Open And so the rain comes down

[Wyatti]

38th of Winter 512
Wright Memorial Library: Day time

It was a torrential down pour. Rain hailed down from the sky, soaking everything it touched. It seeped through cracks, lashed against windows, the strong wind racing through the town, battering and shaking all it came across. Occasionally a distant rumble would sound out, rolling across the landscape until it faded away. The wrath of Zulrav had descended upon them all.

Wyatti had the unfortunate luck of being caught out in it. She ran through the streets, tightly holding onto her bag, looking and searching for shelter that would not be bothered by the presence of a little girl among them. Most of the time she received glares, to them she was a street urchin, a brat, and a soaked one at that. Or they thought she was infested with some form of illness, like the one that had swept through Zeltiva. For a while Wyatti raced along, before stopping outside a large pair of double doors. She stared up at them, looking at the plaque written on the outside, slowly reading the font as she slowly sounded out the letter.

Wright Memorial Library? What’s a Library?

She gave a shrug, and pushed open the door, being pleasantly surprised when it clicked open.

Books, thousands upon thousands, stretched on as far as the eye could see, statuettes standing at the end of the rows of shelves. Wyatti stepped in soaked to the bone, her hair plastered against her face, her skin pale due to the icy rain outside. The rain became near silent when the door clicked shut, only the faint patter of the outside world snuck through the entrance. Barefoot, the Kelvic took her first few steps in, ears twitching for noise if there was any. She nervously looked about, eyes taking in all, her nose constantly twitching. The smell reminded her of Hound, or whatever his name was, dusty books and wood. Not that he was present as far as she could tell. She performed a full turn as she looked about.

“Hello?” her voice unintentionally echoed throughout.

She clasped her hands over her mouth, and carefully stepped in further trying to produce as little sound as possible. It was warm, and pleasant, and bright in comparison to the dreary weather of the outside. But there was one question that continued to fill Wyatti’s mind.

Where was everyone?

The sound of a thunder clap shot through the building, and she turned, watching the entrance with suspicion. She slowly drew her attention away and begun walking deeper into the forest of books that surrounded her. She looked up at the towering shelves, the quiet sound of dripping water as it rolled off her coat, and bare feet padding across a floor. She brought her hands to her lips and blew on them in an attempt to warm them, flexing her fingers
Occasionally Wyatti would stop and look at the statuettes, a quizzical expression forming on her face before walking on. She pondered upon a single thought for a while, and tried to find an answer.

So the Gods are made of stone? How do they do stuff then? Do they pick them up and move them? Or maybe they come to life if the humans pray to them enough… ?

Wyatti turned between the shelves, looking up at them, her thoughts about gods being lost to something she obviously deemed more important. She knew she was going to be stuck in the library for a while, especially with the rain coming down like it was, and so, despite it would most likely bore her she turned her attention to the literature present. She grasped a tome by the spine, and begun to pull, struggling at first, but soon it slid out. She wobbled slightly as it slipped out, but held onto the large tome, and opened it, the fact she was indeed soaking wet having escaped her mind. She settled her self down on the floor, and opened the first page of the tome, before she began the struggle of reading the first few words.

[Wrenmae]

In the candlelight, flickering tongues of dancers churning darkness into shadowy illumination, Wrenmae sat with a slowly rising empire of books around him. The spines, embossed, plain, and simply colored, rose with similar titles from either side of his blue clad arms. Gods. The books regaled, Gods and their servants, Gods and their missions, Gods and their powers. Books on history, the Suvan Empire, the war with Alahea...the Valterrian and the combined collection of eye witness reports. All these and more had been pulled from the shelves and spirited to the table. Since midday, the Waveguard had moved little from his self imposed educational prison.

Lhex is the god of Fate. Lhex blessed an anvil made by the magecrafter Areesa Tallshade. Yahal is a god of strength. Sagallius stole the heart from Aquiras to ascend to godhood...facts upon facts. As the disease started to spread through town, as people started dying, less and less sought answers in the library. They looked for comfort in their faith, in their family, but the dedicated few scholars turned their attention ever stronger toward the repository of experience contained in the Wright Memorial Library. So it was that tonight he burned the midnight oil to expunge any and all mention of the Shroud or Vayt's servants from the books. Thus far, nothing was written on them.

The closest he had come was to someone who speculated the marked of Vayt would bleed poison or some nonsense like that. For the sake of things, he left it the way it was.

Anything new?

I found a book about the gods as comedic figures.

...get out of that section.

But it's way more interesting than your section. Emphasis on the 'way' of that sentence.

This is for both of our necks.

I don't have a neck. I'm a blob of water. My anatomy is a mystery.

An annoying mystery. Get back into the Theological section and give it another look.

I would, but you could always just look in front of you...after all, you practically cleared out the whole section on that topic.

Just keep an eye out.

Aye sir.


Moving between the aisles, Zan wore the shape of Wrenmae. He perused book to book, bored, skipping entire rows as he danced from end to end.

The sound of a book hitting the ground, a little voice, it was more than enough to pull the familiar from his current duty.

He peeked around a shelf, spying out Wyatti and withdrawing quickly, stepping back toward Wrenmae.

What?

Can't you see what I see?

I'm concentrating on reading.

Well, fate's be kind, the little girl without shoes has returned...and she brings a gift of repetition! No shoes!

In the library?

No. In the rain, staring forlorn at you through walls and books. Yes, the library.

Did she spot you?

Beats me.

In the case she has, return to your sealed form.

With pleasure...glad to be rid of your chores anyways.

With a muted flash of light, the familiar became a bottle once more, caught out of the air by an irritable Wrenmae and placing it on the table. She would not recognize him, surely. He had been morphed when they first met and nothing of the Hound was on him.

Save for his smell.

But he wasn't aware that was an indication of anything and, confident in his true form's disguise, continued studying.

[Wyatti]

Wyatti's eyes squinted at the text, trying to read the small script that was written across it. She still tried to sound out the letters, but after a time of trying, the Kelvic gave out a long sigh. She briefly glanced up to catch the sight of a figure disappearing behind the bookcase. For a moment she stared into space that was filled by the figure before she returned her attention to the book. She rubbed at her eyes with her now damp sleeve before snapping the tome shut and struggling to return it to its place. She heaved it up, and with her arms shaking with its weight, slid it back in.

Books are heavy...

Wyatti brushed herself down and stepped out of the row of books, sniffing at the air and for a second look at the face she just saw. She gave a small frown when she saw none, and so, dragging her bag by the shoulder strap proceeded to walk around the library. She thought at first it was her imagination, that the scent of books and dust grew stronger, and more defining like the scent of a person, but she had yet to find the source. She stepped into another row, and this time picked a thinner book from the shelf. It was already less weighty than the previous, enough so that she could still carry it with the one hand with ease. She opened it briefly, flicking through the first few pages, eyes adjusting to the bigger text, her lips slowly mouthing out the words.

"Sss..wo... Swords mmman ship?" she breathed as she titled her head to one side.

Wyatti gave a blink, before taking a step back to look at the shelf. She reached up and grabbed another few, carefully piling them up in her arms, before staggering out of of the row. She kept the books balanced, and peered over the top at a man at a table. She sniffed at the air, her lips pursed, with a slightly confused look on her face. He smelt of Hound, yet looked nothing like him. She carefully stepped round, analysing his form, questioning his looks, before slowly placing herself at a table a distance from him, but close enough she could watch. Wyatti climbed up onto a chair, tucking her feet beneath her before opening one of the books and laying it out before her. She carefully read the title, turning the pages and looking at the small diagrams that represented the steps in which to thrust. Her brow furrowed as she tried to imagine the moves in her mind, and understand the words. But despite her reading and growing curiosity in the book before her, she could not help giving the man looks from across the room, for without a doubt he smelt of Hound.

[Wrenmae]

Peering into the tome he perused, he might as well have been looking into the same one as before, and every one after. Books blended into books at this point, time simply falling away from him in great swaths. Few, if any, books mentioned the God Vayt. Those that did captured his personality in a few words. Evil was a predominant one, and certainly it was easy to consider a god that spread pestilence as the embodiment of cruelty itself.

Wren choked back a chuckle, setting another tome aside. Vayt, as all gods, held his purpose in Mizahar. Pestilence was a boon, granted so the strong might protect themselves from the anchor of the weak around their necks. Peace was an embodied form of indolence. Nature rarely sat at ease, so why should humanity? Why should any of them?

Turning another page into a comprehensive book of gods, he paused at a certain passage.

"It is said that the marked of Vayt carry diseases whe'er they go. One may not know them by his touch, but by their immunity to illness. Where they go, pestilence follows and where they leave, pestilence also."

The sound of tearing parchment rent the library. Wrenmae tore out the page, folding it, and stuffing it in his cloak. This was the last book he had found with passages of Vayt, and it happened to be the only one with clues to the disease within Zeltiva. Standing sharply, he closed the book and stalked toward the entrance of the library.

Zan. We're leaving.

But the girl thing saw you.

So?

So...we kill her?

Why?

Cause...she saw us?

So?

I don't get you.

Murder her in a library and we'll almost certainly be found out. She has no call to follow us, no need, no suspicion, nothing. Let her struggle over her words and frailties and let us depart.

But...

Now, Zan.

I don't have to always follow you.

Yes. You do.

I want to stay, see more books.

...YOU want to see books?

Yes. They're pretty.

Fine. A bell. No more.

Stepping across the library, Wrenmae took a seat opposite the place he was before. Taking out the piece of paper, he emitted the faintest hint of res, covering one end and then lighting it aflame.

Tossing the burning paper to the floor, he waited a moment and then stomped it out.

The remains of the parchment fluttered weakly against the surrounding black of its charred face and Wrenmae sat back, closing his eyes.

Let the researchers come and turn this library inside out...he'd destroyed the only mention that might tie an investigator to his trail.

[Philomena]

There is no book, like the one in which one is buried, and the one in Minnie's hand? She's six feet under in it. The anchor embossed across the front suggests its nautical air, and the dustiness about it suggests its general unpopularity. She stares into it, as she walks down one aisle.

Then stops.

Mutters, looking up over the edge of the book, "What is this? The stones are wet here."

She looks, follows the soggy trail forward with her eyes, to a girl, just before her now. The scholars with their heaps of books, and snarled, desperate faces, the librarians with their carts, these things mean little to her - but this? A girl? With no shoes, and dripping to the skin? This is a wrongness. An unexpectedness. And of all places, the library should be safe, known. Secure. This was HER haunt.

She stumbled forward, with a certain timidity, and looked at the child, just stared, fish-like a moment. She hardly had to turn her eyes down, being only a hair or two over the girls' height.

"You are... looking for a book, girl? Something with pictures? You are not wearing shoes."

The words come out disconnected, unfiltered. Their awkward incongruity shifts out of the woman's lips like the practice of experience, her free hand shutting her own book and setting it down ("The Matter of Webbing and Netting in Third Century Sailing Vessels by Alfred Phlox"), then reaching to push up the knot of a loose ascot, hanging ridiculously from a collarless neck over a dress that looks like a low quality street artist - black lace in waves and folds flopping over her somewhat frumpy form.

"Children like pictures, non?"

[Wyatti]

Wyatti flinched and looked at the older woman, her eyes locking with hers and perhaps for a change to be surprised that she did not have to look up at the adult. The woman seemed for a moment nervous, timid as if she was also equally surprised by the presence of each other. Wyatti still held onto the small book she found on sword play, her eyes quickly darting down to the cover then back up at the woman. Wyatti swallowed, as if about to speak, but the older woman got their first.

"You are... looking for a book, girl? Something with pictures? You are not wearing shoes."

Wyatti went ridgid for a moment. Not wearing shoes was an issue? But I hate wearing shoes, they are uncomfortable, and restrictive, and always too small for her. She shuffled awkwardly for a moment, trying to think of a way to respond. With younger adults perhaps she could of been more relaxed, but this older woman it was different. Wyatti inhaled, taking in the cocktail of scents that hung about her, the most distinctive being the potent scent of perfume that covered most, with other more subtle scents underneath, coffee, meat, the subtle lack of hygine... Wait, Coffee. Wyatti loved the smell of coffee, it was something mother always smelt of and in turn it would often calm the child kelvic.

"Children like pictures, non?"
"We do... but..." Wyatti pointed to the small book she held "I like this one too."

The Kelvic gave a cat like smile, and turned her attention back down to the page she was on, her eyes narrowing as she tried to read the words in her still relatively soaked form.

[Wrenmae]

"It says Swordsmanship," A voice piped from a row of books. Taking two from the shelf, Zan stuck his head through the gap to look at both Philomena and Wyatti. He was ginning, similar looking to Wrenmae but with blonde hair and bright blue eyes, a slightly tighter jawline and pointed nose. Apart from those, they might as well be brothers.

To Wyatti he smelled strange, almost otherworldly, but ignorant to that he pushed on.

"Swordsmanship," He repeated, "By Jeffry Timoth, Foreword by Lanis Mankal...fancy yourself a blader, huh? All you fleshba-err..I mean, all you huma-...crap. What I mean to say is that your kind always do like nabbing the books on violence."

Glancing at the other woman behind Wyatti, he offered a wide grin and pushed some books from the shelf so his hand could fit through and wave.

"The name is Zan, Z-A-N, Zan, pretty easy to remember and easier to say! Whoabouts are you two?"

[Philomena]

Now, a sense of justice demands that we at least be fair to Minnie Lefting: its not that she's a dolt. She isn't, really, even particularly imperceptive. Its just... her mind perhaps prioritizes perception of the real world at a lower level than expectation would suppose of a healthy, grown woman.

It is such that a gnawing odor in the air, a vague smell from a bit of a distance crawled into her nostrils, tiny particles of ash tickling gently at the nerves at the roof of her nasal passage, murmuring softly, 'Burning paper, Minnie Lefting. Burning paper...' do not produce a reaction in the conscious brain. The subconscious, yes, there is a certain vague distraction somewehre behind her eyes, a feeling of, if nothing else, an intensification of the inherent wrongness of talking to a shoeless girl holding a formal treatise on swordsmanship in the midst of HER library.

It is thus, as well, that the words the man stumbles over - 'flesh' and 'human' and what not - perhaps crawl into her mind and murmur 'danger, strange person', but do not quite pierce through.

Why though? What is it that the lady is prioritizing OVER her immediate surroundings? Not the book in her hand, anymore, which she holds shut, her index finger marking her place. No, no, it is something else, the shiny-thing archnemesis of the academic-as-ferret - the literary reference.

"Lanis Mankal? Mankal, M-a-n-k-a-l? Is that any relation, perhaps to Darl Mankal, the poet?"

Now, a wiser mind, perhaps would have taken into account that the man has displayed no more knowledge of the book or its... prefacer... than one might gather from the title page. But, wisdom can so easily be overridden by fascination.

"I am not a specialist in the Configurist poets - I, to be frank, find their emphasis on metrical perfection a bit stifling - but if Mankal was related to a swordsman! A peculiar reflection, that, I wonder how far it would go to explaining his fascination with cold steel in his late works."

By the end of the sentence, she's hardly speaking to her new companion at all.

Now, of course, the observer might assume that the lady is lost now, a hopeless case. But that great heap of impressions, that she was so quick to prioritize low, she does not DISCARD them, clearly, for only a moment of the cogitation of her eyes results in her untangling one layer down from her first thoughts, "Oh, my name... yes... Dr. Lefting, department of literature, are you a student, then?"

[Wyatti]

Wyatti watched the two adults talk for a while, a quick conversation coming from both, a sharing of authors and titles. But all the while they spoke, Wyatti could not help but look at this new person, Zan with all the curiosity in the world. If anything for his rather unusual and alien scent, she had never smelt it before, and it was perhaps this that pushed her on.

“I… I want to get stronger,” she managed to say as she pointed to the book, as if it was almost an answer to her problems.

But it was only her more naïve nature that made her think this. Books and learning never made the person, there were other factors too, but Wyatti had yet to learn this. She shuffled for a moment, looking up at the two of them listening carefully to all that was said, before properly introducing herself.

“I’m Wyatti,” she gave a small wave back up at Zan before her eyes turned back down to the page.

The passage was difficult to say the least; large words were rather difficult for the young mind to understand. So after a while longer of trying, she simply closed it and surrendered to the notion of trying to understand. In time she may learn, but that was in time only. For the meanwhile, innocence would rule and curiosity would lead. Like a question that begun to grow in her mind.

“A student?” her brow creased as she tried to understand “What’s a student?”

It was not ignorance; it was simply a term she was unfamiliar with. A child mind that was unable to see the outside world until recently, so of course everything was new to her. And it was this factor that dragged her out of a more timid nature and forward into her own.

[Paragon]

Wrenmae

Experience

Skill	XP Earned
Research	2

Lores

•	Lore Earned
•	Expunging the Truth

Philomena

Experience

Skill	XP Earned
Observation	1
Research	1
Philosophy	1

Lores

•	Lore Earned
N/A

Legend Becomes Reality

Let me know if you return Wyatti. If you have any questions or concerns regarding your grade, please send me a PM and we can work from there.