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]

"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."

[h-m-winter.livejournal.com]

"It is," Henry agreed. After the bacchanal--after the farmer--he had immersed himself in his work to an even greater degree than normal. The neat, tidy order of his studies enabled him to hold everything together for the others. "Perhaps something of that may turn out to be related to this Caketown--stranger things have happened." He paused. "Especially here."

[chance-silvey.livejournal.com]

"God, tell me about it. If I had a dime for every utterly bizarre thing that happens here, I'd be able to hire a research assistant. And buy a Xerox machine. And have it refurbished to work in a magical environment." Chance shakes her head. "But no, I don't think Liopleurodon magicus has anything to do with Dicranurus monstrosus or with my grandmother. Though maybe the Dreamless Sleep Potion is blanking things out. Still, I'm as sure as I guess I can be. Call it a hunch."

[h-m-winter.livejournal.com]

"What exactly is a Liopleurodon?" he asked. "And what does it have to do with Candy Mountain?" Perhaps if he knew that, he'd have a better idea where to begin in researching a connection to King Leonidas and ancient Sparta.

[chance-silvey.livejournal.com]

In tones a bit more animated than Henry's own style of lecturing, Chance explains everything she knows about liopleurodons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liopleurodon), plus some things she hadn't known before she died. (Chance died in 2001, before the Aramberri find and subsequent controversy.) "I'm not sure what makes the 'magical liopleurodon' magical. That's where this whole body of Candy Mountain lore comes in. A lot of stuff about shunning the nonbelievers, which suggests a mystery cult. Which would explain why there's so little extant writing about it." She leafs through Cavities and Sea Oddities, until she finds an illustration of a bridge. "The liopleurodon's situated on the way to this supposed Candy Mountain. It 'shows the way' to a 'bridge of hope and wonder'. Some kind of psychopomp legend, maybe?"

[h-m-winter.livejournal.com]

Henry digested this thoughtfully. "Well, it's certainly not as though there weren't a plethora of cults in ancient Greece," he said. "It's possible they worshiped this Liopleurodon as some kind of deity, though it wouldn't fit with the traditional pantheon. A group of renegades, perhaps?"

He pulled a pad of paper toward him and began writing, seemingly aimlessly--organizing his thoughts. "This bridge and the way to Candy Mountain itself may borrow from the classic Greek myths as well--Jason and the Fleece, Ulysses, etc. Why they would name a peak Candy Mountain, though, I can't begin to guess."

[chance-silvey.livejournal.com]

"And that's not even getting into the King Kandy aspect of it ..." Chance bites the end of her ballpoint pen (quills are for suckers) thoughtfully. "You know, I'm not the expert on that. I wonder if Jadzia's busy."

Quickly she dashed off an owl to Dax, expert on all things Candy Land:

Dax,
I'm in the library with someone who knows a lot about Sparta and Greek mythology. King Leonidas = King Kandy? Not sure. You busy? We're at a table on the ground floor. You can't really miss us. No one else has a copy of Cavities and Sea Oddities.

-Chance