Exchange of Realities

This week just isn’t good for being impractical. Murphy’s Law as applied to the weekly feature:  between the transitions, the rather scattered topics and the gifts of the players for not following the path that’d give me a clean post, showing you how I used what I discussed this week just isn’t going to work too well.

So I think I’ll just sketch a character instead.

Those who didn’t know her might mistake her for a ghost, as she stalks between her room and the library when she thinks that the hall is empty, a formless silhouette in red silk and gauze. Those who know her better might almost prefer that she be replaced by a haunt. She sits in the library, within a fortress of piled tomes and precariously leaning scrolls; to those who are brave enough to speak to her, she responds in few words, and even those rapidly become more insulting with every misstep her potential conversational companion makes. She doesn’t look up at them to speak—not that they can tell with any certainty which way she’s facing under all the veils—but when they in turn look away, she turns to watch them.

Her room is shelves—one might mistake it for some sort of puzzle. Books, papers, chalkboards covered with sketches and diagrams, all carefully sorted and filed away. One who can manage to avoid being caught reading her materials, or one fortunate enough to be allowed to browse, will see information on the dreams of demons, on transmutations that nobody has imagined because even the most clever know their limits, or just on the generally irritating nature of the world in general and the people around her in particular. Lamps in the corners surrounded by small canisters occasionally spark with lilac or chartreuse flame. Far back in the room beyond the literary labyrinth rest two large, loosely stuffed cushions, both indented with regular use. The indentation in one is smallish, about consistent with her size, but the other is much larger and tends to smell of ashes and something slightly moldy; the wood of the floor around it shows arcing, nearly parallel scratches that curve around the cushion, and scattered around it are the occasional scale-shaped crystal . A small box nearby overflows with burned-out candle stubs, most likely from the single candlestick that rises up from the floor between the two cushions.

 Feel free to make your guesses as to what I’m not telling you about her.