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

[deservesadaisy]

"Did you really?" He smiles, mildly intrigued. "I wonder if it's coincidence or just the nonsense of different universes." Suggesting, strongly, he doesn't expect to go back; meeting her in the future isn't a possibility he considers.

"May I ask who you thought I was?"

[astronomer]

"You may certainly ask," she says, as if she's promising something, grinning as she gives her non-answer. There's no reason, really, not to tell him -- but she feels like the subject of murder is something to reveal slowly in this case. Not to ease him into it, that's not how he comes off, but to make it more interesting.

She shifts her weight again, transferring her books to her other side, and then she taps her hand once on the cover of the top volume with a calm click as if she's decided something. "Are we loitering with intent?" she asks brightly. "I have to pay. Would you like to have coffee, Ivan?"

[deservesadaisy]

"What a delightful suggestion. I assume you meant with you." Rather than just generally. "I'll meet you outside and minimize the loitering."

[astronomer]

She just smiles instead of answering, leaving to pay -- despite being stronger than she looks, it's something of a relief to spread the weight of the books into two separate bags. She meets him with a certain bright, straight-backed, reporting-for-duty air. Very wholesome, apart from how she's just a little off.

"There. All stocked up. There's a charming cafe just down the street," she suggests. "Someone I knew once told me that one coffee doesn't make two people friends. What do you think?"

Steady on, perhaps, considering they've known each other for under an hour, but if Alice forms any attachments, they're fast and slightly unsettling. She frames it as a more or less academic inquiry, in any case.

[deservesadaisy]

"I don't know about that as a general rule," he says, blithe. "I think for some people, it's sufficient, and for some all the coffee in the world wouldn't do. Would you like me to take a bag?" He evidently hasn't bought anything, and his hands are thus free.