[PRP] red pen (eve + renard)

[cibarium]

Quote:

chronomancy

Hello Renard.

If you're interested and have the time, I could use your expertise on a project I've been working on this year. I can meet on weekends anytime, or in the early afternoon or after 6pm on weekdays.

Regards,
Eve Fitzpatrick
efequinox@gmail.com

 

[shibrogane]

cibarium

RE: chronomancy

Come over for dinner this Friday at 7:30pm. My husband and daughter will be at a friend's, so we'll be able to discuss your project without interruption.

V/R

Dr. Renard Leroux
My office hours are Thursday from 6-10pm and otherwise, by appointment.

 

[cibarium]

Among the possible responses to her message, Eve hadn't been expecting a home invitation. Nonetheless, she accepted the invitation with a polite reminder that she had a service dog (in case there were allergies or rules about animals in the house to deal with), and arranged transportation to the estate before going about the rest of the day.

She arrived on Friday a few minutes past the arranged time. Normally she was the 'fashionably late' kind of person, but this wasn't a party, and it was also Renard. He'd seemed the type to expect or appreciate punctuality. She rang the doorbell without dawdling, and Clover waited patiently alongside her.

shibrogane

 

[shibrogane]

Renard opened the door, said, "Eve, come in," and led the way into the house. It wasn't particularly strongly handicap accessible, being as it had been built in the mid-1800s and maintained largely in its original state, but the hallways were wide and the rugs had been moved to allow her a largely painless passage from the door to the dining room. (the door to the kitchen was entirely too small to be passable, but Renard wasn't asking her to go in there and seemed to consider it a nonissue.)

Once dinner was set out (it involved fish, skewers, and a risotto-esque dish set into its own little stoneware dish) Renard took a seat. He'd set out a bottle of wine and gestured, the implication being that Eve should serve herself if she would like some. There was also iced tea, which Renard seemed to prefer. It was lightly minty, and had a hint of sharp ginger.

"So, if I understand correctly, you've been working on chronomancy," he said, without fanfare.

cibarium

 

[cibarium]

Eve was a tea snob, but would still try anything someone else made for her. The ginger bite was a pleasant surprise, and worked nicely to alleviate some of the discomfort brought about by her recent coffee habit. For the moment, she passed on the wine, but figured she might indulge later depending on how the conversation went.

"Yes," she answered. "I've been studying it for about half a year, so I've become proficient in some of the basics... isolation, reversal, expiditing, and specifying particular moments in time to recall an item to or advance it towards. It's all been pretty small-scale work, so far."

shibrogane

 

[shibrogane]

"Interesting," said Renard. His expression was illegible, and his tone didn't really provide any clues either. "With the end goal of?..."

cibarium

 

[cibarium]

This was making Eve a little tense. She was in Renard's home, eating his food, and he was setting the tone and pace of the conversation. Usually she liked feeling more in control, or at least interacting in a more neutral setting.

"The end goal is also relatively small in scale," she answered. "My project is a method to reach into a past moment and undo it, or rewrite it towards a more favorable outcome."

Then she paused to compliment him on the fish. She didn't eat meat or fish often, living in a vegetarian household, and it was among a short list of foods that still tasted pretty good after having lost her fox senses.

"I don't plan on using it to solve everything," Eve said. "But from what I understand, we ended up in our current situation thanks to a long series of mistakes that limit what's possible in the present. If we can make an informed and precise change to just one of them..." Her fork tapped quietly on her plate. It was impossible to read how Renard felt about this so far. She could very well end up being advised to quit, for all she knew.

shibruhgane

 

[shibrogane]

Renard snorted. It was indelicate and not really in line with the cultured Southern gentleman he liked to present to the world. "What you're describing is impossible," he said. "It would rewrite the world. Even my most ambitious experiments only neared such power after decades of experimentation. Your best hope with a creation worked from the magic available to one with potential but no practical talent, created in less than a year, would be to reset something small to its condition before the event."

cibarium

 

[cibarium]

"That's more or less what I meant by undoing," replied Eve, glowering momentarily at her plate. She didn't take being talked down to well. "Most of my recent work has involved restoring objects to a previous state."

shibrogane

 

[shibrogane]

"There's no space in magic for more or less," said Renard. "Inexactitude helped lead you and yours to this situation. It is a habit that will kill you." There was an eyelash-flicker blink.

He shrugged. "A good start. But it was not what you stated your intentions to be. You told me you wanted to make an informed and precise change to one of the mistakes that led you here. But you can never un-make that mistake, not in the time you have remaining. So what is it that you want to do?"

cibarium

 

[cibarium]

Eve had taken on a pretty grave expression at this point. "I'm not interested in continuing that habit. It's one of the reasons I'm here," she said. "I can make do with a reset if that's what I'm limited to. The first thing I would want to undo is the seal that was imposed on my innate abilities."

She paused for a sip of tea.

"I know there must be other ways to achieve that, but it's a way to prove the method. Past that, I'm not going to choose a second target without input from others. If you have any suggestions on that note, I'd be glad to hear it."

shibrogane

 

[shibrogane]

"You'd be resetting your magical core to the date specified," corrected Renard. He was really into that exactitude stuff, wasn't he? "Magical abilities aren't sealed off, in many cases. Melany Dubhslaine's abilities--I assume it was Melany, she's the only living being I know of with that power--simply flip the switch and break the magical circuit. What you want to do is use your schema to restore power, essentially. Correct?"

cibarium

 

[cibarium]

'Magical core' was a new term. Or hadn't Leila mentioned it after she went to see the warg library? Eve couldn't recall exactly.

"Yes," she answered.

shibrogane

 

[shibrogane]

"That's an incredible amount of power," he said. "It has tremendous potential to go wrong. Do you have your schema with you?"

cibarium

 

[cibarium]

"I've yet to make one," Eve confessed. "But I have most of the design worked out, if you want to see that." She was already reaching into her bag to get her notebook.

shibrogane