slow progress

[keep_busy]

Eventually Annie goes home for the day. Her mother lives a long but doable walk from campus, but Annie makes the trip by tricycle for speed and safety, or bus when the ice is too bad to allow riding. This is a trike day.

She tells her mother as straightforwardly as she can what has happened.

Her mother wants to meet the boy, but accepts that this should probably wait until the situation with Zevaia changes one way or another.

A few hours after Annie gets home, she gets a call from the Dean's office. There are results in; she can go hear them at the office. Apparently they're not supposed to release them over the phone for some obscure reason of policy.

Coat goes back on Annie, Annie goes back on trike, trike goes back on campus.

Comments

[keep_busy]

"What's the scale like?"

[touchedinthehead]

"In what way? Do you mean in - what's my range on the scale, what makes up my method for figuring it out...?"

[keep_busy]

"Both."

[touchedinthehead]

"Hmmm... Absolute highest single number was a sixty-seven point three. It's for making the knife go away. The average person tends to rate a seven. It becomes harder and harder to get higher numbers as you get up the scale. I weigh things I find important and how important it is that they be attended to or not, or - how much they matter to me. One point is how much I care about a person who has zero personal qualities aside from being sentient. Er - you also broke my scale, I have no idea how to even begin at figuring out what number you are."

[keep_busy]

"Is the rest of it still functioning even with me leaning on it like that?"

[touchedinthehead]

"Oh, yeah, it's working out fine. You're just - sort of my mental number equivalent of 999999, I'm sort of working around it because it's rather bewildering."

[keep_busy]

"I guess that makes sense. I don't do it with numbers like that. Just - rankings, relative ones, felt out rather than calculated."

[touchedinthehead]

"I'm sort of - obsessively accurate. So."

[keep_busy]

"What's next, after me and getting rid of the knife?"

[touchedinthehead]

"Saving my sister."

[keep_busy]

"Yeah, that makes sense."

[touchedinthehead]

"I do try to make sense," he agrees, softly.

[keep_busy]

"Any responses to your ad about knife-hunting yet?"

[touchedinthehead]

"None, yet," he sighs. "I think I need the Dean to give me more information for them to be willing to risk touching a strange artifact. Even to get rid of the knife."

[keep_busy]

"Maybe he'll come up with enough to go on tomorrow."

If he doesn't, the odds that Zevaia won't have died of dehydration start to go way, way down.

[touchedinthehead]

"Maybe," agrees Aldaras softly.

He knows the odds.

[keep_busy]

Annie pauses in their walk to hug him.

[touchedinthehead]

Hug.

"It has a vested interest in keeping her alive. We know it makes them drink rain water...."

[keep_busy]

"And it has been raining. But - yeah." Hug.

[touchedinthehead]

"Yeah."

[keep_busy]

"I hope somebody answers the ad soon."

[touchedinthehead]

"Me, too," he sighs. "I - think she should have been the one to find the necklace, honestly. She's better at the sort of crisis that involves hitting things. I'm - not."

[keep_busy]

Pat pat.

Annie resumes walking.

[touchedinthehead]

Aldaras does, too, looking pensive.

[keep_busy]

"There's not really anything useful I can do, is there?"