[crow]

Akala thought about proposing that they stop there for today, but Faber was doing his best to look earnest, so he decided to just press on and see how it went. “Hmm... Do you visualize anything, maybe? It could be like a mental exercise, like meditation or something.” Faber furrowed his brows, and vanished. Akala looked around only to find him walking out of the bathroom, grinning triumphantly.

“Yeah, I think I do, actually. I was thinking about your bathroom just then,” he said. “You're pretty good at this.”

Akala laughed, but he still went to check inside his bathroom to make sure nothing was broken. Luckily for him, everything looked intact.

[crow]

But that meant... what, Faber had materialized on top of the toilet? There wasn't exactly much room in there. He looked at Faber's feet, but those were dry. Well, he'd been sitting when he made the jump, so maybe he kept the pose and--- okay, he was thinking too hard about this. It was time to move on.

“So you think about your destination. Sometimes? All the time?” Akala asked.

Faber said, “I guess I must... It's sort of automatic since I've been doing it for so long, and it's different if there's time. I also don't always know where I'm going.”

That made Akala think of what Faber had told him about their encounter. “You didn't know where you were going when you found me, did you?”

“There was a direction that time. Sometimes there's a... really vague idea, like grass, or 'somewhere far away'. But it's true that I can't think of nothing and jump.”

[crow]

So far, so good, sort of. It was a mental thing for Faber, which held some promise. At least it finally sounded like a process, with real steps and key elements, instead of just a thing that happened. Even walking, which required as little thought as it did, still had its mechanics, but he'd been afraid that this magic mumbo-jumbo was going to get all mystical on him.

Maybe he ought to give it a try. He didn't know what would happen, or even if his ability would work that way, but it was worth a shot, right? He thought of his bedroom. It was easy to picture it, since he'd lived here a while and spent a lot of time cooped up there. He even ventured to imagine himself sitting on the bed, and tried his best to will himself there.

What he got was... not exactly what he imagined.

[crow]

He felt something coil in his gut, strange but not unpleasant at first. But then something seemed to go awry, and he was aware of something pressing in on his skull, or perhaps inside it. Before he could think anything of it, however, he heard a loud scraping noise, like something heavy being dragged over wooden flooring. The noise startled him out of whatever he'd been doing, and Akala opened his eyes in alarm. A glance at Faber revealed that the boy had little more idea than Akala himself as to what had happened.

Evidently, Akala himself hadn't moved. Whatever his power was, teleportation didn't seem to be it. Of more pressing concern was the noise. It seemed to have come from the general direction of his bedroom, and Akala ran through the door to see what had been done.

[crow]

It became clear immediately where the noise had come from. Akala found his bed moved half-way across the room, almost beside the door. He did some quick deductions and was forced to be glad then that the noise had snapped him out of what he'd been doing. If he'd continued, he might have ended up with one demolished wall. He didn't know whether that was possible, but shifting the bed with his own physical strength was certainly beyond him. Not for the first time, the idea of using the fragment and its abilities frightened him.

“Oh, hey,” Faber said, peering in from around the doorframe. “Was that you? Wow.” He sounded genuinely impressed, which Akala supposed was something.

[crow]

And, okay, nobody had gotten hurt. He wasn't sure how he was going to move his bed back to its proper place though. It couldn't stay here, and he definitely didn't want to use his power again, knowing so little about how it worked.

Could two people lift the bed? Akala looked at Faber and decided it was a lost cause. “I guess I'm sleeping right by the door tonight,” he said, not pleased in the least but resigned to his fate. Worse things have happened to him, and in time he might have command enough of that ability to put the bed back where it belonged. He'd moved it once; he'd be able to move it again, right?

[crow]

“I don't suppose you've ever seen something like this before?” Akala asked. It was a long shot, but Faber was the magic mumbo-jumbo expert of the two of them. If either of them had any background knowledge, it wasn't going to be Akala. Sadly, the boy shook his head. It looked as if Akala was as much on his own as ever with this one.

It did make sense that his ability would differ from Faber's, and being able to move things without touch might be helpful later down the line... But he would need a lot of practice before he'd be willing to rely on that sort of thing. He had to admit though, it was better than the time bit, in that at least he could think of a use for this one, if he did learn to control it. So there was another project for him to tackle in the meantime, in addition to his journals. Speaking of which...

[crow]

“I've got to get going. I have a lot of reading to get through. I'm starting to wish there had been fewer devoted archivists in my family,” Akala said. “If you can find out more about that other person you detected...” Actually, what would they do in such a case? Interview them about their experiences? Considering Akala's current search for more leads, that was less absurd a suggestion than it sounded. He didn't know what to tell Faber though. The boy wasn't under his command or anything, and he'd already shown an inclination for wandering off to do his own thing.

The boy gave a non-committal shrug, which was as good as it was probably going to get. Pushing him wasn't going to get them anywhere, so he took his jacket and left, though not without casting back one last glance.

[crow]

It took the better part of three weeks before Akala found anything resembling a promising lead, but something of use finally revealed itself in the diaries of a woman some six generations back. One of the few females that had taken the family name--- the Akala line had been unusually blessed in sons as firstborns--- she had had more passion for books than for expeditions. The currently-living Akala had made notes of some locational indicators that he had discovered, but she had been much more thorough. There were notes, some so hastily scribbled as to be unintelligible, going on for pages and pages. At first it seemed like the stuff of scatterbrains, but a closer reading of some later pages was enough to give him pause. The earlier pages, which had contained references to other books dating back a ways even at their time of writing, was of little use to him. The notes began to become more cohesive as they went on, however.

[crow]

His predecessor was still unfortunately scatterbrained, and it took several readings of some passages before he could come up with a meaning that made sense to him. What he did find was... still rather baffling, to be honest. At first, it seemed that she was trying to pin down the locations mentioned in Akala the First's records. Further on, however, notes taken from what seemed to be books of myth began to dominate. Akala scratched at the beginnings of his beard as he read these over. In the area under investigation, there had been myths dating back almost three millennia about a race of... fae-creatures of some sort. This was what she suspected the identity of their Bright One to be.

[crow]

Akala wanted to dismiss this at once. The greater consensus amongst them as the generations became further removed from the ancestor that had started the pattern was that the Bright One had simply been a healer of great repute. It necessitated the assumption that Akala the First had been out of his right mind, but that wasn't hard to believe either. Medical science was barely beginning at the time, and new treatments for then-incurable illnesses were bound to have unforeseen side effects. Perhaps it was some form of mercury poisoning, one ancestor had reasoned. Akala had been of that belief for most of his life. But the appearance of Faber, and the subsequent discovery of just what it was that his own shard could do... How was he expected to be skeptical of all magic after that?

[crow]

There was a part of his mind still attempting to resist, even now. Just because he had accepted the existence of these powers didn't mean that these fae were real. And yet, the shard was clearly tied to the Bright One, and goodness knows there was no magic in Akala's own bones. There had never been magic in any of them, and none of his kin had ever made any such claim. If the power did not stem from the Bright One, then to whom could they attribute it to?

He flipped through the notes hastily, skimming now, and not getting much for his troubles. He wasn't looking for the words though. He could read those later, at his leisure. Right now, he wanted to make sure of something else.

[crow]

Near the end of the book, a page that he had missed the first time, there was a map. That was what he had been looking for. The author of this particular journal hadn't forgotten her original project, like many of the other ancestors that Akala had been reading about. She had gone back and triangulated the location as best she could from the evidence that she had gathered. It was a long ways from here, in a place that was now mostly abandoned, and very likely reclaimed now by the Whisper Forest. Akala didn't fancy a trip there, especially after the events of his last foray into the unknown, but he had questions and he wanted answers. Where the female Akala's health had failed her in the eve of her life, he would take up her work... And maybe he would drag Faber with him if he could, for good measure.

[crow]

Akala packed up all the journals he could find belonging to that particular member of his family, plus a few of the one that had succeeded her just for good measure. His bag was heavy with books as he left the record room. Tasha raised an eyebrow as she saw him, and Akala gave a shrug. “I finally found something, I think.”

“Is it finding something if it's been there the whole time?” Tasha asked.

“Okay, becoming enlightened to its worth, then. Apparently my family wasn't composed entirely of crazies and skeptics... maybe.” Tasha snorted.

“Yeah, well, if you make it into the news this time, I'll frame it and put it on my wall.” They grinned at each other and Akala walked out the door, waving a hand in farewell.

[crow]

He collapsed on the couch as soon as he got home. It was sheer force of habit, and he only realized that Faber wasn't there after he'd had a moment to think about it. He looked around the house, but the boy was nowhere to be seen. It was kind of disappointing. Akala had hoped to talk to him about what he had discovered, and get an idea of whether it was feasible to convince him to come along. Still, it wasn't as if this was an unusual thing, and given a couple of days, Akala was sure that the boy would show up again. It wasn't unlike living with a half-tamed cat, to be honest. He left even left food out sometimes, when he got concerned about how Faber must be doing.