Open Post: The Arms of the Emperor are Never Idle

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon spends her mornings in the practice yard, bright and early, despite the cold. She jogs and stretches to get her blood pumping and her muscles warm before she draws her sword, and then after drills she brings Tally her coffee, and then after that it's back to more sword—unless Tally hauls her off to some other activity, which she pretends to hate but is secretly devastatingly grateful for. The absolute worst part of this place is all the time. Endless stretches of time, with barely any work to be done.

In some ways it's just like the Ninth—except on the Ninth she knew her exits. They were few, sure, and near-impossible, but she knew them: buy her way out, fight her way out, trick her way out, or truly earn it.

None of those apply, here.

She breaks for lunch, and wanders the halls trying to locate various Clues and Mysteries that might end up giving her a way out, and mostly just finds people. More and more people.

She's not antisocial. She likes the people here, more than she's openly liked anyone in her life, individually or as a group. But a gnawing restlessness keeps her on the move rather than letting her time fill up with idle conversation as so many here do. She's always hunting for something to keep her busy, to wear out her body so that when she sleeps her mind is forced to rest rather than serving her a lovely buffet of the worst things she's ever seen and even worse things she hasn't, the things she was yoinked away just in time to miss.

Sometimes it even works.

[This post is open in perpetuity until something happens to make me close it, at which point I will edit it and say so! Feel free to find Gideon in the morning doing sword drills, or tooling around inside, opening and closing drawers and trying peel the wallpaper off in case there's flesh underneath.]

Comments

[temnota]

"They do," Aleksander answered. "What these particular trees are called, I don't know. They do look similar to what we have in Ravka but knowing how this place is, I would not want to assume they are the same. I wonder if the library has something that would say."

Wanting to help, he picked up one of the wood chips that did have bark and started to compare the trees. "But I suppose that is a mystery for another time."

[ninth_cavalier]

"Ugh, the library," says Gideon, and swings her axe, notching the next tree she's chosen. Then she pauses. "Hang on, aren't the books here also made of trees? Like, paper?"

[temnota]

"They are," Aleksander answered, wondering where Gideon was going with this. "Why do you ask?"

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon isn't going anywhere with it, really. "Where I come from," she says, between swings, "or—when I come from, or whatever, everything's, like. Super divorced from the stuff it comes from. Like—raw materials, versus final products. You know? Like, I deal a lot with metal, but I've never seen a mine, or ore, or whatever. Even most of the ways we get vitamins is through nutrient mush delivered to us from another planet, and I have no fucking idea what's actually in it." She hefts the axe and squints at the tree in front of her. "The idea you can take something like a tree and make a table, or a book, somehow, it's all new to me."

[temnota]

Aleksander listened with great interest. It made sense when he thought about - Gideon's world was clearly far more technologically advanced than Ravka and if there were easier ways to obtain raw materials and turn them into goods then the farther way one would be from the process. He'd seen it on a smaller scale as Ravka was turning from an agricultural society to a more industrialized one.

All the same, there was much about the technology of the Mansion that was new to him. "I come at this from a different end. I was familiar with electricity as a concept and some of the Durasts were doing experiments but we had not gotten so far as the cold boxes in the kitchens and lights everywhere. It's been an adjustment - not an unwelcome one, but an adjustment nonetheless."