Kavaa fades into the background in many of our discussions. Even the Forces that have no moral opinion on ideology and instead exist for themselves are more active. Kavaa simply says her piece quietly, and then does not respond. As a behaviour, I can only call it infuriating.
The woman won’t argue back. The woman will admit she does not know more and has no intention of learning anything else. The woman is an encyclopaedia of knowledge when it comes to health and the human body. Yet she treats the fact that she knows all there is to know in that field as being an expert on everything and yet an expert on nothing. She speaks confidently of all there is to speak about because she is Divine and, unlike everyone else, Divinity is not a condition of being, it is a damn job to her!
The woman had actually told me that the reason the White Pantheon is in the situation it is right now is because when we implemented Pantheon Peace, we gave humanity too much leeway in the actual rules and yet we were too harsh on the enforcement! Oh! Thank you! So everything was done wrong!? What a great comment Kavaa! What great advice! Amazing, as expected of the Goddess of Health!
It is not that Kavaa complains. Maisara and Helenna and Fortia and Atis complain about the state of the world. They endlessly mope and say they wish things were better. Kavaa is different in this regard. Kavaa will simply make some judgement call once all is said and done and expect us to take her opinion seriously. During the Great War, she had nothing to say. She simply took the damn jobs that we gave without giving her own input. The woman willingly took the role of cog and now complains that she was made one! If there was such an issue with being sent to the Erdely front, why did she not say anything? If there was such an issue with healing us constantly, why did she not say anything? If there was such an issue that her Clerics were treated as the healers they were and not the warriors they weren’t, why did she not say anything?
This is the greatest issue in that woman. Divinity is a job to her and it is life itself to us. If she wishes to be a cog, then she should not complain about it later and cast her judgement calls as if they matter! And if she wishes her judgements to be worth anything, then instead of complaining, she should make her own suggestions for the future!
The Goddess of Health as a title is one of overwhelming, unarguable good. Kavaa as a person is one that is utterly weak and despicable.
- Excerpt from Goddess Allasaria’s private diary.
‘We have a problem.’ Helenna re-read Olephia’s text before replying. Aris had just fallen. The woman had gotten to inspect her art gallery. The military was moving out to continue their liberation of this nation. Paida was giving a speech on how it was the Empire that saved this country. Helenna and Kassandora had not even fed her the script, it was the woman herself who had decided to be a total pawn in the face of Arascus’ Empire. Helenna walked with Olephia through the cheering city of Aris. Maybe it was her black uniform and cap that was inherently designed to be imposing, maybe it was the fact that Olephia was strolling by her side. The Goddess of Chaos, for all her want about preserving the paintings in the art gallery, was now madly scribbling now appreciating the tremendous architecture around them.
“What’s the problem?” Helenna asked. Olephia scrawled her reply and handed it back.
‘Olonia sent me a message back.’ Helenna didn’t bother to contain her sigh. She had realised that Olephia herself actually preferred when people openly carried their negativity around her.
“And that’s my problem why?” Helenna asked.
‘She said the request I made is out of her budget.’ Helenna read through the note several times before she fully comprehended it. Olephia had made a request that was out of budget for a National Divine? Excuse me? Olonia had the backing of a whole nation behind her. How could something be out of her budget?
“What did you ask for?” Helenna replied. The pair of Goddesses crossed a bridge with statues on either side. It marked the end of Aris centre and the beginning of Aris residential. The huge, never-ending walls of sandstone, so finely carved as to each be a work of art in themselves, gave way to homes and tower blocks and massive malls. Olephia handed her reply back.
‘A telescope.’ Helenna didn’t bother to ask the immediate question. This slower style of conversation with reading naturally entailed itself to making Helenna pace her words and a single moment of thought revealed the issue. Olephia had obviously not asked for the sort of telescope that could just simply be placed on a balcony.
“Do you have a model in mind?” Helenna asked.
‘I want to see the planets.’ Olephia replied.
“Oh.” Helenna replied. Nothing of the sort had ever been built. The Pantheon simply had too many issues to deal with internally to think about the stars at large. “I can start working on one but you should go to Arascus with this.” Helenna made too mistakes. Firstly, she spoke before she thought because she could obviously solve the issue, secondly, she really did not want waste her time on Olephia’s telescope. She understood what Kavaa meant when that Goddess talked about her healing simply being exploited to fix useless wounds.
Olephia’s reply almost broke Helenna’s heart. ‘Please’.
It was just that, with no additional explanation, no more begging and no bargaining. A simple please. How could Helenna reject such a plea?“I’ll see what I can do.” Helenna gave the small piece of paper back to Olephia and saw the Goddess of Chaos smile. Those purple eyes were overjoyed and even her step became lighter. Helenna only smiled as she quickly received the reply.
‘Thank you!’ It was cute that the woman had even taken the effort to draw a huge exclamation mark at the end of that note. Helenna put it into her pocket and kept on the rather fast march through the suburbs of Aris. Even here people were cheering and even here, Kassandora’s armies were making themselves known. A tank flanked by two armoured personnel carriers was stood in the of the street, the civilians had descended from their homes to congratulate the men on securing Aris. Helenna did not bother to inform them that this was merely the military garrison and not the actual boys who did the fighting.
Even at walking pace, a Divine did not cover ground, they devoured distance instead. Helenna and Olephia, both Divines of the highest ranks, annihilated the march to Aris airport. A walk that should have taken two hours instead took twenty minutes, the same pace that one would get there by car. The airport itself was nothing exceptional, Helenna had seen its predecessor a hundred times and the modern structure a thousand times. This was the capital of Rancais and she had been a representative of the White Pantheon after all.
The structure was grand although it was empty. Soldiers with long rifles and in grey uniforms stood by the gates of the car park, not even by the massive building itself. Although Helenna did not even need to say a word to them. She stood half again their height, Olephia was even taller. There was no mistaking they were Divines and Divines were not asked for credentials. They stepped aside. Helenna did not bother leading through the main building, she simply walked around it to the rear and to the hangars.
She was looking for Hangar One. Raptor One after all was an elite unit and elite units always got first priority in logistics. It was straight ahead, a half-cylinder that had been dragged out next to one of the many runways here. An Imperial jet fighter was driving out of its own hangar further down. Men were running around tell everyone to clear the runway. Small trucks with fuel tracks were driving back to their garages and the ground crew were running away. Helenna crossed before the jet fighter got permission to set off.
Across the runway and inside Hangar One was a plane and a man. The former was huge: far, far larger than Helenna. Even the shining steel leg at the front that connected the main chassis to the tiny wheel which was used to manoeuvre the aircraft on the ground was taller than the Goddess. The cockpit looked as if it had enough for three people, even though this aircraft only needed one pilot. In the back, it had a massive cargo hold although Helenna knew that already, she had ridden in the back of this monster several times after all. The front was painted yellow as to resemble a beak. The red eyes underneath the beak felt as if they were watching Helenna.
And then the captain of that beast. In a black jumpsuit, the only person here. He had been put on containment since the battle of Aris and a report from Nestmaster. Apparently, the man’s plane needed maintenance and Douglas simply refused to help the ground crew with the maintenance. They themselves could not locate the issue and the pilot said there was nothing broken yet Raptor One kept failing its flight checks. Captain Douglas was smoking, sitting on one small crate and leaning back on another. He looked up when the door opened, although the expression changed from hope to curiosity when he saw it was just Helenna and Olephia. He stood up and made a salute but it was obviously out of procedure and not any respect. “Captain Douglas, reporting for duty!” He said.
Helenna released him from his salute with her own. She took a moment to think of how to approach this. Smalltalk? But then he was a soldier of Kassandora. He was a soldier of Kassandora and Helenna herself did not have endless time. She supposed she should dive right into it.
“I’ve come because I received this.” Helenna said. She brought out the pictures of Anarchia’s corpse from her coat pocket. Maisara had given the report and frankly, for all the animosity Helenna held to that woman, Maisara could be trusted to report what had happened as it had happened. Anarchia had been killed when Raptor One dived in and opened fire onto the Goddess. Helenna gave the pictures to Captain Douglas, Olephia pulled away to inspect the huge plane. On those printed photos were scenes of Anarchia’s body, her back ripped apart. But it wasn’t ripped apart by bullet or even by explosion. It was obviously the marks left behind by talons.
Captain Douglas scratched his head as he inspected the photos. “This is Anarchia, right?” He asked. Immediately Helenna sensed it, he was too comfortable around Divinity. He must have had experience with the supernatural or he took it at face value.
“You killed her.” Helenna said.
“Well…” Douglas inspected the photo again. He tapped it with his gloved knuckle. “This is obviously a scratch Goddess. Not bullet wounds. The bird doesn’t have claws, we didn’t do that.” Helenna didn’t know if the man knew what he was saying, but he said it so lightly that it was obviously normal for him. But Helenna caught it. That last word, the ‘we’.
“We?” Helenna asked.
Douglas shrugged and extended one arm to the plane. Olephia was close and inspecting the beast already. She was walking around under the wings and staring up at the massive four-engine monster in awe. No doubt she would want to paint it later. There was some part of Helenna that understand frankly. It was a tremendous amalgamation of steel, with two engines below the wings and two engines fashioned into the body at the rear. The front was tipped with yellow as to resemble a beak, underneath the cabin were a set of red eyes. And the rest was the same pitch black that the feathers of birds of prey were coloured in. “Well, we.” Captain Douglas said from behind Helenna. “Me and her.”
And as if to agree with the man behind the Goddess of Love, the plane moved. The flaps on the rear of its wings moved up and down in the exact same way a human would nod to voice agreement. Olephia turned immediately, a smile painted on her face. She knew Helenna’s job here as well as Helenna did herself. They were to imbue spirits into machines through nothing but pure faith. It was supposed to be with drones, that was what Arascus had given them to work with… But this plane had no one inside it, the engine was not even turned on. What had just happened should be impossible. And yet it had happened. Helenna turned back to Captain Douglas. He stood there as if what was happening was completely normal. “You and her?” She asked.
Douglas shrugged. “Me and her.” He affirmed as if Helenna had just asked him whether grass was green. That confirmed Helenna’s thoughts. The man was delusional. He truly believed in his plane. The Goddess of Love turned back to stare up at Raptor One. The flaps on the wings moved again as if to voice agreement to what Douglas had just said. There was only one word she could think of when she looked up at that plane.
Undeniable.