Who: Eleri Lloyd, Adrien Green What: A day at work Where: The Institute When: 7 August, 1888 Rating: G
Eleri was rarely late for work even on ordinary days, but this was no ordinary day. The shipment that was coming in today was quite the find, even for their line of work. Today, they were receiving a shipment of ancient vellum scrolls, purported to belong to Merlin himself. Eleri was so excited, she could just about fly - if she was the type of faerie that had wings. Which she wasn’t.
She flitted into the Institute shortly after dawn, having risen with the sun in anticipation of the day’s work.
Adrien arrived promptly, looking typically dour. Shipments of any sort to their department necessitated no end of cataloguing, recording, verification, preservation, and other busywork, and he knew that requests from the Institute researchers would pile up in the meantime.
His Fae assistant was there before him, and he nodded crisply as he walked through the door. “Miss Lloyd,” he said, reaching for his first of what would be many cups of tea. “I don’t suppose they’ve come by yet, then,” he added, even though it was obvious. (He was rather bad at small talk.)
“Dim, Mr. Green,” she answered without thinking, then made a face. English, Eleri. “I mean, no sir. Not yet. But it’s…” Forgetting the word for “exciting”, she substituted an excited sort of hand-waving gesture in its place, expecting him to follow her meaning. “I like the oldest things. I like history.”
Adrien Green, it must be said, was near enough a saint in Eleri’s eyes. She didn’t know how many other employers would overlook her achingly sub-par English skills and give her the job anyway. Still, she did good work, and she was smart and learned quickly… she just couldn’t seem to pick up the language as well as she would have liked. Not that it was for lack of trying.
“I brought…” Another gap in her vocabulary. Rather than embarrassing herself with more mime, she chose instead to hold up that which she had brought: Cornish pasties, still hot from the oven, and they would remain until such time as they were eaten - Eleri would ensure that.
Eleri knew, of course, that he didn’t require that sort of food -- but she tended to insist anyways, and the food she brought was usually reasonably good.
“After the shipment,” he said, raising a finger. “Unless you need a break for lunch. I’ll not have grease or flakes of pastry on the vellum. And we think it might be old. It’ll be up to us, and Mr Winslow, of course, to determine whether that is the case.”
Adrien’s supervisor would, no doubt, require a full report before he did testing of his own.
“I know,” Eleri said, a little put out. “I thought they might be a nice lunch for us - after the work.”
Until the shipment actually arrived, though, there was plenty to be getting on with. She slowly began to walk around the perimeter of the storage space, testing with her fingers the integrity of the magic holding any and all damp at bay. “Wet here,” she remarked, pointing at a particular corner. “I… hmm.”
She knew what she needed to do, and he knew what she needed to do, and so there seemed little point in beating herself up for not being able to verbalize what was largely redundant anyway. She walked over to her desk and opened a drawer, rummaging through and pulling out a selection of herbs. With a mortar and pestle she crushed them together, breathing deeply and grinning at the rich, herby smell that emanated from them. Oh, she loved her work.
A spell to repel water by its nature required a little of the opposite element, so once the herbs were crushed she touched her finger to the mixture, giggling a little at the little fizz and pop of them being set alight by little more than her will. She let the herbs burn, humming a mysterious little tune over them to activate the spell - to imbue it with her will, so to speak - and when she was finished, there was a fine powder left in the mortar.
Taking up the soft brush on her desk, she took the mortar over to the damp corner and brushed the area with the powder, feeling the water recede even as she did so. “Not today,” she crowed in Welsh. “You will not enter our space this day.”
His assistant was an odd, cheerful little being, and full of noise -- but she tolerated his gruffness and didn’t appear to take too much offense at his occasional shushing and extended periods of silence, and from what he could see, she did her job thoroughly and with care for all her fluttering.
And her ability to help manage the damp was a godsend he was willing to put up with a little chatter and singing for.
“You will want to wash your hands,” he said, mildly enough, taking a sip of his tea as he started opening the morning’s mail and sorting it.
“Will I?” she returned in a similar tone. “Or are they clean now?” She held them up in front of her, wrinkling her nose with effort and humming under her breath, watching as her hands were encased in a thin film of water. They looked like gloves, and it made her giggle - but it was not an effect she could sustain for long, so she let the water seep back into nothing, breathing heavily. “I am clean. You, you don’t worry about me. I am clean.”
She knew that he was being cautious because of the rarity of the items they worked with, but she personally thought his warnings were more suited to a person who was very new to the job - that, or a person who was very, very stupid. She tolerated the warnings, because she knew where they were coming from, but she was too much of a Tylwyth Teg to let them go by without some sort of sassy return.
Soap was always preferable, of course, but he’d given up that battle a few years back. He simply snorted and took a sip of his tea, and continued with his morning correspondence in silence.
The delivery arrived not soon after, a set of packing crates that his assistant excitedly cooed over before they brought out the crowbars and began to pry them open, at which point she wisely kept her distance due to the iron.
As the tops lifted to reveal packing straw covering tubes of aluminum sealed in wax, Adrien took them out carefully and put them on the work table, nodding at the deliveryman to take away the detritus (and the crowbar).
“Now,” he said, “let us see what the Institute no doubt spent a ridiculous sum to obtain.”
He was nice, Eleri thought to herself (and not for the first time). Lots of people wouldn’t remember little details like that, about the iron hurting her badly. Lots of people would just “oops” after the fact, when she was collapsed in the corner in pain, or worse, unconscious. She had known people in her time. Some were just plain unaware - and that was fine, albeit annoying - but some knew very well about her limitations, and just didn’t care enough to think about it.
He was nice.
She hovered near his shoulder as he pulled the tubes out. Aluminum… she hesitated to touch them, just in case. Iron and steel, she knew she couldn’t touch, but she tended to take a “better safe than sorry” attitude with most metals.
There was a process that had to be adhered to, so as much as she was vibrating with anticipation, she knew she had to wait. This was all Adrien, this part - she was on hand to hand him tools and such, but mostly this part of her job was watching and waiting. Patiently. She huffed out a breath, turning her head away from the scrolls first. Impatient she might be - stupid, she was not.
Adrien broke the wax seal and opened the tubes, and then washed and carefully dried his hands (with soap). Although he suspected vampiric skin had different properties of acidity and oils than human skin, he still tended to take every precaution on the off chance.
He could feel his Fae assistant practically vibrating with excitement, and huffed a little, but decided to keep his censure for more obvious violations of policy than simply being enthusiastic in his vicinity.
He pulled out the first scroll delicately, carefully, trying to not let it scrape against the sides of the aluminum tube as he did so, and set it on the mat. “Weights, please,” he said.
Wordlessly (in itself a small miracle) Eleri handed him the weights. They were ceramic, and safe enough. Not enough was revealed for her to see any writing, though she could tell just by looking at it that it was old. Distressingly, her say-so hadn’t ever been enough for the picky archivists.
“It’s old, huh,” she remarked, breaking her silence. “So old. The letter said they are Merlin’s! Merlin is Welsh.”
There was, she reflected, actually a point to all her chattering. While her English was poor, there was a chance that it could improve if she used it as much as possible. Huge gaps in her vocabulary notwithstanding, it would never do to “backslide” and lose what little she had. So, she chattered.
“More,” she urged. “I want to see more!”
“We shall see how old,” he replied, shortly. “And patience, please.”
This part of the process was the most delicate -- the first curl of the roll needed to be separated. If the vellum had been stored in too much humidity, it would lose its flexibility and crack, and even though he technically didn’t need to breathe, he still found himself holding his breath as he slowly separated one roll into two, setting the weights down to reveal an inch of vellum with fine, close writing on it.
“There,” he said, quietly. “Do be careful,” he warned, but the warning had no particular bite to it -- he knew she’d avoid anything excessively foolhardy.
Eleri peered at the writing that was revealed. “So small,” she murmured. The words were at once familiar and unfamiliar. Part of her wanted to sound them out, but there were rules against that. Too many people were foolhardy enough to read unfamiliar writing on old papers or from old books, and ended up unleashing unspeakable things… no. Reading with eyes only.
“It is Welsh, but it is not Welsh,” she reported. “Looks the same and different.” She didn’t have the words to make herself understood, so she reverted to mime again. She held a hand up high, and said “Now Welsh.” Her other hand, she held down low, and said, “Then Welsh.” Then, she moved her hands, indicating a position somewhere in the middle and using the other hand to point at the scroll. “Paper Welsh. Cymraeg canol,” she added, because she knew what she wanted to say, just not how to say it. “Ydych chi'n deall mi?”
Adrien gave a short nod. “Like the Canterbury Tales,” he said. “Whan that aprill with his shoures soote, The droghte of march hath perced to the roote.” He frowned. “Perhaps the task of copying would best be left to you,” he said, abruptly. “In pencil, mind. Word for word -- no correcting the spelling. No more than a few inches unrolled at a time, and you’d use the pointer to follow the text rather than your finger. ...It would take a few weeks, I’d imagine,” he added, raising an eyebrow.
He knew his assistant had a rather short attention span from time to time.
“I can do this,” Eleri promised, dancing from foot to foot (a respectable distance from the table, of course). “This is a good job!”
Whatever the Canterbury Tales were, she had no idea and the things he said after that name, were gibberish to her. But it seemed as if he understood her, which was something. Would that every situation could be so easily mimed.
She flitted over to her desk in the corner and took up a pencil, writing down “Cymraeg canol” as a reminder to look up what it was in English later that night. Then she tore that page off, leaving it on the desk, and brought the notepad over to the scroll.
For the next hour, an almost unprecedented length of concentration for Eleri, she slowly and carefully transcribed the scroll in her tiny, impeccable handwriting. What she wrote down made her shiver. After the first couple of introductory paragraphs, there was old magic. It was not evil, or menacing. It was actually some rather ancient protection-based spells, but they were so old and powerful as to be awe-inspiring, especially to a tylwyth teg whose own power was utterly mediocre by comparison. She finished the section she was on and brought her writing over to Adrien.
“I need…” The hour of hard concentration had pushed everything useful from her mind, and she mimed eating something. “Dwi'n llwglyd. Here is start.”
Adrien had been doing his own work, but he’d been looking over at her from time to time, noting the wrinkle between her eyes, and the occasional shudder or uncharacteristic frown, and he very nearly got up to put a halt to it, but she stopped on her own before he’d decided she might’ve had enough.
“Of course,” he said, frowning. “And Miss Lloyd, if the content is proving challenging -- I can take a turn.” He raised a finger before she could protest. “For some tasks,” he said, raising an eyebrow, “it may be better to not know what one is writing down, which would be the case for me -- if it is impacting you negatively, I would err on the side of caution rather than have you believe you need to suffer through it to be of use.”
Eleri did her best to follow what he was saying, but lost him at the first hurdle. “Challenging?” she repeated. “I am sorry, I… you go too fast. I didn’t understand…”
But she’d picked some words out. “Suffer” was the most pertinent, and watching his face gave her… a sense of what he’d said. She thought. “I don’t suffer,” she said. “Just…” she rubbed her belly. “Dwi'n llwglyd. I need… eat.” She gave him her best twinkly eyed wide smile to show that she was just fine.
He could tell she was tired -- her capacity to understand him was usually better -- so he frowned and nodded, and waved her away to eat her food.
He scraped a very small quantity of ink from the parchment with a knife and put it in a stoppered glass container, and sliced a small sliver of the vellum off as well, with a similar treatment.
The next step was to match her transcription, to see if he could follow the spidery, close script well enough to take over duties should it prove necessary. It took a few minutes to wrap his brain around it, as the language was unfamiliar, so he sat where she had been and hunched over it a bit, his eyes shifting between the parchment and her notepad.
Even the first bite was refreshing. She perched on her stool and chewed happily, eyes closing in delight. These were good pasties. She tore through the two she had bought for herself, and then, with a pleasantly full belly, she set the bag with the two she had bought for him neatly on Adrien’s desk (on a plate, of course, and not anywhere near anything that could be damaged).
“That feels much better,” she said finally, feeling much more in control. “Now, I can do more writing. Is it alright, my writing? Did I do a good job?”
For all her spoken English wasn’t great (and worse, when she was hungry and a little brain-weary), her writing and reading of English were much better, and her writing of Welsh was better still. Plus, she knew she had lovely handwriting - she prided herself on it. So she was hoping very much that the work she had done so far would please Adrien.
“It is good work thus far,” Adrien admitted, frowning, “but you shouldn’t do more than half an hour at a time,” he added. “I can try my hand at it some as well, and you can check to see how accurate I can be without knowing the language.”
“Half an hour, Miss Lloyd,” he repeated, “and then you can file books for a while before going back to it.”