Closed RP: Chance and Henry in the library

[h-m-winter.livejournal.com]

Henry, in a frame of mind unusually thoughtful even for him, had made his way to the library on something close to auto-pilot. Next to his and Camilla's room, the library was a kind of sanctuary, whether he had any specific aim in mind or not.

It wasn't often that he did not, and today was no exception. He had spoken to a Dr. Chance Silvey about Caketown, which, so she said, was somehow connected with King Leonidas of Sparta. His own curiosity now piqued, he was determined to add his own research to hers--whatever this 'Caketown' and 'Candy Mountain' were, he had a feeling their connection to ancient Sparta would be...interesting, whatever else might be said of it.

He laid claim to an entire table, thumbing through the card catalogues and hunting up anything and everything that might have any bearing at all on his triumvirate of subjects. He'd brought an array of parchment and straight pens, determined to stay here until at least dinner.

Comments

[chance-silvey.livejournal.com]

Chance doesn't generally have a problem being punctual. She arrives just when she said she would, finding Henry Winter easily enough given that he's taken over a whole table. She's hit the jackpot, she hopes -- he definitely seems to know his stuff when it comes to Sparta. Or at least he knows how to use a card catalog.

"Hey. Thanks for coming." For her part, Chance only has a couple of books. "The library doesn't have a whole lot about this type of liopleurodon, or about the place names mentioned in conjunction with it. What I do have I mostly found by accident at Flourish and Blotts, with some help from Dr. Brennan (http://community.livejournal.com/hogwarts_hocus/1346962.html?thread=68258962&style=mine#t68258962) -- Billy, if you've met him." She hoists her copies of Cavities and Sea Oddities: The Liopleurodon/Candy Mountain Connection and The Rise and Fall of Spartan Soufflé: A History of Ancient Greek Pastries. "They don't exactly read like scholarly work, either. More like your average Nessie-hunter's tabloid stuff. But there is also this." She sets down the first two books, and holds out a third to Henry: The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times. (http://press.princeton.edu/titles/6811.html) "It's not perfect (http://palaeo-electronica.org/2000_2/books/hunter.htm) but it's definitely interesting. Especially in conjunction with this kind of work. Liopleurodon magicus is one elusive plesiosaur (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liopleurodon)", she concludes ruefully, and takes a seat next to Henry.

[h-m-winter.livejournal.com]

"Not a problem," he said. "You've caught my interest with this. I studied a great deal about ancient Sparta in school, and never ran across anything like Candy Mountain or a Liopleurodon." He'd done enough reading to know that, while magical history was often directly intertwined with Muggle, the magical half rarely got written down by Muggle historians.

He eyed the assortment of books, wondering if any of them would actually be of any real use. "Now, I have to ask, how much do you know about ancient Sparta?"

[chance-silvey.livejournal.com]

"Next to nothing. I didn't do a lot of ancient civ. Didn't do a whole lot of anything that wasn't in the hard sciences, to be honest. Other than your typical breadth requirements when I was an undergrad, and most of that I can't say I retained all too well." Chance shrugs. "Not that I'm knocking the humanities. I just had a really specific focus, I guess you could say, from a really early age. My grandparents were both professors in my field -- a geologist and a paleontologist -- and they started me off pretty early. What I know about Sparta I've gotten from the Encyclopedia Britannica, the Encylopedia Magica that this library has, and --" she points to the gaudy cover of The Rise and Fall of Spartan Soufflé.

It has a guy in a toga and a chef's hat. He's holding a plate with a big cake on it. A cake with lots and lots of frosting adornments. Weirdly, he has a toothbrush tucked behind his ear.

"So, yeah. Probably you should assume you're starting with a blank slate, here."

[h-m-winter.livejournal.com]

Henry actually smiled, a little dryly. He knew all about having a specific focus--his had just been on the other end of things, as it were.

He reached for the book, eying the cover with a very slight amount of disbelief. The chef hat he could deal with--barely--but the toothbrush? Not so much. The contrast of the chef hat with the toga put him strongly in mind of Susan's trucker hat, and he almost laughed.

"All right," he said, pulling out a neatly bound parchment notebook. "I wasn't sure how much you'd know, so I made some notes. I'll try to give you the concise version, and let you read the more detailed information later."

Briefly, he outlined the history of ancient Sparta (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparta)--customs, language, religion, and general culture. He talked about Leonidas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonidas), the hypothetical King Kandy, and the legend of the Spartan 300. "As for Candy Mountain and the Liopleurodon--the Spartans, like most Greeks, were notoriously superstitious. Assuming these things were real, that they were a place and a creature of magic, that must have leaked into the Spartan pool of story."

[chance-silvey.livejournal.com]

Chance listens with thorough interest and all due attention. She likes lectures. Never cared for that group discussion shit, as empowering as it's supposed to be and all. She wants real information.

She's grateful for what she gets. More, she's impressed. If Henry Winter were a professor, he'd probably get rock-bottom teacher evaluations for the dryness of delivery, the lack of pizzazz, but that's all to the good. When something's interesting and solid, you don't need to jazz it up. Shouldn't need to.

"You ever teach?" she asks, casually.

[h-m-winter.livejournal.com]

Henry was fully aware of his penchant for long, rambling monologues--it wasn't often he found an appreciative listener. Not everyone could follow the essential thread behind the rambling.

He blinked, surprised at her question. "No," he said. "No, the closest I came was translating Catalus. I died when I was quite young." It was still an odd admission to make, but his naturally reserved nature saw little wrong with revealing it--after all, it seemed half the school had been dead at one time or another.

[chance-silvey.livejournal.com]

"You too?" Chance shakes her head very slightly. "Sorry to hear it. I lived long enough to get my doctorate and an assistant professorship. And to teach a bunch of thankless Bible Belt creationists their basic geology. I like to think of Hogwarts as a nice research fellowship."

[h-m-winter.livejournal.com]

Henry actually winced at the term 'Bible Belt creationists'. Creationism vs. evolution was not something that had ever been an issue for him, but the mindest of that sort of person was immensely distasteful to him. He wouldn't have gotten his degree even if he hadn't died, thanks to Julian, so that at least hadn't been lost to his suicide.

"You know, I never considered that," he said. "It's a good way to think of it. I've certainly done enough research here." Granted, much of it had been on Dark magic, but it was research nonetheless.

[chance-silvey.livejournal.com]

"It took me a while to come around to seeing it as something positive. This place, I mean. For a long time I thought I was hallucinating it -- last few seconds before brain-death, who knows what the dying person sees? A magic school in Scotland with a talking hat would be just Lewis Carroll enough, wouldn't it? Helps there are other paleontologists here." Grant, Billy, even Dr. Sattler whom Chance doesn't really know well at all.

"Of course, maybe that's how I'd imagine the afterlife, too. Populated with paleontologists. So I expect the verdict's still out if you want to be technical. But it's easier to accept that we're all really here. Occam's Razor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor), right?"

[h-m-winter.livejournal.com]

Henry could no longer remember just what he'd thought, when he first showed up here--the headaches he'd had not long after had rendered most of that time a malleable, unreliable thing.

"We're not dead," he said. "I know that much." Susan and Silas's zombie girlfriend, as Camilla called her, had proven that to him. Silas himself had been dead before he came here, too.

[chance-silvey.livejournal.com]

Of course, Chance has to ask. Even though she knows better.

"Feel free to tell me there isn't any answer, but -- what makes you sure of that?"

[h-m-winter.livejournal.com]

"Camilla has a bodyguard of a sort--a monk named Silas--who is good friends with a zombie woman." He still couldn't bring himself to say 'zombie girlfriend' aloud; he firmly believed Silas was both too psychologically damaged and too much a monk to form any kind of actual relationship. "And the woman you met--the one wearing the hat at the time--is an incarnation of Death. The jewelry and the hat were, I believe, the result of her inability to understand the finer details of humanit." Having known Susan beforehand, he knew that she would never wear such a hat, or so very much jewelry. "There would be no need for a Death in the afterlife, nor would I think there would be any zombies. Would be a bit redundant, really."

[chance-silvey.livejournal.com]

"Well, there wouldn't be any need for a talking hat, either," Chance points out. "But fair enough." She pauses. Without thinking, she finds herself tracing a seven-sided figure on the tabletop, and makes her finger stop, folding her hands so she can't do that anymore. "If you don't mind my asking, in a place where no one can die why would anyone need a bodyguard?"

It's none of Chance's business and she doesn't care enough to pursue the question if Henry deflects it, but she is curious.

"I've met her brother. Seems like too much of a drunk to pose any real problems." Chance has found Charles Macaulay decidedly unimpressive.

[h-m-winter.livejournal.com]

Very little escaped Henry's notice--he watched her hands trace the symbol, and wondered why she did it, and what it meant. "Just because you can't die here doesn't mean you can't be hurt here," he said--a noncommital answer at best. "Silas is very loyal, and none to stable--I believe it does him good."

He didn't quite go still at Chance's mention of Charles, but for a moment his face was as immobile as a statue's. "You've met Charles, have you?" he asked, tone carefully neutral. "What did you think of him? Aside from the fact that he's a drunk?"

[chance-silvey.livejournal.com]

Chance snorts. "I didn't get the impression there was much else to know about him."

[h-m-winter.livejournal.com]

...Henry knew there was a reason he'd thought he could like Chance. He was not a man who made friends easily, but Chance was not difficult to be around like most people.

"You were right," he said. He wasn't about to mention that Charles had come to kill him, just before he committed suicide, but the dryness of his tone said much. "He, I think, is harmless in and of himself. What he might induce other people to do is another story." There was a certain finality to the words, and abruptly he changed tacks. "That symbol you were tracing--what is it?"

[chance-silvey.livejournal.com]

No, Chance wouldn't be difficult company, if you were someone like Henry. She's unobtrusive, capable, low-maintenance, and no-nonsense. In a word, she's competent.

She does her own planning. She doesn't look to someone else to tell her what to do. And she's resourceful. Henry just so happens to be a good resource when it comes to research on Sparta -- and Chance hasn't pretended to cultivate his acquaintance for any other reason.

She finds him easy company too, like-minded in a way. So she keeps talking. And she thinks maybe he won't think she's crazy if she answers his question.

"It's something I think I remember dreaming. It should be a geometrically impossible shape if it's not curved, and this one I remember was straight-edged. Found it in a fossil imprint. Something my grandmother was working on before she killed herself. Something not right."

[h-m-winter.livejournal.com]

Henry raised an eyebrow. The bacchanal had opened his mind to all sorts of possibilities, and he had no trouble accepting her explanation. "She found it in a fossil, and killed herself?" he asked. "Did you ever figure out what it was?"

[chance-silvey.livejournal.com]

"No. She found a lot of fossils in her lifetime. She was a paleontologist too. No particular reason this one should have been any different, nothing to suspect. It just turned out to be all kinds of wrong." Chance takes a deep even breath. "I mean, I know what the fossil was. Trilobite fossil, Dicranurus monstrosus. I just don't know what it was, if you see what I'm saying. Worse, it gets really blurry. Sometimes I wonder if I ever saw it at all. I don't know where it is now. And I think before I came here -- okay, before I died -- I forgot all about it. For some reason. There had to be a reason."

[h-m-winter.livejournal.com]

Henry did follow. Paleontology was hardly his forte, but he knew there had once been all sorts of creatures in the world that man now knew next to nothing about.

"Of course there was a reason," he said--Henry, great believer in Fate, felt this with full certainty. "The trick is in discovering that reason. I feel safe in guessing it's part and parcel with the fossil itself--do you know what happened to it, after you died?" He spoke of death quite matter-of-factly, as he spoke of all else.

[chance-silvey.livejournal.com]

"No," she says, not without regret. "The hell of it is, I don't even know what happened to it before I died. It's like I remember two different ways things went. One way, I found it, and her notes, and a big crate of stuff she'd left. And another way, I don't think I ever saw it. And neither one of them is all that clear to me anymore, but the clearer by far is the way where none of that happened. Except she died the same way. Hung herself. Every time."

[h-m-winter.livejournal.com]

Henry thought about this. Could Fate decide it had made a mistake, and fail to correct it properly? The idea went against his grain, but then he'd seen so many bizarre things here that he couldn't really discount anything anymore. Or perhaps the artifact--whatever it was--was itself to blame; perhaps it had tried to manipulate Fate, and failed.

"I wonder," he said thoughtfully, "if it was dying that disrupted your memory, or something that came before."

[chance-silvey.livejournal.com]

This gives Chance pause. "I can't say," she realises. "I really can't say. It could have been -- "

Those disjunctions between experience and memory. Looking at herself in the mirror and seeing blood she knows isn't there. That trip to Florida, Deacon holding her hand as they looked through the safety glass at the albino girl Chance thought she'd only dreamed, and the girl remembered her, called her by name.

"Could well have been something that came before."

[h-m-winter.livejournal.com]

"Do you think it was some kind of magic?" he asked. "From what I've seen here, there are many more kinds of magic than that taught at this school. And there are things, things we don't yet understand, that might well be called magic." The bacchanal--the god they had summoned--was not what one might strictly call magic, but it was something completely unexplainable by normal society.

[chance-silvey.livejournal.com]

"I've seen magic. Some that worked. Some that didn't work. Some I'm not sure about. The way I died, it wasn't pretty. The woman who killed me was trying to summon something -- some things. Wolf-dog-things. And it worked but they didn't want what she had to offer ... anyway, it's not related to the other. To the trilobites and the seven-sided figure in the fossil imprint, that is. It's related to some other things and I've had a hell of a time even thinking about it, let alone disentangling any of it." Chance shrugs. "It's much easier to think about work. Work's something concrete."