by Joseph Bonis
She leaned back to look at her white board, scoured clean and with a new inspirational quote written on it every week. This week, it read, It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light. --Aristotle Onassis Tracy smiled softly, and turned her attention back to the phone. “I can do that, sir, but you will have to wait quite a while more. If you'll give me a chance, I might be able to save you a lot of time.”
There was some angry shouting, and Tracy nodded. “Of course, Sir. I'll put you into the queue, then.” She cut off the next protest with a quick press of the transfer button, and sighed. “Just hurting themselves,” she said to herself, and checked the clock. Just about time to leave. Not enough time to handle a full call. She triggered a break on the phone, shunting her next call to the next available rep.
“Another one for the board?” John asked.
Tracy gave a wry little smile. The words hadn't changed, but the sentiment was different. “Yeah, gotta reference the wisdom.” She looked at the board, biting at her lower lip as she pondered the quote. What light? In smaller text under the main quote, there were a lot of small words listed. Jewelry, charm bracelet, good food, time with friends. Renne Faire and her truck. She'd already used all the easy things that inspired her and cheered her up, and it was the end of the day and she was feeling tired and brain-dead. Impulsively, she just drew a silly little kitty-face on the board. It was juvenile, but it reminded her of Nameless.
Time to go! She gathered up her things and stuffed them into her purse, filled out her time sheet for the day, then hit the button on her computer for clocking out. Around her, half the room was standing up and stretching, working out stiff and aching legs after hours of sitting on the phone, and the exodus began. She was so glad they'd updated the time tracking system - now that everyone had the time clock program on their computer, there wasn't the huge pile-up in the lobby as everyone waited in line to use the single station for clocking out.
She was using her pale green windbreaker today, and even that was overkill as she stepped outside into the warm spring morning. It was more habit than anything else. The tiny trees lining the street were budding with bright green buds, and the air held that damp feel laden heavily with all the living, verdant scents of flowers and fresh growth, and new grass. Tracy's bus stop was to the left, but she turned right instead, towards the park a couple blocks down. This was where the scents were coming from, and she absolutely loved walking in the park in the spring, luxuriating in the burst of new bloom. Every day seemed a bit different as the park changed and grew lush and green.
While normally it might still be a bit cool for her, now the sun was warming her wonderfully, especially in the thin windbreaker. She slipped it from her shoulders and tied it round her waist, then hiked her purse on her shoulders and smiled to everyone she passed.
The park was as wonderful as she was hoping, though the soil was fairly wet from recent spring rains. The smells were rich and wonderful, and she loved the people-watching she could do in the park. There were kids emerging from the winter months to swarm the jungle gym, with mothers sitting nearby on a bench, talking with each other. The joggers, rusty after months of winter, but exuberant to take advantage of the lovely weather, made their way through the park with an excess of energy and many rests.
She left the mostly-dry concrete path when she got to the river running down the middle of the public park, turning off it to follow along the rock-lined riverbank. Ironically, staying close to the river gave her the driest shortcut through the forested area, the stones giving excellent drainage, and gave her a moment of privacy after a long day of dealing with people. Despite her love of people-watching, she was grateful for that illusion of being alone for a moment, all the sounds of the city muffled and distant.
It was a peaceful little walk, didn't take more than ten or fifteen minutes, and she was through the park and stepping up to a nondescript little three-story building with apartments on the upper two floors and a used book store on the first floor. She circled around back, went down a set of stairs to an unmarked basement, and pulled out her key ring to get the right key.
Inside was a short hallway, and she took a deep breath as she walked in, let it out as mist coiled from her parted lips. “Ahhhhh…” she said, and let a wind follow her in, bringing fresh air into the slightly musty basement along with her. Several heads looked up as she came in, including Tyra's. “Hi, Tracy!” cried the black woman. “Nice t'see y'!”
Tracy smiled warmly and strode past her, holding out her fist. Tyra held up her own fist, and the two both made a faint explosion noise, splaying their fingers when their fists struck.
“How was th' nine to five?” Tyra drawled.
“Ah, about normal. Nothing out of the ordinary. You got anything tonight?”
Tyra shook her head. “Gotta show up, but there's no jobs scheduled, so Ah'm prolly just goin' t'be bored out of mah skull.”
“You get dinner already?”
“Yeah. Pizza 'n salad in t'other room. Y'all owe me ten.”
Tracy nodded confirmation as she smiled and chirped a happy, “Thank you!”
She didn't usually prefer pizza - too greasy, usually - but Tyra's favorite pizza was a chicken bacon pizza with alfredo sauce from a little mom-and-pop place she knew, and it was absolutely delicious. She couldn't chow down just yet, though - she contented herself with a quick, light salad as a snack, then ducked into the locker room to change. It was a bland and sterile changing room, a bit smaller than her high school gym locker room, but otherwise having the exact same feel. She unlocked her own locker, where she stored her things while she was at work, and quickly changed into a spare set of workout clothes, then stepped through the far door to go into the arena.
She'd gotten caught up in Jacob's view of the community - filled with lords and hunters, fights and politics, that she'd started to make assumptions that it was all like that. Pax, Lord Brin, Slate, none of them had thought to tell her otherwise. When Jacob had casually mentioned 'other arenas,' she'd assumed were all the same as the first - big, office-like dome building with an impressive coliseum contained within, where deadly battles took place on a daily basis.
What she'd missed is that Jacob had thrown himself directly into the midst of all the politics and combat by joining the hunters right away. There was a reason his focus was a knife, after all. When she'd realized one of the arenas was close to her workplace, she'd dropped in and was surprised to find that it was tiny, subdued, and entirely unimpressive. The arena proper was just a plain little room with white-painted concrete walls and padded floors and cameras in the corners of the room. There was no fancy sci-fi transparent aluminum to protect bleachers - it was a projection TV back in the main room where Tyra had been lounging, with some ratty but comfy old couches to sit on.
And the fighters who contested here very rarely ran the risk of slaying one another. A few bruises, maybe, and even then only if very unlucky. The matches she'd watched here were more like SCA rattan fights than any serious attempt to hurt each other - mild little elemental attacks against carefully donned armor with a point-based scoring system … she'd had a very angry discussion with Jacob when she'd found out about that. He'd known about it, of course - it'd just never occurred to him to let her know such a system was available for her to use.
She wasn't here for a fight today. She was just here for a safe place to practice - somewhere she didn't have to worry about wrecking anything or having anyone outside the community see her. She was wearing her keiko-gi, as she usually did. She'd gotten into the habit of thinking of her magic and her martial arts as one and the same, and one practice often flowed into another - though at the Aikido classes she had to be very careful not to let herself slip. Control, again. That seemed to be the watchword in every aspect of her life.
She straightened up, tucked her hands just under her diaphragm, and took a deep breath in, then slowly out, her breath wisping from between her lips in that soft, cool mist. Though she was re
ady to use her magic, she just held it in place, for the moment, and shifted to the first stance for her Tai Chi, the slow, simple movements very calming for her, letting her gather her mind and loosen her body, to feel where she was tight after a full day of sitting behind a phone. Each movement flowed into the next, her feet making soft whispers of noise as they slid across the exercise mats.
Her first time through the motions, as usual, she focused on the basic structure. She was overly aware of which muscles were tight from her day of sitting, overly aware of how stiff she felt. The second time through, she flowed more easily, her muscles loosening up, sliding into the movements more naturally. And as she started into the forms for the third time, she finally released the magic.
One thing she had found as Spring had come was that it got easier to create water and ice. Water didn't come from nowhere - she'd been pulling water from herself and from the air around her. As the dry winter air shifted to the moist air laden with Spring showers, water had suddenly been in abundance for her to use.
She lifted her hand before her, and a streak of frost etched itself on the concrete wall. Her foot slid in a half-circle across the floor, and frost trailed behind it, etching a single arc of frost from her big toe. The mist sliding from between her lips with each breath lifted around her, not fading away as swiftly as it should, and it swirled with her motions as she slowly stepped through the empty room, tracing patterns across the floor and wall with the movements of her hands. As the temperature dropped, the mist started trailing from her fingers, too, leaving floating patterns in the air of graceful arcs and curves that she could pass through without disturbing them.
From the outside, it seemed very simple. Tiny bits of ice and frost and mist, simple patterns traced from her fingers and toes - but Tracy knew how very delicate this kind of control was. As the patterns became more complex, she had to spend more and more will towards keeping them from spreading, keeping ice from forming where she didn't want it - but the largest difficulty was the floating mist. She had to keep it in place against the faint breezes, against her moving through it - reforming it behind her even as the pattern became more and more intricate and involved. It's not like she or the mist were actually intangible, after all!
She flowed through the Tai Chi forms without thinking, now, guided by muscle memory of thousands of times through the forms. Her focus was mainly on the magic, on incorporating it into her physical movements - a new layer on top of the physical. When she'd started learning Tai Chi, she'd just been mimicking stances. Then she'd become more aware of her balance, and how she needed to have that balance during each stance. She'd learned how her breathing affected her movement, and dealt with the bizarre concept of needing to practice how to breathe. Then, she'd built upon that balance between the stances, flowing from one to another. Every time she'd thought she'd figured it out, there'd been another layer to expand upon. This was just more of the same - it felt so natural just to incorporate her inner magic into these ancient movements.
Like Tai Chi itself, the way she used the magic wasn't directly applicable to fighting. The control it taught, the balance, the focus - that was the goal. Slow, delicate, gentle - but the simple stances formed the foundation of any combat stance. Focus on every step, every breath, every thought, every emotion. Her spirit sang with the calm contentment of simply being, the art of movement, the wonder of the magic.
And then she was done. The pattern was too complex, she'd done too many repetitions, and it was starting to fray around her. Delicate patterns broke apart as her arm swung through them, trailing behind her wrist and hand. She finished off the forms one last time, letting go of the mists so that they could swirl and dance with her, then brought herself up to the original stance, standing straight as she brought her hands in to her sides. As she did so, the ice on the walls flowed down to the floor, the ice on the floor flowed towards her feet, and leaped up into the air before her to gather together, spiraling inwards to create a sphere of ice for her to reach out and take in her fingers.
The first time she'd gathered the ice to her, she'd been surprised at how much of it there was, how heavy it had been, all collected at once. Now, she was ready - she held it partly with her fingers, partly with her will. The ice was cool against her skin, but as she'd soon come to learn, not truly cold. The ice didn't numb her or freeze her, and it didn't grow more uncomfortable to hold over time. She lifted it up to her face, looked into the sphere, and smiled softly to see all the tiny crystalline structures inside. Different, every time … like herself. Changing in tiny ways every day, but still basically the same overall.
Here was the trick she'd been working on lately - something that should help her when the next winter came around and there was less water to work with again. She focused her will, and the ball of ice started to shrink, sublimating right from solid to gas as she returned the moisture to the air, leaving her with a little orb a bit smaller than a cue ball. She smiled happily - last week it'd been so much harder, and the week before, she'd been left with a wet outfit she'd needed to dry out. She was improving! She tossed the ball from hand to hand, letting out a soft breath of relief and pride.
Then a second ball added itself to the mix - a ball made of insubstantial mist, but she handled it as if it was solid - only she knew how much control it took to 'handle' mist like that. As her fingers touched it, ripples flew across the surface, and shock waves flowed over it as it pressed against the air with each toss. Then she pulled upon a third charm, and a ball of flame joined the first two, and she juggled them half with her hands, half with her mind.
She was weary from the long day at work, and she still wasn't very good at juggling, but she tried for the last ball anyway. Circling the three other balls over her left hand, she reached out with her right to the concrete wall, drawing out some of its substance to make a heavy gray stone ball in her palm. It took several minutes - stone was not easy to work with one's will alone, but eventually it parted from the concrete and she held it in her fingers. The essence of earth was its immobility, and her will couldn't budge it, but she tossed the stone sphere into the pattern and wove it with the other three, biting her lip with the concentration of it. Each ball needed a different focus - the mist and fire mainly controlled by will, the ice and stone mainly controlled by her hands, and she had to balance the two types of control to make this practice work.
She managed about five seconds before she fumbled it, the ball of mist splashing over her hand and dropping another foot besides, and as she tried to pull it back up, the stone ball smacked into her fingers and bent them backwards, pulling a sharp cry from her as the pain shot through her hand. Despite the pain, a feeling of amusement bubbled through her, which confused her for just a moment.
She splayed her fingers, dispersing the three less solid balls - the ice sphere shattering and leaving damp wetness around the room. She took several minutes to carefully return the stuff of the stone ball into the concrete wall, restoring it to its original place. Then she sagged, letting go of the magic at last, feeling the mental ache of having exerted herself for so long and with such intricate control.
Then she went stalking from the arena into the lounge, where Tyra and the others were lounging around on the old couches, and Tyra was grinning unrepentantly at her. Tracy tamped down on the empathy, cutting off her awareness of their amusement at her fumbling.
“Really?” she asked sharply. “Spying on me?”
Tyra raised an eyebrow, smirking. “Y'all jes' walked past us sittin' in front of th' TV t'go practice in th' room with cameras. Might as well have just walked in an' started doin' it in front of us. We weren't spyin', jes' had t'press one button t'watch.”
Tracy groaned. “So now I'm going to be paranoid all the time that I'm being watched.”
The pizza, despite having gone cold, was as good as Tracy remembered - and she rather liked cold pizza better than hot pizza, anyway. The conversation was pleasant enough - when she could talk with Tyra. The others sitting
around kept wanting to inject their thoughts, and Tracy had long ago figured out that just sharing the ability to do magic didn't mean one had a lot in common with everyone else. Even after several months, they wanted to hear her tell her story of fighting Lord Pax, and she just wanted to forget it. It'd been recorded - but her own screening fog had kept most of the action from being captured.
Still, she eventually shooed them off so she could have a quiet conversation with Tyra, heavily implying that they wanted to discuss 'secret battle strategies.' They retreated to a corner, Tracy put up a privacy wall of solid air, and they shared stories of past and present, as they often did. Tyra's family was poor, and she hadn't talked with her father in five years - but it hadn't always been that way. When she was young, he'd been successful, and had taken them on trips and they'd had a nice life. Tracy didn't know what had happened, and Tyra always danced around the subject, so Tracy didn't push.
What Tracy did push on, from time to time, was a particular curiosity that fascinated her, despite Tyra's reluctance to share. “So, standard question-”
“No.”
“C'mon, Tyra-”
“No. Stop asking, Tracy.” Tyra sighed, flustered.
“Everyone has a focus, though. You must have one.”
“I do have a focus. I'm the only one that knows what it is. It's embarrassing. Stop asking.”
Tracy laughed, sighed, shook her head. “You realize everything folks can imagine is probably more embarrassing than the reality, right?” At Tyra's shrug, Tracy shrugged too. “All right. For today.”