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

a cafe, brock marsh | shunday;

[astronomer]

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.

verbatim, creekside | misdi;

[astronomer]

Verbatim has its charming aspects- admittedly it’s full of cats while Alice is a dog person, and she tries to time her visits so that Thomas is on duty and Marnie isn’t to avoid making any tiresome conversation, but no one bats an eyelid when she's trying to calculate how much weight in books she can reliably carry all the way back to Brock Marsh.

Right now, Alice has books on space and time, the ecology of the Gross Tar, the history of stelanmancy, legends about the fog disguised as a scientific treatise, the culture of Baedal (what culture, you senseless, mindless fake, you’re a bloated and rotting existential patchwork, a Frankenstein’s monster of a city), stacked and balanced on her hip, against her side. She almost looks like she works here, or at least she doesn’t look like the other customers, hesitating and enjoying the temptation of this book, that book, muddling along in peaceful, scruffy quiet- rather, there’s a purpose in her actions which makes it seem like every move she makes is according to some kind of plan.

the shore, gallmarch | veerdi;

[astronomer]

Alice likes the ocean; it’s the right amounts of beautiful and destructive, and it makes her feel less hemmed in. There are no walls here- though of course, you can’t really escape via sailing. It’s strange that she finds that compelling, these invisible forces, unseen reasons why and why not. They blame it on monsters, but she’s not interested in monsters.

She is here to feel free, but more than that, she is here for the Hole.

It sits just visible in the distance, surprisingly small and (she knows from her reading, from the haphazard and often-disastrous research done on it) perfectly circular. They do not know where the stone structures around it came from; they do not know where the Hole itself came from. It simply stays there and eats and eats, water rushing down it but never depleting.

It’s beautiful, this perfect circle of perpetual hunger. It’s so wrong. People are so afraid of it.

Alice stands on the rocky shore, hugging her coat around her as the sea wind whips her hair up into a frenzy of red curls, across her face, strands in her mouth- she pushes it back like drawing a curtain, thinks it’s not far.

She doesn’t want to believe they found an eyeball, either, or a tongue, or a lone finger- the body part changes depending on who tells the story of the friend of the friend of the friend they all have who jumped into the Hole. She wants to believe they never found anything at all. She wants to believe that the Hole makes people nothing. She wants to think it doesn’t ravage, only subtracts.

Standing on the shore and watching the Hole drink reminds her that she is something and somewhere beyond learning Ragamoll, beyond assisting the star-mapper who disgusts her more each day with his well-meaning bumbling, his massive and useless brain and shy kindness towards her, beyond her prim and well-made shoes, beyond budgeting. The Hole reminds her of where she is- not just a mad city but a multiversal parasite, a blight on the face of physics, a place that can’t be but is, trying to suck her in and crush her. More than that, though, the Hole calms her. It is a gap of nothing in this city filled with everything. More than Baedal, the Hole reminds her of who she is and what can't be stolen from her.

misc;

[astronomer]

There are always errands to do- errands, and the idle fantasies of putting her employer out of his misery with her bare hands briefly play out in bright colours in the back of her mind, sniffed at and dismissed but briefly cheering. She fetches him endless reams of paper and parchment and pens, which he is constantly losing- she brings messages to other researchers associated with the University and is careful to become a welcome, well-known face amongst them, sweet and funny and with a razor sharp mind, drops little hints about her thoughts on her employer’s latest research, leaves them frowning and interested in her wake. She collects letters, prints, books, the parts of a new calculating engine he is building and which she helps him with, suggesting tiny, crucial changes- he blinks, and she wonders irritably if he’s ever going to twig that she’s cleverer than he is.

In some ways, getting out of the observatory is a blessing- at least while clicking at a business-like rate through the streets of Baedal, stopping in to deliver this or that, to pick up something else, pausing at bookshops to hunt down the reference book Dr Krithn is sure he had in his hand just last week or possibly last year, called- called something with constellations in the title, well, anyway, there is a passage that is essential to his work and could she have it by three, please- at least then she is not trapped in the same room as him, frustrated by the alien stars and his inability to remember her name more than twice a day.