Happy Sunday everyone!
Day 8
He finished sorting through the stories of the Couran. They were still conflicting, but Ames felt he knew all that was available to him regarding the mark he saw on Folson’s wrist. He glanced at his notes but didn’t reread them as though he was searching for a central thesis for the idea in his mind. Instead he leaned back in the chair and let the information swirl.
Oddly Garana’s letter came to mind. She warned him that something was coming and that he should use all of the protections available to him. A part of him hesitated. He spent so long dismissing her dreams and gut feelings that to heed them now felt like a betrayal. As though he laughed to her face while secretly thinking her right.
It felt wrong.
‘It might be a way to get her back,’ a part of him whispered. Ames blinked and sat up. He wasn’t entirely sure where the thought came from. He was moving on with his life as she was with hers. He missed her and still felt raw and battered when he thought of their break up.
‘It would be a way to show her you are willing to change, not just out of desperation when you thought you would lose her.’
He recognized that this was a deep part of himself, but it wasn’t one he focused on. Until know he thought he was just dealing with the break up. He didn’t think about getting her back. He hadn’t thought it was even a possibility.
‘Still not a possibility,’ he told himself. ‘But I suppose it couldn’t hurt.’
Ames leaned forward. He closed the files and ejected the thumb drove. He returned it to the box and rooted around until he came up with another drive, a plain black on this time with no exterior markings. His hands closed around it and he lifted it up to his computer.
Ames inserted the drive and pulled up the file directory. This was less of oral history and more of an index of symbols. They were arranged by the type of symbols. He clicked on the file marked protective. Here there were indexes with the names of the symbols and the descriptions of the type of protection the symbol offered. There was a number attached to each item in the index that corresponded with a picture of the symbol. Ames scrolled down the list and finally reached an image that had no separate descriptor. This image did not have a number, it just had Ames written in the label. He clicked on it and a design popped up on the screen.
In grad school many of his classmates were getting tattoos. For those studying the early empire the slightly altered battalion symbols were quite popular. Ames thought about getting one of his own but wasn’t quite certain what to get. In the end, he designed his own. It incorporated all of the protective charms he found into one decorative element.
He thought of it as the ultimate protective charm. ‘The protection I never thought I’d need.’
Ultimately Ames decided not to get the tattoo. Mostly because it wasn’t one of the Battalion reminiscent ones and he was worried about what the others would thing. He was very aware that in his class he was the only one who showed any native physical traits and suspected a tattoo of pre-empire designs might set him up for more mockery and ridicule. There were many in his class who came from the more elite families and already didn’t think he belonged there.
He wasn’t wealthy. His family wasn’t powerful. Those were two strikes against him before they even met him. He tried to stay off their radar and suspected the tattoo would make him a target. Ames stared at the drawing. He still liked the design. He had never shown it to anyone but it was very much him.
‘And very protective.’
Ames frowned. Garana never came into his home office and didn’t know about the flash drives let alone the design of the tattoo. He thought of her dreams and other events that came of them.
Ames sighed. “What could it hurt,” he said. He printed out the design and before he could change his mind, Ames too the design and folded the page into a pocket. He closed down the computer and put his flash drive away. With everything turned off, Ames grabbed his wallet and keys and left the apartment.
‘I could always just grab dinner,’ he told himself as he walked.
Ames turned his steps away from campus. While he knew there were many fine tattoo artists around campus and they were often open all hours of the night. If he was going to do this then he wanted to do it where it wouldn’t be a part of his work environment. There may no longer be the snobby scions of wealthy families waiting to mock him but Bacol’s amusement would be worse.
Ames walked towards the old town. Part of the original settlement it was where the Empire left the native population while they made their encampment on the higher ground. That there was a fallen temple on the high ground just meant they had an extra reason to clear away the rubble.
‘And building material for some of the first buildings in the military encampment,’ Ames thought. Today with highrise buildings spearing up into the sky the high ground of the hill no longer looked impressive, but the encampment built there would have been able to have a clear view for miles as well as the ability to look down on the native village.
Most of the original village was gone, although a few of the original buildings remained, usually as back rooms in other, larger and more modern buildings. The Pre-empire settlements were all built of straight lines while the empire preferred round buildings and the difference still showed in the streets. Areas the Empire always controlled had streets that curved around things and buildings that still favored the circular over angles. By contrast the Old Town section of town was crisply straight and harshly angled.
While many simply accepted it for what it was, Ames always felt a distinct separation between the two parts of the city when he shifted from one to the other. Ames found himself wandering through the Old Town often when he needed to think or stretch his legs. His apartment building was still in the University district, but it was close enough for an easy walk.
It was something Bacol remarked upon when he had too much to drink at one of the fundraisers last year. Nasty comments about why Ames found living in the Old district so comfortable. He managed to not only use some terms Ames hadn’t heard since he was a child but some slurs that Ames were fairly certain hadn’t been in open use since his grandfather was a child.
Ames pointed out he lived in the University district and many of the faculty thought that Bacol was allowing both his racism and professional disappointment to show with too much drink. The statements lost Bacol several supporters among the faculty so Ames considered the event to work in his favor even if he disliked having to be polite during the slights.
Later, even Bacol seemed to realize he went too far. While he never apologized for the statements he was much more careful of his wording when they spoke. Ames often wondered if someone might have had a word with him. Ames set thoughts of Bacol aside and continued into the district. The fact was, he did feel comfortable there. While he did not grow up in the old town and the ruler straight lines weren’t as familiar to him as the curved buildings he grew up with, the scents were the scents of home.
Both his parents worked long hours and his grandmother managed the house, including doing the cooking. While she made some of the foods that were favored by the general population, she also leaned heavily into the spiced dishes that came from the non-earther side of her bloodline. His father delighted in teasing his mother in law and riling her up, but she enjoyed taunting him with food. Making one particularly bland earther based dish and then adding several well spiced local items on the table around it. His father ate both with equal enjoyment but they still argued about it, their eyes sparkling with amusement as they argued.
His mother sat back and watched knowing they both liked to argue and that there was nothing she could do to stop it. “They enjoy it, Ames,” she told him with a shrug when he asked why she didn’t stop it. “I only step in when one of them goes too far and actually becomes insulting, otherwise, I enjoy the show and the food.”
Ames smiled. Here in the old town district the scents from the food cards reminded him of his grandmother’s cooking. He knew he would be stopping at one of them on his way back. This was not qa day when he was willing to forgo the pleasure to seem more like others.
There were several places he visited routinely in the Old Town, one was the main library. While other branches were in more use, the main library had an extensive collection of documents in the archives he often found useful for his work. On each trip to the library he passed a small tattoo parlor. It was this shop that was his destination.
