milliways_bar | (no subject)

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Ah so, here is the recovering alcoholic hippie, in the bar, at a booth, with real food. Yeah, totally. He's eating it very, very slowly, but he does have what appears to be a ham sandwich. And tea.

And a really big, really old book, compliments of ~~Nearly Wristless Rod~~ Roderick Usher.

He is also playing with a spoon, twirling it in one hand lazily.

Please annoy.

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"I'd like to see the libraries in all the worlds that have them," Miniver grins. "Especially Greece and Rome and... oh, everywhere! I'd probably die before I could read even a fraction of them, but how wonderful would it be to TRY? Although I guess... I might rather end up living in the other worlds I can read about. I will someday, you know." He's very certain of this.

"I have not seen the library in Rome, but I have spent a day in the Athens library. It is wonderful. The reading room there is two stories tall, and has columns on either side."

"It is not a bad ideal to seek to live in another world. I am living here, after all, and do not go back to the world from which I came, much, so I cannot condemn it."

"I'm never going back to mine. Never. It blows. I'm going to learn to be a wizard, right? So I can survive wherever I want. And protect everyone I love so they'll be safe. And be... someone." He's half-dreaming, barely talking to Yrael specifically. A poet's babbling.

Yrael tilts his white-haired head, curious. "Who do you want to be, if not yourself?"

Oh, Yrael. You've opened a can of worms.

Discounting the first answer thaty comes to mind, which is anybody, Miniver sits back in his seat and looks up at the ceiling.

"Oh, man. It would be so cool to be Merlin or Arthur or Lancelot, or Puck or Dante or Virgil or any of the old Greeks, or Henry VIII or George Washington or the Ancient Mariner, or Zeus, or the king of the Druids, or Cosimo Medici, or..."

Perhaps Yrael gets the idea.

Perhaps Yrael should shut him up before he gets to ranting.

Yrael begins laughing around the twentieth name or so.

"Is it so bad, being Miniver?"

"It's a little pathetic," Miniver says sheepishly. "I'm a nobody-person from a nothing-past. I guess I've got Draco, and like, he had this wish ring and... Well, anyway, I could be someone now, but wouldn't it be great to have been someone? Back when it really meant something?"

Yrael's green cat-eyed gaze levels on Miniver. "... you sound like a friend of mine with your talk of nobodies, but you have not his reason."

"It always means something to be someone. You have your life now, so you will either use it now or not."

Yrael orders a glass of milk and sips from it. "Though personally, I do not think it would be great to have been someone. The past tense is bothersome, for it means one is not anyone now."

"Yeah, I guess so. You're good to listen to me. Most people don't even let me get this far." He smiles. "Who do I remind you of?"

"A friend called Axel, but you only remind me of him a bit, with your talk of being nobody. Axel is a Nobody."

The intonation of 'nobody' and 'Nobody' is easily noticeable.

"But to tell the truth, spend enough time shaped like a cat and you get to be really good at listening to people talk at you." Yrael grins at Miniver.

"Well... thanks." He pours more tea and toasts Yrael with the mug. "You must pick up a lot of strays doing that. Listening."

"I also learn a lot, hear stories and lives and of worlds, and meet people who also like stories and lives and worlds," Yrael smiles. "You would love the Clayr library, in the Old Kingdom, it sounds like."

He'd also probably get eaten by something hiding in it, but hey, what's a library without a few monsters lurking beyond the stacks?

Miniver would stab them with his magic quill. Hey, for all he knows, maybe it DOES slay monsters, in addition to writing in all sorts of interesting shades of ink without his particular knowledge or consent as to what color it will use next!

"Which old kingdom?" Miniver asks, sipping his tea with a rapt expression on his face.

"Umm..." say the Bright Shiner. "The Old Kingdom. North of Ancelstierre and the Wall. You probably haven't heard of it."

Monsters of the sort in the Library aren't really... killable. That's why they're there. Contained but not killed.

This is why Miniver does not deal much with monsters.

"Those are pretty names, though," Miniver muses. "That's where you're from?"

"Not originally, but it is where I was before I found Milliways."

He grabs a napkin, asking Bar for a pen and ink (he remembers to thank her, too, which is important). He begins to draw a map, labelling each place in rather spidery writing.

"There is the Clayr Glacier, where their great Library is, and Belisaere, the capital, and the River Ratterlin, and the Abhorsen's House, and the Wall. The Old Kingdom."

"Ooooooh." Miniver studies it. "Did you like living there?"

"No."

Hey. It's succinct.

Miniver frowns. "Why not? Was there a war or a plague or an unjust King or something?"

Yrael grins, suddenly. "No. I was imprisoned there for a very long time, and the place only holds bad memories for me now. I do not go back very often."

He was, one might say, one of the monsters. Only, not so lucky as to be one of those imprisoned in the library. He was put into servitude.

"Ohhh. Man, that really blows. I see why you'd hate it. Sort of like why I don't want to go home. Fishkill was a prison and the factory was worse, but warm. Why were you imprisoned?"

Miniver imagines Yrael must have done something terribly heroic and daring and been locked up for upsetting the unjust lords of the place...

"I refused to help my elder siblings strip the power from other creatures like us in order to imprison my little brother."

And thus save Creation. :D

Miniver considers that. And eyes Yrael.

"Hey!" he exclaims suddenly. "Are you like a god or something?"

Yrael shakes his head. "That is a term from other worlds than the one from which I come. I am one of the Nine Bright Shiners. The Eighth, technically."

"Well... you are pretty shiny," Miniver agrees solemnly.