Magic Under Construction: TOMU #493
Mar. 4th, 2011 03:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinStarted:3/4/2011, 3:00 PM
Status: Paused; housemate came home. (updated 7:15).
Word Count: ~2500 (666 words carried over).
Hours Writing: 1.5
[1.5 hours in. Refined Audra's dialogue/introduction a bit, as I zero in more on who she is. Interestingly, Audra's presence in the story is revealing more about Teddi.]
I couldn't get anything but out-of-office echo traps from Lee, which was worrying in that special way that only something that had any number perfectly reasonable, perfectly innocuous explanations could be.
It was the weekend, after all... and even if his lack of availability had anything to do with recent events, it could be nothing more than him wanting to keep his head down for a few days, or have a chance to step back away from things.
He had a life outside of work, after all. Maybe this wasn't universally true of lawyers, but it was in his case. He was planning a wedding, or at least he was party to one that was being planned... and that was just one more reason why it wasn't necessarily suspicious or remarkable that he wasn't around to take my reflection on a Saturday morning.
If some shadowy figure I didn't recognize was answering his mirror and telling me that I should not concern myself with the whereabouts of Mr. Jenkins, I would have known that something was definitely going on and I shouldn't trust anyone or anything, but with nothing but an ordinary canned image popping up and telling me how much he values his generic client or associate's time... well, that didn't give me much to go on.
If I had any real reason to be suspicious of the mental healing center, I would have just not gone... but it was in the same innocently menacing category as Lee's absence. Steff and Dee vouched for the woman, there were all sorts of legitimate reasons she might have been available to answer at three in the morning... and really, if there was some sort of sinister shadowy something or other at work, wouldn't they have gone out of their way to not be suspicious?
My brain wanted to fill in something like "unless they knew I'd think that", but I wasn't so far gone into the depths of paranoia as to believe that somebody might have instructed Lundegard to act suspiciously in order to lull me into a false sense of security.
Anyway, the really big shoe had already dropped... if there was an agenda at work here, it would be a little one. The school looking for information to use against me seemed like one possibility, and the reason I'd wanted to talk to Lee. In the absence of his advice, I supposed that I would just ask for a statement of confidentiality in writing so if they tried to do anything with anything I said we could turn it around on them.
It didn't even have to be any bigger than one person... maybe "Teddi" was writing a book or something.
In any event, with no real chance of a literal ambush or anything concrete I could put my finger on, it seemed like the best thing to do was just go in. I could always leave, if it wasn't on the level... it seemed like it would be tantamount to legal suicide for the school to keep me in the mental healing center against my will, given the facts in my case against them.
As soon as I thought that, though, it occurred to me that there was something more of a precedent for holding someone in a mental healing facility against their will. Okay, an extension on the side of the student healing center wasn't exactly an asylum, but it didn't seem completely inconceivable that the professional mental healers the school employed would be incapable of making the determination to have someone put away for good.
It seemed mostly inconceivable that they would, for all the reasons that I'd told myself it was unlikely that imperial agents would make me disappear and more. Power had its limits, even when it was being abused. Without someone like Embries trying to get rid of me, I doubted the school could pull something like that off... and I knew Embries didn't want to get rid of me for the simple reason that I was still walking around, and I was pretty sure there weren't two entities with his level of power and influence intimately tied into the school's administration.
I doubted he would have stood for that kind of competition. I doubted the school would have stood long after it, either.
So it was that after a lot of hemming and hawing and a little bit of sleep that I found myself walking into the waiting room of the mental healing annex. It wasn't like the waiting area of its physical counterpart... it was an actual lobby. There was a small, contoured wooden desk near one wall, but nobody sitting behind it. The other furniture seemed like something you'd see at a mid-range inn... comfortable-looking chairs with backs and armrests, neither identical to each other nor mismatched.
I didn't get a chance to find out how comfortable they were, though, because a woman in a purple outfit that looked like something between an exercise suit and pajamas popped into view in far doorway.
"Miss Mackenzie," she said, smiling blankly and pleasantly. It wasn't quite a question, but it didn't sound definite.
"Ms, please," I said.
"Are you Miss Mackenzie," she said, still smiling and still not quite asking. Brown bangs moved as she tilted her head slightly, and I glimpsed some indistinct runes. I was too far away to read them and didn't want to stare, in any event.
"Yes, I'm Mackenzie," I said. That seemed like a good compromise between causing her distress by giving her an answer she couldn't deal with and sticking to my wands when it came to biased naming conventions.
"Theodora is waiting for you," she said. "If you will follow me."
Her unchanging facial expression was somewhat disconcerting, as was her lack of inflection. Two had a somewhat unmodulated voice, but in her case it wasn't so much that she couldn't inflect as she wasn't acquainted with when and why to do so. This woman's voice just sounded like she was stuck speaking in a soothing tone, with results that were anything but.
"Have you worked here long?" I asked her as I followed her into a hallway.
"Sometimes," she said. She didn't elaborate and I didn't ask.
The room she took me to again reminded me more of an inn or lodge than anything else. It was big enough that a somewhat intimate and informal class could have been taught in it, and I supposed that maybe that did happen... skilled subtle artists were rare enough and mental healing was a demanding enough vocation that it seemed likely the professors did double duty.
The golem didn't follow me inside but just knocked on the doorframe.
"Ms. Mackenzie to see you, Theodora," she said.
"Thank you, Audra," a woman said. I hadn't immediately spotted her because I hadn't known where to look. She wasn't behind the big oak desk, or sitting in front of the fireplace, or on any of the chairs. She'd been seated on the floor in the corner, in what I recognized as a meditative position. "Go get some lunch."
Audra turned and left with an abruptness that would have garnered some words about manners from Two.
"You'll have to excuse Audra," Theodora Lundegard said to me. She was wearing a brown tunic-like blouse with some beadwork on the front and a pair of tannish leggings. She had a metal band across her forehead, sort of like a very minimalist crown. There was some kind of crystal set into the middle of it, covered with a network of metal lines. "If she isn't polite, she also isn't exactly rude. Her ways are simply inflexible, and they were set by someone who didn't consider manners to be important in a golem."
"How long has she been working without a meal break?" I asked.
"We've been working since a little bit before noon," she said. "We had breakfast then. She's good at filing and things. Please, come in."
I realized that she was sitting in the middle of a semi-circle of stacks of papers.
"Does she belong to you?" I asked. My internal debate on whether or not to distrust "Teddi" was not alleviated
"To my family," she said. "I don't have any power to free her, Ms. Mackenzie, but I believe she's happier when she can get out and do things."
"That's convenient for you, if you have a lot of filing to do," I said.
"If I didn't want Audra, my mother would keep her in the china hutch," Teddi said. "She only needs to eat when she's active, and she'd only be taken out to dust herself. I don't exactly work her fingers to the bone, Ms. Mackenzie, but I don't let her feel neglected or useless, either. I wonder, do you always care this much about people you've just met?"
She got points for saying "people", but then if she knew anything about me at all she'd know I had a golem for a friend and roommate.
"Not always," I said. I finally closed the door and began to move nearer to her. "The truth is, I don't notice most people, individually. But Audra sort of... well, she was standing right in front of me and talking to me. I couldn't help noticing her. Once I noticed her, I cared."
"I don't normally use her as a receptionist," Teddi said. "But it's sort of a weird weekend here, and I suspected that you wouldn't give her any problems so I sent her to fetch you."
"Were you trying to show me how open-minded you were by hanging out with a golem?" I asked.
"Not exactly," Teddi said. "I had a feeling you might have difficulty opening up to me about your life, so I thought I'd show you something of mine. Audra was my companion, growing up. She did a lot of the raising of me. I can seen on your face that you're trying to imagine what that was like. It wasn't bad."
"How much money do your parents have?" I asked. Being raised by a golem nanny was almost a cliche, but I didn't know that it actually still happened... at least, not among the common folk of the Imperium.
"My parents? Not much," Teddi said. "My family has a lot of money tied up in land, mines, and various investments. The house I was raised in belongs to a trust. The house I live in today is, too. So does Audra."
"So only the trustee or trustees could free her"
"No," Teddi said, shaking her head. "There are all kinds of protections built in, to make sure the ancestral properties can't be sold off, the family's capital can't be invaded, and the house golems can't be transferred, sold, or freed. They're bound to the family."
"What happens if the family dies out?"
[][][][][]
"Did you have some kind of instructions on me?"
"What, like 'handle with care'?" she asked.
"I just mean... you got back to me awfully quick," I said. "I wondered if anybody had told you to, you know, be available."
"That's my job."
"At three in the morning?"
"I tend to stay up late Friday nights," she said. "A habit from my student days that I never grew out of. I saw your a-mail right before I went to bed. I knew if it was urgent, you'd be waiting for my reply so I wouldn't have to wait around to see if you responded. Mackenzie, even if I had been given some instructions concerning you, my priority would still be simply to help you. Not 'just the same as' any other student, because you're not any other student, but neither is anyone else."
"Are you able to read my mind?" I asked.
"Possibly, with practice and care," she said. "If there's something you want me to delve into your psyche for, we'll have to do that over the course of many sessions, and I'll need another healer to act as a... well, spotter, I guess. There is a procedure for it."
"Have you ever done it?"
"Not as such, no," she said. "We used the technique recently in another situation involving a potentially dangerous mental contact, but it didn't directly involve a half-demon."
"How confident are you that you could do that without getting hurt?"
"I'm confident that we could stop it before any harm was done," Teddi said. "I couldn't promise you results, in other words, but exposing myself to risk isn't responsible healing. Is there something along those lines that you would like to investigate?"
"No," I said. "I was just... well, when you said 'just the same as any other student', you kind of echoed what I was thinking."
"The subtle arts don't
[][][][][][][]
"It's a filter of sorts," she explained, seeing me looking at it.
"To filter out my infernal nature?" I asked.
"It does that," she said. "But you know, a filter isn't the same thing as a wall... we sometimes define filters by what they keep out, but really what distinguishes one filter from another is what it lets through."
"And what does that one let through?" I asked.
"Emotions, mostly," she said. "When I'm wearing this, I'm more strongly empathic than I am without it, even as I have less access to thoughts and images. I might use it as a diagnostic tool with any patient, or when someone has privacy concerns but still wants the advantage of my insight."
"But you have to wear it, around me," I said. I could see where she was trying to put me at ease by suggesting she wasn't just wearing it because I was a half-demon, but the fact that there were other reasons she might use it with someone else didn't actually change the reason she was using it with me.
"If it bothers you, I could take it off," she said. "But wearing it allows me to relax, and I think I can help you best if I'm relaxed. But if you'd be more comfortable without..."
"I'd rather know that you're safe," I said, and she nodded.
"Do you worry about that often?"
"Your safety?"
"People's safety," she said. "Other people, I mean. Around you."
"Maybe not enough sometimes," I said, thinking back to my hungry spell earlier in the year... and the wacky hijinks with my pitchfork. "I could do a lot of damage, being careless. And I am careless."
"So have you done much damage?"
"Some."
[1 hour in. Audra was unexpected/unplanned. I sort of fear her catching on.]
I couldn't get anything but out-of-office echo traps from Lee, which was worrying in that special way that only something that had any number perfectly reasonable, perfectly innocuous explanations could be.
It was the weekend, after all... and even if his lack of availability had anything to do with recent events, it could be nothing more than him wanting to keep his head down for a few days, or have a chance to step back away from things.
He had a life outside of work, after all. Maybe this wasn't universally true of lawyers, but it was in his case. He was planning a wedding, or at least he was party to one that was being planned... and that was just one more reason why it wasn't necessarily suspicious or remarkable that he wasn't around to take my reflection on a Saturday morning.
If some shadowy figure I didn't recognize was answering his mirror and telling me that I should not concern myself with the whereabouts of Mr. Jenkins, I would have known that something was definitely going on and I shouldn't trust anyone or anything, but with nothing but an ordinary canned image popping up and telling me how much he values his generic client or associate's time... well, that didn't give me much to go on.
If I had any real reason to be suspicious of the mental healing center, I would have just not gone... but it was in the same innocently menacing category as Lee's absence. Steff and Dee vouched for the woman, there were all sorts of legitimate reasons she might have been available to answer at three in the morning... and really, if there was some sort of sinister shadowy something or other at work, wouldn't they have gone out of their way to not be suspicious?
My brain wanted to fill in something like "unless they knew I'd think that", but I wasn't so far gone into the depths of paranoia as to believe that somebody might have instructed Lundegard to act suspiciously in order to lull me into a false sense of security.
Anyway, the really big shoe had already dropped... if there was an agenda at work here, it would be a little one. The school looking for information to use against me seemed like one possibility, and the reason I'd wanted to talk to Lee. In the absence of his advice, I supposed that I would just ask for a statement of confidentiality in writing so if they tried to do anything with anything I said we could turn it around on them.
It didn't even have to be any bigger than one person... maybe "Teddi" was writing a book or something.
In any event, with no real chance of a literal ambush or anything concrete I could put my finger on, it seemed like the best thing to do was just go in. I could always leave, if it wasn't on the level... it seemed like it would be tantamount to legal suicide for the school to keep me in the mental healing center against my will, given the facts in my case against them.
As soon as I thought that, though, it occurred to me that there was something more of a precedent for holding someone in a mental healing facility against their will. Okay, an extension on the side of the student healing center wasn't exactly an asylum, but it didn't seem completely inconceivable that the professional mental healers the school employed would be incapable of making the determination to have someone put away for good.
It seemed mostly inconceivable that they would, for all the reasons that I'd told myself it was unlikely that imperial agents would make me disappear and more. Power had its limits, even when it was being abused. Without someone like Embries trying to get rid of me, I doubted the school could pull something like that off... and I knew Embries didn't want to get rid of me for the simple reason that I was still walking around, and I was pretty sure there weren't two entities with his level of power and influence intimately tied into the school's administration.
I doubted he would have stood for that kind of competition. I doubted the school would have stood long after it, either.
So it was that after a lot of hemming and hawing and a little bit of sleep that I found myself walking into the waiting room of the mental healing annex. It wasn't like the waiting area of its physical counterpart... it was an actual lobby. There was a small, contoured wooden desk near one wall, but nobody sitting behind it. The other furniture seemed like something you'd see at a mid-range inn... comfortable-looking chairs with backs and armrests, neither identical to each other nor mismatched.
I didn't get a chance to find out how comfortable they were, though, because a woman in a purple outfit that looked like something between an exercise suit and pajamas popped into view in far doorway.
"Ms. Mackenzie," she said, smiling blankly and pleasantly. Brown bangs moved as she tilted her head slightly, and I glimpsed some indistinct runes. I was too far away to read them and didn't want to stare, in any event. "Theodora is waiting for you. If you will follow me."
Her stiff facial expressions were somewhat disconcerting, as was her lack of inflection. Two had a somewhat unmodulated voice, but in her case it wasn't so much that she couldn't inflect as she wasn't acquainted with when and why to do so. This woman's voice just sounded like she was stuck speaking in a soothing tone, with results that were anything but.
"Have you worked here long?" I asked her as I followed her into a hallway.
"Sometimes," she said. She didn't elaborate and I didn't ask.
The room she took me to again reminded me more of an inn or lodge than anything else. It was big enough that a somewhat intimate and informal class could have been taught in it, and I supposed that maybe that did happen... skilled subtle artists were rare enough and mental healing was a demanding enough vocation that it seemed likely the professors did double duty.
The golem didn't follow me inside but just knocked on the doorframe.
"Ms. Mackenzie to see you, Theodora," she said.
"Thank you, Audra," a woman said. I hadn't immediately spotted her because I hadn't known where to look. She wasn't behind the big oak desk, or sitting in front of the fireplace, or on any of the chairs. She'd been seated on the floor in the corner, in what I recognized as a meditative position. "Go get some lunch."
Audra turned and left with an abruptness that would have garnered some words about manners from Two.
"You'll have to excuse Audra," Theodora Lundegard said to me. "If she isn't polite, she also isn't exactly rude. Her ways are simply inflexible."
[][][][][]
"Did you have some kind of instructions on me?"
"What, like 'handle with care'?" she asked.
"I just mean... you got back to me awfully quick," I said. "I wondered if anybody had told you to, you know, be available."
"That's my job."
"At three in the morning?"
"I tend to stay up late Friday nights," she said. "A habit from my student days that I never grew out of. I saw your a-mail right before I went to bed. I knew if it was urgent, you'd be waiting for my reply so I wouldn't have to wait around to see if you responded. Mackenzie, even if I had been given some instructions concerning you, my priority would still be simply to help you. Not 'just the same as' any other student, because you're not any other student, but neither is anyone else."
"Are you able to read my mind?" I asked.
"Possibly, with practice and care," she said. "If there's something you want me to delve into your psyche for, we'll have to do that over the course of many sessions, and I'll need another healer to act as a... well, spotter, I guess. There is a procedure for it."
"Have you ever done it?"
"Not as such, no," she said. "We used the technique recently in another situation involving a potentially dangerous mental contact, but it didn't directly involve a half-demon."
"How confident are you that you could do that without getting hurt?"
"I'm confident that we could stop it before any harm was done," Teddi said. "I couldn't promise you results, in other words, but exposing myself to risk isn't responsible healing. Is there something along those lines that you would like to investigate?"
"No," I said. "I was just... well, when you said 'just the same as any other student', you kind of echoed what I was thinking."
"The subtle arts don't
[][][][][][][]
She was wearing a metal band across her forehead, sort of like a very minimalist crown. There was some kind of crystal set into the middle of it, covered with a network of metal lines.
"It's a filter of sorts," she explained, seeing me looking at it.
"To filter out my infernal nature?" I asked.
"It does that," she said. "But you know, a filter isn't the same thing as a wall... we sometimes define filters by what they keep out, but really what distinguishes one filter from another is what it lets through."
"And what does that one let through?" I asked.
"Emotions, mostly," she said. "When I'm wearing this, I'm more strongly empathic than I am without it, even as I have less access to thoughts and images. I might use it as a diagnostic tool with any patient, or when someone has privacy concerns but still wants the advantage of my insight."
"But you have to wear it, around me," I said. I could see where she was trying to put me at ease by suggesting she wasn't just wearing it because I was a half-demon, but the fact that there were other reasons she might use it with someone else didn't actually change the reason she was using it with me.
"If it bothers you, I could take it off," she said. "But wearing it allows me to relax, and I think I can help you best if I'm relaxed. But if you'd be more comfortable without..."
"I'd rather know that you're safe," I said, and she nodded.
"Do you worry about that often?"
"Your safety?"
"People's safety," she said. "Other people, I mean. Around you."
"Maybe not enough sometimes," I said, thinking back to my hungry spell earlier in the year... and the wacky hijinks with my pitchfork. "I could do a lot of damage, being careless. And I am careless."
"So have you done much damage?"
"Some."
[0.5 hours in. There are 666 words from what I had thought the last chapter was going to cover.]
I couldn't get anything but out-of-office echo traps from Lee, which was worrying in that special way that only something that had any number perfectly reasonable, perfectly innocuous explanations could be.
It was the weekend, after all... and even if his lack of availability had anything to do with recent events, it could be nothing more than him wanting to keep his head down for a few days, or have a chance to step back away from things.
He had a life outside of work, after all. Maybe this wasn't universally true of lawyers, but it was in his case. He was planning a wedding, or at least he was party to one that was being planned... and that was just one more reason why it wasn't necessarily suspicious or remarkable that he wasn't around to take my reflection on a Saturday morning.
If some shadowy figure I didn't recognize was answering his mirror and telling me that I should not concern myself with the whereabouts of Mr. Jenkins, I would have known that something was definitely going on and I shouldn't trust anyone or anything, but with nothing but an ordinary canned image popping up and telling me how much he values his generic client or associate's time... well, that didn't give me much to go on.
If I had any real reason to be suspicious of the mental healing center, I would have just not gone... but it was in the same innocently menacing category as Lee's absence. Steff and Dee vouched for the woman, there were all sorts of legitimate reasons she might have been available to answer at three in the morning... and really, if there was some sort of sinister shadowy something or other at work, wouldn't they have gone out of their way to not be suspicious? My brain wanted to fill in something like "unless they knew I'd think that", but I wasn't so far gone into the depths of paranoia as to believe that somebody might have instructed Lundegard to act suspiciously in order to lull me into a false sense of security.
Anyway, the really big shoe had already dropped... if there was an agenda at work here, it would be a little one. The school looking for information to use against me was one possibility, and the reason I'd wanted to talk to Lee. In the absence of his advice, I supposed that I would just ask for a statement of confidentiality in writing so if they tried to do anything with anything I said he coul
[][][][][]
"Did you have some kind of instructions on me?"
"What, like 'handle with care'?" she asked.
"I just mean... you got back to me awfully quick," I said. "I wondered if anybody had told you to, you know, be available."
"That's my job."
"At three in the morning?"
"I tend to stay up late Friday nights," she said. "A habit from my student days that I never grew out of. I saw your a-mail right before I went to bed. I knew if it was urgent, you'd be waiting for my reply so I wouldn't have to wait around to see if you responded. Mackenzie, even if I had been given some instructions concerning you, my priority would still be simply to help you. Not 'just the same as' any other student, because you're not any other student, but neither is anyone else."
"Are you able to read my mind?" I asked.
"Possibly, with practice and care," she said. "If there's something you want me to delve into your psyche for, we'll have to do that over the course of many sessions, and I'll need another healer to act as a... well, spotter, I guess. There is a procedure for it."
"Have you ever done it?"
"Not as such, no," she said. "We used the technique recently in another situation involving a potentially dangerous mental contact, but it didn't directly involve a half-demon."
"How confident are you that you could do that without getting hurt?"
"I'm confident that we could stop it before any harm was done," Teddi said. "I couldn't promise you results, in other words, but exposing myself to risk isn't responsible healing. Is there something along those lines that you would like to investigate?"
"No," I said. "I was just... well, when you said 'just the same as any other student', you kind of echoed what I was thinking."
"The subtle arts don't
[][][][][][][]
She was wearing a metal band across her forehead, sort of like a very minimalist crown. There was some kind of crystal set into the middle of it, covered with a network of metal lines.
"It's a filter of sorts," she explained, seeing me looking at it.
"To filter out my infernal nature?" I asked.
"It does that," she said. "But you know, a filter isn't the same thing as a wall... we sometimes define filters by what they keep out, but really what distinguishes one filter from another is what it lets through."
"And what does that one let through?" I asked.
"Emotions, mostly," she said. "When I'm wearing this, I'm more strongly empathic than I am without it, even as I have less access to thoughts and images. I might use it as a diagnostic tool with any patient, or when someone has privacy concerns but still wants the advantage of my insight."
"But you have to wear it, around me," I said. I could see where she was trying to put me at ease by suggesting she wasn't just wearing it because I was a half-demon, but the fact that there were other reasons she might use it with someone else didn't actually change the reason she was using it with me.
"If it bothers you, I could take it off," she said. "But wearing it allows me to relax, and I think I can help you best if I'm relaxed. But if you'd be more comfortable without..."
"I'd rather know that you're safe," I said, and she nodded.
"Do you worry about that often?"
"Your safety?"
"People's safety," she said. "Other people, I mean. Around you."
"Maybe not enough sometimes," I said, thinking back to my hungry spell earlier in the year... and the wacky hijinks with my pitchfork. "I could do a lot of damage, being careless. And I am careless."
"So have you done much damage?"
"Some."
Status: Paused; housemate came home. (updated 7:15).
Word Count: ~2500 (666 words carried over).
Hours Writing: 1.5
[1.5 hours in. Refined Audra's dialogue/introduction a bit, as I zero in more on who she is. Interestingly, Audra's presence in the story is revealing more about Teddi.]
I couldn't get anything but out-of-office echo traps from Lee, which was worrying in that special way that only something that had any number perfectly reasonable, perfectly innocuous explanations could be.
It was the weekend, after all... and even if his lack of availability had anything to do with recent events, it could be nothing more than him wanting to keep his head down for a few days, or have a chance to step back away from things.
He had a life outside of work, after all. Maybe this wasn't universally true of lawyers, but it was in his case. He was planning a wedding, or at least he was party to one that was being planned... and that was just one more reason why it wasn't necessarily suspicious or remarkable that he wasn't around to take my reflection on a Saturday morning.
If some shadowy figure I didn't recognize was answering his mirror and telling me that I should not concern myself with the whereabouts of Mr. Jenkins, I would have known that something was definitely going on and I shouldn't trust anyone or anything, but with nothing but an ordinary canned image popping up and telling me how much he values his generic client or associate's time... well, that didn't give me much to go on.
If I had any real reason to be suspicious of the mental healing center, I would have just not gone... but it was in the same innocently menacing category as Lee's absence. Steff and Dee vouched for the woman, there were all sorts of legitimate reasons she might have been available to answer at three in the morning... and really, if there was some sort of sinister shadowy something or other at work, wouldn't they have gone out of their way to not be suspicious?
My brain wanted to fill in something like "unless they knew I'd think that", but I wasn't so far gone into the depths of paranoia as to believe that somebody might have instructed Lundegard to act suspiciously in order to lull me into a false sense of security.
Anyway, the really big shoe had already dropped... if there was an agenda at work here, it would be a little one. The school looking for information to use against me seemed like one possibility, and the reason I'd wanted to talk to Lee. In the absence of his advice, I supposed that I would just ask for a statement of confidentiality in writing so if they tried to do anything with anything I said we could turn it around on them.
It didn't even have to be any bigger than one person... maybe "Teddi" was writing a book or something.
In any event, with no real chance of a literal ambush or anything concrete I could put my finger on, it seemed like the best thing to do was just go in. I could always leave, if it wasn't on the level... it seemed like it would be tantamount to legal suicide for the school to keep me in the mental healing center against my will, given the facts in my case against them.
As soon as I thought that, though, it occurred to me that there was something more of a precedent for holding someone in a mental healing facility against their will. Okay, an extension on the side of the student healing center wasn't exactly an asylum, but it didn't seem completely inconceivable that the professional mental healers the school employed would be incapable of making the determination to have someone put away for good.
It seemed mostly inconceivable that they would, for all the reasons that I'd told myself it was unlikely that imperial agents would make me disappear and more. Power had its limits, even when it was being abused. Without someone like Embries trying to get rid of me, I doubted the school could pull something like that off... and I knew Embries didn't want to get rid of me for the simple reason that I was still walking around, and I was pretty sure there weren't two entities with his level of power and influence intimately tied into the school's administration.
I doubted he would have stood for that kind of competition. I doubted the school would have stood long after it, either.
So it was that after a lot of hemming and hawing and a little bit of sleep that I found myself walking into the waiting room of the mental healing annex. It wasn't like the waiting area of its physical counterpart... it was an actual lobby. There was a small, contoured wooden desk near one wall, but nobody sitting behind it. The other furniture seemed like something you'd see at a mid-range inn... comfortable-looking chairs with backs and armrests, neither identical to each other nor mismatched.
I didn't get a chance to find out how comfortable they were, though, because a woman in a purple outfit that looked like something between an exercise suit and pajamas popped into view in far doorway.
"Miss Mackenzie," she said, smiling blankly and pleasantly. It wasn't quite a question, but it didn't sound definite.
"Ms, please," I said.
"Are you Miss Mackenzie," she said, still smiling and still not quite asking. Brown bangs moved as she tilted her head slightly, and I glimpsed some indistinct runes. I was too far away to read them and didn't want to stare, in any event.
"Yes, I'm Mackenzie," I said. That seemed like a good compromise between causing her distress by giving her an answer she couldn't deal with and sticking to my wands when it came to biased naming conventions.
"Theodora is waiting for you," she said. "If you will follow me."
Her unchanging facial expression was somewhat disconcerting, as was her lack of inflection. Two had a somewhat unmodulated voice, but in her case it wasn't so much that she couldn't inflect as she wasn't acquainted with when and why to do so. This woman's voice just sounded like she was stuck speaking in a soothing tone, with results that were anything but.
"Have you worked here long?" I asked her as I followed her into a hallway.
"Sometimes," she said. She didn't elaborate and I didn't ask.
The room she took me to again reminded me more of an inn or lodge than anything else. It was big enough that a somewhat intimate and informal class could have been taught in it, and I supposed that maybe that did happen... skilled subtle artists were rare enough and mental healing was a demanding enough vocation that it seemed likely the professors did double duty.
The golem didn't follow me inside but just knocked on the doorframe.
"Ms. Mackenzie to see you, Theodora," she said.
"Thank you, Audra," a woman said. I hadn't immediately spotted her because I hadn't known where to look. She wasn't behind the big oak desk, or sitting in front of the fireplace, or on any of the chairs. She'd been seated on the floor in the corner, in what I recognized as a meditative position. "Go get some lunch."
Audra turned and left with an abruptness that would have garnered some words about manners from Two.
"You'll have to excuse Audra," Theodora Lundegard said to me. She was wearing a brown tunic-like blouse with some beadwork on the front and a pair of tannish leggings. She had a metal band across her forehead, sort of like a very minimalist crown. There was some kind of crystal set into the middle of it, covered with a network of metal lines. "If she isn't polite, she also isn't exactly rude. Her ways are simply inflexible, and they were set by someone who didn't consider manners to be important in a golem."
"How long has she been working without a meal break?" I asked.
"We've been working since a little bit before noon," she said. "We had breakfast then. She's good at filing and things. Please, come in."
I realized that she was sitting in the middle of a semi-circle of stacks of papers.
"Does she belong to you?" I asked. My internal debate on whether or not to distrust "Teddi" was not alleviated
"To my family," she said. "I don't have any power to free her, Ms. Mackenzie, but I believe she's happier when she can get out and do things."
"That's convenient for you, if you have a lot of filing to do," I said.
"If I didn't want Audra, my mother would keep her in the china hutch," Teddi said. "She only needs to eat when she's active, and she'd only be taken out to dust herself. I don't exactly work her fingers to the bone, Ms. Mackenzie, but I don't let her feel neglected or useless, either. I wonder, do you always care this much about people you've just met?"
She got points for saying "people", but then if she knew anything about me at all she'd know I had a golem for a friend and roommate.
"Not always," I said. I finally closed the door and began to move nearer to her. "The truth is, I don't notice most people, individually. But Audra sort of... well, she was standing right in front of me and talking to me. I couldn't help noticing her. Once I noticed her, I cared."
"I don't normally use her as a receptionist," Teddi said. "But it's sort of a weird weekend here, and I suspected that you wouldn't give her any problems so I sent her to fetch you."
"Were you trying to show me how open-minded you were by hanging out with a golem?" I asked.
"Not exactly," Teddi said. "I had a feeling you might have difficulty opening up to me about your life, so I thought I'd show you something of mine. Audra was my companion, growing up. She did a lot of the raising of me. I can seen on your face that you're trying to imagine what that was like. It wasn't bad."
"How much money do your parents have?" I asked. Being raised by a golem nanny was almost a cliche, but I didn't know that it actually still happened... at least, not among the common folk of the Imperium.
"My parents? Not much," Teddi said. "My family has a lot of money tied up in land, mines, and various investments. The house I was raised in belongs to a trust. The house I live in today is, too. So does Audra."
"So only the trustee or trustees could free her"
"No," Teddi said, shaking her head. "There are all kinds of protections built in, to make sure the ancestral properties can't be sold off, the family's capital can't be invaded, and the house golems can't be transferred, sold, or freed. They're bound to the family."
"What happens if the family dies out?"
[][][][][]
"Did you have some kind of instructions on me?"
"What, like 'handle with care'?" she asked.
"I just mean... you got back to me awfully quick," I said. "I wondered if anybody had told you to, you know, be available."
"That's my job."
"At three in the morning?"
"I tend to stay up late Friday nights," she said. "A habit from my student days that I never grew out of. I saw your a-mail right before I went to bed. I knew if it was urgent, you'd be waiting for my reply so I wouldn't have to wait around to see if you responded. Mackenzie, even if I had been given some instructions concerning you, my priority would still be simply to help you. Not 'just the same as' any other student, because you're not any other student, but neither is anyone else."
"Are you able to read my mind?" I asked.
"Possibly, with practice and care," she said. "If there's something you want me to delve into your psyche for, we'll have to do that over the course of many sessions, and I'll need another healer to act as a... well, spotter, I guess. There is a procedure for it."
"Have you ever done it?"
"Not as such, no," she said. "We used the technique recently in another situation involving a potentially dangerous mental contact, but it didn't directly involve a half-demon."
"How confident are you that you could do that without getting hurt?"
"I'm confident that we could stop it before any harm was done," Teddi said. "I couldn't promise you results, in other words, but exposing myself to risk isn't responsible healing. Is there something along those lines that you would like to investigate?"
"No," I said. "I was just... well, when you said 'just the same as any other student', you kind of echoed what I was thinking."
"The subtle arts don't
[][][][][][][]
"It's a filter of sorts," she explained, seeing me looking at it.
"To filter out my infernal nature?" I asked.
"It does that," she said. "But you know, a filter isn't the same thing as a wall... we sometimes define filters by what they keep out, but really what distinguishes one filter from another is what it lets through."
"And what does that one let through?" I asked.
"Emotions, mostly," she said. "When I'm wearing this, I'm more strongly empathic than I am without it, even as I have less access to thoughts and images. I might use it as a diagnostic tool with any patient, or when someone has privacy concerns but still wants the advantage of my insight."
"But you have to wear it, around me," I said. I could see where she was trying to put me at ease by suggesting she wasn't just wearing it because I was a half-demon, but the fact that there were other reasons she might use it with someone else didn't actually change the reason she was using it with me.
"If it bothers you, I could take it off," she said. "But wearing it allows me to relax, and I think I can help you best if I'm relaxed. But if you'd be more comfortable without..."
"I'd rather know that you're safe," I said, and she nodded.
"Do you worry about that often?"
"Your safety?"
"People's safety," she said. "Other people, I mean. Around you."
"Maybe not enough sometimes," I said, thinking back to my hungry spell earlier in the year... and the wacky hijinks with my pitchfork. "I could do a lot of damage, being careless. And I am careless."
"So have you done much damage?"
"Some."
[1 hour in. Audra was unexpected/unplanned. I sort of fear her catching on.]
I couldn't get anything but out-of-office echo traps from Lee, which was worrying in that special way that only something that had any number perfectly reasonable, perfectly innocuous explanations could be.
It was the weekend, after all... and even if his lack of availability had anything to do with recent events, it could be nothing more than him wanting to keep his head down for a few days, or have a chance to step back away from things.
He had a life outside of work, after all. Maybe this wasn't universally true of lawyers, but it was in his case. He was planning a wedding, or at least he was party to one that was being planned... and that was just one more reason why it wasn't necessarily suspicious or remarkable that he wasn't around to take my reflection on a Saturday morning.
If some shadowy figure I didn't recognize was answering his mirror and telling me that I should not concern myself with the whereabouts of Mr. Jenkins, I would have known that something was definitely going on and I shouldn't trust anyone or anything, but with nothing but an ordinary canned image popping up and telling me how much he values his generic client or associate's time... well, that didn't give me much to go on.
If I had any real reason to be suspicious of the mental healing center, I would have just not gone... but it was in the same innocently menacing category as Lee's absence. Steff and Dee vouched for the woman, there were all sorts of legitimate reasons she might have been available to answer at three in the morning... and really, if there was some sort of sinister shadowy something or other at work, wouldn't they have gone out of their way to not be suspicious?
My brain wanted to fill in something like "unless they knew I'd think that", but I wasn't so far gone into the depths of paranoia as to believe that somebody might have instructed Lundegard to act suspiciously in order to lull me into a false sense of security.
Anyway, the really big shoe had already dropped... if there was an agenda at work here, it would be a little one. The school looking for information to use against me seemed like one possibility, and the reason I'd wanted to talk to Lee. In the absence of his advice, I supposed that I would just ask for a statement of confidentiality in writing so if they tried to do anything with anything I said we could turn it around on them.
It didn't even have to be any bigger than one person... maybe "Teddi" was writing a book or something.
In any event, with no real chance of a literal ambush or anything concrete I could put my finger on, it seemed like the best thing to do was just go in. I could always leave, if it wasn't on the level... it seemed like it would be tantamount to legal suicide for the school to keep me in the mental healing center against my will, given the facts in my case against them.
As soon as I thought that, though, it occurred to me that there was something more of a precedent for holding someone in a mental healing facility against their will. Okay, an extension on the side of the student healing center wasn't exactly an asylum, but it didn't seem completely inconceivable that the professional mental healers the school employed would be incapable of making the determination to have someone put away for good.
It seemed mostly inconceivable that they would, for all the reasons that I'd told myself it was unlikely that imperial agents would make me disappear and more. Power had its limits, even when it was being abused. Without someone like Embries trying to get rid of me, I doubted the school could pull something like that off... and I knew Embries didn't want to get rid of me for the simple reason that I was still walking around, and I was pretty sure there weren't two entities with his level of power and influence intimately tied into the school's administration.
I doubted he would have stood for that kind of competition. I doubted the school would have stood long after it, either.
So it was that after a lot of hemming and hawing and a little bit of sleep that I found myself walking into the waiting room of the mental healing annex. It wasn't like the waiting area of its physical counterpart... it was an actual lobby. There was a small, contoured wooden desk near one wall, but nobody sitting behind it. The other furniture seemed like something you'd see at a mid-range inn... comfortable-looking chairs with backs and armrests, neither identical to each other nor mismatched.
I didn't get a chance to find out how comfortable they were, though, because a woman in a purple outfit that looked like something between an exercise suit and pajamas popped into view in far doorway.
"Ms. Mackenzie," she said, smiling blankly and pleasantly. Brown bangs moved as she tilted her head slightly, and I glimpsed some indistinct runes. I was too far away to read them and didn't want to stare, in any event. "Theodora is waiting for you. If you will follow me."
Her stiff facial expressions were somewhat disconcerting, as was her lack of inflection. Two had a somewhat unmodulated voice, but in her case it wasn't so much that she couldn't inflect as she wasn't acquainted with when and why to do so. This woman's voice just sounded like she was stuck speaking in a soothing tone, with results that were anything but.
"Have you worked here long?" I asked her as I followed her into a hallway.
"Sometimes," she said. She didn't elaborate and I didn't ask.
The room she took me to again reminded me more of an inn or lodge than anything else. It was big enough that a somewhat intimate and informal class could have been taught in it, and I supposed that maybe that did happen... skilled subtle artists were rare enough and mental healing was a demanding enough vocation that it seemed likely the professors did double duty.
The golem didn't follow me inside but just knocked on the doorframe.
"Ms. Mackenzie to see you, Theodora," she said.
"Thank you, Audra," a woman said. I hadn't immediately spotted her because I hadn't known where to look. She wasn't behind the big oak desk, or sitting in front of the fireplace, or on any of the chairs. She'd been seated on the floor in the corner, in what I recognized as a meditative position. "Go get some lunch."
Audra turned and left with an abruptness that would have garnered some words about manners from Two.
"You'll have to excuse Audra," Theodora Lundegard said to me. "If she isn't polite, she also isn't exactly rude. Her ways are simply inflexible."
[][][][][]
"Did you have some kind of instructions on me?"
"What, like 'handle with care'?" she asked.
"I just mean... you got back to me awfully quick," I said. "I wondered if anybody had told you to, you know, be available."
"That's my job."
"At three in the morning?"
"I tend to stay up late Friday nights," she said. "A habit from my student days that I never grew out of. I saw your a-mail right before I went to bed. I knew if it was urgent, you'd be waiting for my reply so I wouldn't have to wait around to see if you responded. Mackenzie, even if I had been given some instructions concerning you, my priority would still be simply to help you. Not 'just the same as' any other student, because you're not any other student, but neither is anyone else."
"Are you able to read my mind?" I asked.
"Possibly, with practice and care," she said. "If there's something you want me to delve into your psyche for, we'll have to do that over the course of many sessions, and I'll need another healer to act as a... well, spotter, I guess. There is a procedure for it."
"Have you ever done it?"
"Not as such, no," she said. "We used the technique recently in another situation involving a potentially dangerous mental contact, but it didn't directly involve a half-demon."
"How confident are you that you could do that without getting hurt?"
"I'm confident that we could stop it before any harm was done," Teddi said. "I couldn't promise you results, in other words, but exposing myself to risk isn't responsible healing. Is there something along those lines that you would like to investigate?"
"No," I said. "I was just... well, when you said 'just the same as any other student', you kind of echoed what I was thinking."
"The subtle arts don't
[][][][][][][]
She was wearing a metal band across her forehead, sort of like a very minimalist crown. There was some kind of crystal set into the middle of it, covered with a network of metal lines.
"It's a filter of sorts," she explained, seeing me looking at it.
"To filter out my infernal nature?" I asked.
"It does that," she said. "But you know, a filter isn't the same thing as a wall... we sometimes define filters by what they keep out, but really what distinguishes one filter from another is what it lets through."
"And what does that one let through?" I asked.
"Emotions, mostly," she said. "When I'm wearing this, I'm more strongly empathic than I am without it, even as I have less access to thoughts and images. I might use it as a diagnostic tool with any patient, or when someone has privacy concerns but still wants the advantage of my insight."
"But you have to wear it, around me," I said. I could see where she was trying to put me at ease by suggesting she wasn't just wearing it because I was a half-demon, but the fact that there were other reasons she might use it with someone else didn't actually change the reason she was using it with me.
"If it bothers you, I could take it off," she said. "But wearing it allows me to relax, and I think I can help you best if I'm relaxed. But if you'd be more comfortable without..."
"I'd rather know that you're safe," I said, and she nodded.
"Do you worry about that often?"
"Your safety?"
"People's safety," she said. "Other people, I mean. Around you."
"Maybe not enough sometimes," I said, thinking back to my hungry spell earlier in the year... and the wacky hijinks with my pitchfork. "I could do a lot of damage, being careless. And I am careless."
"So have you done much damage?"
"Some."
[0.5 hours in. There are 666 words from what I had thought the last chapter was going to cover.]
I couldn't get anything but out-of-office echo traps from Lee, which was worrying in that special way that only something that had any number perfectly reasonable, perfectly innocuous explanations could be.
It was the weekend, after all... and even if his lack of availability had anything to do with recent events, it could be nothing more than him wanting to keep his head down for a few days, or have a chance to step back away from things.
He had a life outside of work, after all. Maybe this wasn't universally true of lawyers, but it was in his case. He was planning a wedding, or at least he was party to one that was being planned... and that was just one more reason why it wasn't necessarily suspicious or remarkable that he wasn't around to take my reflection on a Saturday morning.
If some shadowy figure I didn't recognize was answering his mirror and telling me that I should not concern myself with the whereabouts of Mr. Jenkins, I would have known that something was definitely going on and I shouldn't trust anyone or anything, but with nothing but an ordinary canned image popping up and telling me how much he values his generic client or associate's time... well, that didn't give me much to go on.
If I had any real reason to be suspicious of the mental healing center, I would have just not gone... but it was in the same innocently menacing category as Lee's absence. Steff and Dee vouched for the woman, there were all sorts of legitimate reasons she might have been available to answer at three in the morning... and really, if there was some sort of sinister shadowy something or other at work, wouldn't they have gone out of their way to not be suspicious? My brain wanted to fill in something like "unless they knew I'd think that", but I wasn't so far gone into the depths of paranoia as to believe that somebody might have instructed Lundegard to act suspiciously in order to lull me into a false sense of security.
Anyway, the really big shoe had already dropped... if there was an agenda at work here, it would be a little one. The school looking for information to use against me was one possibility, and the reason I'd wanted to talk to Lee. In the absence of his advice, I supposed that I would just ask for a statement of confidentiality in writing so if they tried to do anything with anything I said he coul
[][][][][]
"Did you have some kind of instructions on me?"
"What, like 'handle with care'?" she asked.
"I just mean... you got back to me awfully quick," I said. "I wondered if anybody had told you to, you know, be available."
"That's my job."
"At three in the morning?"
"I tend to stay up late Friday nights," she said. "A habit from my student days that I never grew out of. I saw your a-mail right before I went to bed. I knew if it was urgent, you'd be waiting for my reply so I wouldn't have to wait around to see if you responded. Mackenzie, even if I had been given some instructions concerning you, my priority would still be simply to help you. Not 'just the same as' any other student, because you're not any other student, but neither is anyone else."
"Are you able to read my mind?" I asked.
"Possibly, with practice and care," she said. "If there's something you want me to delve into your psyche for, we'll have to do that over the course of many sessions, and I'll need another healer to act as a... well, spotter, I guess. There is a procedure for it."
"Have you ever done it?"
"Not as such, no," she said. "We used the technique recently in another situation involving a potentially dangerous mental contact, but it didn't directly involve a half-demon."
"How confident are you that you could do that without getting hurt?"
"I'm confident that we could stop it before any harm was done," Teddi said. "I couldn't promise you results, in other words, but exposing myself to risk isn't responsible healing. Is there something along those lines that you would like to investigate?"
"No," I said. "I was just... well, when you said 'just the same as any other student', you kind of echoed what I was thinking."
"The subtle arts don't
[][][][][][][]
She was wearing a metal band across her forehead, sort of like a very minimalist crown. There was some kind of crystal set into the middle of it, covered with a network of metal lines.
"It's a filter of sorts," she explained, seeing me looking at it.
"To filter out my infernal nature?" I asked.
"It does that," she said. "But you know, a filter isn't the same thing as a wall... we sometimes define filters by what they keep out, but really what distinguishes one filter from another is what it lets through."
"And what does that one let through?" I asked.
"Emotions, mostly," she said. "When I'm wearing this, I'm more strongly empathic than I am without it, even as I have less access to thoughts and images. I might use it as a diagnostic tool with any patient, or when someone has privacy concerns but still wants the advantage of my insight."
"But you have to wear it, around me," I said. I could see where she was trying to put me at ease by suggesting she wasn't just wearing it because I was a half-demon, but the fact that there were other reasons she might use it with someone else didn't actually change the reason she was using it with me.
"If it bothers you, I could take it off," she said. "But wearing it allows me to relax, and I think I can help you best if I'm relaxed. But if you'd be more comfortable without..."
"I'd rather know that you're safe," I said, and she nodded.
"Do you worry about that often?"
"Your safety?"
"People's safety," she said. "Other people, I mean. Around you."
"Maybe not enough sometimes," I said, thinking back to my hungry spell earlier in the year... and the wacky hijinks with my pitchfork. "I could do a lot of damage, being careless. And I am careless."
"So have you done much damage?"
"Some."