sunnydalealum | (no subject)

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The thin slanting light of a winter midafternoon is sifting in through the high windows as two figures step into the main room of the Library of the New Watchers' Council: a vast round vaulted space lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves.

Andrew's seen it before; he's looking at Nita, grinning in anticipation of her reaction.

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Overlapping: "-- Oh frell. Nita, don't move, I'll get Ms St. John --"

"Easy for you to say!"

Meanwhile, as the humans have their discussion . . .

. . . the books are having their own.

The way books communicate uses words, but mostly in ways that the human mind is too slow to follow.

What Nita's manual says to the library boils down to: It's cool, she's with me.

And, after some hemming and hawing (that boils down to Kids, I don't know, in my day we'd have asked permission first) and additional arguments (that have the words CATNYP and Book in them) . . .

Nita suddenly stumbles as the air goes back to being air, allowing her to complete her interrupted step.

"Uh --"

Andrew pauses in midstep, not because he's been interrupted but because ...

"-- what just happened?"

Blinking, she waves a hand experimentally -- takes a step backward, takes a step forward.

"I have no idea."

(If it's possibly for a book to look smug? Her manual looks smug. Discreetly.)

"Okay, well."

Cautiously he touches the open door, as if half-expecting the gesture to set off an alarm.

"If we don't get anyone coming to demand what we just did to the wards, it's probably okay."

"Here's hoping."

She continues to eye the door warily, but nothing further seems to be forthcoming.

"You want to lead the way back? I'd hate to get lost in these stacks."

The table where they left the books isn't all that far, but Andrew's happy to lead the way.

Within a few minutes they're seated, with three books lying open on the table in front of them.

Nita rolls her shoulders and pulls the first volume closer, handling it with care.

Within a few minutes, a frown of concentration is creasing her forehead. A few minutes after that, she flips open her notebook and starts copying down symbols, with notes in the Speech underneath.

Andrew cranes his neck to peer over her shoulder.

"What've you got?"

"Not sure. Something to study."

She turns the book and taps a symbol with her finger. "Does that mean anything to you?"

"Hang on, let's see, it might be...."

He peers at it.

"...nope, no idea. Let's check the syllabary."

"Worth a shot." She frowns at her notes. "I've kind of got a sense of the context, but it's not doing me much good."

Flip flip flip. Rustle. Flip.

"Let me see that again?"

Flip fl- pause.

"Got it. That's tla, and, hang on, because there's no iek following it ... it means 'to lift'."

". . . Well that's anticlimactic."

"Why, what's the context?" He cranes his neck to look at the rest of the line on the page.

Rueful: "I, uh, can't really explain most of it in English. But I think this . . . sentient-abstract-concept," she says, tapping a symbol further down the page, "is giving instructions to these aware-but-lacking-self-abstract-traditions."

Andrew looks at the page.

And back up at Nita.

"You're good."

She grins.

"I have an unfair advantage. Not," she adds, glancing down again, "that it seems to be doing that much good. 'To lift'? Seriously?"

"That's the simplest meaning, but I told you, Sulcaric's complicated. There could be shades of abstract -- like, to uplift, or to raise to another level of -- here, let me see the rest of the sentence again."

He writes down the word lift on a blank page in his notebook, circles it, and starts flipping pages in the syllabary again.

"Oof."

She makes a few more notes of her own, then goes back to skimming the page.

"What does spoken Sulcaric sound like?"

He chews on the end of his pen for a second before answering. "I've only ever heard it spoken once," he says. "And not by a Sulcar demon, so."

Yeah, he sounds a bit subdued.

She glances up, raising her eyebrows.

Beat.

"-- I guess I really didn't tell you the whole story."

"Not really, no."

She props her chin on her hand.

Andrew sighs. "Okay. Long story short: somewhere in New York there's a Sulcar demon who's overproducing this substance called hysk, which in ordinary circumstances is what they feed to their young so that their brains develop properly. And someone, maybe the demon himself or maybe somebody else, is selling hysk to college students as a brain-booster drug."