No Cure For Curiosity [Finished]

[Bee]

This was going better than she imagined! The Torquehelm weasel—middle-aged, mildly malnourished--was new in town, had no friends, and was generally disliked or looked down upon by the people around him. He was a fellow no one would miss should something go wrong. Phaedra did not very much like herself for being able to view a human being this way, but…she wasn’t going to read the thing herself.

She said, “When you’re done with your shift, I have a business proposition for you.”

The weasel was unconvinced. “I’m pretty happy here, thanks.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Are you? And anyway, it’s not a permanent position. It’s a one-time deal. I just need a little help with a project.”

“There are plenty of scholars around,” he said, appearing mildly confused.

“A scholar is exactly what I don’t want,” Phaedra said. Bringing another academic into this meant butting heads and sharing whatever glory was to be had, and Phaedra didn’t like doing that if she could help it. Community support was grand, when it was convenient. "I need someone...unbiased, pure."

Well, the words were true, in a sense.

[Bee]

"I'm sure I don't have anything to offer you," Ezra said again. He really still wasn't sure why this woman was approaching him, of all people. Surely there were other people in Esterberry who weren't established in the academic community. Perhaps some flunkie--was Esterberry as a region capable of producing failures? It was an interesting thought--could be brought in.

He was starting to wonder what in the world could be so important, however, that she would doggedly keep at trying to get him involved. Most Esterberries he saw (the ones that weren't timid academics mercilessly run over by their more merciless intellectual ladder-climbers) had tremendous ego and didn't like sharing the love, as it were. Maybe that's what she meant by not wanting a scholar. She didn't want anyone from Esterberry who might be tempted to nab a bit of her limelight.

Unsympathetic, but probably accurate.

He said, "You aren't going to leave me alone, are you?"

[Bee]

"No," she said, with a bit of cheer. It looked like she was going to get him one way or another. He didn't seem to have a lot of willpower, and if there was one thing Phaedra had an abundance of--in addition to brains, of course--it was force of personality. Intellectual gifts were useless if one did not have the right demeanor to impress one's ideas on others.

Apply the right amount of force, and Ezra would topple. She was very confident in this assessment. Academia was ruthless. She knew who she could bully, and how. This was going to be a mere war of attrition.

"And think of it this way," she continued. "If you can help me, and all goes according to my plan, it would look very impressive to any insitution to which you may be tempted to apply if you provided crucial assistance to an established Esterberry scholar."

[Bee]

The woman was staring at him intently. Ezra weighed his options. He could continue to tell her no, but he felt he wasn't going to keep up with that well for very long. Eventually he was going to say yes just to get her to stop badgering him.

He may as well say yes for good reasons. Getting into an Esterberry university could do good things for him, if he decided to stay here permanently. He was content as a Third Assistant, no matter what the Second Assistant might have to say, but he had to admit...a degree would shut people up. Ezra hated being pestered. It was one of the reasons he retired from making music. Fans and critics alike perplexed him, and he had grown exhausted putting up with both. He just wanted peace and quiet.

He sighed. "I'll hear you out," he said.

[Bee]

Phaedra made sure to tidy up her small home before her company arrived--better her house than some public venue where any nosy scholar could easily eavesdrop--because while she was a neat person, she was also a student with three majors going, and at any given time her place tended to be littered with academic detritus. There was a method to the madness--the books, the papers, the endless coffee mugs and candy wrappers--but it was nevertheless madness, and she would not let anyone see it.

Ezra arrived at five. She was happy he was prompt, at least. Her house was clean.

She said, "You may seat yourself on the sofa; I will bring us tea."

He sat. She brought the tea, and dropped seven or eight sugar cubes into her spiced black brew.

"I have an item," she said, "that I believe might hold immense value. The script appears at predictable times. But there is a warning that sometimes appears." She recited the little poem to Ezra. Part of her--a large part--wanted to leave that little bit of information out and just tell Ezra to read, but she couldn't quite bring herself to think that much like a Corvie. She was justice, after all. She might be persuading someone to possible misfortune, but she was going to make them fully aware of the risks.

[Bee]

Ezra hardly touched the tea--he was more occupied with the sugarglider and her weird tale of artifacts and strange script. He also wondered what she could possibly say that might persuade him to take a risk like that--the rewards appeared to be high, but the downfall might go farther. He had an ambivalent relationship with life at the best of times, but that didn't mean he wanted to go out and invite doom to his doorstep.

If the rodent's hypothesis that speaking the words aloud would lead to results was true, it stood to reason that reading the thing in light would lead to some manner of unpleasantness.

She said she wanted to read it both at day and night, when the script appeared, and see what happened. She said there was also the possibility that the whole thing was a scare tactic, designed to frighten the reader. The book was filled with grotesque fairytales.

"Authors frequently try to lend an air of authenticity to their fiction by making the reader believe it's fact; they pretend to be collecting letters, address the reader at the beginning, et cetera. These stories are clearly horror tales; the author was probably trying to give the work an added touch of the macabre by insinuating the book itself was cursed."

She showed him several books that employed these techniques. Her logic tracked, but she was still doing far too much to try to convince him that there was nothing to this, especially since she seemed to regard the tome as such a find that it would not be shared with other Esterberries.

"If you're so certain it's a scare tactic, why don't you just read it yourself?"

[Bee]

Phaedra issued a small sigh.

"I'm...superstitious." It was a lie through and through; there was nothing that perplexed or vexed Phaedra more than superstitious nonsense; she had no patience for it, and thought little of people who believed it. She believed in curses, but those were predictable, rationally-explained things: vengeful spirit of mage inhabits vase, unlucky shop patron breaks vase, unlucky patron now has internal organs made of fragile stained glass. But she called bullocks on idiocy like "sneezing on a Tuesday afternoon is bad juju."

She thought copping to superstition might persuade the weasel to help her, though. A cold academic professing to irrationally fear a children's book of murder and mayhem--silliness!

She wanted to read it herself, she said, truly she did, but--she could never quite make herself not believe there was a small chance that something bad might genuinely happen.

"I'm sure we can outsmart the thing, too," she said. "It will be dusk soon. If it is neither day nor night, what might it do?"

[Bee]

She had that look again, the one that let Ezra know that he probably wasn't getting out of here until he caved and did as she asked. For all her pleasant arguments, he really just thought she was a bit loony--that she was secretly too superstitious to open the thing herself seemed more plausible by the moment.

He wondered if all the sugar she ate--oh, he could tell she was an addict; there was hardly a shelf or inn table that was not stocked with lollypops or pixie sticks, and no normal person put more than half a dozen cubes of sugar in their tea--had addled her sanity. Esterberries were such curious people.

"Fine," he said, with a light sigh. "I'll read the thing at dusk."

Her face brightened like someone had given her a set of encyclopedias made entirely of sugar.

[Bee]

"And I'll make sure you get where you need to go in Esterberry," Phaedra replied, with a rather unnerving level of perkiness. Dusk was around seven this time of year, and there was only an hour and a half before they could begin. She would need to keep them occupied until then.

Ezra did not seem to need to be occupied, however--he was mostly content to sit there and poke around at some of her books. Phaedra drank more tea and tried to get a little more studying done. There was always more studying to do. She dropped a few more sugar cubes in her tea; it still didn't taste sweet enough.

She glanced down from her book and sighed--it was more cube than tea now. A glacier of sugar jutting out of a diminishing sea of caffeine. She downed it, and went for another.

Her attempts at conversation were met with little success; Ezra did not seem to be much for small talk. Once the usual topics--work, hobbies, pets--were exhausted, it was back to books.

Seven loomed.

[Bee]

Finally, the hour arrived, and Ezra finally got to look at the book from which he would be reading. He nearly ran from the house and told Phaedra she was on her own. The thing was...vile. He came from a cursed land. He knew a curse when he felt it. And this thing had something wrong with it.

"This thing is..." He couldn't complete the sentence. He wasn't sure he felt strongly enough about it to call it evil--he rarely felt strongly enough about anything to label it with such intense words--but there was something off.

Phaedra opened it. Script he didn't recognize was scrawled across the pages.

"It's an older dialect of Lowland tongue," she informed him. "I doubt anyone speaks it anymore."

Ezra wondered how he was supposed to read it, then. He asked her precisely that question.