Fantasy RPG Forum - Standing Trials

"I have absolutely no idea what you are saying to me right now," Faith said with a grin as he breathed in. He was, there was no doubt in her mind, adorable when he was passionate about things which he was learning about. "I mean, let me be clear, I don't need to understand." Thank all the Immortals for that, because he might as well have been speaking in Rakahi. He could, she knew, a little. Maybe he was just inserting words here and there. "I just need to know what we're doing here?"

This was her own fault, she realised. She'd made the mistake of walking into their bedroom. That was where she'd found him, surrounded by bits of parchment, some fruit and bits of wood and string. There were things going on here, she did not doubt, which his wonderful brain was desperately trying to communicate, but he refused to believe the simple truth. "The thing to keep in mind," Faith put the cup of tea she'd brought him down in a relatively safe spot, then sat on their bed and looked at him with earnest silver eyes, "is that I am a halfwit in comparison to you when it comes to this. However, I understand enough now to be able to help you." She motioned to the cup of tea, her expression softening as she did. "The first time in my life, my whole life, Padraig, that I ate or drank something made by a freeborn person was an arc ago totrial. You made me a cup of tea." She smiled at him, sure that he would remember. "And asked me what you should do, should a slave curtsy to you. We agreed that for you to curtsy back would be a bad plan."

She'd turned up at his door, carrying books and full of sass and desperate to learn. When he'd asked what she wanted to learn, she'd told him the truth. Everything. All of it and they'd discussed why she believed it was foolish to restrict the education of slaves. Turned out, he'd been right on that one, she considered. Although, "You were wrong you know," a strange thing to say, considering what she'd thought. But then, she'd changed her mind. "I didn't want to be free because I got an education. It was never about that. I stopped being content the moment I met you." Her grin turned wicked as she realised what she'd just said. "You know what I mean. A whole arc, Padraig. You have been making me happy for a whole arc." And somehow, they had gone from tutor and student, freeborn and slave topreparing for their wedding with their child growing inside her.

"So, you want to make things, props and teaching aids for your presentation to Professor Dashiell?" Faith asked, gesturing around at what seemed to her eyes to be the chaos he was working in. "You want to present what you found to the Professor? How do you want to do that?" Of course in asking that, she really meant the next five words, plain and simple. "How can I help you?" What ever he wanted, if she had the skills to help him, then she would.

What were they doing? Well, Padraig had told Faith, they were doing things that had never been done before. So far as he knew. But then it seemed illogical to think so. Surely he wasn't the first man to wonder how the universe around them was put together, how it worked, what part did Idalos play in it all. And what part did the Immortals play it it, for that matter? It would seem the height of arrogance if he was the first to wonder, think and look into it.

"Keep in mind," he said with a grin while gesturing to his notes and drawings, and in turn towards the variety of materials that he'd gathered. "Much of this is an educated guess, based on my observations and study. It's far from canonical fact." When she claimed half-wittedness for herself however, he grinned, shook his head and put the materials aside temporarily. "You are perfectly capable of understanding this. All of it. And you know it," he added dryly. "But astrophysics is no more your focus of interest than medicine is mine."

But together, he told her, all of their parts made a whole. And always had. He was incomplete before he'd met her, found her outside his door for the first time. He just hadn't known it then. Happy? She'd been, and was, the cause of his happiness. Before her, he'd aspired to a life of study, of learning, but on a personal level, not much else. How foolish he'd been. She'd opened his eyes.

"What I need," he said, turning back to his would be project. "Well, what I'd like to do is create not only a depiction on paper of my vision...regarding Idalos' postion to the suns, the stars, the larger...out there, based on my observations and calculations. But also a model. A three dimensional one. " Not by using fruit, however, he teased her. Given time, it would stink and rot after all. And draw insects.

"Made of wood and metal, with moveable parts." The engineering part of it he could do. He'd learned just enough to do it. But the carpentry part of the equation? Not so much.

"Oh, good. That's what we do best," Faith sat on the ground, cross-legged and she grinned at him. "Impossible things, I mean." Her silver eyes watched him as he wondered. Was he the only man to consider the nature of the universe? Faith was pretty sure that no, he was not. There was a fundamental difference, though, between him and others. Yet, he did not see it. More than that, he maintained that she was perfectly capable of understanding it. Faith stopped, putting down her cup of tea and then taking his hands in hers. "I can understand it, yes, I'm sure. If I chose to and put the time into it. But Padraig, you have to understand that I can not do what you do." His was a very particular kind of mind, she explained. Hers, a different one. "Medicine is practical. It's physically there in front of me. What you do is immeasurable, abstract." Shaking her head, she lifted his hand and kissed it. It wasn't about areas of interest, she said, it was about what they saw. "I see a person and I see a soul in a body. That body is a vehicle, like a carriage. I want to know how to keep that carriage in good repair, how to maintain it, fix it when it's broken. An incurable disease is a challenge, not an end. I just.. it's what I see. I think you look at the night sky and you see more than I do. You see vast potential and other worlds, suns and Immortals. I see stars." It was the best way she could describe it. Whilst she could understand what he did in principle, and him what she did, they couldn't see the world through each other's eyes.

His words, though, that he had been incomplete before he met her? Faith smiled and moved forward, putting her hand on his cheek. "You are mine. I am yours." There were long and complicated ways of saying it. Words which confused the truth because language could not express what they felt. Faith was more than shoddy at saying it, she knew this, but she also knew that he knew her truth. Having met an arc ago this trial, they had loved each other and had made each other happy since that trial. Every fight, every pain and hurt had been theirs; hers was his, his was hers. Joys and sorrows, defeats and victories. It defied definition, yet it was. That had to be enough, "For all that you can understand the heavens themselves, that I can look at incurable diseases and understand how to cure them. Neither one of us can explain this, right here." She smiled and kissed him with a brief and passionate embrace. "And so it should be."

He needed help, though, so she dragged her attention from his lips, his arms and the curve of his jaw and she looked at the chaos he had wrought on the bedroom floor. What he wanted was a model? Moving parts and three dimensions? Faith beamed at him and nodded. "We can do that! Look, I've been meaning to show you this. Hang on." She jumped up, moving over to the dresser and, from the drawer there, she pulled a piece of fabric. In the light, as she moved over and handed it to him, it shimmered and changed colour. "I wanted to see if I could do it myself. So, there it is. It's not really how it looks," she was quick to explain as she handed it to him. "It's just a trick, really. But I can make coverings for them that glow and shimmer and things. If you'd like. That might look amateurish, though." In fairness, that was the last thing the fabric looked, but Faith's gaze was earnest as she considered it.

"When Tristan owned me, he did that play. You were there." He didn't like talking about Tristan, she knew, but there was a point here. He'd seen the play, so he knew what she was talking about. "I made all the costumes." Why would he pay money for them, after all, when he had a slave who was a seamstress as she had been at the time. "I made the backdrop of the night sky. We could do that, if you wanted? Have it in a large box or something? With no front or just have a background. If that helps. And the pieces... well, what pieces do you need?" There was Idalos, she said, and there were the two suns. But would he want the three moons too? Would they need to be to some kind of scale? With a wry grin, she stopped asking a hundred questions, and instead waited for him to tell her exactly what he wanted.

Now he could get a word in edgeways, after all.

"You are impossible," he teased her and grinned. Except that in a sense, it was all very true. Impossible that she'd have turned up at his door, impossible that his views on relationships could have changed in an instant, impossible that they could have been together at all. And yet all those things had come to pass in spite of the odds to the contrary. "Always have been. I wouldn't have it any other way." Even a sworn scholar could be transformed.

He wouldn't exactly say that what he did and understood was immeasurable or abstract. Instead, he'd simply agree that what was out there and around them was so vast and difficult to reach that one might spend ten lifetimes at study and not learn but a fraction of what there was to know. "There's nothing wrong with seeing stars," he told her and smiled. "Science tends to like breaking it all down into parts, studying them, plotting them, labeling them, assigning numbers to celestial bodies. Just looking up and gazing with the naked eye though, that's the mystical and romantic aspect of it. Nothing wrong with romance."

But the model that he was hoping to create here and the charts to go with it? Nothing particularly romantic or mystical about that. The fabric though fascinated him, and he turned the sample over in his hands to watch as it caught the light. She truly was a wonder, and had apparently created this without the use of chemistry or alchemy. But amateurish? "Far from it," he said. "I'd like to include that in fact." As for the backdrop? "Front open, yes, but is it possible to create one that's more like a quarter sphere...or a half one depending on your perspective, that can better mimic a surrounding sky?" Dotted with stars, plotted ones that was, that would seem to surround the model from a viewer's perspective.

But all of it. Idalos, the two suns, three moons, and all to scale. That was what he wanted, to be mounted on a base and connected together in such a way that would allow things to be re-positioned and rotated, one around the other in a particular way. He had a drawing, he told her, that ought to help with shapes and sizes...relatively speaking, of course.

"I am? Good," she replied when he told her she was impossible. "I need to be in order to keep your attention. Anything less than impossible and you might grow bored of me." Faith's eyes told him the simple truth of her teasing at that point. She was all he saw, she knew that and there was not a single doubt in her mind about his feelings for her. Somehow, that had become the case; even when she doubted herself, she didn't doubt him, or them together. "It's good you wouldn't have it any other way, though," It was an entirely serious point she made when she said that. "I firmly believe there is no other way we could be." Fatalistic? Perhaps. Faith would have to conceded that, as far as he was concerned, she was totally sure that they were meant to be. It was a change in her viewpoint, there was no doubt, but it was as scientifically fact as the knowledge that the heart beats inside the body.

Science liked breaking things down and doing this and that? Faith grinned at him and gave him a gentle nudge with her elbow. "My Charter is from the institute of Science, you know. Cheeky, you are." But there was nothing wrong with romance? Faith couldn't hide her smile as he said that. How he had changed from when first they met; then he had been a most serious scholar. She was quite sure that, on that trial an arc ago from this one, he would have said that romance was a complete waste of time. Probably he would have thought that romantic endeavours or relationships of any kind would distract from serious thoughts.

In terms of what he wanted to make, though, he seemed to think that the fabric might be useful. "It's just a trick, it isn't real like you could do it, but I thought it might be useful." In terms of what he wanted, though, it wasn't a rectangular shape, but he wanted a sphere? Hollowed out and more in line with looking like the surrounding sky. "Yes, that's fine. We can do that. I'll put it on a stand, so that you can transport it more easily." But he wanted Idalos, the Suns and moons, all to scale? That was easily done, Faith said with a smile. "This backdrop," she wondered, looking at the diagram.

"I understand that the stars are different each night, and depending where you stand on Idalos," she said, with a frown of concentration. "That being the case, would you like the backdrop to be like one of those star charts? Accurate to that, I mean?" What they could do, if he wanted, she said, was to create a small scene on the base, of the garden in Scalvoris where he had taken the measurement. Perhaps, if he wanted it, that was, they could create a map on the base. "If you have a map or can get one from the.. Actually, we have one here although it is overlaid with incidence of measles in under sevens, but we don't need to put that detail in." The study of the spread of disease was the foundation of her work, Faith would say. There were maps and maps and more maps both at home and at work, detailing incidence of disease, demographic, geographic and all sorts of data. There were patterns, she was sure. Still, that was not for now. "We could carve the map on the base, make it clear where this observation came from."

Looking at the diagram, Faith frowned slightly and asked what might seem to be a rather obvious question. "Padraig, what have you actually found?" All these piles of data, all this information. What did it mean, Faith wondered.

Grow bored? "If I was to discover the link to immortality," Padraig told her, 'scolded' her with a mock stern expression. "I could never grow bored with you. You are both my anchor and the thing that sets me free. Both at once, impossible as it may seem." So yes, she was very much impossible. He might as well try and unlock every last mystery of the universe. There wasn't enough time in twenty, even a hundred lifetimes. He grinned then and suggested that perhaps he should have reserved that one for their wedding and what he might say to her then.

At the moment though, there was the serious matter of getting this project off of paper and put into something one could see, study and touch. If he didn't, his professor would wonder how he'd been spending his time in Saun. As for the backdrop, he frowned as he considered it. The model, comprised of Idalos, moons, suns, ought be interactive, and each piece should be connected in such a way to another that turning one would turn all, just as they should go based on his observations and calculations. But the backdrop was just that. "It's for aesthetic purposes," he said. "Something that simply captures a moment in time." Therefore one of his charts would work perfectly.

But before they could put a model together, they'd need to create the pieces. So when she asked him what he'd found, Padraig grinned and opened up the top of a familiar box of fruits. Different sizes, different shapes, but she'd get the idea as he arranged them on the bed in a particular pattern. "Well first of all, I've come to the conclusion that my suspicions are correct. The world is round...spherical, and so are the suns, moons and so on. However, where the world is comprised of solid things and water, the moons as well, my suspicions are that the suns themselves are comprised mostly of gasses...Probably. And they move something like this," he said, moving pieces around each other by cross referencing with hand-drawn charts and a long list of calculations and notes in the margins.

But as he moved the largest sun on a long, irregular orbit around Idalos, after which it ought to travel leagues away from it all at the tail end of Saun, Padraig stopped, his hand hovering over the large orange and frowned. Utterly perplexed. Looking back at the notes, those calculations that had been recorded not just by himself, but by Faith, Katie, Cyrus and even Luna, he shook his head. He moved the orange back on its orbital path, forward and then back again, as if it was bouncing off of an unseen wall. But so subtly that the wobble could hardly be seen. Instead of continuing along a steady path, off into space, it was...stalled. "This can't be right," he muttered. Based on what he'd observed over a full season, and the predictability of the seasons, arc after arc, one ought to be able to predict what might happen beyond a single season of study.

"I don't understand," he muttered, more to himself than to Faith. But to her as well. "I took some of these measurements but I didn't catch this," he said, showing her the most recent calculations. "Everyone initialed their own measurements, but I checked the math. I checked the math, but I didn't catch this. Look here. Look how the numbers repeat themselves," he told her. "They should be progressing, always. even by tenths or hundredths of a fraction, but not advancing and retreating like that. The second sun," Padraig told her with a frown. "All this time its been advancing and should be headed out away from us, not to return for another arc. But it's not. It's here," he said, first pointing at the chart and then tapping a spot on Idalos where he'd stopped moving the orange.

All this time, could he have been wrong? He hadn't, after all, really considered what hand the Immortals might have in the way the universe worked. He'd approached it all with a sense of thinking that there might have been a point of creation, that time when things had first come to be. But based on what he'd observed, it had seemed to him that once creation had occurred, things would then progress in a predictable way. So, "Question is," he guessed, "Is this the norm? The way things have gone for eons? Or is it something new?"

While he'd considered it all, he'd rechecked his math and had asked her to do the same. The calculations were correct, and the fact that the notations had been made by no less than five individuals, it seemed more likely that those observations were reliable. If it was otherwise, then he could only explain it by guessing that between the five of them, they'd gotten careless with their observations and notes. It wasn't out of the realm of possibility.
Nothing was, really, when it came to things like this.

She was his anchor and yet the thing which set him free? Faith's attention was nowhere other than him as he spoke, her attention held by how suddenly they had gone from teasing each other to him saying that he could live a hundred lifetimes and would love her still. It had to be said, it caught her off guard and she was speechless for a moment, although her pleasure at his words was evident in her expression. "If you say that sort of thing when we get married," her voice was low and her emotions showed in the tremble in it, but she smiled at him. "I will, at best, descend into a sobbing wreck" It was a very good job, she told him most seriously with tears in her eyes, that she was not at all emotional since getting pregnant. "Some women do, you know," she informed him with an earnest and honest expression.

She frowned, then, some concern furrowing her brow, "Have you written what you're going to say? I don't entirely know that I have the words, you know. If I say something shoddy, or give you a pistachio nut instead of say anything, is that alright?" But when thoughts turned to the practical, as always, Faith was much more able to express what she felt. "I don't think a star chart is good enough. I'll make a star chart out of fabric, with multi-hued and sparkling stars in accurate places." It was just the backdrop, she understood that but still ~ every part of it should be the best they could make it.

He explained what he had found and Faith frowned slightly. "But if the sun is gas, why doesn't it dissipate and dilute in the air? Just... float away? And how does it burn?" But she wasn't sure that he actually even heard her as he looked at the orange and then the recorded measurements. Faith had seen that look of concentration on his face more than once and she watched as he muttered that it wasn't right, then looked at it again, and again. The numbers, each one initially and Faith nodded. "I'm sure the numbers are correct, we had checks in place, after all." When she said we, it was more or less that she'd come up with a system whereby they checked on each other.

As he checked the maths, and asked her to do the same, Faith was quiet. There was no need for her to say anything as he worked, but he remained perplexed it seemed. What he asked her to check, she did, but Padraig was much better at mathematics than her and Faith came to the same conclusion as him. "If the numbers are recorded correctly, the maths is accurate." The numbers should be moving forward, but they weren't and Faith raised an eyebrow and looked at him. "What does that mean?" For his work, for his studies. "Have we made a mistake?" If they hadn't, if it was accurate (and it should be, she was quick to repeat) then what did this mean?

Whatever it was, Faith considered, he had to present it. "You work on that, double check the numbers against the backups." She'd insisted on a backup system, so the numbers were recorded in two places, thereby lessening further the possibility of there being an error. "I'll get started on the props, you work on your notes." What was Professor Dashiell going to say to him, Faith wondered but did not say. Would his eccentric Professor be someone who was willing to accept that something strange was happening or would she assume that he'd made a mistake in the recording of the data? She didn't know for sure, but she knew that her worrying at it wasn't going to help anything, so she'd get started on making the spheres, the physical props which would make up this.

"Can you alchemically make this glow?" Faith asked, as she worked on her carving of the sun. "I mean, like a candle or something? So that it looks like the flickering sun?"

He hadn't written what he planned to say on the trial of their wedding, Padraig told her. On the one hand, he'd wanted to be able to prevent seeming foolish, should he say something utterly stupid. But when he took the time to think about what he might say, he realized that there just weren't enough, or enough right words to express it. "Well you are the reason I don't shrink away in horror, these trials, at the very sight of a pistachio nut," he teased her. Of course he still thought they were strange looking, and he still didn't care for the taste of one on its own. But Faith was able to work magic in the kitchen the way that was hard to imagine in practice. She could turn anything at all into a glorious feast.

As for the star chart? He'd defer to her wisdom on how it might look. His only reservation was wanting to avoid his professor saying that there was more form than substance in the project. Too many theatrics, not enough of what she believed counted. And the sun? He frowned, trying to find a way to explain. "I'm assuming it's made mostly of gas," he told her, though his theory was based mostly on observation and theory. "You have to understand that it's size, to us, is a matter partly of optical illusion. It seems close, but isn't, based on my calculations. It's enormous...Dozens, even hundreds of our own worlds might fit inside it. A ball of gas that large would take many more than our own lifetimes to burn itself up. And then there's gravity."

But they hadn't made a mistake, he assured her. But it was very possible that he had. The math wasn't wrong, after all. "It's difficult to explain," he told her while pulling another chart. The model of Idalos, suns and moons were there, surrounded by a field of stars that had been divided up in a grid. "You see, all this time, my observations have seemed to confirm just what I'd suspected. Until now. There's our usual sun, in the center, with Idalos and our moons revolving around it. That seems now to be likely the case, still. But the second sun, here," he said, pointing at the other object and the long orbital path he'd drawn through it.

"I've believed, and so far my observations have backed up the belief, that the second sun travels a very long and wide path, and while we orbit around the usual sun, this one passed us, around us in Saun, then disappears into the universe again. Not to return for another arc." He frowned again and looked at the most recent results, and shook his head. "But this doesn't make any sense. You see, the second sun has traveled through each of these quadrants on the graph, but here...it's stalled. Why? And for that matter, if it's stalled, then why has nightfall returned? Why are we not still seeing it? It's not so far away that the curvature of Idalos should conceal it behind the horizon."

He could probably, Padraig told her, make the suns in the model glow for aesthetic purposes. And he'd have a project to turn in when they were done. But his final conclusions might turn out to be anything but conclusive. "The problem is, that I can't resolve the question to anything scientific, or even logical, based on my observations so far." What that meant was, as much as he hated to admit it, he might have been wrong all along. About shapes, orbits, revolutions, all of it. Or, he might have been right, but only up to the point where the second sun stalled on it's orbital path. He hadn't, after all, taken the influence of Immortals into account.

Or? He'd been right, and even his predictions about what should happen next were also accurate. Except that this trial, unlike others, something had happened to cause things to change. What that might be, he could't begin to guess. Whichever the case, being proven wrong was also a part of science and progress, so with Faith's help he'd create the model based on his calculations, all of them, and include this newly arisen mystery as part of his written observations.