[Closed] Necessary Efficiencies (Cerise)

[Umberto Bassington-Smythe]

Brunnhold - Umberto's Office

The Ninth of Bethas, 2720, the forenoon

'T

here are,” he said, still scribbling noted in the margin of the incantation, the still too-inefficient incantation, “other improvements that can be made. More efficiencies, more trimming of dross. This,” he gestured to the hasty scrawl of an incantation he had made, “is still littered with it. Redundancies, redundancies. Still, we can press on.”

Her casting was harsh, all spikes and jaggs, but there was force in it, and real facility. Not, perhaps, the subject he had been imagining, but perhaps rather a better one. There was small margin of error in a duel, and errors could be catastrophic. Reliable, compact, efficient casting was the order of the day. A near-perfect scenario to disprove his theories. And if Miss Vauquelin disproved them? Four years of work all lost in the river, flowing out and away to the sea. Ah well, then let it pass, pick up the useful pieces and try again.

It would work though. Of that he was almost sure. Well, as sure as any academic could consider himself to be.

He would need to see more of her casting. One invisible pedestal did not a case-study make. It was a good datapoint. He would need hundreds more. More, and more than one subject. How fortunate she was a duelist. Duelists required opponents. More data free and public. No real ethical issues there. It was not as though he was going to write a form book and begin placing bets on the outcomes.

Bets. Form books. Those would exist, wouldn't they? Everyone competition had its punters, its marks, and its gamblers. Its bookies. Now there was an idea. And they too would hang about the dueling grounds, notes in hand. Hundreds of matches, odds and appraisals, perhaps even analyses. The data would likely be rough, collected for a different purpose. It could still be of the utmost value.

Well done Miss Vauquelin. Sporting had never occurred to him. Now it seemed the most natural thing in the world. An ocean of data. A legion of potential observers.

And, to cap it all off, the sharp young lady had agreed to the proposal. “Capital! Most excellent. I look forward to our future collaborations.” Collaboration. Yes, it would have to be that. The subject could, of course, not be named outright in the inevitable paper. She could not share authorship. Efficiencies in her casting were not enough compensation. She would have to sacrifice time. Time perhaps better spent in classes. And yet Reginald had sent her here. Sent her to him. Curious. An indication that she did not mind if Miss Vauquelin let at least some of her courses slide. And he was faculty, after all.

“Now, this work is going to take up a fair amount of time, both yours and mine. Study, great deal of practice, and you’ll have to be at your dueling quite often. And I will need to watch you in your competitions.” He would have to become a habitue of the dueling grounds. More time to commit. More time to study this duelist.More time to study the others. “I can easily clear my calendar. I’m mostly here to give the odd lecture that almost no one attends, and to keep out of the way, doing my work.” Out of the way and out of the light. His work would be ignored, passed over, derided as absurd, too theoretical, too heretical. Unless it worked. Unless he could prove it. “Are you at all able to dedicate a non-trivial amount of time to this? Consider it, perhaps, independent study? If your advisors will allow it, of course.”

[Cerise Vauquelin]

Umberto's Office, Brunnhold University
Bethas 09, 2720 - Before Noon

Cerise raised her eyebrows. Redundancies. Things that could be removed--refined? He had continued to write, even as Cerise had cast. Even as she had released it, contemplating what any of this was for. Other than, of course, potentially wasting her time.

There was something a little fascinating about watching him, honestly. What a strange man. She could practically see his thoughts pinging off of each other as he scrawled more notes. None he felt the need to share, but that was fine. Cerise had accepted the offer, anyway. It was, she thought, something to do. And perhaps it would make her professors look more kindly upon the occasional lapses in attendance, if she were doing something that appeared studious.

"Collaboration, is it?" She couldn't quite contain a disbelieving huff of laughter. "Uncredited, I assume." Cerise waved her hand, grinning. She didn't want credit, or her name in some paper or another. She only cared about the results. As long as the results were solid, she would provide all the data he wanted.

Some of this sounded a little too good to be true. Most of it, actually. What this arrangement sounded like, as Mr. Bassington-Smythe went on, was that it would take up an enormous amount of her time--to be filled with dueling, and thinking about doing so, and preparing to do so. And less with dry lectures on pre-modern galdori history, or the class in government that she had been made to take because of her father's work.

This man was strange, but he seemed to have something of a sense of humor. At least she thought that was a joke; it would have been a joke if she said it, but with this galdori-stork hybrid, she couldn't be quite sure. Cerise quirked an eyebrow and tilted her head to the side. Her hair followed riotously after. It seemed strange to her to keep a lecturer around who did very little lecturing. Then again, the ways of academics were often so--Cerise hardly understood them. Even Siordanti was strange, and she had known him at least a little bit before he graduated.

"I should be," she agreed, although she hadn't asked. There was plenty of room in her schedule, if she just squeezed out all the boring bits. "Especially if, say, one were to make a strong argument for this 'independent study' taking the place of... How should I put it... Less valuable parts of my education. A strong argument from a fellow educator." Cerise stared rather meaningfully at the dark-haired academic. She, of course, couldn't suggest it. That would be too terribly transparent.

[Umberto Bassington-Smythe]

Brunnhold - Umberto's Office

The Ninth of Bethas, 2720, the forenoon

S

harper now that even before, Miss Vauquelin named her price. Likely she thought it a bargain. Work with a heterodox scholar, all manner of dueling, practice, and so forth. It probably seemed like it would be a lark. He would let her think so, at least for the nonce. And none of that was inaccurate, not in the slightest. Merely woefully incomplete. There would be considerable amounts of poreing over abstruse grammars, half-mad works on Monite lexicography, historical reviews, phonological analyses, field harmonic work, elocution lesions, and a battery of tedious exercises. He knew it all well enough, had done it all himself. Five years of work. Five years of promising lines leading only to dead ends. Well, almost all. The latest refinements had been considerably more promising. More so now that Miss Knives was already proving the basics could be at least borrowed by another sorcerer.

Borrowing alone would not do. No, he would not be simply providing the duelist with improved and pithier incantations. He would need to know she could construct her own, in real time, and as needed. A living method, not simply the receiving of hoary wisdom from some other scholar. That was the whole problem with orthodox approaches. Too much veneration of the works of the past, for spells long made and deeds long past. A veneration of artefacts and stories. Idols of worship. The sorcerers of old should not be venerated like statues, rather they should be emulated. They were not content to toy only with the edges of magic. Moving it along by slow increments year after year. Scholars yes, and fine ones, but no one could call them timid incrementalists. They had pushed it forward, with headless joy, created whole disciples, reshaped the world a thousand times over.

Magic was much fallen off. Too tame, too respectable. Wild flights of fancy were the stuff of legend, not of everyday practice. Any why? Conventionalism, caution, and the siren song of comfort and status. He wanted none of that. No, he wanted to walk the high hills alone amidst the storms yet be untouched by wind and rain, to travel into Otherworlds and Afterlives, to consult with the dead and listen to their riddles. To wrap spells about the prow of ships and venture into the great unknown and trackless seas.

And he wanted others to be free to do the same. If the galdori claimed to be sorcerers, then let them be sorcerers, not office-holds who dabbled in a little magic.

“I believe,” he said, with a growing smile, “that I can put in a word here and there. But I warn you, Miss Vaquelin, that this is not the easy way out. You will be doing a great deal of work. A great deal of magic. There will be danger of course. Backlash, the odd brail, probably several trips to the infirmary.” At least he had contacts there. His cousin would not let him down, would not let his subject burn herself to a crisp with magical fire, or wither away to a Mona-cursed husk. “Now, which courses and professors are you wishing to be rid of?”

[Cerise Vauquelin]

Umberto's Office, Brunnhold University
Bethas 9, 2720 - Before Noon

This would all be called off if he'd reacted the wrong way to her sly suggestion. He could deny her, of course; that wasn't the wrong reaction. No, the wrong reaction would be to scold her, express disapproval that she had tried. To prove himself dull, honestly. Cerise didn't mind work; it was tedium that she couldn't abide. Especially when it felt like there was no greater purpose for it than to be tedious.

"I am no stranger to either, sir--work, or danger." A heavy brow swept into an expressive arch, but she smiled too. That was the right reaction--the ideal reaction, really. Cerise was starting to think this might be more interesting than she had bargained for. Certainly, it didn't seem like it would be boring. Of course, it could be. She thought of the field notebook she'd only briefly looked through and the forest of papers around Mr. Bassington-Smythe. Some of it was bound to be dull. She could hope at least it would be in the minority.

And if it wasn't, she could quit. Probably. Possibly.

Certainly the idea of ending up in the infirmary wasn't off-putting to the dark-haired girl. She'd been there plenty. For reasons both related and unrelated to her dueling--she thought it was best to keep that to herself. The academic across the desk from her didn't need to know how many times she'd been in because of the swing of a fist or an ill-advised attempt to sneak past her minders. Or any other manner of deeply unladylike behaviors. He could find out on his own if it mattered.

Backlash, though? Cerise paused over the idea of backlash. For a moment she allowed herself to weigh it properly. She had dismissed it out loud, but inside she wasn't so sure. It had been backlash that had ended Siordanti's career as a duelist, hadn't it? Cerise chewed on it in the back of her mind. If that were to be her--if her career ended before it began...

No. No, she couldn't think that way. The risk was there. She just wouldn't let that happen. What was magic without risk?

"Well," she said, leaning forward with a predator's interest, "There's Pre-Modern Galdori History, for starters..."

[Umberto Bassington-Smythe]

Brunnhold - Umberto's Office

The Ninth of Bethas, 2720, the forenoon

"P

e-Modern Galdori History. I see.” Pre-Modern, well that was a vast ocean of time, depending upon when one considered the modern age to have begun. Some particularly irritating wags, the kind one avoided at parties and who were driven for history departments first by laughter and then by increasingly heavy pieces of furniture, maintained the modern age began with the end of the War of the Book. The intervening two millenia being nothing more than a sort of limping along, bereft of culture and value. That would be an unlikely periodization. Easier to study for the brevity. No, no. It would be much later. Post the Unification of the East? The aftermath of the fall of the Fluvial Republics? The Seventh Hessian War? The refounding of the Symvoulio in the fifteenth century? No matter. Whatever arbitrary line the professor was drawing, it still left heaps of unstructured time behind it.

“I believe, and not without some cause,” he said, leaning back in the chair. A horrible thing, all hard wooden slats that,if they weren’t digging into his back were creaking and groaning in a most alarming way. Any day now, any hour, the thing would give way and he’d be sprawled upon the flow in an undignified manner, or else transfixed by the jagged remain of the slats. Where he particularly unlucky, it would happen at this very moment, and Miss Knives would have considerable call to laugh. Or run screaming from the room. Both were fine options. He leaned forward. Best not to risk it. “That we can cover at least some of that subject matter within an applied context. That is to say, the history of magic will concern us greatly. However, if you are wishing to avoid tedious lists of unremarkable Anaxi diarchs, a recitation of the supposedly precise dates of ancient battles which may, or may not, have happened, then you are well in the clear.” He gave what he hoped to be a sly and conspiratorial smile. “And if you are worried about a lot of meaningless morality tales, hagiographies, and just-so stories then I can assure you in the strongest possible terms that these will not be making even a fleeting appearance.”

History was a fascinating subject, provided it wasn’t taught by history professors. Odd that. Then again, the polymorphously perverse nature of the world probably demanded it. Some sort of obscure cosmic balance was no doubt at play.

“I’ll have a word with your tedious professor. I assume they are monstrously tedious? Mine always were.”

He shuffled some papers upon the desk for no particular reason, other than it seemed brisk and business-like. “Assuming I can get this done, and the removal of any other academic parasites you would care to name, how soon can you begin? A week from the 11th? That is to say the second 11th? Perhaps in the middle of the afternoon?” It would give him time to prepare, to unwork Miss Knives’ schedule, and brush up on dueling theory. “Oh, and one more thing. It would be good if you had neither breakfast nor lunch upon that day. Variables, you understand.”

[Cerise Vauquelin]

Umberto's Office, Brunnhold
Bethas 09, 2720 - Before Noon

Mr. Bassington-Smythe leaned back in his chair, and it complained as if it would at any moment fall to pieces. Cerise raised her eyebrows, wondering if it would hold. That would certainly be an interesting twist to this initial meeting, and perhaps rather inauspicious. Funny, though, she had to admit. She didn't know if she could keep herself from laughing if the thing collapsed with the academic still in it. She could certainly try, but had doubts about her ability to succeed.

Perhaps he saw it on her face, or in her mind. He sat forward again as he continued to speak. There was a moment when she frowned, opening as he did with the promise that the same material would be covered in the span of this arrangement. Cerise wasn't opposed to it, in theory, but it made her pause and frown. The frown eased into another one of her thin, pleased grins as he continued. Either she was more fortunate than she would ever have dreamed, or there was a catch here.

"That is excellent news," she allowed with an incline of her head that sent some of her hair tumbling riotously around her. She folded her hands sharply against her lap, pleased. History was a subject she could enjoy; the recitation of dates and genealogies of long-dead politicians was not. She had more interesting books on the topic than she had ever had enjoyable classes, something that had never ceased to prove both true and baffling.

To hear another academic, even a mere visiting lecturer, declare all of his professors "monstrously tedious" was both amusing and terribly strange. One of her eyebrows pulled upwards, though the other refused to follow. The teenager couldn't help but wonder if there wasn't some sort of ploy to ingratiate himself in her favor. Cerise peered at him as he began to shuffle the papers on his desk. No, he really didn't seem the sort. Were he capable of such calculation, he would likely be in a much better office. Or at least have a chair that didn't seem as if it were threatening to give up the ghost if he relied upon it too much.

"The second—yes, I believe so." She frowned again, sorting through her calendar in her head. The second 11th would be the 21st, or so she assumed. She was not so occupied that this was beyond reason; Cerise nodded again, more decisively. She would have time, depending on the precise hour, to feed Sish, to eat herself—

Or, not. The grey of her eyes narrowed. Neither breakfast nor lunch. Well, she likely would have skipped the former at least—that was her habit. It was not the instruction that made her frown sharpen and her eyebrows draw together in her pale, narrow face. She simply did not understand the purpose of doing so.

"I do not understand, at all. However," she said, and held up a hand as if to warn off any explanation, "that's fine. Duly noted. Should I come here to your... office?" Cerise hesitated to call this closet of a room anything so grand as "office", but that is at least nominally what it was.

[Umberto Bassington-Smythe]

Brunnhold - Umberto's Office

The Ninth of Bethas, 2720, the forenoon

M

iss Knives did not understand. He could hardly blame her for that. Were he pressed, really pressed upon it, he could not state the exact reasons why his methods seemed to work best on an empty stomach, but data were all correlated in any number of charts. That alone should be enough to convince a flashing intellect like the Vauquelin girl. Though, if she insisted upon downing a lunch, there was a two in three chance that she would get to enjoy it again, making its transit ever upward. It was a flaw. All systems had flaws, but this one was particularly bothersome. Also expensive, if you found yourself regularly consuming a second lunch.

The griping of the guts was not inevitable, but it was common enough that it seemed best to take reasonable steps to avoid it. Bright young ladies were, in his experience, not keen upon ruining their clothes and persons in quite so public a manner. Come to think of it, that observation really would apply quite generally. A fine axiom. One to remember.

“I do warn you, miss, that this will not all be fun and games and lively destruction of target dummies and hideously tacky lamps wished upon us all by ancient great-grandmothers.” They really had been horrific; like something out of a deep, pastel, netherworld. A hellish place where nightmares dressed up in twee little costumes and doomed unsuspecting young fellows to interminable tea parties. They were supposedly valuable. He’d tried to sell them oto Uncle Gian, always on the sniff for a good antique. Bardo my boy. Gian always called him that, the old Riverword form of his name. An affection. Another antiquity. They may be of impressive provenance, vanishingly rare, and highly collectable, but I will not have something that looks as though it will whelp a litter of doilies at every opportunity cluttering up my warehouse. I do have some standards.

So, the horrible lamps had met a fitting end as objects of magical experimentation. The shards were still around somewhere.

“Though, should you have any of those, I can assure you that you will find their destruction most cathartic.” Cathartic, yes, but only marginally useful.

“As to the place of our meeting. Shall we say the dueling grounds?” Damn. He should have suggested the misty hour of dawn. That would have been more appropriate. “I assume you are required to insult me, and that I must take grievous offence? Gloves slapped about and cries of ‘you rapscallion’? I am afraid I have no second to arrange matters.” Not unless he was to make use of his fractious valet or his medical cousin. “So, it shall be me alone that you shall meet upon the field of honor.”

[Cerise Vauquelin]

Umberto's Office, Brunnhold University
Bethas 09, 2720 - Before Noon

That was a very specific example, the lamps. The look Cerise gave Mr. Bassington-Smythe was largely one of skepticism, liberally laced with judgement. A comfortable sort of expression on her face, that she was well used to leveraging. Especially at lecturers, truth be to tell.

On top of it Cerise bristled, mildly insulted by the insinuation that dueling was a game to her. A sport, yes. A game, though? It was certainly not that, not in the least bit. She waved her hand with a dismissive kind of growl. She did spare half of a thin smile, at the end. For catharsis.

”Nothing like that I’m afraid, sir. However, I must warn you, I take my sport very seriously.” Her hands were settled on the arms of her borrowed chair, and she leaned back with as much of an easy, arrogant slouch as any young woman could really manage. The bright glint of her eyes fixed on his beaky face; there was still a smile on her mouth, but it wasn’t particularly kind.

She waited while rambled on a bit about the place of their meeting. Rolled her eyes, not even bothering to disguise the expression. He was, after all, only a visiting lecturer. And if her attitude was off-putting enough to call an end to this entire arrangement, well, she would be no worse off than she had been that morning. He needed research assistance; her dueling had been going quite well without this potential improvement. Oh, she was interested, rather more keenly than it seemed from her demeanor. But if she had learned anything, it was that one should never appear to want anything more than the person across from them. It only gave them the advantage.

”You do realize we are discussing the sport, sir?” Social dueling and sport dueling were different—only an idiot thought they were the same. Or an ignoramus, which was an acceptable enough thing to be on this subject provided one was not an employee of the very school the team played for. The Lawn then, on the twenty-first. Cerise thought he would be easy enough to pick out that there was no point in being more specific than that.

”But as you won’t be my opponent, I suppose I can insult you all you wish.” Cerise grinned.

[Umberto Bassington-Smythe]

Brunnhold -Umberto's Office

The Ninth of Bethas, 2720, the forenoon

S

erious? Of course she was serious. In the practices of her sport, in the carriage of her head, in her hard and determined expressions. Seriousness had arrived in his office clothed all in green and skepticism and disdain were crouched at her heels. What curse had fallen upon his head that caused him to be surrounded by the serious-minded? His valet has all the humor of a toothache and if Miss Knives here were any more serious, she would probably sprain something.

That would not do. Well, not before he’s made considerably more observations. A damaged subject so early, before even the experiments began, well, that would be a disaster. He’d had enough of those all on his own.

“Of course you are serious in your sport, Miss.” He gave a thin, antiseptic sort of smile. “Just as I am serious about my research. And I am serious, Miss. Deadly so. But I find a little levity helps maintain perspective, allows me to recover from my mistakes.” Receive notices of rejection with something approaching philosophy. Even of the soulless minions of orthodoxy were, as was almost always the case, quite wrong. “I do not wholly trust those who cannot laugh, especially at themselves.” Sport. Yes, and here approached a useful analogy, strolling alone the garden path of discourse. “Think of it like stretching. A proper limbering up helps prevent injury. A proper laugh helps prevent hubris.” Well, that was the theory at least. He was not quite sure it worked so well in practice.

“I am,” he said, scribbling a few more notes in the margin of his notes, “fully aware that you are referring to the sport, as it is currently constituted. With all the trappings of fair play, courtesy, and so forth that we pretend mask its rather bloodier origins.” And now, an idea, and a devious one at that. “The practices are, of course, quite ancient, stretching back back, into the pre-modern period. Traditions of astonishing antiquity. Isn’t that interested, Miss Vauquelin? Interesting, and indeed instructive enough, that a thorough survey of archaic dueling methods of the pre-Anaxi Arovan societies would more than satisfy the requirements for your historical studies. Survey first, literature review, a brief report on what you perceive to be the most reliable sources. Primary sources.” He tapped the notes again, then scribbled a few more. “Do you read Old Estuan? The local dialects I mean? If not, I can recommend some working grammars if you wish to puzzle your way through. Translations will, of course, be acceptable.”

The resultant papers would make more interesting reading. Ancient dueling practices, their socio-political context, their embodiment of values considered long dead, were a field about which he was rather vague. Well then, it appeared he would have reading to do as well.

“But all that can come after your demonstrations. Targets to begin with, I think. If that is acceptable. I should like to keep the variables in the flow of magic to be as controlled as they can be.” Another notebook made its appearance, wine-dark leather and rather battered. His day book. A few flips of the pages and he located the date. “The seventeenth hour. The Lawn of Practical Application. That shall be the place and time of our meeting. It should prove most interesting.”

[Cerise Vauquelin]

Umberto's Office, Brunnhold University
Bethas 09, 2720 - Before Noon

Deadly so, he said; Cerise found it hard to picture him anywhere adjacent to anything truly deadly or dangerous. To one's career, perhaps. But all that soft clairvoyant mona didn't exactly put one in mind of physical harm. They didn't even have clairvoyant duelists on the team except rarely, for Lady's sake. And at the varsity level there was only so much risk one really took on. Certainly none of it fatal, outside of rare accident.

Cerise had the distinct impression that Mr. Bassington-Smythe thought her humorless, rather than himself unfunny. Well far be it from her to break him of such an illusion, if that was what he wanted to labor under. She hadn't been much of a laugh herself, she supposed, for the duration of this meeting. She wasn't much of a laugh to anyone, most of the time. Not these days. Cerise shifted in her chair.

"I shall brush up on my comedy routine before the twenty-first then," she put in dryly. "I'm sure I know a few knock-knock jokes. For the prevention of hubris." She grinned.

Mr. Bassington-Smythe started writing more notes to himself as he carried on. Cerise frowned, and bit her tongue on an annoyed protest. They masked nothing; it was simply different. But he was still talking, and she was worried that he might prove the type to repeat himself if interrupted. She choked it back. Similarly she choked on a comment on just how interesting such "astonishing antiquity" was. Eventually she understood where he was going with it, and she was only a little irritated at the idea of writing a report. She didn't mind the work itself; if it got her out of the lecture, she would write him all the reports he wanted.

"I can muddle through with translations." Old Estuan! What did he think she studied, that this would be of any value? Did he think it was standard course material? What a strange, baffling person this was. At least she would only have to write this thing after a more practical demonstration. At the suggestion of targets, she nodded; that seemed fair enough. She hadn't the faintest idea what they would be doing with said targets, of course, but she was looking forward to that far more than any report-writing.

Although, it did at least sound interesting. She supposed. Not entirely without merit.

Yet another notebook appeared, as if he had invested in stock at a bookbinder's and needed to ensure it did well. "The seventeenth hour it is then, on the Lawn." Speaking of the hour; Cerise looked up. She hadn't the faintest idea how long she'd been sitting in this broom closet-turned-office, but she had a rather demanding and beloved reptile to feed. The clock told her it was about that time. Without being bid Cerise rose to her feet. She, at least, was done with this conversation.

"Was there anything else you needed of me, sir...?" She asked the question, but it was clear from the way she was already halfway turned to leave that she expected no such thing.