The Budding Metalinguist

VI

Lillian was testing out the Idea of Motion. She watched as her backpack- something she knew to have a strong barrier on it- hovered in the air before her. It was almost indescribably easy. She could look away, do something else, and still the backpack hung motionlessly near the ceiling. Lillian tried to pull it down several times with her full body weight, but it refused to budge.

She had to admit that Professor Kern had been telling the truth about something, at least. She could tell that whatever he had taught her was not thaumaturgy at all. She knew from experience in her thaumaturgy lab that it was very difficult for people to maintain telekinesis when other people were trying to move objects around. And besides, telekinesis took a great deal of energy, and Lillian was barely tired at all. She stared at the backpack expressionlessly and moved it around in a circle.

Just then, she heard the door creak open.

Instantly, Lillian let go of the Idea and let the backpack fall back into her hands. She turned halfway around to see Leslie framed in the doorway of the dorm room. Leslie watched Lillian with narrowed eyes and a dubious expression. Lillian highly doubted that she had seen anything. It was probably just her natural reaction to finding Lillian inside the bathroom with a backpack.

"I was trying to do thaumaturgy again," she lied. "Tossing it up and seeing if I can get it to hang there." She demonstrated by flinging the backpack up to the ceiling with altogether too much force.

Leslie took a long time to respond. "I can't trace anything," she said. "I don't think it worked."

Lillian shook her head with an expression that she hoped looked slightly exasperated. She deposited the backpack on her chair and pulled her new notebook out of her back pocket.

"What are you using it for?" Leslie asked casually.

Lillian opened the notebook to a blank page in the middle and showed it to Leslie, holding it by the front cover so her roommate couldn't tell that there were more pages in front of it. "Nothing yet," she said casually. She dug in her backpack for another notebook and took them both up to her bed and started taking notes from her meeting with Kern and her recent experiments. It was odd, she thought, how quickly she had been able to pick up metalanguage. All Kern had needed to do was show her the Idea, and she had picked it up almost immediately. She wrote this observation in the notebook.

☙❧

Dakota stared in concentration at the old, battered computer in the bottom cupboard of his file cabinet. He flipped the switch, watching as the dark blue dot bloomed in the center of the screen and spread to the edges like ink soaking paper, concentrating hard on the Idea.

The screen refused to resolve. It remained the same shade of deep, vivid blue. Dakota smoothed his hair away from his forehead in resignation. He flipped the switch off and slumped in contemplation.

"You're not going to find anything," Ashley said from behind him.

He was hardly surprised. He knew that when he wanted to apologize to Ashley, she didn't wait for him to come to her. She came to him.

"You know it doesn't have that kind of a range. You can't see anything in the Alin Gap, and you can't see anything there."

"I should go there," Dakota replied. His tone was miserable and submissive, as he knew the response he would receive from Ashley.

"Nonsense," she dismissed and thwacked him lightly on the back of the head. He exclaimed and clasped his hands over his beanie. She stepped over next to the file cabinet and leaned down to look into Dakota's eyes. "They have a registry of metalinguists."