gone_byebye | (no subject)

Spring in Massachusetts can be a time of chaotic weather for those who have lived long in New England's climes, but there are worse days by far than today. The air is buzzing with the work of bees, and birds are winging lazily overhead. A handful of scattered trees dot the grassy, well-kept landscape in all directions, but buildings rise taller than the majority of the trees in the distance.

Somewhere, a not-very-well-tuned carillon is ringing.

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"Okay!" Suzi says, reaching for the cape and tossing it on. It doesn't take much to get herself hidden in the mass of fabric, she's quite a bit smaller than Ray. "Just show me where to go."

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gone_byebye

"Follow me," says Ray, and fairly catapults himself out the door and down the stairs.

The sunlight is bright out here, for a place whose ambient is as tightly wound as Arkham's. It falls clean and bright on the drawn, narrowed faces of the strongest men in the Economics department; they're carrying a sagging, gangling burden-

"I think that's Dr. Peaslee," says Ray, who's standing on tiptoe to see over the heads of some of the taller students.

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Suzi has no chance at all of ever looking over the head of anyone older than ten. She looks under their arms, instead, and then backs up into Ray. "He zlins weird."

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Ray blinks, looking down at Suzi, wide-eyed. "What do you mean? Weird how?" he asks quietly; around here, 'weird' can mean any number of things, none of them good.

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"Weird like...like...um. Imagine putting a salt filling in a chocolate bonbon?" Suzi says, trying to figure it out. Also? Pressing against Ray's legs. "Or fish jello?"

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Ray's eyes narrow and he looks back at the crumpled figure being laid straight on the ground. "Excuse me," he says very firmly to the young men next to him. "Let me through, please."

There's a pause.

"Don't make me use my elbows."

Somewhat reluctantly the crowds part, and Ray steps forward. "honestly, you're as bad as New Yorkers- someone's gone for the doctor, I assume?" He doesn't wait for anyone to answer, but crouches down beside Peaslee's inert form instead, bending over him with one hand's fingertips resting lightly on the man's chest. "He's still breathing, at least..."

From:

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Suzi follows Ray and starts looking over the fallen man as well (she REALLY doesn't want to touch him. That's alright; she doesn't have to) with a hand floating just above the skin, "He's not...I don't think he's sick?"

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Ray falls back on his knees, two fingers resting against the groove in the man's throat. "I think you're right," he says. "That's a pretty normal pulse, for an unconscious man. Does anyone here know what happened?"

A young woman hesitantly puts up a hand and says, "Professor Peaslee was in the middle of his economics lecture, and suddenly started wobbling."

"Wobbling how? Verbally, physically, around the edges?" Ray looks over his glasses at the girl.

"Physically," she says, and several of the others watching murmur their agreement. "Rocking back and forth on his heels, and then his eyes just rolled back in his head and he collapsed on the floor."

Ray looks down at the man, his lips pursed for a moment; then he looks back to the girl. "Was he saying anything unusual at all?"

"No, sir," she says after some thought. "Nothing at all. Just his usual lecture."

Ray nods. "I see," he says soberly. "Has anyone sent for Dr. Peaslee's son?"

There's some discussion, and then someone at the back of the crowd darts off. Ray looks up to Suzi as he pushes himself to his feet. "Suzi," he murmurs as quietly as he can, "I think I might have an idea of what's going on."

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"Oh?" Suzi responds, without moving her head, "What? Because I don't know, and it's weird and uncomfortable."

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Ray rubs at his nose lightly. "There are more than a few entities in this universe that're capable of touching a person's mind directly," he murmurs. "Usually they do it in dreams, though, when people are most vulnerable. That would ordinarily mean a stroke or a seizure- but if you're not zlinning a physical issue, then it's something metaphysical. Something is leaning so heavily on this man's mind that it knocked him out entirely, and from the sound of things, it's still there."

In the distance, one of the students is leading a man in a white coat in their direction- the campus physician.

From:

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Suzi says nothing very eloquently. (The local nager says !!!!!!! rather a lot, in a variety of fonts and colors.) "Oh." the Sime manages in words after a time, "That, um. I don't know? It's...it doesn't feel like a human is in there - white coat official man."

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"Huh boy," says Ray, rubbing at the back of his neck with one hand. "And you don't recognize whatever it- hello, Doctor Waldron!"

"Mr. Stantz," returns Waldron in acknowledgment; he's a man in his late sixties, just this side of retiring and heading off to live with his family. "I should've known you'd be here if something strange was going on. So-" He kneels as carefully as he can beside the unconscious man. "What's happened to Nathan now, hmm?"

Ray makes a rapid get out of his like of sight gesture to Suzi with one hand before relaying the story to the physician. The older man, for all that he's physically frail and has something of a heart problem, is very sharp mentally; even as the doctor examines the fallen man he's all but interrogating Ray at every available turn.

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Suzi? What Suzi? There is only a Very Uninteresting young woman wearing a too-big coat doing her best to look inoffensive and like she belongs.

...Maybe someone will mistake her for a relative of Ray's? Suzi doesn't fit in terribly well. She is, however, hovering out of the doctor's sight.

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The doctor asks a few more probing questions, but as his eyes turn to Suzi a younger man comes running up. "Dr. Waldron," he says, panting. "What happened to my father?"

"I don't know, Wingate," says Dr. Waldron. "It doesn't quite look like a stroke, but I don't want to say more until we've taken him somewhere more private." This is delivered with a pointed look at the students, and a far sharper one at Ray.

"I've rung our family doctor already," says Wingate. "Will he be all right to take home, or does he need the hospital?"

"Home should do," says Dr. Waldron, straightening up. "Mr. Stantz, if you want to be useful, go and get that motor-car the library uses. I don't want this man being jostled around in a wagon."

"Yes, Dr. Waldron," says Ray, and gestures surreptitiously to Suzi to come with him.

From:

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Suzi follows Ray like a lost puppy. A really cute lost puppy, but yes. She Belongs With That Man Really!

Please don't eat her, Mr. Doctor Waldron. She's inoffensive and cute. (It works as a defense more often than not.)

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Waldron watches them go, but as soon as they're out of his line of sight Ray turns to Suzi. "I hate to do this to you, Suzi, but you need to go back to my office," he says. "Go back there and stay there. I'm going to help them get Dr. Peaslee back to his house, and Dr. Waldron asks questions about absolutely everything. I promise I'll be back as soon as I can- there's some books I have to go through. It could be vitally important."

From:

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"Alright." Suzi says, nodding seriously and heading back to the office without further question. She will ask a million of them, later. When it's safer. "Take care, Ray. I'll wait."

And do paperwork, if any is on the desk and it's obvious what needs to be done. Tidy up. Just...keep herself busy.

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There's a fair amount. Most of it's cataloguing, or listing off books badly in need of repairs to their bindings and reminders to have the students pull them from the shelves. None of them are in the Restricted Section. Ray knows better than to leave that kind of reference out.

Eventually he returns from the trip to the Peaslees', knocking at the office door before coming in. "Sorry that took so long, Suzi," he says. "Dr. Peaslee started twitching in his sleep halfway there and we had to stop while Dr. Waldron checked him over. He's reluctantly concluded that there's no evidence of any physical abnormality whatsoever and turned him over to the Peaslee family physician for now." Ray rubs at his face with both hands. "I'm going to have to do some serious digging. I'm almost sure I know what's going on, but this isn't the kind of incident where you can afford to put so much as a toe wrong. Can I get you anything before we go any further? I've got a teakettle and a stolen Bunsen burner around here somewhere."

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Suzi can do that. She can do much of it at once, really, and by the time Ray is back she's gotten the books stacked carefully and has done a significant amount of the cataloging.

"Tea would be nice." Suzi says, nodding, "If I can do anything, let me know? And, um. If you show me how to do repairs, I can start that? I've done it before, but not on books this old."

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"All right. I'll get the tea started." Ray ducks into a nearby closet. "I'm sorry if it's not what you're used to- the selection's a little limited by the current vagaries of intercontinental travel. There's still three good years left of sail-bearing commercial vessels, for Pete's sake. I should know. I had a bust on the last serious one built."

As he sets up a jury-rigged frame around the Bunsen burner and starts the tea, Ray notes, "Those aren't even the oldest in the University library. They're just some of the more readable works available to the student body. Would you believe that most of my job here revolves around keeping people away from books?"

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"As long as it's hot and won't murder me, I'll drink it." Suzi says, "And has sugar. I'm in a strange and dangerous world without selyn, I want sugar." Suzi curls up in his chair and eyes the books again, "Um. Why? Do you have to keep people away from books? Books are...they're...all of Keon had less than twenty. This is riches."

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"There's plenty of sugar on hand," Ray says. "There's also rum, although technically I'm not supposed to have it. Mostly I keep it on hand to offer some of the twitchier professors when they come in, but you're welcome to add some of it to your tea too."

He settles back in his chair and slides one hand under his glasses. "The majority of the books in the Orne Library, which is this building you and I are sitting in right now, are perfectly harmless volumes of history, science, and philosophy," he says. "Those are nothing to do with me. I mean, yeah, I do a lot of the cataloguing and I usually get the preservationist assignments, but other than that? Not my bailiwick at all. The books they hired me to look after, now, that's another story. Some of the books in this library are too valuable in their own right to get rid of, but much too dangerous to allow the reading public to glance at so much as a page of."

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"Ooo, rum." Suzi adds both to her tea, and turns her attention to Ray, head tilting. "Um. So they're books about the scary things outside the world? The ones in that man's head?"

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"Exactly," says Ray, nodding. "Them and the people who actively cultivate such things- cultists, worshippers, and general followers of that kind of monstrosity. Some of those books have spells and rituals in them that act almost like sonic keys to open up the passageways between this world, this dimension, and the realms outside all the known planes where the Great Old Ones wait to return and reclaim the world they held millions of years before the ancestors of man even existed."