Dreamstorm, Chapter 2, Part 1 (Patreon)

You only get up to Chapter 2, then you'll have to wait for the rest! >.>

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Vasiht’h couldn’t describe how weird it was to walk through campus in the middle of spring, watching the bustle of students, and not be part of it. He didn’t feel old enough or different enough to be looking down on them from some rarified height of experience, so it felt unnatural not to be joining the stream of people on their way to classes. But then… he’d spent almost ten years here, between his undergraduate and graduate years. Maybe that was normal?

Consulting Jahir would probably not be useful. For either of them. You didn’t ask the alien friend with ten times your lifespan if it was strange to feel out-of-place in a place you shouldn’t.

And yet: “I feel it also.”

Vasiht’h glanced up at the Eldritch. The weather was cool enough that his friend was wearing a high collar and a light scarf, but the sunlight invested Jahir’s face with a warm glow that worked well with his honey-yellow eyes. He looked happy, which in an Eldritch meant a slight curve of the mouth and a faint upward bow of his lower eyelids. It was only under that, in the mindline, that Vasiht’h sensed the faint bittersweet taste of nostalgia, like hibiscus tea. Not bad, just… yes. Whatever that was.

“I should have known you would,” Vasiht’h said, smiling. “So where first? We’re early. No one’s expecting us for an hour. Gelato?”

Jahir did smile then, more obviously, and a twinkling merriment scattered the mindline with glitter. “Tea and Cinnamon. There will be time enough for gelato.”

That’s where they had lunch then, and it was a good choice: Tea and Cinnamon was a café in the epicenter of campus, next to the student center, and from their table by the window they had a fine vantage. It was the middle of up-week a month after midterms, and there were a gratifying number of people going about the business of learning.

“Strange that it looks less cosmopolitan now that we’ve been living on Veta so long,” Vasiht’h observed. “Back when I first moved here, it felt really urban.”

“It is urban,” Jahir answered over his cup of coffee. “There are more people in this one university than in some cities on this planet, much less on other, less populous ones. But we have been residing in a port city, which is another level again more urban than this.”

“I love it,” Vasiht’h said. “Not that all these Seersa aren’t great, but… I like the variety we see every day.” He listened to bits of conversation as they passed. “Also it’s a little odd that they’re all so young.”

Jahir, who’d been holding his mug near his lips, hid a laugh at his wrist.

“No, really!”

Kindly, his Eldritch friend didn’t observe that Vasiht’h was only five years past his own college career. “It is a university.”

“I know,” Vasiht’h said. He laughed. “Can you imagine if we’d stayed here? We’d have a practice like Minette’s.”

“I would not want Minette’s practice,” Jahir murmured.

“Me neither. Not that it doesn’t have its moments, I’m sure, but…”

“You like the diversity,” Jahir said.

“Don’t we both?”
 His Eldritch partner looked out the window for a long moment, his eyes focused here, there, watching the people go by. What was it like, Vasiht’h wondered? To go from the homogeneity of the cloistered Eldritch homeworld to the Alliance Core? Even Seersana, homeworld to the Seersa and so leaning toward a higher number of them in any crowd, had aliens to surfeit even the most jaded palates. Phoenix with their shining feathers; centauroid Ciracaana gliding past, their jaws hovering two or three heads over their classmates’; every Pelted race of the Alliance in all their varied coats… 

“Yes,” Jahir said. “This is sacred.”

Why that made Vasiht’h blush, he couldn’t have explained. He didn’t try, just resumed work on the hazelnut pastry. There were scones in Tea and Cinnamon’s baked goods case, and they were probably good, but he’d known better than to order one after five years of Veta’s.

“I remember,” Jahir said, surprising him, “when I first went to the student clinic, Healer KindlesFlame thanked me for incrementing the clinic’s total alien count by its penultimate statistic. They had only failed to see one alien race, once they’d added Eldritch to their tally.”

Vasiht’h canted his head, thinking. “Naysha? No, there’s a water tank here. Platies, maybe? Or…Faulfenza?”

“Chatcaava,” Jahir said.

“Oh!” Vasiht’h grimaced. “Yes. Probably an empty day in the Goddess’s mind before one of those pops up here. Unless some full-blown peace treaty pops up, and that doesn’t seem likely to me.”

“What a thing it would be, though.”

Vasiht’h tried to imagine being better friends with the draconic shapeshifters on their border. Nothing he’d ever heard of them suggested they’d be peaceful neighbors, much less anything more positive. “Or maybe we’ll find more alien species? Faulfenza were the last that I know of, and that was a while ago…”

“The universe is infinite, and its glories beyond our experience.”

“Amen,” Vasiht’h murmured. And smiled. “Our little universe is enough for me.”