I joined the brotherhood // My books were all to me

[magical_bosom]

Characters: Amber (magical_bosom) and OPEN
Date/Time: 25 to 26 August 2011, any time in the day
Location: Adventurers HQ/ the Bazaar/ the Farm/ Wellspring Island/ Section Two
Rating: PG
Summary: Amber goes about her day. Come bother her say hello? [ooc: Just jot down time and place for a thread, I'll go from there. ♥]

Comments

Early afternoon/Adventurers AQ

[stonyfaced]

Vimes felt out of place in the Adventurers AQ. When it came down to it, he really wasn't sure exactly what they did or why they did it aside from assessing the danger of the Wilderness or how they operated as a team. It was certainly an occupation unique to Edensphere. To Vimes, there was no enjoyment to be had romping around in a mysterious land that could change at the drop of a pin, but others seemed to enjoy it well enough.

Despite his lack of understanding, he liked Target, one of the heads of the Adventurers. She was no-nonsense and smart, and Vimes privately thought that in another world, she would make a fantastic Captain of the Watch. He was here to see her today, in fact, to ask after how often the blank wildernesses struck and as it was closing time today anyway, perhaps strike up a little conversation (it wasn't gossip if it was beneficial to their jobs, was it?) about the Wilderness.

As it was, it looked as if she had either stepped out for the moment or had gone off shift on time for once. Ah, well. That didn't mean that he couldn't ask someone around here about the blank Wildernesses at least. Still in his battered armour, he peered around the corner and saw a woman around his age sitting at a desk.

"Hello, ma'am," he said first, because he was in the practice of being polite to non-watchmen who weren't actively making him angry, in which case he could also be polite in a very nasty sort of way. "Have you got a moment? I've got a question about the Wilderness."

[magical_bosom]

Amber had, in truth, been quite absorbed in the report in front of her. The present one was one of those tricky Wildernesses that refused any kind of adequate qualification other than "changeable, dangerous". It did not help that she was by now convinced this strange realm was familiar. What sort of world did she come from if it boasted environs like that?

She had been compiling yet another outline (slightly more thorough than the previous one) on the Wilderness, jotting down recurring features and creatures Adventurer teams had encountered, when a gruff voice clearly still bent on courtesy startled her in mid-sentence. She lifted her pen and glanced up.

"Ah. Of course. Pardon me, ser, I was... No matter. If I can help you, I certainly will."

[stonyfaced]

Vimes noted now that it sounded like she was busy before he stepped in, but he shrugged it off easily enough. He'd never get anywhere if interrupting people bothered him in the least. Besides, it was only a quick question.

If the frequency of these empty wildernesses began to rise, he would have to call a meeting for his watchmen to prepare for the worst, he thought. Whatever the worst was, he didn't know, but he wanted them to be prepared to do their job and keep everyone as safe as they could even in a crisis.

"Do you know how many days those blank wildernesses have popped up this month?" He asked, getting straight to the point. It had stayed for fourteen days last month, he remembered, for as long as their visitors had been here. He resolved to check exactly which days they came up this month as well to see if it corresponded at all to the events of the Sphere. It was unlikely that he could find a correlation, but it was worth a shot.

/makes up shit about Adventurer procedures, hi

[magical_bosom]

"Yes, of course." She stood from her chair, smoothed her skirt with her hands, and went to a hand-drawn calendar pinned to a wall nearby. "Here. On all the days marked in blue, the Wilderness has been empty. So we have... a very regular pattern of every other day for the first two weeks of the month, then a week of a single, regular Wilderness, and now the two-day alternation has begun again."

She had not glanced at a clock in the last hour, at least. It was probably technically past her shift by now, but she had her own desk and could sit there poring over reports however long she wished. The office was a little somnolent these days, as the malleable Wilderness kept most field-worthy Adventurers out of the headquarters other than for the delivery of reports and resupply of equipment.

Procedural shit exists to be made up!

[stonyfaced]

"Huh." Vimes walked beside Amber, over to where the the calendar hung to look at it himself. "Thank you. Don't let me keep you, I won't be long."

That said, he patted his pockets and produced a small, thick notebook nearly filled to the brim with Vimes' messy, spidery handwriting and a pen. He had gotten into the habit of writing everything down early into his first year in Edensphere, and found it useful to keep up the habit. You never knew what would happen in this place, after all. This practice was somehow damaged by the fact that Vimes always meant to write out a different copy but kept on misplacing the sheets of papers in the mess that was his desk.

He wrote down all the dates into his notebook, then crisply snapped it shut. It was pretty late in the month, so it looked like there were fewer blank wildernesses than last month. Interesting. Or at least it would be interesting if Vimes had the faintest clue what it meant.

[magical_bosom]

"Oh, no, I was... just finishing." She might wish to see about that, indeed, no matter how intriguing or puzzling the present Wilderness was. The office was growing sweltering with the heat of the afternoon, and she might be well served with something to eat and drink in short order.

So, while he jotted down whatever he wanted to make note of, she went back to her desk, finished her sentence and arranged all the stray papers into orderly piles. It occurred to her that he seemed a bit more interested in the Wilderness than a casual inquirer, though of course they answered questions from anyone who had them.

"Were you just curious, then, ser?" she ventured as she glanced about the office to make sure she wasn't leaving anything conspicuously unfinished. "Pardon me, it's simply that I recognise most of our regular visitors on the subject of the Wilderness."

[stonyfaced]

"I'm not much of a regular visitor," Vimes said, turning around. "I don't actually tend to go to the Wilderness, but I am trying to keep track of how often the wilderness is going blank."

He didn't know this woman, nor did he know whether or not she was actually interested in the least in the going-ons of the Sphere, but the fact that the blank wilderness corresponded to the destruction of the Sphere wasn't exactly difficult to understand. Whether or not she was concerned, it was everyone's business by now.

"They obviously don't mean anything good, so I'm hoping that monitoring the changes will help give some sort of advance notice before everything goes--" to hell "--pear-shaped."

[magical_bosom]

When Amber had arrived, the blank Wilderness had already been manifesting for several months. To her, the fluctuating state of the third level was the only state of affairs she had ever known. However, the Adventurers' records stretched back for more than three years--a prodigious amount of time, by the standards of the Sphere--and she had spent many a quiet evening poring over old reports. She had at least a second-hand understanding that the Wilderness had been much stabler and more regular once.

"I see. A proper interested party, then." She smiled slightly, her mouth quirking further at the rather obvious omission of a more objectionable epithet in his sentence. "I'm rather too new to have a long-time perspective, but I am aware that the white space bodes ill. It's perhaps a meagre reassurance, but we are doing all we can to understand it, ser..."

Perhaps, at this juncture of the conversation, it was both polite and prudent to suggest an introduction.

[stonyfaced]

"Oh, are you? We haven't been getting as many newcomers in the past few months. Nearly none at all now, as you well know." Bloody bad timing, if you asked Vimes. Having lived here for over two years and watching this place slowly self-destruct wasn't what he'd call a walk in the park, but it'd be even worse to step foot into a place only to have it already crumbling apart.

When Amber prompted an introduction, he tapped two fingers to his well worn helmet in an informal salute of introduction. "Vimes. Just Vimes is fine, thanks, no 'sir' necessary." Most people called him sir anyway, but he never demanded that anyone call him by any sort of title but his men.

[magical_bosom]

Her smile widened a fraction. "Neither is the 'ma'am', in fact. I am called Amber. And then we have already met, though not in person. You... wrote something on the matter of dwarves, and then later dragons."

Now her curiosity was well cemented. There were glances and echoes of familiarity about many people she had met, but perhaps the most solid chain of connecting factors when it came to comparing different worlds that she had found had been in her conversations with Vimes. Commander of the Watch, she had heard, and perhaps seen him in passing in the Bazaar and paid it no further mind.

"As it seems I am finished here, where were you headed next? Of course, don't let me interrupt your duties."

[stonyfaced]

Vimes was not a man who smiled easily or often, but his expression and voice shifted into a rather affable one as he recalled the conversation. He usually mixed up most of the conversations on the journals because he made an effort to sit down and read through everything every night, but because he seldom wrote in it, it was easier to remember conversations he participated in.

"Right," he said, "I remember that. No, I'm on my break right now, otherwise I'd be in my office or on the streets, not in here."

Amber had intrigued him then, and he couldn't say he wasn't pleased to meet her in person. He had meant to speak with her again at some point and see if they recognized any other aspects of their worlds, but it had slipped his mind. Well no, not slipped his mind. It had stayed in the back of his mind to natter at him, along with several other things that he kept on meaning to do. Why not check this one off the list?

"I was going to the Bazaar to pick up some lunch after this. You're welcome to come along," he said. Then, never one to beat around the bush, he added on, "I'd like to hear more about the world you come from. I can't say I run into many other people who know about dwarves - or any other people, at that, and I've been here longer than most."

[magical_bosom]

"Thank you. I might take you up on that offer." She nodded, smoothed her skirts, and gathered the small shoulder bag in which she carried her journal and a few other necessary things from the back of her chair.

"I'm afraid I don't have a great many details. I can grasp some ideas, and I've begun to sort out the things that feel familiar." She opened the door and held it for him to exit before her. "But if I can tell you anything without simply repeating what I wrote to you before, I will try my best.

"Have you learned much about your world? When you say 'longer than most', I get the impression you mean a long while, at least by the standards of this place."

[stonyfaced]

A part of Vimes resisted the door being held open for him, but he walked through anyway with a nod of thanks. "About two and a half years now," he said. "Which doesn't sound like too long to live somewhere, but I can count the people I know who've been here for as long as me on one hand."

As they exited the building together, Vimes fell easily into the walk of a watchman without thinking about it, an easy, swinging gait of someone who both had all day and also had a good distance to cover that day. "I haven't learned half as much about my world as I'd like to," he admitted, "but talk around and you'll find out you know more about the place you come from than you think you do. It's the sort of stuff you assume everyone ought to know until you realize they don't."

Stuff like the world being flat. He spoke to those who absolutely insisted that he was an ignorant fool for claiming the world was a disc, but Vimes knew better. Frankly, he thought that other worlds must possess some sort of strangely powerful magic to keep up a round world. It wasn't something he applied much thought to.

[magical_bosom]

Amber settled for walking at a steady pace, easily keeping up with him. She had surmised her way of life back home had not been entirely sedentary; while she was adding on years, she was quite sprightly and rather more resilient than her appearance might have suggested.

"So I've heard--and seen, in this short while. People simply do not come to work one morning. You wait for a time, perhaps ask around, and..." She did not know if she was glad or not that she hadn't made many close connections in her time in the Sphere. While it made her life more solitary, it was also a protective measure: the pain of loss touched her more distantly.

"You must know," she finished. "Best not to linger on that, in any case. But now that I hear you say that, it is true. There's much here I do not recognise. Much of the flora looks very familiar, but its properties are entirely different. I do not see elfroot in the healers' gardens, yet so many remedies can be prepared from that simple plant."

[stonyfaced]

Vimes looked around them, as if noticing the fact that plants did indeed grow on the ground for the first time, then shrugged. "That's one thing we won't be able to compare," he said. "I can't tell a weed from a flower."

As they walked towards the Bazaaar, they were greeted with the unique combination of smells Vimes had long since learned to associate with Edensphere as a whole. Though Vimes was more than familiar with the presence of minorities and what they did to the atmosphere of a city, Edensphere was a bit of a special case. Even now, the sorts of goods and foods they offered never ceased to baffle him, and seeing things as foreign as raw fished wrapped in rice alongside the comforting presence of stews always made him look twice.

"Sounds like you were something of a healer, wherever you came from," Vimes noted. "Why'd you choose to become an Adventurer, then? Not that it's a bad job. Target runs it well."

[magical_bosom]

Amber, too, found the Bazaar puzzling for the most part. She had procured many useful things in its stalls, but when it came to food, she preferred to avail herself of the Farm surplus and cook over the curious stove in her small house.

"I... am not wholly sure," she said at length, having to consider his question for a moment. "I wasn't aware of my aptitude for plant lore in the beginning, though perhaps that guided me to work at the Farm. But the work the Adventurers do, studying the new places in the Wilderness... That seemed to appeal to me. Perhaps there simply seem to be few opportunities for learning here, as paradoxical as that may sound, given we arrive here with next to nothing."