cyclone "cy" kapur. (synergies) wrote in emillion, @ 2013-08-02 14:29:00 |
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Entry tags: | !complete, !log, cyclone kapur, guy lenard |
salagadoola mechicka boola bibbidi-bobbidi-boo.
Who: Cyclone Kapur & Guy Lenard
What: Putting her consummate personal assistant experience to use in cleaning her mentor's office, in exchange for some training.
Where: Guy's offices at the Tower.
When: Recently, idk.
Rating: G/PG. She doesn't even swear this time!
Status: Complete.
Keep busy, Rashmi had always told her – it was one of the founding tenets of Cyclone’s entire personality. Her mother had always trended towards housework, cleaning, non-stop cooking, tinkering with the delicate shards of magicite on their shelves, and browbeating the crowd of children milling on the Kapurs’ doorstep. Without an entire neighbourhood of youths to fuss and mother, however, Cy would simply have to settle for Guy Lenard. Cormac was set for the day – in fact, he’d been spending more and more time away from her, and for a moment she wondered what was keeping him so busy, before she brushed the thought aside – and Cy needed to do something to take her mind off decaying flesh peeling back from scalps, and the rancid smell of rot that she couldn’t scrub out from that one pair of field clothes. No matter the profit she’d made from those last-minute sales, perhaps trekking out to the caves had been a mistake. Regardless. Cleaning and reorganising her mentor’s office was a mythic labour well within her capabilities. So the girl wound her way through the Mages Tower, moving like a Seeker Bat, muscle memory taking her down the sixth floor. And with that, she felt a pang of long-repressed homesickness; Cy used to live on this floor with the other synergists for years. She could recognise that burn mark on the door, and the chipped stone at the second turning before she reached – G. Lenard. She knocked. Guy Lenard was casually leaning out the open tower window, cigarette dangling in his mouth, contemplating the profound nature of the universe or something quite like it, when the knocking at the door came. Right, his appointment. With one last, quick drag of his cigarette, he flicked the remainder of his bad habit out into the afternoon breeze, as if there weren’t further testaments to his vice strewn about the entire room, makeshift “ashtrays” (a can or a cup or something bowl-shaped and metallic that sufficed in a pinch) settled between the other clutter. Guy never considered himself as an intrinsically messy person, of course, but the utterly mundane details of his daily life did not easily lend themselves to being present at the tower often. Things in his office simply had a habit of piling up in his absence then, forgotten or discarded. Opening the window had been an attempt at airing the room out a bit. It was notably dusty, after all, and everything smelled like cloying smoke and old stacks of papers. Guy moved across the room in a zigzag of motion, shuffling a stack of ledgers here and nudging an empty can with his boot over there. The desk was piled with paperwork in some vague semblance of chronological organizing (oldest was on the bottom), several crates of gutted machinery and wires were stacked toward the wall, the bookshelf was overrun with papers and trinkets and things which didn’t inherently belong on a shelf designated for books. The details of things that required sorting unfortunately went on and on. He’d tried to tidy up at least a bit, but the state of the room was very obvious. So it was with a final shrug that Guy wandered to the door and answered with what was his best hopeful smile. “Right who I wanted to see,” he said cheerfully, gesturing her inside. “Come in and take a look.” As soon as the door opened and Guy stepped aside, allowing the younger synergist to see the quarters, her reactions played out across her face in a tangible ripple. First: horror. Then: delight. “I was about to ask ‘what’s the damage’, but this is. Well. Damaged.” Straight to business, then. She couldn’t hide the irrepressible grin that spread like wildfire – observing the teetering piles of books and papers and trinkets and various stacked boxes, Cy lit up as if it were Faram’s Mass. “No offense, mate, but it’s like you just handed me keys to a candy shop. I’ve had Hier in mostly-working-order for years, it’s been forever since I’ve been able to get at an office this cluttered...” She pivoted on one foot, spinning in a slow, ponderous circle as she sought to take in a 360° view of the place. Her mind was already categorising what was visible at a glance, mapping out the corners of the room, its size and capacity. “We’ll need some trash bags and some empty crates.” Guy wandered back in the room after her, his expression turned to relief. He would’ve been a poor mentor, after all, if he’d somehow unintentionally managed to traumatize her with his ailing organisational skills. Kicking a stack of books on the floor, he reached down to the box of trash bags he’d bought earlier in the week. “Right to business then,” he grinned, removing the first of many bags to be used and handing it to her generously. “There’s a few usable crates over near the wall there.” He shrugged one shoulder over to where they were stacked. Tapping the box against his bearded chin in thought, Guy appraised the room as Cy did, following her gaze, moving from foot to foot as if her excitement and energy was beginning to infect him. But for a synergist such as Guy, it was perhaps a hazard of the work that he was always full of energy, always seeking forward momentum, as if Haste was forever lodged somewhere in his spine, nudging him onward. “Now what do you need me for?” “To tell me what’s what. What can be thrown out, what not. If you’re a hoarder – which it seems very likely you might be – then you’re gonna want to say ‘keep’ to everything, but that’s what I’m here for. To be the hardarse saying no.” Cy rustled the bags, snapping one loose and unfolding it as if she were gearing up for war. They were armed, they were ready. And the innate chatterbox kept talking as she traipsed around the outskirts of the room, sizing up the place that would be their battlefield. “I mean, helping you out is the least I could to, to be honest. Repaying the favour for some of our magick lessons. And it’s a bit of a relief seeing the office like this, too, ‘cos it proves that you’re only human.” When Cy’s smile came this time, it tried to be reassuring: she didn’t judge. She never judged. Spend enough years in a clinic, one tended to become shameless. Guy ambled along behind Cy on her curious path around the room. “Not hoarding exactly,” he said sheepishly, “just your typical absent-mindedness.” Of course, he hadn’t even thought about what to keep and what to discard, and his eyes grew a bit wide when Cy wandered over to each stack of clutter. Running a hand through his hair, Guy returned her smile with one of his own, attempting some manner of humbleness. “I suppose we could rid ourselves of some of these old papers and other garbage?” Reaching out for an empty take-out container from an age long past, Guy busied himself with a trash bag of his own. It was an attempt to seem as amiable and compliant with her efforts as he could. In truth, there was a strong reasoning behind employing the younger synergist for this task, as was proven by the hazardous state of the room around them. He really had no idea what he was doing, and this was why, perhaps, he was much better suited to life outside the tower. Cyclone, meanwhile, was an efficient little storm of productivity. She set about the room with a fury, scooping trash into the bag and shovelling piles of paper into combined stacks. “Are you here often?” she asked mildly, sweeping her finger across the side of the desk. It came away dusty, and she surreptitiously wiped it away on the side of her trousers. “It reminds me a bit of Cormac’s. All you brilliant mages are all alike in some ways,” she said, pausing once she reached some sort of magicite contraption teetering on a chair. Guy tried his best to keep pace with her (as only a fellow synergist can likely do), scooping up as much loose trash as he could find. As Cy had quickly taken the dominant lead in this cleaning business, it meant he had only to hover around enthusiastically and attempt to appear more useful than he really was. “I’m sure it seems obvious,” he admitted, “but I tend to travel and keep on the move.” Once she’d stopped to inspect one of the machines he’d long ago salvaged, Guy hopped over and wrangled the contraption up in both hands. “Nothing terribly brilliant here, unfortunately,” he grinned, “but surely enough clutter. This thing was part of an airship, once. I’ve taken out most of the insides, you see, but at one point I believe it was used for navigation.” He shuffled around in place, looking the room over. “Now where should we put it?” “If you’ve already taken out the insides, do you really need the shell?” She was used to her boss shedding used scraps and equipment like detritus, leaving Cy to scurry in his wake and clean it all up. It had started training her in the art of assessing what was really necessary and what wasn’t. But she always paused to take Guy’s cue if there was doubt, picking up an object to brandish it in front of him with a question mark in her arched eyebrow – he’d then take it from her, and quietly categorise it or set it aside. They moved through the room like this, tackling quadrant by quadrant and steadily working on clearing the space. “In repayment for my services today, I’ll accept a pay cut if we bump up our training a bit,” Cy said, as she started rifling through a nearby drawer. “I’m working my towards Veil, slowly but surely. And I mean, if anything I’ve got Shell and Protect down, so I feel like the next spell can’t be very far off. The principles are the same, or at least that’s what all the books tell me—” She kept up the running chatter as they went, the older synergist tagging along beside her bemused. And their work went on. |