PM to join [The Docks] A Dialogue Between the Spirit and the Dust

[Philomena]

Minnie shivered just enough to be perceivable: it was not so much that she was cold, as tired, now.

So much in one night! I wish I was more for you, Mother Qalaya.

But enough, Minnie-la. You can be enough, that is all she asks of us.

She was almost derailed by the faint bitterness in Raisa’s voice. She wished… a vague thing, a sort of desire to wrap the girl (No, a woman now, Minnie Lefting, she’s full grown, time has run from you) up very tightly, or to… she could not play her finger on it. She wanted to bind the lint on her knee, when she scuffed it on a cobble playing Loop-the-Spar. And most of all, she just wanted to tell her, at that moment, that things would be alright. Only, she realized, she had no idea if she would, and she was not the person to say it, and —

This - is this how it feels Mother Qalaya? A little bit. To watch us all hurting and making great, stupid mistakes, and needing comfort, and having to simply watch, and remember.

“Yes,” her voice was soft and sad, “I have… a… a task, I have… it is so hard to explain, now. I have a task, I do not know just what it is, but it is around the books. Kena’s … but… but you have never seen them, you wouldn’t know they exist, you wouldn’t… I forget, I’m sorry. Do you have… have a tablet, or a quill and some foolscap? I must… please understand it must be something that we can destroy afterward, it cannot be seen by anyone, or kept, except in your mind, its… and my books, my books, you are sure they are safe?”

They returned to her mind with a little pang of fear, then. How neglectful she had been! What a fool, how could Mother have trusted her with all of this? She had taken Raisa’s word, that the man who took her things was trustworthy, but HOW trustworthy? Raisa had not known! She had not known how important the things were! The lock could be broken, the box stolen, what if the man WAS trustworthy, but he had just… just taken them to a room and left them? None of them knew - none of them knew! Bethany’s words rang dark and portentous in Minnie’s mind: All is not well — dhomaidi critical. Those were not the words of just a scholar’s excitement. There was danger in those words, there was urgency and perhaps… fear? Can the Gods and their beloveds even fear.

They must. They must have feared, after all, the Valterrian. What was that, that the Red-Script Anonyme said?

These are the days,
When endings come.
When gods, like princes
Without armies,
Tremble on their thrones.

These are the days,
When all souls wail,
When the stars, unmoored
From their eternal quays,
Shudder and quail.

When all prayers, to heaven thrown,
Thrust forward, speak, despair, and fail.

x

[Liminal]

"Your books? Is that what was in your trunk? If so, they're at Hospitality House, and in my time here, I don't think anyone has so much as swiped a towel. The Akvatari don't have much inclination toward theft, the sailors are all the best I could get, and there's hardly anyone else here -- an art student sometimes, or a wandering traveler, but that's about it. I can't think of many places in Mizahar where they'd be safer." Raisa tilted her head even further, unsure where Minnie was going with this conversation. Nonetheless, she rose from her seat, put the lute back on its stand, and retrieved a wax tablet and a stylus from the bottom shelf of the bookcase. "Here you are." She handed the implements to Minnie. The look of curiosity was still in her eyes. "You can erase it when you're done with...with whatever you're doing. But books? Like the Account? Or great-aunt's voyage logs?" The dubiousness in her voice indicated that Raisa had no confidence that her guesses were correct, but she also had no idea where the Doctor was going with any of this. She was tired too -- the performance had been one of the most emotionally exhausting things she had ever done -- but it felt like, now that the subject had been broached, they needed to see the conversation through to its conclusion.

[Philomena]

Raina's words were comforting at least. Minnie was partly assuaged, but still cast her eyes subconsciously about as if she might see the trunks in a corner somewhere, and be assured they were alright. But she bit her lip, and after a moment simply nodded, and took the tablet, and the quill, after sliding her glove back over the Qalaya-marked hand. She closed her eyes then, and concentrated, recalling some of the gibberish-looking characters to her mind.

She had spent enough time transcribing them to protect from losing them that she ALMOST had a real feel for writing them, now, though the lack of meaning impeded any fluency in the practice, and made it difficult to remember the precise ordering of them on any given page. But, there was a page that had struck Minnie, where, more than likely simply by the accident of a pensive mode and a fair night's sleep, the writer's hand had been particularly smooth and graceful in its writing, where the swoop and angle of the writing had had a kind of alien beauty that had struck Minnie in the exhausting work of transcription. Lately, though of course she knew it was nonsense, for she did not even know if it was the same language, and had no idea if it were the words if it WERE the same, she had fancifully pretended that the words spelled "Dharopan".

She opened her eyes, then, and with a slow steady hand begin to trace the characters onto the wax. IT was not simple work, for the original letters had been in ink and quill, rather than the round nib of a stylus, and she after all did not known if the calligraphic fluctuations of the stroke weight were a significant part of the language or simply an accident of the pen, so in writing them in wax, it was almost more akin to drawing, and then she wrote much larger than her normal minuscule script so as to make the image clear.

When she did finish, she looked down. It was not perfect, of course, but it would do. She showed it to Raisa, "This writing. Have you ever seen characters like these? Your... your great-aunt ha' a whole case of books filled to the scupper-holes with letters like these. You... I don't think you studied it in school, but have you heard of the Azianthan Tablets? This is the same writing as those - only it was written by Kenabelle Wright, centuries after those must have been made."

She sighed and continued, "I've looked for more on them, and there's so little. They were found, of course. A woodsy-man found them about 150 years ago, in a cave in the Zatoskas. I tried casting about for his family, to see - sometimes people keep little... mementos, when something like this happens, and then they're too ashamed to admit it, you know. But I didn't have time, there was so little time! I was sick, you remember, and then Qalaya--" she stops herself abruptly, "--then I got better, but then I was arrested and put in the asylum, and I never got to ask, and I dunny think I would be welcome there nae more, now. And otherwise, nothing. Lots of books about it, but all of them stuff and nonsense, near as I could read, and I asked some real linguists. I tried at some books about linguistics myself, but I'm not an expert, and I was.. was told to keep them a secret."

Her eyes wandered the room slowly as she spoke, peering at the window, at the stairwell, to make sure none looked in. With Raisa's permission she scrubbed the characters out thoroughly with her thumb.

"I dunny hae anything else to go off of. I've spoken to nigh everyone who even had a cousin's beau anywhere near your aunt or her ship, by now, in Zeltiva, and if they knew about these... these letters, I think I would know 'twas amiss. Hannah was the best source t'be had, and I... maybe she kept a secret from me, but..." she smiled wryly, "I loved Dr. Watchtower, but I dunny think she could've kept a secret had it been to the keeping of her own life. So... so Bethany, she told me to come here, and I ha' thought and thought of what I'm to be doing, here, and I thought, 'Well, Minnie, at least you know the name of one of the Akvatari that she knew, ey?' So... I thought, maybe... its not a big city, I think, by the books, so I thought maybe... you might know the family, Dissapoi--- no, that is, Imtappdentosin. He knew your auntie, and I thought, you, being the good soul you are, coming here I dunny think but you might've... gone at asking after his kin, maybe..."

Her voice trailed off, for she realized she was rambling a bit, now, but she looked up to Raisa, hopefully.
x

[Liminal]

Raisa looked somberly at the characters on the tablet, tracing them repeatedly with her eyes. At length, she shook her head. "I've never seen anything like them, not in any of mother or grandmother's things that they let me see. I've heard of the Azianthan Tablets, vaguely, but all I ever did at the University was take music classes, and I've never seen them personally. I'm sorry I can't be of more help to you." She seemed genuinely disappointed, but at the name of the Akvatari that Minnie was searching for, she perked up again. "Oh, Imtappdentosin! There, I might be able to help you." Raisa smoothed her hair down with her left hand. "He's dead, of course -- I'm not sure there's anyone now living in Abura who remembers when great-aunt Kena arrived here. His grandson though -- Trekusether -- he's a bit older than I am, and he sometimes is the Akvatari rep for Hospitality House. Most of what he does is stonecarving, with tiny figurines -- he's amazing, they're all amazing -- but he does show up here every few days." She looked up at the windows. There was nothing to be seen outside except the moon and the intermittently-lit spires of the city. It was late now -- very, very late. Normally, Raisa would have retired to bed long since, and her eyelids were growing heavy. "I don't really know what he'll be able to tell you. Akvatari families are...different than Zeltivan ones. They're loose and weak, unless the family members find that they're also friends, and I don't know how much family lore is actually transmitted between generations. But you could ask Trekusether. At the very least, he's someone easy to find." For a moment, it seemed that Raisa was completely done talking, and her eyes even closed briefly. But then she opened them sharply and looked back to Minnie. "Wait...Bethany told you to come? Bethany Edgetower? How...how is that even possible? I mean, I suppose she could be a ghost, but it feels to me like we'd have seen her ghost in Zeltiva before now if that had happened, or that great-aunt would have written it down. How...do you know her?"

[Philomena]

Minnie nodded keenly, listening to the name, and her mind immediately began galloping off in at least five distinct directions:

A thread considering that, to the Akvatari, family is less important than friendship, which wanders into a culminating imagination of a sort of registry of friendships, in which one would register kinships of choice instead of blood, and a subsequent consideration of how she would register those she new, this branching into a separate thread considering the limitations of Common in expressing the varying types and intensities of friendshpis available, with a subsequent whimsical proposal of the revival of certain now defunct words from middle and old common to better flesh out the available option

A thread trying to divine the spelling of Trekusether, branching into at least four different attempts to divine the name’s anagrammatic origins, the best she can divine being ‘usherette’, which would after all, make a lovely name, but lacks the ‘K’ (or is it a C? Or a Q? Or an exceptionally hard G? She discards this last, considering the softness of Raisa’s accent). This meanders pleasantly into wondering what kind of story Lanie might have told about an Akvatari whose name proceeds from ‘Usherette’, which ends abruptly, as she realizes that the recipient, in this case, is a gentleman Akvatari, and so her terribly clever answer is even more manifestly wrong.
A consideration of the art of stone carving, with attendant musing over the similarities of the art to woodcarving, which she had looked into, after all, in pursuit of information on the creation of Kenabelle’s ship. This leaves her with a sudden consideration that she had not made previously: that it was entirely possible that Imappen… imp…she gives up trying to correctly spell the name again in her head… at any rate, that Disappointment, the friend of Kenabelle, may have tidied up or even replaced some of the carvings, considering that they were the sort of fine work that would have been easily damaged in wrack and wind, and that the crew would have precious little time to repair. This leads into a broad series of branchings as she considers how one might divine if a ship (no longer extant) with carvings (no longer extant) had said carvings updated by an artist (no longer extant) of a far off city (extant, and unexpectedly present), interspersed with the mental equivalent of excited squeals at the thought of a new line of reasoning.
A consideration of the foolishness of diving into the water earlier without bringing a tablet (the dive itself, despite her lack of ability in swimming, not even registering as potentially unwise). This involves her making complex (and entirely unnecessary) mnemonics to remember the name ‘Trekusether’. Trekking You See The Air is the best she can come up with, which, again, reminds her of Lanie, the old image she treasures of Lanie trekking through the mountain-tops, breathing air that blows from the dark and wicked continent instead of Old Father Laviku. This blends with the image of previously mentioned of Lanie telling a story, along with the image of the categorization of friends.
A song enters her head, a long ago song she had heard some of the orphans singing, about ‘Little Black Andy/Strode upon the Sandy/Said that he would gladly stand/‘gainst any other Man-dee.’ It had been mostly a nonsense rhyme, but somehow it entered unbidden and with no relevance. The irrelevance of it made it bubble and percolate just over the roasting fires of her subconscious, and as the fourth thread wound into its queer harmonics, the semi-conscious song took on a peculiar melancholy, that did not translate well into external expression but left her with a tinge of sadness amidst the excitement of the research. IT blended with Minnie’s semi-parental affection for Raisa’s voice, and her lovely eyes, soft and tired now in the gas-light.

All of this pitched and rolled with a pleasant confusion of the imagination as she listened and watched, listened and watched, listened, and —

Very abruptly stopped at the mention of Bethany. At another moment, it would have simply brought her strung nerves into an alert. But, now, her senses were buried in all of these other threads, and as the threads collapsed, her sensibilities collapsed with them. So, for a moment, she swallowed the question, carefully, manually digesting it, as if it were in a foreign language. Her mind diagrammed the sentences, extracting verb and object. “Know” and “Bethany” were the ones that crawled through her mind the most, dancing a savage, terrifying dance across her skull, that made her retreat, retreat, retreat, so that all that was left the little subconscious song.

Little Black Andy/Oh, he was a dandy/And all of the girls came by./To kiss at his lips, and tug at his locks/And sit on his burly thigh

The little body which she normally inhabited rested just in front of and to the right of her. It still lived, of course, she was not dead, really, not really, just — no, thinking, that kind of thinking felt too close, now, better to drift, and watch. She watched as her lips moved, but the sound of them was very far away,a nd somehow she didn’t really care what they were saying.

But you must care, Minnie-la, you must. Don’t you remember? You have to write it down, dearest, that much you must be able to do.

She felt as if the words we’re coming through ram’s wool, rough and muffed and thousand-stranded, but she concentrated and with great concentration, she could hear herself speaking, ould even… sort of remember what she had already spoken.

“Yes, I know Bethany. I should not have said so,” her voice sounded odd, but she marveled with pleasant distance at how bland her face remained, “I should have kept it to myself, but I seem to have slipped, I think. I seem to have forgotten, I was not supposed to say.”

And pretty young maid/With long red braids/Had sat on that faithless thigh.//So with eyes all a-kindle/She took up her spindle/And wielded the distaff, with angry cries/And drove it right into his eyes.

“No, no, I won’t say it like this, I won’t, I won’t say it when I’m not even here,” she felt the force of her thought, and realized, of a sudden that the thought had come off of her lip into real sound, audible sound, and she felt her eyes, but did not want to know if she had frightened Raisa, not yet, because she would only say the thing once, and so she shut her eyes, shut them tight like nuts.

“Yes, I talked to her: I did it twice.
Once in my stony cell. Once in the house
Of your great-aunt, where I had hid away.
She came to me… like… I cannot say what.
As if I wished there was a word that’s more
Like magic, than the word itself has proved.
She came from Qalaya, and saved my life
The first time, in th’asylum. And again
To tell me I was bid to hurry here,
By Qalaya, to do some unnamed deed—“ she breathed, and opened up her eyes, and they were confused, but lucid. Too young, altogether, but then, there was the exhaustion, apparent now, that might explain it. She said then, very softly, and in a voice more suited to normal conversation, “Please… it is a secret. Please don’t tell, and please don’t think me crazy."

x

[Liminal]

If the force and the heightened iambic cadence of Minnie's words startled Raisa at all, she didn't show it. Instead, she stared over at the bookcase, her voice soft. "Doctor Lefting, I've seen and heard too many strange things to disbelieve you, and I'm not at all interested in betraying your secrets or your trust. I'm still not sure I understand all the way, but I know enough to keep my mouth shut." A self-deprecating chuckle punctuated the sentence. "Anyway, it's late -- so, so late -- and I'm sure you're exhausted. I know I am." Raisa stood up now, and offered a hand to help Minnie. "Everything should be ready for you at Hospitality House so that you can get some well-earned rest." Unless Minnie had anything else to say, Raisa would walk Minnie over to her room, and then leave her to rest, before returning to her own quarters and falling into a sleep of her own.

OOC: I think that's the end!

[Philomena]

Minnie nodded, and took the hand groaning just slightly with stiffness as she fought to her feet and took up her stick. She pulled her half-dry clothes from where they clung to her leg, and nodded again, not quite sure what she nodded at.

Gods I'm tired...

She looked at Raisa, and smiled, a small smile, "Thank you, Raisa." She took the girl's arm (No, she's a full-grown woman, now, Philomena Leftings) and tottered to her room, leaning to check her boxes. Finding them intactly locked, she nodded again, to Raisa, "You're a good woman, Raisa Wright-Allwave. Thank you." Then once Raisa slipped out she peeled out of the sticky clothes, shuffled quickly into the first thing she found in her trunk, and collapsed on the bed, just as the first lights of morning began.

x

[Liminal]

OOC: A lovely thread!

Socialization +2
Observation +2
Singing +1
Poetry +3

Lore: Imtappdentosin's descendants
Lore: With Raisa, Minnie is Among Friends