Michiko doesn't matter, everyone's always telling their stories without her. If chess is meant to emulate war then she's always in some other country, peaceful and pointless.
Only it isn't peaceful! It's not even pointless, her little red heart hurts like that, knocked to-and-fro by storms and endless rains.
She’s so moody!
She has a lot to be moody about, though. Her powers suck and she’s weak and she’s a shitty student, how did she even get into this place, and her Fate-assigned roommate and partner she’s stuck with four years sucks, and given all the shit he gets up to, everything that’s happened to him he gets more Life Experience in a week than she’s gotten in a decade, a half and a little more so she’s also jealous of him!
Which is weird, because his personality sucks, but you wouldn’t believe that would you?
Would you, traitor, empty observer, a convenient conjuring in Michiko’s head, for her to blame all her problems on.
She throws her pen at her desk.
Throw is a strong word. She drops it while feeling aggression.
Maybe that could be a throw? If she were a better psychokinetic, it probably would be. Her power slips out of her grasp, though, isn’t in sync with her emotions, her thought, her consciousness, her Will, true or false.
See! She has no psychic gift or talent! She was awakened when she got to Lydia Wark International School and she didn’t even really apply for the psychic power, or make for a good cutting edge psychic researcher so she was pretty shocked she got in? She was just running away from her past, still is, and there’s no better way to do that then to take a few steps ‘out of bounds.’
She crammed to get here in Washington. Not Washington state, that’s what she was running from, but Washington, D.C., the birthplace of psychic power, the resting place of the Condor Raid, a city that had lost number and language and coherence and was built back from the top by the Imperial Dynasty of America, who came from… who came from… did it matter? She didn’t know.
(It was rend asunder by [Null Point] so completely. No trace of humanity, worldpower or worldly power was left. But President Winthrope remembered it well, or so he thought. The monuments, the history, all the living souls, he kept them so dearly in his dreams?
And yet when Washington returned in 2044, it was clear to everyone that it was taken apart and put back together by someone who didn’t understand how it worked.)
People said Washington was pretty hard to enter in general, with all the changes, but she got into a night school there super easily? The administrations there accepted everyone. Was it possible that you were grosser, more dejected than her? Ah-ah-hah, she’s just kidding. Don’t mind her discordant laughter.
The things she learnt while there were pretty conventional, anyway. Conventional enough that she passed all of the difficult Lydia Wark tests even if her GPA started slipping. Her parents noticed, scared of losing their good child, but the first year of Lydia Wark cuts into the last year of high school, she was free of the tears, the screaming and the torment, but not really. Not really.
Would she lie to you?
She’s not clearly miserable, slumped over, pen rolled to the edge of her desk but luckily, so luckily not fallen off it, partner looking at her, smirking, judging. Why would she be mentally ill.
“Akutagawa.” People don’t seem to like to refer to her as Michiko? Maybe this guy just likes the guy she stole the last name from more.
“Y-yeah?” she stumbles to say.
“Can you give a definition of psychic power not already mentioned.” She doesn’t know. What was mentioned?
She got this one into her head in Hancock Cram, maybe nobody’s said this one?
“Psychic power is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will,” she recites.
“Did you think that it would slip past my notice that you’re quoting Aleister Crowley?”
Like the wizard? Is she actually? It’s certainly slipped past her notice!
Hm.
She can salvage this!
“Do you one hundred percent believe that psychic power manifested within President Ezra Buckley out of nowhere in 2040, no precedents, no nothing?”
“We discussed this at length a mere five minutes ago. President may not have been chronologically the first person to become possessed or to host the mass anomaly, but I believe that the fact that history has gathered around him and defined him as such indicates that psychic power used him as a lead anchor and could possibly have worked chronologically backwards. Nevertheless, this does not mean that some charlatan and pervert who pretended that throwing his personal rivals down the stairs was a potent form of magic prefigured and predicted the system of psychic power.”
Michiko doesn’t know anything about Aleister Crowley actually, apart from the fact that his life was more interesting than hers.
She should probably shut up.
She doesn’t.
“Many things have started out as false and been rendered true.”
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
Michiko looks at her water bottle.
THE CITY OF GOD, BOOK SEVEN
For Numa himself also, to whom no prophet of God, no holy angel was sent, was driven to have recourse to hydromancy, that he might see the images of the gods in the water (or, rather, appearances whereby the demons made sport of him), and might learn from them what he ought to ordain and observe in the sacred rites.
“That’s what you said yourself, pretty much. Is it really impossible that a statement which was false in its time, whether because it was delusion or set up to trick others, can become a full and rich statement later? That an incorrect description of reality at one point can become perfect later, like how… Newtonian physics doesn’t apply when you’re fast enough or go to small, but in reverse? If tricksters and charlatans can’t speak true things about psychic power then how come we call a single field of altered reality a nomos? That’s the Greek word for law, right? I’ve never met a lawyer that I can trus—”
Her partner, Connor Gierke, elbows her in the stomach. She’s flimsy, she didn’t eat breakfast, she reels.
“You’re unserious,” her teacher replies, “and missing the point. What does your definition meaningfully state about psychic power? What is change? What is will?”
A thousand eyes are staring at her.
Change is when things are different, which they will never be.
Will is something she will never have.
----------------------------------------
Uneasy she walks out of class with Connor.
“Impressive showing,” he says, and she doesn’t respond. “I gave you a compliment. You should respond.”
Unsure she looks straight down, at the floor, her shoes, but somehow unconcerned with tripping, or overly concerned, or wondering if she’ll spew bile onto the nice long skirt that she bought when she burnt through the first quarter of Second City student stipend to replace her wardrobe, out with the old, in with the new.
“Mitchie. Respond.”
“Ah, yes.”
“You should learn to take losing arguments less personally.”
“I should,” and she genuinely agrees, even against the impulse to disagree just because.
“You said a lot of interesting things about will.”
“I said nothing about will and everything about Will.”
“Am I really supposed to believe that you don’t know anything about Aleister Crowley?”
“Yes—how do you even know that?”
“That was an open book during the argument. Everyone in our class heard it.”
What? You didn’t hear anything, you saw it telepathically, a talent that she couldn’t muster, Chii (if you had to nickname her let it be Chii) was not only rank one but one without any skill or precision, Connor was rank three, averagely above average, so she’d never gotten familiar with invading people so casually, could read faces like any sleepy human could, not thoughts.
“Don’t act surprised,” he says, and she tells herself that the surprise was evident from the second-long silence.
“Okay.”
“Don’t just say that. You shouldn’t just agree to everything if you have no plan of improving yourself.”
Michiko once saw a meme where a J-pop idol told the viewer ‘you should improve yourself’, obviously meaning that they should kill themselves.
That’s probably not what Connor means.
“But anyway,” he continues, always with the prattering, and she’s sure that he knows that she can’t bear to listen to him always try to ‘include’ ‘her’ or rant at her but doesn’t actually care, is sure that he’s sure that he can break down the great wall of Michiko with enough force, “I know what my True Will is.”
Did she even say True Will? She swears she didn’t know about that until she searched for Aleister Crowley online immediately after the class concluded.
“What’s your True Will,” she asks.
“I’d like to score Evelyn Fairbanks. You should be my wingman. Wingwoman.”
“Why me.”
“It has to be you.”
“I don’t know Evelyn Fairbanks.”
“I thought you would.”
“Why would I.”
“Because you’re both—”
“Because we’re both what.”
“Vitalitas students!”
Nice fucking save, dude!
No, she doesn’t know everyone in this school who shares a single, if critical, quality with her. She’s not a psychi—okay she’s a psychic but she’s not that sort of psychic. That’s not how psychic powers work. Except if she says that this sort of knowledge was a precursor to psychic power in human history to not make herself look stupid, then it totally does.
“What do you even see in her,” she asks. She feigns interest now or she’s asked to feign interest later.
“She’s hot.”
“Is that it.”
“She has a good personality.”
“What’s her personality.” Does she have one?
“Well, you’d think she’d be in Litteras,” if that’s how you start off describing someone then she probably doesn’t, but she’ll bear with Connor through the corridors to the study room, it doesn’t matter where she is or where she’s going, as long as she’s in Lydia Wark she doesn’t actually have a choice, “she’s super cultured. Super super cultured, films, TV, anime, books, web serials,” web serials are NOT a sign of culture, “it’s just adorable how up-to-date she is with everything, how passionate, the links she can make, the thematic analysis she can do.”
“If you have shared interests it might work,” she says plainly. She dips into her self-loathing, making it loathing for others, hopes he reads the notes of it on her face.
“Indeed, it may. We think similarly, too. Have you heard of the Grendel incident?”
She had to remember a bunch of high rank anomaly incidents for her conventional high school, so yeah! “Berlin, April 13th to April 16th 2060, rank seven, focused on inflicting mental damage over death and therefore killed exactly and only one-hundred and eight people, a surprisingly low nu—”
“I was there.”
“I know.”
“I’ve never told you.” So it’s only problematic when she knows info he’s never said.
“Okay, but you’re from Berlin, right? So obviously you were there.”
“I moved to Berlin the year before that, I was raised in Vierbein and Windhuk.”
“Where are those?”
“Namibia. My father is South African, his family moved to England a few decades before he was born, he read Physics and German at Kings, moved to Magdeburg and met my mum, they moved to South Africa and then Namibia and helped build Vierbein as a sort of research town.”
“I see,” she says. He tuts at her, like ‘why didn’t you already know that.’ To be fair, he’s probably explained it to her before. She was probably tuned out.
“Since you’re too familiar with Carcosa,” and she is, but it’s not some fictional dead city but simply the other suburbs of Washington, “you might not get it.”
“Get what?”
“Empathise with the feeling of dread, the fear, the endless terror of being caught alone in the night and thrown out to the wolves.”
“Why… wouldn’t I empathise with that?” Carcosa is just a suburb of Washington.
“You don’t even sympathise with much of anything I say.”
“I’m sorry.”
“See, what did I just say?”
“I don’t sympathise—”
“Before that.”
Oh. “It’s pointless to apologise and then not improve yourself.”
“It is.”
They come to the study room door together.
BEOWULF
And a young prince must be prudent like that,
giving freely while his father lives
so that afterwards, in age, when fighting starts
steadfast companions will stand by him
and hold the line. Behaviour that's admired
is the path to power among people everywhere
Michiko walks through those gates alone.