Polynya

He approaches Zaena, and as he does, she starts to shake her shoulders loose. “It’s freeing up!”

So like thirty seconds?

She drops and quickly moves over to him. “Wow! Your new marble is very, very interesting. Just think of what you will be able to do!”

“Do you think … ?” Ryuk places the marble in his mouth and feels gravity tug at his stomach.

“Amazing!”

New skill learned!

Skill: Levitate

Level One: By placing a marble in your mouth, you can levitate for thirty seconds. Higher levels allow for longer levitation.

Requirements: Level 15 Mage, LUCK > 12.

Ryuk now floats about a meter off the ground. He looks down at Zaena with a huge grin on his face.

“Do something!” she calls up to him.

“What do you mean?” he asks, the marble still in his mouth. He notices that it has started to dissolve. It fizzles on the back of his tongue and is completely flavorless.

“Um, fly or something!”

“I’m not flying, I’m floating!”

“Then float.” She moves her hand in a swimming gesture. “Like this.”

“It’s not like that, it’s like … ” He thinks of the best way to describe it. “It’s like I’m on solid ground.” He takes a step forward to demonstrate. “An invisible plane.”

“Can you go higher?”

Ryuk falls back to the ground. “No idea,” he says as he pops another marble in his mouth. He resumes his floating position and places his hands before him. As he does, he feels what seems to be an invisible ledge. He scrambles up onto it, and now he’s about two meters up. “Apparently, I can!”

“Let me try!”

Once he’s back on the ground, he hands Zaena a gravity marble. She places it in her mouth, holds it there and ... nothing happens.

“Well, it was worth a try.” She spits the marble into her hand, and rather than give it back to Ryuk, she uses her ghost limb to pop open the pouch on his belt.

“That’s the wrong one.” He says as a tingling sensation comes over him.

“Well, which is the right one?”

“This one,” he says, pointing at the new pouch on the left. He awkwardly waits for Zaena to finish putting the marble in. Once she’s done, they turn back to the water.

“It really is a pretty lake,” he says. Secretly, he’d like to test out a few more gravity marbles, but now that Zaena’s around, he feels a bit self-conscious about it.

Why? he asks himself in his head. Humans have the weirdest emotions. He’s pretty sure she wouldn’t mind watching him lift things into the air and play with gravity for the next hour, but to be polite, he lets her take control of the conversation.

As if on cue, Zaena sighs, her eyes transfixed by the water. “This reminds me of a small pond near my home in Athos, back in Ultima Thule,” she finally says, her mood suddenly the polar opposite of what it was just moments ago.

“Oh?”

“My tutor, Clemon, would instruct me along the shoreline during the warm months. We’d start with Thulean texts, then mathematics, then combat, then lunch, and we’d usually dedicate the afternoons to studying your world.”

“He taught you all that?” Ryuk tries to remember if he’s ever had a professor who taught such a wide variety of subjects. He comes up flat.

“He was an RPC who held several doctorate degrees and studied at all the great universities across the three floating continents. He’d won awards, given lectures, had been asked to run for various offices but always declined, and in retirement, he taught me. My siblings too.”

“In combat?” Ryuk imagines an old man teaching Zaena how to swing her blades.

“Can the elderly kill just as easily as the young?” she asks.

“It sounds like it.”

Zaena’s face hardens. “But that was then, and this is now.”

“Okay?” Ryuk looks up at her, not sure of what she means by her statement.

“But he did teach me a lot about your world. Still, there are many things I don’t understand. It is odd to think we were created by your kind, yet your kind comes here to escape there. I’d love to see it, though, your world.” The smile returns to her face. “I can only imagine what it’d be like driving in an aeros, shopping, visiting other countries, using crazy technology that most of you seem to barely understand … ”

“It is definitely something else.”

Silence grows between them for the next few minutes, and Ryuk, rather than try to awkwardly force a conversation, allows the moment to happen.

“Shall we wake the others? I would keep your levitation act from the goblin for the time being. It may be useful in scaring him later on.” She grins wickedly. “I can think of a pretty funny prank we could play with a white bed sheet.”

“Yeah, that’d be good.” Ryuk laughs as one of the herders across the way mounts his griffin. The griffin flaps its wings and soon the herder is airborne.

“Let’s wake them; I’d like to be in Porthos by this afternoon if we can manage it.”