I know it for what it is, but it beats the alternative

[more_magic]

For Darlington, the idea had been there for a while, a seed that needed time as much as opportunity to germinate. There was and had always been something strange about the Darrow History exhibit--the doors to the gallery always locked, exhibit installs perpetually in a state of setup or teardown, burst pipes and other renovations continually in need. Once, he'd even found the whole wing closed for a wedding the events staff said had been booked for months. When he'd pressed, however politely, for more details on any of those, the most he ever got was blank stares or the same bland non-answers all of the city transplants grow to expect from Darrow's native residents.

It was a mystery, bizarre and complicated, exactly the kind of thing that wouldn't have been within his purview with Lethe but that he'd have unabashedly wished could be. Something was behind those doors, and the longer he went not knowing what it was, the more appealing the idea of finding out became.

The strange, slow vanishing of the non-transplanted Darrowites was unnerving, to be sure, but as the museum grew quieter and more deserted, the louder the thought of taking this opportunity became. This place has to have a history, a concrete narrative that explains what it is now and what it had been in the past, a cohesive whole instead of the oft-conflicting memories of its citizens. The possibility of finally getting there, of the satisfaction of discovery, keeps him up some nights and makes him distracted on other days; without really realizing it, Darlington starts to think of it as inevitable. To no surprise, Alex wants nothing to do with the idea, but it's no work at all to involve Palamedes--and Camilla, for where one goes so does the other, and God knows they could use the backup--in roughing out a plan, debating this detail and arguing over that bit of timing until they have something that feels as though it's going to work.

If they get caught, it's more than grounds for Darlington's termination, even arrest for all three of them--but in a vast complex of empty exhibit halls and abandoned offices, who's going to be there to know? On the appointed day, Darlington ignores Alex's huffy, pregnant glares and heads into the city, driving along eerily empty streets until a snarl of stalled and vacant cars forces him to park the car on a--hidden and nondescript, because the last thing he's prepared to do is explain to an already-irritated Galaxy Stern that their car was stolen on top of everything else--side street and walk the rest of the way.

They'd agreed to meet around the side of the building, near the smaller and less conspicuous staff entrance. Darlington checks again that he has his keycard and looks through the bag he'd brought, full of tools that might or might not be necessary depending what they find. In a city as empty as Darrow is now, even the quietest approach is noticeable; hearing footsteps coming closer, he looks up, relieved to see the twin figures of his friends.

And, for today, partners in whatever kind of mystery this turns out to be.

Comments

[hellonspectacles]

“Our plan was sound!” Palamedes insists sotto voice. “…At least, given the variables I considered.” Unfortunately, they had not considered all of the variables—for example, the fact that Palamedes Sextus and Camilla Hect were both already considered too clever by half and known to cause trouble. But that adventure had not been a complete loss, even if they had been caught. “Given we did find that coagulation theorem that no one had used for half a myriad, I think the comparison bodes well.”

Pal keeps his own torch off for the time being, peering into the darkness from the edge of the beam of light that Camilla casts. He has been in this room before, but it could be an alien planet for all that he recognizes it now. The beam of light briefly falls across one of the displays, and Pal sees something flicker in the depths.

“Wait right there,” he says under his breath, creeping forward to investigate.

[go_loud]

"Didn't say it wasn't," she says mildly, smiling at the memory. They had gotten caught, but most of what she remembers was the act itself, creeping through night-lit corridors, Pal looking up section numbers while she stayed on alert, the delight of seeing scribbled theorems and their transcriptions unfolding before them. It'd been exhilarating, even if they likely had been let off without a more severe punishment only because they'd been extremely cautious with the actual materials.

"We had this...friend --" she starts, to give Darlington some context, but then Pal's murmuring to wait and moving forward and her eyes narrow.

Cam's not sure if he's telling her to wait, or half-instructing whatever it is he's seen, but like hell, which she may just mumble under her breath. She gestures to Darlington with her head and mimes holding a hand out, pointing at her own flashlight so he can move, slowly, toward her to take her torch. She wants to keep the light as similar as possible.

It's a shit role to give him, but she's not standing here like a damned lamp while her necromancer chases moving shadows, and while she appreciates Darlington's skill where both physical and mental exertion are concerned, there's a difference between him going with Pal and her doing it.

Besides, he doesn't have a blade with him.

[more_magic]

The moment Pal's focus shifts to the diorama and he whispers at them to wait, Darlington's taking a step forward to join him instead, picking up on his curiosity and letting it fuel the fire of his own. It's only Camilla's swift jerk of her head that stops him, her gesture economical but clear. For a moment, he thinks Alex might find something to appreciate in Cam's attempt to save him and Pal from themselves--or at least see some kind of familiarity in the long-suffering air she adopts while she does it. If they get out of this unscathed, and once she's calmed down enough to have an interest in hearing it, he'll have to tell her.

He nods once, smoothly changing course to come to her side, taking the flashlight from her with only the slightest wobble in the light as it spills towards the darkened diorama.

[hellonspectacles]

“Do you ever listen to me?” Palamedes huffs when feels Camilla fall in behind him. He shouldn’t have expected anything else, really, and maybe he’s more pleased than petulant. Pal still can’t believe his fortune that his cavalier is here, that by some stroke of luck or magic they have been reunited. He couldn’t be annoyed by her presence if he tried.

The torch in Darlington’s hand provides a clear but narrow tunnel of light, though the further Pal walks towards the edge of the echoing hall, the more the darkness creeps in. If he has remembered correctly, and he usually does, then there should be a diorama of saber toothed cats in this direction. But is anything else lurking among the prehistoric creatures?

He’s busy squinting ahead into the darkness, which is why he manages to miss-judge how close he has gotten to the edge of the hall. He yelps as he trips over a low plinth of some kind, which sends him forward and over the rail around the exhibit, landing with an echoing oof at the feet of a stuffed, glassy-eyed cat.

[go_loud]

His huff isn't in a particularly serious tone, so Cam knows that the sting she feels at it is more than it deserves, and that Palamedes is lacking a lot of context for just how seriously she does take his instruction. It still stings a little.

She doesn't quite let it enter her voice when she counters, lightly, "When I ought to." She falls quiet, scanning the hall for signs of movement; Pal has moved ahead toward the edge of the light, the shadows around him indistinct.

He yelps, then, and she finds her hand going for her knife unbidden as she calls, "Pal?" She's already parsing the sound of falling, but the light's also eerily flickering across some -- eyes?, and her heart double times as she runs -- carefully -- forward.

[more_magic]

Darlington does make a genuine attempt to stay put, holding both flashlights steady and settling into a loose fighting stance--at least at first. He watches the two of them move closer to the dark void of the diorama, Cam scanning the area and Pal a little more singleminded in his focus, but when there's a cry and a scuffle, Cam reaching for something on her belt as she quickens her pace, Darlington only hesitates a moment before he's following. The light bounces over the figures within, catching the grey of Pal's hoodie and the metallic glint of the knife suddenly in Cam's hand, then throwing strange, crouched shadows against the wall. In the chaos, he sees fangs and staring eyes, and though common sense ought to tell him it isn't real, it's real enough to have him startling backwards.

"Holy shit."

[hellonspectacles]

For a moment, Pal disappears behind the papier mache and plastic plants that make up the prehistoric habitat. Then he sticks up his hand and gives a wave, the gesture just visible in the darkness. “Here,” he calls. “Ow. Don’t worry, I’m all right, just knocked my head a bit. Ow. And the artificial vegetation is unnecessarily spikey. Also the scenery is lying go me. Again. This palm tree is giving off a signature that implies it’s three hundred yers old.”

He pushes himself up to seated. "But there doesn’t seem to be anything else back here. Might be worth examining the diorama’s perimeter, just to be sure, but I think we can chalk this up to a trick of the shadows—“

He gives another sudden yelp as he raises his eyes and looks straight up into the reflective gaze of one of the diorama’s residents.

After a moment he calls, "...don't worry, I'm still all right."

[go_loud]

The lights are a chaos, seemingly splitting movement into moments as Darlington dashes for them. She hesitates only a moment before hopping the rail to see what's happened to Palamedes.

Then he pops up, Darlington's lights carving the diorama into sharp darkness and light. "Bloody Resurrection," Cam huffs half under her breath, as she put her knife away. It's a curse combination that's a lot more casually thrown around in Edenite circles than it is within the Houses but was recognizable enough to have worked its way into her vocabulary. "If the palm's anything like me, it just feels three hundred years old."

Cam picks her way extraordinarily carefully through the diorama, feeling a little like she's committing some kind of heresy more awful than anything she'd even thought of back home. Somehow, she manages to startle herself at the same creature that had alarmed Palamedes. It's a strange, huge cat-like thing with fur that she thinks might actually be real and teeth that look like something someone made up for fun while practicing constructs.

Did that exist once in Darrow?

She fixes her eyes on her necromancer, stretching a hand down. "Here. Slowly. Any dizziness?" She should have taken her flashlight back from Darlington, but something about going back and then turning around and trampling back through the diorama -- careful or not -- seems even worse.

[more_magic]

"For whatever it's worth, which isn't much, this particular diorama was built in 1952," Darlington says, training the lights in the direction of his friends' voices. Keeping them steady gives him a better look at the stuffed cat that seemed to frighten them all by turns, the constant light a reminder that it's inert, inanimate, posed in a perpetual almost-leap that will never come to pass. It helps calm the frantic beat of his heart, at least, and once again he settles into his role as observer and torchbearer, watching Cam check pal over amidst reconstructed greenery and papier-mache boulders.

[hellonspectacles]

“There is zero indication that Darrow existed until nine years ago,” says Pal, who is still annoyed that the city seems unwilling or unable to reveal anything more definitive about himself. It reminds him too much of Canaan House, among other things. Matter shouldn’t be capable of lying, for goodness sake.

He takes Cam’s hand and rises with her help, resisting a retort regarding his well-being. He had gone running off into the darkness, after all; her concern was at least somewhat earned. He brushes himself off and considers her question. “None. I also wasn’t mauled by a prehistoric beast, which would have made an unfortunate end to our investigation, even if it would have been a decidedly unique experience."

[go_loud]

Cam reaches up to take his chin firmly in her free hand and turns it from side to side, glancing with a smile as Darlington's flashlight beam hits them. The Warden's pupils, at least, contract away from the light with the proper unhappy speed. "You might have a lump to ice when we get back," she relents, "but you're in one piece, at least."

She allows herself to laugh belatedly at the second part of that, nudging him back toward the path they're supposed to be on. "Let's not count our blessings so loudly." She glances back. "Do those things exist in prehistory outside of Darrow?" Cam asks, more quietly and also more honestly curious, as they both clamber over the exhibit rail and alongside Darlington. She's not sure if those sort of records don't exist on the Sixth or if she merely hasn't read them: pre-Resurrection fauna isn't exactly her forte, much less the kind that was extinct just prior to the Resurrection.

[more_magic]

"You know that, and I know that," Darlington says in response to Pal's grousing, "but I doubt any of our vanished friends and colleagues would say the same. We'll see if there's anything more definitive once we get into the exhibit." Despite this mishap diverting them from their intended course, he's determined to keep thinking of it as a when and not an if.

He watches them both make their way out of the diorama and back over the rail, shifting his hold on the flashlights to free up one hand to assist them up and out. Handing Cam's light back to her, he waits for them both to regain their bearings, then continues along the darkened hall. "They do," he says to Cam as they walk. "They went extinct millions of years ago, mind, but they're definitely part of the natural history of...well, of Earth, at least as I know it." The need to clarify so boldly still carries an edge of amusement for him, a fascination that's reminiscent of all the books he'd read about a new world, a different one, opening up for an unsuspecting soul. "Occasionally, some archaeological expedition or another will dig up a fossil, or part of one. There's a few examples in New Haven, actually, at the museum I used to work for."

[hellonspectacles]

Pal screws up his face as Cam inspects him, but he otherwise allows her to check him over without complaint. Once they’re back on firm ground on the other side of the diorama, he casts a final glance at his would-be feline attacker. “Contrary to that particular tableau, they didn’t really overlap with homo sapiens, though I suppose dramatic license is to be expected. Cam, that reminds me—we should really come back during daylight. The dinosaurs are fantastic.”

He stops himself from expounding further on what he has read about the prehistoric world, falling silent as they continue their journey through the darkened halls. At the end of the diorama hall, a doorway leads into a narrow hallway. “Which way from here?"

[go_loud]

Camilla hops the rail easily, though she takes Darlington's hand at the last second, the corner of her mouth twitching with self-aware amusement at her obligation to propriety, or something like that.

Falling into brisker step between the two taller men as they head back toward their original route, her eyes light up at the idea, glancing between them. "We don't have much in the way of animals," she contextualizes to Darlington with a touch of apology. "Prehistoric fauna are a bit exciting." She glances at Pal. "You are absolutely showing me the dinosaurs. Not -- we probably should not do massive skeletons in darkened halls." She represses a shudder, thinking of that regenerating construct.

She falls silent as they get closer to the edge of the hall. She has even less idea of this place than Pal does, and she glances at Darlington for direction, listening for any sign of a real presence other than them.

[more_magic]

"Probably best to avoid the dinosaurs for the present moment," he agrees, though he does look towards the entrance of the exhibit as they pass. "They do have an impressive collection, though."

They reach the end of the hall, and Darlington takes a moment to think about their route. "We're going to have to go up one floor to get there," he says, "and there's a staircase over...no. Wait." He grins, looking over at Pal. "This way. We'll cut through the rare books display and then go up."

Time is on their side, and while it might be better to move as quickly through the museum as they can, he can't resist the chance to see his friend's reaction to the history museum's collection of books and other printed artifacts. He turns right down the hall that branches off from the dioramas, rather than left towards the staircase they can just see the shadow of in the dark, trusting the two of them to follow.

[hellonspectacles]

Even in the shadowy light, Pal sees his friend grin and brightens in return. “Daniel, you know the way to my heart,” he says. “Though honestly, I can’t entirely believe they just leave the books out on display at all. Back home, anything made of actual paper is kept under aggressively strict conditions, and very few people are allowed to see the originals.” He exchanges a smile with Cam, though it grows a little wistful when he speaks. “Lady Pent would absolutely lose her mind if she were here.”

Clearing his throat, he explains, “Fifth House heir and a remarkable historian. She’d write me monthly, like clockwork, requesting access to some of oldest materials. My denials never stopped her from trying again."

[go_loud]

"Stop flirting, you two, Alex is going to be cross enough already," Cam faux-scolds, though she too has, of course, gone a little sharp and excited at the eyes at Darlington proffering the route through the rare books. Retroactively, she hopes a little that he's started to get her sense of humor down; Palamedes always knows when she's joking, but as with most of her emotions, it telegraphs a little close to the chest.

She's distracted from her second-guessing herself by Pal's addendum, smiling back at thoughts of home, and of the handful of pre-Res documents she'd had the privilege to see by virtue of being the Warden's Hand. She nods at the mention of Lady Pent, lips pressed together in regret, though she can't help but relax a little fondly at the memory of her insistent dispatches.

"She'd be absolutely boggled by this place," Cam agrees, quietly, to keep herself from thinking too much about how things might have changed with Abigail Pent alive and well. "So much guess-work, completely blown out of the water. Though, can you imagine trying to get information out of a Darrow ghost?"

[more_magic]

"If we ever, somehow, make it to New Haven, I'm introducing you to the Beinecke," says Darlington. Just like all the other times he's mentioned it to Pal and Cam, his voice carries the deep fondness he holds for his favorite place at Yale--his favorite place in the city, even, outside of Black Elm. "You'll either take up residency or insist on revamping their collections policies. Or both."

He does laugh at Cam's feigned exasperation, though the joke carries the sting of a reminder at the back of it: the memory of his and Alex's fight only a week prior, the dark and wounded glare in her eyes as she watched him leave just a few hours ago. Whether they come out of this with answers or not, he'll have plenty of things to apologize for. The turn to talking about their friend is a welcome distraction, either way, and Darlington listens with interest as they walk past display cases and informational plaques, the arched doorway of the books exhibit a mere smudge for now in the deeper shadows of the hallway.

"I can't decide if it'd be easier or more difficult than trying to question a living Darrowite," he says. "Alex hasn't tried to, not specifically, but she's definitely run into helpful Greys and those...not so much. Again, rather like the living."

[hellonspectacles]

“Abigail was very good with revenants,” Palamedes tells Darlington. “Even stubborn ones. And she could be awfully persuasive, too.” For a moment or two, he lets himself imagine both Abigail and Magnus in Darrow. It might not be home, but they would like it, he thinks. And it would give them more life than they had been allowed.

With a soft puff of breath, he lets the thought go. It’s a little too painful to contemplate for long—all the more because of how tantalizingly possible it is that they might appear someday. “To be honest, the very presence of ghosts in Darrow is a bit of a puzzle, don’t you think? Has Alex said if they’ve gone with the rest of the long-term residents?"

[go_loud]

Cam allows herself a little, wistful smile at the idea of Abigail and Magnus here -- impossible to not imagine them together. It's better than the visceral memory of them in the makeshift morgue of Canaan House, herself and Palamedes slapdash coroners for them and so many others, of that key... She studiously tries to envision them here, Magnus chuckling over a pun or delighting over pre-Resurrection pastries, Abigail adjusting her spectacles in excitement over some piece of history; both of them likely to firmly mother-hen the nearest teenagers.

"The Fifth House specializes in speaking to spirits," she says to Darlington, for some better context. "And beauracracy," she says with a little wry smile. "It's the largest in the system --" Cam goes through the little mnemonic she's learned that they use here and counts out from Dominicus, or Sol as it is now, she guesses. "Analogous to Jupiter, as you'd know it, I think. They're the core of the Empire, and very traditional, but they've always been spirit adepts and concerned with other kinds of history. Watchers over the River.. Abigail Pent was a very good example of her house."

They don't speak of spirits quite enough for the word Greys to not still sound a little funny to Cam: at home, if someone had said it, it'd almost certainly have been a -- probably derogatory -- nickname for the Sixth. She glances at Pal with a little curl of a smile, wondering if he ever thinks it too.

She lifts an eyebrow at the possibility. Either way -- that's fascinating, and something she hadn't thought of. "Darrow seems to delight in oxymoron," she points out, waving her fingers at the museum, the vast history contained by a place that should be devoid of it -- even if this isn't Darrow history specifically, it seems to have access to the remnants of a world you can't get to from inside it. She lifts her head as they turn a corner, instinctively listening for footsteps, glancing around for security measures.

[more_magic]

"I think it might be argued that spirits and bureaucracy is at least half of Lethe's usual workload," quips Darlington, as much for the truth of it as a way to lighten the moment. Even with the dark of the museum around them, it's hard not to miss the slight, pained look on each of their faces--even if it's only there a moment. Pal's question is a welcome distraction for all three of them, and Darlington nods.

"They've gone with the rest, according to her," he says. "Which is its own kind of mystery. She's elated, for obvious reasons, but the lack of them is...I wish I could explain it."

[hellonspectacles]

“Really? Fascinating. Blast, now I really do wish we had access to a decent spirit talker. I’d be curious to know if it was possible to call any of them back…” Palamedes trails off, wondering if he should just try it himself. Given Darrow’s low level of thanergy, he’d probably have a nosebleed for days, and he couldn’t even be certain that if he failed, Darrow would be to blame. As talented as he is, Pal is much better at the theoretical applications of the more occult forms of spirit magic than the practical ones.

He shoots Darlington a grin at the joke about bureaucracy. “Lethe sounds more and more Sixth every day, you know. Anyone in the Library who actually does need to call a revenant as part of their research needs to fill out four forms, submit a statement of interest, and have the whole application examined by a review panel—“ He cuts himself off, eyes alighting on an illuminated manuscript resting open under a plex vitrine. “Cam, come look at this!”