2021-07-20: Magilou Interrupt!
- Log: 2021-07-20 lan magilou-library
- Cast: Lan Lilac, Magilou
- Where: Shevat, the Palace Library
- Date: ICly sometime in June, 2020
- Summary: Lan is looking for a magical solution to her lack of a Gear. Magilou is very, very, VERY magical.
<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.
There are a lot of things Lan enjoys about cities. For all that they tend to be crowded and kind of smelly in ways that she isn't used to, there are things that only occur because someone made the effort to make them happen. Entertainment, and schools, and libraries are some of her favorites.
She's too old to enroll in a school now, even if she needed to (or could stay in one place long enough), but libraries are fine for everybody! They don't even cost anything to go into, so they've already got a leg up on most 'entertainment'.
And today, entertainment is actually not what Lan Lilac is after.
The pale-haired shaman has a short stack of books piled up on the table and another one laid open in front of her. They're all about magic, and Lan looks like she's been here a while. Well, summoning is a pretty specialized discipline, and if she were on Spira maybe she'd have better luck...
She turns the page, sees a large magic circle described in painstaking detail, and leans her head back to stare at the ceiling with a sigh. This is so not how she learned magic back home...!
<Pose Tracker> Magilou has posed.
And then sometimes entertainment IS your education! Wait, no, that's ridiculous. Never mind that.
There is something ridiculous in the storied libraries of Shevat, though. Of late there has been an evil presence haunting its halls, possessing a particular desk...
The horror which is...
... a clown?!
A woman all dressed in jester's raiments, oversized hat upon her head, separated sleeves, checker-schismed hot pink and midnight blue. And, only more outrageous for the locale: a skirt made entirely of books.
Magilou has been researching! Everyone else has been staying out of Magilou's way, the way it makes perfect sense to give a wide berth to those surface-dwellers who are particularly strange.
To wit: here she's walking back to her own territory with a book on Filgaia's history, circa, oh, five hundred years ago.
But Magilou doesn't stay out of the way of everyone's way, because that's their job. She sees one particular young woman sag back in her seat, and --
-- all a sudden Lan's view of the ceiling is blocked --
-- because there's a strange woman leaning over her to peer at her book. "Huh," Magilou remarks, and twirls away before she says anything else. A hand to her hip, the other snaps her own book shut. "Don't tell me you're struggling with a little thing like that!"
<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.
Guardianist magic doesn't use summoning circles. It doesn't use anything even close!She's starting to consider the idea of taking a break for a cup of tea or a walk...
Magilou Interrupt!!
"Gah," she almost yelps. Almost, because it's a library and you're supposed to be quiet in those and Lan has just enough self-control to keep from breaking the Most Sacred Library Rule. "Uh," she tries again, sitting up straight and turning to watch Magilou twirl away. "It's not really the kind of magic I'm good at! ...Or have any experience with at all." Because Lan is great at Guardianist magic!!
Possibly the only thing she's more talented at is being a goddamn nuisance. It really depends on who you ask.
"Why, do you understand it? Is the circle something you have to get exactly right every time? If it is, how are you supposed to be able to summon something without a ton of time to prepare? It doesn't seem set up really well--" Oh no, she's talkative.
<Pose Tracker> Magilou has posed.
Magilou just lets Lan talk for a while.
Meanwhile, she holds up her hands.
Meanwhile, in one hand, a paper doll starts spinning in the air.
Meanwhile, in the other hand, POOF --
"Waaah!" Bienfu flails, as Magilou holds him up by the collar. His very fine tophat remains firmly secured to his head. (It covers his eyes, but there are eye-holes, so it's fine.) "Miss Magilouuu! I'm on break!!"
"Shut up, I'm using you to demonstrate a thing," Magilou tells him, all aside, entirely dismissive.
Magilou just stays silent for another moment before she holds her hands up, having evidently already given up the gig. "Summoning is easy-peasy! It all depends on what you're summoning! If you're summoning shikigami..." That's the paper doll, "... or Normin..." is that what the weird bat-cat devil creature she's manhandling is called???, "... the most important thing is a good working relationship!"
"I'm calling the union!" Bienfu wails.
"You don't have a union," Magilou reminds him.
"Then I'm calling--!"
"No you're not." Magilou shuts down his cat-dog unification strategy immediately.
"You're right," Bienfu sighs, all aslump. "I'm not."
"Mister Grumpypants here is Bienfu," Magilou introduces him, popping him down on the ground so he can stop flailing about. "And I am the grand sorceress known throughout history as Mazhigigika Miludin do Din Nolurun Dou...! Magilou for short," she adds, with a wink. "Now, what is it you're trying to get in contact with that you'd need such an elaborate circle, anyhow?"
<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.
Lan is really good at talking, but she's also pretty good at watching. She can even do both at the same time! She watches the paper doll spin, which is a really neat trick all on its own, but when Magilou easily manages to summon an imp of some sort (named Norman??) at the same time, it's impressive enough that Lan actually shuts up.
Well, for a few moments anyway, which is long enough for Magilou to make introductions. "Oh. Hi! I'm Lan Lilac." It is much shorter. "Nice to meet you, Bienfu and Magilou!" Yeah, she's not even going to try saying Mazhig... Mazzy... the whole thing. Lan stands up from her chair and crouches down to get a better look at Bienfu, and holds out a hand to shake (or sniff, she's not entirely sure how imps greet one another). She's clearly a Baskar, and probably a Drifter of some sort since she's in Shevat instead of... you know, on the surface. A lacy shawl covering up an abbreviated strappy top and part of her shorts is Lan's attempt to 'drss nicely' for a visit to the palace. It looks handmade.
"I'm not sure yet," she admits. "I mean... I really want to know how it works. I'm a shaman, so my version of summoning doesn't last very long. The Guardians can't exist for more than a few breaths on our plane, and I kind of... want something that will stay around." She seems perfectly content to just kind of camp out there at ground level, at least for now, despite the way half of the length of her hair is now lying on the floor.
<Pose Tracker> Magilou has posed.
That's him, Norman Seraph. That's exactly what he is. Good job, Lan!
Bienfu at least looks mollified by the fact that Lan greets him first, puffing up his chest and adjusting his swanky little bow-tie. "Nice to meet you too, Lan!" He says, high-pitched but distinctly still a fellow in voice, taking her hand in his -- it's hard to say whether it's a hand or a paw, but whatever it is, he can grasp her fingers and give them a good shake. He's about cat-sized, so his idea of a good shake isn't quite a human's, but he is doing his best.
Magilou, meanwhile, is clearly... clearly... not from here. That's about all that can be discerned from her style of dress.
"Oh, boy, those Guardians," Magilou sighs, with a Significant Look to her shikigami. Which are translated as 'Guardians' in the English release. Magilou still hasn't gotten around to sueing Filgaia for copyright infringement. She grins, as she looks back to Lan. "Sounds like you need some better Guardians! Surely Filgaia has minor spirits, too? You know! The type which possess umbrellas! Or paper!" Oh, is... is that what a shikigami is?
"Or you could go to Spira," she points out, waving her free hand. "They've got an entire meditation system for summoning their particular spirits, so I hear. Just go through years of grueling mental preparation, then something, something, yadda, yadda, Aeon!" Magilou flashes a V for victory, with eminent cheer.
<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.
To be fair, Lan has been to Etrenank and people dress really weirdly there, too. Definitely not 'academic clowncore' levels of weird, but pretty weird nonetheless.
What's with people and being particularly unimpressed by the Guardians? It's not like they hold the world up or anything...! At least Bienfu is polite and adorable.
"Well, of course it does! And I already know how to summon things like wind spirits." They're a reliable source of directions, for starters. Lan stands up, the fringe of her shawl swaying gently with the movement. "And I've been to Spira, and if it takes years then it takes years, but I was kind of hoping there was something I could learn that wouldn't take more than maybe a few weeks."
Maybe she'd better start from the beginning or Magilou's going to keep having the wrong idea...!
"It's because I don't know how to pilot a Gear, and I'm bad at machines and things anyway, but I thought maybe I could use my magic to do the same kind of jobs a Gear would do! But it would need to be super big, bigger than Bienfu," and here Lan stands on her tiptoes, lifting a hand high overhead, "Like, ...I guess Gear-sized, almost? And wind spirits definitely aren't that..."
The fringe of her shawl lifts with the movement, exposing the plane of Lan's belly briefly. Above her navel, on the flat plane of her stomach, a twisted and large scar digs deep into the skin.
The same place where that boy pulled a sword from Magilou.
"...So I dunno," Lan continues blithely, "Maybe I could just come at it from a different angle, and try enchanting a horse? But that seems cruel to the horse."
<Pose Tracker> Magilou has posed.
"And they're not deeply bitter at the whole world? Wow!" Magilou claps her hands together. "Filgaia's wind spirits must be a real treat!" That's not fair, Magilou, you know why he's bitter, you are being a jerk.
(Fun fact: half of Magilou's narrative is actually supplied by Bienfu. Guess which half!)
Still, she settles back on her heels, a little rocking back-and-forth, as she listens to Lan's travails. She seems accepting enough of the limitations, but...
"Huh," Magilou remarks, as Lan gets to the point of making magic work like a Gear. She raises an eyebrow, but she lets her continue on with her point. Uuup she goes...
And Magilou frowns, just briefly, just in that one moment. Her midriff is bare and unscarred; for a moment, her own hand comes down to cover it.
(Shevat's healers didn't find anything wrong with her -- not that she helped them terribly much. They thought she was there for the burns. The burns were nothing much. Magilou might have been fighting Gears, but Seraphita wasn't trying to kill humans outside of their robots, after all.)
It's very blink-and-you'll-miss-it; it's easy to think that motion was just the beginning of Magilou twirling on a heel, entirely heedless to the unwritten rules of library etiquette. One's hands come to that position when spinning, after all. "Boy," she remarks, with no less cheer than she'd had a moment prior, "I'm not going to stand here and say you're not ambitious, Ribbons McShawl! I don't know many people who'd look at those giant monstrosities and think, gee! What if I magiced up something just like that!"
(There's one hint that something's wrong, though. It's Bienfu, who saw that wound and looked right to Magilou, with all the concern she doesn't have.)
"Buuut," Magilou says, tilting her head askance and laying a finger delicately to her cheek, "if you're not at the level of taking on Gears with your magic yet..." There was someone who went out, in the battle for Shevat, on foot, fighting Gears with magical acumen. .................... that was this lady?!
"Why don't you just enchant a robot? That's soooo much easier than making one from scratch."
<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.
"...?" Bitter? "Not like... wind seraphs," Lan clarifies, a little bit of patient concern seeping into her voice. "Spirits. Oh, but maybe they're different on Lunar, or far enough away from the surface?" The wind spirits she knows are simple, without much in the way of 'emotion'.
And maybe Magilou was going to twirl again and thought better of it, and maybe Lan would've let it go, but there's that look from Bienfu, who Lan hasn't been ignoring. She's still stretched out as tall as she can make herself when she spots it, and settles back down onto her sandaled heels right after. First curiously, and then a bit more uneasily, Lan blinks at the diminutive Normin.
Huh, what was that about...?
For Lan, it's been years.
"Ambitious...? Wouldn't it be more ambitious to say 'I'm going to go get a Gear somehow'? You'd have to go dig one up or maybe buy one if you were super rich, and I'm not super rich..." She was flogging crochet lessons for spare snacks just the other day!!
She's certain that she can 'just magic it up'. It's the 'how' that Lan is lacking. "I mean, I guess I could? But then if a Gear hit me I'd get killed in one hit! You need armor to fight Gears, don't you?!"
...Does a bookskirt count as armor?!
"Wait, were you the mage that they said was fighting Solaris right alongside the Shevat forces?" It would make sense. The knowledge of magic. The sheer brass balls attitude. You'd have to be supremely confident or supremely crazy to try that, and Magilou could easily be either... or both.
Lan holds up a finger, as if she's trying to make a point. "But I don't have a robot to enchant. Which is why I thought it'd be easier to just use magic for the entire thing."
<Pose Tracker> Magilou has posed.
"Oh, I'm just having a little fun at someone's expense," Magilou waves off the concern, clearly amused. "Why pay for a joke when you can use someone else's coin?" This may make the matter as clear as mud. Layers and layers of mud.
Bienfu adjusts his hat, and looks a shade nervous, looking back up to Lan. He looks at her belly again, though it's since been covered. He is terrible at his tells. Magilou always wins their poker games! It's a tragedy!
"Oh, I'm sure those things are just lying around anywhere," Magilou dismisses the difficulty of finding a Gear, with precisely the tone of voice of someone who's never tried to get one. "There's a whole hangar of them here somewhere!"
"Miss Magilou, those belong to people..." Bienfu reminds her, and at least he has a reason to sound nervous, now.
"Piffle-posh, if they were that important they wouldn't leave them unattended," Magilou dismisses him, with a wave of her hand.
Magilou seems entirely unconcerned about the idea of a Gear hitting her, though she doesn't draw the obvious conclusion. Lan does, though, and Magilou laughs, a hand to her chest. "I see my reputation precedes me! Yes, that was I, the great and indefatigable Magilou! I set fire itself ablaze, and I even did it with a tummyache! I'm amazing, aren't I?" Once more, she winks to Lan, entirely brazen.
Her words don't sound particularly calculating. But, somewhere in there...
"But all right, all right, fine, if you're going to be boring and not steal the robots which are just lying out there waiting to be taken, that doesn't mean you can't copy their homework a little." Magilou holds up a finger, with one of those shikigami drifting in circles above it, again. "Minor spirits like having places to live, but that doesn't mean they're constrained by them. Mine gets as big as I want it to, see?" That shikigami proceeds to grow in size until it's as big as Magilou, which is saying something, even as short as Magilou is. It was hand-sized just a second ago! "I don't know if you've noticed," she jerks a thumb back to the rows of books as her paper doll twirls around her before returning to its normal size, "buuut... paper doesn't usually do that! Now, the ineffable and inviolable idea of paper..."
Magilou grasps her shikigami, and taps it to her temple, head all atilt with an easy grin. "Ever tried just getting one of the little guys into a robot and letting them figure out how it's put together? If they like the idea of a big stompy robot, don't you think it'll be way easier to get them to arrange themselves the same way on their own time? Look, I'm not going to tell Filgaia what its deal is, because, frankly, I've read a book about it, and I am not getting into that," she flashes a hand, palm-up, as if to indicate Filgaia can very well talk to it, "but where I'm from, most spirits won't have the idea of being a giant stompy robot on their own time. Help a little guy out, why don't you!"
<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.
Bienfu's doing it again. Lan watches him, concern levels ever rising. "...Hey, is something wrong?" she asks him, crouching down again. "Are you not used to being in physical form or something?" Some spirits don't much care for it, Lan knows. "It's probably a lot more inconvenient than being incorporeal."
A ditzy-sounding girl like Lan knows a college word like that??
"Oh, you had a stomach ache? Didn't the local food agree with you?" she asks Magilou, frowning faintly. While the variety of foods available in Shevat isn't terribly wide, Lan really prefers it to the bland, processed things she ate in Solaris. Or maybe it's just that companionship is the best seasoning! "And, uh... I don't really want to steal anything. Especially not something that somebody else needs!" Lan definitely seems like the goody-two-sandals type. But she's also pretty easy to impress, if all it takes is a shikigami show! (That is in fact all it takes.)
Lan watches Magilou's guardian change size as easily as anything at all, mulling something over. She stands again, her own hand rising - but only to the level of her chest this time. "So sort of like how a star can be tiny and distant," A mote of light gathers above her palm, the size of a seed, the size of a hope, "Or as big and close as... well, not the sun or the moon, I guess," she amends after a moment's thought. The tiny firefly-sized thing flutters and swells, until its glow throws Lan's tawny features into a starker relief and the sphere of light fills her hand. "But something big and close. ...Uh, I don't want to make this as big as we are," she explains after another moment, letting the light gutter. "It'd disturb everybody else. But that's a great idea!" she enthuses, pale lavender eyes gleaming. "I'm so glad you snuck up on me today!" what
<Pose Tracker> Magilou has posed.
"Huh??" Bienfu asks, like the Seraph whose hand was caught in the cookie jar. He shakes his head, holding up a hand-paw reassuringly. "No, no! Us Seraphim are used to taking forms!" He's a Normin... AND a Seraph..??? That's what he's focused on answering, apparently. "I was just having a nap, since I've been researching all day..!"
A nap... inside Magilou.
Is that weird? Magilou isn't acting like that's weird.
Instead, she laughs, as Lan frowns. "No one can accuse me of eating crow," she says, and it's a phrase to indicate embarrassment after taking a false strong position, so maybe it makes perfect sense for someone as bombastic as Magilou to deny those accusations. "But maybe I had a teensy-weensy argument... oh, it ruined dinner entirely!"
Magilou does seem to have very loud and expressive emotions which would affect her so deeply. That is to say, she is loudly expressing emotion.
What's another word for an entertainer, anyway?
Look, a shikigami!
Magilou looks, too, as Lan invokes the power of the very stars themselves. "Oh, very nice!" She claps her hands, with zero regard for the library atmosphere. "You know," she winks, "some stars can be a lot closer than you think." She doesn't stop to explain just what she means by that, though. Instead, she presses a hand to her chest, reaching up to the ceiling. There are sparkles. How are there sparkles? She's a witch, don't ask questions. "Sometimes, the answers to the questions we're looking for are so close, we're liable to stumble right over them! Here's a girl trying to summon a spirit large enough to ride on, when she already knows plenty of spirits... why, to not point out the obvious would be a tragedy upon a tragedy!"
Magilou's hand comes back, to rub at the back of her head, with a lackadaisy grin. "Every couple hundred years I come across someone with big ideas," wait, hang on, she looks, like, twenty, how is she -- "so you'd better pull it off, or I'll be SO disappointed!" Well, she does have pointy ears. Can elves look that young for that long? Apparently!
<Pose Tracker> Lan Lilac has posed.
"As long as you're okay, then it's okay. Right?" Lan smiles down at Bienfu. He's such a cute little Seranormin! Magilou's so lucky to have a friend like that! She must never get lonely...
An argument? "It must've been an awful blowout, to give you a stomach ache. I hope you were able to make up afterward. It can be so painful to carry regrets with you." Maybe she's thinking more along the lines of strictly emotional pain, but Lan knows that heartsickness can make someone physically ill as well.
Magilou doesn't seem like the type to let such things stick to her, but Lan has been wrong before...
With her starlight extinguished, Lan ducks her head a bit at the effusive praise. Is... is Magilou teasing her?? It's really hard to tell, for some reason. Usually Lan has a better idea of what's going on! It's just that everything Magilou does is loud.
"It's just starlight," she demurs. It's weird to be praised like this, isn't it...? No, it's just her imagination. "--Wait, closer than I think? But what's that mean?" Lan asks plaintively. "If you mean 'ride on Rigdobrite' that definitely won't work--"
Lan absolutely did not float the idea past her patron. For real, she didn't.
Magilou does have an air of... well not oldness about her. But... maybe jadedness? But she's so vibrant! She's smiling! She's nothing like anybody else Lan knows. It's definitely, definitely her imagination.
Magilou is definitely an elf, and the long lifetime of her people has clearly made her a bit Touched. Like that other 'greatest sorceress in the world', what was her name? "You don't know someone named Margaret, do you?" Lan asks suddenly, because she has absolutely no idea what's going on anymore.
<Pose Tracker> Magilou has posed.
"You got it!" Bienfu flaps his little wings, cheerfully. "But I think the demonstration's over, so I'm gonna get back to my nap." He thusly toddles over to Magilou, and promptly... disappears, into Magilou.
Magilou doesn't get lonely, no. She doesn't feel something like that at all.
"Yes, it can be," Magilou agrees, inscrutably; there's just something about the way her eyes are always half-lidded and her smile always seems to know something that lends that description to her reply. She's heard it can be absolute agony. And there's this beat of silence, before she blinks, and her smile gentles by degrees. "You're some kind of bleeding heart, eh?" This is delivered with a shade more jovial digging, and something shifted, but Magilou isn't explaining quite what.
It's not like she can come out and ask. But it seems she's satisfied, whatever she was wondering.
... maybe it's making her a touch paranoid, she acknowledges, quietly, to herself.
Magilou wags a finger, as Lan names Rigdobrite. "Definitely, schmefinitely!" She seems so old, but she speaks so carelessly. What's up with that?
It turns out, apparently, all the weird old elves know each other, because Magilou bounces on her heels, wriggling from the bottom up, hands all clasped before her. "Why, dear Margaret! Since her recent reimagining, we've become great friends! Isn't she just darling? And with quite the figure," Magilou winks, outrageously lascivious. "You could do worse than listening to her magical advice, you know! Though, you could also be listening to me. But there is only one of me. I am uniquely incomparable!" That isn't even a lie. ... she's lived for much longer than them.
She twirls, again, hands clasping together. "And now," she decrees, "I am over there." Without even looking to see where she put it, she grabs the history book she'd retrieved from the shelf, and places it upon her head as she balances away, humming to herself. La la la la la~
What just happened? No one knows that.