“The Mentor’s Way”

“No! No! No! This part’s too vague and this whole section is completely wrong!”

Those were the initial words of complaint that I remember Nuju uttering in what would be the first of many lessons with me. I wasn’t surprised. I had read his many academic evaluations shortly before he had appeared before me. All of them spoke very highly of him; many of the Seers who had taken him under their wing believed he was destined to become a fine scholar. Indeed, he was believed to be one of the brightest and most promising students Ko-Metru had seen in decades, maybe even centuries.

However, there was a catch with taking on a student like Nuju — I’ve found there usually are in these sorts of things. For all his cleverness, he was said to be… well, ‘impatient’ was the politest word I managed to glean from twelve of my peers. And while firm in his convictions (a promising characteristic in any student), Nuju was said to be particularly stubborn — more than a few teachers had said that he struggled to see things from other perspectives. But then, of course he was struggling! He was still young after all, and bright ones like him always had so many hills to die on.

From his desk, the young Ko-Matoran glowered at me coldly. I took no offence at his harsh gaze; among us Matoran of Ice, it was all too frequent a response. To the outside eye, it seemed as if we viewed silence as a perfectly adequate greeting. But among us, silence was its very own language, conveying moods and emotions as loud as a Le-Matoran commentator at an Akilini tournament. And in the silence between teacher and student, there was much being said in the unsaid. Nobody likes to be proven wrong, but Nuju’s eyes gleamed with something worse than frustration. They glowed with disappointment.

He held out the tablet he had just finished reading. “This cannot be a useful learning tool, Ihu.”

I walked to where he was sitting. An array of stone tablets was scattered messily across the top of his table, each lecturing on a different branch of philosophy or science. Nuju held out his hand expectantly, offering up the tablet he was specifically displeased with. I took it and examined it closely.

“Nuju, you are critiquing a highly acclaimed document,” I began. “This text compiles the notes of some of Ko-Metru’s finest scientists. I do not see how their shared thoughts on the Kanoka creation process could be inaccurate, especially since their ideas have been in practice ever since.”

“The information is hundreds of years old,” Nuju grumbled. “In the centuries since, scores of mask makers have proposed new and better techniques to create Kanohi. These techniques are obsolete and outdated.”

“And what do those mask makers base their progress on?” I asked him. “They will always refer back to the initial data in some way. The technology that created the first Kanoka, regardless of how old it is, laid the foundation for an entire industry in this city.”

Nuju grumbled for a moment, his eyepiece whizzing back and forth as he re-examined the tablet in much closer detail. I smiled at my new student courteously, despite the icy glare he shot at me. He still had so much to learn.

“Why am I studying this anyway?” he demanded, daring to sound almost defeated. By now, his face had contorted so fiercely and with such frustration that one could be forgiven for believing he was wearing a different mask.

“I am not here to be starstruck.”

I considered this and smiled at him, from one stargazer to another. Dodging the irony, Nuju pressed on.

“If I were,” he continued, “then I’d be down in the schools of Onu-Metru. I know when I am right, and I know that Kanoka has no relevance in either the study of the future, or my own future.”

I had expected this much from Nuju. My smile fell from my face, leaving behind an altogether sterner expression.

“You ask me why this is relevant, why it matters. It matters because Metru Nui’s greatest advancements have almost never relied upon stargazing or solving cryptic puzzles.”

I turned away from him and began to pace across my observatory. Beyond my essential stargazing equipment, the room was spared any of my personal effects. I have, for many years now, been of the belief that a workspace serves equally as a reflection of its occupant’s character. For this reason I had made sure my quarters revealed as little as possible. And for this moment in particular, perhaps it was all the better for that. I came to a stop near a massive window that overlooked the spires of Ko-Metru, a glass empire framed by a crystalline skyline.

Nuju, naturally, frowned at my silence. “But studying Kanoka does not help us learn about the future.”

My shoulders heaved with a sigh. “To understand the future, we must understand the decisions that led us here in the first place. We can never truly dismiss our past, it’s the rudder that guides us towards our destinies. It informs the way we understand it.”

When I turned to face Nuju again, he had a look of pure, incredulous shock on his face, as if I had just muttered some foul Po-Matoran curse in the Great Temple.

“With all due respect, Ihu, the past is something we leave the Onu-Matoran to bumble about. Any Seer worth his work knows our future is determined by ever-changing patterns in the present. The past merely tells us what has gone before. It cannot guide us into our future.”

I frowned.

“Without history, how do we study the future? Our past shapes us into what we’re going to be. Every mistake we make affects the way they look ahead. What are our lives, if not a dialogue between what has happened to us and what we hope will happen next?”

Silence. Nuju’s stare again, which had now made the complex leap from annoyed, to exasperated, to white-hot Nova Blast of undergraduate contempt. In the unsaid, Nuju’s face was saying something to the effect of:

What in Mata Nui’s name are you talking about? What does any of that even mean? Are you being serious, are you an idiot?

Which, when he returned to the spoken word again, translated into:

“This explains why your peers don’t like you, sir.”

I couldn’t help but grin at the comment. “I see they are being polite again.”

It was true that the name ‘Ihu’ carried with it as much acclaim as it did derision. For years, I had endured the white noise that comes with being one of Metru Nui’s leading thinkers. It was an inflated reputation, but I could only blame my own knack for prophecies for that. Many times over, I had deciphered Metru Nui’s most cryptic prophecies with a standard that had never been matched, though in more recent years, I had become far more suited to the lectern than the observatory. Many of these were expected stops for a Ko Metru scholar — the Knowledge Tower celebrity speaking circuit was a well-worn path — but more recently I had been called upon to lecture in places well beyond my district — the schools of Ga-Metru, the Onu-Metru Archives and even in the most private chambers of the Coliseum.

However, a personal philosophy that was all-inclusive of the past, while popular with Onu-Matoran, did not sit well within the elite circles of the Ko-Matoran. Personally, I did not mind their gawping and gossip. It makes my job all the more fun, truth be told.

I gave Nuju a friendly smile and pressed on.

“Those peers you refer to are stubborn and narrow-minded, and I assure you I am neither. But for now, if I’ve done my job, you should have plenty to think about. We’re going to have many more lessons like this, so a change in perspective might go a long way in making them all the more enjoyable.”

Nuju snorted as he raised himself from his desk, then left the room without another word. It appeared ‘Thank you’ or ‘goodbye’ were to be a luxury. I went to my window and considered the horizon before me. He wasn’t my student, not in mind or spirit, but he was still new to the Knowledge Towers. He would need a helping hand through his first few hurdles, especially with Ko-Metru’s finest watching with hungry eyes.

I would be more than happy to help him, but it would be up to Nuju to accept it and do the most important thing that any Matoran could possibly do.

Listen.

I was standing in the lobby of my Knowledge Tower, one of the most distinguished of the Towers of Thought. Apart from the mechanical chirping of the nearby Vahki drones, not a single word had been uttered. That said, even if I had wanted to speak, I would have no doubt have been escorted off the premise — the nickname “the quiet Metru” was a surprisingly literal one. That said, it was almost a relief to know that the nearby scholars were bound by silence, if only because it refrained them from talking amongst themselves.

It had been two months since I had become Nuju’s mentor, and needless to say, he had not been responding well to our lessons. My theories appalled him and my heresies outraged him, while my life’s work was little more than the scribblings of a jumped-up hack. Nuju had attempted to dethrone me more than once in my own classroom, much like many of my colleagues had when I myself was a young Seer. He had not been the first to try and was unlikely to be the last.

Many times over, Nuju had presented me hours of work that I had dismissed with the wave of my hand. There were always small oversights — too little attention to detail, too many presumptions in his arguments. He did not hate the fact that I criticized his work, he hated that I was right. Now, it seemed, it had finally gotten to him.

I approached the group of Vahki, keeping a wary eye on the huddled scholars that dotted the corners of the room, their eyes boring holes into the back of my head as I approached. The squad leader, clearly of the Keerakh variety, split off from the rest of its team and approached me, taking long, calculated strides as it came closer. Beside it stood a serenely blanked-faced figure I recognized as Nuju, who was staring up at the ceiling with a placid, wide-eyed interest.

I sighed as I realized the cause of Nuju’s mindset. The Staff of Confusion was said to be the most merciful of the Vahki stun tools, far more compassionate than the Staff of Erasing. However, I had always found it unnerving to see the aimless drifters borne of the Keerakh’s power, idly wandering in the streets.

The Vahki commander turned and issued an order encoded in a mechanical whistle to its comrades. Immediately, the other Keerakh turned to the huddles of Ko-Matoran watchers and began shooing them off. I looked up into the empty blue eyes of the commander, who stood firm and motionless. I cleared my throat.

“I heard of what Nuju did. I do not condone his actions, but I want your assurance that he has not been harmed.”

The Keerakh titled its head slowly, its mechanical eyes never flickering off me. A short pause ensued and a sinister silence clutched us. All the while, Nuju continued to stare at the ceiling. I cleared my throat again once I realized how long I had been rooted to the spot.

“Well, thank you for your assistance. I will escort Nuju back to my observatory.”

The Vahki didn’t reply. Instead, it broke itself from its motionless stance and made its way to the lobby entrance with the rest of its unit. Within mere seconds, they vanished into the blizzard outside. I frowned for a moment, then turned and herded the confused Nuju through the tower’s winding passageways. We strode past several rooms of prophecy, ancient centres of learning and far too many laboratories. Along the way, scholars and students scowled at me disapprovingly, though I paid their judgments no thought.

By the time we had returned to my observatory, near the very top of the tower, Nuju was back to his old self again, though he refused to look at me until we were within the safety of my inner sanctum. I seated him down in one of my armchairs before turning on him sternly. At times like these, it helped my office was soundproof.

“What was that?”

Nuju shrugged. “A protest.”

I fought back the urge to pull a face.

“A protest? Screaming down the corridors of the Towers of Thought is not a protest, especially when all you’re doing is complaining about me.”

Nuju shrugged. “Sounds like a protest to me.”

“Not when you’re disturbing other scholars in a no-speaking zone! You know as well as I do that the Vahki monitor those buildings around the clock, they’ll arrested students for making even the slightest noise. What you did out there wasn’t smart or clever, it was petulant and it was stupid! And what did you hope achieve with this? Humiliate me in front of my colleagues, make my teachings seem foolish?”

Nuju began his explanation, but his confidence was already in retreat. “What can I say? I’m beginning to think they’re right about you—”

“If you were looking to embarrass me, then you succeeded: I was quite the fool for taking you as my student.”

A stunned silence. Nuju did not say a word, but I could see the hurt in his eyes, and I immediately regretted what I had said. My anger subsiding for guilt, I sighed and took a seat beside the young Seer. It was a long time before we spoke again.

“I’m sorry,” I finally said with a heavy heart. “I didn’t mean that.”

Nuju did not look back, but I heard his voice. “I’m sorry too.”

A great pause. The unsaid filled the silence yet again. When it became unbearable, I looked to him and this time caught his gaze.

“You have a brilliant mind, Nuju, and it will take you very far. But you’re doing yourself no favors, carrying on like this. Maybe you were right to be angry at me, but whatever point you were trying to prove, this sort of will go such a long way in hindering you. You know that, don’t you?”

Something changed in Nuju’s eyes in that moment. It was subtle of course, but the change was there nonetheless.

“Yeah,” he mumbled, a quiet but earnest concession.

I savored this moment, small as it may be. Nuju had not been my most yielding of students, but I had never wished him any ill. This moment was fraught and unsteady, but maybe after so much resistance, after so much anger, maybe now I was getting somewhere with him. Nuju’s gaze then turned to the great telescope that sat on my balcony.

“Perhaps we should see what the stars hold for us tonight,” he ventured earnestly.

“Not tonight, I think.” My eyes were fixed on the twin suns setting in the distance, the orange skyline joining them in the retreat.

“You need to rest. The mysteries of the Great Spirit will still be waiting here when we return tomorrow.”

Like before, Nuju left without another word. Like before, I returned to the window, stared at the emerging stars and looked beyond.

A lot can change in the span of a year.

Turaga Dume can create a new public holiday, Ko-Metru can even win an Akilini tournament for the first time in 1,000 years, and In-between all of that, a mentor and student can become friends for the first time.

From my most defiant student to my most avid listener, Nuju’s stubbornness had finally been tempered enough for him to concede on at least some fronts.

He was still as sharp as ever, and analyzed everything that crossed his desk with unrivaled scrutiny, but he no longer did this to prove my folly. Or at least, not intentionally. Unsurprisingly, lessons had become much easier with him here in the Knowledge Towers. He had even been permitted back into the Towers of Thought. The intelligentsia of Ko-Metru had begun to forgive him for his earlier transgressions, which I knew from experience was not an easy process. The upside was that it had brought some much-needed normality back into my classroom.

Today, however, I had decided to do something a little bit different.

Feeling the need to sweep aside any lingering tensions, I had decided to take him with me on an excursion to Ga-Metru. I myself was familiar with the region; many Ga-Matoran teachers had asked me to lecture here and had more than once offered me a position at their schools. All were very respectable institutions, but they were not suited to me — I could never really wrap my head around those Proto Level examinations. But coming to this district, and walking among its dazzling splendor, remains one of the great joys of my life.

Unfortunately, however, Nuju was not quite as well traveled as I was, and was immediately thrust out of his comfort zone. Like many Ko-Matoran, he rarely left the Knowledge Towers he was admitted into, let alone the Metru itself, so to see his reaction to the stunning scenes of Ga-Metru for the first time was something truly special.

We began our tour with a trip around the Fountains of Wisdom, followed by a tour of the Great Temple itself, and then went on an expedition along the coastline via a plucky service called Macku’s Canoes. By the late afternoon, Nuju had chiseled up what looked like forty-five pages of notes. This was not surprising.

“Next time, I should take you to see the musicians in Le-Metru,” I remember saying as we crossed an intricate bridge overlooking the beautiful Protodermis Falls. “Nobody makes up an orchestra quite like the Le-Matoran. Their symphonies are truly spectacular, provided the choirs aren’t singing in Chute-Speak.”

Nuju grunted in acknowledgement and leaned against the railing, staring out at the orange suns and the rushing waters of the Falls. He had heard me, but he wasn’t listening. Instead, he took a moment to soak up the atmosphere of the world before him. There was peace here, a harmony that couldn’t be found anywhere else in the city. Seconds ticked by as the two of us just stood there, watching the waters topple over the cliff tops.

“Why did you bring me here?” he asked gently. I did not look at him.

“To prove a point,” I replied.

Nuju laughed warmly. “What a surprise!”

Ignoring his sarcasm for once, I continued.

“I wanted to prove to you that there’s more out there than an office in a skyscraper with a telescope in the sky.”

“So should I give it all up and become an Akilini player instead?”

I chuckled. “No, not at all. But the world is not beautiful so we can observe it through a keyhole. What do I always say, Nuju? What do I keep telling you?”

Nuju smiled wistfully as he repeated my own words back at me. “All of life is a journey, and the journey is not about how high you climb or how far you walk…”

I took it upon myself to finish the line. “…it is about what you learn on the way, and how you choose to use that knowledge.”

We looked out at the water again, Nuju’s eyes shimmering with thought. He looked to me and said, “I don’t think Metru Nui will ever have a Seer quite like you, Ihu.”

I finally forced myself to meet his gaze.

“And it’s time you proved me wrong. You no longer need me anymore; your destiny is your own. I have taught you everything I can, and you finally have the only thing I have ever tried to give you.”

My student seemed puzzled. “And what would that be?”

Water rushed over the Falls.

“An open mind.”

“Ihu, you have a visitor waiting for you in your observatory.”

I turned away from the circle of Seers I had been talking with to face a young messenger.

“Please tell him to make an appointment first.”

Ehyre stiffened none too subtly as he said his next words. “Sir, he says he’s an old student of yours. A Seer from the southern end. Nuju, I believe his name is. He’s already waiting in your office.”

I turned back to the messenger, a look of surprise etched upon my mask. It had been four years now since Nuju had left me, and since then he had gone on to enjoy a very successful career of his own. He was scarcely found outside his new observatory, where his restless mind could focus without distraction.

“Tell him I’ll be right with him,” I said. Ehyre nodded solemnly and left without a word. I quickly excused myself from my congregation and hastily made my way through the crystalline corridors of the tower.

Arriving at my observatory, I opened the doors to see Nuju standing out on my balcony, gazing up through my telescope. He turned at the sound of my entrance and nodded courteously, the ghost of a smile on the tips of his mouth. I smiled back to him and moved to tap a clenched fist in the customary manner, but was greeted instead with an open palm. We shook hands.

“Nuju, my friend! How have you been?”

The lens of my former student’s mask zoomed in and out as he looked around the room.

“I am very well, Ihu. Plenty of new projects to keep me busy, some of which I can’t even tell you about. If I did, it would be my turn to report you to the Vahki.”

Though it wasn’t obvious, this was Nuju’s version of a joke. The only problem was he never made it apparent when he was actually trying to say something funny.

Nuju titled his head, noting the joke had not quite landed as intended. “And how have you been since we last met? Taken on any more students?”

“Not this time,” I said as I took a seat in one of my armchairs. “This old Gukko’s wings can only stretch so far — and you certainly strained them.”

Fighting back a grin, Nuju seated himself in an opposing chair. “So what do you do now?”

My eyes trailed off over his shoulder as I thought of a response.

“I’ve been poached for one or two projects myself. Many still value my knowledge of the prophecies, so I haven’t run out of interesting work. I am, however, finding myself drawn to other ventures.”

There was a pause. It was in no way awkward. Many Ko-Matoran paused mid-conversation to collect their thoughts and catalog their feelings.

“You’re going somewhere, are you not?” Nuju asked.

I refused to dignify him with anything less than a perched eyebrow. He was spot on, of course. But he didn’t need to know that.

“And what makes you say that?” I asked playfully.

Nuju shrugged. “The packed bags were a clue.”

I chuckled lightly, more to myself for having made that all so obvious for him.

“A group of Archivists have asked me to be the guest speaker at the opening of the new wing of the Archives.”

Nuju’s grin disappeared with that news.

“Typical. Another Onu-Matoran expansion with more funding than it deserves. One day, I’ll make sure they come to understand the importance of our research.”

I rolled my eyes. “Well, when you become the next great pioneer of our future, remember to name something after me.”

Nuju smiled back at my joke. “Consider it done.”

I peered outside the window and stared at the suns, noting how low they hung in the ginger sky. Deciding now would be the best time to leave, I rose from my armchair and moved to my desk.

“Unfortunately, I should get going. I don’t want to miss my trip. You know what those attendants are like when you’re running late.”

As I began to make my way towards the door, Nuju rose and extended a fist to me. For the first time in all our years together, we bumped fists.

“All the best with your lecture, Ihu,” he began, his voice filled with genuine affection. Warmth even.

“Have a safe trip.”

“Oh, Nuju,” I said merrily with a wide grin. “I’ll be back before you know it!”

And thus concludes my memoirs for the moment. Being a Ko-Matoran, I feel the act of putting chisel to stone both irksome and unnecessarily tedious, so I have devised a better way to amass my thoughts. Indeed, many will question my use of this Memory Crystal for such a purpose, but I could not think of a better way.

The Memory Crystal’s potential goes far beyond that of mere data storage. It could be used to record entire accounts of one’s life without the painstaking effort of carving letters onto stone.

Whilst my memoirs are currently incomplete — my tutoring of Nuju simply being a smaller chapter of a much larger work — I will properly conclude them once I return from my excursion to Onu-Metru. Until then, I leave you with these words I imparted to Nuju in Ga-Metru, one that had him thinking for days:

Life is a puzzle that cannot easily be solved, the bane of every philosopher’s existence. It takes time and patience to piece its intricacies together, and then to understand its meaning in a global vernacular. If these mysteries frustrate or confuse you, look to the skies above and keep an open mind. Your future is not a series of events set in stone, pre-determined by the forces of chance. Our pasts are alive; the defiant and impetuous navigators who live in our choices and chart our course, no matter what paths we were meant for. We may each have a destiny, but even those can be resisted, and in the most extreme cases, averted. Our future is determined not with solid certainty, but with careful consideration of variables. The slightest of miscalculations, shifts in temperature, even impulsive actions can throw the entire natural order out of balance.

And such a world is something worth reveling in.