01.075 Touchstone

Friday, March 18, 2022

Fighting gym, Long Island City, Queens, New York, United States

Hear you around from Jade. Train?

Ella smiled at the text from Craig. He was single-minded about his fighting career. And it had been a long time since she had just sparred for fun. She made a quick decision and grabbed her gear. One day away, and she couldn’t bring herself to take a break. She sort of loved it.

When she got to the gym, she saw Craig holding pads and someone she didn’t recognize hitting them. He was clearly a beginner but was sweating it out pretty well. He had a bit of a belly and red beard and looked familiar but she couldn’t place him.

Ella grabbed a rope and started warming up. She had always wanted to be like boxers in the movies with rope tricks, but all she could manage were a couple of double passes. She contented herself with a rhythm along with the loud gym music.¹

After she wrapped her hands and began moving around one of the target dummies, lightly hitting it with her ungloved hands. Zaidu was working on getting them used to completely unwrapped fighting which involved a lot of open handed strikes and a very different targets.

Craig came over to watch as she kept working the training dummy, harder and harder. “I didn’t teach you that. It’s an illegal sweep in Muay Thai. And that shot before the sweep, was that an eye gouge?”

Ella regarded the training dummy she had been using and nodded.

“What have you been doing with your time?”

Ella shrugged and climbed through the ropes. She bit down on her mouthguard and waved for him to come at her.

Afterwards, Craig rubbed his ribs. “What have you been eating? I’d swear those shots came from someone at least fifty points heavier, if not my weight. Your kicks are brutal.”

Craig regarded her — Ella had done well. Too well for how long she had been training. She wasn’t quite at parity with him yet. But he had to work for each blow, and her strikes had been focused and brutal. If anything, he had seen her almost take illegal shots out of habit several times that had made her hesitate at critical moments. How had she developed those reflexes?

Ella said, “Been practicing shifting my weight better. Glad it is working.”

Craig nodded but he looked troubled. “Ella… are you juicing?” He looked serious.

“What, me? No.” Ella laughed uncomfortably.

“You were leaning out two months ago, but now? You seem to be a bit too strong. You aren’t a lot bigger, but I look at you, and more importantly feel your strikes,” he grabbed her shoulder, “and what I see is solid muscle.”

Ella looked at where Craig was holding her. She knew she was getting stronger than she should be. It had been obvious for a while. She could train every day and rarely feel sore. She was pretty sure she could have trained twice a day and been fine.

Plus she had noticed that even small cuts and bruises from training under Zaidu had been healing too fast. She had intuited it earlier, but after weeks of extreme training, it had been made loud and clear. The rest of the squad would rotate out, getting time off from contact fighting, but Zaidu had fed her into the grinder every day. She had been fine while others had been nursing injuries.

“Just good genetics I think. Definitely no juicing.”

Craig looked at her and let go of her shoulder. “If you want to, that is your choice, but be careful - lots of junk out there. I can put you in touch with a guy?”

“Not for me. I’d definitely grow a mustache or something.”

Craig still didn’t look like he believed her but he dropped it.

Ella hopped up the subway stairs. She was excited to see her parents and even her brother. She glowed her eyes to check for magic out of an abundance of caution, and she caught just a whiff just ahead.

She took a circuitous approach, checking for anyone tailing her. They had a few lectures in counter-surveillance, but hadn’t had a chance to practice much yet. When she got close to her home, she hung behind a corner and saw the glow of magic across the street from her parent’s town home. Ella carefully pulled her sidearm and checked the chamber. Then she got a look at a figure in the window, one with the telltale glow of a scorpion bottom half.

She called Bahu. No preamble, “Why are there Aqramuabelu outside my parents’ home?”

Her voice was terse and warning.

“Guards. You are exposed and they are a lever.”

Ella felt ashamed. She had been too self centered and forgotten that her parents and brother were at risk?

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“To see if you’d ask.”

Testing. Always testing. Arcsa had once said that the Aqrabuamelu had become complacent after they had left Kur. And they had almost lost everything.

“You are right. I should have. What about Jade and Charlie?”

“Charlotte has her own guards in her building courtesy of her father. We tested them and they are competent. Jade had a guard, but now she lives with Charlie. Our resources are limited for now.” Meaning until Ella fulfilled their prophecy.

It would have to be good enough for now Ella thought.

She went in. Harish was there with his newest girlfriend. The revolving door of his love life was too hard for anyone to keep track of,. But even by his standards, the new girl was air-headed and ditzy. Pretty in the way he liked: meaning blonde and busty. He made some quick introductions and then they disappeared up to his room. Loud music started to float down the stairs.²

Ella went up to her room to wait for her parents to come home. She needed to think about her path forward.

She took a sheet of paper and drew a line down the middle. On one side she wrote “Ella” and on the other “Ekerri”.

Next to Ekerri, she put Kothin’s name. And then Donna’s. A large circle for the drow in aggregate.

On her side she put Charlie and Jade first. And then honesty made her erase and put Jade just a bit over to neutral - Jade was struggling for acceptance. Her squad was next. They squad had bonded a lot in the past two months, but it had only been two months. The Aqrabuamelu and the Huldufolk. And then a lot more over to neutral was Xu.

She looked at this line of alliances and thought about it. Xu she moved downwards and put him marginally on her side, he was really on his own side. She was missing something.

And then it came to her. Across the top, she put a large blob, ‘Humanity,’ and put the center a bit on her side. She knew that humans would take both sides so that oval crossed the line. For now she would treat humanity as one force. One more force, the “People” and put them in the middle of her and Ekerri.

So the three pivots were in the middle: Humans, the People, and Xu.

She flipped over the sheet.

Xu’s levers were obvious: wealth, power, and arrogance

She circled power, that was the bargain they had struck. He would lend her his power and support for the power to be out in the open.

For which she needed another force, maybe humans. Human levers were the same. But what did she have to offer that couldn’t be taken from her? She didn’t have the power to deal safely with a government or the UN. Even if she counted the scorpions as wholly hers, their numbers weren’t enough to take on humanity. They had twelve divisions worldwide, and their population kept declining.

And they weren’t hers, not yet.

Thinking through it, her next actions became obvious.

1. Acquire power to have leverage
2. “Cure” the Aqrabuamelu