Maxwell did always have the important skill of keeping Alex from being an idiot. Of course, the raw idea needed some refining - He had to give Elza a reason to spend a lot of time with him outside of classes, but that presented itself quickly. While Elza had leapfrogged Alex, in his disorientation, in several subjects, he still had vastly superior knowledge when it came to history, especially that of the True Church. And they had a test coming up on just that subject. So, Alex proposed that every night, after dinner, they spend time crunching out some study time together. This was rejected, but Alex counter-proposed spending their time between lunch and afternoon classes in the library, studying together, and against his expectation, she accepted this proposal.
"So," she said, over a pile of books and video discs that Alex had picked out, "What do you actually want me to do, and how does any of this help?"
Alex had prepared for just this question, and rose off his seat, picked up by his feet on the ground, his hands on the arms of his chair, and just a little bit of intuitive magic loosed unintentionally. "We're going to make our way through this, and I'm going to quiz you on it all, and-"
"Why should I, again?" she asked. She was already shifting in her chair as if she was about to stand up, but Alex had expected that, and continued on as if she hadn't just cut in on his sentence.
"And you're going to be in the top three of our class when our history test comes around."
Elza looked him over. "You're asking me to do all this extra work, and you're not even promising me top billing?"
Alex bristled at this. "I can't work miracles, Elza."
She raised an eyebrow, and without breaking eye contact, grabbed one of the heavier hardcovers Alex had set aside, and threw it at his head. Alex pulled his focus away, to it, and stopped it a few centimeters from his face, before slowly letting it sink back onto the desk.
"Fair enough," he said, knowing what she was getting at. "Literal miracles, sure, but metaphorical ones, you'll have to give me more than a week."
Elza smiled. "You play along well enough. I can't promise I'll do well, though."
"That's okay," Alex said.
"And I can't promise I'll respect you. You've got to earn that moment-to-moment, and if you stop, I will just mess with you," she added.
"Is this part of that messing with me?" Alex asked, genuinely. Since she'd started establishing the rules, the game wasn't yet on as far as he was concerned, and so, such questions were fair game.
"Uh," Elza said, pulling away slightly. "No?" She furrowed her brow. "I mean... I think I'm being honest with you on that one?"
Alex considered this a minor victory. She usually had him on the back foot, and even if he had to be weird and pedantic to get a leg up on her, he'd take it just to end this relentless feeling of being out of his depth. Alex had two possible states - being the best, or being in contention for being the best. Elza was trying to push him into a third state that he couldn't even define, but he didn't like it one bit.
"Good," he said. Maybe by challenging her, he could hold her attention. "What do you think I'm going to do?"
Elza shrugged. "Something dweeby, I assume."
While he wouldn't use those words, that was somewhat right. "You're not going to remember much of this the way they teach it in class."
"Says who?" Elza asked, indignantly.
Alex could have specified that both Rosaline and Francesca indicated as such, but he had the sense that saying so would have just gotten Elza to stand up and walk away. Instead, he opted for slightly deferred flattery. "Your scores would be better if the normal way suited you."
Elza eyed him over, looking for any hint of sarcasm, and found none. "Yeah," she said tentatively. "So, what's the dweeby way of doing this?"
Alex cracked his knuckles. While he was supposed to be focusing on strategic execution, few things tapped directly into his instincts like someone asking, directly, what he thought was right. He gestured at the pile of media on the study desk between them. "All of these take place during the fall of the Roman Republic. Half of the questions are going to be about the life of Jesus and the early history of the Church, and the correct answers for that can only be found in the Scriptures. You know that, I know that, and if you don't study for that, that's not my fault."
Elza cocked an eyebrow. "But as my Pair, it's your responsibility, isn't it?"
"Yes," Alex said, "But I've got limited time and limited resources, and I'll get more of a return on investment if we work on things that we haven't heard about a dozen times before in church and classes and theater and music and literature and-"
"Okay, okay, I get the idea," Elza said, waving him off. That happened an annoying percentage of the time that he tried to clarify things, though he wasn't surprised in the slightest that Elza continued the trend. "What do we actually do?"
Alex swallowed. This was always the hard part. It had only worked with Max and Chess so far, but he'd be damned if he didn't try. "We watch these Twilight-Era movies, and afterwards, we talk about what was in accordance with the textbooks and what wasn't, and why."
Elza just stared at him, as if waiting for the other shoe to drop.
It didn't.
"That's it?" she said.
"I understand if you don't want to waste the time on it, but I promise this works-" he said, trying to keep a pleading tone out of his voice -
"Why the Hell not?" Elza said.
Alex fought an urge to shush her swearing, and just barely succeeded. Instead, he grabbed a brace of movies and splayed them out before her. "Which do you want to start with?"
Owing to the fact that there were only so many hours of free time in the day, and Alex had only managed to secure access to a select few of them, it took them two days to finish their first selection. And when they did, they only had a few dozen minutes before their next class, though that seemed not to matter.
"What the Hell was that?" Elza exclaimed, as the credits rolled on the blacked out glass monitor in a dark corner of the library.
Alex crossed his arms proudly. "A masterpiece, that's what."
"What? No," Elza said. "How can anyone expect two and a half hours of my free time and not have the common decency to even tell me if the main character lives or dies?"
"Does it matter?" Alex asked.
"That is the dumbest opinion I've ever heard." When Alex just sat there, smiling, secure in his enjoyment of the movie, she saw she had to clarify her meaning. "Of course it matters! The last few hours were dedicated to making me care, and now it slams a door shut in my face for caring! Ugh."
"Well," Alex said, "do you want to know what happened to Plebius, then?"
Elza's eyes lit up for a fraction of a second, before she scowled at him. "I thought you said this was historical fiction. You didn't lie to me about that, did you?"
"No no no," Alex said, waving his hand. "But I think it was inferred." Elza made a noise of protest that could have, if he'd given it time, developed into a word, but instead, he interrupted her. "What happened in the last scene?"
Elza looked at him skeptically, but played it out in her head. "Marcus Antonius, during the Lupercalia festival, buck-naked, ran up to Julius Caesar, and presented him with a crown - it was both clearly a joke, just a costume crown in a silly bit of theater, and clearly deadly serious - with each time Caesar turned down the crown, it looked more and more real. And with the last rejection of the crown, he looked at the camera and winked, and then, credits. Which plays with our knowledge that Caesar did pretty much take over, and that the Republic was replaced with a line of emperors after his assassination. But that doesn't say crud about Plebius - it just ended."
"Yeah," Alex said, "But what was Plebius's goal throughout the movie, and what was the last we saw of him?"
"I was paying attention, you know," Elza protested.
"Yes," Alex said, "but just humor me, it's how I work."
She looked him over for any signs of teasing or malice, and apparently, he passed. "He was chasing anti-democratic conspiracies the whole time, trying to stop a revival of Sulla's dictatorship, through the Catilinarian conspiracy through to Caesar's schemes, though because of his focus on Sulla and Catilina, and later Pompey, he didn't see what Caesar was doing until it was too late to stop. And the last time we saw him... well, he was looking on at the Lupercalia festival, right?"
"Yes!" Alex said. "So when Caesar winked at the camera, Plebius saw that. He was consistently the perspective of the film - we never really left him except for establishing shots and dramatic camera moves, everything was tied back to him and his experiences somehow or other. That wink told us, and Plebius, that he had lost."
"So, what then?" Elza asked. "He's a republican facing down dictatorship and civil wars. Does that just mean he dies?"
Alex shook his head. "We've seen that Plebius knows when to cut and run - he wouldn't have made it to the end of the movie alive if he didn't. I think he sees Caesar wink, and he runs off to Hispania to live out the rest of his life."
Elza fumed. "Spain? Are you calling him a coward?"
"No," Alex said, "I mean, you've got to keep in mind that most people in human history weren't made like us. He has a family lineage he probably cares about, he's in his forties, which to him means he's got a few decades left, and he doesn't know that the eternal souls of mankind rest on his shoulders or anything like that. He doesn't even know God exists, let alone all the details. A glorious, morally righteous death would be pretty meaningless to him."
Elza went silent, and somehow, that silence took up space. Alex, on pure instinct, waited for her to say something, and a good twenty or thirty seconds later, she did. "Fair."
That was enough for Alex to keep going. "And as for Spain: early on in the movie, he mentions that he's got some family and connections in Hispania. I think if he had to abandon his cause and make the most of things - as implied by that last scene - he'd go there."
She continued to frown at him, before eventually nodding. "Okay. You're stupid, but you're smart." Just as appreciation started to show on her face, she jolted upright in her chair. "Wait, what the Hell is the point of any of this?"
"Did you hear any of what you've been saying?" Alex asked. "Would you have remembered any of the political details of the late Roman Republic if you hadn't watched the movie? Stories can make us care more than if we just tried to force ourselves to care."
He expected further protestations from her, but instead, she just said "Huh," stood up, and pushed in her chair. "Thanks, I guess. Same time tomorrow, then?"
The study plan worked better than Alex expected, at least at getting Elza to learn history, and getting her to spend a lot of time with him. Alex and Max had tried the same general technique on Gabe, trying to get him to care about the same historical dramas and collections of trivial knowledge that they enjoyed, but it turned out that while Gabe would study history for a class, and enjoyed fiction here and there, mixing the two was like oil and water to him.
Of course, there was the question of what exactly Alex expected to accomplish, besides making their grades better - considering that they were graded as a Pair now, that was a worthy goal on its own. According to Rosaline, Elza was still sneaking away from dinner, and according to his own ears, Elza was still coming back to their apartment in the dead of night, well after curfew, night after night. And while he'd hoped that just spending more time with Elza would have maybe led to hearing her say something that illuminated the situation even a little, the day of their history test arrived without making any progress on that front.
Going in, he was reasonably sure that she knew the test material well, and he knew he did, but the entire time, taking the test in silence, writing out answers in pencil, he was thinking about how he could salvage this. He wasn't content to not get answers, or not even make progress towards them. But, as their professor called an end to the test period, and the Pairs walked out of the room together, Elza looked at him excitedly. "I nailed that! How'd you do?"
And then it hit him. "Great!"
There was nothing stopping him from being a bit more direct.
"Fantastic," she said. "Remind me that we should study together next time I have trouble." And with that, she started to walk off without him.
Alex grabbed her by the wrist, and she whipped around, her hair tracing a crimson arc in the air, sudden anger in her eyes. Considering the sheer display of violence she'd put on during their magic tournament with a similar look, Alex probably should have let go of her.
He didn't.
"Hey, Elza?"
She snatched her arm back, but he'd got her attention. "Yes?"
"We did a great job, you know? I think we should celebrate."
"Celebrate?" she said, cocking her head. "What-"
"I know we're still getting used to being a Pair, but we should eat dinner together tonight," he said, mustering as much innocence as he could.
She blinked at him. "I-" she trailed off, thinking it over.
It was a shot in the dark, but if Alex was there with her, she'd either have to show him what she was doing, or she'd have to be more normal. Either way would be some kind of victory. It was a shame that he hadn't thought of it earlier, and didn't have time to figure out a more innocuous way of phrasing it. Elza could very reasonably tell him no, and he'd have no counterargument.
"Sure. Pairs should eat together, right?" she said. "Is tonight okay?"
Alex stumbled over his words, but eventually managed to say "Yes".
Elza smiled. "I'll be sitting with Rosa and Tab, I'm sure you'll find at least one of us."
And with that, she walked away.
That was easier than Alex had expected. All that was left was the follow-through.
Alex's stomach kept flipping between a sense of dread - thinking that something had to go wrong - and a strange hope that just maybe, everything would be perfectly normal and he wouldn't have to think about this again. When he found Rosaline and Tabbitha at a booth off in a corner of the dining hall, and sat down across from them, he started to see the same feeling in Rosaline's face.
"Alexander?"
"Yeah?"
"Not that you're not welcome here, but... Is there a reason you're sitting here and not with your friends?" Rosaline asked.
Alexander briefly considered that he could tell her a white lie, but that would be unseemly.
"Elza invited me," he explained.
Tabbitha, who had already been looking out of sorts, squinted. "But she hasn't had dinner with us in..."
"Weeks, now," Rosaline finished. "Did she say she'd be here?"
Alex nodded. "That was the premise of it, yes."
Rosaline pushed her curly bangs back, and rubbed her forehead. "And you believed her?"
"She sounded genuine," Alex said. Though, he thought, he wasn't entirely sure what "genuine" sounded like for Elza yet.
Rosaline turned to Tabbitha, and some meaning that Alex wasn't privy to passed between them. Whatever it was, Rosaline squeezed Tabbitha's hand, and nodded in that kind of "No matter what happens, it'll be okay" expression that he used countless times with Maxwell. This seemed to calm Tabbitha, at least until Elza sat down forcefully next to Alex, hip-checking him a half a meter deeper into the dining booth.
"Hey gals, how's it going?" Elza said brightly, while using her food-tray to shove Alex's out of her way and closer to his new position.
Tabbitha's mouth hung open, while Rosaline managed to get as far as an "uh".
"Good talk!" Elza said.
"Gals?" Alex asked. "What about me?"
Elza looked at him like he'd forgotten to shower for a few days. "I'll get around to you when I feel like it, have a little patience." And with that, she dug into her meal, a heaping bowl of shepherd's pie made with plant protein.
Everyone just stared at her for a few moments.
There were some intense mental calculations to be made, and stories to be kept straight. Elza knew that Tabbitha and Rosaline knew that she'd been sneaking out of dinner every night, though she didn't know that Alex knew. No one but Alex knew that she'd been coming home after curfew, and while he wanted to get to the bottom of that, he also didn't want to put that information out in the open with Tabbitha and Rosaline.
After she finished chewing, Elza looked around at the three of them. "What's with the silence?"
"Well, I-" Alex began.
"Not you, not yet," Elza said. "But seriously. Rosa, did you find out anything more about that Guardian in Class C?"
"The one with the accent?" Rosaline said. "According to their Wards, they picked it up working mostly alone in the Scandinavian territories. The more remote towns there still speak some of the old languages, and that gives a lot of the locals thick accents to their English. She apparently started subconsciously imitating them while talking to them, and it just kind of... Stuck."
Elza nodded, looking satisfied with this information. "How'd you get the idea to ask her Wards?"
"Are you kidding me?" Rosaline said. "If I was her Ward, that'd be one of the first things I asked about. Wouldn't you?"
Elza pursed her lips. "Nah. Guardians are weird, or at least, mine is."
Tabbitha and Rosaline's eyes turned to Alex, as if expecting him to defend Julian. "Ours is, but I think that might be a more "him" thing than a Guardian thing," he said.
The two of them looked surprised, and Alex shrugged at them.
"I was kind of thinking about that," Tabbitha said, twirling some spaghetti around a fork without any intention of eating it anytime soon.
"About what? My Guardian?" Elza said. "Or Guardians in general?"
"No... more like weirdness," Tabbitha said.
"As in the concept itself?" Rosaline asked.
Tabbitha gave that an affirmative hum. "Like, I was wondering, what makes something weird?"
Elza laughed. "That's easy. Something's weird if it doesn't fit the patterns we see in the world. Like a missing doorknob, or an Angel with an accent."
"Yeah, but..." Tabbitha said, still playing with her noodles. "Does that mean anything like, actually new is automatically weird?"
"Hm," Elza said. "I guess that depends on how novel it is."
"And," Tabbitha continued, her voice getting a little stronger, "is weirdness a binary? Like, something is either weird or it isn't. But that doesn't feel right."
"No, it doesn't," Rosaline agreed. "Everyone's a little weird, I think, as are most individual things."
"But "It's either weird or it's not" has an appeal to it, right?" Elza said. "At least it's simple."
"Maybe it's both," Tabbitha said. "Like, everything's made up of pieces. If I have a pencil that writes in green, it's kind of weird, but most of the pencil parts are completely normal. It's the part that writes in green that's completely weird."
"But none of it is weird without context," Rosaline pondered. "The green pigment is just green pigment until you put it in a pencil."
Alex was having difficulty keeping his head in the conversation. This was clearly a definitional problem, and he just wanted to pull out a particularly large dictionary and put the whole idea to rest with a sufficiently-detailed definition of the word "weird".
"Is this the kind of thing you usually talk about?" Alex asked, driving a stake in the middle of the conversation.
"Yes, actually," Rosaline said.
"So then," Elza asked, turning to Alex, "What do you and your friends talk about?"
Alex started to respond, and then realized just how difficult of a question it was to answer satisfactorily. A comprehensive listing of conversational subjects would be the direct option, but that wouldn't get at the heart of it.
"Everything?" he said. "It's more like one long, running conversation that's been going for as long as we've known each other, with digression after digression, and whenever a topic that's "finished", there's whatever we digressed from to return to. We've got to be several hundred layers deep at this point." That just about covered it, he thought.
"Cool," Elza said, "but that's just how friend groups work, right? Dipping in and out of the flow of words, riding the wave. That doesn't answer my question. Give me an example, like, what were you talking about at lunch?"
Alex thought back. "Well, a couple of days ago, Max and I had been talking about military history, in particular about the various Expeditionary Forces, and between then and now, he'd been reading up on them, checking the entries on the digital encyclopedia, and he noticed something that he wanted to tell us about."
"Just some trivia, or..." Rosaline said.
Alex smiled. "Not quite. You see," he said, "if you look at the metadata - you know, the information listed about the entry in the encyclopedia itself, not the subject of the article - you can see when an article was last updated, and a list of dates on which the article was updated.. And Max likes to check that kind of thing. It's interesting when you find something that hasn't been changed in a long time - it should mean that everything we know today about a thing was found out by then."
"Huh," Rosaline said. "So if there was a debate about one of the entries, could you see that through a whole string of updates happening in a short period of time?"
"Yes!" Alex said. "You can't really be sure, but you can read into it. Anyway, Max found that while most of the pages about the Expeditionary Forces, they'd last been updated ten or so years ago. Except for the pages on the North American Expeditionary Force. All of them had been edited between now and mid-December."
"What does that mean, do you think?" Tabbitha asked.
"Well," Alex said, "That was what we were talking about. We actually had a pretty big debate about it, though I think it's settled. Gabe thinks it means nothing, while Max thought it might be something doctrinal - like perhaps an earlier author of the page made a philosophical error that snuck by the editing process."
"What did you think?" Rosaline said.
"I think it means there's a new North American Expedition happening," Alex said, excited.
Rosaline leaned back and crossed her arms. "That's a big claim, Alexander."
He nodded. "Yes, but I think it's the only real explanation The last North American Expeditionary Force was so long ago that if they added in any information now, it would have to be from new sources, or from a new, meaningful investigation into their fate. And why else would there suddenly be this new influx of interest? In fact-"
"This is all super interesting," Elza interjected, "but nature calls, so I hope none of you will mind if I dip out for a minute, okay?"
"Go ahead," Alex said. "As I was saying, I think that there's no other explanation. Updating one or two of the documents we have access to about the last North American Expeditionary Force could be a coincidence, but updating all of them in the past two months, when the last database update on them was ten years ago? That has to be indicative of another expedition being launched, or at least planned soon."
He expected Rosaline to object, but instead, Tabbitha was the one to speak up. "Couldn't it just be some clerk fixing mistakes?"
"What do you mean?" Alex asked. He watched Rosaline watch Tabbitha closely.
"Well," Tabbitha said, looking down at her wringing hands, "if my job was to make sure that the records for stuff were true, I'd want to stick to one thing at a time. Like, it'd be easier to keep it all in your head if you kept to one subject at a time. All things related to growing flowers, or everything about photography, or-"
Alex nodded excitedly. "Or about expeditions, or about one region!"
Tabbitha looked up from her hands, making eye contact with him. "Yeah!"
Gears turned in Alex's head. That was one of his favorite feelings, next to righteousness and glory, of course. "We can make a testable hypothesis out of that! If the edits are just a clerical thing, we should be able to find edits relating to categorically similar subjects dated to similar times, while if it's part of military preparation, we would find a cluster of strategically similar edits. It's all about figuring out motive, and-"
He trailed off.
"Alexander?" Rosaline asked, as, eyes unfocused, the alarm hit him.
"Oh no," he said, and shoved himself out of the dining booth so hard that he stumbled when he hit his feet.
"Oh no?" Tabbitha asked.
"Elza gave us the slip," he said.
"Oh no." Rosaline said, her expression dropping.
"Exactly," he said. "Bye."
With that, Alex darted across the dining hall, scanning for Elza. If she'd waited a little later to escape, less students would be fiddling around with desserts and optional additions and - darn, even the main line for entrees was still accepting people, she could be anywhere. From what he'd seen and heard, she always snuck out with a takeout bag, so she had to be getting food to fill it with, but with some slight of hand and confidence, she could already be done with that. His best option would be to try and intercept her outside. There were two exits to the dining commons, placing his raw odds of finding her at fifty-fifty. However, one exit faced north, towards the Pair apartments, which was likely to be the exit used by people heading home for the night after dinner, aka, most people. The other faced south, and faced more traffic as an entrance during lunch and the first ten minutes of dinner - but not now, and that meant that if you wanted to avoid being seen, that'd be the one you'd pick.
At least, as he jogged across the dining hall, making sure to not move too fast and alarm people, he hoped. Once he burst through the first set of double doors, into the little atrium / airlock that formed the atmospheric seal of the Sagan dining hall, and was safely beyond the eyes of his fellow students, he launched into a sprint. He lowered his shoulder, reinforced his body, and tackled his way through the heavy outer doors into the frigid winter air and the moonlit dark.
About a hundred meters away, next to a leafless tree on a hill of half-frozen grass, holding a bulging takeout bag, stood Elza. She was facing away from him, so for once, he had the drop on her. Alex amplified his senses just in time to hear her speak.
"Obscuration," she said, under her breath, shortcutting a complex combination of magics, and fading out of view.