Alice is used to university quarters. She likes them well enough- she’s better at liking places than people, and while academics are tiresome, they are at least a familiar style of tiresome. She's seen a local man with a trademark tweed jacket, leather elbow patches on all four of the arms-- so stupidly, prissily Oxford that it made her laugh inside, cheered her up for some inexplicable reason, made her briefly enjoy listening in to his conversation with professor-ish type about archaic Ragamoll grammar. And speaking of Ragamoll, that is part of her studies- her extensive studies. Baedal translates the spoken and written word when necessary (she must look up the details, it must go on the list of things to know more about) but the University appreciates a working knowledge of Ragamoll in its applicants and its scholars- it’s not on the official literature, just delicately and disdainfully suggested everywhere else.
So she can be found writing out long pieces of practice translation, verb conjugations, practicing grammar, checking back to her books and tapping her pen against her lip, a Brock Marsh poster girl from her head to her high-heeled loafer-shod toes. She studies outside in cafes because she has so much to do, because she can practise tea for one, please and do you know the way to Creekside, to Dog Fenn, to Syriac Well and do you have the time in Ragamoll on the people around her, because she has to absorb the outside world- she can’t shut herself off in her academic pursuits like she suspects so many of the newcomers who make Brock Marsh their home do, pretending they’re learning to understand Baedal while really they’re shutting themselves away from it in their ivory towers. Idiots. She listens to the conversations around her as she translates. People consider her dead to the world around her because she’s focused on one obvious and demanding task- they’re idiots too.
The wind ripples suddenly, makes a moth-winged woman behind her trying to break up with her partner shudder and tuck her wings closer to her, makes Alice’s books tumble from the table, makes her hair stream in ribbons across her face. The pages she’s ripped from her notebook fly into the air and are scuffed along the ground and suddenly she’s furious- this pointless vicious hungry make believe city isn’t fair.
a cafe, brock marsh | shunday;
So she can be found writing out long pieces of practice translation, verb conjugations, practicing grammar, checking back to her books and tapping her pen against her lip, a Brock Marsh poster girl from her head to her high-heeled loafer-shod toes. She studies outside in cafes because she has so much to do, because she can practise tea for one, please and do you know the way to Creekside, to Dog Fenn, to Syriac Well and do you have the time in Ragamoll on the people around her, because she has to absorb the outside world- she can’t shut herself off in her academic pursuits like she suspects so many of the newcomers who make Brock Marsh their home do, pretending they’re learning to understand Baedal while really they’re shutting themselves away from it in their ivory towers. Idiots. She listens to the conversations around her as she translates. People consider her dead to the world around her because she’s focused on one obvious and demanding task- they’re idiots too.
The wind ripples suddenly, makes a moth-winged woman behind her trying to break up with her partner shudder and tuck her wings closer to her, makes Alice’s books tumble from the table, makes her hair stream in ribbons across her face. The pages she’s ripped from her notebook fly into the air and are scuffed along the ground and suddenly she’s furious- this pointless vicious hungry make believe city isn’t fair.