Mirror

Chapter 5: Aurora

Roryyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!

I rewrote this chapter; it seemed rushed. Tell me if you think I should do so again. I kinda like it how it is, myself.

A land of love, and a land of light,

Withouten sun, or moon, or night:

Where the river swa'd a living stream,

And the light a pure celestial beam:

The land of vision, it would seem

A still, an everlasting dream.

-Queen's Wake

Kyli gasped in surprise, then smiled back. "Hello, Rory!"

"Kyli!" Her friend pulled back and crouched down to see the shorter girl's face better.

"Rory, what are you doing in here?"

Rory's laugh was like a songbird trilling. "Same thing you are, I expect, assuming you're trying to fix the SM?"

"Yes...you haven't had any luck with the IWSs?" She assumed, heart sinking. If she had, there wouldn't be any trouble right now.

Rory laughed again. "They're all blown out."

Kyli shot her a suspicious look. "Why is that funny?"

The tall girl shrugged. "Don't ask me. The computer thinks it's funny." Rory had had a mental link with the SM ever since either of them could remember.

Kyli sighed. "The computer is insane. It's thinking lots of strange stuff."

"How do you know? You're not linked with the SM, are you?"

Kyli huffed at her. "Yes, I am linked with the SM. I was doing Calculus, and I decided to check or the neural transmitters because the voice ones weren't working. "

Rory clapped her hands together. "How fun!"

Kyli glared. "It's not fun, Aurora. The computer is being very strange."

Rory looked a little confused. "I am very strange;" she said slowly, "but you can stand me."

"It's not the same at all!" Kyli practically screamed, extremely frustrated at Rory's incomprehension. "The computer isn't supposed to be illogical; I should know what it will think next! I've always known you have random thoughts, but the SM..."

She trailed off when she saw Rory's face. The girl was not frightened, or angry, or upset in any manner.

She was laughing.

"Whatever, LiLi."

Kyli scowled, but felt a smile tugging at the corner if her mouth.. "Don't call me 'LiLi'. She pleaded with the other girl. "You know how I hate it."

"Re'Jel calls you LiLi."

Kyli flushed a deep crimson, the grin no longer threatening. "Yes, well, Re'Jel is...Re'Jel is..." she stuttered, fighting for the right words to say.

"Re'Jel is...your boyfriend?"

Kyli's eyes widened as she grabbed Rory's shoulders. "Re'Jel is not my boyfriend." She growled through gritted teeth. "We've been over this...we're friends."

Rory was smirking. "Yeah...close friends..."

Kyli sighed, deciding to drop the matter. "Well, let's get out of this valve, anyway...er, how long have you been crawling in there?"

"Oh, about an hour. " Rory replied off-handedly. "Is it shorter your way?"

"An hour? Rory, I do believe you're a little crazy."

"We're all crazy, aren't we?"

"Granted," Kyli said, smiling a little. "But I believe my brand of insanity is a bit different from yours."

Roy did not say anything to this, merely repeated her question. "Is it shorter your way?"

Kyli looked into her bottomless eyes for a moment or two, biting her lip. "Yes, I'd only been in here a few seconds when I ran into you." She said softly, unsure what she was seeing in the depths of Rory's warn brown eyes, swirling and plunging.

Rory's face changed; now there was something like fear in the liquid brown, but that didn't make sense, and, oh, now it was morphing, and it was understanding...everything Rory thought could be visible, right in her eyes...windows; not, perhaps, to her soul, but to her mind...

Kyli was lost, lost in the lake of thoughts, in fact, she was drowning, in the random processes, the strange ideas, never, never had a mental link felt this way before...

There were shapes, triangles, mostly, but when she inspected them, they, too, had shapes inside, they were made up of tiny crystals, expanding, enfolding, magnifying--

"So, back up." Rory ordered.

"Huh?" Kyli blinked at her.

"Back up!" Rory urged her, grabbing her shoulders and pushing her gently.

"Oh...right." With difficulty, she tore her mind apart from Rory's and began crawling awkwardly backwards, followed by the other girl.

"So, when did you realize something was wrong with the SM?" Kyli questioned shakily as the clambered out though the hole on the wall; someone needed to say something, her friend must have seen her, floating abstractly inside Rory's own mind...

Rory sighed. "It quit out on me and Gabre during our Portal Backgammon match."

Kyli winced, coming more fully into the outside world. "Who was ahead?"

"I was, of course. He was losing by 10.7 points!"

The red-headed girl laughed. "That's impossible," she countered, "I know for a fact the highest you can be ahead is 10 points!"

"It all depends on how you look at it," Roy sighed, sitting at the table. "You see, Gabre was 10 points behind and he had a waiting piece trapped in 3D...so, technically, he was 10.7 down."

Kyli frowned slightly as she tentatively tapped into her confused neural functions to calculate, then nodded. "You're right. If you're counting those in the score."

"We were." Rory said unnecessarily.

"So..." Kyli stood up again, unwilling to sit idle and let herself be captured by Rory's mind again. "Shall we go tell the Old Ones?"

"I expect they already know," Rory replied, "but there's no harm in it."

The two walked out the door, and Kyli felt some of the pull to delve in, to tear out, decrease.

One relief.