Starting late
12-7-2006 (Reyce, Laelle):
Records Room
Some effort has been made to keep this immense room warm and comfortable. Given its size and contents, this has not been an easy undertaking. There is a slightly musty scent to the air and no matter how many baskets of glows are brought in, there seems to be a perpetual state of gloom. Some of this may have to do with the way the cavern is arranged. The area nearest the exits is given over to tables and chairs, meant to be used by those studying the records. Here it's always quiet but generally well-lit and not as musty.
Then there is the rest of the cavern, which is filled with hundreds upon hundreds of stone shelves. Rising from floor to ceiling, they bear more scroll tubes than could be counted in a month. The hides inside of each tube cover every topic imaginable and are marked by little tags, indicating where they're to be stored according to the organizational system created by the current weyrwoman.
With no windows to let in the telltale rays of sunlight, the records room runs on its own time system. Darkness falls after midnight, when 'extra' glows get taken away, leaving only a bare minimum of light augmented by the lights kept for individual desks. When dawn rolls around, the glows come back out, restoring the room to its usual daytime gloom. The cycle of daytime has just begun, records workers still going about the room to place glows in their accustomed places, and Reyce - surprisingly enough - is here to bear witness. The Bendenite sits in a corner of the room with a heavy sheaf of hides piled up before him. Pushing back his chair, he palms his eyes tiredly.
The Bendenite isn't alone, either, at least not for long. Despite the rather absurd hour, Laelle appears at the entrance. Her hair is still damp and dark from recent bathing and it hangs about her shoulders in loose, drying waves. Even now she wears the smudged kohl around her eyes. She comes with cup of tea in one hand and scrape of hide in the other. When she spots Reyce her only reaction is an exhale that can't quite be called a sigh. She set her mug down at a seat not far from him and turns to stare almost blankly at the sea of scrolls. Every once in a while she looks down at the hide, then back up.
Reyce drops his hands back to the desk with a loud thump that carries through the room. Having had the place very nearly to himself all night, he has little concern now for keeping the silence in respect for others. Although his noise-making earns him a glance from a nearby records keeper, the other man clearly sees no need to trouble himself over a disturbance that has already ceased. Only then, belatedly, does he process the sound of Laelle's sigh, or the proximity of a tea cup that wasn't there before. Twisting in his chair, he finds her behind him and draws in a quick, sinus-clearing sniff.
The thumping and sniffling make Laelle take a breath, her own subdued reaction to the sudden sounds. It straightens her spine a little more and lifts her chin, but she doesn't jump or startle. Instead, "It's going to take me all four turns just to figure out how this place is organized," she says, quietly, but surely for Reyce's ears. She must make some progress, though, for a finger reaches out to follow along the shelf, reading the little tags down the case until she's crouched low. Despite this, a more noted sigh, this of failure, follows.
Reyce marks the small changes in Laelle's posture with no more than a glance, another, smaller sniff drawn in at the register. His turn to speak is delayed by a sudden yawn, his mouth gaping wide as he rubs a hand along his stubbled jaw, as though the action might somehow ease off the force of his yawn. "Ask the workers," he suggests, his voice swinging down off the high note of the yawn. He snaps his teeth, dissastisfied by the sound this produces. "What they're here for."
"Then I'll never learn," Laelle answers easily, ignoring the yawn's note and the way he snaps at the air. She may hardly know Reyce, but these are the sorts of behaviors she's already come to expect. Meanwhile, one of those workers does inch up towards the tall girl, but she just smiles and shakes her head. She moves on to the next case and then a quick breath seems to signal her success, or at least the nearing of success. It takes her a few more moments of shelf-tracing before she pluck out the scroll she was looking for. She returns to the table and claims her seat without glancing at the Benden man. "Do they have anything to write on here? Slates, perhaps?" she wonders, eyes on the hide as she spreads it in front of her.
Reyce's lip twitches in at the corner at her easy answer, but he doesn't push the matter. Turning back towards his own desk, he begins to thumb through the hides he keeps there. The three on top all have the same cramped, messy handwriting - rife with cross-outs - and these he picks above the rest, pushing the others to the top of his desk and laying those three side by side. "Yeah," he answers, distracted as he skims the first page. "Workers keep them in supply." Though it touches on their previous exchange, Reyce doesn't seem to notice the circularity of the discussion; or if he does, he doesn't make anything of it.
Only once Reyce is busy with his own work does Laelle look up at him, her sheilded, shadow-lined eyes hunting his face for a brief moment. Then her stillness is broken and she stands, seeks her writing tools and returns. Unbuttoning her jacket and swinging it over the back of the chair, she also pulls out two small orange fruits from the pocket. Once she's seated again, she rolls one down the table to Reyce. By the time it reaches him, her eyes are on the hides once more. And yet she asks, "You've been here all night?"
Reyce follows the approach of the fruit by the sound it makes rolling across the table, and does not once lift his eyes from his paper. "Yeah," he answers as the rolling sound abruptly stops, the fruit pinned down beneath his hand. Only then does he spare a look for it, lifting it before his face and turning it around as he examines it. "Thanks," he decides, closing his fingers around the thing. He kicks back in his chair at a dangerous angle, his knees propped between him and the desk with his work on it, while he starts to unpeel the thing.
"Couldn't sleep or just too enthralled with angles to bother?" the pale woman wonders, even as she starts to jot down notes. As the scent of fruit begins to waft about the room, she pauses her writing to breathe it in deeply. "From Nerat," she mentions. "A care package to my cousin." She must be talking about the orange. Paused as she is, she glances up at the man again, eyeing the careful tip of his chair.
Reyce has chair-tipping down to a fine art, or a fine mathematical equation: as long as the angle of the chair with the floor remains greater than or equal to forty-five degrees, he will not overbalance. The reason for his adoption of this position becomes clear when, ill-practied in peeling oranges, his nails dig too deep and send juice squirting towards the desk - only to be blocked by his raised knees. That his pants catch flak does not, apparently, bother him. "Had a paper," he answers, his eyes flicking sideways to meet hers.
Laelle does not shy from his gaze, but meets it impassively. Her lips start to quirk, but whatever expression was about to form, it's lost when she speaks. "You'll be done in time?" she asks idly. She reaches not for her own fruit, but for the mug of klah. She sips it daintily, her eyes still watching him over the rim.
Reyce has been gathering the orange peels in his palm, but as they threaten to overrun his hold he begins eyeing the desk again. His own work covers most of the space in his own section, so he quickly crosses over and leaves the peels in the next spot over. "Am done," he notes. His hand, on its way to the orange, pauses to knock knuckles against the three hides spread before him: quite a long paper, by the looks of it. A tilt of his palm dismisses it, though, as he looks back to Laelle. "Got your classes?" he asks after a moment, jerking his chin at the reading she's picked out.
Laelle nods, "Yes, some," she answers, her gaze returning to her work. "Starting late, as I am, I'm a bit behind." She taps the scroll with her pointer finger, much in the same thay that he'd knocked knuckes to his own studies. "History." She sets her mug down and seem ready to return to her work, but just before her focus can take hold, she looks up again. "A paper on what?"
Reyce lets out a thin breath of amusement, but none of it makes its way onto his bland expression. "History," he responds, his tone dismissing the subject's worth entirely. The last bits of orange peel get cast off onto the neighboring desk, and now the juice squirting begins in earneast as he starts to pull off pieces.
A brow cocks slowly at the paper's topic, or perhaps it was that hint of amusement. "Is it any good?" Laelle asks him, that slow smile spreading over her lips. She lifts her chin a little, as if to peer over to read his assignment. "Or do you excell at shapes and numbers to the detriment of everything else?"
Reyce's own eyes narrow when hers start to wander towards his paper, his knee shifting out to put more of a block between her examination and his work. Yet, he's frank enough assessing the paper's quality: "No." Realizing there was another question in there, he elaborates: "No good," and shrugs as he pops the first orange slice in. His expression guards his reaction to the taste of the Neratian fruit, but he's quick to go for another one. "Don't like the subject," he remarks, his focus on the orange and his words slightly impeded by the piece still held in his mouth. "Just getting through with it."
"You don't think you'll have any use for it?" Laelle guesses offhandedly. She tucks her chair in so that she might lean back and still be close enough to her scroll to work, should she get around to it. Though her expression has grown even and cool again, there is something vaguely satisfied about the way she now watches the fruit move so quickly to his mouth. She taps her pencil against her barely-started page of notes, just a few quick taps for no apparent reason.
Reyce frowns over her words, but his displeasure is directed down at the orange, helpless to protest. Pressing his lips together as he swallows the first bit of rind, he pushes out an 'mm' sound to fill the space of silence between her question and his answer. It comes a moment later, after he's popped a new orange piece into his mouth. "No, and don't like it," he says, his frown pulling deeper before it wipes away entirely.
"You think it does have use, then," Laelle surmises. She's forgotten him and the orange for the moment and instead stares at the pages laid neatly before her. Her lashes are low and her lips firm in a thin line, holding her silent. Whatever thoughts are in her head, they preoccupy her and are left unshared. She taps her pencil again.
Reyce, quite the opposite, has forgotten his work in favor of himself and the orange. His gaze slips sideways to her again, but only briefly; finding her distracted by her own things he returns to his snack. "No, I don't think I'll have use for it," he corrects. Since she's not looking, he doesn't bother to keep his mouth closed while he chews. "Been told often enough it's got uses. Don't see it. Don't like it." He pauses, little bits of orange rolled over his tongue while he gives his own opinion consideration. "Don't care," he admits with a shrug.
"Mm," Laelle returns as answer, perhaps mimicking him or maybe just because she's too busy staring at the scroll to give any other reaction. A long moment passes where she neither moves nor speaks nor looks at him, then finally. "I'll not bore you with talk of it, then." The pencil taps once more, like natural impulses of energy that need to be released from her calm stillness and make their escape through her the twitch of her fingers. Her dark lids lift and her eyes find him again, still thoughtful and sheilded. "Do you like the orange?"
Reyce has, during the silence while she considers her paper, nearly finished the orange. The last two pieces split with the soft sound of the fruit's torn flesh, one cradled in his palm while the other gets popped into his mouth. "Yeah," he answers, dragging the word out as he pulls the orange around to the side of his mouth. "Thanks," he repeats, in case she missed it the first time; his brow raises briefly, but falls as he bites into the orange piece.
"If you're still hungry, I think they were setting up breakfast when I passed through," Laelle mentions. Perhaps it's a hint for him to get lost. She does not, however, offer her own orange. What she does offer is, "You're welcome." Proper and polite. But when she says, "I love the way they smell," there is something more natural in her tone, honest and at ease.
Reyce freezes up suddenly, though the change is hard to note. Busy licking the last bit of juice off his fingers - for he's just popped in the last orange slice - he simply pauses with a finger still hung in his mouth. "Sure," he picks up after a half-second, dragging that finger back out and wiping his whole hand on his pants. "Going to get breakfast," he decides, hauling his hidework back together. Orange rinds get thrown into his pocket so he can keep his essay separate from its sources which, apparently, he must now return to a basket near the front. "See you." His chair clanks back down to all four feet, and Reyce clanks down onto two; he pauses only to stretch the nightlong accumulating of pains out of his back before going to find (more) food.
Records Room
Some effort has been made to keep this immense room warm and comfortable. Given its size and contents, this has not been an easy undertaking. There is a slightly musty scent to the air and no matter how many baskets of glows are brought in, there seems to be a perpetual state of gloom. Some of this may have to do with the way the cavern is arranged. The area nearest the exits is given over to tables and chairs, meant to be used by those studying the records. Here it's always quiet but generally well-lit and not as musty.
Then there is the rest of the cavern, which is filled with hundreds upon hundreds of stone shelves. Rising from floor to ceiling, they bear more scroll tubes than could be counted in a month. The hides inside of each tube cover every topic imaginable and are marked by little tags, indicating where they're to be stored according to the organizational system created by the current weyrwoman.
With no windows to let in the telltale rays of sunlight, the records room runs on its own time system. Darkness falls after midnight, when 'extra' glows get taken away, leaving only a bare minimum of light augmented by the lights kept for individual desks. When dawn rolls around, the glows come back out, restoring the room to its usual daytime gloom. The cycle of daytime has just begun, records workers still going about the room to place glows in their accustomed places, and Reyce - surprisingly enough - is here to bear witness. The Bendenite sits in a corner of the room with a heavy sheaf of hides piled up before him. Pushing back his chair, he palms his eyes tiredly.
The Bendenite isn't alone, either, at least not for long. Despite the rather absurd hour, Laelle appears at the entrance. Her hair is still damp and dark from recent bathing and it hangs about her shoulders in loose, drying waves. Even now she wears the smudged kohl around her eyes. She comes with cup of tea in one hand and scrape of hide in the other. When she spots Reyce her only reaction is an exhale that can't quite be called a sigh. She set her mug down at a seat not far from him and turns to stare almost blankly at the sea of scrolls. Every once in a while she looks down at the hide, then back up.
Reyce drops his hands back to the desk with a loud thump that carries through the room. Having had the place very nearly to himself all night, he has little concern now for keeping the silence in respect for others. Although his noise-making earns him a glance from a nearby records keeper, the other man clearly sees no need to trouble himself over a disturbance that has already ceased. Only then, belatedly, does he process the sound of Laelle's sigh, or the proximity of a tea cup that wasn't there before. Twisting in his chair, he finds her behind him and draws in a quick, sinus-clearing sniff.
The thumping and sniffling make Laelle take a breath, her own subdued reaction to the sudden sounds. It straightens her spine a little more and lifts her chin, but she doesn't jump or startle. Instead, "It's going to take me all four turns just to figure out how this place is organized," she says, quietly, but surely for Reyce's ears. She must make some progress, though, for a finger reaches out to follow along the shelf, reading the little tags down the case until she's crouched low. Despite this, a more noted sigh, this of failure, follows.
Reyce marks the small changes in Laelle's posture with no more than a glance, another, smaller sniff drawn in at the register. His turn to speak is delayed by a sudden yawn, his mouth gaping wide as he rubs a hand along his stubbled jaw, as though the action might somehow ease off the force of his yawn. "Ask the workers," he suggests, his voice swinging down off the high note of the yawn. He snaps his teeth, dissastisfied by the sound this produces. "What they're here for."
"Then I'll never learn," Laelle answers easily, ignoring the yawn's note and the way he snaps at the air. She may hardly know Reyce, but these are the sorts of behaviors she's already come to expect. Meanwhile, one of those workers does inch up towards the tall girl, but she just smiles and shakes her head. She moves on to the next case and then a quick breath seems to signal her success, or at least the nearing of success. It takes her a few more moments of shelf-tracing before she pluck out the scroll she was looking for. She returns to the table and claims her seat without glancing at the Benden man. "Do they have anything to write on here? Slates, perhaps?" she wonders, eyes on the hide as she spreads it in front of her.
Reyce's lip twitches in at the corner at her easy answer, but he doesn't push the matter. Turning back towards his own desk, he begins to thumb through the hides he keeps there. The three on top all have the same cramped, messy handwriting - rife with cross-outs - and these he picks above the rest, pushing the others to the top of his desk and laying those three side by side. "Yeah," he answers, distracted as he skims the first page. "Workers keep them in supply." Though it touches on their previous exchange, Reyce doesn't seem to notice the circularity of the discussion; or if he does, he doesn't make anything of it.
Only once Reyce is busy with his own work does Laelle look up at him, her sheilded, shadow-lined eyes hunting his face for a brief moment. Then her stillness is broken and she stands, seeks her writing tools and returns. Unbuttoning her jacket and swinging it over the back of the chair, she also pulls out two small orange fruits from the pocket. Once she's seated again, she rolls one down the table to Reyce. By the time it reaches him, her eyes are on the hides once more. And yet she asks, "You've been here all night?"
Reyce follows the approach of the fruit by the sound it makes rolling across the table, and does not once lift his eyes from his paper. "Yeah," he answers as the rolling sound abruptly stops, the fruit pinned down beneath his hand. Only then does he spare a look for it, lifting it before his face and turning it around as he examines it. "Thanks," he decides, closing his fingers around the thing. He kicks back in his chair at a dangerous angle, his knees propped between him and the desk with his work on it, while he starts to unpeel the thing.
"Couldn't sleep or just too enthralled with angles to bother?" the pale woman wonders, even as she starts to jot down notes. As the scent of fruit begins to waft about the room, she pauses her writing to breathe it in deeply. "From Nerat," she mentions. "A care package to my cousin." She must be talking about the orange. Paused as she is, she glances up at the man again, eyeing the careful tip of his chair.
Reyce has chair-tipping down to a fine art, or a fine mathematical equation: as long as the angle of the chair with the floor remains greater than or equal to forty-five degrees, he will not overbalance. The reason for his adoption of this position becomes clear when, ill-practied in peeling oranges, his nails dig too deep and send juice squirting towards the desk - only to be blocked by his raised knees. That his pants catch flak does not, apparently, bother him. "Had a paper," he answers, his eyes flicking sideways to meet hers.
Laelle does not shy from his gaze, but meets it impassively. Her lips start to quirk, but whatever expression was about to form, it's lost when she speaks. "You'll be done in time?" she asks idly. She reaches not for her own fruit, but for the mug of klah. She sips it daintily, her eyes still watching him over the rim.
Reyce has been gathering the orange peels in his palm, but as they threaten to overrun his hold he begins eyeing the desk again. His own work covers most of the space in his own section, so he quickly crosses over and leaves the peels in the next spot over. "Am done," he notes. His hand, on its way to the orange, pauses to knock knuckles against the three hides spread before him: quite a long paper, by the looks of it. A tilt of his palm dismisses it, though, as he looks back to Laelle. "Got your classes?" he asks after a moment, jerking his chin at the reading she's picked out.
Laelle nods, "Yes, some," she answers, her gaze returning to her work. "Starting late, as I am, I'm a bit behind." She taps the scroll with her pointer finger, much in the same thay that he'd knocked knuckes to his own studies. "History." She sets her mug down and seem ready to return to her work, but just before her focus can take hold, she looks up again. "A paper on what?"
Reyce lets out a thin breath of amusement, but none of it makes its way onto his bland expression. "History," he responds, his tone dismissing the subject's worth entirely. The last bits of orange peel get cast off onto the neighboring desk, and now the juice squirting begins in earneast as he starts to pull off pieces.
A brow cocks slowly at the paper's topic, or perhaps it was that hint of amusement. "Is it any good?" Laelle asks him, that slow smile spreading over her lips. She lifts her chin a little, as if to peer over to read his assignment. "Or do you excell at shapes and numbers to the detriment of everything else?"
Reyce's own eyes narrow when hers start to wander towards his paper, his knee shifting out to put more of a block between her examination and his work. Yet, he's frank enough assessing the paper's quality: "No." Realizing there was another question in there, he elaborates: "No good," and shrugs as he pops the first orange slice in. His expression guards his reaction to the taste of the Neratian fruit, but he's quick to go for another one. "Don't like the subject," he remarks, his focus on the orange and his words slightly impeded by the piece still held in his mouth. "Just getting through with it."
"You don't think you'll have any use for it?" Laelle guesses offhandedly. She tucks her chair in so that she might lean back and still be close enough to her scroll to work, should she get around to it. Though her expression has grown even and cool again, there is something vaguely satisfied about the way she now watches the fruit move so quickly to his mouth. She taps her pencil against her barely-started page of notes, just a few quick taps for no apparent reason.
Reyce frowns over her words, but his displeasure is directed down at the orange, helpless to protest. Pressing his lips together as he swallows the first bit of rind, he pushes out an 'mm' sound to fill the space of silence between her question and his answer. It comes a moment later, after he's popped a new orange piece into his mouth. "No, and don't like it," he says, his frown pulling deeper before it wipes away entirely.
"You think it does have use, then," Laelle surmises. She's forgotten him and the orange for the moment and instead stares at the pages laid neatly before her. Her lashes are low and her lips firm in a thin line, holding her silent. Whatever thoughts are in her head, they preoccupy her and are left unshared. She taps her pencil again.
Reyce, quite the opposite, has forgotten his work in favor of himself and the orange. His gaze slips sideways to her again, but only briefly; finding her distracted by her own things he returns to his snack. "No, I don't think I'll have use for it," he corrects. Since she's not looking, he doesn't bother to keep his mouth closed while he chews. "Been told often enough it's got uses. Don't see it. Don't like it." He pauses, little bits of orange rolled over his tongue while he gives his own opinion consideration. "Don't care," he admits with a shrug.
"Mm," Laelle returns as answer, perhaps mimicking him or maybe just because she's too busy staring at the scroll to give any other reaction. A long moment passes where she neither moves nor speaks nor looks at him, then finally. "I'll not bore you with talk of it, then." The pencil taps once more, like natural impulses of energy that need to be released from her calm stillness and make their escape through her the twitch of her fingers. Her dark lids lift and her eyes find him again, still thoughtful and sheilded. "Do you like the orange?"
Reyce has, during the silence while she considers her paper, nearly finished the orange. The last two pieces split with the soft sound of the fruit's torn flesh, one cradled in his palm while the other gets popped into his mouth. "Yeah," he answers, dragging the word out as he pulls the orange around to the side of his mouth. "Thanks," he repeats, in case she missed it the first time; his brow raises briefly, but falls as he bites into the orange piece.
"If you're still hungry, I think they were setting up breakfast when I passed through," Laelle mentions. Perhaps it's a hint for him to get lost. She does not, however, offer her own orange. What she does offer is, "You're welcome." Proper and polite. But when she says, "I love the way they smell," there is something more natural in her tone, honest and at ease.
Reyce freezes up suddenly, though the change is hard to note. Busy licking the last bit of juice off his fingers - for he's just popped in the last orange slice - he simply pauses with a finger still hung in his mouth. "Sure," he picks up after a half-second, dragging that finger back out and wiping his whole hand on his pants. "Going to get breakfast," he decides, hauling his hidework back together. Orange rinds get thrown into his pocket so he can keep his essay separate from its sources which, apparently, he must now return to a basket near the front. "See you." His chair clanks back down to all four feet, and Reyce clanks down onto two; he pauses only to stretch the nightlong accumulating of pains out of his back before going to find (more) food.