(no subject)
Title: Five Books Sheska Read
Author: bookelfe and genarti
Recipient: bay115
Rating: G
Characters/Pairings: Sheska, Hughes, Fokker, OCs
Summary: Sheska reads everything she can find, but some books mean more than others.
Notes: Most of the books are made up, but the quote in the second section is taken from Jean Henri Fabre's Social Life in the Insect World, which is a hilarious book you can find (in Bernard Miall's translation) on Project Gutenberg here. The imperialist views of Ishval in the same section are, obviously, not the same as ours.
1901: For Fuhrer And Country, Dane Major
Central Library, West Angelica Branch, F Ma 145.6
Dane Major books aren’t even that short, but it only ever takes Sheska about an hour to finish one. They just go so fast. As soon as the men of Squad 405 -- Blaze Delta and Ray Sargent and Sinclair “Snipes” Hardwick and all the rest -- get out into the field, it’s all spies and close encounters and heart-pounding shootouts in the brush and last-minute daring rescues and there just isn’t any way you can possibly stop until you know they’re all okay again. Not even if your mom needs you to do the dishes. (Maybe especially not then.)
Of course this is a problem that Sheska has with a lot of books -- all right, maybe every book -- but right now Dane Major books especially, which is why she has a limit that she’s only allowed to get one out of the library at a time.
Which means that finishing one is always a little bit sad, because on the one hand it’s done and everyone is okay and you get the satisfaction of finishing a book, but then on the other hand that feeling never lasts more than like a minute and then you realize it’s over and there’s at least a whole day to wait before you can go back to the library and get out another one. And it will be hard to find another one as good as For Fuhrer and Country, too, Sheska thinks gloomily, as she closes the back cover on the last page. Not only has Ray Sargent saved the day and almost single-handedly prevented an elite squad of enemy Drachmans from sneaking in to assassinate the Amestrian high command, but the Fuhrer has personally given him a medal of honor at the end in a special secret ceremony. Ray Sargent is Sheska’s favorite; he’s the older one who mentors the young hotshots, the one who has kids at home and sometimes if it’s his turn to be the hero he’ll get to have a scene at home with them and talk to them about how important it was for him to keep the country safe for them.
Sheska thinks Ray Sargent probably looks a little bit like her dad, although to be honest she doesn’t remember what her dad looks like all that well. He’d look different now, anyway, than he does in the pictures -- the young laughing version of her mother in old photos of the two of them is practically unrecognizable. If he were alive he’d maybe be starting to get gray hair, like her mom has now. He’d definitely have a medal from the Fuhrer. At least one. Sheska is completely positive of that. When Dash Owens died in Squadron’s Last Stand he got a posthumous medal for bravery. Sheska’s dad didn’t, even though he was killed on the battlefield just like Dash, but Sheska’s teacher said enough people had died in Aeruga that day that they just couldn’t give medals to everyone, even though she was sure he had deserved it. Most of the other kids in her class whose parents were killed in the army never got medals for them either, but Sheska still thinks it’s a little unfair.
She opens up the back cover and turns the last page back, to reread the medal scene, but she’d forgotten about that insert page that they always put in the back after the story ended -- “Sign Up at Your Nearest Command Station Today!” with a picture of Fuhrer Bradley, hands folded behind his back, looking sternly concerned in front of an Aerugan battlefield. Usually Sheska has a hard time skipping over print, any print, even print that she’s read twenty times before, but by this time she’s read everything on that page basically like a hundred times before, and she knows perfectly well that the ad wasn’t meant for her. It wouldn’t be for her even if she was a grown-up already; the army doesn’t need clumsy, awkward girls with glasses. She can’t do any of the kinds of things Ray Sargent did, or even Kat Racetrack from Squad 407. If an enemy soldier was trying to sneak past her post, the only way she’d probably be able to stop him would be to trip on him.
Besides, they probably don’t have any libraries on the Aerugan front.
1907: The Daily Lives of Insects, Jean Favreau
Central Library, Main Branch, ET 195.472 Fav
In theory, Sheska is visiting the library’s Main Branch downtown in order to work on a composition for history class. And she did mean to work on that, really she did. But, well, to get to the Drachman history books in the LW section, she has to walk by the EG-EU shelf, and she’s spotted an old book with a fascinating binding of tooled leather, the kind nobody’s bothered to make for at least fifty years, and well, she hasn’t read it before, and somehow she’s found herself back at the table she’d claimed with three books on the Drachman precipitation of border conflicts, one on the classification of seaweed, and The Daily Lives of Insects.
She’ll get to the others -- they’re books, aren’t they? And she has four hours until the library closes, which is plenty of time to read five books and pick out another armful to take home.
It’s easy to get interested in reading a book about Drachman borders, but not very easy to get interested in writing a composition about it. So, despite the notebook and inkpot and pen she’d carefully laid out at her elbow, Sheska’s five chapters into Favreau’s insect biographies, and has completely forgotten about inconvenient homework assignments.
Thus hustled by these dwarfs, and at the end of her patience, the giantess finally abandons the well, she reads, nibbling absently on a fingernail. She flies away, throwing a jet of liquid excrement over her tormentors as she goes. But what cares the Ant for this expression of sovereign contempt?
According to the card at the back of the book, this has only been checked out of the library four times since its 1844 acquisition. Sheska doesn’t understand how that could be, when it’s so fascinating -- though it’s true that hardly any of her classmates seem to appreciate books much at all. She’s been harboring a secret hope that this will change with adulthood, but she’s old by now enough to realize that it’s probably not going to. Hardly any adults seem to really understand her either, even the otherwise sensible ones. She knows her teachers must mean well when they tell her that there’s life beyond the library, but she’s gotten awfully tired of hearing it. Of course there’s life beyond libraries. It’s just not very interesting life compared to the kind you get in a book.
She finishes the chapter and turns the page -- carefully, because the book is old heavy paper, and it would be even more of a shame than usual to tear or smudge the page. Books deserve to be treated with respect.
Favreau transitions with gleeful abandon from the cicada’s songs to a story about scarab beetles, nesting in the warm comfortable sands of Ishval. He spells it the old way, Yshavall, which makes Sheska half-expect to come to the kinds of traveler’s stories she’s read before in books from the early 1800s: detailed, bemused stories jovially footnoting each other as they talk about the ‘fierce, proud tribesmen’ and their abhorrence of alchemy and their striped oowashah sashes (which today’s newspaper never spells that way). In those stories they’re always declaiming long complicated speeches over native delicacies which never sound very appetizing, and announcing the traveler to be a brother to them, and promising to hold Amestris in honor and respect because of the nobility he’s shown.
But Favreau is firmly fixed on his scarab beetles, which is a little bit of a relief. The newspapers are talking a lot about Ishval these days, but it’s never jovial, and they don’t talk much about Ishvalans honoring Amestris (or honoring much of anything). They don’t make it sound like a very nice place to live, specially without Amestrian agricultural innovations that the Ishvalans keep rejecting even though they could grow more crops and they wouldn’t starve so often. Sheska thinks, uncertainly, that even fierce proud tribesmen don’t want to starve -- surely they must see that everything will be better for them if they accept Amestrian help? Can the whole country really be that stubborn? It’s hard to know what to believe. But Ishval is all anyone seems to talk about these days, at cafes and newsstands and taxi stands.
Sheska doesn’t like newspapers as well as books, but they’re hard to avoid, and anyway once words are in front of her she just has to read them, and she can’t help but remember what they say. And you’re supposed to read the newspaper, as a responsible citizen, right? So every morning her mother puts the newspaper by her plate once she’s done, and Sheska reads it cover to cover while she eats her breakfast roll and yoghurt, before she walks to school with a book in hand. She wants to be an informed person. But with newspapers, with politics, she’s never sure what to think.
So it’s extra nice, right now, to spend time with Favreau’s scarab beetles, and their world of dry warm caves and rolling dung-spheres like tiny planets being wheeled across the desert. It sounds comfortable to be a beetle.
She really doesn’t understand why only four people have checked this book out.
1909: The Right Job, Right Now: Maximizing Your Employment Potential, Mikage Eisenstein
Central Library, West Angelica Branch, NR 472.3 Eis
For the first time in her life, as far as she can remember, Sheska is feeling daunted by a pile of books.
It’s not the fault of the books, of course. They would be absolutely interesting, in a peppy and extroverted kind of way, if she was just reading them for themselves. The problem is that these are books she’s expected to read and then go and do something about that’s not, well, reading more books. Sheska isn’t used to thinking of books as for something. A book is an end in itself, or should be.
But that only goes so far when your mother has just told you that she’s not sure how much longer she’ll be able to work, that she’ll only get paid out for two months of medical leave and then it’s savings and her small widow’s pension and whatever you’ll be able to earn to keep you both in books and food and -- the one thing that takes precedence over books, even -- Mom’s medicine.
So she’s here with a stack of self-help books, and a notepad (even though she doesn’t need it, she’s never needed to take notes to remember the things she reads, but the new librarian kindly offered her one and she didn’t have the heart to turn it down) and a desperate attempt to figure out if there’s anything, anything at all, that somebody might pay her to do.
Mikage Eistenstein says: Make a list of your good qualities, and highlight the ones you will want to discuss in a job interview. Practice speaking positively about yourself. If you do your homework and create an interview style that emphasizes the qualities in you that shine most brightly, you may find that you have already prepared your own path to success.
The paragraph is illustrated with a helpful cartoon of a caterpillar emerging from its cocoon as a beautiful butterfly wearing librarian-style glasses.
She scowls at it. Being a librarian, she suspects, may not be the answer to her question. She’ll try anyway, because it really is the obvious job -- and if she can make it work, wouldn’t it be perfect, to work with books all day long and get paid for it? But she worries, deep down, that the same thing that makes her love libraries so much would make her terrible at a job that meant sitting behind someone’s front desk all day, surrounded by books, and focusing on other things than reading.
When she was younger once she’d asked her favorite librarian why she never saw librarians reading behind the desk. Mrs. Anderson had answered, in a kindly enough fashion, that working in the library was a job like any other, and they had tasks they needed to perform; they read in their leisure time, the same as everybody else. It makes sense, in a logical sort of way. It’s just that she doesn’t quite understand how anyone could make themselves do it. But maybe, if she works at a busy enough library where there are patrons asking her questions all the time -- if she remembers that she has to make money for Mom’s medicine, she has to help other people find books for themselves, she has to focus on the job -- maybe she can learn to do it.
As for working in a bookshop, that’s the same only worse, because a bookseller has to be able to look at their shop -- shelves and shelves of stories and journeys and information and adventures! -- and see money. Sheska thinks she can maybe, probably teach herself to set aside books for a little while to help other people find them, but she can’t do it for a profit margin.
Still, she’s going to have to try first to play to her other skills. A list of good qualities? Well, maybe it will help her figure out something useful about herself that isn’t ‘reads faster than anyone else in the world.’ She flips the page, hoping that Mikage Eisenstein will have some other pearls of wisdom to drop. A straightforward list of ‘here are the kinds of jobs a girl with a standard school diploma who can’t afford to get any specialized training can do, and here is what you need to be able to do to impress people enough to get them’, for example, would be nice. But he’s on about networking now, how to make connections and use other people to take you the places you want to go in your career.
It’s not that Sheska doesn’t have connections, but they’re all people she’s never met and who don’t know she exists, and many of them are a hundred years dead or more, so that really isn’t much help.
She sighs, and glances over at the rest of her pile. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Making It in Central City is probably going to be next, although it looks like it’s marketed more towards small-town teenagers moving to the big city for the first time. Still, even the country girls who’ve never done anything except sheep-farming can’t possibly be less qualified for most jobs than Sheska.
She can’t start that one until she’s finished with the one she’s reading now, though. Sheska’s never left a book unfinished in her life, and all the grown-up worries that have suddenly landed on her head aren’t going to change that.
She turns the page, and squints dutifully at the capsule how-to-network scripts that Mikage Eistenstein has helpfully provided. She’ll remember Eistenstein’s suggestions word-for-word, but she knows already that having the phrases at the back of her brain won’t make it any easier when she’s faced with a real live person and has to make them come out.
1911: Spies of Aerugo: Espionage in the Silver City, Maureen d’Aqilla
Central Library, Argentum Branch, F Ge 45.218
“Artemisia took a firmer grip on the ruby, then hiked up her skirts, leapt onto the wall and pressed herself flat against the roof, suppressing her heart so that it barely beat,” Sheska reads, pitching her voice low. She’s good at getting caught up in a book, but not so good at putting the action into her voice; she’s always a little afraid that her mother must find this much more boring than reading for herself.
But, well, Mom can’t muster the energy for reading most days, and that’s a fact. Second best, Sheska thinks, will have to be good enough. And it is nice, if she ignores the pinched look of her mom’s face (and ignoring that is, sadly, growing easier and easier with practice) and the restless twists of her newly gnarled hands, and just focuses on sitting her with her mother, sharing a book. Mom used to read to her when she was small -- so it’s only fair to return the favor, right?
Besides, she’s out of work again, and paying polite calls to everywhere she can think of, every morning, hasn’t earned her a job again. No one’s hiring; everyone’s full up, or they don’t want a shy girl not long out of school, or they want qualifications she doesn’t have, or they want to know why she lost her last job and then she has to explain all over again that she lost it from reading too much on the job, and then they tell her that they can’t use her after all. It’s worst when they’re kind about it.
“One, two, three guards went by; the fourth looked up, ready to cry out, but before he could he was distracted by a figure coming up behind him. With a start, Artemisia recognized Maud,” she reads, and her mother makes a startled, discontented sound. Sheska glances at her quickly, trying to assess if that was a noise of pain. Maybe she should stop, but they’re right in the middle of an exciting part. Mom doesn’t look as if her medicine is wearing off yet, though. Her brows are drawn together in what Sheska’s thinks is indignation. “Maud smiled at him in a a flirtatious way, and then lifted her pen and stabbed him in the neck. ‘The pen,’ she said sweetly, ‘is mightier than any man’s sword,’” Sheska continues. “‘Artemisia laughed, and slipped down from the roof. ‘You’re starting to learn the ways of this game’--” Mom, are you okay?”
“I’m fine, honey,” her mom assures her hastily. Sheska’s gotten good, these days, at telling when her mother is lying, and she’s pretty sure that’s genuine. Her voice is strong, by current standards. “It’s just -- I’m sorry, that’s ridiculous, Maud Pettigram never did anything of the sort.”
“Well,” Sheska points out fairly, “it is historical fiction. D’Aquilla’s adding this stuff to make it more exciting -- it wouldn’t be half as dramatic without the sword fights.”
“Sure, but if she did get in sword fights, she wouldn’t talk about it that way. And flirting with strange men like that, when she was a well-bred young lady, in 1823? She’d’ve been called a trollop of the most shameless sort!” Mom’s warming up to her subject now, and Sheska can’t help but be amused, even as she keeps an eye on her breathing. Mom gets overexcited so quickly, these days. “Not to mention that she lived fifty years after Artemesia Ray! Didn’t this person do any research at all?”
Sheska can’t help it -- she bursts out laughing. “Mom, you’d think you’d never read a novel before in your life!”
Her mother starts laughing too, with the quiet wheeze that accompanies every deep breath these days. “All right, all right, I’m a fuddy-duddy. I guess it’s not ‘cool’ to think historical fiction should be historical, huh?”
Sheska rolls her eyes good-naturedly. For just this moment, it’s okay that she’s a failure who can’t hold down a job, that her mom can’t stand up most days, that they have to pinch every penny and Sheska can’t even dream about buying books instead of borrowing them -- it’s okay, because she’s just joking with her mother, and being out of work means she’s home in the afternoon to do it. “Fine,” she says, with exaggerated concession. “I’ll finish this later. Some people appreciate a good swashbuckling story. I’ll go find that biography of Artemesia instead, how’s that?”
“Much better, thank you,” says her mom with prim dignity, and folds her hands (with their swollen knuckles and painful cricks) tidily on the counterpane. Sheska manages all of three seconds before she starts giggling again.
1914: Riding the Storm, Dane Major
Central Library, Third Branch, F Ma 145.94
Sheska’s lunch break ended ten minutes ago, but Snipes Hardwick is being held prisoner in an abandoned Xerxian ruin by a group of fanatical Ishvalan terrorists and things look incredibly tense -- and Captain Fokker hasn’t come to roust her out of the lunchroom yet, so she’s probably safe for at least the few minutes it will take for her to read to the middle of the next chapter. (Experience has taught her that you never want to read to the end of a chapter in a Dane Major book. Dane Major never met a cliffhanger ending that he didn’t like. Sheska knows it’s a cheap trick to keep the reader’s interest, and it works on her like a charm every time.)
Sheska really is a lot better about putting down a book when she absolutely has to these days -- or maybe it’s just that her superior officer in the investigations department has perfected a STAND TO ATTENTION bark that makes her jump out of her skin every time. That really could have come straight out of a Dane Major book, although not much else in her military experience so far bears any resemblance to what her reading has taught her to expect. She hasn’t seen anyone striding through the corridors gritting dramatic exclamations to themselves, let alone charging out to rescue lost comrades in spite of a politician’s refusal to help. Or at the Fuhrer’s secret request, but that’s part of the ‘secret’ part, she guesses -- but still, Ray Sargeant and his men never really bother that much with the regulations. Or with paperwork and requisition forms and escorting superior officers around the city. And nobody in Dane Major’s books ever does preliminary research into anything. They just get handed a vitally important mission, and Bull Konning spends ten minutes in the archives grabbing precisely the right records to tell them what they need to know, and then all the rest is intuition and square-jawed determination. It’s not much like Sheska’s job at all; so far as she’s seen, in fact, the whole military thing really isn’t all that different from her brief-lived secretarial jobs, except people here are much more willing to pluck the book out of her hands and drag her back to work.
None of them have quite Lieutenant Colonel Hughes’ gift for dumping a pile of extra work on you and making it feel like you’ve just received a favor. But it hurts to think about Lieutenant Colonel Hughes. That wasn’t much like the books, either. There wasn’t anything noble or glamorous about the way he died -- it was just, one day he was there, and the next he wasn’t, and nobody knew why. Sheska still doesn’t understand why or how kind Maria Ross could have killed him, or Colonel Mustang could have killed Maria, or any of it. There’s no plot, no reason, no narrative to give it any meaning.
She thinks she likes it better in books. Dane Major’s ideas about the military might be a little silly, as seen from an insider’s point of view, but at least if Snipes Hardwick dies in those Xerxian ruins it will end up meaning something.
Maybe that’s why she still reads these thrillers so avidly, dives on a new one every time it’s in at the library. Not that Sheska’s ever been too discriminating, really -- her mother always says that someday she’ll have run through all the books in the world, and then she’ll really be in trouble -- but there’s something soothing about a world that’s so predictable and makes so much sense when these days everything about the army seems to make less and less.
But they don’t pay Sheska to make sense of things. They pay her to find information and record it and send it off to somebody else, and to remember it when everyone else has forgotten all about it. Given how long and hard she fought for a job, how comfortable her mother is now in the new hospital and how long it’s been since an angry red-printed bill turned up in her mailbox, it’s probably better to let the increasingly disconcerting statistics she finds remain meaningless numbers on a page. (Though she won’t forget them, either. Sheska never forgets anything she’s read.)
Other people can live out the stories. It’s when they’re done, when someone else has written it down and made their own story out of it -- that’s where Sheska comes in.
“Sheska!” It’s Fokker’s voice, and Sheska jumps hastily up and slams the book shut.
“Yes, sir!”
Snipes Hardwick will have to stay in Xerxes a little longer. He and the rest of his squad will always be there for her to come back to -- that’s another difference from real soldiers, that they never complain at her when she’s just trying to get things done. Meanwhile, she has a job to do.
Author: bookelfe and genarti
Recipient: bay115
Rating: G
Characters/Pairings: Sheska, Hughes, Fokker, OCs
Summary: Sheska reads everything she can find, but some books mean more than others.
Notes: Most of the books are made up, but the quote in the second section is taken from Jean Henri Fabre's Social Life in the Insect World, which is a hilarious book you can find (in Bernard Miall's translation) on Project Gutenberg here. The imperialist views of Ishval in the same section are, obviously, not the same as ours.
1901: For Fuhrer And Country, Dane Major
Central Library, West Angelica Branch, F Ma 145.6
Dane Major books aren’t even that short, but it only ever takes Sheska about an hour to finish one. They just go so fast. As soon as the men of Squad 405 -- Blaze Delta and Ray Sargent and Sinclair “Snipes” Hardwick and all the rest -- get out into the field, it’s all spies and close encounters and heart-pounding shootouts in the brush and last-minute daring rescues and there just isn’t any way you can possibly stop until you know they’re all okay again. Not even if your mom needs you to do the dishes. (Maybe especially not then.)
Of course this is a problem that Sheska has with a lot of books -- all right, maybe every book -- but right now Dane Major books especially, which is why she has a limit that she’s only allowed to get one out of the library at a time.
Which means that finishing one is always a little bit sad, because on the one hand it’s done and everyone is okay and you get the satisfaction of finishing a book, but then on the other hand that feeling never lasts more than like a minute and then you realize it’s over and there’s at least a whole day to wait before you can go back to the library and get out another one. And it will be hard to find another one as good as For Fuhrer and Country, too, Sheska thinks gloomily, as she closes the back cover on the last page. Not only has Ray Sargent saved the day and almost single-handedly prevented an elite squad of enemy Drachmans from sneaking in to assassinate the Amestrian high command, but the Fuhrer has personally given him a medal of honor at the end in a special secret ceremony. Ray Sargent is Sheska’s favorite; he’s the older one who mentors the young hotshots, the one who has kids at home and sometimes if it’s his turn to be the hero he’ll get to have a scene at home with them and talk to them about how important it was for him to keep the country safe for them.
Sheska thinks Ray Sargent probably looks a little bit like her dad, although to be honest she doesn’t remember what her dad looks like all that well. He’d look different now, anyway, than he does in the pictures -- the young laughing version of her mother in old photos of the two of them is practically unrecognizable. If he were alive he’d maybe be starting to get gray hair, like her mom has now. He’d definitely have a medal from the Fuhrer. At least one. Sheska is completely positive of that. When Dash Owens died in Squadron’s Last Stand he got a posthumous medal for bravery. Sheska’s dad didn’t, even though he was killed on the battlefield just like Dash, but Sheska’s teacher said enough people had died in Aeruga that day that they just couldn’t give medals to everyone, even though she was sure he had deserved it. Most of the other kids in her class whose parents were killed in the army never got medals for them either, but Sheska still thinks it’s a little unfair.
She opens up the back cover and turns the last page back, to reread the medal scene, but she’d forgotten about that insert page that they always put in the back after the story ended -- “Sign Up at Your Nearest Command Station Today!” with a picture of Fuhrer Bradley, hands folded behind his back, looking sternly concerned in front of an Aerugan battlefield. Usually Sheska has a hard time skipping over print, any print, even print that she’s read twenty times before, but by this time she’s read everything on that page basically like a hundred times before, and she knows perfectly well that the ad wasn’t meant for her. It wouldn’t be for her even if she was a grown-up already; the army doesn’t need clumsy, awkward girls with glasses. She can’t do any of the kinds of things Ray Sargent did, or even Kat Racetrack from Squad 407. If an enemy soldier was trying to sneak past her post, the only way she’d probably be able to stop him would be to trip on him.
Besides, they probably don’t have any libraries on the Aerugan front.
1907: The Daily Lives of Insects, Jean Favreau
Central Library, Main Branch, ET 195.472 Fav
In theory, Sheska is visiting the library’s Main Branch downtown in order to work on a composition for history class. And she did mean to work on that, really she did. But, well, to get to the Drachman history books in the LW section, she has to walk by the EG-EU shelf, and she’s spotted an old book with a fascinating binding of tooled leather, the kind nobody’s bothered to make for at least fifty years, and well, she hasn’t read it before, and somehow she’s found herself back at the table she’d claimed with three books on the Drachman precipitation of border conflicts, one on the classification of seaweed, and The Daily Lives of Insects.
She’ll get to the others -- they’re books, aren’t they? And she has four hours until the library closes, which is plenty of time to read five books and pick out another armful to take home.
It’s easy to get interested in reading a book about Drachman borders, but not very easy to get interested in writing a composition about it. So, despite the notebook and inkpot and pen she’d carefully laid out at her elbow, Sheska’s five chapters into Favreau’s insect biographies, and has completely forgotten about inconvenient homework assignments.
Thus hustled by these dwarfs, and at the end of her patience, the giantess finally abandons the well, she reads, nibbling absently on a fingernail. She flies away, throwing a jet of liquid excrement over her tormentors as she goes. But what cares the Ant for this expression of sovereign contempt?
According to the card at the back of the book, this has only been checked out of the library four times since its 1844 acquisition. Sheska doesn’t understand how that could be, when it’s so fascinating -- though it’s true that hardly any of her classmates seem to appreciate books much at all. She’s been harboring a secret hope that this will change with adulthood, but she’s old by now enough to realize that it’s probably not going to. Hardly any adults seem to really understand her either, even the otherwise sensible ones. She knows her teachers must mean well when they tell her that there’s life beyond the library, but she’s gotten awfully tired of hearing it. Of course there’s life beyond libraries. It’s just not very interesting life compared to the kind you get in a book.
She finishes the chapter and turns the page -- carefully, because the book is old heavy paper, and it would be even more of a shame than usual to tear or smudge the page. Books deserve to be treated with respect.
Favreau transitions with gleeful abandon from the cicada’s songs to a story about scarab beetles, nesting in the warm comfortable sands of Ishval. He spells it the old way, Yshavall, which makes Sheska half-expect to come to the kinds of traveler’s stories she’s read before in books from the early 1800s: detailed, bemused stories jovially footnoting each other as they talk about the ‘fierce, proud tribesmen’ and their abhorrence of alchemy and their striped oowashah sashes (which today’s newspaper never spells that way). In those stories they’re always declaiming long complicated speeches over native delicacies which never sound very appetizing, and announcing the traveler to be a brother to them, and promising to hold Amestris in honor and respect because of the nobility he’s shown.
But Favreau is firmly fixed on his scarab beetles, which is a little bit of a relief. The newspapers are talking a lot about Ishval these days, but it’s never jovial, and they don’t talk much about Ishvalans honoring Amestris (or honoring much of anything). They don’t make it sound like a very nice place to live, specially without Amestrian agricultural innovations that the Ishvalans keep rejecting even though they could grow more crops and they wouldn’t starve so often. Sheska thinks, uncertainly, that even fierce proud tribesmen don’t want to starve -- surely they must see that everything will be better for them if they accept Amestrian help? Can the whole country really be that stubborn? It’s hard to know what to believe. But Ishval is all anyone seems to talk about these days, at cafes and newsstands and taxi stands.
Sheska doesn’t like newspapers as well as books, but they’re hard to avoid, and anyway once words are in front of her she just has to read them, and she can’t help but remember what they say. And you’re supposed to read the newspaper, as a responsible citizen, right? So every morning her mother puts the newspaper by her plate once she’s done, and Sheska reads it cover to cover while she eats her breakfast roll and yoghurt, before she walks to school with a book in hand. She wants to be an informed person. But with newspapers, with politics, she’s never sure what to think.
So it’s extra nice, right now, to spend time with Favreau’s scarab beetles, and their world of dry warm caves and rolling dung-spheres like tiny planets being wheeled across the desert. It sounds comfortable to be a beetle.
She really doesn’t understand why only four people have checked this book out.
1909: The Right Job, Right Now: Maximizing Your Employment Potential, Mikage Eisenstein
Central Library, West Angelica Branch, NR 472.3 Eis
For the first time in her life, as far as she can remember, Sheska is feeling daunted by a pile of books.
It’s not the fault of the books, of course. They would be absolutely interesting, in a peppy and extroverted kind of way, if she was just reading them for themselves. The problem is that these are books she’s expected to read and then go and do something about that’s not, well, reading more books. Sheska isn’t used to thinking of books as for something. A book is an end in itself, or should be.
But that only goes so far when your mother has just told you that she’s not sure how much longer she’ll be able to work, that she’ll only get paid out for two months of medical leave and then it’s savings and her small widow’s pension and whatever you’ll be able to earn to keep you both in books and food and -- the one thing that takes precedence over books, even -- Mom’s medicine.
So she’s here with a stack of self-help books, and a notepad (even though she doesn’t need it, she’s never needed to take notes to remember the things she reads, but the new librarian kindly offered her one and she didn’t have the heart to turn it down) and a desperate attempt to figure out if there’s anything, anything at all, that somebody might pay her to do.
Mikage Eistenstein says: Make a list of your good qualities, and highlight the ones you will want to discuss in a job interview. Practice speaking positively about yourself. If you do your homework and create an interview style that emphasizes the qualities in you that shine most brightly, you may find that you have already prepared your own path to success.
The paragraph is illustrated with a helpful cartoon of a caterpillar emerging from its cocoon as a beautiful butterfly wearing librarian-style glasses.
She scowls at it. Being a librarian, she suspects, may not be the answer to her question. She’ll try anyway, because it really is the obvious job -- and if she can make it work, wouldn’t it be perfect, to work with books all day long and get paid for it? But she worries, deep down, that the same thing that makes her love libraries so much would make her terrible at a job that meant sitting behind someone’s front desk all day, surrounded by books, and focusing on other things than reading.
When she was younger once she’d asked her favorite librarian why she never saw librarians reading behind the desk. Mrs. Anderson had answered, in a kindly enough fashion, that working in the library was a job like any other, and they had tasks they needed to perform; they read in their leisure time, the same as everybody else. It makes sense, in a logical sort of way. It’s just that she doesn’t quite understand how anyone could make themselves do it. But maybe, if she works at a busy enough library where there are patrons asking her questions all the time -- if she remembers that she has to make money for Mom’s medicine, she has to help other people find books for themselves, she has to focus on the job -- maybe she can learn to do it.
As for working in a bookshop, that’s the same only worse, because a bookseller has to be able to look at their shop -- shelves and shelves of stories and journeys and information and adventures! -- and see money. Sheska thinks she can maybe, probably teach herself to set aside books for a little while to help other people find them, but she can’t do it for a profit margin.
Still, she’s going to have to try first to play to her other skills. A list of good qualities? Well, maybe it will help her figure out something useful about herself that isn’t ‘reads faster than anyone else in the world.’ She flips the page, hoping that Mikage Eisenstein will have some other pearls of wisdom to drop. A straightforward list of ‘here are the kinds of jobs a girl with a standard school diploma who can’t afford to get any specialized training can do, and here is what you need to be able to do to impress people enough to get them’, for example, would be nice. But he’s on about networking now, how to make connections and use other people to take you the places you want to go in your career.
It’s not that Sheska doesn’t have connections, but they’re all people she’s never met and who don’t know she exists, and many of them are a hundred years dead or more, so that really isn’t much help.
She sighs, and glances over at the rest of her pile. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Making It in Central City is probably going to be next, although it looks like it’s marketed more towards small-town teenagers moving to the big city for the first time. Still, even the country girls who’ve never done anything except sheep-farming can’t possibly be less qualified for most jobs than Sheska.
She can’t start that one until she’s finished with the one she’s reading now, though. Sheska’s never left a book unfinished in her life, and all the grown-up worries that have suddenly landed on her head aren’t going to change that.
She turns the page, and squints dutifully at the capsule how-to-network scripts that Mikage Eistenstein has helpfully provided. She’ll remember Eistenstein’s suggestions word-for-word, but she knows already that having the phrases at the back of her brain won’t make it any easier when she’s faced with a real live person and has to make them come out.
1911: Spies of Aerugo: Espionage in the Silver City, Maureen d’Aqilla
Central Library, Argentum Branch, F Ge 45.218
“Artemisia took a firmer grip on the ruby, then hiked up her skirts, leapt onto the wall and pressed herself flat against the roof, suppressing her heart so that it barely beat,” Sheska reads, pitching her voice low. She’s good at getting caught up in a book, but not so good at putting the action into her voice; she’s always a little afraid that her mother must find this much more boring than reading for herself.
But, well, Mom can’t muster the energy for reading most days, and that’s a fact. Second best, Sheska thinks, will have to be good enough. And it is nice, if she ignores the pinched look of her mom’s face (and ignoring that is, sadly, growing easier and easier with practice) and the restless twists of her newly gnarled hands, and just focuses on sitting her with her mother, sharing a book. Mom used to read to her when she was small -- so it’s only fair to return the favor, right?
Besides, she’s out of work again, and paying polite calls to everywhere she can think of, every morning, hasn’t earned her a job again. No one’s hiring; everyone’s full up, or they don’t want a shy girl not long out of school, or they want qualifications she doesn’t have, or they want to know why she lost her last job and then she has to explain all over again that she lost it from reading too much on the job, and then they tell her that they can’t use her after all. It’s worst when they’re kind about it.
“One, two, three guards went by; the fourth looked up, ready to cry out, but before he could he was distracted by a figure coming up behind him. With a start, Artemisia recognized Maud,” she reads, and her mother makes a startled, discontented sound. Sheska glances at her quickly, trying to assess if that was a noise of pain. Maybe she should stop, but they’re right in the middle of an exciting part. Mom doesn’t look as if her medicine is wearing off yet, though. Her brows are drawn together in what Sheska’s thinks is indignation. “Maud smiled at him in a a flirtatious way, and then lifted her pen and stabbed him in the neck. ‘The pen,’ she said sweetly, ‘is mightier than any man’s sword,’” Sheska continues. “‘Artemisia laughed, and slipped down from the roof. ‘You’re starting to learn the ways of this game’--” Mom, are you okay?”
“I’m fine, honey,” her mom assures her hastily. Sheska’s gotten good, these days, at telling when her mother is lying, and she’s pretty sure that’s genuine. Her voice is strong, by current standards. “It’s just -- I’m sorry, that’s ridiculous, Maud Pettigram never did anything of the sort.”
“Well,” Sheska points out fairly, “it is historical fiction. D’Aquilla’s adding this stuff to make it more exciting -- it wouldn’t be half as dramatic without the sword fights.”
“Sure, but if she did get in sword fights, she wouldn’t talk about it that way. And flirting with strange men like that, when she was a well-bred young lady, in 1823? She’d’ve been called a trollop of the most shameless sort!” Mom’s warming up to her subject now, and Sheska can’t help but be amused, even as she keeps an eye on her breathing. Mom gets overexcited so quickly, these days. “Not to mention that she lived fifty years after Artemesia Ray! Didn’t this person do any research at all?”
Sheska can’t help it -- she bursts out laughing. “Mom, you’d think you’d never read a novel before in your life!”
Her mother starts laughing too, with the quiet wheeze that accompanies every deep breath these days. “All right, all right, I’m a fuddy-duddy. I guess it’s not ‘cool’ to think historical fiction should be historical, huh?”
Sheska rolls her eyes good-naturedly. For just this moment, it’s okay that she’s a failure who can’t hold down a job, that her mom can’t stand up most days, that they have to pinch every penny and Sheska can’t even dream about buying books instead of borrowing them -- it’s okay, because she’s just joking with her mother, and being out of work means she’s home in the afternoon to do it. “Fine,” she says, with exaggerated concession. “I’ll finish this later. Some people appreciate a good swashbuckling story. I’ll go find that biography of Artemesia instead, how’s that?”
“Much better, thank you,” says her mom with prim dignity, and folds her hands (with their swollen knuckles and painful cricks) tidily on the counterpane. Sheska manages all of three seconds before she starts giggling again.
1914: Riding the Storm, Dane Major
Central Library, Third Branch, F Ma 145.94
Sheska’s lunch break ended ten minutes ago, but Snipes Hardwick is being held prisoner in an abandoned Xerxian ruin by a group of fanatical Ishvalan terrorists and things look incredibly tense -- and Captain Fokker hasn’t come to roust her out of the lunchroom yet, so she’s probably safe for at least the few minutes it will take for her to read to the middle of the next chapter. (Experience has taught her that you never want to read to the end of a chapter in a Dane Major book. Dane Major never met a cliffhanger ending that he didn’t like. Sheska knows it’s a cheap trick to keep the reader’s interest, and it works on her like a charm every time.)
Sheska really is a lot better about putting down a book when she absolutely has to these days -- or maybe it’s just that her superior officer in the investigations department has perfected a STAND TO ATTENTION bark that makes her jump out of her skin every time. That really could have come straight out of a Dane Major book, although not much else in her military experience so far bears any resemblance to what her reading has taught her to expect. She hasn’t seen anyone striding through the corridors gritting dramatic exclamations to themselves, let alone charging out to rescue lost comrades in spite of a politician’s refusal to help. Or at the Fuhrer’s secret request, but that’s part of the ‘secret’ part, she guesses -- but still, Ray Sargeant and his men never really bother that much with the regulations. Or with paperwork and requisition forms and escorting superior officers around the city. And nobody in Dane Major’s books ever does preliminary research into anything. They just get handed a vitally important mission, and Bull Konning spends ten minutes in the archives grabbing precisely the right records to tell them what they need to know, and then all the rest is intuition and square-jawed determination. It’s not much like Sheska’s job at all; so far as she’s seen, in fact, the whole military thing really isn’t all that different from her brief-lived secretarial jobs, except people here are much more willing to pluck the book out of her hands and drag her back to work.
None of them have quite Lieutenant Colonel Hughes’ gift for dumping a pile of extra work on you and making it feel like you’ve just received a favor. But it hurts to think about Lieutenant Colonel Hughes. That wasn’t much like the books, either. There wasn’t anything noble or glamorous about the way he died -- it was just, one day he was there, and the next he wasn’t, and nobody knew why. Sheska still doesn’t understand why or how kind Maria Ross could have killed him, or Colonel Mustang could have killed Maria, or any of it. There’s no plot, no reason, no narrative to give it any meaning.
She thinks she likes it better in books. Dane Major’s ideas about the military might be a little silly, as seen from an insider’s point of view, but at least if Snipes Hardwick dies in those Xerxian ruins it will end up meaning something.
Maybe that’s why she still reads these thrillers so avidly, dives on a new one every time it’s in at the library. Not that Sheska’s ever been too discriminating, really -- her mother always says that someday she’ll have run through all the books in the world, and then she’ll really be in trouble -- but there’s something soothing about a world that’s so predictable and makes so much sense when these days everything about the army seems to make less and less.
But they don’t pay Sheska to make sense of things. They pay her to find information and record it and send it off to somebody else, and to remember it when everyone else has forgotten all about it. Given how long and hard she fought for a job, how comfortable her mother is now in the new hospital and how long it’s been since an angry red-printed bill turned up in her mailbox, it’s probably better to let the increasingly disconcerting statistics she finds remain meaningless numbers on a page. (Though she won’t forget them, either. Sheska never forgets anything she’s read.)
Other people can live out the stories. It’s when they’re done, when someone else has written it down and made their own story out of it -- that’s where Sheska comes in.
“Sheska!” It’s Fokker’s voice, and Sheska jumps hastily up and slams the book shut.
“Yes, sir!”
Snipes Hardwick will have to stay in Xerxes a little longer. He and the rest of his squad will always be there for her to come back to -- that’s another difference from real soldiers, that they never complain at her when she’s just trying to get things done. Meanwhile, she has a job to do.