Rules Are For Losers

Chapter 6 - The Princess and the Almost-Friend

I'm sat outside, on porcelain white stone steps. They have a slight feel of marble dust, which makes the steps feel softer. Dyeki sits behind me, though more hidden by her silence than her location. In front of me is a little lake. It's a small-ish pond really, but I'd rather call it a lake, complete with orange fish, the exotic type with 'whiskers' near their mouths, and so many other strange species too! To keep watching them is captivating, their rhythmic movements matching those of the waves, a group of colourful black, white, red and orange specks of undulating specimens, appearing like a sunset rainbow.

The Journey begins tomorrow, and classes are over for today. They were tough, and annoying, and I feel hella tired. Sat here by this pool, with water as blue as a summer sky's tears, I can't move a muscle. Though obviously the blue has nothing to do with my muscles. It's just... mesmerising really, the lapping 'waves', the light reflecting different shades of pearl blue on an ever changing water.

Okay, you get it. The fish are nice. The water is nice. Everything is nice. After feeling like hell, I am now feeling rather nice.

I look up, away from the shifting water, up to the sky. After the first day, the beams of light and then ropes of ether, came the next day. I had some personal one on one training with an academy tutor, on ether 'buildup' and manipulation, and she tested my potential and what I could do. To be honest, you never really know what you are in others' eyes till they tell you, and I'd thought I was awesome.

She told me I wasn't.

Not exactly like that, but I could tell I didn't come across as the most adept of pupils. I ended up learning a lot, though she says I have to keep practising extending my potential outside me, and then quickly pulling it back in again. She's taught me some drills I need to practice now. Though at first I hadn't been sure what she'd meant, she'd found a way to teach me. Birds had done the trick.

"Watch this."

The little blue bird she'd made appear on her finger flew away, to the corner of the room, resting on a bronze door handle.

"Aaand... back." The little bird took flight to swoop through the air, and onto my tutor's finger once more.

"Now you try." This was easy enough. My little bird appeared (it wasn't a real bird, mind, just a slightly see-through apparition. Making it seem real and detailed took more thought and energy). My little bird flew, reached the end of the room, sat on the door handle, and then at my beckoning, returned, to land stylishly on my finger again. I resisted the urge to brush an invisible speck of dust off my shoulder. Boom.

But then it got tough. The instructor used not one, not two, but a whole herd (um, that's what you call them, right?) of little birds, taking them to the end of the room (the ding dangity things actually made the shape of a huge hand and opened the door by the handle. What the actual flip.), then making them fly down a castle corridor, where there was a bell that the birds pushed against to ring, so we could hear they'd reached their target, and then flew all the way back to the instructor's hand, just after finishing with a group bow. Darn.

I tried to replicate it. I really did. Bird by bird, I could eventually make a whole flock appear too, but it's hard to concentrate on all these little moving masses at once, each one being a projection of my memory of a living bird. They weren't uniquely original, like the teacher's' were; being one bird amplified fifty times, they all moved as clones. But even that was okay, that was good. It was only when the see-through aspect of my birds got a bit extreme that things started getting tipsy. I was just about able to get my birds out the door together in one piece (Boom), but when the little critters left my vision, I didn't know what was going on anymore. My birds just... flopped. Or disappeared. I'm still not sure where they went.