Alex tells a fib.
RL Date: 4/1/09
IC Date: 5/9/09
Resident Common Room, High Reaches Weyr(#378RJs)
Just off of the main passageway lies the small cavern that forms the hub of the residents' quarters, kept immaculately clean by the headwoman's staff and warmed in cold weather by a stone hearth to the left and well back from the entrance. Comfortable chairs and a plush fur arrayed before the hearth make an inviting spot to curl up with a book or handicraft, or just to sit and chat. Beyond, additional chairs stand in clusters throughout the room, some upholstered with age-softened hide, some plain wood. At the widest point of the cavern, a round table gleams with polish, though its surface is nicked and scarred from Turns of use. Beyond the table, the very back of the cavern often lies in shadow unless the glowbaskets there are unlidded to cast cozy pools of light. The commingled scents of klah, smoke and polish permeate the air along with the sweetness of rosemary and lavender.
Tapestries hang across the entrances to dormitories and more private quarters as well as the exit to the outer hall, colorful protections from drafts.
Habit. Alex is a creature of it. The table, the charts, the equipment-- fortunately, not the head-beating tonight. Instead, he's got a new way to torture himself for his shortcomings: the waste basket halfway across the room, the crumbled page he's wadded into a ball, the hook-shot he keeps trying over... and over... and over... Every time he misses, he peels out of his chair, goes over, picks up the ball, sits back down, and tries again. Mindless.
Oh. Wonderful. This is the look that clearly reflects on Carobet's face as she enters the common room. (She even rolls her eyes.) The healer makes her entrance just as Alex is picking up the missed ball and walking back to his seat. She shakes her head at the spectacle, then heads to her favorite arm chair and settles herself in: sitting sideways, the bends of her knees over one arm. She cranes her neck slightly to address Aleczir. "Sharding long division, hm?"
Aleczir misses. Again. "What?" For a moment, starkly reflected in his blank expression, he cannot place the joke. Probably because he hasn't noticed Carobet yet, and thus has no foundation for the remark. Ah, yes; "If only. Do you ever sit like a normal person?" While he plods back over to his chair, plops down, withholds his next air-ball to await a response.
Carobet shakes her head. "No. Why would I? It's more comfortable this way. Plus, I'm a Mindhealer. I'm not expected to be normal." She begins to sort through the files she's brought with her, once more, using the floor as a filing cabinet; she, too, has her habits. "Do you ever /act/ like a normal person?"
"I try not to." Alex's hookshots are way off the mark, but his sitting-jump-shot? Pretty all right. Provided he was aiming for Carobet and not the basket, since that's where the paperball lobs this time. "Shouldn't you do that someplace..." Where there's not paper flying? Not Starsmiths prying, ostensibly coming over to her chair to collect that paper? "...private?"
Carobet scowls, her eyes narrowing at Alex as it hits her nicely on the nose. She grasps it in one hand, squishing it tighter. "You assume that you know what I'm doing, Starsmith. I thought men of your craft were trained not to make assumptions?" After a moment, she looks down at her palm. Shrugs, uncrumples the paper to see what might be on it. Maybe it's interesting.
Aleczir, shaking his head; "Incorrect. We assume all sorts of things. We're just trained to disprove them immediately afterward." The paper, uncrumpled, is a near indecipherable mass of scribbled handwriting, things crossed out, half-erased, a few margin-notes along the lines of "THIS IS THE WORST IDEA THAT EVER EXISTED" and so on. "Where, from what I gather, your craft is trained to make assumptions and then insist forever that you are absolutely right about everything and the rest of us are just... misguided. Sorry you looked yet?" Eyes toward the paper.
Carobet glances down at the paper, wrinkling her nose as she realizes she can barely make heads or tails of it. Darn. That was less exciting than she thought. She turns it on its side, then upside down, just in case this reveals anything more about it. Then she crumples it up again (Alex's answer.) "That is a rather false assumption," she says blandly. Then hits Alex squarely in the head with his crumpled notes. And then a second, well-aimed ball of paper-- just after a crumpling sound from behind the high-backed arm chair.
Aleczir takes his beating like a man, eyes closed reflexively while the paper bounces off his forehead, opened, closed again for the second round. "Ah, then I'm doing my job pretty well. Can you say the same?" Made an assumption; immediately disproved it; go him. "You're... very violent for a Do-No-Harmer," he observes, disappears behind the horizon of her chair to go collecting not one but two balls of paper. He's coming up in the world!
"What, did you get a papercut?" Carobet asks, letting her voice drip just a tad with an 'aw, poor baby' tone. "Primum non nocere. Who came up with that nonsense, anyway? And yet they expect me to use tough love on my clients. 'No harm.' Harrumph." She crosses her arms, disliking this paradox. "I'm doing my job quite well, thank you," she finishes, although provides no proof. She's clearly not a Starsmith.
Straightening, Alex sets the paper wads on either side of the back of Carobet's chair, his head leaning farther and farther till it's tipped quite to one side in his efforts to make them equidistant from each other and from the ends of the chair itself. For no apparent reason. This goes on for quite some time, even after she's done harrumphing and all. Focus shifting abruptly from the papers to the Healer-- "I'm sorry. Was it my turn to say something?"
In that long silence that Alex was straightening out those wads of paper-- for no apparent reason, and thus, not something that remotely held Carobet's attention-- she had turned her eyes back down to the stack of papers in her lap. So when he speaks again, she takes her time in looking up at him. "We were having a conversation? Didn't think that was your sort of thing."
"Wait-- we /were/ having a conversation, or /we/ were having a conversation?" A cautious step taken backward sees the two wads in their final positions, Alex's hands draw away carefully, one reaching up to scratch idly through already disheveled hair. Pretty much perpetually disheveled. She so much as wobbles that chair, it all comes crashing down, but he returns to his seat at the table for now.
Carobet does more than wobble. She drops her papers onto the floor, then swings her feet off the arm, turns around, and folds her arms over the back of the chair. Had the papers stayed until then, she'd have knocked them right off, but they're long gone by that time. "/Conversation./ Not the participants, or whether it is past or present." She turns her head to one side, considering the other crafter. "You are /so/ not like other guys. They spend that much time as close to me as that, their eyes would /not/ have been on balls of paper." And she seems slightly miffed by this lack of attention.
Aleczir starts forward, like he can warn her-- no! paper balls!-- but too late. He sighs. He leans back into his chair. He looks mournfully at the little balls of paper on the floor. He raises sad eyes to Carobet's. "Was that strictly necessary?" Shaking his head, he picks up his pencil and takes up another of his favorite ways to pass time: scratching his forehead with the end of it. "Yes? Well, they wouldn't need a term for anomalies if they didn't exist, would they?"
Carobet glances down at the balls of paper on the floor. Oh. "Yes. It was." And as for the last thing he says? /So/ not what she was hoping for. She sighs wistfully, propping her head on her hands. "I suppose that is a good point. And if there were no human anomalies, then I would be out of a job." But no googly eyes at her this evening. Too bad. She eyes the movement of Alex's pencil as it-- what? assists in thinking? Human anomaly, indeed.
Aleczir, at the table, scratching his forehead with a pencil, his crap spread out around him, as usual. Carobet, in the armchair, looking wistful, her crap spread out around her, as usual. "Why?" He unfolds suddenly, the pencil behind his ear where it-- assists in looking bookish? And he's crossing the room once more, bending all lanky-armed to collect the two fallen balls of paper in one hand and place them side-by-side on the back of the chair. "Why?"
** ed note: Yuliye had planned to join here, but something came up, so that's why her name's in Carobet's pose. :P **
Carobet's eyes follow Alex as he walks towards her and places those wads down on the back of her chair. Then they catch Yuliye, whose whirling entrance gets a thorough head-to-toe-to-knot appraisal. But since she's silent, and the Starsmith speaks, so attention is turned back to him. "Why not?" And, just to be petulant, she flicks the two balls of paper-- One! Two!-- across the room. And, as it happens, in Yuliye's general direction.
"Hmn," utters Alex, watching the two papers go sailing, watching the arc of their trajectory, watching where they land. "Is this because I don't think you're pretty?" he asks abruptly, straightening out his bemused frown into a suddenly enlightened one before he goes off to collect the wads, to sit back down-- since no one's in his chair after all!-- and resume his earlier occupation. Hookshot; airball; now he gets a second try! Guess how that one turns out.
Earlier she thought that he just wasn't interested; now he's uttered those words. Not. Pretty. How dare he??? But Carobet maintains her composure-- taking a few, audible deep breaths in order to do so-- because she will /not/ let him win. "No. It's because it's fun to wreck havoc on the order in your world. Besides, it's fascinating." She smiles prettily, charmingly. It's amusing, apparently, as well.
Distracted; "Order. Order... order, order..." Alex makes a good show of sifting through the chaotic array of notes and papers on the table, suddenly finds a compass he thought he lost and delights in the discovery with a brief beam before he shoves it in his pocket. No, he wasn't looking for anything in particular, and he stops as abruptly as he started, sinking into his chair with his long arms folded so one wrist comes up to obscure half his mouth. "How do you say it again? Primum something something?"
Carobet watches him, the sublime amusement on her face revealing the private chuckle she won't make audible. "There's order to your madness, though. And from what I've seen? Beyond your own little sphere, you must have order in every little aspect of the world." The Mindhealer, giving out a freebie! What benevolence. "Primum non nocere," she supplies, drawing out the phrase for his benefit. Pree-mum noo-oon no-kaay-raay.
Aleczir echoes, "Pree-mum no-something something. And how did I put it?" Trying to stack the mess is fruitless, but he stops being all folded up to start making some /order/ out of the chaos, all the papers in a pile, all the miscellaneous odds-and-ends on the pile, all gathered into his arms. "Make assumptions and them assume you're assumptions are infallible? That's the problem with mindhealer science-- please pretend I put those little finger-quotes around science?" Because his hands are full, and he can't actually do it. "Untestable hypotheses."
"You said, Primum something something," Carobet recalls for Alex's benefit. Her lips purse at the not-so-wonderful accusations of her craft, and in her haughtiest voice, she retorts, "I never said my assumptions were infallible. I was reflecting only on the observations I have made so far. And it is a science, just as much as Starsmithing is. I can see into your brain with about the same amount of approximation that you can see stars through those fiddly farviewer things of yours." So there. She flops back into her chair, picking up her papers once more. Suddenly, they are oh-so-interesting. This conversation? Over.
Aleczir, summarily dismissed! Fortunately, not the kind to let it drag him down.
IC Date: 5/9/09
Resident Common Room, High Reaches Weyr(#378RJs)
Just off of the main passageway lies the small cavern that forms the hub of the residents' quarters, kept immaculately clean by the headwoman's staff and warmed in cold weather by a stone hearth to the left and well back from the entrance. Comfortable chairs and a plush fur arrayed before the hearth make an inviting spot to curl up with a book or handicraft, or just to sit and chat. Beyond, additional chairs stand in clusters throughout the room, some upholstered with age-softened hide, some plain wood. At the widest point of the cavern, a round table gleams with polish, though its surface is nicked and scarred from Turns of use. Beyond the table, the very back of the cavern often lies in shadow unless the glowbaskets there are unlidded to cast cozy pools of light. The commingled scents of klah, smoke and polish permeate the air along with the sweetness of rosemary and lavender.
Tapestries hang across the entrances to dormitories and more private quarters as well as the exit to the outer hall, colorful protections from drafts.
Habit. Alex is a creature of it. The table, the charts, the equipment-- fortunately, not the head-beating tonight. Instead, he's got a new way to torture himself for his shortcomings: the waste basket halfway across the room, the crumbled page he's wadded into a ball, the hook-shot he keeps trying over... and over... and over... Every time he misses, he peels out of his chair, goes over, picks up the ball, sits back down, and tries again. Mindless.
Oh. Wonderful. This is the look that clearly reflects on Carobet's face as she enters the common room. (She even rolls her eyes.) The healer makes her entrance just as Alex is picking up the missed ball and walking back to his seat. She shakes her head at the spectacle, then heads to her favorite arm chair and settles herself in: sitting sideways, the bends of her knees over one arm. She cranes her neck slightly to address Aleczir. "Sharding long division, hm?"
Aleczir misses. Again. "What?" For a moment, starkly reflected in his blank expression, he cannot place the joke. Probably because he hasn't noticed Carobet yet, and thus has no foundation for the remark. Ah, yes; "If only. Do you ever sit like a normal person?" While he plods back over to his chair, plops down, withholds his next air-ball to await a response.
Carobet shakes her head. "No. Why would I? It's more comfortable this way. Plus, I'm a Mindhealer. I'm not expected to be normal." She begins to sort through the files she's brought with her, once more, using the floor as a filing cabinet; she, too, has her habits. "Do you ever /act/ like a normal person?"
"I try not to." Alex's hookshots are way off the mark, but his sitting-jump-shot? Pretty all right. Provided he was aiming for Carobet and not the basket, since that's where the paperball lobs this time. "Shouldn't you do that someplace..." Where there's not paper flying? Not Starsmiths prying, ostensibly coming over to her chair to collect that paper? "...private?"
Carobet scowls, her eyes narrowing at Alex as it hits her nicely on the nose. She grasps it in one hand, squishing it tighter. "You assume that you know what I'm doing, Starsmith. I thought men of your craft were trained not to make assumptions?" After a moment, she looks down at her palm. Shrugs, uncrumples the paper to see what might be on it. Maybe it's interesting.
Aleczir, shaking his head; "Incorrect. We assume all sorts of things. We're just trained to disprove them immediately afterward." The paper, uncrumpled, is a near indecipherable mass of scribbled handwriting, things crossed out, half-erased, a few margin-notes along the lines of "THIS IS THE WORST IDEA THAT EVER EXISTED" and so on. "Where, from what I gather, your craft is trained to make assumptions and then insist forever that you are absolutely right about everything and the rest of us are just... misguided. Sorry you looked yet?" Eyes toward the paper.
Carobet glances down at the paper, wrinkling her nose as she realizes she can barely make heads or tails of it. Darn. That was less exciting than she thought. She turns it on its side, then upside down, just in case this reveals anything more about it. Then she crumples it up again (Alex's answer.) "That is a rather false assumption," she says blandly. Then hits Alex squarely in the head with his crumpled notes. And then a second, well-aimed ball of paper-- just after a crumpling sound from behind the high-backed arm chair.
Aleczir takes his beating like a man, eyes closed reflexively while the paper bounces off his forehead, opened, closed again for the second round. "Ah, then I'm doing my job pretty well. Can you say the same?" Made an assumption; immediately disproved it; go him. "You're... very violent for a Do-No-Harmer," he observes, disappears behind the horizon of her chair to go collecting not one but two balls of paper. He's coming up in the world!
"What, did you get a papercut?" Carobet asks, letting her voice drip just a tad with an 'aw, poor baby' tone. "Primum non nocere. Who came up with that nonsense, anyway? And yet they expect me to use tough love on my clients. 'No harm.' Harrumph." She crosses her arms, disliking this paradox. "I'm doing my job quite well, thank you," she finishes, although provides no proof. She's clearly not a Starsmith.
Straightening, Alex sets the paper wads on either side of the back of Carobet's chair, his head leaning farther and farther till it's tipped quite to one side in his efforts to make them equidistant from each other and from the ends of the chair itself. For no apparent reason. This goes on for quite some time, even after she's done harrumphing and all. Focus shifting abruptly from the papers to the Healer-- "I'm sorry. Was it my turn to say something?"
In that long silence that Alex was straightening out those wads of paper-- for no apparent reason, and thus, not something that remotely held Carobet's attention-- she had turned her eyes back down to the stack of papers in her lap. So when he speaks again, she takes her time in looking up at him. "We were having a conversation? Didn't think that was your sort of thing."
"Wait-- we /were/ having a conversation, or /we/ were having a conversation?" A cautious step taken backward sees the two wads in their final positions, Alex's hands draw away carefully, one reaching up to scratch idly through already disheveled hair. Pretty much perpetually disheveled. She so much as wobbles that chair, it all comes crashing down, but he returns to his seat at the table for now.
Carobet does more than wobble. She drops her papers onto the floor, then swings her feet off the arm, turns around, and folds her arms over the back of the chair. Had the papers stayed until then, she'd have knocked them right off, but they're long gone by that time. "/Conversation./ Not the participants, or whether it is past or present." She turns her head to one side, considering the other crafter. "You are /so/ not like other guys. They spend that much time as close to me as that, their eyes would /not/ have been on balls of paper." And she seems slightly miffed by this lack of attention.
Aleczir starts forward, like he can warn her-- no! paper balls!-- but too late. He sighs. He leans back into his chair. He looks mournfully at the little balls of paper on the floor. He raises sad eyes to Carobet's. "Was that strictly necessary?" Shaking his head, he picks up his pencil and takes up another of his favorite ways to pass time: scratching his forehead with the end of it. "Yes? Well, they wouldn't need a term for anomalies if they didn't exist, would they?"
Carobet glances down at the balls of paper on the floor. Oh. "Yes. It was." And as for the last thing he says? /So/ not what she was hoping for. She sighs wistfully, propping her head on her hands. "I suppose that is a good point. And if there were no human anomalies, then I would be out of a job." But no googly eyes at her this evening. Too bad. She eyes the movement of Alex's pencil as it-- what? assists in thinking? Human anomaly, indeed.
Aleczir, at the table, scratching his forehead with a pencil, his crap spread out around him, as usual. Carobet, in the armchair, looking wistful, her crap spread out around her, as usual. "Why?" He unfolds suddenly, the pencil behind his ear where it-- assists in looking bookish? And he's crossing the room once more, bending all lanky-armed to collect the two fallen balls of paper in one hand and place them side-by-side on the back of the chair. "Why?"
** ed note: Yuliye had planned to join here, but something came up, so that's why her name's in Carobet's pose. :P **
Carobet's eyes follow Alex as he walks towards her and places those wads down on the back of her chair. Then they catch Yuliye, whose whirling entrance gets a thorough head-to-toe-to-knot appraisal. But since she's silent, and the Starsmith speaks, so attention is turned back to him. "Why not?" And, just to be petulant, she flicks the two balls of paper-- One! Two!-- across the room. And, as it happens, in Yuliye's general direction.
"Hmn," utters Alex, watching the two papers go sailing, watching the arc of their trajectory, watching where they land. "Is this because I don't think you're pretty?" he asks abruptly, straightening out his bemused frown into a suddenly enlightened one before he goes off to collect the wads, to sit back down-- since no one's in his chair after all!-- and resume his earlier occupation. Hookshot; airball; now he gets a second try! Guess how that one turns out.
Earlier she thought that he just wasn't interested; now he's uttered those words. Not. Pretty. How dare he??? But Carobet maintains her composure-- taking a few, audible deep breaths in order to do so-- because she will /not/ let him win. "No. It's because it's fun to wreck havoc on the order in your world. Besides, it's fascinating." She smiles prettily, charmingly. It's amusing, apparently, as well.
Distracted; "Order. Order... order, order..." Alex makes a good show of sifting through the chaotic array of notes and papers on the table, suddenly finds a compass he thought he lost and delights in the discovery with a brief beam before he shoves it in his pocket. No, he wasn't looking for anything in particular, and he stops as abruptly as he started, sinking into his chair with his long arms folded so one wrist comes up to obscure half his mouth. "How do you say it again? Primum something something?"
Carobet watches him, the sublime amusement on her face revealing the private chuckle she won't make audible. "There's order to your madness, though. And from what I've seen? Beyond your own little sphere, you must have order in every little aspect of the world." The Mindhealer, giving out a freebie! What benevolence. "Primum non nocere," she supplies, drawing out the phrase for his benefit. Pree-mum noo-oon no-kaay-raay.
Aleczir echoes, "Pree-mum no-something something. And how did I put it?" Trying to stack the mess is fruitless, but he stops being all folded up to start making some /order/ out of the chaos, all the papers in a pile, all the miscellaneous odds-and-ends on the pile, all gathered into his arms. "Make assumptions and them assume you're assumptions are infallible? That's the problem with mindhealer science-- please pretend I put those little finger-quotes around science?" Because his hands are full, and he can't actually do it. "Untestable hypotheses."
"You said, Primum something something," Carobet recalls for Alex's benefit. Her lips purse at the not-so-wonderful accusations of her craft, and in her haughtiest voice, she retorts, "I never said my assumptions were infallible. I was reflecting only on the observations I have made so far. And it is a science, just as much as Starsmithing is. I can see into your brain with about the same amount of approximation that you can see stars through those fiddly farviewer things of yours." So there. She flops back into her chair, picking up her papers once more. Suddenly, they are oh-so-interesting. This conversation? Over.
Aleczir, summarily dismissed! Fortunately, not the kind to let it drag him down.