Solo Who Needs a Key?

[Lenore]

Lenore sat at his little desk in the forest of doors. He was fairly sure Tellerwak was here somewhere, but where was always the question. On his desk sat two door knobs, attached to their mechanisms as if they were on a door but lacking the door itself. There was a note beneath them as well. It assigned Lenore to discover the magical properties of the doorknobs, write those properties down, and submit the answers for evaluation.

The animator stared the door knobs on the table like they might bite. He had come to suspect that his lack of diversified magics was frowned upon, and now he was certain. Picking up a quill he prodded the first doorknob, there was an awful scritching noise but nothing else happened. Moving on to the second he repeated the process to find he couldn’t actually touch the mechanism itself, it was like there was a thick layer of film over it that was determined to repel or slide off the quill.

Curiously, Lenore attempted to touch the knob with his hand and found it equally difficult. There was no oily texture to it, just a strange barrier. The old Nuit had an theory but he needed more resources to be certain. He placed the two door knob mechanisms into his backpack, along with one of his blank books, artist toolkit, and the writing supplies from his work station. The inkwell was properly stoppered. He meandered out of the laboratory, his mind almost fully on the project at hand. It would take a number of chimes to get all the way to the library.

He had to keep an open mind, although the note had said to find the magical properties of the door knobs, it was entirely possible that one was fully mundane. Still, a hypothesis of mundanity should be applied until all avenues were exhausted. There was also the matter of figuring out which books would be most helpful to him. Lenore’s Nader-Canoch was passable but by no means fluent, he was proficient enough to know the titles could come in a wide variety of words that all come to similar meanings. Rather than searching blindly through the stacks of books Lenore began to construct possible categories his search might find;

Djunn Djed: The vertical line crafts, should mean personal magics.
Irsts-Djunn Djed: The vertical line veiled crafts if the second knob was shielded as he suspected.
Daeq-Irst Djunnt-Djed: The veiled shape, vertical line crafts. This one was most promising.
Heas Djunnt-Djed: The vertical line craft that is seen. If there was a magic that could diagnose other magics by sight this would be its name. Lenore had a faint inkling such a craft existed but had never knowingly seen it performed.

[Lenore]

He arrived at the library without incident. It was still a slight relief each time the library authentication accepted his apprentice’s ring, he now had access to each of these books at least in the general section. No matter how much he wanted to he couldn’t check one out either, but he could certainly copy pages from them into his own books.

Lenore eyed the little fetcher golem, if he knew the titles of the volumes he sought he could utilize the service but this was not such a specific situation. So he moved passed the little golem and went straight for the stacks. Without much thought he chose a table at random to deposit his backpack and then went to work searching the book cases. He found several volumes with titles varying from his list. He was pulling them and setting each on the table behind him, before long he had ten books piled. Rather than continuing to complete the list potential texts to study he chose to stop with these ten and make a mental note of his stopping point alphabetically. There would always be more time to spend within the library, another body, another century, another book. Lenore picked up his precarious stack and headed back to his table.

The first book turned out to be useless for his purposes, it was a medical book. Lenore had anticipated such problems might come up when he had designed his word parameters for his search. Setting that aside he moved on to another book. This one was titled very much as he had anticipated ‘Heas Djunnt-Djed Yaqt-Djed’. He hadn’t considered that the same craft might be able to identify personal magics and world magics, but it was certainly something to consider. It was clearly a more currently written book, the use of the ancient tongue was just an affectation of the scholar likely a Sahovan Nuit. Within it he found a clearly Common word that rung familiar with him, ‘auristics’ Lenore could recall his Master prior to the Valterrian, he wrote and read in the ancient tongue even though it wasn’t even the dominant language then. It had been the marker of a scholar even then, Lenore could only understand that in retrospect. At the time he had been too young and uneducated to notice the reasons behind it. Now he himself was a scholar, and in truth had been for centuries whether Sahova agreed or not.

He browsed the other books quickly, searching for relevant titles and sifting out the irrelevant. He made note of each relevant title in one of his blank books and a quick description in Common.

Heas Djunnt-Djed Yaqt-Djed: A Discussion of ‘Auristics’
Daeq-Irst Djunnt-Djed: A Discussion of ‘Shielding’

The rest of the selection was mostly a bust. he went to work copying out the pertinent parts of the texts, leaving room for illustrations which he could add in with his art supplies.