diatuooc | Test Drive #7

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Test Drive #7

Test Drive #7

Air Apparent

The fundamental principle of Sundering, that of breaching the barriers between here and there, often manifests as summoning. Simply open a portal and then bring through that which you desire to command. Today's lesson in the magic went slightly wrong, and now a strange creature called an "air imp" stalks around the campus, causing mischief wherever it can. Its powers are not terribly dangerous, but it is a trickster with the swift gusts of air it can conjure, and almost impossible to see since it is the very color of the air itself.

The faculty has made two important announcements. First, do NOT go commando under your robes while this thing is out there. Second, whichever student or group of students catches the imp shall earn five points for the Colormarch for their House or Houses, and shall be taught a special spell of Discovery personally by Professor Trammel.

This reward has the student body in a tizzy, and groups of eager imp-hunters stalk the campus after classes, each of them with a clever idea to get the prize for themselves. Quickly, find a partner and join them!

Only Shooting Stars

Thanks to some horrible twist of fate, a body-swapping magic has caught you in its claws and wrenched you into a form that is not your own. Perhaps you're a familiar now, a blobby owl or a sneaky cat. Perhaps you've taken over the body of that student next to you, who's now looking at you from the eyes that ought to be yours.

There isn't any easy answer for this. You're stuck, for the moment, anyway. All you can do is try to make the most of it... or just get through.

Another Fine Mess

The fervor of the day down Anastara way surrounds a shop that just released their new special product: Airsquiddlies. These curious little toys take the shape of a squid, and through some little trick of magic they catch the air when held up above one's head. Tethered by a string, they drift about a few feet up with their tentacles waving most realistically and slithering around to curiously investigate whatever, or whoever, they find.

By luck, you've managed to get one of these -- and as delightful as it might be, it does come with a couple of quirks. Has its tentacles gotten somewhere you'd rather they not -- a merchant's wares, the hair of a fellow student perhaps? Or maybe you're stuck dealing with a few people who are intent on getting their own Airsquiddly, any way they can since the stores are sold out?

Labwork

Not every magical disaster is caused by some wayward student you don't know. Many of them are caused by you instead. To wit: you're on the spot in one of the magical labs, being called on to demonstrate a technique more advanced than others you've mastered so far. Failure is expected, and the wards should prevent any injury to others from a miscast spell. But will the sparks of your magic just sputter out and die? Or will you inadvertently mispronounce, misform, misshape, or miscalculate in a way that brings chaos to you and your lab partner?

(You could also manage to succeed in casting the spell, but that isn't very fun.)

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"Am I supposed to?" she asked softly, wishing she hadn't spoken. She kept working on cleaning things up.

Perhaps he should educate her. But despite being an angel of God, his job had been spreading miracles, encouraging humans towards goodness, thwarting wiles...not playing missionary. That was more the task of humans or other angels.

"No!" he assured her, kneeling down primly, trying to avoid getting anything else on his clothes. "No, nooo. I'm just surprised is all. I can't say I've met too many humans unfamiliar with the concept, even if they choose to disbelieve in its existence." And then, because it was a rarity, he added, "If you don't mind me asking, where are you from? Originally, I mean."

"Oh, I'm not a human," she said. That explained that at least. "I'm a Nobody." Well. Sort of.

He tried to peer under her hood, even though that was probably a bit rude, and adopted a sympathetic tone. "No one is a nobody. Everyone is someone."

Even Death, and War and Famine and Pollution (and before, Pestilence) were someones even if they were really just embodiment of human fears.

Her shoulders slumped and she shook her head. Why did she always have to explain this? "I am a Nobody, mostly. Nobodies are what is created when a heart is stolen from someone and they are too strong a personality to fade into the darkness when they become a Heartless. My best friends were Nobodies too, for a while."

It was all a bit confusing, and he wasn't really sure he was making sense of it. People did not survive without a heart--most creatures didn't--unless she meant heart in a less literal sense of the word. Unless she, like many humans, equated a heart to an emotional core or a soul or essence. If that were the case, was she saying that someone without a 'heart' turned into a heartless, and what was left of them became a 'nobody'? (Even though it quite sounded like they had the body...?)

That sounded very tragic. A bit like Falling against your will.

"I'm sorry. What does it mean to be without a heart? For you, at least?"

"For me?" she asked quietly and considered as she cleaned. "I never had a heart. Not like the others. I was an experiment. It means I can't feel emotions, only vague intimations of them. I was never meant to exist." she gave a small shrug. "Nobodies weren't ever meant to exist, and a failure like me, least of all."

She wasn't sorry for herself, she didn't have the heart to feel that. Or so she was convinced. she was simply explaining the situation, yet again.

Aziraphale knew what it felt like to think oneself a failure and he was going to have none of that from her. But firstly:

"Would you like to know a secret?" he asked, smiling conspiratorially and leaning in closer, hoping to be encouraging and uplifting. "I don't believe in accidental existences. If you're here, you were meant to be here, you were meant to come into being--even if the reasons seem unclear or nonexistent right now." Ineffable. The word on the tip of his tongue is ineffable.

"Besides," he continued. "Sometimes one fails at what they thought their original purpose was, only to discover they are actually extraordinary at something entirely different."

She gave him a look for a moment, then caught herself and shook her head. "You are a Somebody, you are allowed to believe whatever you want. I was created to serve Xemnas, and in the end all I could do to defy him was to be forgotten and die. Whatever Roxas says will happen in the future... is in the future. That's nothing to do with me." As she was, here and now. A failure who couldn't even protect her friends.

She was dead? Well, perhaps death was a temporary condition for Nobodies.

"Is it? The future is shaped by the actions of the past, after all." Aziraphale fidgeted a bit with indecision before resolving to leave out some details. "Just because the specifics are different, doesn't mean we aren't alike, you and I--whether I am a somebody or not." He sighed, and carefully took a towel from her hand so she had one less distraction from him, one less thing to hide behind. He knew all about that sort of thing--hiding.

"I don't know this Roxas," he said gently, "or the future, but don't downplay your actions. Defiance in the face of your creator, in the face of unjust orders, is a revolutionary enough act on its own." He pursed his lips and considered, before offering a soft smile. "Perhaps don't think of it a grand scale, hm? Think of them as choices you made--liberties you took when you weren't allowed the personhood to have that free will--choices you made independently to do the right thing, even if it wasn't a big thing: it was the Right thing. You can believe in whatever you want, too, you know. You allowed yourself to believe in something different than what you were created to do. ...Sometimes all that matters is having the ability to choose at all."

She watched the towel as it left her hands, as she listened to him. His words weighed on her, and she asked in a whisper the only thing there really was to ask in that moment.

"But how do I know what the right thing is?"

She'd asked Riku and the answer hadn't been helpful. Oddly, Axel didn't have a good answer for her either. What was the right thing? How did someone know when they found it?

"You can't." Saying it, Aziraphale realized, those words were as much for himself as they were for her. "None of us can."

That was patently untrue. Some of us can, but God and seers are different things entirely from the rest of the populous and most people, nobodies, somebodies, angels, and demons had to go about living their lives without any idea what lay ahead of them. They could make educated guesses, of course, or attempt to make plans, but the best laid plans...and all that.

"But we can do our best," he offered brightly. "We can do what is good, and kind, and considerate towards others, and we can hope. And sometimes, we can do that and still get it wrong, but it's not because we are a bad person; you're merely human." To err, after all. "But we do our best."

"But I'm not human," she reminded him. "And you said i did the right thing, how do you know it was right to leave my friends?" the words weren't accusatory but soft and quiet.

"Well, neither am I," he admitted, blushing faintly at the mistake in calling her human. "But I'd like to think, sometimes, that I'm a little bit more in tune with humans than with my own kind. As for how I know you did the Right Thing," he shrugged, a small, almost cute gesture, "for one, you did it to help your friends. That's certainly not a wrong thing to do. It's commendable. And judging from what you said," albeit mostly guesswork and reading between the lines on Aziraphale's part, so he rather hoped he was correct in his assumptions, "your Roxas seemed to think so, too."

"He didn't think so at the time," she said softly, looking at her gloves. "Neither did Axel. But Riku said it was the only way to wake Sora, and that Sora was more needed than a Nobody who was never meant to exist in the first place. So I had to return to him."

Oh. Was this Sora person the being she was before becoming a Nobody? Or, well, the being that somehow she was tied to despite being an experiment and...goodness, this was confusing. Aziraphale felt he needed to take notes.

"And what did you feel, at the time?"

"I can't feel, I don't have a heart," she explained. "And I don't want one."

How tragic, to never feel anything at all. Though he didn't believe that she was immune to emotions. She may think she was, she may try very hard to be, but someone would not be so concerned with rehashing if they did the right thing or not if they were merely a creature of logic. Or so Aziraphale thought.

"Why ever would you not?"

"Because they could change people too much. I've met Sora, here. He's nothing like Roxas. And if Saïx is really telling the truth... he's completely different than when he was a Nobody too. There is so little of me to begin with.... if I change.... it will be the same as dying and being forgotten again," she whispered.

"No, no. But change is...growth, my dear. We cannot stay the same forever, because time itself changes things. Opinions change! Experience changes people. We... adapt. We...become, hopefully, better versions of ourselves. To not change is to--is to live in isolation! You did not become who you are now by avoiding change. You'll become more of yourself if you let yourself open up to people."

He shook his head, frustrated. "Fear is such an ...unpleasant emotion! Of all the ones you cling to, don't let it be fear."

She shook her head. "There is a difference between change over time and changing all at once. I just found my friends again. I don't want to vanish."

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Test Drive #7

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