Difference between revisions of "Logs:Study Time"

Records Room, High Reaches Weyr(#367RJs)

Books. Scrolls. Bound hides. Maps. If it's a record pertaining to the Weyr, it's likely to be in this roughly oval room with its floor-to-ceiling cherrywood shelves, its multitude of slots for scrolls, and its wide drawers for materials that shouldn't be rolled up or folded. A scribe is usually on duty at the tall desk up front with its good view of the room, and is able to help visitors find what they're looking for via the big bound index on its rotating stand. Past the desk, several tables stand in neat rows for note-taking, each stocked with glowbaskets, scrap hide, paper and pencils. Additional lighting is provided by a many-armed wrought-iron light fixture, its glows gleaming through luxurious glass containers in fluted shapes instead of baskets.

To one side of the room, a gap between two sets of shelves outlines where another set once stood, now replaced by a tapestry-covered aperture. Peeking behind the tapestry reveals another cavern, this one likewise full of shelves, but occupied by only a few boxes of older records and a somewhat musty air of disuse. As well, two narrow but solid doors are locked when the room is unattended and a discreet staircase provides direct access from the Weyrleaders' weyrs.

If there was ever any doubt that he was as serious as he let on, if not moreso, about their studying together, his arrival in the barracks after dinner to pick her up for their first session should have banished it all. E'sren takes with him a few supplies, some extra in case she needs anything, and carries them in a small bag through the tunnels to the records room. He talks to her along the way, talks to her about his day, even though she shared most of it, about what kinds of things they should study. Once they arrive, they claim a table out of the way of anyone who might think they also need something from the records room at night time and it's there they sit hunched over their books and supplies.

While Sabella didn't likely think that E'sren wasn't serious, there's definitely some surprise when he basically collects her from the barracks after dinner. It's still raining hard out there so she brought her umbrella and wore some ugly poncho thing over her clothes. Already soaked one set today, thanks. That thing is hanging by the door to the records, dripping dry out of the way. She's slipped into the chair across from him, her hand tentatively touching one of the books on history of the local regions. It's one thing to do this alone and a completely different matter to be doing it with someone else, exposing your own ignorance. But she's brave or trying to be. "Alright, where do you want to start?"

His umbrella is leaned up against the wall over there, his jacket hung next to her poncho. He's smoothing his hand over his short crop of hair to either rub the rain into his scalp or move it around to dry faster, whichever happens. Once they're both settled in their seats, he starts emptying that bag, setting book atop book and laying out some parchment and pens. She might notice the parchment is pre-lined somehow. "I was thinking," he replies while he works, "about stuff I'm bad at. I wanna work on math and grammar." He pulls a rolled up ball of cloth from the bag as well, unwraps it to reveal some carrot sticks and a bread roll, a mouthful of which he's chewing on already so soon after. "And I was thinking I could help you with your penmanship."

Yeah, she notices those lines already pressed into the paper. Her eyes flicker across them and move quickly over to E'sren once more, leaning her forearm onto the surface of the table. Her curls are drying, coiling up tightly with a lot of bounce tonight. "I can help you with the math." Sabs replies almost right away, reaching across for a pen and taking one of the slips of paper. "What do you have trouble with?" She taps the untensil against her lips and smiles sheepishly. "Unfortunately I'm going to need help with the grammar too. I haven't had to do a lot formal writing, it wasn't a focus."

"Then I can help you with yours, you can help me with mine, and we can help each other on the other stuff. It'll be like the blind leading the blind, it'll be fun." He too takes a slip of paper and a pen, making his roll disappear with another bite and rubbing his fingertips together to rid them of crumbs. Once he can talk again he says, "Okay. So maybe if I write the alphabet out here, letter by letter, you could use this as a practice page, and then if you made up some math problems I could try and solve 'em. Or." He holds up one of those books. "We read from the book." It's a book telling the very long, very complicated story of all grammatical syntax.

"And Quinlys can be all 'How come E'sren and Sabella both don't know the difference between a comma and an apostrophe? Why are they both mixing up the different forms of there, they're, their in the same instances?' And we'll just stand there and smile like brilliant idiots." And here Sabella does smile, teasing and impish. She's following his suggestion though and beginning to write out a series of simple math problems out on the paper. When he lifts that book up she reaches across and puts her hand onto his, forcing it back down onto the table. "Oh, I think we'll save that for some late night reading down the road. You know, when I'm having trouble sleeping." Or maybe she'll use it as a stepping stool, that's how excited she looks to crack that sucker over.

When a mommy comma and a daddy comma love each other very much. He puts the book down obediently, laughs at the thought of them, the brilliant idiots. "She'd be impressed. We went down the road less travelled. Paved our own way." He smiles lopsidedly, fond of their little jokes, but bends to the task of the alphabet, scrawling each letter, lower and upper cases all, with meticulous care. "It's crazy to me that Ahruth hasn't tried that hunting for himself thing that seems so in right now with all the other dragons. I'm glad he's staying away, don't get me wrong, I'd have a heart attack. But still."

"That's a great way of putting it. We should defend all of our actions with it. We're innovators." Sabs jokes, able to continue with the joking even as she puts those formulas down. They range from simple addition and subtraction, multiplication and division. Then there's a weird one that looks like a quadratic equation or something. Though that probably won't be on their test, right? "I'm glad that Ghislaith hasn't either. I'm perfectly fine her ripping the meat off the carcass though. It's keeping my clothes much cleaner. I've lost so many shirts. I can't believe how fast she's grown, it seems to be slowing a little. Right?"

A grin for any joke. This one's no different. "Yeah, the ripping is fine. Blood on his face I could do without but I better get used to it... Yeah, now that you mention it. It does seem a little slower. Like now that we have that one less thing to worry about, I have more time to think about everything. And to really see him grow. It's crazy." Which he already said, but it bears repeating. "I'm gonna put some short sentences for you to copy too," he lets her know, just in case. Once the alphabet pages are done he sets them aside and moves onto a new, blank sheet of paper. There he begins to write those short sentences, with such classics as 'Stick in the mud.' and 'Do you know the way to the orchard?' and of course, 'My pants are full of legs.'

"Yeah, I'd rather not have to clean all that off of her face. But it's better than washing it out of all of our clothes." Sabs agrees easily enough, finishing the touches on what looks suspiciously like a series of basic geometry problems. When she's done, she pushes the sheet over to him to take when he's ready. And while she said she wasn't going to, she reaches over and grabs The Big Book and turns the pages, flipping through it. Eventually she settles on a page and reads through some of the information. "Okay." She responds in confirmation to his plans. "I've felt a lot more like myself this past seven. It's nice, I was kind of starting to feel weird about that. Like she'd changed me and I'd never... you know." One hand gestures as if he should get that while she absently pulls another sheet to herself and begins to copy some examples from the text.

'Bacon is delicious.', 'Excuse me, you're sitting on my important documents.', and 'Where's the pie?' join the ranks of silly sentences and then he, too, passes over his pages. In the same motion he pulls hers over so he can start looking them over. "Mm, yeah. I know what you mean. I mean for me, it wasn't really a change. I mean he's a lot like me in a lot of ways. I guess they all are to a certain point. But I feel really self conscious still, because he's always watching me and sometimes I can see me from him. It's weird. So I can do the basic stuff, you put some good ones on here." E'sren begins to make some marks on the page, fast at first as he breezes through the simple addition/subtraction, slightly slower when it comes to multiplication and division. And of course, for the more advanced stuff, suddenly a spare sheet of scratch paper comes into play.

What Sabella copies over for her clutchmate to write lacks the same sort of light humor that's coming so easily to him. But they're good examples of obnoxious words that people so often use in the wrong places where they don't belong. Her handwriting is slanted and... the ink drags across the page because it would seem that she's left handed and that's probably part of the problem here. Her eyebrows furrow together in concentration. "Ghislaith is yeah, the same but different. We're both very private and she doesn't talk much. But she feels a lot and she shows me things." She passes that second sheet over to him now and pulls his towards her. The alphabet is there and she begins the painstaking process of copying those letters over as neatly as possible.

"What kinds of things?" E'sren wants to know, and he looks up to receive her reply but notices how she's holding her pen. After a quiet moment of watching her slowly copy the lines of his neat writing using her own ink, he pipes up. "Is that the hand you use to do everything else with? Like when you use a knife or something, which hand do you use?" He's left-handed, see, is the thing, and maybe this is just him identifying a fellow lefty. "Try holding your pen in your other hand."

"She's like.. a building, kind of. With all these open windows that she looks out all the time. She notices the other dragons, their riders. She shows those to me sometimes. Ghislaith likes to watch." Sabella explains, pausing here and there along the way as she tries to find the appropriate words. "What?" There's confusion spelled across her face for that and she glances down. "This is my writing hand." Like that explains everything, it's not her doing things hand. She lifts her other, the left one. "I draw with this one." But since this isn't argument time, she switches the pen from one to the other and begins to copy again. There's still a bit of concentration and a lot of slowness, but there's dragging.

It's possible that E'sren doesn't know what a person is supposed to look like when they're using their right writing hand, especially if that person is kind of getting the hang of the whole writing thing and would look a little new at it either way. But he does note the little changes, and after another quiet moment spent watching on, he decides this must be some kind of improvement. Maybe at least she's more comfortable. He looks over at the drawled, slanty words she wrote down for him and smiles. "Ahruth doesn't really watch. He's too crazy. I don't think he sits still long enough. Man, I can't wait to see what he can do in the sky." This grin is quiet, inspired, hopeful, and he tilts it down with his focus so he can continue to chip away at those math problems.

She does seem to be more comfortable at least and maybe after a time, there'll be less of that forceful concentrated look on her face. "I've noticed. He's very high energy." Sabs comments when she glances over to him again, her smile lopsidedly amused. She's close to the end of the alphabet now and soon finishes it. Then it's for the next piece of paper. Her green eyes scan it and she begins to laugh quietly, toned down to not disturb anyone else that might be there. She gives him a look for some of these. Studiously she starts in and she'll work at getting them mostly right. When that's done, she'll begin around two with him. And as the night drags on to curfew time, E'sren can expect her return sentences to get worse and worse. Like funny worse. Insanely funny worse. Over the top. When they leave, they pack it all up together and depart with just the puddle from their clothes marking that they'd even been there.