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Post by Noa on Nov 24, 2021 23:40:37 GMT -6
For that particular venture, however, Noa would prefer to conduct his research at a place that was less volatile than the mansion's grounds. Thus far it hadn't given him any trouble this month, but there was also no telling whether their luck would hold. The place was famously capricious, and he was moreover studying one of its own denizens, displaced from its month of origin, so to speak. That seemed to him as if he was inviting trouble to come find him, and while boredom was something he struggled with on a regular basis, he also didn't want to go out of his way to make trouble for himself.
If he came back here, it would be without the Nebuli from now on. There was more work to be done on the nodes he had just acquired, and he had had just about enough of fresh air for the day anyway. He didn't even bother explaining this to his companions; Rhys knew, as only a familiar with a connection to his mind would know, and the Nebuli was by now acclimated to his shifts of whim. It was time to go home. That was all there was to it.
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Post by Noa on Nov 24, 2021 23:57:05 GMT -6
With the whole business of the Nebuli's speech resolved, the thing that drew Noa back to the mansion was simply... restlessness. Wanderlust, perhaps. he had never thought of himself as a wanderer, but then the option had never seemed available. The realities of his condition kept him confined to the property where he grew up.
... Well, that wasn't precisely true. He could have left if he wanted. There was hardly anyone left to stop him, except Rhys, of course, who would have reminded him of his research, and the impending deadline that existed for him -- and for all the members of his family.
But that was just the thing: his research was here. The facilities best suited to it were here. There had been many things lost to the accident that had taken his father, but there was enough here, still, that he would be a fool to leave it all.
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Post by Noa on Nov 24, 2021 23:57:16 GMT -6
Thus, the furthest he could wander afield was a day's travel, and having lived some twenty-odd years, he had seen more or less everything worth seeing within that radius. The mansion was the only thing that really offered any variety, and it occurred to him that he really hadn't seen much in the way of its November offerings. The time he had spent there so far this month had been occupied with the task of teaching the Nebuli to understand Common, so he hadn't had much of a mind for noticing anything else. There hadn't seemed to be much to notice beyond some well kept gardens, but that couldn't have been the extent of it. There was always something strange about the mansion, and the fact that it was so well disguised this time around only served to pique Noa's interest further.
They had to go back there, of course.
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Post by Noa on Nov 24, 2021 23:57:27 GMT -6
Rhys didn't like it, though Noa couldn't really fathom why. He asked, impatiently, when the Faeron made the third entreaty in the space of half an hour that maybe shouldn't they do something else instead? But Rhys would not give him a straight answer, and so Noa simply shrugged it off and ignored him. If he had no reasonable objections to offer, then Noa was simply going to do as he had planned.
The place looked good, a good deal better than it did in many months of the year. The gate as it was now was in good shape, and the gardens that Noa had barely noticed on his previous visits were vivid with flowers. As Noa walked through the gate and onto the path that led from it to the house itself, he inspected the flowering bushes that lined the path.
"Do you recognize these flowers?" Noa said, inclining his head and tapping a finger against his chin.
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Post by Noa on Nov 24, 2021 23:57:37 GMT -6
Rhys, who had been looking warily about as though he expected something dreadful to emerge around the corner at any moment, was brought out of that state by Noa's question. He startled slightly, but not very much; it was hard to surprise him, given the extent of their connection. At Noa's prompting, Rhys peered at the flowers himself, his whiskers extending forward to better assess them. Noa waited, going through his own mental catalogue of plants in the meantime. He wasn't a herbologist, strictly speaking, but he had what he considered a fairly in depth knowledge of plants. An herbal remedy of some sort had been one of his first avenues of research when he began trying to find a cure for himself in earnest. It had yet to bear any sort of useful fruit, and these days he was much more focused on magical research, but the basis of knowledge still remained.
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Post by Noa on Nov 24, 2021 23:57:54 GMT -6
Moreover, he had imparted some of it upon Rhys, in preparation for one of those hare-brained contests that the Faeron so liked to enter. It had been one of his more reasonable requests, since gardening skills might yet be put to some use -- though the point was rendered somewhat moot now that they had an actual gardener working on the premises.
Still, Rhys was at least able to offer an educated second opinion on these matters now. So it wasn't a complete waste of time.
{I don't think I've ever seen anything like this,} Rhys replied. The tone of his voice betrayed his unease, but he had been twitchy all day to no useful end, so Noa simply chose to ignore it.
"It's curious, isn't it? I wonder, if I took some cuttings, would they survive the trip out of the grounds?" Noa mused, lifting a hand to inspect the leaves.
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Post by Noa on Nov 25, 2021 0:23:20 GMT -6
As his fingers brushed against the edge of the leaf, it curled away from him, and the whole bush shook -- Noa blinked, and slowly retracted his hand. If he hadn't known better, it really looked as though the bush had just shuddered.
"Ah," Noa said. A smile spread across his features. "I suppose that answers my question." It didn't really, but something this strange most likely wouldn't survive outside the mansion's grounds; and even if it did, it wasn't liable to retain the properties that made it so interesting. If he were to take a cutting, he half expected it to disintegrate the moment he left the mansion's borders; or else it would turn into a perfectly ordinary flower, and be absolutely no help to him at all.
He was intrigued, however, and reached out his hand again. This time the bush's foliage parted around him, as if it was doing its best to avoid his touch.
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Post by Noa on Nov 25, 2021 0:23:36 GMT -6
It was a little rude of the plant, but also deeply amusing. Apparently even plants with some modicum of intelligence didn't like him. "I should be glad," he remarked to Rhys, "that the plants in our garden don't have so much agency. I might never have gotten anything done if they did."
{... I don't think you would have let something like that stop you,} Rhys said. {Though it might have been more trouble to harvest them.}
"Mmm, I suppose so. Well, I was the one who raised them, so it's the least they can do for me to be obedient." He said it cheerfully, and left the trembling bush alone, making directly for the house.
Rhys continued to scan their surroundings until they were nearly at the door, at which point he seemed to snap back to himself again, with more acute alarm than he had shown before. {You're... going in?}
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Post by Noa on Nov 25, 2021 0:23:46 GMT -6
He didn't sound frantic, but there was a cautious note to the way he asked that made Noa frown. "Yes, I'm going in. Why wouldn't I?" he said. He wasn't quite impatient yet, but if this was more of the useless false start nonsense that Rhys had been doing all day, then he wasn't going to humor it for much longer.
{But -- The doors,} said Rhys. {What if you get locked inside?}
Noa's lips thinned out into a flat line, and for a moment he wanted to say something sharp. He closed his eyes and repressed the impulse, however. It was true that he didn't often set foot inside the mansion itself, owing to the fact that it was an unpredictable place outside of his own control. And while there was always the open avenue of escape if he ran into danger outside the house, once they entered, it would be harder to get out.
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Post by Noa on Nov 25, 2021 0:23:56 GMT -6
That wasn't what Rhys was talking about though. Rhys meant, of course, Noa's specific fear of being locked in.
It wasn't something he liked to think about. In fact, he acknowledged it as little as humanly possible most of the time. It didn't matter. He was a powerful mage -- not as powerful as his parents had been, but certainly stronger than anyone else he had met. He could teleport out of a bind if he wanted to. He had also forced himself to learn how to pick locks until he became deft at it, thinking to conquer that pesky weakness of his. Locks were just locks. They could be picked, they could be broken, and they had absolutely no right to hold any power over him.
And yet, he still didn't like to be in rooms with the door closed, if he could help it. Not that he always could.
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Post by Noa on Nov 25, 2021 0:24:26 GMT -6
When he was working on research, he had to place a locked door between him and the rest of the world. But that was why he dedicated an entire section of the house to it, so that it was not merely himself in a single locked room, but the blocked-off basement or tower. That made it easier -- that it was not a single enclosed space. Even then, he preferred to lose himself in the work as quickly as possible, to stave away any lingering thoughts about it.
But now he shook his head impatiently. "It doesn't matter," he said. And it didn't. He could enter this thrice-cursed house if he wanted to, and if the gardens would offer him nothing more than these mild curiosities, then he could only imagine that the worthwhile things lay deeper inside. There was no point to wasting his time out here if that was the case.
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Post by Noa on Nov 25, 2021 0:43:14 GMT -6
Almost angrily, he wrenched the door open. It moved smoothly on its hinges, even as Rhys let out a sharp cry. {Wait--} the Faeron began, but Noa strode briskly in, his movements so sharp that Rhys was dislodged from his usual place on Noa's shoulder. His wings beat frantically for a moment as he righted himself in the air, before chasing after Noa. {Noa, wait! Don't go alone!}
"If you're going to follow, keep up," Noa said, without sparing a glance at Rhys. His familiar was hardly a helpless creature; after all, Noa had trained Rhys himself, and he didn't tolerate creatures that were useless.
He had meant to march right into the heart of the house, but his advance was halted as he saw the room that he had emerged into after entering the mansion. There was no entryway, no foyer area as one might have expected to find in a house like this.
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Post by Noa on Nov 25, 2021 0:43:24 GMT -6
What greeted him instead was a stark and sterile room, lit with bright fluorescent lights -- the walls so white that they almost seemed to glow in the lifeless light. Tables were placed at regular intervals, occupying the center of the room. The rest of the space was framed by bookshelves, wrought in the same stark style as the rest of the room.
Noa came to a stop, taking in the room with wide eyes. Then he smiled. "You see," he said to Rhys, "it was worth it, coming here." Idly he drew up alongside one of the tables, glancing over the sheaf of notes scattered across its surface. A cursory scan of the headings told him that these were papers on chemistry. A book lay to one side, with more information on the same. At another table were more notes, this time on physics, along with a small model of some sort whose purpose he didn't know.
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Post by Noa on Nov 25, 2021 0:43:49 GMT -6
But he wasn't terribly interested in it either. Physics was well and good, and he had had an adequate education in basic science when he had been younger, but the focus of his family had never been scientific pursuits. That was best left to the number crunchers who chose to work in the labs; his mother had even said as much when she had still been alive. Chemistry and biology were of more meaningful interest to them, but neither had managed to produce a viable cure. And something about the fact that his family had historically chosen to devote their efforts to magic told Noa that the most likely avenue to a breakthrough was through spells. The illness might even have been of a magical nature to begin with, more a curse than a conventional ailment.
But that didn't mean this room had nothing of use to him. He left the tables and began to browse the bookshelves instead.
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Post by Noa on Nov 25, 2021 0:44:19 GMT -6
There had been a variety of topics represented already, and he refused to believe there wasn't anything that covered information of a more magical nature here, not with how many books there were on the shelves. He skimmed his fingers along the spines of books, reading them as he went. Here was a book on botany; there a history of some topic he didn't care about. Ah, what was this? His hand stopped on one book with an interestingly tooled binding, and he pulled it from the shelf with a slight frown. The title was written in runes, but not in any language he knew -- and he had made a point of studying them, since a lot of older magical texts were written in lost, arcane languages. He had hardly ever found anything useful to his magical research written in Common, after he had mastered the basic principles of spellcasting and energy channeling.
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