rememberettersberg | Open Post: This Is Where The Magic Happens

A new notice has appeared on the welcome table and at several well-traversed locations around the mansion and its grounds. It invites residents to stop by a certain summer house (which has recently sprung into existence on the shore of the lake) if they are interested in the discussion and/or instruction of magic.

Should anyone's curiosity take them in that direction, they'll find Nightingale there with a pot of tea always on the go and a rotating selection of snacks and nibbles. He's started to cultivate (heh) a small library of his own - important texts in the history of his magical tradition, textbooks for the study of a number of dead/archaic languages, and a growing pile of his own notes.

He'll be delighted to catalogue the differences (and similarities) in the way various worlds practice magic, conduct experiments to see if they can use each other's traditions, and (in the case of Laertes and anyone else that seems like they might be a fit candidate) begin some basic magical instruction.

Closed.

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"I think so," as he steps inside, glancing around, his serious eyes taking in everything interesting, the books and the notes and the snacks all scattered about.

"What brings you here today?" Nightingale closes the book he's been reading and sets it to one side. "Does magic take your fancy?"

He hadn't realized Nightingale did magic, and his gaze immediately flicks back to him. "Are you a druid?"

"I'd call myself a wizard or a practitioner, but I suppose it's all the same thing in the end."

"What do you do?"

"With magic? Any number of things. Usually I find myself preventing more unsavoury practitioners from misusing their powers to do harm."

This is one of the more understandable ways someone has described their profession to him since he arrived, frankly. "Did you build this house with magic?" with a slight tilt of his head. "It's new."

"I didn't build it, no, but whatever sort of magic fuels this place provided it." Nightingale looks around the room and shrugs. "I went out looking for a suitable space until the mansion decided to provide it for me."

A nod. "I've done that too."

"What were you looking for?" He's genuinely interested in the answer.

"I made a gift for Claudius."

Nightingale smiles, endeared, and manfully doesn't think about the last time he and Claudius talked. "What did you make?"

"A scarf." He fingerspells love against the sketchbook. "Because his clothes are always beautiful. I knew it was something he cares about-- I wanted to give him something beautiful to wear."

"That's a kind and wonderful thought." He's quiet for a time, pondering the strange mechanics of this place, how it gives and takes away. "What would you make for yourself?"

That seems to catch him by surprise. "For myself?" He looks at Nightingale for a long moment, with that intensity he doesn't even know he has. "I want a watch," he admits, finally.

"That should be quite easy to achieve. What sort of watch takes your fancy?" Nightingale wears a vintage mechanical watch with a window showing the intricate, beautiful workings beneath the hands, though he has no idea what time to set it to here. He takes it off to show Galahad. "Something like this perhaps? Or a pocket watch maybe?"

His eyes widen slightly as he looks at Nightingale's watch -- from Magnus' drawing, he had expected something a bit more functional and less beautiful. This one, with all of its mechanics showing, is breath-taking. When he looks at it, he feels as if he's looking at time, and he wants to know more about it; it can't be as simple as Magnus said, it has to be like a miracle or a magic. Who decided the pattern of hours and minutes and seconds? It wasn't God, surely, or He would have already told. Is it like the turn of seasons, an inevitable part of the world? Does it ever change or are the rules a constant? If he had a watch like Nightingale's, will he always be in some kind of brotherhood with everyone else who has one, because they'll all be able to look and see the same time?

"Like that," he says.

Galahad's fascination is evident and endearing; Nightingale finds himself wanting to explain, to teach. "This type of watch runs purely on kinetic energy - each morning or evening, you wind the dial on the side until you feel resistance as a spring inside is coiled. The uncoiling creates enough energy for the cogs and wheels to turn precisely, keeping track of each second." He demonstrates the winding with a smile. "This one can be yours if you want it."

"It's yours." This feels like too great a gift: something so beautiful and weighty as time, to someone Nightingale barely knows.

Nightingale shrugs. "The offer is there. Alternatively, we can see if the mansion will conjure you up something similar. Or leave a book about horology somewhere that Laertes might happen upon it." He grins a little at that.

"Is horology making watches?"

At the mention of Laertes he feels a strange little tremor of something. He... he misses Laertes? He hasn't seen him since that night in the kitchen, and he misses his kindness and the warmth of his touches, the quiet company of reading in the library with him. He wants to know him better, enough to understand what Nightingale means by his comment. Laertes is a friend, or close to a friend, and Galahad feels disappointed that he isn't sure.

Edited 2023-11-19 16:35 (UTC)

"It's the study of time and ways to measure it. Horologists make clocks, watches, sundials, hourglasses... all sorts of timepieces."

"Do you have a book like that?"

"Not personally, but there's a fair chance that the library might."

"I want to learn more about that," he admits. It seems like a small enough want to be safe.

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