Fire Emblem 3 Houses: Idol Worship

Chapter 2

Amrita: Heads up. I have a lot of places that I want to go, and with the time I have left, I'm going to be running around to do it.

Sylvain: Well then, let's get right to it.

~*~*~

"You're taking notes?" said Sylvain. He started reading them out loud. "Knights' Hall: no good, terrible lighting. Hallway arches: pretty arcs, but if the sun is too bright, shadows will be too sharp. Viewers will be distracted by shadows flickering over dancers — you're evaluating hallways?"

"Hey, don't look at my notes," Amrita snapped. She picked the pink bar she had handed him out of his hands, did some things on the glass face, then handed it back to him. "Just click on the circle like I said. But wait for when I say."

"Wait, what is this thing?" Sylvain asked. Now there was another thing shown on the glass face of this...whatever it was. As he moved his hands, he realized he was looking at an instant replica painting of what he saw. He shouted in alarm. "Oh! How did you get here? How did you get in this thing?"

"I'm over here, Sylvain!" Amrita was standing in the middle of the road, with the stables on one side. Hubert glanced their way once as he stood, with his arms folded, in front of one of the stables.

"But you're over here, too!" Sylvain said. "How did you get so small?"

"Just hit the button!"

"The button? What button?"

"Put your finger on the circular thing!"

At this point, Hubert was straight out watching their exchange, and Ferdinand, who had come out from the stable, stood beside him, open-mouthed. Sylvain held his arms up in protest, for once genuinely innocent. Amrita walked back to him and said, "Look...you push here — oh you were already recording..." She tapped some more things and handed it back to him. "Now this time, look, see how you hold this up, steady?"

She had no reservations guiding Sylvain's wrist and shifting the way his hands held — the Thing. Hubert, now apparently disgusted with their touchy exchange, re-engaged with Ferdinand in arguing. Sylvain was relieved. In all honesty, he didn't expect this tour of the campus to get this hot, and he didn't really want Hubert and Ferdinand to be in on the exchange. He felt weird and watched.

"Take this picture of me. Tap where I am, on screen, so you can focus on me," Amrita instructed. She did a pose all of a sudden, and for an unpleasant moment Sylvain thought of Lorenz. "Did you get that?" she asked.

"Ah! What did I do? It flashed!" he said.

"So that means yes." She jogged back to him, this time smiling. "Okay, let me see what we've got."

He watched over her shoulder as she swiped over the 'screen'. To his shock, he saw her, on the road, in the middle again, where she had been standing, just a moment before. "What is this thing?" he asked, fascinated.

She grinned slyly. "This is a picture," she said. "You captured...a moment...in time." She'd added pauses for dramatic effect.

Sylvain looked at her, jaw-dropped. She held the pink bar up at arms length and 'hit the button' again. "Look at this," she said. "It's you and me."

Sure enough, on the screen now, there was another picture, of Amrita looking big, much much bigger than in the last one, so that she didn't even fit in the screen anymore. And beside her, looking — really like an idiot, with his mouth in an 'o' and his hair looking stupid-unkempt — that was him in the 'picture'. She had 'captured' him.