Quarrels and Quills

Nairn Tuckamore

She thought Ulga was giving up a little too quickly - at least, she had once spent weeks researching a single topic in the bowels of the Priory's 'secret' library, so the fact that the woman was declaring defeat after less than a day seemed hasty. At first. Nairn soon realized that the orc was right to redirect her energy. One could only spend weeks on a topic if one actually found snippets of useful information. Summerset was looking to be a bust from the mission perspective. But still...

Nairn was looking up at the top shelves when Ulga made her exit. She'd made a sort of 'hmm' sound in response to let the orc know she'd heard her, but was far too distracted to form a coherent reply. Well, she had an idea on where to look for rarer books - and watch her back at the same time. She shadow-ported to the top of the stacks and sat herself down in a layer of dust with her feet hanging over the edge of the bookcase, leaned over and selected two tomes.

She only left her lofty perch once. As the sun set, she procured a lantern and returned topside. Working her way down the first set of shelves, then the next. One after the other. Nairn tucked books she thought had promise into her bag to streamline the search. After she had collected enough materials, she'd set up on one of the long desks, take up her pen, and gather the knowledge together on her own paper.


Fira-Nar

She had stared at the book in her hand for a good long while, trying to decide how she felt about it. Other than embarrassed. She could never have finished this book in a single morning like Nairn had. No wonder she read so many stupid books - she read so fast she had time to read garbage and still read smart stuff. Fira obviously wasn't going to read this book, but that left her wondering what it was she should do with it. The norn would want it back, surely? If for nothing else, to 'exchange' for another book. But where did that leave her in the mean time? She couldn't just...carry it around.

Mind made up, Fira marched off in search of Anakita and Stefan. They were the norn's friends - surely they'd know where she could leave the book. Finding them, she walked up and held the book out ahead of her not unlike it were a small animal trying to bite her. Her other hand rubbed the back of her neck as she suddenly realized how odd this request was going to sound.

"Hey, uh. Nairn left me with this book and uh, I don't want to read it...I mean, lose it. So I was wondering if you knew where her stuff was...so I could drop it off. I guess?"

Ulga gra-Shatul

Apocrypha was... Apocrypha, all green and books and darkness, an ever shifting literary maze. Ulga had been spending far too much time here the past few months, and she was rather tired of it. It briefly crossed her mind that Nairn would have loved this - but no, Fira was right, and Ulga had been foolish to suggest it. Ulga had made some friends in her current group, but that didn't mean she had found people who would walk into danger with her. That was her responsibility, and no one else's. She would avoid making that mistake again.

The Infinite Archive was... Infinite. Too much for one person to search in a reasonable timeframe.

"Scruut? Leramil? Can you help me with something?"

A many-limbed Watchling and a tall, unnaturally pale Altmer respectively answered Ulga's summons. She briefly explained the assignment - and clearly intrigued them both - and soon they were digging through the stacks of arcane tomes with her. The archivist, Master Malkhest, showed up with glares and clicks of disapproval, but before long was examining volumes with them too.

Ulga felt a shadow in her mind, like someone watching over her shoulder. Hermaeus Mora. He was just being nosy, Ulga realized.

"Mora," she acknowledged briefly, then ignored him and got back to work.

After several hours - and several shifts of the Archives - Ulga found what she sought. In the Faerûn section, a nondescript brown-jacketed volume labeled simply, The Lore of Crenshinibon.

Lore alone wasn't going to do it, of course. She needed concrete direction. But there, in the last chapter, was an incantation to locate Crenshinibon in time and space. Success!

Ulga thanked those who had assisted her - and received gracious acknowledgement from Scruut and Leramil, and a noncommittal grunt from Malkhest - and returned to the mortal plane.

"Nairn? Good news. I found it. What did you turn up?"

Anakita Snakecharm

Anakita gave Fira a puzzled looked... then (perhaps) caught on.

"Ah," she said. Then, with the exaggerated fake casualness she affected when trying to make a subtle social point, "You know, some people can't read very well."

Anakita actually wasn't one of them. People tended to assume she was barely literate at best, seeing her after a life spent in the woods, but Anakita had been quite well educated in her youth before taking to the forests upon reaching the age of majority and never looking back.

"But you know, other people can read. And other people can teach people to read if they can't read, if they want to be people who can read. Understand?"

To drive the point home, she gave a dramatic wink.

Nairn Tuckamore

The pivot had been worthwhile. Summerset had eventually given up its books on the world's own magic and Nairn had collected them to herself as a hen gathered her chicks. They sat in piles around her at the long table she'd claimed. Before her, pages filled with precise lines in her own hand. Two broken quills lay to her right, shadowed by the book held in her hand as she transcribed it with her left. Nairn's face was completely neutral - neither excited, nor bored - her fingers were the only parts of her that visibly moved. The pages flitted between her fingers, then the book was set to her right and a new book procured from the stacks to her left.

"Excellent." came the reply, delayed and with no inflection. Had Nairn only been reading, she would have been more eager to receive the information Ulga had. As it stood, she was reading, transcribing, editing and labelling information with reference to other tomes she'd already made records of. As Ulga stood there, the third quill trembled and gave up making letters. Nairn paused long enough to deposit it in the pile and reach into her satchel to draw out a fresh one. She took the moment's reprieve to make eye contact with the orc.

"Competing dialogues. There are theories about how your Towers and stones work, and each people have their own ideas." A disappointing, but likely unsurprising conclusion from Ulga's perspective. "But," she raised the quill in the air, a faint smile appearing on her lips and the lantern light suddenly reflecting in her eyes, "There is a thread. A single story that passes through all. I can see it - I just need to find the ends."

Ulga gra-Shatul

Ulga smiled a little, seeing Nairn so engrossed in the project. She didn't really understand, herself - but Nairn clearly did, and that was what mattered. The Norn was clearly making progress.

"Wonderful," Ulga said. "You've done great work. When you're ready, you can head back and tell the others what needs to be done. I'll be tracking down this artifact."

Naturally, that thought made Ulga nervous. Going by herself to another plane she didn't know anything about was uncomfortably close to a suicide mission, and she didn't want to die. But what alternative was there? This was going to be approximately a thousand times more dangerous than a trip to Apocrypha, and the group she'd found herself in was kind and friendly but had just proven very risk-averse - not that she blamed them. Who would want to risk their life if it could be avoided? But in this case, it couldn't. The world was in peril, and time was of the essence. The Dread Wolf could be tearing down the Veil and destroying reality while she tried to recruit help.

She didn't want to think about never seeing her home again, never again being with her husbands and her children... but if she didn't go, if she didn't face that danger, they would all die. At least this way, they would have a chance at life, whatever happened to her.

An idea crossed her mind. She grabbed a quill and jotted some lines on parchment, then rolled the parchment and gave it to Nairn. "If I don't return, please send this to my family. Thank you."

There. Now at least she'd said her farewells, of a sort.

"Goodbye, Nairn. I'll return to you at the camp as soon as I can."

The Orc stepped away, leaving Nairn to her studies. As she was reading the instructions for the portal she would need to create, the transparent shape of Tempest appeared before her, looking ghostly.

"Ulga? How did it go? Did you find anything?"

"Yes. Nairn is still working on the Towers and Stones, but I found a book about the artifact and I'm going to find it."

Ghost-Tempest's brow furrowed. "By yourself?"

"Yes. Of course." How else? There was no time to waste...

"Absolutely not. Look, just wait a few minutes more, won't you? Please? I'll get Cullen and we'll come with you."

Ulga sagged slightly in relief. "Thank you," she said.

She waited.

Fira-Nar

If argonians could blush, Fira would have been bright red. She held out the book, brought it back close to herself, opened it, closed it, moved it between hands, gestured with it, and finally tucked it under her armpit as she folded her arms across her chest. Likewise, she ducked her head, not meeting Anakita's gaze.

"I can read. I can. It's just...hard. And not fun. And this book is boring. And what makes reading so great anyway? It's not like you have to...to...to be...to be smart."

Why was it suddenly harder to breathe? Fira wiped at her nose with her hand before tucking it back away under her arm. Now she was even more embarrassed. She felt like she needed to explain. Explain something so that the ranger wouldn't assume she was stupid. But she'd sort of already admitted to having trouble reading, so surely it was obvious now. All that was left was to make a desperate attempt to save some face by expressing what exactly she didn't like about reading. Yeah. It was a preference, surely? To want to beat one's head against a wall was certainly other people's prerogative, but it didn't have to be her own.

"I just don't have time to wait for the letters to stop moving. I don't understand why some other people would put up with that and want to read all the time. Some kinda self-torture if you ask me."


Nairn Tuckamore

Once Ulga had given her instruction for Nairn to return once she finished, the Norn had returned to her task. As a result, she all but ignored everything around her that wasn't one of her selected books. She did take the rolled parchment and stuff it in her satchel with an murmur of agreement. The orc's farewell went unanswered. She was working.

So much for 'watching her back' as Ulga had warned her.

Anakita Snakecharm

"Well, that's true," Anakita agreed amiably when Fira said you didn't need to read to be smart. There were all kinds of ways to be smart. Stefan wasn't much of a reader, but he knew how to do a lot of things, and he could always make her laugh. And she herself read the forest and the animals like a book. Not all knowledge was trapped in ink and paper.

She felt on slightly shakier ground when it came to the rest of it.

"So. Uh. The words don't move for me. I don't think they do for a lot of other people, either. Have you tried looking for a different kind of book? Maybe they make special books with letters that don't move. They can make a lot of things with magic and technology these days. Or maybe if you like stories but the pages are hard to look at, someone could read to you?"