Doomed To Dream - Part 5

“Son, are you alright?”

All Sollux could do was look down at his plate, pushing around his food with his fork. A part of him wanted to eat, was highly tempted by the overwhelming scent of honey treenut cluckbeast, but another was just consumed by all the planning he needed to do. How was he supposed to get to the capital and find the blue blooded, mutant eyed female that could save Cyclos? What was the point of a meal until he figured that key point out?

“Sollux, are you even listening to me?”

How much time would he even need to be there anyway? What if this shadow didn't really frequent the restaurant as Sapphiric had concluded? What if she was and it took weeks to find her? How was he supposed to approach her, get the message to her, get her to help him? Could he? What if Sapphiric had really just lost a part of her pan and...

“Sollux you will answer me or I will ground you off of that damn husktop of yours for anything other than work.”

That snapped his head up from the food on his plate, staring right across the small table in the food preparation block to look at his guardian. To say that Cyclos looked unhappy would have been the utmost kind of understatement. Had Cyclos been hatched with psionics like Sollux had, the air around his horns would have been crackling wildly with his own psionic power colors. As it was he was fuming, his brilliant gold eyes flashing with fury.

“Sorry, I had my pan wrapped around a problem that came up at work...”

“Why don't you share it with me? Obviously you aren't managing to figure it out on your own,” Cyclos said, gesturing with his fork at Sollux's plate. “Isn't honey treenut cluckbeast your favorite?”

“Always,” Sollux agreed, still pushing his food around.

“Except you've never been the kind of troll who could put aside a problem for a meal. My boy, where did I raise you wrong?”

“No where,” Sollux sighed, pushing the plate away from himself.

“Which is hard to believe, with your behavior this morning. Did I not teach you to share your problems? Sometimes a fresh set of eyes is necessary to solve a problem.”

“This isn't the kind I can share,” Sollux sighed, shaking his head.

“Work then?” Cyclos just shook his head at that. “If there was ever something that I didn't know how to handle, it was the kind of work you're involved in. Computational devices were never a specialty of mine.”

“Hardly surprising,” he couldn't help but laugh, “I've had to fix your husktop enough to be sure of that. Still, it's a work thing, so I really can't talk about it. Privacy protocols and all that.”

There Cyclos nodded in understanding. If there was one thing Sollux was sure of, it was that his guardian knew about privacy. More than once he'd seen the rather large stack of privacy contracts that Cyclos and his crews had to work with, the secrets he had to agree to in the production of his movies. It meant that claiming non-disclosure was more than enough to get his guardian off of his back. It was even a damn good ploy for his moirail, what with her respect for the law as a legisticator.

“Well, then maybe I can at least distract you long enough to let another part of your pan process the problem for you. Come, eat your dinner. I had some good news during my meeting tonight...”

“With the prospective producers?” Sollux asked, finally loading his fork with some of the meal. It would be wrong to let this go to waste after Cyclos worked so hard to prepare it, especially since it was his favorite meal. Way better than living off of cheese sticks, starch-based oil-fried slices flavored with vinegar and salt, and the occasional order of dough-with-sauce-and-grub pie.

“Indeed. It seems that I've been given the go on filming.”

“Wonderful,” Sollux said, forcing as much fake sincerity as possible into his voice. Cyclos filming meant traveling meant him being out of the range where Sollux could protect him. A perigee of casting, more of practice and sets and props and costumes, then perigees of filming. “It's been almost half a sweep since you've been behind the lens.”

“Fourteen perigees, five weeks and three days, to give a nice estimate,” Cyclos laughed. “But, of course, it means my traveling again. I know you don't like it when I'm gone...”

“You always offer to take me with you, but we both know I'm bound to my systems for work.”

“Yes, but I always do offer. So I'm going to once more. Come with me and take some time off of your work. Let me show you the world outside of this small town I've settled into. There are so many things to see. Entire hives dedicated to the finest arts troll hands can create. Giant repositories of knowledge. Restaurants, shopping, anything and everything you could wish. I could even arrange that we dine with the Empress and Heiress. They have been inviting me to visit for sweeps, the Heiress is a fan of my...”

“Empress?” Sollux found himself asking, refilled fork halfway to his mouth. He'd been trying to eat, but that word had set off countless alarms in his head. The Empress and Heiress lived in the capital. The shadow frequented the capital. Cyclos was going to the capital...

“Yes. Gyliea has extended me a personal invitation to join her for a meal.”

“The Empress lives in the captial,” Sollux found himself observing rather stupidly.

“Yes,” Cyclos laughed, “that would be a rather true statement.”

“I'm going with you,” Sollux announced, putting his fork down. “Maybe not for long, but I want to see the capital. Take me with you.”

“Done.”

* * * * * *

In the end Sollum managed to get his meal down, his appetite restored as he discussed the pending trip to the capital. Now though, back in his hive, Sollux wasn't quite sure what to do with himself. The most obvious thing was his slab, the crimson and azure slab dressings inviting to his eyes. And repulsive to his pan. He didn't have to close his eyes to know just what he'd find in the world of his dreams. Cyclos's voice calling him, pleading, drawing Sollux to spend his unwaking hours sitting at the base of his not-stone form, trying to block out his voice and at the same time trying to pinpoint whether it was getting louder or not. There'd be no rest, no relaxation, no planning like he should have had any other sleep cycle. All he could do was suffer.

No, there would be no rest this morning, not until he was too exhausted to think while he was caught up in his dreams. Something else had to be done. Which left one thing.

The flashing lights of his system called to him. After all, there was plenty of things that needed done if he was to pull this off. For one thing he had to find an excuse to get away from work for a while. Waleti wasn't going to accept the idea of him running off for a few weeks for the sake of sight seeing with his guardian. Especially not when he wouldn't be able to take the work with him. Sure, he'd outfitted his husktop to do some serious stuff, but it could never achieve the kind of things he could do with his apiculture mainframes. No, he'd have to come up with something that Waleti could support. Of course she'd see through it, see to the core of the matter, but that didn't matter if he at least had something superficial.

Luckily the capital was a big place, it shouldn't be too hard to find something around the right time to give him an excuse to be out there. With a sigh he moved to boot up his system, reaching for his thermal hull so he could at least enjoy a sweet drink to calm his rampaging mind.

Not that the drink got far. By the time he was through with it he had gotten the computer up and running, booked tickets to a apiculture convention complete with the reveals on the new breeding schema for a  more efficient line of worker drones. He wasn't likely to use it, though. His bees had never let him down before, so forcing them into a new behavior pattern was wrong. They weren't treating him wrong and he wasn't going to treat them wrong either.

Unfortunately it hadn't taken too long to achieve that. It hadn't taken even an hour to get it all done, which meant that he had far too much time left to try to avoid sleeping. There weren't many ways left to fill the night, so he turned to one of the more fruitless things he could try. There were few things like turning his pan to a nearly unsolvable problem to keep it up all day.

Writing code was a hobby that Sollux never got over indulging in. He'd started simple when he was young, making text based adventure games for himself and some of the other young trolls at his schoolfeed institution. After that he'd moved on to more complex programs used to scour the net for relevant information for projects and reports. Later he'd turned his hand to cryptology, both creating and breaking high end encryptions just for the sake of it. After a sunny season spent taking classes at an Enforcer academy in one of the inland training hives—and meeting Terezi who had come out for a special class on melding the role of Detectors to Legisticators—he turned his attention to creating response programs that allowed Terezi to test her interoxamination methods. Not that any of that stood up to some of the things he did for the Enforcers. Sure, they were fun, but that wasn't enough.

And it didn't compare to what Sollux set to putting together now. For this he needed all of his bees, and so he set them to waking slowly with a gentle prod from his psionics. Once they had worked themselves up a buzz he started into the code he'd need. Accounting for a range of factors to let him search the web as effectively as possible for the few traits he'd been given. Setting up programs to search horn shapes to try and pick out the right styles in any kind of image. Scrounging to find some way to get any kind of hints about the eye clue...

Hours spent pushing the bees to their limits, working the code every way that he could manage to get the smallest bits of information that might bring him closer to this shadow. Hours and all he had for it was almost a gigamite of materials to search through. So much, and no guarantee that this was going to work out. Grabbing a set of new cans of drink from his thermal hull he started through the data, knowing that no matter how good his programs were, a pan was going to be the tool he needed to break this down.

The bits and pieces started to blend into one another too quickly to believe, and none of them were important. A cerulean here with a horn that could possibly be one of the ones Saph had mentioned just barely visible in the corner of someone's trollbook profile picture. A report on potential origins of odd eye mutations and how they affect the lives of those who exhibit them. An indigo who had recently sold their mining rights to move into fisheries instead. The picture of a young troll from behind who was one of three wards involved in a custody dispute that had resulted in two of the wards being given adult rights and the third being placed under the care of their matesprit's guardian.

It was as he started into this article, the thousandth out of so many he'd been through already, that his body finally gave in despite his pan's protests. He woke, almost seamlessly, into the familiar and pained landscape of his dreams. Well, maybe woke wasn't the right word. Never had been. With a sigh he stretched, reveling in the pleasure his pan told him the motion should give him, even if it didn't really do so. The stretching was how he started his sleep-cycles, just as he did when his body awoke. Almost felt like he was freeing his pan from the burdens of the flesh, leaving it free to ponder only the problems he set before it. And the problem he set before it  now was...

Why was it so quiet? Sollux all but leapt to his feet as the silence around him registered in his pan. There was never silence here. The closest thing he got to it were those rare times when the voices of the dead were not so insistent, when their deaths weren't so immanent. And even then he was always able to hear the voice of Cyclos. It was something his pan latched onto the moment he awoke. It was how he'd known there was a change. It was the reason he was doing all that he was. How could he not hear it now when he had 'awoken' in the shadow his his guardian's...

When he turned to look into the face of the troll whose form he had become conscious under he was shocked at what he found. Not the familiar, welcoming, now pained face of his guardian. No, the image he met instead was that of a female troll, about his own age. Her hair was long and flowing back from her face as if caught in some phantom puff of wind. Her eyes met his, defiant, strong, cold even. Well, her eye actually. Only one of them was visible. The other was covered, half by some of her hair, the other half by a piece of cloth held in place with a string. Something in him said that behind that cloth he'd find what Saph had hinted at: an eye with seven pupils. The more he looked at her, the more certain he was of the fact. After all, didn't the troll bear two mismatched horns, one which was forked and the other more like a barb. This, then, was the shadow he was looking for, right?

For all that he couldn't be sure of it, Sollux still spent a while there, looking into the face of the troll, committing it to memory. This one he'd have to remember completely on his own, no chance to go to a drawtist for help. That would just get this troll into Waleti's attention, and Sollux wasn't fully sure he wanted to do that yet. The only thing he could rely on now was his memory. Even going to Terezi wouldn't work, she didn't spend as much time on her art and she asked questions he wasn't prepared to answer. At last, when Sollux was certain he would remember that face no matter where he found it, he turned away from the troll he had no name for, and turned his attention on the more unnerving situation of his dream state: the silence.

The silence still filled the air, surrounding him in a bubble that almost made him feel off balance. As if one of his senses had been torn away from him, and since it was one of so few he had here, it was more painful for its loss. Yet as he strode away from the form of the mysterious troll, he couldn't help but notice that the voices grew louder. When he moved back toward her the silence returned. There was no explaining it, but there it was: something about this troll calmed the others around her. And Sollux didn't doubt it was this troll that was doing it. When he glanced around at the other assembled trolls, their eyes all seemed to be on her. It was a kind of thing he'd never seen before in the whole of his dreamscape, and what it meant was something he couldn't begin to fathom.

“Who are you?” Sollux couldn't help but ask.