Flashback [Orphanage] There is No Frigate Like a Book

[Philomena]

1st Day of Winter, 480 AV (Kenabelle Wright Day)
Eveningtide
The Farson Home for Orphans
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Ah, those were not the Orphanage's best days.

It was a good day at the Kennel, as the more clever of Minnie's pseudo-siblings called the broken down girls' wing of Farson Home - 'for we ain't no better kep' 'en dogs, are we 'en?' Hattie had told her once, when she asked why they would call their house something so ugly.

But, still, it was a good day, the first day of winter, and in Zeltiva, that meant one thing: Kenabelle Wright Day. To the more brutish girls - those most likely to survive to a healthy adulthood - this meant more stalls and loosely buttoned pockets out, more chance for food and money to be found. But even to Minnie, who could't have picked a pocket with a thousand lucky marks on her back, and woudl never have tried, it meant that the streets were alive. And the orphanage, forgotten on most days, was only mostly forgotten on a festival day - that was only the 29th year since Kenabelle WRight had managed her first trip, after all, and it was still something intensely important to the port city, still their point of pride. After all - there had been only a few subsequent circums attempted, and most had ended with the fizzling, morbid silence of no return message after long enough to assume death. People felt generous on Kenawright Day.

But Minnie? Minnie loved the day to pieces. Most of what she learned as an orphan was, frankly, dull. She'd always been a sharp girl, and the endless lessons on practical skills - needlework! For Gods' sake, no! - drove her mad with frustration at her incompetence. History was somewhat better. But Literature! Books! Stories! And in Zeltiva, there was after all, one great story, one story of stories, and that was Kenabelle Wright.

Of course, this was an orphanage, they didn't have books, per se. Their lessons in letters were drawn with horrid low quality chalk on rough slate, and usually consisted of nonsense about porridge and cats, and kelp, and boys named Dick with sisters named Jane. But one week, for Kenawright day, a doctor from the university had come in, and told them the story. He was horrid - so sanctimonious and full of his own generosity that you didn't feel so bad about the bleach drops that Hattie and her gang had plashed stealthily across the man's silk slippers as he spoke. But the story! Adventure! Tragedy! Friendship! Young girls doing great things! It was the sort of thing a child, lonely and generally unloved even by her peers, dreamed of!

A few years later, on an off day (Snitching Fourth Day, the girls called it, after the activity one was supposed to do to acquire extra food this day), she'd gone off to wander the quaysides, and had seen - with her own two eyes! - Charm Wright! The great Kenabelle's sister and confidant! In the flesh! Not only that, but miracle of miracles, the woman had bent down to her and given her a COIN!

It was only a penny - and honestly, given the smell of festered sores she'd been emitting at the time, it was as much pity-disgust as pity-love, she figured in retrospect - but that penny! On the hungriest days of the hardest winters since, Minnie had kept it with her. When they'd fit her for her first girdle, she'd used her sloppy needlework to cut a pocket in her girdle, so she could hold the little talisman close to her skin all the time. It was... a treasure, the sort of treasure girls like her never had. One of the girls had seen it one day, and that was the only time she'd willingly fought one of her peers, was to get the creatures grubby hands out of her girdle. A penny? This was no penny! Charm Wright was worth more than a parcel of dog bones from the butcher to suck gritty marrow from.

So, on this particular Kenawright Day, she was off to the Fountain, where there was to be speeches. She didn't understand three quarters of them, but how she loved them, with their talk of heroines of the past, and journeys of discovery, and the fronteirs of our glorious future.

And that is where the Great Occurrence happened.

Hannah Godiout, one of the Kennel girls, was threading through the crowd below her - Minnie, desperate to hear the speeches, had perched herself on the crossbuck of a streetlamp which, though it put her up dangerously exposed to threats (something a good Kennel girl learned by necessity to avoid), also gave her a beautiful view of the speakers and the stage, where a great wooden model of the Seafarer rested, waiting to be donated to the Library as a display piece by some old sailor baron or another.

Hannah Godiout had always put on airs - Minnie was no saint and hated her as desperately as the other girls, because Hannah never forgot to remind them all that SHE had a real surname, for she HAD had a mother for a time, until her parents died. The rest of the Kennel girls had scraps and bits of names, or like Minnie, no surname whatsoever. The stage wasn't very interesting for a moment, as they were switching speakers, a great plump man monopolizing the stairwell as he climbed down it. So she watched Hannah, and saw that Hannah, for all the airs she put on as being above the rest of them, was an awful pickpocket. Even Minnie, to whom the whole enterprise of petty theft was an incomprehensible mystery, could see this. The girl, just as Minnie watched, reached into the tight leather belt of a sailor 0 not a prince or baron sailor, just a low, scruffed fellow with the close purse of a poor man. And the sailor felt it of course - everyone knew, you never robbed a REAL sailor, Hannah! - and snatched up the girl's wrist.

Minnie gasped - forgetting a moment she was on the cross buck - and leaned forward to see what would happen. And then, she remembered precisely where she sat, for the sudden shift of her weight sent her toppling off toward the ground. The fall, like all great falls, was in horrid slow motion, giving her time to consider how stupid she was to have started so violently for someone so insignificant as Hannah Godiout. But, also like all falls, it did eventually end - and it ended with her splayed across the tumbled body of the sailor, knocking over several other people at the same time.

She never knew which person had lost The Book in the ensuing scuffle. The whole scene was a blur to her, Hannah grabbing at the scattered bags and wallets of the tumbling people, Hannah running, people shouting, Minnie lurching up to her feet and stumble-running behind, feeling the wrongness of the bones of her upper arm through the rush of adrenaline. The whole scene was a mess in her mind, but she thought she saw sometimes in her memory: the Book. She always imagined it coming from the arms of some young sailor girl, some Kenabelle-in-Training, but she knew this was her mind making the best of things, that in fact, the Book's genesis would likely never be known. She had stumbled home, to have a nasty break in her arm set irritably by one of the orphan-keepers, then to have Hannah stumble up to her bed.

"Honor's honor. You helped me outta a scrap. S'you get part of the loot. One thing, that's it, though, and no bitching about it."

And she'd poured the contents of a satchel onto Minnie's bed, hovering over it with the air of a terrified vulture. And there, in the middle was the Book.

Was it awful? Oh, yes, even at the time she knew that. The binding was torn off - probably by Hannah herself in the process of flight - the pages were falling from their stitching, there were seemingly meaningless passages underlined, and scrawled grocery lists and reminders in the margins. But it was The Book: 'An Account of the Circumnavigation of Mizahar by Kenabelle Wright.' She'd snatched it up from between two long twists of dried fish, both food enough to last two weeks. But this, this was like the penny. This was more than food. This was The Book. Hannah looked warily at her, then at the book, wondering if she'd missed something, but quickly scurried her fish and watch-bobs and plugs and scarves and handbags back into the old satchel, and nodded, "Pleasure doing business, Min."

Over the years, Minnie read the book so thoroughly, so repeatedly, that what was left of its binding dissolved, and she ended up keeping it in a discarded onion crate, instead, flipping the pages over into the lid as she read, and reread, and reread. She started going to the library, asking questions, learning to find out more, to peer into the mind of a girl who was so terribly much more than she was, the way one might read scripture to glimpse the mind of a God. But always, first and foremost, it was the book.

It was a horrid edition, a third quality knockoff, of course, and of the notoriously error-ridden second edition at that, and by now, she never reads it seriously, her work on Wright served largely by the scholars transcription she made herself and a printed volume of the fourth edition she used for page references for the reader's guides. But still, the old onion crate sits on her bookshelf, in her most prized books, its pages almost illegible with dirt and wear. And sometimes, even now, she'll tuck herself into the corners of the dormers, and stroke the feathery old pages of it - they, and her own eyes, are too far gone to be read anymore, of course.

[Echelon]

Adventurer's Loot A Gift Experience is its own reward. Philomena's Loot : Philomena Lefting Skill XP Reward Writing +1XP Story Telling +1XP Tailoring +1XP Brawling +1XP Climbing +1XP Acrobatics +1XP Observation +1XP Larceny +1XP Organization +1XP Lore: Farson Home For Orphans : "The Kennel" Raised In The Dog House Kenebelle Wright Day: Generosity Pride And Hope Dull Of Practicality Though Sharp of Abstract Spells Doom For An Orphan Droll Of Meaningless Scribble Comical Applications of Bleach Blessed Coin of Charm Wright Growing In A Rare Land Where Charity Is Commonplace Hero By Happenstance Gifts Of A Poor Orphan's Chance Simple Luck For The Luckless "The Book" - 'An Account of the Circumnavigation of Mizahar by Kenabelle Wright' A Hero Gained Navigating A Library Inspiration Sparked Items or Consequences: +1Miza from Charm Wright (Keep it) Dissolved And Decrepid Book: "An Account of the Circumnavigation of Mizahar by Kenabelle Wright" Notes: For more XP from single posts write more about the technical skill, may require some research. (Philo... I love you. I am so touched by this story and I have hope again in Zeltiva. This was beautifully written, and clearly well thought out. Please keep it up and don't let your post quality drop even in threads with other people. This is just amazing. I do suggest spending more time looking into the individual emotions and sensations of Minnie in the future, though that may be easier from times when she is older. Do know that this will play a huge part in how the orphanage will be viewed in the past, and not only have you followed all the lore (save for pennies not existing) to the t but also helped influence Lore of the future with this thread. - if you have ANY questions or concerns about this grading, please PM me.