Need to Know

"Need to Know" is a BOTGD 2 Act 1 thread written on June 17, 2019.
==Summary==
Akkey runs into Milae--literally--and takes him to the healer, and he catches her up on his progress with finding Frigga, asking if Akkey would be able to portal to a place she only has mental access too. They both agree to try to find a way into the "empty pockets" both Frigga and Hel have alluded to. Milae explains the source of his power, the Norns, to Akkey.
==Full Text==
Akkey Black: Akkey wandered Haligan, taking in familiar buildings and scenery, but seeing many new faces. Ten years changed it a lot, yet stayed the same. Clouds swept across the bright, blue sky above. A distant dragon screeched faintly from the stables.
She took a turn up a small hill, away from the crowds.
Yun Milae: There was a sudden rush of vertigo and out out nowhere, Milae walked straight into Akkey, yelping as he bounced off her front and sat hard in the dirt. He blinked up at his sudden obstacle, fumbling for his staff before recognizing Akkey and relaxing in relief. “Ah, Akkey…sorry. That doesn’t usually happen.” Haligan is so damn crowded now.
Akkey: “Milae!” she exclaimed. She extended a hand, “Are you alright? Where the Hel did you come from?”
Milae: “Research.” He looked tired, but not nearly as much as he had when they’d been transported from the hatchery. He smelled strongly of acrid smoke and he had several diagrams of what seemed to be a village tucked under his arm. His scars were lightly stained with blood; there was a single half-hearted bandage tied around his left arm. “More of looking into our problem. I also began looking for Pitch Black, but you nixes are tricky to follow.” He grabbed her hand once he had shuffled his papers into place and stood, wincing slightly as he put his weight onto his left leg. “I am surprised you stayed on Haligan.”
Akkey: She pulled him up, a worried expression in her face. This guy… “I don’t really have a lead anywhere, and my chances are better off here with Grey.” She reached out to his shoulder, “Do you need a healer?”
Milae: He grunted a little as he tried to step forward, glancing down at his swollen hock. “I wouldn’t say no to that. I cannot afford to be injured in the next coming days.”
Akkey: “You wouldn’t be opposed to a portal, right?” She took his arm around her to support him. She didn’t really wait for him to respond, and she waved a hand. They sank through the ground, immediately resurfacing before the open door to the healer’s hut, where a lone doctor jumped quite violently at their appearance. “A little bit of help, please.”
Milae: Milae grimaced as Akkey helped him ease down into a stool, huffing as he stretched his leg out. “Don’t bother with the scars,” he noted in a low voice, as the apprentice began to hesitantly attend to him. “They won’t heal.”
He looked over at Akkey and nodded his thanks, reaching up to undo the front of his cloak. He smiled a bit, something close to wistfulness. “Your powers are as strong as they ever were, I see.”
Akkey: She leaned against the wall, folding her hands in front of her, “I’ve been practicing.” She cocked her head to the side as she eyed him curiously, “I’m interested in yours, actually. How… does it work?”
Milae: “How?” He hummed to himself, bouncing his good hoof up and down slightly as his leg was worked on. “You may as well ask yourself how you create portals, Akkey. One simply does, especially when it comes to beings as powerful as the Norns. The most I know is that I only need activate the seal–” He lifted one forearm in demonstration, and it glowed strongly through the blood– “and I am off to a different timeline. Now what said powers do, has a set of answers I have been studying for much longer.”
Akkey: “Hmmm…” she mused, “The reason I ask is… I was curious about something Frigga said to me. When I met her in Helheim…”
Milae: Milae’s leg jumped in the apprentice’s grasp and they shushed him in annoyance. He waved a hand in apology, focused on Akkey with a new sense of fear and urgency.
“Frigga? What? What did she–Helheim? What happened?” he demanded. “Tell me everything.”
Akkey: She rubbed a hand at the back of her neck, “Hel got really mad when she learned about what Frigga’s been up to. So she called her down and she revealed some… things.” Akkey looked straight at him, “Frigga said the reason why she was able to take Hunter’s soul was because of ‘lucky timing’. She said she has your timeline hopping to thank, that she understands ‘time and its empty pockets’, and that Hunter wasn’t Hel’s child in that moment.”
“Do you know what any of that means, Milae?”
Milae: “Well of…of course he w…” Milae’s mind was moving a mile a minute. What the Hel were empty pockets? He assumed they were places that time was not, a place where he assumed Frigga was kept if she was allowed do ruin things as she had…
“You are adorable, you really are.”
Skuld leaned up against the wall of the healer’s hut, her cool white eyes staring into his. “I know where you were, little goat.”
“I don’t suppose you have something to do with this,” he growled in a low voice. The apprentice looked up in panic, believing Milae was speaking to them. Milae continued looking at Skuld for the moment.
“Me…?” She drew out the word ridiculously long, her delicate white fingertips pressed against her chest. Her eyebrows raised in false shock. “Exacting a fair price for the loss of my most devoted disciple…I would do no such thing.”
Milae huffed and folded his arms. Her eyes tracked the movement, and a small smirk lifted her dark lips at the sight of his weeping wounds. “That was one of your most wonderful deaths yet, little goat, I must say.”
“I am not speaking with you right now.”
Akkey: Akkey narrowed her eyes as the goat seemed to get more agitated, staring at the wall. She glanced at it but saw nothing. She folded her arms when he mumbled his last words, “Milae? What are you saying? You won’t talk to me?”
Milae: He looked back around at the half-breed again. “My apologies, Akkey. I do not wish to alarm you, but there is a Norn in this room that does not care for either of us.” The apprentice stared down at his leg with wide, disbelieving eyes as they bandaged his hock, still too startled to say anything.
She made a scoffing noise. “You will not let us play our little game, then. I see how it is.”
Milae ignored her. “She is…how do the young children of Haligan put it…a bitch.”
Skuld pointed a finger at his chest, and he clenched his fists as they began to sear with amber light, sending intense waves of uncomfortable pain radiating through his arms. His vision blurred slightly with vivid, hallucinogenic colors. He glared her down as the light dissipated, and his sight returned to normal.
Akkey: “A Norn…!” Akkey’s hand immediately reached for her pouch, as if nix powers could possibly help her at this moment. Her eyes widened at the harsh glow, staring between Milae and the empty wall in a panic, “What’s going on? Why is there a Norn here?”
Milae: “There is a Norn here,” Milae said patiently, while Skuld focused her gaze on Akkey, leaning off the wall and beginning to walk towards her, circling her with a disdainful gaze, “because this is part of my problem.” He lifted his arms, which still flared with an occasional brief amber trace of light down one of the lines of his scars. “I am blessed and cursed by the Norns, Akkey. This is why I am driven to seek the help of the gods whereas I would otherwise not need their meddling assistance.”
“Nix, you said?” She leaned in front of Akkey’s face, looking into her eyes. She sniffed in disgust. “Filthy little Helspawn, dogging death’s heels. You were meant to die at the hands of the witch. That was a gorgeous scene I had set up for your little Rebellion…”
He stood and pushed at her with a hoof, and her hip, the highest thing he could reach, dissipated and swirled like white ink in water around his gruff gesture. Skuld looked unimpressed. “That’s enough,” he said in a low voice. “Akkey, I know exactly who Frigga has and why she has her. Hel said she would assist me, but…in the meantime, I am…”
For the first time in a while, he looked uncertain. Scared.
“I don’t know what to do. Hel left and I have heard nothing. The power of the Norns falling to Frigga…Akkey, it would be ruinous.” His eyes darted to the valkyrie standing next to him. “And if Skuld knew this, she would not be attempting to hedge my way as she has been for the past century.”
“Frigga will never see a wisp of your seidr.” Skuld looked more serious. “If you only gave your power to the hands of the future instead of the past, Milae…you are a fool for running from me.”
“Did Hel give you any more valuable information?”
Akkey: “Norns…” she mumbled under her breath. More of the divine. It’s spinning out of control.
She nodded, a little confused. “Frigga has Eir because she owns her, does she not?”
“I don’t know anything else, unfortunately.” She continued, eyes still flitting around the room in search of something she couldn’t see, “She said that we would be able to figure something out ourselves. She did… have mercy and returned Hunter’s soul to him.”
Milae: “No, not…not Eir.” His eyes blurred slightly and he blinked rapidly. “Someone else, that I have been searching for…”
He bumped a fist against the top of his leg, looking in frustration at the ground. “Figure something out ourselves,” he muttered through a lump in his throat. “Typical. Typical! She will devour every god and then abandon us for the devils.” The apprentice gathered up their belongings and slowly scooted past them out of the hut, mumbling something about being needed elsewhere.
He clenched both fists, feeling a tremor course through his body. Skuld’s huge white wings unfurled and filled the space of the hut, feathertips curling and around him in a threatening curtain. “How did Frigga speak to you? Did you catch sight of her hiding place?”
There was a second, soft whisper. “She has her.”
Akkey: Akkey followed the apprentice out with her eyes, before bringing her gaze back to Milae. He looked so distraught, her chest tightened a little.
“Nobody saw her. It was just her voice; it floated around and sounded really distant, cracked.” She took a small step towards him, concerned for the goat, still unaware of Skuld, “Are you sure it’s someone else? She didn’t seem to… have anyone else. She only spoke of Eir and Hunter.” 
Milae: Milae ran a hoof through the thick fur on his head. He felt faint. Skuld’s eyes were trained on something behind him. Black feathers. 
“You think too much.”
He felt queasy asking his next words. “Akkey…the first thing I must know. As a hypothetical…would you be able to open a portal…where you…experienced Frigga’s presence?” He held out a hoof. “Not now. But if it were within your abilities…”
Akkey: “Wh-what…” Akkey stammered, taken aback by the nature of his question, “I do-I don’t… Milae, I need to have been to a place to be able to open a portal to it. I need to visualize the surroundings, the scenery, the point where the portals need to connect. I don’t–” She shook her head, “I can’t teleport to an… experience.” She exhaled, still trying to wrap her head around the concept. Can I?
Milae: “What if they were amplified somehow?” Milae’s eyes were shining intensely. He was already running calculations. He knew what the Norns could see in his head, and he could feel their gazes meeting each other like lightning finding purchase in the rich ground of a storm-ridden earth. 
Akkey: Akkey put a hand to her head, “I-I don’t know…” I’ve only ever opened to physical spaces… That… That was a space that was there… Yet also not… I already know where it is, I know where to connect it. I’m halfway there. If amplified… She looked up at him, brows creased, “Maybe…”
Milae: “You should try, perhaps with something similar.” He took her hand and squeezed it, energy beating through him despite his weariness. “Try it and tell me what happens. Ah, uh, second thing–tell me when Hunter is awake, if you happen to visit Yrus. I must speak with him.”
Akkey: She stared down at his hoof, then back up him. She opened her mouth, as if to protest, to wonder what in Hel’s name he was thinking, but she ended up saying nothing. Just try it. “Al…alright. I’ll let you know if he wakes up.”
Milae: He nodded quickly. He looked distant already, as he withdrew into his head. “I have to make notes. Lots of notes.” He looked up. “I will be back, don’t worry. I am part of the Rebellion now; I will be returning.”
Akkey: “Alright,” she said. He worried her, despite the short time knowing him; but he seemed to have a plan, so she can go along with it for now.
Category:BOTGD 2
Category:Events
Category:Act I
Category:Akkey Black
Category:Yun Milae