January 7th, 1895 — Crowdy Memorial Library

The man kept reading books and papers on curses, and Morrigan kept watching him find them. She had seen this happen several times before finally she took an opportunity to bring a cart back to the stacks, and it was inevitable that she find the table he was sitting at. She had to wheel through the library, after all — no one could accuse her of only being interested in patrons if they were researching her personal interests.

Her lips quirked up; she recognized the book he was reading not by its cover, but by the purple edges of the binding that were visible even as he had it open. She abandoned her cart to approach the table.

"Smirke's research is contradicted by that volume," Morrigan said, indicating a book further down in the man's small pile with her index finger. "So I would not get too attached to his thesis."

Ezra Applegate

  

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set by Bee

Ezra had accidentally explained the situation to the assistant head of his department (he had accidentally explained a lot of things lately), and she had agreed to let him switch to a night shift until he found a solution, provided he wasn't working on anything that had the potential to go catastrophically wrong while he was alone in the Department of Mysteries at midnight. This meant he had his afternoons free to keep digging into the problem, after using his mornings to try and sleep where he could.

He'd been at the library for a while now, but he'd only really been awake for half of it. He was skimming the third chapter of Smirke's Outward Presentations of Internal Magical Maladies when the librarian approached. He followed her finger to the title she indicated with a frown.

"It wasn't a very useful one, anyway," he admitted. Much of the specific research was interesting, but the conclusion he seemed to be working towards was flawed — Ezra knew from experience that curses could be very real without having a physical manifestation, which Smirke thought was a necessity even if it was a slow development. That, or — well, he suspected that if Smirke had studied him, he would have simply come to the conclusion that Ezra was mad. It wasn't that far-fetched.

"Have you read all of these?" he asked curiously. Librarians read a good deal, he was sure, but this was... something of a niche interest area.

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Morrigan was always town, in situations like this — should she reveal enough about her interests, and people might guess. But if she didn't reveal her interests, then she had to play dumb, and that was nearly as frustrating. She did not have the same dilemmas as Drusilla did — Morrigan did not have a desire to live a somewhat-normal society life — or even Lucien — who hated them. But that didn't mean she wanted people to know she was cursed, either.

"I'm a research librarian," Morrigan said, as if it were the most obvious answer in the world. She decided to take his response as an invitation, and sat down in the chair across from him. "You're researching?"

  

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set by Bee

"Yes," he agreed, thoughtlessly. He caught on to what was happening and tried to prevent saying too much by adding a truthful-but-irrelevant statement, something she might see as an explanation even though it had nothing to do with his current area of research: "I'm an Unspeakable."

This was an excellent thing to say in that it meant most people would immediately stop asking questions, and with his condition the way it was he really needed to avoid being asked questions whenever he could. It was also a dangerous thing to say, because for some small-but-nonzero percentage of the population it was interpreted as an invitation to ask him more questions, and if he wasn't careful he might end up accidentally telling her something that would guarantee her a visit from their pet obliviator later that week. He was really trying to avoid that. Memory was fragile enough as it was; he didn't need to go inflicting memory-meddling on innocent bystanders without cause.

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