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[gone_byebye]

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.

Comments

[sime-channel.livejournal.com]

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.

[sime-channel.livejournal.com]

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."

[sime-channel.livejournal.com]

"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."

[sime-channel.livejournal.com]

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?"

[sime-channel.livejournal.com]

"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."

[gone_byebye]

"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."

[sime-channel.livejournal.com]

"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."

[sime-channel.livejournal.com]

"But you're not going to destroy them." she's just checking! She'd be perfectly willing to have a Dreadfully Unfortunate Accident if he wanted!

[gone_byebye]

"Destroying them would be an extraordinarily bad idea," Ray says. "They're insanely dangerous and run a chance of exposing the reader to ideas his or her mind isn't capable of handling without going mad- but they're also the only books of any kind to which we have access that contain even the slightest bit of information on how to repel the Great Old Ones or lock them out of reality. Otherwise the whole room would be torched in a heartbeat."

[sime-channel.livejournal.com]

"Oh." Suzi says, cringing rather a lot, "Oh. Um. I'll just...make new bindings for these, then?"

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"Probably for the best," Ray says. "I do a lot of that when I'm not cataloguing and classifying the books in the Restricted Section. It's safer that way. When I'm not doing either of the two I"m usually working on the machine, but I mostly do the design work here and the building at home. I'm currently renting a room in a boarding house on Pickman Street. You're welcome to stay there if you want, but my landlady has some fairly old-fashioned views on men and women even for baselines, so I'm going to have to introduce you as my sister on a temporary visit if we do that."

[sime-channel.livejournal.com]

"If you don't take me in, Ray, where will I stay?" Suzi says, eyes wide, "I don't have any money, and I'm...here I'm a freak? I'm afraid." She's in a world where BOOKS can drive you MAD.

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"I was gonna say the alternative is that one or both of us bunk down here until I've got the machine done," Ray says mildly. "It's not like people haven't seen me sleeping here dozens of times before. I'd just get yelled at for failure to be properly hospitable, but around here they all think I'm a little bit cracked anyway."

[sime-channel.livejournal.com]

"I'm not good at being alone." Suzi says, very firmly, "I'm very not good at being alone. Symbiont, remember?"

[gone_byebye]

"That's what I figured," says Ray. "I'll do the talking when we get back to the boarding house. Not that I'm particularly good at lying, but I can at least pretend really hard to be Peter Venkman if I need to."

[sime-channel.livejournal.com]

"You're better at it than I am." Suzi promises grimly, "Stick as close to the truth as possible, or I'll be totally incapable of helping. Um. Considering the nature of the situation I don't think Whistler would be upset as Sosectu in Farris if I were to offer you the chance to join our Household. That would mean you are extended family."

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"That would make two groupings that've offered me extended clanship," says Ray thoughtfully. "The Knight household, and Farris. I don't see much of Michael or Kitt or Eddie or Bonnie or even Karr these days, but we still consider each other something in the way of extended family- would that be a problem?"

[sime-channel.livejournal.com]

"Considering that Farris pretty much stands for to yourself be true, no." Suzi says, "It doesn't."

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"Okay then," says Ray. "If that's what it takes to get you a place to stay without societal issues, I have no problem with it. You're more closely related to me by physical measures than my daughter is, anyway."

[sime-channel.livejournal.com]

"...So are puppies." Suzi points out, "It'll just...well, it means neither of us have to lie. Since you're neither Sime nor Gen there aren't even any duties to go with it. Richard says he's my bodyguard."

Silly werewolf.