49- Just the two of us...and eventually a Brahmin

  8/2/5/4353 M.A.C - Muchiri- Ashrama - Late Afternoon

  Emi looked around in wonder as she strolled down the wide street alongside Arctic, craning her neck in directions that made onlookers rub at the back of theirs in sympathy.

  The architecture of the buildings surrounding her wasn't impressive in and of itself, two-story structures made of wood and large bricks of adobe, but many of those bricks were adorned with carvings or paintings of many different styles and colors. One of the bricks caught Emi's attention, and she walked up to it to have a closer look.

  "Hey, Arctic. Check this out!"

  Arctic looked at the brick Emi had singled out and gave a small smile tinged with homesickness. The scene portrayed on the brick depicted a small group of furry white creatures leaving a forest, their hands outstretched and filled with nature's bounty. Some details were a bit off, leading the pair to believe that the artist was working off their imagination rather than a scene they'd witnessed, but the whole had managed to convey the artist's fondness for their subject.

  "Looks like you guys have fans."

  Emi tussled the fur at the top of Arctic's head as she joked teasingly. Arctic stepped away and glanced around before looking back at her with an evil grin on his face.

  "Yup. At least more than you. I can't see an owl on any of these."

  Emi went rigid and put a hand above her heart.

  "Shots fired! I got got!"

  Arctic was visibly struggling to maintain a straight face at his big sister's dramatic antics, but Emi decided victory was close at hand and pushed on. She tilted her head ninety degrees to the side, rolled up her eyes, letting her tongue flop out of her beak limply.

  *Clap**Clap**Clap*

  As Emi's overblown acting finally made it past his defenses, Arctic started chuckling for a moment until he heard someone clapping behind him. A passerby had stopped and was grinning at the pair.

  "Sorry, mister. It is our first time in town, and my sister got a bit excited."

  The passerby looked at the brick behind the pair and then focused his attention on Arctic.

  "Don't worry, little guardian of the forest. Muchiri is under the purview of the Ashram of Inspiration, so all kinds of creative expression are encouraged as long as it doesn't get in the way of others. Then again, if you are good enough, you might get away with blocking a street for a while. I've got to keep going, but welcome to Muchiri."

  Emi and Arctic waved at the man as he walked away and around a corner.

  "Well, that explains all the painted bricks, I guess. The layout of the buildings is also really impressive."

  Arctic looked up at Emi with a puzzled look on his face.

  "You might not have noticed because you didn't see the town from the sky, but this town is nearly a perfect circle. The street we are on is straight like the spoke of a wheel, but the side streets curve around it. It looked pretty damn symmetrical from the sky, but I didn't expect it to be this exact from up close."

  "Why do you care about the shape. Don't places come in all shapes and sizes?"

  Maybe it is because accurate maps are commonplace on Earth, or because I played a bit of that geo-guessing game online, but even grid-like cities like New York rarely have anything close to perfect symmetry. It must take a lot of work and planning to pull something like this off, wouldn't just happen by itself.

  Emi quietly explained her thought process to Arctic as they kept making their way toward the Muchiri Ashram, but she wasn't sure if Arctic truly understood the effort it would take to build this way. Furthermore, Emi wasn't sure why someone would bother with such an endeavor for a border town with no more than a few dozen thousand inhabitants.

  If this was a smaller town, I could see it as a stunt or proof of concept, and it might make sense as a special feature for a famous capital, but why in a place like this?

  Her questions would have to remain unanswered for now as a building that Emi suspected of being the ashram came into view and made her put a pin in them.

  Ok, I get why they laughed when I asked for directions now.

  A long and straight ornamental outer wall of what appeared to be carved marble stretched over a hundred feet in either direction. An open arch twice as tall as the wall provided a point of ingress into the walled area. Unlike the town wall and the buildings she had seen so far, this wall seemed impossibly carved out of a single piece of stone without a seam in sight. The wall also appeared to be deceptively thick as multiple deep alcoves dotted the wall between the intricate sculptures along its surface.

  Before making her way through the arch, Emi decided to peek at a statue that had caught her eye in a nearby alcove.

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  You!? If I only had a marker, I'd write "meat" on your forehead.

  Arctic bent down to read the plaque at the foot of the statue and started laughing.

  "So this is the Ascended who made you an owl by mistake? Are they a boy or a girl? I can't tell."

  "Sundar, the one and only...I think he is a guy, but who knows?"

  Arctic squared up with Sundar's statue and gave a bow in its direction.

  "Thank you Mister Sundar! I know it wasn't on purpose, but thank you for sending Emi my way!"

  Awh...shucks. Little guy is gonna make me cry.

  "From the little he told me, I think he may still be asleep. Also, you get the credit for finding me, not him. If you hadn't found me, I would have probably headed East on my own and gotten myself killed. If anyone deserves thanks here, it is you."

  Emi tried to pat Arctic on the head, but he stepped aside and looked away bashfully.

  Ah...The beginning of the end. They grow up so fast!

  "Come on Big Sis, let's get moving; less than an hour before the sun sets."

  ***

  "How is good old Ishan fairing? Still bored out of his mind?"

  Brahmin Viraj was holding onto the recommendation while sitting behind his desk. Emi had asked the first official-looking person for directions and had been led into the largest and gaudiest building at the center of the walled area. After less than a minute's wait at the entrance, a smiling young man had come to lead them into a cozy office down a side corridor.

  "Pretty much. Seems like our arrival was a welcome distraction."

  "I'd feel bad for him, but he did try to pull an Icarus."

  Icarus? Like the Greek myth?

  "An Icarus?"

  Arctic, who had never heard the name, asked for clarification.

  "Icarus is a boy who is at the center of a moralistic rhapsodia from the Breakaway Isles. The clever boy comes up with an invention out of necessity but grows too confident in his plan and pays the price for it."

  "He could have used a pair of wings like mine."

  Arctic looked at Emi questioningly.

  "Oh, have you perhaps heard it performed? Indeed, had he your wings, the ending would have been quite different, but that isn't really the focus of the tale."

  If Ben was here, he'd be saying that the real moral of the story is that you should do thorough research before field testing a new invention, and then only incrementally step-up the scale of such tests. Then, he'd push his glasses back up.

  "Icarus made a pair of wings using wax to bind bird feathers together in order to escape captivity. He made his escape successfully but got drunk on the feeling of flight and kept rising until he was above the clouds. The sun then melted his wings, and he plummeted to his death."

  Pretty much the same story I remember from back on Earth...Must have been some ancient Greek Blesseds long ago. So far I've got Japanese, English, Roman, Chinese, and Indian. One story is not enough to confirm it, but I may be adding Greek to the list. Could always be a Roman or an English who brought it back. It coming from an Indian, Chinese, or Japanese Blessed would be kind of a stretch.

  Brihonian and Latin both being a thing, Emi had concluded that at some point in the past, a significant amount of Blesseds had been people from Japan, Britain, and the Roman Empire. She also heavily suspected that some of her predecessors had been Chinese because who else would set up sects of cultivators in the mountains?

  "What do you mean by Ishan 'pulling an Icarus'?"

  "About forty years ago, back when Ishan and I were young teenagers, we were both apprenticed here at the ashram. We both flourished in our own ways, but Ishan particularly excelled at record-keeping and detail-oriented work while I was just a generally successful apprentice. Then, he got noticed by the Head Enumerator on one of his visits and became one of his disciples. If he'd just been happy with his new situation and done his best, he'd be in a much better situation now."

  Emi and Arctic were both on the edges of their seats as they listened to the gossip.

  All we're missing is some tea or some popcorn. Also, teenagers forty years ago!? Why do these fifty year old dudes look like hunks in their early twenties?!

  "He decided that he had to prove himself, having been scouted for his talent, and consistently challenged his elder disciple. Ishan would try and one-up her every chance he got, to the point where he got consumed by the competition and got sloppy. Although he managed to set himself ahead of her on an even basis, he mistakenly thought he was doing as well as her. In truth, the times he would defeat her would be by a slim margin, and the shortcuts he took to achieve those victories proved inversely more detrimental when the risks did not pay off. Eventually, the Head Enumerator got annoyed at the bickering and Ishan's inconsistent work, so he transferred him to Ajani Village to cool off and teach him patience."

  Emi laughed as she remembered Ishan expertly manipulating their plans to lead them away from the Muchiri Tabularium.

  Your buddy sold you out. Your efforts at trying to hide your dark past from us have gone up in smoke.

  "Alright! Well, I'll help you out if you encounter any major issues while you are visiting Muchiri. Keep in mind that both of you are still children, legally speaking, so if you cause trouble, your tribe leader will be on the hook as your guarantor. Do you require my help with anything now, or did you just drop by to give me the letter and introduce yourselves?"

  Emi thought her answer over for a few seconds before responding.

  "Do you know of an affordable but lively inn? We have some funds for travel expenses, but somewhere to sleep that is not too expensive and where I might get some drunks to tip me for my singing would be perfect."

  "Oh! Are you an Aiodos? That would explain how you know of the Icarus Rahpsodia."

  "A what? No, I'm more of a musician, a singer. You know, singing to music."

  Viraj looked taken aback by her response.

  "Well, yes, you accompany melodious words with music to tell stories, right? That is an Aiodos's job."

  It was Emi's turn to be somewhat taken aback. His explanation wasn't exactly wrong, but it felt as if it described something different from what Emi did.

  "Well yeah, sometimes the songs tell stories, but not always. I work from the music first, and the lyrics are mostly there to dress up the music to make it more pleasing to the ear and illicit emotion in the listener."

  "Strange approach...So the words don't tell a story? Wouldn't that get boring after a while, I could see that working for the first five or ten minutes of a song, but after twenty minutes?"

  Emi frowned, not that the others could see it, thanks to the feathers that covered her face.

  Twenty minutes? Something is off here.

  "Most of my songs last between three and five minutes, very few make it to ten."

  "Wouldn't that make for a very short performance? Sounds more like long children's rhymes than songs."

  "Well, I'd sing quite a few different songs, try to hit different emotions, and get people to sing along with the chorus. There is sometimes a narrative, but not always."

  "Oh, you have a chorus? So you do perform Rhapsodes!"

  Even Emi's Abilities did not help clear up the misunderstanding. Emi wasn't quite aware, but a lot of words had made their way from Greek into English, but not all of those had kept their original meaning. Chorus was one such word, and the overlap turned out to be a blind spot for her Ability.

  "Look, I think it would be easier if you just accompanied us to the right type of inn, then you can stay for a few songs and see for yourself. Don't forget to bring a tip."