This post's authors have general content warnings that might apply to the current post.
View Flat HTML
View Metadata
Search Post
Aya is little used to having the opportunity to set her own priorities, but she likes it. She's not hurting for any material resources, and the organization of the attic would produce those more than anything else; and she has this entire bookshelf closer to hand. So the attic, which may or may not contain ghosts, languishes; and she steadily works through the book collection. Right now she is on the third in a series of myths from the old religion; this volume is about Aelare, the trickster.
namesthesky
Aya - stops.
"If there are any singing ghosts or other entities that might sound like singing ghosts in this attic," she says, "they could save me a lot of trouble by singing the opening bars of Hail The Queen Of The Spheres."
"If there are any singing ghosts or other entities that might sound like singing ghosts in this attic," she says, "they could save me a lot of trouble by singing the opening bars of Hail The Queen Of The Spheres."
The standing tower starts playing that song. If she looks, she can see its keys pressing themselves.
namesthesky
She looks.
When it has stopped, she says, "And now I would like to confirm that you aren't just reacting to song titles. Do you know the one that starts, Above the magic valley Yine?"
When it has stopped, she says, "And now I would like to confirm that you aren't just reacting to song titles. Do you know the one that starts, Above the magic valley Yine?"
namesthesky
"You are clearly magic, but I would like to be able to distinguish between 'magic human, retaining all reasoning faculties' and the possibilities between that and 'magic trained mynah bird'."
A little sequence of high fluttering notes that you could imagine might be a laugh, and then it plays the requested song, although only the line she named and one more after it.
namesthesky
"Okay. I'm going to go get some paper and a pen and come up with a code so you can talk to me without reference to my relatively limited song vocabulary. Back in a minute, possibly with a companion."
namesthesky
Aya goes back downstairs (carefully, carefully) and looks to see if the nameless son of the Duke is in his room.
anotherbreeze
Technically he has a name. Just not one he wants.
He is in his room; the door is closed.
He is in his room; the door is closed.
anotherbreeze
The door opens.
"Hi," he says. He looks generally rumpled, like he was just napping, and has neglected to put on a shirt.
namesthesky
"Magic human turned into a set of standing tower pipes. Can apparently hear. I'm going to work out a code so it can communicate complicated information."
anotherbreeze
"...I definitely didn't expect that," he says. "I wonder - where it's from, how long it's been that way. Is it that huge one that kind of looks like it fell out of a magic? I always thought the designer was just really eccentric. It's never sung around me."
namesthesky
"It's the hugest set of tower pipes up there. Do you want to see if it'll sing around you now?"
namesthesky
"Hello again. So, I'm not much of a musician and definitely not blessed with perfect pitch - you?" she asks her companion.
anotherbreeze
"As you can maybe tell from the attic full of instruments I don't play, I'm not that musical either."
namesthesky
"For all I knew you used to take lessons, or sometimes go through phases where you sing - the question is how good we are at distinguishing pitches, it'll affect how complicated and therefore how fast the code can be." Aya starts writing out the letters of the alphabet. "For myself, I think I can tell apart - anything actually too low for me to sing, anything I'd have to sing more in my chest than up in my throat, anything higher than that still in my range, and anything too high for me to sing. So that's four possible recognizable starting pitch groups, and I think this set of pipes easily exceeds what I can get out -" Aya sings aaah as high as she can, then as low as she can, demonstratively.