arrival:
blog
(6.17.2007-)
+5:37 p.m.]*
# Excerpt 1-
Gabriel yawns and stares up at the ceiling above him. It’s difficult to fall asleep in a moving vehicle like this when one is not used to that sort of thing. In his case, however, he has spent years on the move, getting rides where he can, and still it becomes difficult to drop off with the continuous dull roar rolling into one's ears.
He thinks back to how little he had going for him at the last train station, however (namely getting paid for his compositions with a coin that belonged to a currency based far away enough that it was completely useless and several dubious looking potatoes), and is glad that something besides busking finally came up even if it does involve an anecdote in his history that he would rather not think about.
Arget.
It’s either Arget, or starvation.
Gabriel grimaces and turns over onto his stomach. The mat between him and the floor is soft, and is just thick enough to cave a bit and prevent him from rolling across the floor and over Thursday, but he likely won’t be getting any sleep in tonight. That is beside the fact, of course, that Krysos has the unexpected vice of snoring. Granted, it isn’t as loud as snoring generally tends to be when coming from a person of a more average size, but the small noise adds to the rest of the small noises to make a torrent of little noise pebbles that collect overtop of Gabriel’s head and eventually bury him in decibels.
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FOUR YEARS PREVIOUSLY
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The archives are a beast. Electronic articles and hard copies of information each can manifest into various sorts of paper cuts, headaches, long hours spent in an attempt to dig up missing information, wild tries at categorising a bit of data that simply does not appear to fit in any of the groups that already exist, vampires…
Well, not vampires, not in the plural sense. Just one.
Gabriel takes on all sorts of jobs along his way to gather enough money to keep living. If it only paid better, it would have been his dream career, being a drifter. He meets all kinds of interesting people, goes from one end of the continent to the other, witnesses things and places that settled folk can only imagine, and yet at the end of the day, here he is playing a temporary clerk in a large underground cavern for a jittery vampire obsessed with keeping a store of up-to-date information. If someone had told Gabriel that this archive housed data on practically every subject possible, the young man would have scoffed at them. It was impossible to get material for everything.
And yet… there was Arget. Gabriel had put on several test runs already just to make sure, entering searches for the most nonsensical, irrelevant information thinkable. And there were always results. Not just one or two that contained some vaguely connected keywords, but pertinent articles, and more than just a few.
It is entirely flabbergasting to think of. So Gabriel tries not to think about it anymore.
For a vampire, the silver-haired Arget is a considerate employer, ensuring there is a comfortable bed available, access to necessary facilities, and most important of all, food. He tends to be reclusive, staying nearby only long enough to communicate necessary instruction and ask how things are progressing. For a scatterbrained bard, Gabriel is surprisingly good at organising incoming records and receives bits of praise for it here and there. Really, he cannot think why no one else wanted to take this job. It’s true, Arget smokes (and heavily, apparently to take his mind off of blood cravings), but after the places Gabriel has already been, this cavern is one of the more fresh-smelling stays he can remember.
It’s also true that the fangs scare him a little. But he has decided it’s a necessary evil. He is getting paid, after all, with room and board, and even if the company is not all too impressive, at least he can say now that he’s worked under a vampire. Certainly not everyone could attest to a claim like that.
Today is a late drag; quite a pile of new material had come through early this morning to stack on top of the articles that have been waiting in the archival queue, and Gabriel has already been working all day, wanting to just get it finished off before he retires to bed. So far, this has translated to working four hours longer than he usually has these past six weeks. He rubs his eyes and blearily peers at the screen, glancing over a snippet discussing common workplace ethical conduct from a point in history, some seven hundred years back or so. Why anyone would care to take this in, Gabriel can’t think, but he files it off anyway.
The next one is a little more puzzling. It appears to be somewhat vague in its classifications, and he can’t figure out whether to file it under Monarchs Gone Insane (34407-76219), or Refreshing Coastal Salads (142905-152763). He contemplates the screen just long enough for his eyes to lose focus in an attempt to tell him he needs to go to bed, then he snaps back to awareness and remembers he still has an article to archive. Well, there is nothing for it. If he can’t figure it out, he will simply have to take it to Arget.
Gabriel pulls out a scrap of paper and jots down the particulars of the article, then browses over it once more to make sure he isn’t missing anything before getting up to look for the vampire.
The underground cavern is filled with shelves and aisles of varying sizes and alignment, put together as efficiently as manageable in such an irregular space, eventually forming concentric circles around the very middle where Arget’s desk sits. Gabriel’s workstation is only a few aisles distant from this, located on one of the three main terminals in the cavern, and consequently it doesn’t require a long walk for him to see that his employer isn’t at his seat just now.
The thought of lurking vampires rises up, and Gabriel tries to suppress it before it starts giving him the heebie jeebies. Those are certainly not what he needs at the moment; besides, he has been treated just fine all this time. There is absolutely no reason to think things have suddenly gone awry in the space of a few hours.
He fails to notice that the paper in his hands is half crumpled by the time he crosses through the desk area and heads into the aisles on the other side of the cavern. Finding Arget should really be as simple as sniffing out the smoke trail, although with the amount of cigarettes he goes through, and even with the odd-looking row of oscillating fans on one end (perfectly and freakishly synchronised in their movements), it’s a wonder the entire cavern isn’t completely hazed over.
The thought comes into Gabriel’s mind that he must have been a blind idiot not to notice something was wrong here, to just merrily walk right into the job without properly thinking it through. His mother would have been ashamed. But the thought isn’t justified, he doesn’t think. Life has been just fine here for over a month already. It’s only the dark atmosphere and the few oddities, the things that look out of place, that are suddenly giving him the creeps. Besides, it’s the wee hours of the morning and everyone knows the imagination works on overdrive when one is more tired than they ought to be.
The paper has started to grow a few little holes close to its edges by now. Gabriel’s fingers continue to work away at loosening up the fibres as he edges farther to the end, farther from the centralised light that eventually fades out into blue-black shadows at the very fringes of the cavern.
They aren’t moving. That’s just a trick of the eyes.
The cigarette smoke is stronger here.
“Sir?” he ventures aloud, glancing about at all sides. “I’ve a… er… I’ve a question…”
And then he spots movement in the periphery of his vision, turning just enough to see Arget standing there, with… red eyes? Glowing red eyes?
Oh, bugger.
He sees the cigarette drop from Arget’s mouth, tumbling forgotten to the floor in a spiral of smoke – an odd thing to notice at such a moment. There isn’t time for much else.
Arget moves so fast.
so the story goes
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(12.03.2006-)
+11:49 p.m.]*
# The story as of December the First-
http://www.freewebs.com/jandalf/savantblithe.htm
so the story goes
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(10.31.2006-)
+7:48 p.m.]*
# Current Dramatis Personae-
It's October 31st. I have only half an idea of what I'm doing.
Sw33t.
The cast as follows:
Phil is a paladin. I'm not sure whether she's going to be an elf or not yet. Also, she is not to speak a single word in the entirety of the book. No one knows whether she's mute or just doesn't bother saying anything. Because of her silence, I'm thinking of making the novel limited third from her perspective. An explanation behind her name can be found by following the link.
Krysos is Phil's conscience. Since he was transferred from his job in Papua New Guinea a few months back, he tends to dress more like Phil instead of the tropical gear (the transfer was due to a difference of opinion between him and his supervisor). Approximately six inches high, Krysos' main duty has fallen to speaking for Phil where he can, since she doesn't really seem to need a conscience. What an embarrassing demotion.
Thursday is the third MC, a boy of about twelve years. Have you ever stared at something for so long, or so hard, that it starts to disappear without really vanishing? Or have you ever looked right at a star and it seems to disappear unless you look just beside it? A part of him is always like this, whether it's one of his hands, a leg, etc., and it's never more than a portion of him. Since most people don't expect to have difficulty seeing other people in this way, they can never quite figure out what it is about Thursday that bothers them so much.
so the story goes
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(10.14.2006-)
+9:08 p.m.]*
# Savant Blithe-
Savant Blithe: NaNoWriMo 2006
so the story goes
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