Lazarus- The Academy- Midday

Lazarus dropped the cat. It was unintentional. He hoped the cat would forgive him, it really shouldn’t blame him. He was currently engaging in a battle for his sanity. The cat would understand, if it didn’t. Lazarus didn’t really care, he had bigger problems. In his curiosity he’d gone back to actively sorting through his perception of the Essence in the room and when Mistress Hazumi had addressed him by his Title he’d immediately whipped his head to see who the melodic voice belonged to and it was like getting hit by a freight train, a freight train traveling at speed approaching the sound barrier.

Lazarus was actually quite proud that he didn’t drop to his knees and hold his head. Or let his jaw drop and drool. Or start gibbering like a maniac. He managed to shut out his Essence sight, after the little glimpse he got of Hazumi through it, unprepared. It was like intimately knowing a force of nature. Lazarus blinked and shifted his sight back into the real world and felt like he got punched in the gut as he took in Hazumi for the first time. Gorgeous was a good word to describe her. It didn’t quite do justice but it was a good try. Lazarus fought with his own mind trying to get a handle on some very human responses and the experience he had just had viewing Hazumi is such a way. The image sent tremors through his psyche and he could feel it cracking. He managed to acknowledge her curtsy with a nod of his own as she departed. Finally he grabbed Esperacchius and forced Essence into the spells guarding his mind. They held the pieces of his mind in place while he sealed away the image of Hazumi through his essence sight deep in his subconscious. 

With a shake of his head Lazarus looked around. Hazumi had departed to attend to something else. He was about to pull his Essence sight back into focus when he thought better of it. Better to absorb the image of Hazumi through the sight first and let his mind adjust to the information it had received without a filter. Lazarus was convinced that the human mind had very few limits but it was also like stretching. If you pushed it too quickly, it could tear and it took a very long time to heal and sometimes it never fully healed. Lazarus knew that all too well, and while his mind could take in far more than the average human he knew that there were things that could still damage it if he wasn’t very careful. That being said he had the strangest urge to follow Hazumi. He stood mulling it over. Maybe he could find a drink first.

The drink was easy to locate. Lazarus had found a chair too. Fancy that. He’d lost track of the cat and the other entities observing him, but he didn’t really care. Alternating between sipping from the scotch he was holding and trying to slowly and very carefully re expose himself to the image of Hazumi through his Essence sight. Like a person being exposed to early morning light he carefully scratched away at the barriers he had erected around the image. As he peeled back the barriers it was like a camera flash when you came out of a dark room. It hurt like hell for a few minutes as he let his mind adjust to it. The scotch helped, he suspected he’d also need a dose of some sort of pain killer after this too to quell the rising headache. 

Normally he’d have waited till he was somewhere with less distractions and more booze but he was too intrigued by Hazumi to wait. A small part of Lazarus piped up and volunteered that perhaps he wasn’t use to be being caught off guard by anything and that forcing himself to come to terms with the image was his way of compensating for a moment of weakness. His ego quickly beat the thought into silence even if it did make Lazarus pensive. 

After another scotch and about twenty minutes of work he’d assimilated about sixty percent of the image and figured that was enough for now. Maybe now it was time to see what else was going on around here. While Lazarus could certainly dance, play and sing it wasn’t really something he did in public. In fact come to think of it he hadn’t danced since Kathleen had died. With that he stood and started through the crowd singing under his breath so against the tune already in the air, the snatches of the tune that he sung were an irish tune called the [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hF6MTwACKZk&index=33&list=PLnlYdMkZq0NBvLegtIzTLcaEXcDroDaC8]Star of the County Down[/url]. It always made him think of Kathleen