𝐑𝐈𝐌𝐄

Pt. 5: History Lesson from Griffith

"I was the last one of my race left, so I obviously moved around quite a lot since to stay in the same place was...well, painful, to say the very least."

"Then why here?" Kingston interrupted.

"As I said, it was the only place I could think of off the top of my head. I—"

"What happened to Atlantis, then? Why was the island destroyed if Atlantis itself was underwater and why was all of the population on the island during the cataclysm?"

"No questions until I'm done," Griffith huffed in displeasure.

"Okay, okay."

"The only reason I appear 'normal' to humans —" he made air quotes around the word normal — "and they can't see Minerva is because they don't want to. They want everything to be the same as everything else, nothing out of place. They don't want to see anything except that which belongs according to them."

"How come I can see you, then?" the librarian blurted, unable to help himself.

"Because you wanted to," Griffith said simply. And that was that. "You, unfortunately, are not the only one that can see me. I'm not the only being humans would consider mythical, and one particular human considers himself the hunter of those beings. Orion. You met him — or well, his voice, in your basement with the word-boxes. He found me when I first came up to the surface again for the first time in more than a year, venturing onto the mainland of Greece. I was gullible enough to lead him to the Tópos Synkentrosis, and he raided the island of its technology and then shot me with a tranquilizer." Griffith shivered.

Atlanteans were supposedly a race with advanced technology, advanced even more so than ours, let alone Ancient Greece, Kingston remembered something from a book.

"I woke up in some kind of holding facility," Griffith continued. "Where I was told they wanted to know 'how I worked,' like I was one of the machines they had stolen."

"Who's 'they'?" Kingston asked, "besides Orion?"

"His hunting dogs, the other humans that don't like beings that aren't the same as them. I escaped, and then I found you a couple of weeks later. He's still after me because he hasn't quite gotten what he wants yet. He wants to find out how my Core works. Unfortunately, he has a worldwide reach and so this was the only place I could think of where he isn't."

"Core?" Kingston asked. Griffith tilted his head.

"Yes, my Core. The living water Kiporos gifted to my people. It's what keeps us alive." He undid his coat, stopping. Kingston stopped and watched as Griffith lifted his shirt to show him. To the librarian's amazement, the Atlantean's torso was completely transparent from his sternum to his diaphragm. His ribs were thin and translucent, showing his lungs taking in oxygen and pushing carbon dioxide back up as he breathed. His heart sat nestled under his left lung like any human's would, but there was something else as well. An orb of water sat in between his lungs, gently swirling and reaching out small tendrils that disappeared to the rest of his body.

"My Core," Griffith said, lowering his white shirt and buttoning his coat back up. As he did so, Kingston caught a glance of the letters lining his collar:

MONSTR.

"What does he want with it?" Kingston asked inquisitively. Griffith shrugged dismissively, as if it didn't matter much. Was that it? The story felt a bit anticlimactic for some reason.

Like he wasn't telling him everything.

"Okay," Kingston said slowly, satisfied for the time being. "What about the Storm? Why are you trying to stop it even though it has nothing to do with you? How come you haven't just returned to the ocean?" But Griffith was done explaining for now. He rubbed his side absent-mindedly, abruptly stopping. He reached into his pocket for his bag of rings but drew out nothing. His grey eyes widened and he tried again, pulling off the coat and dumping out the pockets. Several trinkets, including a silver cufflink that Kingston owned but had gone missing, apparently stolen, fell out, but the cloth bag was gone. The endling groaned, hanging his head.