#i did 1 readthrough thats enough right? ehaha

[rabbitocean]

My memories of this time are somewhat hazy so please forgive me if the details seem a little odd. They’re half buried in a dream. Please forgive me if I seem to veer off the topic of our discussion, or well, my story. Lastly, please forgive me for repeating myself three times. Its a habit that I need to get rid of when it concerns apologies.

Now...you wanted to know about how this all began.

I stared blankly out the window. It was one of those partially cloudy days where everyone always wanted to go outside, even in this squalid city. As always, I balked. The sun was out, and it was still too hot. Though too hot in my mind was anything above seventy degrees Fahrenheit. So with a grimace, and a shake of the head, I closed the blinds and turned back to the rest of my second floor apartment.

Apartment is the wrong word for it actually. It’s defiantly more of a house, since I bought and inhabited the entire second floor on this side of the block. My room occupied a third of the total space. It was a lavishly decorated space. Old paintings, statues in the old greek and roman styles, a four post veiled bed, a large wardrobe and vanity. Most of this I inherited from my old mentor who passed away not three years before I bought this place. Though despite my mentor’s expensive tastes in decor, which i dutifully kept according to his will; every surface of the room was covered in books. Bookshelves lined every empty space, the large antique desk and low coffee table bore stacks of manuals, journals, and heavy tomes of various topics. Truly quarters fit for an Archmage.

It was home, and it fit me like a glove. Though it was a pain to clear space on the coffee table in case I had people over for tea, or other activities.. I glanced at the ancient grandfather clock sitting directly opposed to the double doors that led to the rest of the apartment, 11:15. No more time to spend sitting about then. I threw on some day old clothes draped half-heartedly over the back of a sofa, (everything else was strewn about) and strode through the double doors, letting them hang open behind me as I entered the wide open floor of my workshop.

An entire floor dedicated to my studies in the mystical and mechanical. I graduated several years ago with a degree in robotics engineering, specializing in cybernetics. Though, many never took my ideas seriously before my mentor. Thanks to him, this entire floor was furnished with every aparatus I could wish for from fine tuning and testing to machining and assembling anything I may need. It hummed with power, the air was vibrant and fresh as my air conditioning constantly pumped to keep the heat at bay. It was here i laboured over my projects and advanced my understanding in fields unknown to many.

My mentor was known as Baroque Legato, I know its a queer name but he took great pride in making sure everyone knew exactly what to call him. I do believe he had it legally changed from whatever his old name was, but he never shared it with anyone as far as I knew. No one from his past called him anything but Baroque or Doctor Legato. I hope I’m not the only one who felt it was off.

I first met him at my university. He was the professor assigned as my advisor, and for the most part I went unnoticed until I declared for robotics and proceeded to upset every other professor with off the wall ideas. Everyone believed I was wasting their time, except for Baroque. We would have long discussions in the basement workrooms of the university about boldy exploring different paths to science, and about how both science and life were about discovering something first, then working to understand it. He firmly believed that improving what we already understood was a solid, but boring and unbearably slow process.

I should also mention that Baroque was the head professor of the robotics department, also the most awarded and well known. He was the mind that sparked our sudden rise in cybernetic technology you know. I may have done a lot of the foot work and branching ideas, but his initial delve into the field is what gave us the foundation non-magical scientists work off of today.

Now, one day after a few long discussions. Baroque handed me a book, the cover was too smudged for me to make out, and it was clear it had been passed from teacher to student for a long. Long. Time.

“Give this a read when you have some time, Evelyn.” He said in his low, raspy voice.

How rude of me, I haven’t even given you an idea of what he looks like. Baroque was a rather tall, angular man, his greying hair seemed to stick out in all directions as though he had been electrified (as I later learned, that was often the case) and his frazzled beard matched. His eyes however were a keen grey, he always gave the impression he was staring straight into you, or straight through you. Sometime he would finish your sentences, and just nod knowingly. I never understood how he did this until much later, and even now I’m still somewhat bewildered with how effortlessly he did it. He was a tall man, easily a head and a half above me. He was always dressed in a lab coat and scrubs that seemed a size too big for him, and constantly obscured the shape of his body. He slouched often, though the few times I watched him straighten up were rather intimidating. Those times he was a large, broad shouldered man who looked as though he could snap whoever was in front of him like a twig. But, he was a kindly man. Given his eccentric behaviors, he often scared the younger students away, those who remained found him to be an absolute joy to work with. The world has truly lost one of its brightest minds.

So he gave me this old book. It was large, leather bound, and smelled of vanilla slag. Old books and welding torches. In my spare time I read it. It was a shoddily constructed journal, each teacher inserted their own notes, observations, and essays concerning a certain subject. There seemed to be centuries long debates, wild winded theories, and often insane perspectives, all surrounding this one thing. Reality.

I read that book, cover to cover. It took me three full months to puzzle through and decipher all of the handwriting and codes some of the previous authors used. As well as translate several languages; arabic, greek, latin, russian, and chinese, to name just a few. It was within my grasp to do though and before long I had compiled my own journal of the translated writings.

It was around the same time that Baroque invited me to a dinner at his home, just outside the city. The dinner was small and rather informal. He asked if I had finished the book, and I confirmed his suspicion, showing him my “translation” He seemed ecstatic and we talked well into the night about everything that journal contained. When I was tired, I excused myself momentarily to use the rest room before I would head home. That;s likely when he slid a second book into my bag, as he knew I probably wouldn’t have accepted another set of reading that night, and I didn’t notice the book until I was getting ready for a day trip to the beach with friends the next day.

I can’t tell you the name of the book, because honestly I’m not quite sure myself. But I read it, that day at the beach, when my friends weren’t pestering me to put it down anyways, but I digress. I spent the next year reading and re-reading this book. It was the most vague and cryptic set of texts I had ever come across, I knew after reading it a second time that this must’ve come from Baroque. However he claimed to have no knowledge of the book, despite the knowing twinkle in his eyes.

Then it happened.