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 Posted: Thu Apr 17, 2014 3:14 pm
Hvergelmir had never seen so many books looking like this in all her life. Sure, she'd seen libraries with loads and loads of books before -- but she'd never seen them all crammed into a building they'd clearly outgrown like this, spilling out over everything as though they were a tribble infestation. "A clue, somewhere in here..." she marveled, thinking about the immensity of the project. How did one find a needle in a haystack? (Or, as her father had joked once, an upstanding lawyer.) There were books everywhere, and if they were all written in alien languages, nevertheless... "Tara," she said, breathing out in amazement. "You're a genius!" This probably would've been a little hyperbolic coming from anyone but Laney. She believed in her friend, though, with her whole heart -- and it relieved her to learn there was more to life as a magical warrior than just -- making magical war. "I mean, this library was yours once, right? So you have to think about what you'd keep in a library. So I mean, would you keep books in your library that weren't very useful against space monsters and alien invaders? Probably. But would you keep books in your library that were? Definitely. So it's in here -- I bet there's loads of stuff in here. "And if this is your library, that means you could read these languages before, once. And if you could learn any of these languages before, that means you can learn them again for sure -- because, I mean, you're still you." She smiled, the wide grin brightening her face. "And they may not be Earth languages, but, just... look at them! They're still books, most of them, books like our kind of books. So if these were written by people who record their writing and bind it into paper books the way we do, then at least some of them had to have been pretty similar to us -- and I'll bet our languages are similar too." She trailed off, her enthusiasm pulling her slightly off-course. "I bet we'll find the Shakespeare of Space," she posited. "Or at least, like, the Stephen King of Space."
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Posted: Tue Apr 22, 2014 8:49 pm
And just like that, everything was better.
Well, not everything. Aquarius was still upset about the situation. She still felt guilty, and responsible, and her arm was really hurting. But all of those things could wait. As long as Laney believed she was on the right track, everything else would be fine.
How did Laney always know the right thing to say? And why hadn't Aquarius picked up on that skill?
That, too, could wait for later. In the meantime, she nodded excitedly. "Exactly! If you meet other people involved in this mess- and you probably will- they'll give you an earful of suggestions and demands and arguments. And I can't tell you who's right and who's wrong. But I can say that there are resources at our disposal, and it would be silly not to use them, right? I mean, even if all we find is Space Steven King, I'm sure he'd have a thing or two to say about intergalactic warfare."
She started moving again, wading through a lake of books towards the back of the library. "Most of my notes are at the desk. I know you won't have much of a frame of reference for them, but take a look anyway? I've compared what I could find to Earth languages and haven't found anything I can use so far, but that doesn't mean anything. I've been staring at them for so long they're probably burned into my corneas. Maybe you'll notice something I'm too close to see."
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Posted: Sun Apr 27, 2014 12:08 pm
Laney laughed, following her friend a pace behind. "There's a desk in here? Is it made of books?" She'd have a look at Tara's notes and do her best -- but Laney didn't have much confidence she'd be of any use if Tara hadn't been able to make anything of them. Laney had never been the thinker, or even the imagineer. She was the cheerleader, and if Tara was hoping for more from her than that, it meant she must have come up pretty dry. "Do any of them have, um... pictures? Captions? Maybe, uh... a table of contents? At least you'd know what the symbols for the numbers are, right? That's gotta be... something." She had no idea how anyone went about decoding a language. Hvergelmir made a mental note to look up the Rosetta stone on Wikipedia when she got home. Maybe she could go on a click trail and learn something.
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Posted: Mon Apr 28, 2014 10:40 pm
"I actually have no idea what it's made of. Too much stuff on top, y'know? But who knows? Even if it's made of wood or something, maybe we could crack it open like an Easter egg and there'd be more books in the middle."
That was meant to be a joke, but as Aquarius spoke, something about the idea seemed familiar. She had tried the drawers before, only to find them resistant to her touch. But there was more than one way to crack an egg. Maybe it was time to think outside the desk-shaped box.
Laney's ideas were, of course, good. "I've sorted some of them by what I guess their purpose is, based on illustrations and diagrams. We've got things that look like botany books, and geology and biology and chemistry- pictures of test tubes and really weird animals, all sorts of stuff. Honestly, there's probably a lot we could learn just from that. But knowing about the existence of an ancient nine-legged bear from the planet Wokkawokka isn't going to help us right now. We need to get to the meat of the matter, and that's in the text. I hadn't thought about isolating the numerical characters, though. It's hard to tell sometimes, and the books aren't all written in the same language, but we can try."
She stepped carefully as she spoke, hopping over smaller piles of books, and wading through larger ones. The desk was at the very back of the library, in what Aquarius considered an inconvenient nook. It was paired with a chair that seemed to be made of some kind of metal, with a high back and plain arms. It was, like most other surfaces in the room, already occupied. The desk itself was totally covered with books and loose papers, many of which looked like recent additions. Most noticeable was the plain composition notebook on the very top- the master list of letters she had discovered so far. It was open, revealing a page full of graceful, curvy characters that Aquarius suspected were the basis of her own written language.
"That's what I've got so far. Take a look, see what you think! I'm going to test something." That flippant comment about the desk had stuck with her, and she approached it from the side, rapping one fist lightly against the wood, not quite sure what she was expecting to find.
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Posted: Wed Apr 30, 2014 3:35 pm
Laney nodded thoughtfully, looking down at the composition book and the characters scrawled across its pages. It was a pretty language, if utterly inscrutable. She wasn't sure what she could do with it, honestly -- she'd never even finished high school. "You're right, it's probably not anything very useful," she agreed. "It's only, you know how I told you I used to do those spelling bees, like, when I was really young? Well, I'd practice with all kinds of word puzzles, because I didn't have anyone to read my flash cards to me -- and with the cryptograms, you'd always start with the really, uh, really likely words or letters? Like, usually every sentence had a 'the' and you knew you could always pick out the 'a' or the 'I.' So I was just thinking, let's say you had, like -- a book on trees? With pictures? And if you look at enough pictures, probably a lot of them have 'tree' in the name, whatever the word for tree is, so you find which letters keep repeating themselves and it's like, there, now you know 'tree.'" She shrugged. "I don't know, I wish I was more help! I wouldn't even know where to begin with all this, I'd probaby just make pizza rolls and sit in front of the TV and cry. I mean, I guess maybe I'd start with whatever language I have the most books of. Make a fort out of the others." Hvergelmir looked around for a place to sit in among all the books, so she could look over Tara's notes more thoroughly. There was the floor, just barely -- otherwise, the options were books, books, and more books. "You need to get some bean bag chairs up in here," she decided. "Do you stand up the whole time when you're working on this? How long does it take you? You look like you've gotten through a ton already."
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Posted: Tue May 06, 2014 7:43 pm
Aquarius was only half listening as she set about knocking on the sides of the desk with her non-throbbing hand, but the half she heard was interesting. She hadn't really thought about trying to read the words without understanding the syllables that made them up. Though there was little she remembered about learning how to read, she did remember having to sound out words she didn't know. That was impossible when she had no idea how to pronounce the language she was looking at. But maybe the language itself wasn't important, if the context could provide her with what she needed. It could, at least, be a start.
"Are you kidding? This is great. It's just what I needed- a new way to look at things." It was as she'd said: after spending so long staring at the same characters, she couldn't see them as anything more than scribbles. The elegant lines in the notebook had only been drawn after extensive practice, samples of which could be found underneath. In some cases, she'd gotten so frustrated that her pencil had gone straight through the paper, at which point she would usually end a study session, only to come back weeks later and do the same things again.
She was about to comment on the bean bag chairs- another fantastic idea- when the bit of desk she was rattling slid to the side. "Hello there," she said instead, bending down to see what it was. A small panel had been dislodged, and several small items that looked like coins were falling out, onto the floor. Aquarius scooped a few into her good hand and brought them out into the light, where they could both get a better look.
They weren't coins. Or if they were, they were really weird coins, made of some sort of green stone that reminded her of jade and wrapped with gold wire. In the light, she could make out some symbols engraved on the surface of the stone, which made her want to shriek until she realized that she recognized these. The symbols of the Zodiac. She had seen those before. She had seen these discs before.
"It's a key, I think." Aquarius put the handful down on the desk, then picked up a single circle. It was quite small, with a loop of gold wire at the top so that it could be strung on something. "They had something like this at the end of... well, anyway, I think it lets you come here without me." Not that she planned on letting Laney wander through her new life alone, but there was a lot that she couldn't help with. A lot that Laney would need to figure out for herself. If nothing else, Aquarius needed to make every tool at her disposal available.
So she held out the token in her open hand. "It might come in handy, for something or other."
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Posted: Wed May 07, 2014 2:03 pm
"Ooh, cool." Laney looked at the little green disc in her hand. It was pretty, and lighter than it looked, so she should be able to carry it around easily enough -- Some . . . where . . . Laney reached down and began patting at the sides of her dress experimentally -- much like Aquarius had tapped at the side of the desk only moments ago. Her experiment met with less success, though; moments later she was looking up at Aquarius as though someone had just replaced her regular coffee with Folger's Crystals and she could definitely tell the difference. (In truth, Laney didn't have a very discerning tongue where coffee was concerned, so her reaction here was probably a bit bigger, if anything.) "They didn't even give me pockets!" she announced, horrified. "Tara, I've got no pockets!"
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Posted: Wed May 07, 2014 10:13 pm
The utter seriousness of the situation- life and death, fate of the universe stuff- being mixed with the critical issue of pockets (or lack thereof) made Aquarius start to laugh. At first, a few giggles. Then a hearty chuckle, which lead to uproarious guffaws that made her sides hurt. She wheezed and grinned and clapped her good hand over her abdomen. Under her fingers she could feel the slightly raised skin of a set of parallel scars, the souvenir of the last stop on her year-long senshi vacation. That made her stop, so abruptly that she wound up coughing for a few more moments.
"Wow, I really needed that." When was the last time she had allowed herself to be amused by something senshi-related, rather than scared or angry? "If it makes you feel any better, I don't have any pockets either." She held the side of her pants out to demonstrate, then tugged at the torn sash at her waist. "Though I do tuck things in here sometimes, when it's not ripped. Which is good to know, I guess- you've got magical dry cleaners on your side. Every time you change, your dress should be good as new, no matter what you do to it. And as for pockets, you might not have a real one, but there's always this."
Aquarius showed her hands, as if she was performing a magic act. Then, with a look of concentration, she reached off to the side. "Nothing up my sleeves and- presto!" There was her senshiphone, still shiny and new from lack of use. Or maybe the magical dry cleaners did phone touch-ups too. "Important senshi stuff- or knight stuff in your case, I guess- is always at your fingertips! But you can't put not-magic stuff in your handy dimensional pocket, sadly. Or at least, I haven't been able to. I usually bring a bag with the important stuff. I just don't have it today because I wasn't expecting... I mean, it's not like I'd planned...
And there it was again, the elephant in the outpost. No matter what Laney said, she still felt that if she had been better-prepared, none of this would have happened. Now that it had, there was no going back.
"Are you hungry? I'm kind of hungry. Beating up eldritch abominations can really work up an appetite." As usual, she chose the coward's way out. Unable to deal with the thoughts she thought and the feelings she felt, she pushed them all deep down, where they couldn't bother her. It wasn't the smartest way to handle things, but then, she had never pretended to be clever.
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Posted: Thu May 08, 2014 6:10 pm
There had probably been hundreds of times, in the course of their friendship of a few years now, where Laney and Tara might've benefited from talking about their negative emotions instead of repeatedly smothering them with the nearest change of subject. This was certainly one of them. But today had been a hard day -- for the both of them -- and Laney wasn't in any more of a mood to try and have a heavy conversation with Tara than Tara was with her. No, she wanted a hamburger. Or five hamburgers. Or a whole cow. Come to think of it, she really was hungry. "You read my mind," she answered, setting the notebook down on the pile -- well, one of the piles -- of books. "You read my mind before I even thought it." (Laney had avoided seeing Inception, so the chance at a good topical reference was unfortunately lost on her.) "I am starving. Lead on, maestro."
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