There’s a curious phenomenon in the NaNoWriMo world called the Week 2 Slump. The underlying cause of it is actually coming down from the euphoric high you feel as you undergo your first week surge into the land of words. Much like an adrenaline crash, the Week 2 Slump is extremely draining, both physically and mentally, as you realize that you’re only a scant quarter through your novel and the dishes have been piling up and mouldering in the sink. (Not that I have any first-hand experience with this, cough cough.)
Week 2 Slump hit me hard with my first two NaNos; the first year, I simply… stopped writing, and I fell 15,000 words behind that I fought vailliantly to write in the last weekend of the month. The second year wasn’t quite as bad, but even though I was hitting wordcount, I was definitely not enjoying what I was writing (and does it ever show).
My epiphanies the last two years came in the form of new stories: A Mind of His Own (Digimon) the first year, and Ebb and Flow (and original story loosely based on SaGa III) for the second. The problem now is that I’m only writing one single story, and I don’t have the benefit of completely switching gears unless I write things out of order, which isn’t a bad thing, but not as entertaining for you, the reader.
I just need to get through Week 2 and I should be okay. I had a disturbing slump during Week 1, and I still feel that one of the sections I’m writing (which I’m posting below) is boring as all fuck, but hey, it’s a challenge.
“Adelheid’s… what?”
My mind went blank as I received the news, the shock hitting me like a slap in the face; I’m sure I mumbled a quick ‘thank you’ to the messenger who’d delivered the news to me, but all I could feel was a sudden knot in my heart that nearly suffocated me with its intensity.
Adelheid Sturm… we had received our training together back in the day, back when we were aspiring students who wanted learn everything we could through the Schultz School of Martial Theory. Professor Schultz saw great promise in the two of us, and our training had paid off in spades – she rose through the ranks to become Republic Chief of Staff and leader of the Special Operations Squadron, and I caught the attention of Captain Klara and somehow became a Mythril Musketeer, the special unit that serves the President directly. And as our duties demanded our full attention and dedication, our relationship, platonic as it was, became distant.
I never had a particular attraction to Adelheid throughout our schooling, but she did seem to have an eye for me. She began calling me by a shortened form of my name – “Nick”, for “Nicolaus” – and it jars me every time she uses it, which tends to be every time she says my name.
But the news of Adelheid’s death completely shattered me; I ended up returning to my quarters and sitting quietly on my bed to digest the news. I had a terrible feeling when she told me the nature of her deployment, but I would have never imagined that an entire platoon of Quadav would have completely wiped out her and her unit.
The entire incident seemed completely out of place.
I rose from my seat and sighed, and I felt something wet fall down the side of my neck. I wiped the tears away with the back of my sleeve, something that I certainly wouldn’t do in polite company, and I stood in the middle of the room feeling lost and confused.
I wandered out into the hallway outside of my quarters; I had nowhere to go, but I let my legs take me wherever they saw fit. I soon found myself outside the Ivory Dove – the same coffee house that Adelheid and I had eaten lunch together a little over a day ago – and I closed my eyes to fight back the grief that was threatening to explode from within me.
Movement to the far edge of my peripheral vision caught my attention, and I turned to see who was around. The shock must have dulled my senses as I saw no one, but I elected to move on before anyone saw me; if someone asked me right at this moment how I was feeling, I’m sure that I would burst out crying, which is behaviour that is certainly unbecoming of a Mythril Musketeer.
The funeral came the day after. The sky had opened up shortly after dawn, and the grey clouds looming overhead, along with the incessant downpour, had made a sad and depressing day even more unbearable. I said nothing throughout the ceremony, trying to avoid the gaze of anyone who might be looking for my reaction to the entire affair, and though I tried a few times, I found myself being unable to even go near the closed mahogany casket, draped in Bastok’s flag, that I knew contained her body.
It still didn’t actually register with me that she was dead. My mind refused to process it even though I’d just been to her funeral, which I knew was an extremely illogical way of thinking.
So why was I doing this to myself?
I excused myself from the ceremony as soon as it was over, and I quickly walked through the slick cobblestoned pathways in the Markets. The rain’s intensity increased as I hurried on, and by the time I’d reached the Metalworks, my clothing was soaked right through.
Though the war was over and they were in the process of dismantling the barracks and letting people return to their own dwellings, my private quarters remained in the Metalworks due to my rank with the Mythril Musketeers. I didn’t come across anyone as I made my way to my quarters, and once there, I quickly stripped my clothing and threw them in a heap by the fire so I wouldn’t catch a chill.
As I dressed myself in dry clothing – I’d taken the first items I’d found in my closet that had a slight chance of actually coordinating with each other, which were a pair of thick black and grey trousers and a black and grey jerkin with orange trim – my mind wandered to the report I had read about the battle in Grauberg. After fighting with a sock that didn’t seem to want to be put on my foot, I moved to my work chair to finish putting my boots on and to re- read the report while I did so.
The Second Division Scouts have… … had fifteen soldiers, not including Adelheid herself. These soldiers were all Scholars who have had supplemental training in combat techniques, and they all wielded spears and wore heavier armour than what we Scholars were usually accustomed to wearing. With my mind taking a sharp tangent as I perused the report, I chuckled to myself as I imagined the reactions of most of my peers if they were told to engage in weaponry training as some of them clearly weren’t meant to be on the battlefield itself; however, I was somewhat regretful that I’d never learned how to use a weapon… perhaps training could be something I could do now that I had more free time to myself.
Returning my focus to the report, I thought for a moment about the abilities of the men in Adelheid’s unit; they were at ease with the manipulation of their Grimoires, though she’d urged them to focus on the supporting spells of White Magery – Regen, Protect, Shell, and En- spells – in order to assist the more combat- oriented units that would fight alongside them. On the whole, these men were very combat- worthy, and they certainly weren’t the types to be extra baggage on the battlefield.
As was customary with military reports, this one was succinct enough: fourteen casualties, two unknowns that were presumed deceased. The report went into gruesome details over the state in which some of the bodies were found, and I had originally skipped that part as I knew at the time that I wouldn’t be able to handle reading details Adelheid’s death; however, now that I was reading it closer and with a slightly clearer mind, I found that the report completely omitted details about Adelheid herself – only that some of her personal belongings had been found on the battlefield.
It was a curious omission to not have put any details about Adelheid in the report, especially since she was not one of the unknowns that had been mentioned before. I skimmed through the pages again, wondering for a moment if I had temporarily gone insane, but I truly did not find any details regarding Adelheid.
I closed my eyes for a moment as I took in this information, and I sighed as I realized what my mind was trying to do; no amount of over- analysis would bring Adelheid back, so was there any point to thinking about this?
I knew I couldn’t bring her back, but these inconsistencies bothered me greatly. I set aside the report for now, and I began focusing on my own tasks for the day.
Over the next few weeks, the Republic continued their series of operations to root out the remaining Quadav that hadn’t surrendered or retreated back to Bedeaux, the very same type of reconnaissance and combat mission that Adelheid had been sent on. The Quadav had been ferociously resistant to any diplomacy that had been offered to them, and the only solution was to send troops to dispatch them.
These missions weren’t without their casualties, though none had been as high- profile as what had happened to the Second Division Scouts. The number of men and women that were giving their lives was incredibly frustrating, however, and my heart sank whenever I’d heard of yet another death, and the summaries of the battles were beginning to form a small pile on the corner of my desk.
Meanwhile, life went on. I continued my duties as a Mythril Musketeer, though I certainly wasn’t as busy as I had been before, leaving me with slightly more time to myself than I was accustomed to. However, this also had an unexpected side- effect that I never could have anticipated…
I was bored.
I had already re- read my more interesting novels as light reading before retiring for the night. Walks through the city were interesting enough, especially with the speed at which the reconstruction was going, but there was only so much bricklaying I could watch before I became tired of it.
I was almost wishing that the President would have assigned me some complicated task that would take a significant amount of time to complete, only to keep my mind and my sanity occupied, but he was close to being unapproachable at this time as he had his attention on Bastok’s infrastructure and the Republic’s relations with Jeuno.
It had come to the point where doing menial tasks such as paperwork had become an interesting diversion. And it was on this cold, rainy day that I sat at my desk and slogged through composing various reports that are part of my regular duties. I somehow believe that the reason why I’m always assigned the task of composing long, rambling reports that would only be of interest to a blind insomniac bureaucrat is because I’ve become proficient enough in the art of wordsmithing that I can craft dozens of documents, all reporting exactly the same events or requisitioning the same resources, without two looking at all the same.
Today, however, my mind kept drifting away from my work. I’d felt like I was unable to focus on any one particular thing all afternoon, and I had caught myself staring out the window and watching the steady downpour that had been falling over Bastok over the last few days. With Gustaberg being a harsh environment for all manner of fauna and flora that live here, rain was generally welcomed as an opportunity to nurse the broken land for even a little while; however, with this being the fourth day of grey skies and cold rain, everyone had pretty much enough and was anxiously waiting for the sun to peek out again from the heavens.
The wind outside shifted suddenly, and a squall of rain flew through my open window onto the papers that I’d been procrastinating over. I quickly got up and scrambled to close the shutters before things became worse, and once that was done, I sighed as I picked up papers that had blue- black splotches on them where the ink had been marred by the wetness.
As I collected all my papers, one in particular caught my eye; it was one of the casualty reports from the joint clean- up operations that Bastok and Jeuno were undertaking. Apart from the first one that had involved Adelheid and the Second Division Scouts, I still hadn’t read them since I started receiving them. I had nothing pressing to take care of, so after cleaning up the mess, I sat down at my desk and started going through the reports as I nibbled on a piece of jerky.
It had been five weeks since the original mission. Since then, troops have been deployed to various areas – Gustaberg, Grauberg, Pashhow and Rolanberry Fields – though nowhere on the same scale as during the war. The battles had been particularly brutal, and I combed through the reports to look at the casualties and injuries.
I sighed when I saw a name in one of the earlier reports – one Tarutaru named Kurepi, who I remembered taking lessons with. She was a talented Scholar that had been assigned to help with the Republic’s war efforts, and I couldn’t help but cringe at the mention that she had died from the blast of a goblin mine that she’d unwittingly tread upon.
There were so many Scholars that had lost their lives in these operations, and it made me sick to the stomach at how many good men and women we had been losing so recently. As I read through each report, I noticed just how many Scholars were actually involved in these operations; Scholars aren’t spectacular as combatants on the battlefield, so it seemed odd to see so many mentioned here.
I frowned and went back to some of the earlier reports, and I took out a fresh sheet of paper and started noting down how many of my peers I was seeing here. Including the Second Division Scouts, I noted over fifty Scholar- related injuries and deaths in the last five weeks. And despite knowing that war, and even its aftermath, could be a very unpredictable and volatile beast, I could ascertain for a fact that these numbers weren’t at all normal.
I leaned back in my seat to reflect on this discovery. Why were so many Scholars being deployed at this present time? A Scholar could just as well perform his or her duties outside of the battlefield, and having them be on the front line was generally an exercise in futility.
I entertained the idea of asking the Ducal envoys on their reasoning behind this situation, but I immediately dismissed this as a terrible idea. I rested my head in my hands and closed my eyes as I mentally evaluated every single scenario I could think possible at this present time. Paranoid wasn’t a trait that people would normally use to describe me, but the situations were simply too perfect for this to be a mere coincidence.
Acquiring the deployment roster would put my mind at ease, but as I thought of how I could go around to doing that, every single possibility I would end in failure. I couldn’t exactly break into the embassy’s offices, nor could I simply ask for a copy without having a genuine reason to do so; despite my rank, this didn’t afford me the ability to acquire classified documents.
I sighed as I realized that there was nothing I could do at the moment except to keep my eyes and ears open. Analyzing the reports would be the only way I would be able to discern a pattern to all this, and unfortunately, all I could do is wait for them to come.
This thankfully gave me something to occupy my time, and over the next two weeks after that I watched the comings and goings of the troops along with their missions. Some were simply reconnaissance, and others were to aid in the reconstruction of the Republic’s various outposts and fortifications. But the combat missions still came, and my peers — when I discreetly asked them why they were being sent to perform such tasks — seemed as confused and uneasy as Adelheid had been. Still, nearly no one questioned their orders… after all, why would they? There was no reason to doubt the tactical ability of the Republic and the help they were getting from the Duchy, and even I started to question why I was being so paranoid.
The night sky was clear and the stars shone overhead as I made my way back to the Metalworks that evening, the crisp evening air reminding me that the weather would be cold tonight. The Metalworks were all but deserted at this time of night, and I silently admonished myself for having lost track of time while perusing texts at the library. Once I reached my quarters, I lit the small oil lantern I kept on my desk so I could see what I was doing as I changed into my night clothes, and once I’d washed my face and tidied my things, I extinguished the light and lay down to sleep, the bright orange tip of the wick fading to black as quickly as I began to fall asleep.
Comments