Back home, Rizzo had to drive on down to the drive-in if she wanted to catch a flick. The options were pretty limited to whatever reel the man in charge had lying around, but she wasn't too big on the things anyhow. Here, though, they had plenty of movies just lying around on the bookshelf, waiting to be thrown up on the screen in the rec room - in
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Maladicta followed her quickly in, sharp quiet curses in Uberwaldean on her tongue, and grabbed the little girl up.
"Where exactly did you think- Oh," she said. There was someone else there, someone who looked deeply upset. Maladicta was struck suddenly off-center. She'd been there too long, she thought. The distress, the way the young woman, who she recognized but did not know, was standing next to the projector- she had a dark gut feeling as to what the problem might be.
She sent up a silent prayer to the Duchess or whoever that Polly had found that book, all those years ago, and not William.
"...What did it show you?"
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"Mnuh," Olivia said, extending one hand, fingers curling open and shut.
"I don't know what that means, either," Maladicta murmured to her spawn. After a moment, she walked further into the room, to take up a lean against the sofa on the opposite side of the projector from the crying girl.
"The shelf gave me a book once. It's jarring, and not particularly fair."
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"Maladicta von Borogravia. This is Olivia."
"Olivia!" Olivia added.
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"Hey," she said to them both, with a truly questionable attempt at a smile. "I'm Rizzo." And then, because everybody goddamn knew these days. "Betty Rizzo."
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"Rizzzz-iz-iz-iz-iz," Olivia said quietly, not in the burbling nonsense way most toddlers did, but rather as though she was working out a new and intriguing phonetic.
"Rizzo," she said more firmly, looking up at the girl. Maladicta looked bemused in the utmost.
"...All right. So, what do you want to do with it?" Maladicta asked, nodding to the reel in the projector.
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"Destroying it won't do any good," although it would be awfully cathartic, "people've already seen it." She took the dic out of the projector, shoved it back in the case anyway, holding it close to her chest and not at all wanting to look at it.
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"Sometimes if you take what it gives you and don't destroy it but hide it away, it lessens the chance of another showing up. Or it... makes it easier to pretend like it's less likely, at any rate."
Olivia squirmed pointedly out of Maladicta's arms to start crawling over the couch. Maladicta watched this with a sort of flat bemusement for a moment before looking back at Rizzo without comment.
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Rizzo watched the little girl's progress with a detached sort of interest. "Did you bury somethin' about you?"
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"Including one or two interesting novels the shelf turned up. This was all years ago, now."
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