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

[sporesprouter]

Tress laughs outright. "I'm not saying I'm not glad to have a skeleton! Bones are nice to have."

[ninth_cavalier]

"Bones are nice to have," Gideon agrees, solemnly. "Those should be our House words, really. Ninth House, Keepers of the Locked Tomb: Bones Are Nice To Have."

[sporesprouter]

And that's another laugh. "It does have a ring to it. What are your House words?"

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon's face face settles into a slightly unnerving stillness. "Nine for the Tomb," she intones, "and all that was lost." She runs a hand through her hair, relaxing back into normalcy. "It makes more sense in context—it's the end of a poem describing all the planets in the System."

[sporesprouter]

She looks thoughtful. "So there are nine of them and you're from the last, then?"

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon nods. "Most of the others have, like, money and shit. Cities, cultures. Ours is a tiny rock at the ass-end of space with a piss-poor atmosphere, a prison, a giant mining shaft, and a bunch of doddering old nuns. And, you know, the Tomb."

[sporesprouter]

"The island I grew up on was also a tiny rock with with terrible air, mines, and no one was allowed to leave. We didn't have nuns, though. Or an important tomb."

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon raises her eyebrows. Tress seems so—well, normal. Well-adjusted. Somehow she'd pictured her from some kind of idyllic little cottage or something. "How'd you get out?"

[sporesprouter]

She shrugs. "I impersonated a royal inspector and got a ride on a ship that had stopped to trade in port."

[ninth_cavalier]

"You impersonated a royal inspector?" Gideon asks, delighted. "Shit, that's cool. Did you wear a little outfit and everything?"

[sporesprouter]

"Stole her spare uniform coat." She gestures to the very coat she's wearing. "My mother altered it the night before so it fit me properly."

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon laughs. "It suits you perfectly, I never would have guessed it wasn't originally yours." She sighs. "I thought about trying to impersonate the shuttle driver on the Ninth a couple times, as one of my escapes," she admits. "But I don't actually know how to drive a shuttle, so I definitely would have burned up in atmo."

[sporesprouter]

"For what it's worth, the ship I got on turned out to be a bunch of smugglers who didn't actually want a royal inspector on board, so as soon as they could, they drugged me and threw me in the brig."

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon experiences a sudden and bloodthirsty urge for absolutely no reason at all. "Drugged you?"

[sporesprouter]

She nods. "They thought I was suspicious of them, so they drugged the water in the cabin they'd given me. Easier to lock me up that way, I guess."

[ninth_cavalier]

"Yeah, it would be," says Gideon, still feeling mysteriously stabby. "How'd you get out?"

[sporesprouter]

"Oh. Their ship got attacked by pirates." That isn't at all a complete answer to the question, but it's definitely the first step of the answer.

[ninth_cavalier]

"And the pirates saved you?"

[sporesprouter]

"It's a little more complicated than that, but more or less?"

[ninth_cavalier]

"Did you stay with them, then? Are you some kind of pirate queen?" That'd be hot.

[sporesprouter]

"I did end up staying with them and also ended up becoming the captain of the ship, but they're not pirates anymore. They didn't really want to be in the first place. The captain before me more or less forced them into it."

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon grins. "You scared 'em straight. Or—un-scared 'em straight. A heroic reformer on the high seas."

[sporesprouter]

She laughs. "I guess that's one way to put it, yes."

[ninth_cavalier]

"So what do you sail around doing, back home? If not pirating." She wonders, briefly, if Tress is like Mothwing—rescuing people from unfair bondage. But it's unlikely—that kind of person has to be crazy rare.

[sporesprouter]

"Trading, now that the Sorceress is gone. We're the only ones who can trade through the Crimson and Midnight seas, so it opens up routes that weren't available before to distant places. It's useful."