(Almost) Everything Is Comin' Up Chase [closed post]

[summerdude]

Magnus, triumphant, has finally managed to make some old bamboo sprout. With Drosera fed recently enough that she's not complaining of hunger and resting in her new favorite perch (lounging on his shoulder tucked right against his neck, her beak tangled in hair that is once again getting long), he sneaks it into the Mansion, hides it in a large gift-bag a closet gives him, and hangs it on Claudius and Galahad's doorknob with a quickly-jotted note that reads Claudius, What next? - MAGNUS CHASE.

Then, since he's already inside, he figures, why not wander around until he finds someone to talk to?

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[summerdude]

"I only saw her the one time," Magnus nods. He's still thinking about animals and zoos and the way that Galahad had a different name for giraffes. "Hey, how many animals are in that bestiality of yours?"

[onthewillowsthere]

"I have it." He climbs to his feet and goes to the bookshelf on his side of the bed, where he's been keeping his favorite books instead of returning them to the library. The bestiary is an illuminated manuscript with full-page illustrations of the creatures inside, both real and mythological (there's actually an entry for a lindwyrm in addition to griffin, unicorn, manticore, harpy), with an entry on the habits of each, although this information is, as the age of the book might suggest, largely wrong.

[summerdude]

"Okay, this is so cool," Magnus says, laughing at some of the weird names and weirder facts listed for some of the animals.

[onthewillowsthere]

"We had one in the nunnery like this. The sisters let me look at it sometimes."

[summerdude]

"What was different about it?" Magnus asks, curiously. He's never been this up-close and personal to an old-timey book before. He's heard of illuminated manuscripts, but this is way beyond what he ever imagined.

[onthewillowsthere]

"Some of the beasts here," meaning this book, "weren't in it. And on the page for dragons there were paw prints. A cat walked in the ink when it was being made."

[summerdude]

"Oh." Magnus blinks, strangely overcome at that mental image. "I really like that."

[onthewillowsthere]

"I liked it too." He glances over at Drosera, who's curled up like a cat herself now, with even her taloned feet tucked up under herself. "When I was lonely I would pretend I was the monk who wrote it. I used to pray to God to send a kitten for me to find."

[summerdude]

"Did he?" Magnus asks, curious. He strokes a hand down Dro's back, gently; she shifts a little and then tucks her beak more firmly under her back paw.

[onthewillowsthere]

"No. I don't think it was important to Him." There's no censure in it; he doesn't expect this to have been something that would concern God. "I used to ask for a lot of things."

[summerdude]

"Gods have weird priorities," Magnus says, in tones of great commiseration. "What kind of things?"

[onthewillowsthere]

"For the birds to stay in the kitchen garden and not fly away when I came to pick herbs. For another child to come to the nunnery. For fish to be meat so we couldn't eat it during Lent. For Sister Mathilde to live to nine-hundred years like Methuselah." He looks thoughtful. "To be better at sitting still. I was scolded a lot for moving too much."

[summerdude]

"Dude, me too," Magnus says. "Um, that last one. I don't know who Sister Mathilde is and we didn't do Lent. I always got in trouble for fidgeting too much."

[onthewillowsthere]

"Sister Mathilde was my favorite nun, but she was old. She died when I was eleven." Galahad taps his fingers on his thighs. "I did get better at being still."

[summerdude]

"Aw." Magnus gives Galahad an apologetic grimace. He knows what it's like to lose people. A little philosophically, he says, "I don't think I ever did get better at sitting still. Why was she your favorite?"

[onthewillowsthere]

He shrugs. They both know people die. "She liked to listen to me. I used to talk too much, but she never told me to stop. She said I was like her sister's son and when she was very old and blind she called me his name when I came to read to her. The abbess told me to read scripture to her but sometimes she told me folk tales instead, even though she wasn't supposed to."

[summerdude]

"She sounds awesome," Magnus says, leaning against Galahad. "I bet my teachers wished I just talked too much. I'm pretty sure I was a nightmare child."

[onthewillowsthere]

He leans back. "What were you like?"

[summerdude]

Magnus thinks for a moment. "Disruptive," he decides. "Maybe partly because of the asthma and panic attacks? But mostly because I'd just get up and do things instead of doing what I was told, and I'd always talk about wanting to go outside instead of sitting in class. It was enough that I had a disciplinary record a mile long by the time I had to leave school. ...But also I think some of my teachers were just dicks. My second-grade teacher hated that I'm left-handed so he taped my hand to the desk to force me to write with my right hand."

[onthewillowsthere]

This doesn't really surprise him; he knows left-handedness is said to be bad luck, or a bodily failure like blindness or limblessness. He nods (like Lan Wangji, he hates these cruelties that have been visited upon Magnus, that Magnus talks about so easily, as if they were nothing -- but he expects the world to be a cruel place, so he tends to just take them in). "What does that mean, second-grade? A lesser teacher?"

[summerdude]

"Ooh, okay, so where I come from, school is compulsory until you're, like, eighteen," Magnus says. "Twelfth grade. Senior year of high school. Um, obviously I dropped in my freshman year -- ninth grade -- cuz my mom died and since I had that record, they thought I caused the apartment explosion, so I had to, like, go on the lam or whatever. But you have kindergarten when you're five, and maybe preschool before that, and then they count the grades by years. First grade is when you're six, second grade is when you're seven, and so on and so forth. They say kindergarten through fifth grade is elementary school, sixth through eighth is middle school, and ninth through twelfth is high school. Then, if you're lucky, you can go to college. Um, university? This is all only true in the United States, though. Other countries have different rules. Like, Shen Yuan could probably tell you what they do in China these days."

[onthewillowsthere]

The idea of everyone being schooled is completely alien to him; he was taught to read and write Latin by a monk who visited the nunnery periodically and left him lessons between those visits. College and university are both meaningless words. "What is there to learn for that long?" curiously. "You didn't study scripture."

[summerdude]

"Reading, writing, how to do math -- I got all the way up to geometry before I dropped out. Um, science, like about the earth and space and the human body; I was taking biology when I dropped out and I think we were learning about cell division then? Social studies, history -- sometimes those two overlap, I think we were learning about to US Constitution which basically laid out our system of government? And why it was written the way it was and why it focused on the things it did. Um, art, music, other languages... sometimes you take PE classes -- that's, like, exercise and stuff. Sometimes they teach you life skills and social skills and stuff like that, but I didn't learn a lot that really helped me out on the streets. Besides reading, I guess. And the longer you stay in school, the more specialized you can get with the things you're learning."

[onthewillowsthere]

Galahad twists around to look at him, impressed. "I learned to read and write, but no sums, nothing of the body, and no history except as it was part of the history of the church, like the Council of Nicea. No art or music. I was taught Latin and I learned to speak French because many of the nuns were from France. "

[summerdude]

"Yeah, I guess they tried to standardize things at some point," Magnus says, flushing a little under Galahad's focus. "So that every kid has the same base, or something? But they also wanted you to sit still at a desk for most of it, and I was extremely bad at that."