Levant's hearing

She turned her gaze back to me, float up to my ear with no other motion. When she spoke, it wasn’t with her mental voice but as actual sound, carried on the wind. I looked up to see Vulturnus stretched idly atop a lamppost, unbothered by it being a Hologram. Xihai stood at the edge of a drain, eyes closed as water rushed beneath her. Suryasta stood behind me when I looked back, his demeanor at once reminiscent of a fire about to start and the works mankind had drawn from the flames—dangerously and restrained.

“Okay,” I said, patting Levant’s head as I rose. She smiled slightly, a simple, gentle expression not at all fitting with the sounds that had come from her lips. “Let’s go see, then.”

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It probably went without saying that cities were noisy. With thousands and thousands and thousands of people living their lives, it was only natural for it to be loud. Even beyond what was immediately audible, though, there was a lot to be heard in even out of the way places, if your ears were good enough.

Levant’s were. Or rather, as an Air Elemental, she didn’t need ears to begin with. Because all the air within a rather large volume was under her influence, she could ‘hear’ things simply by the vibrations they left in the medium. She could feel sound in a way far beyond all but the most exceptional creatures or machines could perceive.

Granted, a lot of the things she heard, she probably just ignored. As I said, in a place like a city, there were a lot sounds and most of them probably didn’t mean anything to her. Levant was the wind, old beyond reckoning despite her young appearance, and, in her ‘life’ before becoming my Elemental, had probably born witness to the rise and fall of empires, great loves and betrayals, and countless acts of heroism and depravity alike—but what did any of those things matter to the wind?

Hell, from the perspective of the Elements, Mankind was a new fad—and, between the Grimm and ourselves, probably not one that would stick around too much longer. Even if the wind somehow did have a mind of its own, some strange form of awareness independent of its summoning, what reason did it have to care if we laughed or cried, suffered or rejoiced?

But I cared about those things. And Levant cared that I cared.

So when she heard, amidst the countless noises of the city, the sound of people suffering, she whispered them to me—and I acted. It wasn’t a single sound, not even close; the sad truth was that in a city as large as Vale, there were countless people suffering in ways beyond counting. There were people weeping over broken hearts, people drinking to numb the pain, addicts shaking and wasting away in back alleys, sounds of violence, the results of accidents, sickness, poverty, hunger—

There were a lot of people in pain. I knew mentally that it was nothing in the grand scheme of things, that only a tiny fraction of the population was suffering at any given time—but a fraction was suffering all the time. The faces changed, the reasons changed, but someone was always getting hurt, whether by others or themselves or things that no one could control. And there…there were so many. Another horrible truth was that you couldn’t save everyone; you couldn’t even help everyone. There were lots of reasons, from situational factors to opportunity costs to countless other things, but you couldn’t. You couldn’t even come close. I knew that the moment I heard a hundred voices in pain, listened to a wave of suffering so immense that individuals were dragged under and erased. There was nothing I could do to help them all.

But not being able to help everyone, I reckoned, was no reason not to try to help as many as you could, nor did it lessen the value of helping people.

So I tried. From sound alone, much less the wash of different voices Levant brought to my ears, it was impossible to determine who was most in need or where they were or who should be helped in what order. This was, I realized a bit belatedly, my first time truly out in the city with Levant, to say nothing of the first time she was doing this. She was trying to help but I don’t think she really knew how; she knew that people were in pain, but I wasn’t certain she completely understood the concept and I, her main link to the human experience, probably wasn’t the best example to learn from in that regard. Neither Levant or I would be bothered, or even truly wounded, by say…a few bullets or a car wreck, so what did either of those things mean to Levant? She wasn’t truly alien, she was intelligent and capable of learning, but this…this was something she’d had neither experience with nor use for.

So instead, she just relayed everything, knowing I didn’t like it when people were in pain. And that told me a lot, but not really what I needed to do something about it. Later, perhaps, I could teach Levant how to distinguish between and decide the value of targets, but for now…for lack of any better option, I just asked her to cut down her range, limiting the number of voices to those closest before letting her guide me to specific voices. I spent a moment listening and heard something very…familiar, picking it out amidst the noise.

She pointed and I followed.