faderift | Sixteen books on magic spells

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Sixteen books on magic spells

WHO: Hermione Granger and rifters (or anyone who saw her note and wants to chat)
WHAT: Adelaide is having Hermione find out about magic in other worlds by interviewing rifters ~~for SCIENCE~~.
WHEN: Mid-Drakonis and onwards. There's no deadline on acquiring knowledge!
WHERE: The default is Skyhold's library, otherwise note in the subject line if your character would have arranged to meet her somewhere else.
NOTES: Nothing comes to mind; will change if necessary.

Anyone frequenting the library has probably become used to the curly-haired young girl who's claimed a small alcove as her own. She can usually be found sitting in the corner, nose buried in a book as her brow furrows, attempting to bridge the gap between her worldview and that of Thedas'. It's not always an easy task, and sometimes names and dates get jumbled, which is why she can sometimes be found just a few steps away at the nearest table, books and journals and bits of parchment scattered about as she tries to make sense out of all the reading she's done.

Still, what at first glance appears to be a mess is actually rather organized, and for however engrossed she seems to be in her work, she's always been happy to talk to new people. After all, each conversation counts towards research, even if it isn't in the particular field she's been asked to study. Go ahead and ask around for her if you don't know where to find her; chances are she's hard to miss, and many will be able to point out the inquisitive rifter if she happens to be around.

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"Maybe someday," Ruby offers, hopeful, but not necessarily buying her own optimism there as her mouth quirks with amusement. "I'm sure they'll be fine. Sometimes people surprise you."
Though her tone suggests that she knows full well what it is to have friends who most certainly do not surprise you when it comes to matters of the creature comforts.

Ah. Aha. Ruby's smile turns awkward. "You thought I meant Snow White and Prince Charming? Possibly because I did. Do. She's Snow White and she nicknamed him 'Charming' the first time they met to be obnoxious. It's a whole story." A story she has heard far too many times, and she misses them and right now she's sort of mad at them, and she's just going to gloss over it a little.

"Disease is..." Disease is a terrible way of thinking about it, painful, and the unhappiness at the comparison isn't entirely easy her for her hide, smile fading and giving way yo something more serious. "I don't know. A disease seems like it takes away. And I guess the Wolf has taken certain things from me, but if it'd been handled differently then it needn't have at all. To me, I think spellwork is more like the disease. Or a parasite. The wizard too some of my Granny's memories in exchange for making my enchanted cloak, for example."

"Most people don't really surprise me," Hermione remarks with a laugh, though that chuckle dies down she remembers how much Ron has changed in regard to his opinions on elves and their personhood. It had surprised her to the point where she'd actually kissed him, and she wouldn't have ever thought she'd be that surprised.

"A story," Hermione echoes uncertainly. "You mean a famous story, at that." But then, despite her obvious incredulity, Hermione's already all too familiar with fairy tales having some basis in fact.

She does flinch a little when Ruby questions her use of the word disease, because it's not at all the term she would have most liked to have settled on. "Sorry... maybe a condition is the better term. I didn't mean to insinuate there was anything wrong with you, just... that your DNA is altered by this. I know-... knew a werewolf back home. He'd been a very good friend of mine."

But thinking about Remus still hurts, especially since it makes her think about Tonks, and then of Teddy, and she really doesn't want to make this conversation take such a sharp turn. Instead, she clears her throat and asks, "What sort of enchanted cloak? My friend has an invisibility cloak that his father had given him, but I never knew what sort of magic went into it."

"People don't surprise you, but they do make you kind of incredulous, huh?" It's kindly meant. Then again, Hermione's efforts to understand her changes and her confusion about Ruby's entire world(s) situation aren't malicious by any stretch, but they still sting a little.

Past tense is never a good sign, and there's a flicker of concern before the subject is rolling on and she wonders -- should she just let it go, rather than ask? Maybe. Ruby tried to talk around enough of her own issues. No need to drag someone else through their own grief.

Instead of addressing it exactly, she picks up her cloak, rich red with velvet brocade, and holds it out. "The colourful kind that defines your storybook persona. It keeps me from changing if I wear it during Wolfstime."

"Skepticism is good for the soul... if you believe in the soul, that is." Yes, that's entirely a tongue-in-cheek comment, given her smile that's both a touch sheepish and wry. After all, just because she comes from a world where magic makes almost anything possible, it doesn't mean it is possible. There's still no evidence of half of the things the Lovegoods spout off, after all.

A moment passes as Hermione looks at the cloak. A red cloak. And she turns into a wolf. Well. That's a different spin on another popular tale.

But that seems to be a sensitive topic for Ruby, so rather than bring it up, she observes the cloak carefully, hesitantly reaching out to touch her fingertips along the edge of it. "By 'Wolfstime' I assume you mean the full moon...?" It's a definite question, since she's learned that assuming things doesn't always end the way she thinks it should here.

Ruby huffs out a quiet laugh. "We all need to believe in something, I guess. Personally I'm a big fan of believing in apple pie and a strong cup of coffee as the ultimate breakfast, but I think that might be genuine delusion."

How to explain Wolfstime? "It varies a little, sometimes. The full moon and a night or two either side, but usually it's just three nights altogether. It's more than just the change, though. It feels like I'm more myself then, you know?"

"That depends on how much you value your general health, I'd assume," Hermione replies. Then again, she's the person who's reluctant to have anything but water when she first wakes up, given that her parents had warned her against the sugary dangers of most juices.

"You feel more yourself during then?" Hermione asks, clearly surprised. "That... sounds very different from the way I understand things at home." Remus had gone so far as to stave off the effects of his change by relying on a potion provided by Snape, of all people.

"There's that, yeah. And I don't think it's going to come with vanilla ice cream here, which is a real downer." Ruby Lucas: she can take things seriously, honestly.

"It's different from how I used to understand it," Ruby admits, shrugging a little. "But it's like... I have to keep the Wolf locked up so much of the time. But when it's Wolfstime and I let the Wolf actually run, it's different from any other time when I change. Like tasting what it really feels like to be free."

"If we had the proper ingredients, I could probably make you some vanilla ice cream," Hermione offers. "My dad and I used to make our own during the summertime; there's less sugar that way."

The way Ruby talks, it almost sounds like how someone like Greyback might have spoken about his lycanthropy, and she's not sure how to take that. "And you're sure you're in control of yourself then? You don't black out, or experience any moments when the wolf is so strong that it would do something you wouldn't ordinarily do, like hurt someone you care about?"

For the first time Ruby's face falls. Probably she should have prepared herself for the question better, even as the part of her that knew she should was so desperate to think of anything else. Her knuckles are white, fingers curled tight towards her palms, before she reaches over to take back her cloak. There's no room for jokes and silly talk, now.

"Not any more." But her voice is rough and shaken, and her first instinct is just to go. To go, to run, to remember why the Wolf should be a secret. "The blackouts happened when the Wolf was treated as something I should run from, or a secret that I shouldn't know about, but I don't get them any more."

A moment, and Ruby shakes her head, one hand pushing her hair back as she stands. "I'm sorry. I can't talk about this."

The sudden change in Ruby's demeanor is startling, but understandable, in its own way. That doesn't make Hermione feel any less guilty, though, and she reaches out a hand, though she doesn't expressly try to touch her.

"Ruby, wait," she says softly. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to cross a line. We don't have to talk about anything you don't want to. I was just trying to understand what makes your condition different from the lycanthropy I'm more familiar with. Please don't be upset."

"You didn't." Not really, not when Ruby is a monster and she knows it.

Don't be upset. Ruby smiles at that, though it's an unhappy thing. "Thing is, Hermione... there's not a day that goes by where I don't remember the people that I hurt when I didn't know I was a wolf. And there are days when I can forgive myself, or tell myself that I should, because that wasn't me. But... sometimes? I wish I was still under the curse, and didn't remember that I'm Red, and that the Wolf was still shut away by dark magic."

Ruby shakes her head, at that. "Messed up, right? I want back the thing that made so many people miserable."

It's a tricky situation, one that Hermione doesn't know how to properly navigate. She wishes Remus were here, because Remus always seemed to know just what to say in situations like these. But there's little sense in wishing for the impossible, so she tries to push him and his kind smile out of her mind and focus exclusively on Ruby.

"You want things to be easy," Hermione notes simply. "But life isn't about sticking to what's easy. It's about moving forward with what's right, no matter how difficult it is. Terrible things might have happened to you, but you'd had no control over them. Now you do, and you know the truth, and it's your responsibility to learn from the past and do what you can not to slide backwards. Besides... Dark magic might seem appealing at first, but it often comes at a price far too steep for most people to pay. It's best you're not involved in that."

"I know," she agrees, softly. It's funny, in a way, to be being told this by a girl who could only be half her age, tops. Maybe more like a third, but she tries not to think too hard about how old she was exactly when the curse hit and how long she lived under it, because does anyone really want to look in the mirror and go huh, I'm in my sixties? without expecting to?

And maybe it's less that she wants to perform or embrace dark magic herself, and more that she just understands how Regina got so desperate, even if she doesn't know her that well, and even if she doesn't particularly like her. Understanding someone makes it a lot harder to judge them, no matter how much you'd like to.

"Believe me, I know all of that. I just... I still wish things could be different sometimes. Like I'll wake up one day and all the terrible things will be a bad dream I can keep from happening."

"You can keep them from happening, though," Hermione remarks, smiling a little. "Not the past, no, that can't be undone, even with time travel." And she knows more about time travel than she really has any business talking about. "But you learn from the mistakes of the past, tragic as they might have been. And you keep those horrible lessons in mind as you live out the rest of your life as best as you can, to prevent any further damage."

She can't begin to understand where Ruby is coming from, and she doesn't pretend to. She can only speak from her own experience and hope that Ruby can apply some of it to her own life.

"It's natural to wish things had been done differently. Even I've done things I'm not proud about, things I'd give almost anything to change. But in most cases, I'm stronger for having done them, because I can at least pass on my hindsight to others to keep them from making similar mistakes. Why do you think older people always have such sage advice?" Such as Dumbledore, whom she'd learned after his death had made more than his fair share of mistakes in his youth.

Ruby wonders, for a moment, if what happened would be too much to share, even if she glossed over the details. For a moment she considers asking Hermione if she wants to know, before she just-- stops.
Hermione is a kid. The kind of person who should be protected from that kind of information, and she closes her eyes tight for a second. You're a moron, Red, she tells herself. Belle isn't here, and Emma is vulnerable, and sometimes it feels like Snow has forgotten that she exists at all. She can't talk to anyone from home, but that doesn't mean she should dump it on a kid.

"You're right," she concludes, reining herself in. Just because a child has seen a lot doesn't make them less a child, or mean that they should know of more horrors. Peter is her burden to bear.

In fact, it'd be great if they could move right on from this, and she gives Hermione a quizzical smile, as if she's already moved on smoothly, and it isn't aching and hurting and carving out pieces of her. "You know I'm technically in my sixties, right? I'm the older person with sage advice, kinda."

It's amazing, really, how many people in Thedas have come to consider Hermione little more than a child, even among those not native to this world. She hasn't thought of herself as a child in years; that's hard enough to do when one is more mature and ambitious than most of her peers, never mind when one has gone through as much as she has. And besides, she might petulantly say if it ever gets brought up verbally again, she'll be turning twenty on her next birthday, so that hardly counts as a "kid".

But nothing like that needs to get said right at this moment, even if the conversation is still about age. Not bothering to hide her shock, Hermione looks Ruby over before realizing that she'd said technically.

"What kind of technicality is that, might I ask? If anything, lycanthropy has a bad tendency of making people look older, in my experience."

"Twenty-eight years under a curse when time stands still in a Groundhog Day-style life would be the technicality."

She shakes her head, looks towards the door and wonders if it'd still be better to go, before thinking better of it. Running doesn't tend to go all that well.

"I have a friend, Ashley. She was nine months pregnant for twenty-eight years. That's... a lot of backache and stress."

Twenty-eight years. Staying the same age for twenty-eight years. Staying in a sentient sort of stasis for twenty-eight years, given that a pregnancy had actually been frozen in time as well.

"That... must have been a very developed baby when it was born," she murmurs lowly, trying and failing to make light of the whole thing. "That's awful. I mean, on the one hand, you look wonderful for being older than my mum! But on the other hand... you probably missed out on quite a lot. I'm sorry."

Ruby can't help a little smile. "No kidding. But... I mean, I had it better than a lot of people. I got to have twenty-eight years of being a normal girl. A horribly insecure normal girl with a very controlling grandmother, but..."

She trails off, and shrugs. "Normal girl, all the same. Waking up was kind of an experience, even if it was for the best."

Cracking a small, sympathetic smile at Ruby, Hermione murmurs, "Well, normalcy is far too overrated anyway." She'd never been normal, not before nor after joining the wizarding world, so she'll take being a bit odd as a good thing.

"So it was like... waking up? As though from a dream?"

"I was just walking down the street with my Granny, actually. It was..."

She trails off, trying to wrangle her thoughts. "It was like any reunion with friends you haven't seen in a long time. I was so, so happy to see everyone." She's not sure she'd hugged anyone in her life as hard as she'd hugged Snow, then. "It was jarring and amazing and... kind of intensely overwhelming. From a dream might work for the sort of hazy confusion, but it was more like getting cold water dumped on you, at the same time."

"That sounds...."

It sounds exciting and terrifying all at once, and Hermione's quite glad that she'll never experience anything quite like that. At least, not unless she was secretly living under someone's spell without knowing it.

"... like an experience. I'm sure you were all glad to have one another back to your normal selves."

"Yeah. Mostly, any way. It was complicated."

And Ruby shakes her head at herself. "Let's see how often I can work 'complicated' into a conversation, huh?" She shrugs, easing a little bit. "It's hard reconciling two different lives in your head, at the best of times."

"Well, if it's apt..." Hermione remarks lightly, shrugging her shoulders a bit. "I can't quite think of any other word that might work well to describe what it might be like having two lives in your head. Though, granted, it isn't as though you were living both of them simultaneously, were you? It was just a matter of a false history being planted in your mind."

After a moment's pause, she acknowledges, "Not that that makes things much better; I'm sorry."

"It's okay. I mean, it's not like I really expect anyone to have a manual on how to treat this kind of thing. Living two lives at once would have been a real challenge with the hours I do at the diner," she adds, all too happy to turn back to the lighthearted. It's easier, that way.

"On the bright side, I did get to learn about David Bowie and Dusty Springfield. Whose life isn't better for that?" And she grins a little, embracing her own ridiculous tendencies.

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bookish_lioness - 2016-04-19 18:20 (UTC) - Expand

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