Aarti

Aarti tried hard not to snap the gum in her mouth. They hated that noise. They hated the fact that one of the much vaunted Amazons even chewed the stuff. And she knew for a fact that a few of them hated that she even existed.

Still, the temptation was nearly overwhelming. None of them chewed gum. It was contraband she'd had to have smuggled in with great effort from the one Amazon who didn't give her the constant side-eye. That hadn't stopped Aarti from testing it for purity the moment she was alone. Gum was delicious but also easily poisoned.

Having escaped from one prison, she wasn't willing to put herself in the position to wind up in another.

She tongued the gum into a space between her cheek and jaw as she watched Diana approach her. Aarti still couldn't bring herself to call the woman 'Mother' as she and Grandmother Hippolyta insisted. As usual, not a hair was out of place nor could a wrinkle could be seen anywhere on her clothing. Aarti considered it a bit unnatural. Clothes should at least crumple a little when you bent or sat, shouldn't they?

"Are you here again, Artemis?" Diana asked with a light smile. Behind her, expressions of anger and annoyance were quickly masked by her little entourage.

"Yes, my princess," Aarti said, eyes flickering from her mother to the entourage. One of them, Euphemis, wasn't quite able to hide her annoyance fully. As Diana looked around the small practice ring, Aarti shot Euphemis a mocking look that had her face reddening in anger. "Weird name girl," Aarti mouthed, watching in fascination as the other members turned to Euphemis and noted the increasing loss of control; everyone was aware of the constant fights the two engaged in.

"Have you been practicing your archery?" Diana asked, her gaze stopping at the five targets. They were sequentially fifty feet apart. Except for the farthest, there were arrows peppering the center of the target. "You are doing pretty well." The last target's arrows were just outside the bull's eye.

"Just a little," Aarti said, swiping the bow off the ground. "I wanted to be able defend myself if I needed to."

"For that, you need a sword," Euphemis sneered. "I would be happy to volunteer to spar with you, princess." That last was said in a faux cheerful tone.

"That would be excellent," Diana said as a chime was heard. She touched her belt and flicked open a communicator. "See that she gains some proficiency. Hello? What? Again? I'll be right there!"

"Half-breed scum!" Euphemis snarled as Diana sprinted away. Aarti stared at her expressionlessly. Euphemis and her goon squad never did things in the light of day, so to speak, but Aarti hadn't been exaggerating.

Even as they started to surround her and draw their swords, she fitted a practice arrow to her bow. Unlike the usual ones, she'd wrapped the heads in a weird sort of pouch. With a quick, practiced move, she unleashed it not on Euphemis but on the Amazon next to her.

The Amazon swung her sword, smashing the arrow and the weird arrowhead. A cloud of choking green powder erupted.

Aarti took a deep breath and plunged through the encirclement, dodging wildly swinging swords. She'd had more than enough experience with 'practice' injuries. She sent up a brief thanks to her old friends for slipping her the formula for the powder as she skidded down the hill.

She'd found a cave nearby that no one seemed to go near. Aarti lightly leapt, springing from bush to bush, trying to minimize her trail. She knew that the Amazons that tended to run with Euphemis specialized in scouting and tracking. Aarti had an inkling that it had to do with the fact that she was hard to track; even the more senior Amazons found her a bit difficult to find when Aarti wanted to stay hidden.

Aarti came to a stop before the cave and slowly walked backwards into it, using a branch to obscure her footprints. A smile similar to Diana's quirked her lips as she disappeared into the darkness.

Aarti paused and finally scrambled in her little knapsack for a torch and tinder. Her lips twisted in a wry smile. Even though they were connected to the rest of the world, Amazons still disdained modern technology, preferring to stick to the 'old ways' as they put it. It was more like the 'annoying ways' to Aarti.

With a practiced movement, she lit the torch, praying that the whole thing would catch. She'd wrapped it specially so that it wouldn't give out much light. That'd taken a lot of research in the library and experimentation in her quarters. She at least had privacy there. The librarians didn't like noise and forcefully evicted anyone who made any.

They loved Aarti who was quiet and sedate in their presence. The head librarian even fed her baklava whenever Aarti stopped by, accompanied by warm towels to wipe her fingers afterwards. There were times Aarti wished that the older Amazon was her mother instead of Diana.

Aarti frowned at her feet. The floor of the cave had turned weird a few steps earlier, and now she discovered that it was paved with smooth, flat tiles. The flickering torchlight dyed them a pearly pink that was much at odds with Amazonian culture. Aarti looked up and at the walls. They were similarly tiled with empty sconces every few feet.

'Weird…why would they pave a cave?' Aarti thought as she continued forward.

She walked for a few minutes more. Checking her watch, she discovered that she had been hiding away for two hours. Aarti's mouth quirked into a mean smile. Those Amazons would have some explaining to do once Grandmother Hippolyta found that they had no idea where she was after volunteering for spar practice. She'd long since found that her grandmother strongly believed in following rules.

While her birth didn't follow the rules, she'd long since accepted Aarti with open arms. Aarti figured that was because of the way her mother had been conceived.

With a sigh, she stowed her watch away in her knapsack. If her mother or grandmother found it, they would confiscate it as contraband. The watch was her only minimal contact with her old friends. She was a bit worried about Court. The last she'd heard, he was cursing and swearing vengeance on some guy who'd been annoying him.

She tossed the thought to the back of her brain. If it was serious, Lucy would fix it if only to get away from her own parents. Aarti fully acknowledged that getting bullied by Amazons she could mostly hold her own against was better than dodging whatever fresh hell Lucy's dad brewed up on a whim.

She fully admitted that it answered all the questions she'd ever had about Lucy's imperviousness to poisonous substances. It'd been so extreme that the researchers in the labs had been concocting mass destruction weapon-level poisons to use on her.

Aarti was distracted from her thoughts by the long growl. She looked up to see a canine in front of her. It was chained to the post of a marble gate, the chain gleaming in the faint light from under the gate it lay in front of. At her approach, two braziers on either side of the gateway lit up, giving off an eerie bluish-white light.

The canine had three heads. One head was sleeping soundly on a richly embroidered satin pillow. It was old and stained with dog drool, as if no one had changed it in a very long time. The second head was peering in her direction with malicious interest, as if debating whether it was worth the time to lunge at her and bite. The last head only gave her a disinterested look before returning to nose around in an empty bowl set on the ground. There was another bowl as well that had 'water' spelled out in ancient Greek on it but was bone dry.

Aarti felt her anger spike inside her. She tried fiercely to quell it. Ever since they'd brought her to Themyscira, the Amazons had been telling her over and over that anger was worthless and unneeded in Amazons, that it clouded one's judgement in battle and made a warrior weak and useless. She hadn't been able to muster any response to that. She was only ten when she'd arrived, and that had been five years ago.

Except for the brief stint when she'd managed to sneak onto the transport for the Liberation, she'd been stuck on this island since then. Aarti's only relief was that they'd managed to free the younger children and her friends, especially Ella. Before her escape, she'd heard the researchers discuss putting a limiter as well as a control collar on the young girl. Part of Aarti's fury back then had been that; Ella had only been four at the time.

"Hey, boy, thirsty?" Aarti tried, dredging up the words from her lessons.

She found ancient Greek to be a harder lesson to master than she'd originally thought, but taking the lessons kept her from being sent to the sparring arenas more often. It was amazing what her grandmother thought was necessary for her to learn.

The hungry head turned in her direction, one lip curling upwards to show a sharp fang.

"Why, no, I'm just looking for sustenance for fun," it snarled back in perfect English, even sporting a bit of an upper-class posh accent.

Aarti felt her mouth drop open even as she reflexively tightened her hold on the torch.