Local lore is surprisingly accurate

[what_greater_weapon]

Noelle finds that having a village is quite a pain. So she doesn't have one. Instead she travels. This isn't as easy as the sentence makes it sound. She has several sets of clothes that fit her just badly enough to make her look androgynous instead of feminine, while still being practical and not in her way. It's perhaps not what her fashion choices would be if choosing for aesthetics, but her fashion choices are not based around aesthetics. Instead it's to keep the idiots that think a lone reasonably pretty young woman is a tempting and vulnerable target to a minimum.

Not that it's a foolproof strategy. People are stupid, and she's apparently rather pretty. Not that anyone should try anything; while she might be tempting, she is not vulnerable. She has a sword at her hip that she knows how to use beyond 'pointy end goes in the person,' a small crossbow that looks deceptively useless when it is anything but, and a few knives that benefit from baggy clothes and the ability to hide knives therein. Anyone that thinks she is a tempting and vulnerable target and that they should act accordingly will be corrected. Possibly with the knives, if they especially deserve it.

She's actually in the middle of that right now. Well, sort of. She is working on being in the middle of that right now. In order to get there she has to find the guy. He had some wandering hands that went to unsanctioned locations, and after she broke his finger he, well, ran. Normally she might let him go, call it even, but she realized the next morning that he fit the description of a bandit with a sizable bounty on him. And he did have a mysteriously large purse for a man with that little class. It fits. And he's an asshole, so she can go retrieve him, dump him at the feet of the local lawmen that are looking for him, collect the lovely bounty, and be on her way.

One problem: the asshole ran into a thing the locals call the Witchwood. She realizes rather too late that it is appropriately named. The trees must be moving, or moving her, because she passed by that creek with the rocks in that particular formation and the slightly broken tree two hours ago, and she was following the sun. This should not happen.

Well. She has travelling rations with her, and she can find water reliably well (especially if the creek keeps showing up) but if she's trapped in here forever there's not much she can do about it. If it takes longer than a week she might set the forest on fire, but she's not that desperate. She'll let the magic woods lead her around if they want to, she guesses. Not that she has a choice.

She scrapes marks in trees with her least favorite knife, because it's not like she has anything better to do, and she wants to know how many times trees will repeat themselves. Scrape scrape. Wander wander.

Comments

[what_greater_weapon]

Okay.

So as far as traps go it's a nice one.

It is highly tempting to, say, grab that gorgeous short sword she saw in the armoury, or eat from the kitchen instead of her travel rations, but she doesn't want to piss off whoever lives here, if anyone lives here at all.

More tempting is the library. There are languages she doesn't recognize, she wants them, written languages aren't as fun as the spoken versions but she'll take them, happily. But it's been a long day of wandering through a magic forest, and she doesn't have the energy to work her way through the library. Yet. But she will, eventually, while she's stuck here.

She doesn't feel comfortable enough to take a bed, as soft and tempting and wonderful as they look. Noelle does not want to piss off whoever lives here. She sets up her sleeping pallet in a little nook near the exit that gives a good view of anyone that could potentially threaten her, propped up with her pack so if she hears something she can just open her eyes and see properly instead of moving around and giving away that she's awake.

Zzzz.

(Cautious zzz. She's not a heavy sleeper anyway, but she's sleeping especially lightly.)

[pythbox]

Nothing interrupts her sleep. The lanterns douse themselves shortly after she lies down, except for one or two that stay lit enough to give adequate visibility without shining directly in her face.



In the morning, a heavy wooden tray on an elegant wrought-iron stand comes tiptoeing into the front hall on the stand's little wrought-iron feet.

[what_greater_weapon]

...

The fuck?

She hears it approaching, and opens her eyes and peers at it.

[pythbox]

When she opens her eyes, it sidles a few steps closer and then stops. A teapot rises from the tray to pour fresh steaming tea into a cup.

[what_greater_weapon]

She reiterates the earlier statement.

The fuck?

Magic, apparently.

"... Thank you?" she says, equal parts confused and cautious.

[pythbox]

The stand bobs slightly in a remarkably legible approximation of a curtsy. The tea finishes pouring. A butter-knife butters some toast.

[what_greater_weapon]

The. The stand bobbed in a curtsy. A curtsy.

"How smart are you?" she wonders of the, the magical stand and its magical helpers.

[pythbox]

It has no response to that. But since she doesn't seem to be coming up to its level, it tiptoes closer and then folds itself down so the tray is at a convenient height to be eaten from by someone sitting on the floor.

[what_greater_weapon]

She can't help it. She giggles a little. This is - she doesn't know what this is, this might be the trappiest trap of all traps that have ever trapped, but she'll be damned if it's not endearing.

"Is something horrible and magical going to happen to me if I happen to actually accept the, offered breakfast?"

[pythbox]

The teapot swivels back and forth. Perhaps it is meant to be shaking its head.

[what_greater_weapon]

So endearing!

Well.

She was going to run out of food eventually, anyway, and it's not looking like she'll be able to leave anytime soon. And antagonizing the castle seems like a bad idea.

...

Also that food looks delicious.

She retrieves the buttered toast and nibbles.

[pythbox]

It is delicious, and does not appear to have any effect at all other than being (a) food, (b) tasty. The tea is good. The toast is good. The fresh apple is both totally inexplicable and good. And so on.

[what_greater_weapon]

Well.

There is rapidly less food.

Up she sits, when she is out of food to eat and tea to drink, stretching a bit.

"Does this mean I'm officially a guest instead of just a random confused wanderer?" she wonders, wryly.

[pythbox]

The teapot nods its spout.

[what_greater_weapon]

Okay. Good enough for her. She doesn't think she can resist the siren call of that lovely bed, nor the oh-so-tempting library.

"Can I grab a bedroom, then? And read the library?"

[pythbox]

Nod nod!

[what_greater_weapon]

"Okay then. Thank you. Are any bedrooms fine?" she asks, as she packs up her stuff for moving to a bedroom.

[pythbox]

Nod nod. The tray stands up again, and curtsies, and trundles off to the kitchen.

[what_greater_weapon]

That works for her.

Once all of her stuff's packed, she goes upstairs to pick out a bedroom. The one she picks has a pretty view with an excellent window if one wants to, say, climb out of it and rappel down to the earth below. She doesn't expect this will ever need to be done, but if it does, she wants to be prepared.

She flops onto the bed, just because that seems like the thing to do. Flop. So comfy!

And then up she gets, because while she's a bit stiff she's not exactly tired, and debates on if she's willing to try to ask the castle for a bath while in a strange deserted magical castle, or if she'll just go to the library.

... Library. She'll handle the bath situation later, she thinks. To the library!

[pythbox]

The library contains many, many books.

Some of them are fiction, some are history, some are religious texts. There is even a small shelf of books on languages, although nineteen of the twenty turn out to be about Albish.

There is an entire wall of books about how to do magic that don't appear to be fictional in the slightest, but more than half of them are in a wide assortment of variously recognizable foreign languages, and even the ones nominally in Callian can be near-unreadably dense or technical or archaic. They also do not appear to be organized with a beginner student in mind.

[what_greater_weapon]

It is somewhat unfortunate that she already is fluent in Albish, but the twentieth book might be of use. But first... magic.

Magic written in several other languages.

If this is a trap it is baited so incredibly perfectly for her that she's just screwed. This doesn't mean much in particular, but it is certainly something to think about. And she can't bring herself to resist the chance to learn magic. Hell, she'd have trouble resisting learning the languages. Both together is just - nope, can't do it, she wants it, she will have it. It's like the most tempting puzzle box she's ever seen, and at the end she'd have magic.

She pulls a nominally Callian book off of the shelf, identifies it as more archaic than technical, and deems this good enough to get a better feel for how this dialect works.

...

After about twenty minutes she's stopped reading silently and is speaking out loud. It's better this way, she thinks, language is a living, breathing thing, that changes and evolves and is spoken. To leave it on the page is handicapping herself. How can she learn all of the little tricks unless she tries them out herself, see how it flows..?

Absently, she notes that her typical Callian accent doesn't fit. It feels awkward, not exactly bloated, but it flows incorrectly. On a hunch, she experiments with something more similar to an accent she heard in a pretty out of the way village, a year or two back.

... Better. Much better, actually, but it doesn't quite work, either. She tries out a few others, but they're much worse.

She digs up a poetry book in a sort of similar dialect, because while she's not one for poetry, it's very indicative of how the language is spoken. She flips to a poem that doesn't offend her and reads in her not-quite-right-but-better-than-nothing tiny village accent - she stops halfway through and laughs.

"Got you, you little bastard," she says, triumphantly. "That word order meant something, I knew it was weird -"

She returns to the magic book and rereads the passage in question, hums thoughtfully to herself, and continues reading out loud, from both the poetry book and the archaic Callian magic book.

Her accent isn't perfect, she already knows. It can't be, not when she's just got books, but she's closer. And it's making more sense - she's making much more progress. She's nowhere near fluent in it, but instead of just deciphering text she's understanding the rules it works by. And speaking in it helps show the similarities to its less archaic fellow - this, and this, and here, and this became this, and here the order was changed because of this -

It's great fun.

[pythbox]

Around lunchtime, the ambulatory breakfast tray arrives, bearing lunch. It is now an ambulatory lunch tray. Delicious lunch.

[what_greater_weapon]

Oh, right, lunch.

She has that, and between bites she murmurs sentences in archaic Callian. She has a good enough grasp of it to be able to skim through all books of its type for anything introductory in magic. Is there anything introductory in magic?

[pythbox]

Not in archaic Callian, apparently. There are a few books that purport to contain only safe, easy spells—but then describe these spells in impenetrable jargon. Some go on to abbreviate the impenetrable jargon, usually not in ways that are consistent across books.

[what_greater_weapon]

Hm. How annoying.

Well, she is not just stuck with archaic Callian. She can tackle the Albish next. She'll probably get to categorizing everything properly if no one shows up soon, because it's really becoming obvious that she'll need to.

She finishes lunch, and then switches to doing a very similar thing with Albish. Reading! Speaking! Learning! It is all quite exciting.