Young Writers Society

Nikolai seemed to do the thinking for Mel. It was kind of ironic since just a little bit ago he was a bundle of nerves and anxiety, and he didn't seem to believe her when she said that she came from the future from another world. Well, that last part seemed to not be true anymore; she was starting to suspect that they truly were from the same world. The shared history was too uncanny to ignore.

If Mel truly was from his future, then she was hesitant to tell him about it. How could she just casually say that the wars wiped out all non-powered people? And that the world was in ruins? And that she didn't know anything about "magic" and leagues existing in her time, probably because if they truly did exist, they were wiped too? Maybe?

Censorship of history...

She barely had time to process this idea before Nikolai mentioned a guild meeting that was happening in a few days.

"Wait, rewind," she said setting the tea cup and drawing on the table so she could lean forward with her elbows on her knees. "Are there... uh... time magic people? At this guild meeting? You think?"

Nikolai raised a dark eyebrow at the question, faintly surprised.

"Umm... Well, complicated answer. There's a very small guild of clockmakers in the league. There aren't very many of them in the world. However, they do have some cool abilities like freezing time or rewinding it, and there are rumors of some who can even travel in it. Are they true?" He shrugged. "Maybe. I don't think I've ever met one of them."

It was the second part of Mel's question that he really had to think about. She'd asked this out of nowhere, so she seemed to be pretty interested, or at least curious. He wasn't sure why.

"There won't be any of them at this meeting, I don't think," Nikolai said, leaning back into the couch a little more as he took another sip of tea. By now, it wasn't so hot anymore, just warm. "League members are all over the world, so if everyone tried to get together... well, that wouldn't work for so many reasons. That's why each guild has their own meeting. There's going to be plenty of connections, though, and I'm sure there are people who know them personally."

He knew it didn't really matter anyway. I'm not going anywhere.

Freezing time. Rewinding. Time traveling.

Was that magic? Or powers? Mel knew that at least some of these things were possible. Evaline, for instance, could rewind time, but only for minutes, not centuries. It was a power, yes, but everyone knew that time powers were the least explained by science. It certainty didn't help that Mel had no idea how her power worked since she couldn't exactly experience it herself.

Not that Mel was admitting that magic existed in her world. They were powers. Powers. All explainable... for the most part.

She swatted the thought away and focused on the task at hand. Time magic people—clockmakers—wouldn't be at the guild meeting. But still, Nikolai mentioned that they could travel in time. That would mean it was theoretically possible to get back to her timeline. Maybe. Right?

"Right, right," she said quietly in thought, thinking. "So, uh, if they're not there, then what's this guild meeting about?"

She flashed him a totally natural smile, deciding to add on so he wouldn't be suspicious.

"Just curious. Trying to learn about this repressed history, is all."

Nikolai nodded. That sounded like a good enough reason. He understood her curiosity, too. It wasn't like his knowledge of past history was all that great either, and anyone who learned about gifts would want to find out more.

If they didn't want to burn the league to the ground, that is.

"They were interesting when I was younger," he admitted, suggesting he didn't enjoy them anymore. "It's just an annual opportunity for everyone in the guild to get together. It's very much intergenerational, too. They tell stories about what's happened in the meantime, family gets to chat, guild leader makes a speech or something. Big deal." He sighed. "I haven't been to one since I was eighteen."

Meetings had been exciting and a little scary when Nikolai was a small child. For the first few ones, he'd never leave a parent's side. Wandering off in the noisy, shifting crowd felt unsafe, so he'd hover awkwardly by his mother in her talks with distant relatives, or near his father, standing silently while the grown-ups talked about things he couldn't have understood yet: the people who'd been lost to persecution, problems in other guilds, rumors of new threats to their existence.

But a few years later, people were starting to treat him like an adult already, including him in their discussions. Nikolai started to become more independent, meeting new people without having to be introduced by someone else, and starting to feel like he belonged there. When they lived in Western Europe, he'd attended his father's guild meetings in England instead of his own back in Russia, because that was too far to travel for such a short event, but those had been fine.

He'd given up on them soon after his stepmother had moved into the family.

"They're not that special," Nikolai said. That wasn't really true. The meeting had been special to him once, and he knew they were still important to most who attended. But they didn't hold any meaning to him now. Mel didn't need to know that, though. "Pretty overrated, if you ask me."

It sounded like Nikolai wasn't interested in going to the upcoming guild meeting, but Mel knew she had to go. It was her only hope of returning home and getting out of this miserably cold place. No offense to Nikolai.

Still, she had a feeling it wasn't going to be easy to convince him. Unless...

Maybe she could somehow take this initiation?

"Where is it usually held?" she asked casually, crossing her legs. "Different place every time, right?"

"Oh, that's a good question." Nikolai shrugged. "Well, it's not different every single year. I've been to the same meeting place twice. But yeah, we do alternate locations regularly so there's nothing suspicious or strange about it."

He didn't have to think too hard about where this year's guild meeting was. A strange look spread across his face for a minute, but it was hard to read. It took a moment for him to continue, but he finally took a deep breath and keep talking. Or maybe the deep breath was just a yawn. It was actually very hard to tell.

"This year they're meeting in St. Petersburg," Nikolai said. "Most of the people in this guild are from Russia, because we're one big family and over time we all ended up mostly staying in one place, like the other guilds, so we always meet somewhere here. Oh, and they insist on the date always being the winter solstice, which is probably in a little less than a week. I barely remember dates anymore. That might work in other countries, but honestly, who wants to travel in a Russian winter?"

Not him. That was for sure.

There was nothing wrong with St. Petersburg, of course, especially if you liked cathedrals. But it was quite possibly the last city he wanted to be in.

"Who wants to travel in a Russian winter?" Nikolai posed as a theoretical question.

Well, not me, Mel thought. But it will be me. And you, too. Soon.

"Real fascinating," she hummed a bit blankly, deep in thought. The guild meeting will be happening in less than a week, and they had to go to a city called St. Petersburg. So naturally, her next question was --

"Where's St. Petersburg from here?" she asked. "I mean, we're in the middle of nowhere. Seems kind of unrealistic to expect people to travel far distances in the winter just for a meeting."

"St. Petersburg is to the west of Russia," Nikolai said. He wondered if the reason why she didn't recognize it was because she'd never heard of it before. Maybe the city didn't last forever. He'd learned about fallen historical cities, ones that had seemed eternal once. But no matter how mighty, how powerful, they'd collapsed to something greater in the end. Walls became rubble, monuments became ruins, and what had once been the crown jewel of a realm would begin to rust.

But the ruins, rubble and rust stayed behind. So why didn't the memory of his hometown stay with humanity?

"The fastest way to get there is to travel down to Novosibirsk and then board the Trans-Siberian Railroad." Pushing his questions to the back of his mind, Nikolai drew out a quick sketch of Russia on the same piece of paper, marking an area in the center. "That's Central Siberia, roughly where we are. Novosibirsk is south of us." He drew an arrow down and marked a spot at the end of it. "And then the railway continues west from there."

When he added a line traveling from there to the area where St. Petersburg was, he set down the pencil and sighed. He knew it wasn't that hard to go back there, just a few days of traveling at the most. In fact, it felt even easier now that he'd mapped it out. But he hadn't set foot there for years and he hoped it would stay that way.

Mel peered over and stared at the paper, trying to commit the sketch to memory. She knew of railroads, but had never seen them herself, nevertheless ride on one. It didn't surprise her that this technology existed in Nikolai's time. She knew that it was one of the first transportation methods to be invented.

"So, how far are we from civilization?" she asked. "From the railroad station, I mean. Novosi-something-or-other. Seems like a long trek.

She then extended out her arm. "May I?" she asked, gesturing to hold the paper.

“Yeah.” Nikolai passed it over to Mel. It was strange how she had so many questions, each answer giving more detail. He’d expected her to lose interest a while ago.

Maybe there was more to it than mere curiosity.

“It’d be insanity to walk all the way to Novosibirsk from here, so you’d want to get a troika ride if you ever made that trip. That’s what we call a sleigh with three horses, and they’re fairly common around here. With a troika, it might take a little under three days. We have one here in case we ever do go out—”

He paused, as a thought came to him that he’d forgotten.

“Actually, never mind. My father and stepmother took it when they left. There’s plenty of small villages around here though, and the closest one is an hour away by walking. It’s always possible to buy one there.” Nikolai shrugged. “It’s not too easy to travel long distances.”

A small village. An hour's walk away. Buy a sleigh with horses. Get to the train station. Travel to St. Petersburg.

Got it.

Except, there was one last thing...

Mel nodded slowly, casually taking all of this in. "When you say 'buy,' I assume you're talking about money?" she asked.

She had no concept of what money was like, but she knew it was a common back in the day when people didn't specialize trade with their powers.

Nikolai blinked slowly in confusion at the question that appeared strange to him.

“Yeah... with money.” If he’d been the one to ask someone else that question, he would have certainly gotten a blunter reply such as ‘what else?’ or even something more sarcastic, like ‘no, we only trade with the finest hairclips and carrots, anything else is worthless.’

To be honest, the sarcastic reply sounded like something his old friend Victor might joke about. Nikolai could almost hear that sentence in his voice.

“If you’re talking about currency, though, we use rubles here,” he added quickly, trying to steer away from that thought. “That’s what we use to buy things.”

"Rubles..." Mel echoed in thought.

Never heard of it. Then again, she didn't really know much about money besides knowing its concept and reading about it in books. A system with money honestly seemed bizarre to her since it implied that there were people who had lots of money and people with no money. What were they going to do with coins and slips of paper, anyways? What if they had no money? They'd just starve?

She wanted to blurt all these thoughts out loud, but instead she focused her attention to the more important task at hand here. She was so close to knowing everything she needed to get started already.

"So, do you have rubles then?" Mel asked casually. "So you can buy things?"

“Yeah, we do. Well, we’re not exactly rich in any sense of the word. There aren’t many people like that out there.”

Nikolai had seen plenty of poverty in St. Petersburg— beggars on the street worn thin with hunger, workers with dirty threadbare clothes that looked like they’d been passed down two generations and might still be used for the next. He was still a working-class citizen, but he’d never had about that happening to him so far. Still, he’d seen enough to know it was as dangerous as being gifted— after the harsh winter, there were always less of those who were struggling most around.

“There is one advantage to being gifted, and it’s that we’re all skilled workers because of our abilities,” he admitted. “When we lived somewhere populated, my father used to have fairly regular hunting trips with a crew, and my mother would sell her paintings. The non-magical ones, of course. My uncle would do that too. And that would be enough for us.” Nikolai shrugged. “To answer your question, we can buy stuff, within reason.”

Honestly, Mel stopped paying attention after Nikolai admitted that he had money. She nodded at him with a faked smile, and then when he finished, got up on her seat and held the blanket a little tighter around her.

"Nice," she said as she still held the map in her hand. "Want to leave tomorrow?"