Young Justice: Poseidonis

August 18th, 2010

Tula and Garth returned to find me haltingly inching down the hallway on the third iteration of my underwater broomstick. They stopped, staring at me, and I waved cheerfully. It worked! Sort of. Mostly.

I leaned forward slightly more and the broom whizzed forward, the charms holding me in place on top of the broom pulling me along with it. I tried to stop next to the two Atlanteans, who had both swam to the edges of the hallway as I approached, but overestimated the efficacy of my braking charm and instead slowed to a half several feet behind them.

Once it was clear that I was no longer moving, Garth swam over to me and curiously stared at the broom. “A novel creation. How do you not slip from such a small, slender seat?”

“Magic.”

“I see.”

I climbed off the broomstick and manually turned it to face back down the hallway from where I’d come, then climbed back on. The thing could theoretically turn on its own, but only very slightly and it would need a lot more space than I had here to make a full circle and turn around.

Leaning forward, I did my best to go for a happy medium––somewhere between the crawl from before and the hard-to-stop rush I’d just achieved. I sort of managed it, and Tula and Garth actually looked like they were swimming as they moved along beside me, rather than just drifting easily through the water.

We retrieved Zatanna, who had at first been fascinated by my enchanting but had eventually fallen asleep on my bed, and then headed back to the cafeteria. After some fumbling around, Zatanna ended up hanging from my shoulders as I ‘flew’ between Garth and Tula. Neither the cushioning nor steering charms were designed to respond correctly with a flier and a passenger, something I didn’t really know exactly how to correct. I’d probably just end up making a second one for her eventually, but for now she seemed to be enjoying her time as a living cape.

Dinner was basically the same as lunch. There was a slightly different selection of seafood and a rather unassuming fish dish ended up registering as insanely toxic to my spells so I made sure that Zatanna and I both steered clear of it. We were once again joined by some of our guides’ friends. The red-eyed La’gaan was still just as inquisitive and had come prepared with a fresh list of questions. Fisna’pann was also there, but she spent most of the meal staring at densely-written text carved into a thin stone-like tablet. I took a peek at it and realized that she was probably reviewing for a test.

Topo was absent, and from Garth’s joking words it seemed like the squid-like boy often got so caught up in his work that he forgot to take a break for meals. La’gaan said he’d double check on him later tonight and that was that. Instead, we were joined by a new face, a young woman who looked slightly older than our guides and had the same combination of pale skin and red hair as Tula and the queen.

Her name was Luya and she laughed when Zatanna asked if she and Tula were related. Apparently while the combination wasn’t particularly common in Poseidonis, it, like the complexion that Fisna’pann shared with Kaldur'ahm, was far more typical in one of Atlantis’ other city states. In this case that meant Xebel, the same city where Queen Mera had been born.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

The two had only met this year, when Tula moved up into some of the same advanced classes that Luya was in, and had become fast friends. Luya was a relative newcomer in Poseidonis, having come to the city when she’d outgrown the limited curriculums of Xebel’s Institute of Hydromancy. Tula on the other hand had been born and raised here after her parents decided to immigrate for better job opportunities.

After dinner, Tula, Fisna, and Luya all headed off together while Garth led me and Zatanna towards the library. The building it was housed in was a colossal dome, the entire surface of which was covered in intricate mosaics that shimmered under the light of the glowing orbs embedded at regular intervals into the structure.

Along the way, he explained a bit about the library itself. The building was actually a full sphere, with more than half of the structure hidden beneath the seabed. The entrance to the building was at the very top of the dome, and the three of us swam down past a pair of guards, then had to show our permits––or in Garth’s case, his student card––to a receptionist who studied each one intently, then allowed us to pass. Two half-circle doors the size of a ballroom floor slid open and Garth led us inside.

The library had sixteen levels, connected by a vertical shaft that ran from the bottom of the building to the top. Each floor was filled with rows and rows of shelves, along with tables and small nooks where students were reading, studying, or working on assignments, and was dedicated to one or more magical disciplines or other fields of study.

The top twelve floors were open to all students, while the next four were restricted to varying levels. The first just required you to be a senior student, the next needed a note from any instructor, the third required a pass from the Headmistress or another senior staff member, and the last contained old and valuable texts that could not be accessed directly by students at all.

Instead of books, most of the shelves were filled with thin clay tablets, often arranged in box-sets of ten or more tablets like I’d seen at some muggle stores I’d visited with Zatanna. Others were filled with scroll racks housing rolled-up sheets of some sort of very long, durable sea plant that had been cut into the shape of a scroll and written on.

There were some books, but they were few and far between. Most were either put together out of the same plant as the scrolls, or were clearly surface books that had been spelled to preserve them from the water around them.

Garth gave us a brief tour of the building, showing us where the various sections were and pointing out the librarians who could help us find something if we needed it. Our passes allowed us access to the top thirteen floors, and he mentioned that Headmistress Mera would probably be fine with allowing us to move deeper if we showed a decent grasp of Atlantean magic.

I was fine with that. As much as I wanted to look at the really good stuff they had in their equivalent of the Hogwarts restricted section, I also knew that it was important to learn to walk before you started to run. I looked around, seeing the endless rows of tablets hiding who-knows what sort of magical secrets! Yes, there was plenty to keep me occupied for all the free time I had in the coming weeks and many years after if I ever returned.

With a final warning to not stay up too long, Garth swam away. He and Tula would meet Zatanna and I in the morning for breakfast and more tutoring, but until then our time was our own.

Zatanna and I looked at each other, looked at the table we were floating beside, and both grinned. I flipped the stone disk at the center of the table over, marking it as reserved instead of available, and then we both swam off in different directions. A library of new magic of comparable size to that of Hogwarts? Even if ninety percent of it was rubbish I was still unbelievably excited to jump––dive––right in.