multiversallogs | (no subject)

Who: Hermione Granger, OPEN
What: Hermione goes book-hunting, and runs into ~fellow citizens of Baedal~.
Where: The Library of the Blessed St Brian.
When: A few days after her arrival, before this.
Notes: If you want your character to interact with Hermione but doubt they'd be in the library, feel free to have them somewhere else and she can stumble across them; she's likely going to do some exploring elsewhere.
Warnings: none.

Libraries are sanctuaries, and that, right now, is just what Hermione wants, along with as many cold hard facts as she can find. Rumours are hardly trustworthy, anecdotes are just rumours in seed form, and the only thing the propaganda has done is made her wary and worried. She doesn’t trust herself to go into any bookshops just yet, not on limited funds, and she’s always preferred libraries anyway- from the architecture and the smell, to the fact that these are books passed from person to person, books with history, to the (admittedly mundane and worldly, but still relevant) lack of cost involved in frequenting them.

This, therefore, would be why she’s prowling through the shelves with her eyes wide, seeking out facts and figures and records. There’s an expression of intense, slightly hungry concentration on her face.

There are also three books floating beside her, which she feels a little nervous about. They’re too heavy to carry, and from what she’s seen magic isn’t taboo in Baedal- but she’s so used to keeping it hidden when not in explicitly wizarding society that it feels as if she’s doing something illicit. She keeps glancing at them, and then around, the furrow between her brows getting progressively deeper every minute.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Some of that oddness is admittedly nature; she doesn't think or prioritize the way a human would (never has, and that was a frightening thing when she still thought she was one), and there's an ever-present edge of otherworldliness. More of it, though, is the fact that she's stumbling through years of brutal trauma with no better coping skill than 'ignore it, sometimes with alcohol'. She was much better at pretending to fit the world around her when she didn't have to devote so much energy to not screaming.

After her particular experiences of the supposed superiority of the human race, a certain disinclination to play ball with pretense is probably to be expected, though few in Baedal have got past the initial impression to peg the hurts that drive it. It's been less than a year since she was broken out of the facility.

"There are other fae here," she says, shrugging one shoulder, "but none of my particular species. And I was raised among humans," with a flicker of black humour; Hermione's honest and more or less respectful startlement isn't the kind to raise her guard, "so it was a bit of a surprise to me, too, at first."

They're two separate thoughts, but she has a tendency to tangent and to run things together that aren't connected; linear conversation is a bonus with this one, not a guarantee.

Hermione's just reluctant to pin labels on without actually knowing the details of what a faerie is, at least in Ilde's case; she knows the folklore, but how could she judge based on that? She works- or did work (that thought gives her a pang of homesickness and worry every time it comes up)- in the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures, after all, trying to scrap oppressive laws and often finding herself talking to a wall as far as wizarding attitudes to magical non-humans go.

As for raised amongst humans, the first thing she thinks of is her own upbringing. "Gosh, I can imagine," she says. "I-" No. 'I was brought up amongst non-magical people?' Why not just broadcast it? She swiftly changes what she was going to say. "I suppose it's rather something to suddenly- realise? Be told? Find out? Sorry, I don't mean to ask personal questions- I'm just...curious."

"There's an organization in my world that studies the supernatural in order to better control and weaponise it, among other things," Ilde says, briefly. "I wouldn't say I was exactly 'told'." It's a very sparse thing to say, but the edge in her tight smile is telling to the observant; there are a multitude of sins beneath those words, even if she doesn't launch into a detailed accounting of her abuse. Her frankness on the subject is primarily an act of defiance against Prometheus-- their secrecy, their treatment of her kind as something lesser and shameful.

They were the ones torturing children.

"After the storm it'd have been difficult not to notice." She lets her illusion thin, illustratively, and shrugs.