☥ log; closed; ongoing

[quiesquietis.livejournal.com]

When; Monday afternoon.
Rating; PG, for formal social nicety.
Characters; primrosella, schisming, quiesquietis.
Summary;
Log;

It's slightly after classes conclude for the day that Philomena and Dr. Argento make their way to the Library and their appointment with Princess--or Miss, as Philomena briefed Dr. Argento ahead of time--Rosella. Philomena, of course, isn't nervous at all, or desperately longing for another cigarette as she enters the Library slightly ahead of Dr. Argento. Charlotte would have those kinds of problems, but there's always something a little different about her when she goes by the name that more and more feels more real, even while fewer and fewer people call her by it. Maybe it's just a quietness of the soul as well as the voice, but at least it keeps her somewhat serene, drifting like a pale fragment of ash until they come to where Rosella is among the stacks.

"Oh, hello. Miss Rosella, may I present you to Dr. Argento, the linguistic expert I mentioned before?" Philomena accompanies this little initial introduction with a deeply polite but not overly formal curtsy, one obviously mastered over time, and does nothing so gauche as check to make sure Dr. Argento is following her lead.

(But she very much hopes he is.)

Comments

[schisming.livejournal.com]

Although Elliot's typist would love nothing more than to say that he is in fact following Philomena's lead so literally that he is also executing a curtsy, this is tragically not the case. However, he does incline his head from its ludicrous height in the semi-formal version of a bow to Rosella rather than attempt a handshake, so that's compromise. "You may be mildly overextending my credentials, Ms. Poorwillow."

Again, there's the slight adjustment of formality there, in all its 21st century academic glory. He's also slightly less austere in dress (http://www.polyvore.com/all_these_unopened_doors/set?id=27127015); on what is ostensibly a university level instructors seem to run the gamut from three piece suits to that 'fresh from the Dumpster' ambiance. "And in less ceremonial circles I'm not averse to being called Elliot; my experience holds that persons who insist on the title tend to be masking deeply rooted intellectual insecurity."

Like dudes who drive really flashy cars to compensate for ...stuff.

[primrosella.livejournal.com]

The Monday following a weekend of random curses has always been quite possibly the most reliably predictable of any day in the City; the pattern of two days of chaos followed by one day of peace has repeated for more than a year now, and it's one that Rosella knows quite well. So today, she's back to business as usual: with her wardrobe restored with the stroke of midnight, she is back in her usual red peasant dress with the multitude of pockets in the skirt, and her hair is braided back and twisted up on her head in preparation for another busy day amidst the stacks of the library. It's a simple appearance, and perhaps not one that would automatically call to mind thoughts of princesses, but it's functional and usual and she's long since accepted that she's a rather odd sort of princess, anyway.

"Oh, hello, it's so very nice to meet you, Dr. Argento!" she answers with a curtsy of her own, replacing a few dusty tomes onto their empty shelf in order to greet her visitors properly. "And Miss Philomena, how lovely to see you, too! I do hope you're both well today?"

[quiesquietis.livejournal.com]

"I'm quite well, thank you." Philomena smiles, as usual being quite charmed by Rosella's rather informal approach to being a princess that keeps the best kind of etiquette and not the crude ostentation that money and privilege can afford at the forefront of her behavior. Philomena folds her hands in front of her and nods.

"We were hoping to be able to help you puzzle out this conundrum of yours today, if you presently have a moment to spare, but of course we can retire for a time if you're occupied." Philomena's whispering voice, it must be noted, is perfectly suited to the quiet of a library.

[schisming.livejournal.com]

Elliot is pretty much used to crude ostentation and is terrible at etiquette one way or the other, but he can respond to direct conversational cues! ...isn't that wonderful. Anyway, he nods both to Rosella's inquiry of well-being and overall willingness to wander around the library until such time as things are convenient; he would be perfectly happy to just stay there forever, being mystified by the cataloging system.

Maybe someday later he will pick Rosella's brain about that. "Yourself as well. Ideally my tagging along will be of use, as there's fairly little call citywide for what specialization I possess."

[primrosella.livejournal.com]

"Oh, I'd be delighted," Rosella answers with a nod, lightly dusting her hands over her skirt as she checks--oh, yes, there it is, tucked safely away in one of the many pockets that she's long since gotten into the habit of utilizing. She has a very nice purse in her room at the Warehouse, of course, and a lovely messenger bag besides, but neither of them are quite as habitual yet as the familiar practice of keeping things in pockets. "And I really do appreciate the help, thank you. The wondering has been bothering me for quite some time now."

Giving her books one last glance to ensure that nothing's out of place or at risk of falling over if she leaves it unattended, she leads her two guests over to one of the Library's tables--one tucked unobtrusively between clusters of shelves, where the only likely chance of being disturbed is by a runaway book darting by. "It's just that the only experience I really have with magic is from what I've been able to teach myself, and so it's rather slow going when I stumble across something I can't puzzle out, since there aren't many people around that could help with it, as you said."

[quiesquietis.livejournal.com]

"Wonderful," Philomena murmurs, following Rosella in a swish of her long skirt and settling down at the table only after Rosella does and neatly arranging her own garments for modesty's sake. Because floor length skirts are notorious for disarranging and--no, she's just mildly demented.

"My own knowledge is a bit--haplessly disordered, I know bits and pieces of things, but very little of whole things. To put it one way. But between the three of us I'm sure we'll sort it out admirably." She gives every appearance of being confident in this, at least as it pertains to Dr. Argento and Rosella--she's mostly here as a chaperone, in all honesty, but she's not going to mention that out loud.

oh god i am SO SORRY work ate me ;___;

[schisming.livejournal.com]

Someone should mention it out loud, Elliot will just stare blankly. He is heartmarried, he needs no chaperon. Truly, he could be dropped into the middle of a strip club papered with dollar bills, and by the end of the night he would have memorized every single ceiling tile.

...Anyway. He legs himself into a chair, sitting as much around as in it, because that is the way of persons with such lengthy limbs, and retrieves his glasses case from a hip pocket for the purposes of perching the close-reading glasses his icons do not show on the bridge of his prominent nose. "There seem to be some commonalities in transfer from place to place," he observes of magic in general, "but at the very least if I know nothing I'll refrain from stirring up hopeless confusion."

Rather than give some Manswer like 'AH YES, THE RUNES OF HATHOR. MEANT FOR THE MYSTERIOUS PRODUCTION OF EGGS, I UNDERSTAND.'

not a problem bb!

[primrosella.livejournal.com]

Reaching into the pocket she checked earlier, Rosella carefully retrieves a small scrap of paper (http://i669.photobucket.com/albums/vv60/Fortunes_Wings/Polychromatic/TigerClaw.png) and produces it for her two guests to see, giving it a glance herself before offering it to them. "It's this, you see. It seems...well, magical, and rather odd at that, though I've never seen anything like it before. Well, outside of a rune to keep hedgehogs out of one's cabbages, that is, but I doubt this has much of anything to do with hedgehogs at all, from the looks of it."

She pauses, her lower lip catching beneath her teeth as she thinks a moment, then continues, "The Library has a sort of magic about it, too, and it makes it so that one never finds exactly what one is looking for. And I've rather developed a knack for getting around that by now, but the trouble is that I need to know what I am looking for first, so that I can make certain not to look for it when I go. So if you please, is there any chance you could tell me what this is?"

[quiesquietis.livejournal.com]

Philomena sets her fingertips beside the paper without actually touching it, inclining her head and giving it a intently thoughtful look. She is tactfully modest about half of her career at home, which she self-assures is not lying so much as it is being decorous about the entire truth, which does not need to have its undergarments rifled through or its diary read, so to speak. Technically, she imagines, a teacher's job does include knowing a lot of things. However, her knowledge here mostly tells her what she doesn't know: namely that it's not an obvious cipher or code.

"It does...have a glamour to it, I can tell that much, a kind of--" she hesitates, her fingertips brushing the invisible edge of the faint radiance she can see, with no idea of whether or not Rosella or Dr. Argento can do the same "--I'm not sure how to put it, except that if this comes from your world it's unlike fae--I can hardly call it magic, can I, next to an actual mage? Fae arts. It does...I'd guess it might have something to do with sharing qualities? I say that because it reminds me of pooka, if they were less silly creatures. This is much redder in tooth and claw."

[schisming.livejournal.com]

Elliot cuts his eyes sideways at Charlotte with an appreciative quirk of his expressive brows; he does heart references of basically any kind. "Tennyson, not Blake?" he inquires irrelevantly before ...turning back to the character at hand. He doesn't see the same radiance she does, rather a faint reddish wash shot through with opalescent white, and his expression furrows for a second in mapping out how to put this so everyone's respective definitions of 'magic' match up. On which note he murmurs deferentially, "It all accomplishes much of the same work, does it not."

Plus, Hermetics actually call their magic 'the arts,' so. He shifts around the table a little so he can drum on its surface without touching Charlotte in the process, as personal space is a precious and highly preserved commodity with...well, definitely Elliot. "That aside, if your particular realm of origin--" this to Rosella-- "boasts a population of shapeshifters, you might be advised to start there. The Jekyll and Hyde aspect of the image, you see?"

...or she may very well not, Elliot realizes. He elucidates: "A man singular in body but dual in visage."

[primrosella.livejournal.com]

Rosella tilts her head, looking at the image as she absorbs their words. "Sharing...qualities? Shapeshifters?" she repeats slowly, chewing absently on her lip as a vaguely worried expression flickers across her face. It wouldn't be the first time she'd run across magic like that, of course, and she's certainly been turned into a bird enough times on curse days to know it exists, but being affected by a curse and working a spell herself--no, those are two very different things. And the latter has far more dangerous implications, because as far as she knows, in all the time she's spent in the City, a curse has never worked improperly by mistake.

"I see. Then you think it's a picture of what the spell is meant to do?" she asks gingerly, as the literary reference goes over her head but the elaborated meaning sinks in. "Then the rest of the spell must be missing from beneath it. But why would anyone only rip out the picture and not take the spell itself?"

[quiesquietis.livejournal.com]

On a quiet and understated level, Philomena continues to be grateful for the space both of her companions give as a matter of course--she likes her space, that unpierced protective caul, and it gives her room to think on the questions at hand.

"Oh, I can think of a few reasons, first of which being that they didn't want the spell to be identifiable. Or perhaps the picture was torn out deliberately to leave as a clue to guide people to the spell, although that's a bit convoluted. Or it was an accident. However did you acquire the symbol in the first place?" She laces her fingers together primly on the table, keeping her back straight and her inquisitive gaze on Rosella.

[schisming.livejournal.com]

Elliot laces his fingers together and hunches his shoulders, a frown creasing the corners of his mouth. "The first is irresponsible, at best, at worst dangerous or actively malicious."

He'll shut up in a second so Rosella can answer the question put to her, but! Magic! Going around all willy-nilly without identification! What kind of cretin, etc etc--excuse him, he'll explain. "If done deliberately and not, as you say, by simple wear and tear on the pages. I personally wouldn't feel pressed to try working a rote - spell, if you prefer - sans surety of result, but then I have the questionable benefit of having singed off my own eyebrows more than once."

Yes. "Curiosity killed the caster, as they say." ...no one says that. "But supplemental imagery alone shouldn't emit active resonance. Ceci n'est pas une pipe, oui?"

Did you know this is why Elliot isn't allowed to interact with human beings, Rosella? Because he talks exactly like this all the time. "Ah--René Magritte, Belgian artist. Renowned for, among other things, a painting of a pipe bearing the initially perplexing declaration 'this is not a pipe.' But he's right, you see--the image of the thing is not the thing, ergo: the image of the spell ought not to be magic on its own. Without language it's only a picture."

[primrosella.livejournal.com]

"Well, I found it in a book, actually," Rosella first admits to Philomena, gesturing vaguely to the shelves around them as if to elaborate. "I was looking for a book about runes, I think, since I was trying to search out one in particular for a friend of mine, and somewhere in the stack of them, I came across this. It didn't seem to belong to the book I found it in, though--it seemed as though it were being used as a bookmark, rather."

And fortunately, explaining that buys her the time to try to figure out what in the world Elliot has been talking about in the first place, because it's bad enough when cultural references in general go flying over her head, and doubly so when they're delivered with the rapidity of an offended chipmunk's chattering. "Oh, and I--er, I'd hate to try a spell if I didn't know what it was, either, of course. Or if I didn't know exactly how to work it, I suppose. Which is rather why I asked in the first place. So, er...you think it seems magical because of the book it came from, then? And I ought to be looking for one about shapeshifters?"

[quiesquietis.livejournal.com]

In the realm of humor that preoccupies the little intricate and slightly askew clockwork mechanisms of Philomena's thoughts, she reflects that the differing paradigms between them might make an excellent set up for a joke: a wizard, a fairy, and a princess walk into a library, and they start confusing one another...

"I think what Dr. Argento is getting at more generally is--well, if I understand correctly, the symbol itself may be an important part of the spell. Like a picture in a cookbook showing the proper way to mix ingredients, so to speak, or what your project should look like when it's done. So perhaps the book was torn to undo the working of this spell in particular, and I'm...not quite sure you'd want to be searching for a book that specific." She sucks her lower lip gingerly into her mouth, looking down at the amalgam of man and tiger with her head slightly tilted. "I hardly know any grimoires about one type of spell, it's not very efficient. These tend to be like medieval manuscripts, although that's speculation on my part--if this came from a printing press then it's a different matter. But not many mages enjoy the printing press in their private spellwork, which a few notable exceptions. That's a very long way of saying I'm not sure, isn't it?"