[Loop: 2]
“…That’s… The problem. You are—um… There seems to be an error of the—um—temporal variety?” As the little serpent spoke it turned its head to the side and curled its wings around itself defensively.
It was the look on its face that got to Izel the most. Its eyes were squeezed tightly shut, and even if Obsidian Butterflies didn’t have eyes, they still had facial expressions. Her family could still grimace and wince. Izel knew what the face of someone expecting to be hit looked like.
She was too familiar with those kinds of faces.
The little guy cracked open a wary eye. Then its head shot up a little, like someone in the room Izel couldn’t hear had just said something surprising.
“Hm. Hum? Oh, one moment please.”
The small snake’s eyes went vacant, and it bobbled its head in a little snake dance Izel thought was painfully adorable. Her fingers itched to just grab him. Her? Or was it like Izel? Did it have a definitive gender?
Awareness snapped back to the familiar’s tiny gaze, and it began speaking immediately with authority instead of the previous anxiety in its voice.
“I have spoken with the other Nexus Units, and it does appear as if—pardon me, this may be strange—in some sort of…” The snake pronounced the next words carefully, the anxiety back in its voice, “of um…Time… Loop.”
The little one looked like it was about to say something else, maybe elaborate further, when there came a very loud knock on the apartment door and a familiar voice.
“Izel? Izelllll? Are you home?!”
The voice paused, but even before it introduced itself, Izel knew who was on her doorstep. That tired, panicked voice was, after two years, almost as familiar as Zayne’s or the voice of any member of her family.
“Izel. It’s me, Jax! Janice is here too!”
Izel, panicked, shouted back. She needed to get them away from her and Itzcali’s door. Jax in particular. He had a habit of leaning on things, and the things Jax leaned on for too long broke. It was just a matter of time.
“Look, you know I can’t bring you in here, guys! I—I had a talk just last week with the landlord about the chandelier! We—can’t have another incident!”
It wasn’t that Izel didn’t want her friends in her apartment, it was that if she let them in then it wouldn’t stay her apartment for too much longer. Something would happen and she and Izcali would get kicked out. A wall would collapse. The ceiling would fall. Janise would cough and her strange form of lightning would burn a hole in the floor beneath Jax’s feet. Something would happen. It always, always, did around Jax.
“No. No. It’s fine,” Jax's panicky voice called, “I, uh, just came to drop something off. Uh-Uau-uh! Open the door! Please—!”
“Is it a bomb???” Izel yelled back.
She did not like how anxious Jax sounded. He was always so cavalier about the apparently ever-present grudge fate apparently held against him. Oh, he seemed appropriately frightened when something dangerous was happening to him, but when it was over he tended to calm down frightfully quickly. For him to be this rattled now… Well, whatever he came to drop off couldn’t be anything good.
Jax was silent for just a moment before he called back, “Nuh-oh? No! It’s not a—”
“It’s not a Zayne, is it?” Izel interrupted as her mind flasheded to the worst possibility it it could imagine at the moment. Zayne would be (in her mind at least) worse than any alchemical or magically explosive device.
There came a gruffly feminine voice Izel couldn’t make out. Though she couldn’t make out the words, Izel thought it sounded desperate. Were Jax and Janice arguing? About what?
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“Nuhuh! No. Not at all! No! I huh, I’m not, I don’t—I haven’t seen him today!” called Jax in response to Izel’s question.
To Izel, that... that didn’t sound like Jax was telling the truth. The rising sounds of an argument outside her apartment did not help reassure her.
Thinking on her feet, Izel looked around and decided that maybe the window would work. First, she decided to stall her friends.
“Okay! I was just getting out of the shower, so I’ll be out the door in a few minutes!” That said, Izel turned on her heels and made for the window, snatching her bookbag from its place hanging by the door.
To the snake on her counter, Izel softly said, “Well, whoever you are, feel free to come along while we work out what you need.”
She stopped in front of the hall mirror, looking herself up and down to make sure she wasn’t missing anything vital. Like Itzcali and most of their family, Izel was an Obsidian Butterfly, standing just over two yards tall with a body of hard, black glass-like flesh coated in a thin carapace of actual, glossy obsidian. Humanoid, like most Arkanik, but with three main exceptions. First, an Obsidian’s face was a mask of white ivory shaped like the front of a human skull, with no lower jaw, where the eye sockets were instead shallow divots which allowed them to see in much the same way as other folk used the flesh-grapes they called “eyes.” Obsidians like her had what other races would consider a normal mouth and nostrils, however. That is, normal for a crystalline race. Second, they lacked any features between their legs. Obsidians reproduced asexually, and though Izel considered herself feminine, her kind were without biological gender. The third difference, that most stunning feature which gave the Obsidian Butterflies their name, were the wings. For about three and a third yards to her left and equally far to her right, her pair of huge butterfly wings of patterned blue, red and yellow fluttered, roughly half transparent, and glowing softly in the dimly lit apartment. The wings of an Obsidian were not usable for flight, but also didn’t get in the way, being incorporeal and able to pass through walls and other people. As she stood, taking a breath and assessing her appearance, a bit of magical false dust rolled off of the edges of her wings.
Izel pulled on a light grey blouse and skirt (Obsidians didn’t strictly need to wear clothes, but there were always people who gave them weird looks when they exercised that right. Besides, she knew magic to recolor clothes and it was a fun thing to play with during the day.) and pulled the strap of the satchel containing her books and flute over her head. She cinched it across her chest, before putting on a simple armband which served as her school uniform over her right arm. As always, it took a bit of extra stretching to get it past the cursed spurs of topaz gemstone that jutted from her right wrist and hand. Cursed, not with magic, but with heritage. The mark of her “father” on her body, evidence of his existence.
Before opening the window, she glanced back at where the snake was. Her hopes of inviting it along with her were dashed when she saw that its previous spot on the counter was vacant. The brightly colored winged serpent was nowhere to be seen. Weird. Maybe the familiar could teleport? That would have probably explained how it got into her apartment, would have, if she and Itzcali hadn’t paid for quality privacy wards. Teleporting in and out of their apartment should have been basically impossible with the wards still up.
Her thoughts were so preoccupied with everything—her confession to Siofrenne the night before, Zayne’s message, the snake—that she almost jumped right out the window before she caught herself and remembered she’d need rope for what she was attempting. Quickly fetching it from one of the closets she kept her gear in, Izel returned to the window. Itzcali had once asked her what all her gear was for. The short answer was that it was for situations like this. Jax and Zayne were always dragging trouble to her doorstep, and when they weren’t, chances were good that Izel was the one dragging them off on some adventure.
Izel was in an odd sort of calm panic. She knew her thoughts weren’t totally sensible and she felt a vague sort of guilt about running, but in her defense, she was still processing a lot. Too much to put off, even. Too much to ignore.
Also, from Izel’s perspective, if someone confessed their feelings to their crush in person, they had a right to see their beloved one’s reaction. If on the other hand, someone confessed over Console, well, they deserved to get an over-Console response.
Izel’s plan was to try to push off the wall with her feet and swing over closer to the windowsill across from hers. Her range with Mist Step was short and she wanted to minimize the distance she’d have to cover with the spell if she could. Her apartment building sat on the edge between two Transit districts. If she could get as far as the next apartment over, she would cross the border between Transit districts; a cast of Transit would then take her to Midtown instead of the Transit station for South Campus. Unlike the South Campus Transit Station, the Midtown station actually doubled as a train station. If she could make it that far, then she would probably catch a train and make good on her escape. First the sight-aimed Mist Step to take her over the district line, then the automatically-targeted Transit to whisk her away, mostly on the city's power budget.
Something caught her eye and Izel looked down, because she thought she caught a glimpse of something down there that was not the earthy tones she was expecting. Looking down, her sight registered cerulean blue tones with little hints of pink and purple here and there, a texture that was somewhere between scales and long eloquent feathers, broad wings and an overall shape of a creature that was something like a cross between a feathered crocodile and a dragon.
Her classmate, Janice, went everywhere with Jax. Everywhere. Izel seriously doubted she had ever seen the two of them more than ten yards apart. Izel was beside herself because she should have seen this coming. Of course, they would cover the exits!
Janice’s deep, but still feminine voice carried calm amusement as it sounded the alarm: “SHE’S ESCAPING.”
“You can’t stop me!” Izel yelled back in defiance. Actually, she thought her voice projected an impressive amount of confidence considering she was dangling out a window with nowhere to really go.
“I’m! I’m not ready! To respond yet! If he wanted an answer in person, he could have came in person!” Izel yelled breathlessly as her two hearts pounded in her chest. It was times like these that made her wish the calming effect of her ethereal wings’ magic affected her as much as it did other creatures. Or that they were solid enough to actually provide the ability for flight. That also would have been nice.
It was nice that Obsidian Butterflies didn’t have to pan their eyes (they did not, and Izel did not, have eyeballs as such, just strongly light sensitive regions of her face) to see the edge of their vision in detail. For Izel, her entire field of view was in full detail all the time with her peripherals included. So, she got a clear view of the moment that Jax came sprinting around the corner of the apartment building only to trip on a rock and crack his chin on the ground.
Jax would recover quickly. He was a member of a Greater Race and had some unfair advantages from that. Jax also had this kind of thing happen to him all the time. He often joked that he wouldn’t make it to his thirtieth birthday… which was—uh, disturbing, to Izel because it seemed to her that this was less of a joke and more of a statement of fact. There was a reason she didn’t let him and Janice in her apartment anymore. Walls had a habit of trying to fall when Jax was nearby. Normally she'd express her concern for her friend…But, in this case, Izel was going to shamelessly take every advantage she could. Hopefully, Jax’s bad luck would slow Janice and him down.