Distant Grasses Grow Different Stems
But they all take root the same
CW: dissociation
Outside the Wi’shen Research Center, the winter winds howled frigid fury. Once the sun set, the temperature dropped rapidly, hungry for warmth, turning what was a discomforting cold into something dangerous. The twin moons offered little light this evening. It was cloudy, but Ginej couldn’t see from staring out the window. The Anvillin landscape was entirely black, stretching as infinitely as the Abyss. The winds were the only voices spoken within the darkness, creaking against arcanely reinforced center walls, begging dissent from the etched glyphs. Lightning in the far skies danced over the barren plains that ran along Anvillin’s coastline, and Ginej counted how many veins of light shot from the lightning’s stem. It was fighting a losing battle against the dark; no matter how many branches it created, the black swallowed it again.
“Coffee?”
Ginej looked up, elbow still resting on the window sill, giving her colleague a tired smile. “Yes, please.”
Rzo was tall, bending almost in half to hand Ginej a steaming mug. As a manto-chitin, Rzo stood sharp and thin, with colors as bright a gemstones, the pink and white kind that Ginej couldn't name (she didn't study rocks after all). The long antenna brushed the ceiling, giving a curious expression to Rzo's large, watchful and pitch black eyes. Her scarves, carefully wound around her chitinous plates, drifted over the floor. They were a light blue this evening, adorned with small swirls and abstract mountain peaks, a far brighter and inviting vision than outside. Rzo insisted the scarves were enough to keep her warm, but Ginej couldn’t resist shivering.
“We ought to send for indoor gloves,” Rzo teased, dragging a chair over from across the room. She set her cup on the small, window side table. “You’re looking colder and colder every day.”
“I don’t know why it takes me so long to acclimate to the weather here,” Ginej replied, pulling her own simpler and shorter scarf tighter to her neck. Despite her thick layer of fur, the cold in Anvillin was nothing like the winters she was used to back home. Her chichee ancestry offered no relief from the chill. She welcomed the warmth seeping from the mug into her hands.
“Cold's buried in your bones.”
“Apparently. I'm blaming it on the fact that the storms are earlier this year. I’d expected to have longer in the sun.”
Rzo laughed. “I’ll be sure to start waking you bright and early so you can get your sunshine.”
Ginej groaned, taking a long sip from her mug. The coffee was tart, slightly sweet. Rzo had turned her onto the Tzk mixture of grounds, some bean trees that grew native in the western deserts. “I think I'll take the glow light for now.”
A gust of wind shook the window, rattling it in its frame. Blue ripples of magic cascaded over the glass.
“I’m glad we got those samples when we did. The ground might be more barren than they started by tomorrow morning,” Rzo mused.
Ginej huffed with a small nod. The hours they had spent outside that morning were worth the early rise since she doubted they'd even crack the crust of ice after this storm. “At least we’ll have something to keep us busy if the storm continues into tomorrow. I only brought so many books and breaking into them before the two month mark isn’t a good sign.”
“I’m sure we’ll have many, many more busy days ahead of us. Especially once the rest of the crew arrives.”
Ginej and Rzo had volunteered to prep the research center for the coming winter season. The summer team left a little over a month ago, and it would be three more weeks before the bulk of the winter team arrived. The winter prep wasn’t as difficult as it was time intensive: recharging wards, stocking food and fuel, and making repairs to hail-dented roofs, all alongside ensuring they were meeting research milestones.
Rzo had finished the roof repairs two days prior and was now eager to start her harvest of the few local edible plants. She was an all-trades researcher, fitting in whatever niche required her; it was a trait Ginej admired. Ginej was a scholar and scientist, one of the few pacted members of her team. Her tasks were either staring at warding stones or seeing what stared back at her through the looking-glass.
“Gi?”
Ginej glanced away from the window, not realizing she’d drifted in her mind. She blinked, returning Rzo’s worried frown with a smile. “Hm? Sorry, got thinking about everything we still have to do.”
Rzo’s frown stayed. “Why don’t you come out with me for my harvest tomorrow morning?”
“I’m just tired,” Ginej laughed, trying to dispel the discomfort in her gut. “This coffee is putting me to sleep.”
“Still. I’m not letting you go strz.”
“Aarmaen’s areolas, Rz, I’m not going stir crazy!”
Rzo flicked Ginej’s arm. “The last time I winter prepped I ended up in my room for almost a week. The strz is no joke.”
Ginej snatched her arm back, nearly spilling her coffee on herself. The discomfort had rooted itself in her core and was sinking fast. She took a pointed sip. “I read the pamphlets.”
“The pamphlets are trying to sell you on those moonsflower supplements. The only real cure is walking outside. In the sun. For at least an hour.”
“Ahk, but it’ll be freezing tomorrow morning and there might not even be sun!”
“But there might be!” Rzo stood up to her full height, towering over Ginej. She picked up her scarf and waved it in Ginej’s face, antenna twitching. “I promise to bring you another warm mug. But if I get any lip, I’m filing a complaint.”
“Oh, fuck off,” Ginej giggled, giving the scarf a tug. “One is more than enough.”
The stormy winds continued to wail well into the night. As if conscious of the fact that Ginej was anticipating every second that sunlight might bleed through the thick, glassy windows, the storm insisted on keeping her awake with its thunderous gales. The force of it surely was enough to take the research center and toss it - and her - into the sea of clouds and stars. Ginej didn’t fear the storm, not any more than she feared Rzo’s early morning call. She rolled over in her bed, facing towards her window. There wasn’t anything to see, the dark in her bedroom merged into the dark of the night, an ink stain she was failing to sleep in.
An arc of lightning split the sky and, like clockwork, a rumble followed. The brilliant blue of the arcane storm reflected off the walls of Ginej’s bedroom.
She wasn’t going stir crazy. She simply couldn’t sleep.
Tossing her blankets back, Ginej got to her feet and pressed the thin shape of the glyph near her bedside. Immediately, a sphere of magic burst to life and the room was washed in a soft, yellow glow. It poured over the stone floor and walls, glinting along metal window frames and warming her pink and blue bedsheets. When Ginej was young - a kit among her unusually large litter - she was afraid of the dark, and when her littermates finally fell asleep, she would spend the quiet hours practicing to cast glow orbs and, once she could repeat it with some consistency, huddled under her blankets with them close to her chest.
She grew out of the habit by the time she left for school, but the urge was never entirely gone. And on nights like these, when the storms were loud and the darkness louder, the need reared its ugly head.
Grabbing the wispy orb and balancing it in her palm. Ginej walked out into the hallway and started for the break room. The research center wasn’t terribly large - nothing like the ones to the south - so Ginej didn’t have to walk for long. She slipped inside, careful to quietly close the door behind her.
The break room, which doubled as a kitchen and tripled as a lounge, wasn’t anything special. In fact, most of the crew who came to work at Wi’shen only spent time there when they had to. The smooth grey stone of the walls and floor was remarkably featureless. There were no windows, no posters, not even stains to break up the endless slate. The darkwood of the kitchen accommodations clashed with the bright fabric of the chairs and couch in the lounge. It gave the appearance of something staged - meant to mimic the comfort of home but never quite reaching it. As Rzo put it, “It feels like a jail cell.”
Yet, the insular and simple appearance of the break room was exactly why Ginej sought it out. She needed to clear her mind and that needed to be done as far away from the raging storm as possible. Out in the wild frontier, that didn’t leave very many places.
Ginej put on the kettle, then meandered to the arrangement of cushions and pillows built into a cubby of the wall to sit. She pushed the orb so it bobbed closer to the ceiling, warming a larger section of the lounge. She could still hear the wind from in here, even with the kettle bubbling behind her.
A frontier researcher getting the strz was uncommon. ‘Rare if ever accounted for’, if the funding block at the universities were to be believed. Ginej had heard of only one instance and it was a freak accident. Something about a dnoden man who wandered some miles from the facility until his team noticed him missing. Which, in all honesty, Ginej found hard to believe. The front doors of every research center were fitted with warding stones that needed to be reset within a minute. If they weren't, they filled the building with a sparkling shrill static. His team would've known within a minute that he'd left, if he truly were under the spell of the strz. Ginej couldn't imagine him coherent enough to dispell the wards. She'd had trouble just this morning, nearly knocking the stones off the wall after she'd failed twice to reset it. That instance had been nothing but a bit of early morning grogginess, but if that was enough to trip her up, resetting the wards while in full strz seemed impossible.
A harsh and needle-like whistle had the fur on Ginej's neck standing upright and tense, her claws digging into her thighs. The kettle. It was the kettle. Not the wind. She rose from her seat, meandering to her mug with a shake, smoothing her fur down. Coffee would be unwise at this hour when she needed and wanted nothing more than sleep, but considering her current - and soon to be crewmates - were chitin, her options for anything else was limited. The only tea in the entire facility was either black or eshu-ni. Ginej could already taste the sourness on her tongue. She scrunched her nose.
With her mug (actually Rzo's since hers still lay dirty in the sink), Ginej poured the boiling water over the coffee grounds and patiently waited for the liquid to drip into said mug. While that slow process begun, she opened the ice box, relishing in the burst of cool air. The breakroom was stuffy, she only then noticed. She grabbed the cream and then honey, pouring both into the now full mug, her spoon clinking as she stirred. By the time she turned to return to the comfort of the pillows, Ginej decided she didn’t want to sit.
Calling her light-orb back to her side, she walked instead to the yet unpacked boxes by the entry doors. They were sloppily labeled with ink, the labels from years prior scratched out with vigor. Ginej could still read a few of them - lab masks, bed sheets and blankets, and GLASS: FRAGILE. Now they were stuffed with the cookware and non-perishables that needed to be organized which neither Rzo nor Ginej were eager to do so.
Ginej popped open the topmost box and fished around for the bag of crisptack they’d opened a few days ago. She snatched it up and then walked back out into the hallway.
The Wi’shen Research Center was small, yet oddly labyrinthine for its size. Hallways did not follow intuitive patterns and the uniformity of the grey stone meant every door looked the same as the one before it. The acclimation to the facility was as much about the cold as it was remembering which winding passage led to the bedroom they’d been assigned. It wasn’t an uncommon sight to find a felt-horned newcomer caught in a loop.
Ginej thought to when she’d first arrived to the center, still yet to shed all of her kit fur. She was as bushy tailed as they came, eager to put her academic lessons to work in the field. That eagerness provided little aid in memorizing the layout of Wi’shen. Her first month on the job resulted in her walking into three of her team’s bedrooms and being late to morning meetings when she couldn’t find the conference room.
Her penchant for getting lost was how she ended up meeting - and befriending - Rzo.
Ginej’s light orb bobbed beside her head as she walked, dancing shadows on the lab door she had passed twice now, the window still fogged with the steam from her mug.
The winter storm reminded her of the particularly nasty one that shut her and the team inside for three days straight the first year Ginej had joined the research group. Ginej had been assigned to the light labs, but those were on the other side of Wi'shen from her bedroom. She was walking into the break room, frustrated with her lack of direction, and bashed the nearest door directly into the person behind it.
Ginej could hear Rzo's voice clear as if she were beside her.
“Left door is in!”
“This is… right?”
Ginej's words were clear enough to echo back to her, bouncing off the featureless grey walls. A dull worry throbbed somewhere.
“This is-! Oh. Shit, you're right. Gods, sorry. That's my fault.”
“Would be the first thing I got right today.” Ginej offered her hand. Her orb cast the empty hand shadow on the floor. “I don't think we've met. Ginej. Like the vegetable.”
“Rzo. Like the singer.”
Ginej laughed, placing her hand on the door knob and swung it open. "Were you going out?"
A rush of piercing cold cut through her, drilling deep in her bones through sweater and thick fur. She instinctively held her tea to her chest but persisted in holding the door open for Rzo.
She squinted as pitch black stared at her; it was darker than Rzo's eyes, but something so familiar. She took a step forward, slippered paw stepping onto the front slap with a crunch. Not even the glow orb that bobbed around her head could penetrate it. But the darkness moved, dancing shadows moving within shadows, waltzing in a sea beyond. Maybe it was the Abyss.
This was where Rzo wanted to go. She was going out after all.
Another step and Ginej's arm stretched back where her fingertips barely held onto the doorknob behind her. She had never thought of studying the Abyss but Rzo was her senior and surely knew more.
“Ginej?”
Rzo’s voice was distant, like a call from shore while Ginej was adrift at sea.
“What’re you doing? Come inside!”
The tide was pleasant and Ginej wasn’t eager to leave it, but Rzo’s hands on her shoulders turned her around, guiding her back inside. Ginej didn’t hear the door close, but she did see Rzo bend down into her line of sight. Colorful scarves and chitinous scales twirled in Ginej’s vision as a shrill sound played in the distance.
“Gi?” Rzo asked from shore. “Are you okay? What’re you doing up?”
“I’m alright,” Ginej replied across the waves. “Just got a little lost.”