - "uhmm...").
Tayne failed to find the door of that master's lab - or rather, the door was there, but the inscription with working hours was mysteriously gone, and when she opened the door (with no starbells ringing this time) she found a regular narrow corridor to a bunch of dormitory rooms, with a kitchen in the end - which she quickly got out of since someone was clearly cooking there. Had she got the house wrong? The paper towel where she initially noted the route was long gone, and she probably was misremembering the name of the master as the Cosmarium search got her nothing. Chute. She wanted to thank them. Would've got them a cake were they not an arcana.
Then they shared a meal with Lana in an open-air street cafeteria - a thoroughly mixed mush of fruit slices and molten cheese on an edible bread plate. And while Lana and Naia chatted over some Metacosmos related stuff, Tayne was slowly losing her mind overthinking a thousand things at once, sadly rendering the whole meal forgettable. And then there was a long walk through Nexus to the railway station, located several miles out of town...
Tayne was holding on both her mom's and her new friend's hands like she needed this support to not drown. Well, she was very much drowning - in thoughts and emotions she couldn't quite formulate. Partly about Lana, but also about something else, something grander. Some eerie presentiment was budding inside her, whispering incomprehensible discerning noise directly into her mind. Why? Everything's fine. They're going on a family vacation for once, that was the least appropriate time to worry like there's a life on the line and yet...
She embraced Lana with all strength she could find, whispering her in the ear how much she'll miss her and how she'll write to her and stuff - before turning around and running up the ribbed metal steps of the train, all red, face in the palms. She found her seat and plunged into it, leaning against the unusual, but comforting chillness of the spaceproof glass. Naia tried to comfort her, but receded upon Tayne grudgingly asking to be left alone.
«Am I getting sick?...»
Some movement caught Tayne's attention in the corner of her eye and she focused to look outside. Lana. She was smiling and drumming on the glass with her elegant long fingers; no sound was getting inside the spacecraft, of course, but this wasn't the point. Tayne reached to patter the same inch of glass, also smiling unknowingly.
They held their hands against each other through the window for a while... and then Lana reached to breathe over a large chunk of it before writing in the thin fog condensed on the chill surface. Somehow miraculously accounting for the mirroring of the words on the fly.
"it'll be ok <3"
Tayne sure hoped it will.
And when the train turned on its quetly humming engines, exhaled a resonating toot and started to levitate up, Tayne already watched the outside with interest. Lana, among dozens of other archons, was looking up waving; they quickly disappeared below what Tayne could see, but other vistas emerged. Endless fields and forests of Vatravishna Yadi with some villages in between. The ocean - now Lana was finally seeing it from above, that blueish plane, ribbed with tiny-looking waves sparkling in the light of two suns. Zakossos in the distance, with its university towering over all else in the view...
And then, for some reason, the train halted its ascent and set off forward, picking up speed and doing a weird loop which - as got clear after a bit - was circling in on Zakossos. Why?... They need to exit into orbit for a cosmic gate, right?...
Oh no no. The homeland of cosmic gates had its final surprise to drop Tayne into.
The train entered the airspace of Zakossos. Maneuvred a bit, aligning itself with... something Tayne couldn't see as it was straight ahead, but already guessed. Emitted a second vibrant toot - and thrusted in a manner Tayne could only describe as feral. Pinned to the back of the seat by acceleration, she caught a single glimpse of the university, or rather its statue, beneath her and of a side of a metal ring that statue held zooming past which apparently wasn't just a replica what the stars - before the train plunged into an ethereal whirlpool of a thousand colors stretched into thin jolting ropes by lightyear-per-hour speeds. The interstellar railway line.