open log } swapping your blood with formaldehyde;

[astronomer]

Who: Alice Morgan and you.
What: A few days in the life.
Where: Everywhere; given locations are Brock Marsh, Creekside, Gallmarch, but she can be anywhere.
When: This week, essentially.
Notes: The main post is rambling narrative and context, feel free to skip it. Tag in anywhere, or feel free to post your own situation. PM me or get me on plurk if you feel the need. :E
Warnings: ...Alice. Idle fantasies of murder, general hideousness.

The city is monstrous.

Alice has been in Baedal for just over three weeks, and every morning she wakes up surprised- is it still there? Yes? Really? It always is, outside her grainy and dirty (she has taken a sponge to it to no avail) Brock Marsh window; Baedal, fuming and smoking and twisting away from her, hemmed in by grey-white fog and fear.

She has been following, but hasn’t posted to, the Network. She hasn’t really met anybody but Krithn, the distracted star-mapper she’s been assisting, who forgets to shave and forgets to eat and forgets what he’s paid her and can always be relied upon to shell out more than he should if Alice takes a gentle tone with him and suggests that an advance on her wages would be appreciated, not mentioning the numerous other sums he’s advanced her. He hasn’t noticed that she’s a genius, but he hasn’t noticed much on ground level for years. He disgusts her. She steals his keys. She studies his maps and charts and books when he’s not in.

It occurs to her that perhaps she should have cried on the network, that most people- most of them who are Chosen- must come to their cohort damp with tears and nigh hysterical. It isn’t that she hasn’t cried- she has, for the sheer impossibility of it all, because she was so angry, so indignant, so sure she was straight-jacketed in some padded cell in the real world and it was all so revoltingly undignified- but only for herself. Emotional exhibitionism doesn’t thrill her. It simply didn’t occur to her, at the time, that she should make the effort. She was shocked, briefly, into numb honesty- the truth is that she was and is afraid, of course, afraid and angry and bewildered, but her emotions have never had the power to paralyse her. She’s stronger than them.

And is she mad? Alice thinks about that, eyes drifting from one of her borrowed books to the pavement as she sits outside a cafe in Chimer; is she mad? No, she reflects, staring up at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, rubbing the corner of a page between her fingers. On balance, having recovered from her fit of panicked fatalism, she’s probably not. And that makes things very simple and very complicated by putting her in a familiar position- in a world which makes no sense, upon which people are desperately trying to project order, in which people are trying to eke out lives of some significance.

Some things are constant. (She glances away, across to the xenian waiter who brought her her tea--) Some things are not.

Prison was worse. Prison was better.

So now she works and saves and reads. Her room in Brock Marsh is slowly filling up with books, like every other room in Brock Marsh. Soon, she will outgrow it; she has her eye on apartments. She budgets in pencil down to the last penny, though they aren’t called pennies here. She wears carefully-selected reasonably-priced clothing which doesn’t look reasonably-priced, and invests in expensive shoes, because she intends to do a lot of walking, already thinking in investments and futures and long-term plans. It’s in her nature. It helps. She burns the hospital gown she arrived in.

Despite the care she has taken to claw some temporary stability for herself out of the chaos of Baedal, Alice feels swamped by the city, unable to breathe for all the things she doesn’t know. (How dare they do this to her, make her drown in all this nonsense, how dare they try this with her?) It is a language she doesn’t speak. It is threatening, hungry, consuming. It drags its citizens in and it eats them alive.

The city is evil.

Comments

[rhinemaid]

Despite the desire of several people around her that she be on a leash of some kind, Ilde does still have things to do out in the world - which includes Brock Marsh on a relatively regular basis, as there's a printing/copying place there that will make booklets and copy music sheets for her students at what they promise her is a competitive rate. (She'd shopped around; the place she used to go was cheaper, but it was cheaper for a reason, and she'd opted to pay a little more for quality when she had a better idea of her income.)

She's on her way back from there - she's thinking about stopping in the cafe, she likes it in Brock Marsh even on the days she isn't getting her lunch with Quirin, who she's long been certain is not actually a Candlelighter spy of some kind - when the pages flutter toward her, so it's actually no mean feat that she crouches so nimbly (in those heels, too) to catch them in one hand, clutching her own booklets and handbag with the other.

“Sorry, are these yours?”

[astronomer]

Alice is half up from her chair when Ilde catches the papers- she traps the remaining notes under her saucer and then moves quickly and smoothly to intercept her, all in one motion. She gives a pleased and half-laughing sigh; "Ah. Yes. Thank you--" Her accent mirrors Ilde's somewhat, but she knows better than to assume it guarantees them any background in common. "This is just the trouble with Brock Marsh, one little breeze and half the population has to rush out after their escaped labours of love," she says, as if she has been here forever. Her voice is a lilting murmur as she takes the pages, flicking through them with delicate, surgical precision to check she's missing nothing.

[rhinemaid]

“Well, trouble, charm...” Which probably gives Ilde away for not a local in turn (inasmuch as Baedal has 'locals' - debatable, perhaps, depending on who you ask and where), if admittedly someone in and out on a relatively regular basis. “Um- you're welcome,” after a slight pause, jerking herself back from wherever she'd gone in her head and whatever was happening to Brock Marsh professors in it. “I'd hate to lose something around here, though, in case it showed up a month later in someone else's paper.”

[astronomer]

"Well, that is cynical," she says, not looking at all as if she disapproves. It occurs to her that I must look up how to say 'cynical' in Ragamoll and she stores that notion away somewhere in her immaculately ordered mind. "You're right, of course. Academics are such gloryhounds. Nevertheless, I'm safe with this. Baedalite academia is a mixed bag-" a patchwork, a jumble, a mess "-but one from which the painstaking practice exercises of a language learner are excluded."

She pauses and looks to the cafe, her abandoned table, then back to Ilde. As body language goes, it is an ellipsis. She's aware that she should probably make the semblances of friends; it was brought up time and time again at her trial that she named no friends but John Luther. Things were said. Personality disorder sort of things. She'd been quite insulted, not hurt, just insulted, and while it had hardly been the undoing of any defence she might have tried (getting caught with Ian Reed's shotgun in her hand and confessing was probably to blame for that) she feels that it nonetheless pays to plan ahead. Ilde, anyway, seems at least mildly interesting; there is something over-real and unreal about her, like she was made for somewhere other than here- of course, Baedal is the ultimate round hole for square pegs, but it's something besides that.

"Were you planning on stopping in?"

[rhinemaid]

"Um- I was, yes," and she brightens, a little bit, in a way that's curiously literal, where the light catches on her as she turns slightly, pushing her hair back with one nominally free hand and thinking about what she's going to order. There's a honey tea here that is even better, she thinks, with a little bit of company.

(She should probably work on being so personable to strangers, in that given the sort of people she ends up spending her time with it's clearly not a good plan- but she likes those people, making it a hard sell.)

"I'm Ilde," she says, "not an academic, I'm afraid, just a musician with bad habits." An interest in academia and tendency to lurk around Brock Marsh running errands and having lunch with professors counts as a bad habit, she is relatively sure; or it did when she was younger and she was lurking around professors because she was sleeping with them. Ilde thinks of this as 'precociousness', whereas there are those who'd think of it as 'statutory'. "Languages are my weakness, though- well, one of many- do you mind if I ask what you're studying?"

[astronomer]

"Alice Morgan," she says, motioning smoothly to where she's sitting, inviting Ilde to join her with an offhand, "Please." It's elegant, unthinkingly minimalist.

She takes a moment to reorganise her papers and make sure no gust of wind is going to scatter them all over again, before answering Ilde's question. "I'm studying Ragamoll. It seems prudent, when one finds oneself staying indefinitely in an unfamiliar city, to make said city familiar as soon as possible. Language seemed like the proper starting point. The city translates, but something is always lost- and I would hate to get complacent." She says that with a smile and a wry insincerity; she does not seem like a woman over whom anything so untidy as hate holds much sway.