faderift | CLOSED | She said, "Where'd you wanna go? How much you wanna risk?"

The crutch reminds Ellie instantly of Silver, though this man obviously still has that leg- and the contraption wrapped around it clearly has some use. She looks at it openly, curiously, the kind of wonder that would probably be more befitting someone much younger.

It takes only a few halting words for Ellie to place that voice, and her eyes go a little wider, a smile of recognition flickering suddenly into place. It catches her by surprise.

"What's a bedtime story look like for you?" she asks.

"Riddles?"

The lines that just now sketched in between his dark eyebrows shortly relax, puzzlement smoothing into comprehension, brightening overall. Much like hers, his is an eminently readable face.

"Tonight I'm considering," turning the book toward himself, "Antivan Minerals: An Adventurer's Guide, by Isric Ilban." He reads the plate aloud: "An account of one geologist's journey through the inner regions of the Antivan Principality."

As he looks up, the cover falls shut with a cushioned pat of sound.

"Just Ellie?"

"Riveting stuff," Ellie deadpans, her eyes full of something that dearly wants to become laughter. "Dunno how you'll ever manage to go to sleep with that in your corner."

She presses her lips together, though it can't quite keep back the smile.

"Just Ellie," she confirms, settling.

"It's nice to finally meet you. I was starting to think you were a ghost or something."

"Who says I'm not?"

A casual question as he once again considers, or reconsiders, the book. Her playful sarcasm isn't wrong, is the thing. It's autobiographical, at least in part a diary formatted for publication, essentially just some nerd nerding out about rocks and ores for a few hundred pages, and might actually keep him up—not only the content, but its potential to stoke his ever-present homesickness.

Final verdict: "Worth the risk." He tucks it under his arm. Back to the conversation—

"If these are the hours you tend to keep, it's a wonder it took this long."

"Then I hope you're a cool ghost and not an asshole ghost."

Said with feeling, like she's met more than a few asshole ghosts and she's so damn tired of it, thank you. But the book-tucking has her sticking out her lower lip, nodding decisively to herself: fair.

"Yeah, but usually not for the library," Ellie lies smoothly, because it hasn't been a lie lately. Nighttime is when Abby's usually around, given that she's busy during the day. Right now Ellie is going out of her way to give her a generous amount of space.

"This is the best time of night to use the telescope," she spitballs, which is also true. "I've usually got it set up on the top of the mage tower. I've got most of the night sky charted out."

"An astronomer," he says, with a lilt of pleasure. As he pivots toward Ellie, his empty hand finds the shelf; it's both casual and necessary, a reflex without thought. Irregular sleeping habits, cool ghosts vs. asshole ghosts, maybe they'll revisit these subjects later on. This one clearly takes priority:

"How were you able to obtain access to a telescope? Those aren't easy to come by."

When he thinks of local manufacturing processes, honestly, he gets a little excited.

Ellie casually leans her shoulder up against the shelf next to her as her smile widens to a grin.

"It's kind of stupid," she starts, but as she says it there's a thrum of pleasure because she might've found someone who will wholeheartedly not believe it's stupid, "but when I was a kid, I dreamed of being an astronaut. So I used to read every book I could get my hands on about space. The night sky's totally different here, so I thought I'd get to know it, too."

Which is a little more heartfelt than she meant to get with a near stranger. But.

"It's not technically mine," she admits. "I'm borrowing it from Wysteria. She's on a work trip in Orzammar right now though, and I borrowed it a year and a half ago."

Wysteria again. Her name seems to follow (or precede) him everywhere—she'll become a mythical figure at this rate.

"Yes, the Provost mentioned that of her. I met with him not long after our exchange, by the way, and he was very welcoming. But—" The angle of his head changes, and his neck and shoulders with it, engaging his entire posture in this new inquisitive slant. (Perhaps her own heartfelt immersion permits it.) "What was that word you used? Astronaut?"

That was clearly him saying astronaut aloud for the first time, and enjoying doing so. Sounds like something from an adventure book. (One a certain someone might read.) Maybe she means astronomical studies conducted aboard aerostats? That would be mathematically tricky, but maybe she likes a challenge—

Edited (i'll edit poor word choices hours later if i want to) 2022-10-11 05:04 (UTC)

Ellie grins again at the mention of Tony. Looks like that went well, if Viktor posting up in the library is any indication. She'd kinda had a feeling they'd get along well, and it's nice to be proven at least somewhat right.

She's about to ask how it went, but then Viktor asks something else that Ellie can't help but explain.

"Astronaut. Back where I'm from, before everything went to shit-" she makes a hand motion here as if to say I'll explain later- "Scientists decided they were gonna shoot people into outer space. So they built rocket ships, and space suits. And they did all the calculations."

Ellie pulls back the edge of her nondescript cloak. There are four metal and enamel pins there. Three are familiar: Viktor might recognize the Riftwatch, Scouting and Griffon Rider pins if he has a keen eye. The last one, Ellie reaches up to take off and hand over so Viktor can inspect it in greater detail.

The rocket pin is much older and more battered than the others, possibly much older than Ellie herself. Her expression changes when she handles it. It's something that means a lot to her.

"When they launch a rocket ship it goes straight up," she explains. "Into the sky, and then past it. A few of them have even gone all the way to the moon."

She taps it, lightly.

"The astronauts are the ones inside them."

Viktor accepts the pin and, after turning it over in his palm to see its reverse, picks it up by the backing to see it. His long, clever fingers, with their bony joints and blunt nails, are so, so gentle in its handling. Die-struck, plated, possible tin alloy, maybe zinc? Maybe some metal he's never encountered, something from another world... soft enamel colour...

All the way to the moon, she says, and he looks up at her, follows the movement of her hand back down to the pin.

Tap.

Were he thinking at all of himself and his own understanding of physics, to be given such a simplistic description as flying past the sky might be insulting, but he's thinking only of the stars. Remembering what it was like to be very small, to look up, and to wonder. Into the sky, and then past it—she's carried this idea for a long time.

At length, in a reverent hush,

"What did they find?"

"No cheese," Ellie jokes softly, wonders if it's a joke that transcends realities. But her smile is softer, subdued with the way Viktor's looking at the small, scuffed enamel rocket ship.

"Mostly just a lot of rocks. There's not much atmosphere. But gravity is weak there, so they could jump and kinda float before coming back down... but the view?"

Ellie sighs, around the stitch in her chest, that familiar tightness. It almost doesn't hurt.

"It had to be incredible."

Not a 1:1 translation, the joke, but he won't touch the brakes to ask after it when Ellie's gone on to describe something so fascinating. (He will, however, mentally stick a pin in it for later.) (Or I guess a toothpick.)

"I can scarcely imagine."

He's trying, says his face. The subtleties there. There's a cascade of questions at the ready—how big were these ships, how were they made, what materials, what fuel, how many passengers? How long did they stay? Did they have a specific reason for going, or was it simply because they wanted to try it and see?

A memory flickers up; the faintest smile flickers after it.

"My work at home began with a gravitational anomaly," he says, and offers the pin back to her. "The first time, it was an accident... not the anomaly itself, that was the very thing we were trying to prove, but the scale of it. It filled the entire room."

Viktor has that light in his eyes, the kind that Dina used to get when she was talking about tinkering with something, the kind of feeling Ellie has rising in her chest when she gets on a roll about space.

She sees him rein himself in, and is suddenly sorry for it. Have a lot of people told him to shut up?

Ellie palms the pin, putting it back where it goes inside her cloak, eyes wide as she listens.

"You caused a gravitational anomaly? How?"

It's less a reining-in than triage—even as an imperfect remnant, this memory takes priority over questions he might ask any time, and probably will ask later—but there are elements of both and the effect is the same. He's been a habitual curator of thoughts all his life, and this one bears sharing:

"By being right," he says, because it's true, but rather than a straight brag—because who here tends toward either of those things, honestly—the glint of cheek in his tone makes a shared joke of it. Really, though, "By subjecting a certain crystal to precisely the right resonant frequency, technically speaking. But that was just the missing piece of the puzzle. The real work was in the theory—it took years of research to get to that point.

"Not my research," he's compelled to add, because it's true, and he thinks he can tread carefully enough not to bring the mood down. "I came in late on that one."

Edited 2022-10-19 04:36 (UTC)

Ellie's wide-eyed and delighted all through it. It sounds like one of her comic books, science and magic all mixed up.

These things are always adjacent to more complicated things, as things done by people always are. It's not all sparkle and magic. Surely, there's grit and blood. But right now they're making room for the wonder of it all.

"I wish I could've seen it," she says, wistful. "I always wanted to space walk."

"It isn't out of the question here. There are absolutely subsets of native spellwork that could produce such an effect... granted, doing it on the ground isn't quite on par with drifting among the stars, but... in capable hands, even fundamental forces such as gravity and time are malleable. Actually, as it happens—"

Viktor takes the geology book back in hand, lightly snatches up his crutch, turns it under his arm with ease, and begins to move. He's not going far, just to the end of the row, back the short way Ellie came.

"That glove you mentioned, the arrow-catcher?" When they were writing to each other, weeks back. "I went looking for the notes. The enchantment in that device derives from one such subset. It's a clever little piece of time magic."

"And time?" Ellie asks, the word catching in her throat because that should be impossible, but even as she says it she knows it isn't. She follows at his shoulder and a step behind, head tilted forward, face toward him, her eyes bright with it.

The curiosity is tempered with the reality of what that means.

"I saw," she says. "He slowed the arrow in the air, enough to catch it in his hand."

Ellie straightens. "I didn't see it, but- I know Cosima did. Some kind of alternate future. I wonder if that was time magic, too. And Doc- Strange? The sorcerer? He mentioned it once."

Gravity and time, Ellie remembers, her pulse picking up. It's important and she's not entirely sure why.

"Yes... alternate futures. That's one of the prevailing theories of our being here, that we've somehow... diverged from our own lives. Branched off on a new path."

Branched off, came loose, little errors in the shapes of people. Spirits, maybe, going through the motions, the way they do in dreams. No one here is familiar enough to notice if they get it wrong, so how would they know? Is he even himself? If he isn't, does it matter? Does anything? Thoughts come spiralling in a burst, like wire loosed from a spool: instantly a mess, and a pain in the ass to wind back into a manageable shape.

"I've met the doctor," he says, as the mundane variety of diversion. "He wears his ego like a hat."

The stack Ellie set down catches his eye; it wasn't there before. Seeing not only books, but a further off-ramp, he pivots toward it.

Edited 2022-10-25 15:55 (UTC)

"Or become a Fade-imagined copy of ourselves?" Ellie asks blandly, tilting her head to the other side. "Or we're spirits, but we absorbed the memories of watching a real person dreaming and now we're convinced that we are them because we're trying to give them a chance for something different?"

That last one she has not actually heard from anyone, anywhere, but he doesn't need to know that.

Instead she chuckles at Viktor's assessment of Strange and follows him curiously, feeling a faint flush rush across her cheeks. The books are mostly adventure stories, such as The Adventures of the Black Fox, one of the later copies of Hard in Hightown and a slim volume with the strange title of Majestic Bastards, which appears to be about griffons. Another thicker volume is On Astrariums.

Ellie's apparently a voracious reader.

That last one.

Viktor's gaze darts to one side, like he might turn to look back at her—though he doesn't—and takes a detour through flickering thought on the way back to her books. He sets his pick down next to them and lifts one from the top of the stack.

"Something different," he says, and turns the spine toward himself to glimpse the title. "Like losing the entirety of my life's work?" He then returns the book to the stack without comment, nor any particular indication of judgment. His expression is half-shuttered and cooling; his tone remains more or less amicable.

"They could have at least sent me somewhere with fewer stairs."

Edited (yucky) 2022-10-26 04:54 (UTC)

That last one is dark. She can't say it's something she really believes, but it's crossed her mind. It's one of many, things she cycles through, picks up and and turns over and puts down, and returns to the same answer, the one that feels the most true and the most like a cop-out.

Does it actually matter?

Ellie finds the edge of the table as he speaks, leaning one hip against it and crossing her arms across her stomach. Her smile fades out into something more thoughtful, quieter.

Viktor is one of the few people who doesn't remind her of anyone she can really name. But she has the sense of something spooling out between them, a thread unwraveling longer and longer. She can't see where it connects, or even if it does at all.

Ellie opens her mouth, gives it a tug.

"What do you think we are?"

"People."

He turns, too, and sets his knuckles next to the books. At a glance it barely resembles a lean at all, just a minor shifting of weight; as his thumb presses the table's edge the colour leaves his nail.

"Sapient creatures. Beyond that?" His mouth turns down, brief, like a shrug. "Without conclusive study, it's impossible to say."

Technically not an evasive answer, but still functions like one: ideal. Her what seems to him like a who in disguise, and he'd like to avoid looking that one directly in the eye, so good luck getting him to hold still.

"That's quite a bold question to ask someone you just met, by the way. I usually prefer to reserve my sensitive ontological opinions for the second date."

This is absolutely not a date and never will be and that is why he can say that.

It's a rough question. The answer is important, but so many things go into how someone answers. People, he says, both that simple and that profound. It makes Ellie ache with missing something she can't name.

(How can you be homesick when you don't have a home?)

No matter what they are, they are people. Does it matter if they're real, or copies, or shadows, or imagined? Impossible to say. But in the end, they are people.

Viktor drags her from her thoughts, and Ellie snorts a loud laugh before she can stop herself, reaching up to cover her mouth with one hand.

"Shit, you're right," she says, dropping the hand to theatrically cover her chest.

"That might even be more like a fourth-date question. Probably includes a telescope and some weed."

It's good that she laughs; Viktor might have felt a little bad if he'd accidentally nudged her into existential melancholy. (He doesn't laugh, himself, but it dances in his yellow eye.)

"Fourth? No, no..." With a little sway of shifting weight, he frees up his hand and returns his attention to the stack of books. "Don't save the best for maybe. You open with the telescope. I'll leave the weed part to your discretion. Speaking of which— telescopes, that is, not the, eh... let me know when you're through with this one."

One bony finger tap-tap-taps the stiff leather spine of On Astrariums.

"I can't believe you won't go on four dates with me," Ellie says, theatrically shaking her head as she reaches for On Astrariums and hands it to him. She's here to return it anyway.

"And I can't lend out the telescope or anything, 'cause it's not mine- but there's a balcony off the library..."

That is, if Viktor doesn't mind seeing her around.

CLOSED | She said, "Where'd you wanna go? How much you wanna risk?"

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