Happy Indeterminable Amount of Time to You!

Things were still going good, they just weren’t great.

I chose to dual learn like Jun had suggested so I could cut down the time for my hopeful Replacement; learning how to become a Cupid was a lot already so now, learning two Designations, was -understandably- even more.

The differences between Sentinel and Cupid were large as they were small; large because they dealt with the opposite spectrums of grief and happiness, and small because the monitoring process was similar although definitely not for the same reasons. (Cupids observed for similarities in like minded individuals based loosely on radius and Sentinels followed the strings of friendship and family ties to filter who they would monitor.)

Thankfully, I didn’t have to relearn all the equipment in a new practice area or anything like that; even if all the target practice and projectile device handling exclusive to Cupids was not applicable since Sentinels used different types of main appliances.

The skills I was trying to foster still translated over pretty well, though, and the Transference of information worked the same way across the Herald sphere so at least I didn’t have to relearn that whole system.

Calliope was a different kind of exuberant than Cyan, no less enthusiastic but minus the sibling energy I felt with my Instructor Fairy; maybe it was because the Centaur saved it all for Atlas.

Regardless, she was a very patient teacher -as all of them had been- and my mind constantly searched to place the tender sort of lilt that accented her words. I never pinpointed exactly where the slight variance stemmed from but I tucked away the thought to ask about if the appropriate moment ever arose.

Though I couldn’t exactly determine how many days I’d been in Oeuvre, I’d quickly formed myself a routine and fallen easily into it from the moment I’d wake up, to my rest time at the end of the ‘day’. Jun -and Cyan- always made sure my rest time happened in my room and, more importantly -according to them- in my own bed.

Once I slept for hours that averaged between three to seventeen -there had been a record a couple of sleeps ago which Jun had Hailed me awake from just to check in on well-being- I would stumble over to my couch to see what kind of treat was left under a glass cover on my table.

I’d told Jun they didn’t have to continually leave me something and they flat out ignored me, the most I ever got by way of response was a sort of hum that could have meant anything; they hadn’t even looked up from their paperwork to answer so I hadn’t brought it up again and treats kept appearing on my coffee table.

It was nice to have something sweet to look forward to as I fumbled my earpiece into place and groggily hailed them.

They’d always answer with ‘yes.’ and I’d tell them that it was me.

From there, the two of us -and sometimes Cyan- would meet for what I called breakfast and what Jun called ‘a meal’; then Cyan would appear just as Jun and I were finished talking and she’d drag me off to her planet which I was very close to saying the name of, I might add.

Then she’d leer over my shoulder as I cautiously took notes on the subjects she gave me. So far, I hadn’t made any ‘mistakes’ although the Fairy’s standards were staggeringly high and there wasn’t a day that she hadn’t corrected something I was doing or pointed out how a characteristic could have been annotated in a more detailed way to fit the Subject more precisely.

After however long it took to return back to Oeuvre, we’d file our paperwork, I’d visit the practice areas for Cupid specific target drills, and then I’d hail Calliope so I could switch over to learning Sentinel procedures. As it always was, hearing about what a Sentinel or Cupid did was much easier than the actual praxis, so I was struggling a little with understanding Calliope’s instruction.

Thankfully, she’d okayed our second visit out so I could shadow her to the place where she and Atlas had grown up. I could pronounce this one since it was simply called Holt; a planet that had not even a single deciduous tree and whose air smelled of freshly tilled earth and sun baked pine.

I half expected to see a unicorn perched majestically atop every large stone mantle we passed and then almost fell out of the sky -much to Calliope’s great amusement- when I did, moon silver mane and iridescent horn shimmering impossibly bright in the sun’s magnificently perfect rays.

Holt seemed to have only two major seasons, Summer and Winter occurring simultaneously over the face of the vast forests and meadows with only small strips of Spring and Fall being experienced when you traversed between the two extreme seasons respectively.

Summer gave way to vibrantly colored Fall before you crossed into waist high snow and Winter faded into dewy Spring before you were tripping over large sun baked boulders settled deeply into the banks of streams teaming with fish.

Calliope didn’t fly like I did, her hooves didn’t even seem to touch the ground as we passed between ancient Redwoods and snow capped stone mountains studded with powdery white Hemlocks and Birch.

The Centaur showed me her family Herd, it turned out that she hadn’t actually been an independently acting Sentinel for very long by Oeuvre standard; especially when put against Cyan or maybe Jun depending on how long they had been there.

They hadn’t given me a timeline yet and Cyan had been surprisingly tight lipped about it when I’d asked her. (She’d told me to ask Jun myself but somehow the topic hadn’t come up. I tended to let the conversation take us wherever it went when I was with Jun since there always seemed to be a plethora of things to talk about and then I would just forget to ask.)

For Sentinels, there wasn’t as much in depth research into individual people as there was overall surveillance; a lot of time was spent watching and putting up fail safes in case something were to go amiss when you weren’t there.

Just in our first visit, Calliope sent five different Centaurs information via Transference to remind them that the stream they frequented had washed out due to the seasonal shift; she had told me later that the seasons were continuously oscillating around their Woods like Earth’s were, only at a slower pace.

I wasn’t instructed to make any Transference myself -thank goodness, I wasn’t ready- but Calliope did make me completely disassemble and reassemble her device on the fly just to make sure I had learned how to do it efficiently. Sweating despite the snow I was up to my knees in, I felt like I just managed to do as instructed in a respectable amount of time; Calliope hadn't scolded me about anything although the praise wasn’t quite glowing either.

I believe her words were ‘hmm, not terrible’ which I wasn’t quite sure how to feel about.

Most days I doubled sessions between Cyan and Calliope, stopping for a meal with Jun -and Cyan most of the time- between our trips and then sleeping when I felt like my mind was overloaded.

My body was performing surprisingly well considering how room temperature I had been about my physical health on Earth; not bad but definitely not good, absolutely not in peak condition for me to be on my feet -wings?- for upwards of eighteen hours every ‘day’.

I had Manifested myself a watch so I could gauge how many hours we spent on the Fairy and Centaur’s respective planets and had been shocked at how little fatigue I had felt.

Since my awake hours were filled to bursting with learning and nothing short of exhilarating new experiences, time passed faster than I would have thought. Before I knew it, the little pastry under a glass case on my table was what I could only describe as a shrunk down version of a birthday cake, completed with a single candle and fluffy white frosting.

The words ‘Happy Birthday’ and a ‘1’ piped from frosting made me chuckle quietly as I slipped my earpiece into place. I hadn’t accidentally dropped it or put it in backward for a long time now, barely having to pause in my actions of lifting the lid and eagerly taking a sample of the frosting to gather my mental attention and hail Jun.

“Yes.”

“Is it my birthday or is this your way of telling me that it’s yours? Congratulations on turning one, I guess.”

There was a huff and ‘tch’ on the other side of the line that made an unreasonable amount of amusement pull my lips upward.

“You are incorrect on both counts. Measuring with Human metric-”

“-you don’t have to add that every time, I know you convert for me.”

“-it has been exactly one year since your Displacement. In this case, I believe it is my place to say ‘congratulations.’”

There was a pause, a small clearing of a throat, and a rustle that I knew was Jun pushing their hair over their shoulder. Drama queen.

“...congratulations Jin, the rate of your improvement has been truly… admirable.”

Or, given their tone, maybe they were self conscious and apprehensive about the whole thing. Well, that was just-

“Oh-I… thank you it’s-” I puffed out a breath of air in something resembling a self depreciating, nervous laugh, smearing some frosting over the plate as I fidgeted.

“I mean, you definitely get at least forty percent credit because you’re the one who-

“Forty percent, you say? With the remainder being broken down between you and whomever else, that’s the majority, isn’t it?”

There was distinctly sadistic glee in their tone, quickly chasing away the cloud of whatever awkwardness that had somehow drifted over us.

Uh oh, rapid backpedaling time before-

“Oh shiii-shiitake, Cyan’s going to be absolutely fuming if she heard me say that, don’t tell her I gave a number! You both really contributed to what I learned and– and Calliope definitely deserves credit too so don’t you dare go bragging all over them later. Seriously, it was a joint effort between all of you so-”

I talked a little faster before Jun hung up on me as they tended to do once they felt the conversation was done or they were being particularly mischievous. (Which was almost all the time now that they weren’t worried I was going to go wandering off into places I wasn’t supposed to just because I didn’t know I wasn’t allowed; don’t let their exterior fool you, they were a hellion underneath all the seriousness.)

“-so really all of us should be having cake!”

I huffed, a little out of breath.

“You know what, that’s a great idea; meet me at the cafeteria area as soon as you’re free. We’ll all celebrate together and then I’ll get a chance to thank you all appropriately. So um- see you there!”And then, without even waiting for a response, I hung up on them.