sunnydalealum | (no subject)

Nita offers a bright, friendly grin, hooking her thumbs into the pockets of her pants.

Rachel returns a quick smile for the friendly grin, and nods to Andrew.

"Afternoon, Andrew. What can I do for you?"

"Hey, Rachel. Um, this is Nita, she's a friend from New York --"

"Dai'stiho," Nita puts in, extending a hand. "Nice to meet you."

Rachel's eyes widen slightly, and after a second so does her smile, and she reaches to shake Nita's hand.

"Well met," she says. "Not a Slayer, then?"

"Uh, no -- a wizard."

"A wizard," she repeats, sounding pleased (and faintly amused). "That's new."

Hastily: "It's a different branch of the Art, you might say."

To Nita, he adds, "Rachel's a witch. Training under Ms. Harkness."

"Oh! Okay." Nita grins. "Always glad to meet a colleague."

"Likewise," Rachel says. "And since Andrew's brought you here, might I guess it's on business?"

"Yeah." She shoots Andrew a glance. "I've got kind of a concentration in non-human languages, so he asked me to take a look at some -- Sulcaric, right? Sulcaric writings."

That gets a pause, and raised eyebrows. "Rarefied territory," Rachel says. "You'll need a syllabary, then, and -- any sort of writings in particular?"

"Do you have the account of the Dustrealm Wars?" Andrew asks, before Nita can answer.

"Should do," she says cheerfully. "This way?"

Rachel turns to lead the way into the mazes.

Nita lags a little.

"Should I have held off on the wizard thing?"

In a similar undertone: "No, you're fine. Magic-users call themselves all kinds of things here, depending on where they learned it."

"Okay. Cool."

With that settled, she slips her hands into her pockets and lengthens her stride a little to catch up with Rachel.

Who doesn't seem to have any trouble at all finding her way through the labyrinthine turnings in the stacks. She's worked here too long.

"Here we are," she says, stopping and running her fingers lightly over the spines of several books. "The Wars for the Dustrealm, volumes one through eight. Are you going to need all eight, or is there one in particular you wanted?"

She glances from Andrew to Nita, hand hovering over the shelf.

. . . With great feeling: "Oof."

Would saying she looks enchanted be in poor taste?

"Start at the beginning, you think?" she asks Andrew.

"Start at the beginning," he agrees, "and we'll see if we need to go any farther."

"Very good," says Rachel, carefully sliding one heavy book out from among its companions.

"And the syllabaries will be under language reference," she adds, turning to lead them off in a different direction.

"Great."

She peers at the spines of the other volumes as she follows.

Most of them in this section aren't in English, or indeed in any human language. Some of them have smaller English letters underneath the titles, with phrases like ANNOTATED or WITH TRANSLATION added.

One is titled in a flowing script that looks at first glance startlingly like the written form of the Speech, but a second glance shows it to be nothing of the kind.

That last gets a double-take.

The fascinating thing is that they're not just non-human languages -- they're not alien languages, either. She's never seen anything like them.

You could say they're alien. Just ... not from the same set (sheaf) of worlds Nita knows.

But by this time they're already out of the demonic languages and into the human-but-not-English languages: Welsh, Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, German, French, Etruscan, Arabic, moving too quickly to see all of them.

"Language reference," Rachel announces, "and ... yes, here's the Sulcaric syllabary." As she reaches for the book, she adds "Is there anything else you'll need?"