Who: Mina Murray & Open. Where: Richard Riordan Central Library. When: June 22, early evening. What: About to leave the building. Rating: TBD. Status: Incomplete.
Ideally, the job she would have applied for would involve more excitement than cataloguing dusty volumes or organising reading groups for the illiterate American youth. However, she didn’t have the references or the resources from the British government anymore. Her contact with the MI-5 had been severed by being a continent and several decades in the future away from home.
Here she assumed the time machines had been all lost or malfunctioning! As soon she found a way to return home, there would be a long report testifying the falsehood for His Majesty.
Mina sighed, soundlessly, and finished her rounds in The Art, Music, & Recreation Department. The music bookshelves brought an unwanted nostalgia to her from the times she was a schoolmistress. Times she didn’t miss and was optimist that she hadn’t had to renew that service. That hadn’t even a life she wanted, inside, she had always craved for another lifestyle.
This… nostalgia always made her tighten her scarf a little more. She had sold her old clothes, exchanging for a modern pair before her job interview. All but her long, red scarf; well-kept era costumes, the clerk labelled her wardrobe as. She supposed Orlando had a point getting used to the fickle world of fashion.
Mina would live for a long, long time. And not again, she would return to be a schoolmistress again. She had grown too fond scolding grown-up lads to come back to the normal sized children.
Not that would be useful, she thought. Not with this sudden epidemic that stole our voices. Laryngitis, they in the radio, but since when that didn’t allow people to write down their thoughts?
Mina had wanted to research on that; her self-teaching to use that strange typewriter they called a “computer” (and reminded her to the technology she had seen in her voyages with Allan across the world) had been interrupted and there was nothing else to do. What force could steal communication from them and for what reasons? Divided, they would fall? That would be. She had prayed it wouldn’t be the Martians again. Hyde’s sacrifice would have been enough to stop them. The inability to speak had her concerned; it was deepening the sensation of impotence in many. She could see this change around her. Good Heavens. To what end is this?
Blimey! Nine o’clock already? Mina stared at the wall clock and hurried to reach the “escalator” and pick up her purse and coat. On her way out, she waved farewell to the other volunteers. Most of them were already gone; the library had closed an hour ago to public. She slowed down when she was on the main hall, admiring the imitation of Egyptian designs in the architecture. That had reminded her to certain vaults of the Museum Annexe. Nostalgia again; the kind to put a smile on your lips for those memories with her first League were her fondest since Lucy’s illness.