Thereafter Chapter 3: Alicia
The third of the Heroes of Legend, Alicia Thorn, has a frustrating day and takes it out on her punching bag until a familiar and powerful song takes her far away.
Chapter 3: Alicia
The sun was rising over New York City, and Alicia wanted to punch something. It didn’t matter much what, but out of pragmatic concern for her well-being and the well-being of her property, she had decided to bequeath the honor upon the punching bag in her gym room. She had called it her gym once to make it sound better, but that implied a space that wasn’t economically feasible in New York, no matter how many followers you had. Well, almost, one of those dudebro game streamer boys could probably afford it if they stopped getting involved in pyramid schemes and cryptocurrency scams for a hot minute.
Alicia caught herself, this wasn’t productive, hell it wasn’t even on topic from the previous digression, now what was she doing again?
The blank page of her social media suite beamed at her from her computer screen. Oh yes, she thought glumly to herself, she was ostensibly doing her job. From experience, Alicia knew that she had to get the boring part of the process done first thing, or she’d either forget or postpone it for another day. Granted, queuing up posts for her socials wasn’t quite as boring as the data entry jobs she had in her youth, nor was it as endlessly frustrating as her time as a PT, but once you’d made around 1000 posts, they all started to read the same. It was the most important skill of the influencer, she thought as she started composing yet another scream into the void, to remain ignorant of the inherent repetitiveness of the profession. If Sisyphus is happy, Alicia reasoned, there’d have to be some level of forgetfulness in the picture.
At least the picture series she was dropping today was novel. Some new yoga pose or something from a video game had turned into a bit of a thing, and while Alicia wasn’t crazy about the idea, recreating the pose with some of her own twist on it made for easy content. Of those dance crazes she had ridden to dizzying heights a few years back was any indication, it was usually popular content as well.
Alicia took a moment to go through the photographs in which she had demonstrated considerable flexibility and lacking concern for her own comfort. Alicia had always considered her build slender first and foremost, but there was perhaps no choice but to change that to “athletic,” given the definition of her thighs and back muscles. She looked strong, and that made her feel some semblance of joy in all the annoyance.
The photographer on this one had been good, a lot of them never learned how to light black skin properly, and so failed to capture the fruits of Alicia’s ongoing body project. Still, the man had suggested Alicia put her hair up as to “not seem so wild,” so Alicia was still not so sure if she wanted to use him again. Alicia poured not-inconsiderable amounts of time and attention on her natural hair, and it was one of those points she didn’t want to argue with people about. Her hair was cool and she was proud of it. Past that faux pas, the photographer had been reasonably professional about the ways in which he was racist, and maybe that was all you could ask for these days.
The photo set they had made together was kind of thing the Internet liked, but it had been a pain in the ass to get there. First there was the question of the pose, the wide foot stance combined with bending at the hips was challenging as all hell, and to sell the pose you had to look comfortable with it. Alicia had been swearing like a sailor during that photo shoot, but there was no denying the end results were impressive.
Alicia pursed her lips, for his faults, the photographer had managed to capture the precise moments where the brewing fury in her brown tourmaline eyes had looked more smugly challenging than rancorously angry over the insistent tug of her hamstrings. It was a decent fiction to operate, like Alicia saw the world coming at her and thought “yeah OK, what else do you got?” while bending so deeply at the hip she leaned her elbows on the floor. It wasn’t a true representation of her thoughts, at that moment or in general, but it was a good enough facet of the truth to express to the world.
In a perfect world, Alicia could see herself going full bodybuilder, unafraid of looking strong, beholden to nobody but herself, her reps, and the need to desiccate semi-regularly. It wasn’t even a visual thing, really, all she wanted was to not feel like her strength and her abilities was something that needed to be apologized for, a personal failing that required penance. Like those summer dress shoots she did every year. God she hated those.
Sadly, it could not be helped. Society had expectations, and when your livelihood dependent on the approval of fickle followers, you really couldn’t take risks. Granted, the followers didn’t pay her per se, they were the product and not the customer after all, but her ability to entice their interest was still highly relevant.
Alicia grew dimly aware that she had finished queuing up posts in the middle of this argument with herself. Remembering the last time that happened, she took the extra few minutes to double-check that the text she had written was in fact the boilerplate SEO-optimized text in the style she had come to understand as Influencerish, and not the furious rant that had been brewing in her chest since some time in her teens.
With that tedious paperwork out of the way, Alicia hastened to do the one thing she wanted to do, the one thing her body was yelling for in every language it could. It was time to work out.
Most of the time, Alicia preferred to run some sort of planned program. Starting with some light aerobic exercises, like a jog on the treadmill or biking for a bit, and then work through her muscle groups in an ordered fashion. Today, she had The Anger in her, and she needed to wear it the fuck out. She managed to trick herself into some treadmill interval sprints as a warmup, but after that, she went straight for the punching bag.
Alicia didn’t practice martial arts. She had taken some self-defense classes when first moving to town, and had kind of started developing a style of punches and kicks from there. It wasn’t something she was keen on showing anyone unless sudden and inexpertly applied violence was called for with some urgency, but it gave her something to structure these days when only inflicting her frustrations on the world on her stoic punching bag would do. As she opened up with a few precise jabs, Alicia let the flood gate in her mind open and all her annoyances and gripes started flowing out, first as a spout and soon after like a firehose.
It was some bullshit how she had to walk this razor-thin line of body fat % to neither seem fat nor “too muscular” whatever the hell that actually meant
Alicia jabbed at the midsection of the bag, striking with a closed fist at the leather. She was precise, measured, almost but not quite holding back as she got into the swing of things.
It was some bullshit how so many of her clients treated her as an advertising department intern and not talent, hell, not even the multimedia production professional that she was.
She let her strikes flow over in elbow strikes, hammering at the bag without the slightest bit of care put into accuracy.
It was some bullshit how she and people like her were always in the media about some terrible societal trend, body image issues, attention seeking behavior, anorexia, bulimia, bullying.
At this point she had started weaving in kicks, both full kicks and clobbering knee kicks, the part of Alicia’s brain that told her sensible suggestions like “drink some water” and “maybe another set of reps isn’t necessary, actually” noted that the pace of her attacks was growing fast, too fast by half. Like usual, Alicia wasn’t listening.
It was some bullshit that she was expected to fight all these fires she didn’t start, and the world kept crumbling around her, and seemingly everyone knows but does nothing by it… It was some bullshit that she could never go back there, never could sing the Deep Song again, never could see her again.
With one last, furious strike with the heel of her palm, Alicia sent the punching bag flying off its hook, slamming into the wall with a thud that Alicia felt deep in her soul.
“Well,” Alicia mumbled to herself as she stopped to let the surprise of her sudden sundering strike wash over her. She was strong, but not THAT strong, surely? “There goes my peace accord with the neighbors…”
Alicia squatted down at the thoroughly defeated punching bag. It seemed like the attachment point hanging it from the ceiling had given out under her onslaught.
“That’s weird,” Alicia found herself saying. She had taken great care that her equipment was as secured to walls, ceilings or floors as thoroughly as at all possible. Still, the screws the contractor had used must’ve been faulty or something. “It’s almost like…” Alicia cut herself off, she couldn’t start dreaming about all of that again. Even if it had actually been real, the Steppelands, the Dragon Thane, Lia, all of it, then she certainly was back on boring ol’ Earth, and had been for at least 20 years. She couldn’t call on the strength of the Deep Song, heavens know she had tried.
And yet, Alicia found herself thinking. Did she not hear the careful opening tones of that very sound? It didn’t sound like it came from anywhere, as much as it just came into existence around her. The gratingly deep bass of the elder singers, the powerful baritone of the adult warriors, the nasal alto tri-harmonies she had participated in, hell, she could almost pick up the near-imperceptible vocalization of the children of the clan. Yes, there was no mistaking it. This was the Deep Song. It was not a nonmagical recreation of it, even. She could feel the presence of magic, how it made her light-headed through the inexorable link between mild hyperventilation and the strangely liminal feeling of Magic, real Magic, Magic that was as old as the earth, as fundamental, as strong as the bedrock. It was a Magic that was everywhere, in the chittering of the burrowing creatures, in the cries of the flying creatures, in the deep song that could be called up to flood your very being.
Alicia cried at the glory of it all, she couldn’t help herself. After all these years, she was going back, she was going to run like a wind again, she was going to strike like bolts of lightning from Mother Sky, she was going to be free in a way she could never be in this flawed, uncaring world. If this meant the Dragon Thane was back, she’d kick his scaly cloaca so far up his insides he’d be able to taste it, if this meant the Dragon Clan was back she’d shatter them all. Whatever it took, she would do it, and she would be glad to do it, she would be laughing and cherishing every moment of glorious mayhem, finding strength in every scant rest, in every scrap of dried meat, in every hot, stinking body around her. Alicia closed her eyes as the Deep Song grew to a crescendo, and before she opened them again, she was elsewhere. Somewhat distressingly, it was not the elsewhere she expected.
Author’s Note: We continue with the cast introduction. Alicia is interesting to me since a lot has changed with her during outlining for this book. At first, the Alicia role was rather flat, a warrior woman in the mold of Rachel from Animorphs but more along the butch end of the butch/femme spectrum. Now, this is OK as far as a character sketch goes but it does lack texture.
What really brought Alicia to life for me was the anger. Anger gets a bad rap in fiction I think. It’s an emotional response to unfairness or mistreatment, it can be a powerful driving force of change for the better. This isn’t to say it’s all good. Alicia struggles with her anger, not because she is wrong to feel it, but because it doesn’t really have anywhere to go. Alicia is angry at the world for forcing her to present a pleasant marketable version of her self, and at herself for bending to that pressure. The former, I feel is entirely justifiable, but the latter is probably too harsh, and more a consequence of Alicia being unable to use her anger to change the world. I’m certainly seeing a lot of myself in Alicia, but not as much as our next, and last, protagonist.
There’s a bunch more to this, but I' feel I’m going to get into the many reasons why it’s frustrating to be Alicia Thorn both in and out of various fantasy worlds during the story. For now, I’m mostly just looking forward to share some specific frustrations of hers in the next couple of chapters. One of them is about 8 inches shorter than her and quite enamored with her entire deal, one’s a fellow enjoyer of physical exertion and a professional pain in the ass, and one has been hinted to in this very chapter.
-V.S.D