She was a robot? She was a ROBOT? (mithrigil) wrote in roads_diverged, @ 2008-05-12 22:04:00 |
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Entry tags: | ivalice, mithrigil:ivalice, theme 05: lack of powers/real world |
Ivalice, Meta -- lack of powers, "Rose Parlor"
Title: Rose Parlor
Author: Mithrigil
Fandom: Ivalice -- This one's all Vagrant Story
Characters: Ashley, Heidricht, Callo, Sydney, Samantha
Rating: PG
Warnings: None!
Theme: lack of powers/real world -- Vassar College, 1965.
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Rose Parlor
vagrant story
Mithrigil Galtirglin
MONDAY MARCH 15, 1965
2:46 PM EST
“A charismatic teacher is hardly cause for alarm, Dr. Heidricht.”
Smoking isn’t allowed on the grounds, but of course the Dean can get away with it. In fact, she offers him one. Ashley refuses with a toss of his head, no more. There’s a smear of purplish-brown lipstick around the stem of Heidricht’s—she smokes hers in a holder, as if she’s unaware that thirty years have passed since Prohibition. She was probably a teenager back then, come to think of it. When the smoke she exhales crosses over the brass, it matches her blouse. Nothing at Vassar College is black—the darkest brown is brick, the nearest grey is the still paler than asphalt, and the parlor Heidricht is meeting him in? Pinker than a punctured lung.
“Our school has been around for nearly a hundred years,” she tells him, tapping the ashes practicedly into the ashtray near her elbow, a foot down. Nothing touches the cherrywood tabletop. “We’ve had as many charismatic teachers, and as many hundred sex-starved girls on the cusp of their own liberation who have preyed upon them like the mantises they are. That’s not my concern, Agent Riot.”
The armchair he’s sitting in has stiff brocade cushions and curled, carved arms and legs like snailshells. His knees prop up too high—he might well be the only man to ever sit in this chair. Or at least the only one of his girth. “So Dr. Losstarot’s charisma—”
“—is the cause of my concern, not the thing itself,” Heidricht finishes for him. “We knew there would be some dissent from the student body when President Blanding retired last spring. It’s not a step back for the college to have a male president again, but we expected the students to think so. We did not expect threats to his position and his person, complete with admonitions from the apocrypha.”
“And you trace this to the religion teacher,” Ashley sighs.
“Ours is a godless campus, Agent Riot.”
“I did notice that your cathedral is outstripped by your library.”
She inhales again, through a corner of her smirk. A hunk of ash falls as directed, shadows the crease of the curtain behind her and splatters in the crystal tray. “One would think that learned women would wish to integrate with men, at least to assert their perceived superiority.” The smoke escapes her on a sigh of her own, short and deep-voiced, she probably has gone through a pack a day since her time in speakeasies.
Ah, that would be her real concern. “So President Bardorba is planning on making the school coeducational, and instead of protesting it with pearls and white gloves, they’re nailing theses to his door.” He crosses his arms, drags his elbows along the curved, varnished wood. “I thought you were proud of your mantises.”
Heidricht throws him a rather dark look, but not a black one. Is Vassar integrated racially? Ashley wonders. “There is a difference between a college for women and a college for ladies,” she says.
He’s tempted to ask which she is.
“You are to observe Dr. Losstarot,” she says. “His schedule and what we know of his social patterns are in the file I already gave you. There are many means by which for you to be surreptitious about it, but you’re already somewhat at a disadvantage. I’ve sent ahead another agent ahead to act as a student, undercover—her details are also in your file—but I’m sure you’re best equipped to tailor this investigation to your own style.”
Another agent. And an undercover one at that. “My style involves working alone.”
“Yes, but I’m disinclined to see you in pearls and white gloves. Which reminds me,” she says, and checks her watch on the non-cigarette-holder hand. “They’ll be serving tea here, soon. You’d best clear out, unless you want your face to be a familiar one.”
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MONDAY MARCH 15, 1965
7:30 PM EST
The billiard hall on the corner of Raymond Avenue is more suited to this amount of smoke than the rose parlor was. There’s something appropriate about going over Losstarot’s file by diner candlelight—and something reassuring, about how there isn’t a girl—and by extension, a student—in sight.
Sydney David Losstarot, D-Div Yale 1964, B.A. Notre Dame 1959. This is his first appointment. He’s young and he looks it, with longer hair than the generals of the British Invasion, pale and pulled back in a ponytail like he’s anticipating a regression to the other British invasion. In the photograph his left arm hangs limply and awkwardly at his side, weighed down with thick metal bracelets—a skim through his personal history cites that he’s an amputee, but doesn’t say why or when. And what a sparse personal history it is, not even managing to provide a place of birth, or anything before high school in some backwater town in Maine. He lives near but not quite on campus, in a townhouse with a tenure-track professor in the new politics and law department, Dr. Hardin.
Turn the page, cover the photograph—listen to the chatter of cues and nets (like bones, really) and look for the waiter. There’s no host, so he seems to be seating someone—
She looks up from under the navy blue net of her Jackie Kennedy hat—what is it with the women these days and revering the past? This isn’t 1940—and locks her eyes firmly onto Ashley’s. A brief wave at the waiter, and she’s sauntering over to his table, somehow a combination of straight and curved.
He lets her sit down. He knows who she is.
“Agent Riot, I presume?”
A busboy comes over, sets down a glass for her with more courtesy than Ashley had gotten, and pours. The ice chirps, almost, the sound filtering through the grey air. Instead of answering, Ashley looks at her—dark hair, not ratted, and she does look young enough to pass for a student if she loses some of the makeup, which she probably will on the job. He can’t see much else beyond the net.
She does wait until the busboy is gone to make a proper introduction. “I’m your partner, Callo Merlose. I’ll be going as Cal on campus.” She offers a hand over the table that he’s not certain what to do with, nor does he care, and so he leaves her hanging.
“When are we starting this?”
Her hand falls to her water glass, which she smiles over the rim of. “I’ll be posing as an admitted student, observing tomorrow’s seminar. Analogs of the Goddess in Marian Catholicism. It’s in Sanders, top floor, the room that connects to the attic. There should be plenty of places for you to hide, if you’re concerned.” She lifts the glass under the netting and sips, then—her lipstick also smudges, rose parlor carpet pink.
He cross-references that with the schedule in the file. “I’m guessing you have enough of background in religion to fake interest?”
“It’s one of my doctorates, actually.” She rotates the water glass a little when she sets it down. “I’ll be curious to see whether my real name’s work comes up in class.”
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TUESDAY MARCH 16, 1965
3:21 PM EST
They call him Dr. Sydney. Or at least this one does, sniffling into a rose-patterned handkerchief just out of the professor’s dead arm’s reach. Dr. Losstarot is sitting juxtaposed to her, at the head of the table and well within the bounds of propriety. From where Ashley is up in the attic itself, he can see the man’s sober, understanding mask. And it does feel like a mask.
“I’m just—so worried,” the girl sniffles—blond and bloused and plaid, with a neckline that’s either provocative or negligent. “I kn—knew that he’d be shipped out but I—”
“He’s prepared for this, Samantha,” Losstarot’s good hand is on the table, or, more accurately, on the pile of books in front of him. He leans only enough forward. “But this is because you don’t trust Romeo, right? You don’t trust that even though he’s gone through all the training, and that he’s strong, that he’ll come back to you?”
—Good god, the man’s voice. How does he make such cruel words sound so kind?
The girl, Samantha, sniffles again, wetly. The afternoon sun catches on an engagement ring, buried in the damp, translucent handkerchief when she raises it to her face. “Dr. Sydney, I—”
“Yes,” he says, and pushes back his chair, gets up and stalks to the window. “If you can accept that about yourself, that’s very mature, Samantha. You knew what you were getting into when you fell in love with him, I’m sure you did—in fact, I’ll bet that part of why you love him so much is that he’s a soldier.” Ashley can see the professor’s blond-framed reflection in the window, a faint and hardened smile smeared across it. “Or, well, that it’s the things you love about him that also made him a Marine. Best, bravest. But you also knew—or should have known—what kind of a world we’re living in. For whatever reason, we’re pretending to war, and you’re in love with a soldier. You could have chosen otherwise, Samantha.”
Her shoulders shake, the legs of her chair creak, enough that Ashley can hear it up here. “I didn’t choose to love him,” she seems almost to choke out.
“Yes, you did,” Losstarot says, glancing over his shoulder—the left one, the heavy one. “Love is a form of faith. A different form than faith that he’ll make it out of there alive, because that’s not in your control at all—but faith, nonetheless.” The sun flares on his bracelets as he turns around again—right up through the vent into Ashley’s eyes. “You can follow him as blindly as you do, or you can trust yourself to survive without him, should he die there. Either way, as in all things, it lies with you and not another to qualify your emotions.”
Samantha shivers—Ashley thinks he might as well. But when the girl raises her eyes, which Ashley can’t see, Losstarot laughs abruptly.
“But it’s all right, Samantha,” he says, and comes closer, sidles into his chair again and props his hand over his books, almost draping. “I will guide you as best I can. After all, If I have seen any perish for want of clothing, or any poor without covering; If his loins have not blessed me, and if he were not warmed with the fleece of my sheep; If I have lifted up my hand against the fatherless, when I saw my help in the gate:”
—Why does Ashley suddenly know where this is going?
“Then let mine arm fall from my shoulder blade, and mine arm be broken from the bone.”
Samantha laughs as well, the way that would be light and girlish were it not muffled by her stuffed nose. “Job. 31:19-22,” she says.
“Better you know it by rule and not by rote,” he tells her.
The classroom door opens abruptly from the outside. Merlose stumbles in—that is Merlose, it takes Ashley a dusty moment to realize that he recognized her without the hat and the slink, the perfect picture of a privileged high school girl trying too hard to be mature. “—Dr. Losstarot?”
“Ah yes,” he says, and again that chair finds itself pushed back and vacant of a professor. “You’d be Cal.”
“I hope so, sir,” she says. She hands him a slip of paper, a little wrinkled. “Thank you for letting me observe today. I love what I’ve seen so far of the school.”
“Well, then I hope my class lives up to your expectations.” He glances briefly at Samantha—who, for her part, is calmer, now, wiping her face—then back up, congenially, to Merlose.
“I hope it doesn’t change too much, when they let boys in too. Or is that just a rumor?” she asks, with a twitch of inquisitive innocence.
An audible trill of air escapes Losstarot, clear and clean, and on the edge of a smile. “It is in the nature of the world to change,” he says.
Ashley pulls back from the grating, listens to the settling brown dust.
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