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rainbowfic2025-03-05 06:17 pm
paradoxcase) wrote in rainbowfic2025-03-05 06:17 pm
Entry tags:
Ecru #19 [The Fulcrum]
Name: Technical Support
Story: The Fulcrum
Colors: Ecru #19: Replace
Styles and Supplies: Vaudeville
Word Count: 2239
Rating: G
Warnings: Time-travel-induced schizo tech
Characters: Setsiana, Qhoroali, Liselye, Peatäro
In-Universe Date: 1911.7?8?.?.?
Summary: Qhoroali experiences technical issues.
Some time later in the day Liselye returned, with a small stack of books that Setsiana recognized as having clearly been bound in a temple. Setsiana moved to stand by the double doors, ready to jump at her chance when she left again.
Liselye put the books on the desk. “Make copies this time,” she said. “It’s a waste of all our energy to steal things multiple times.”
“New information has come to light,” said Qhoroali, thankfully without elaborating on anything Setsiana had said to her the day before. “But you’re right, I will make copies this time.” She shifted her attention from the papers to the books.
As she approached the door, Liselye focused her gaze on Setsiana and gave her a truly winning smile. “Come now,” she said. “Do you want to spend all your time trying to fight your way out of this door? Believe me, Rou will come to her senses, we just have to wait her out.” As she said it, she took Setsiana’s hand and lead her over to a chair, sharing a more personal smile with her, like the two of them were sharing a secret. “Just don’t cause too much trouble and you’ll be out of here in no time.” She stooped down a bit so she was level with Setsiana in the chair and said, smiling and conspiratorial: “Shall we make bets on how long it takes? Personally, my bet is two months. Think about it, and be sure to let me know yours later.” Then she stood and sprinted back over to the double doors, left, and locked them again.
A feeling of dread and helplessness descended on Setsiana. Some traitorous and stupid part of her wanted to stay agreeable with Liselye, in the hopes that she would get to know her better, and maybe share more funny stories and laugh together as they had that morning. She had to remind herself that none of them were her friends here - they were holding her captive, Liselye just as much as Qhoroali. She felt in her soul that when push came to shove, she would never be able to will herself to truly fight Liselye, and she might well have to do so in order to escape. Regardless of what the other woman said, she had no confidence that Qhoroali would ever let her go of her own free will. Sapfita had promised her that she would return to 1647, but she could not see the path to that from here.
Qhoroali was standing behind the desk and had opened the hinged top of the large box, and the lid had gone back as far as it could and stood stationary at a forty-five degree angle. “Do you want to see how the copies are made?” she asked. “This is an amazing machine, it’s future stuff. Look, you just put the book like this—” she took one of the books and opened it to a page that she’d been holding the place of with her thumb, and placed it face down on top of the open box, such that the page lay flat and the other side of the book hung down the side at a right angle— “and then—” she poked at a part of the box Setsiana couldn’t see; nothing happened. She frowned, and poked some more. “Oh, soulwrights take this blasted thing, it’s broken again.” She strode to the door and left; Setsiana heard the click of the lock before she could even rise.
A little while later, the door opened again to admit a very tall woman who was not Qhoroali. Setsiana had stood waiting next to it in anticipation of it opening, and didn’t even spare the new woman a second glance before trying to push her way through to freedom.
She met Qhoroali coming the other way, and Setsiana tried to grab her arms and force her back out and out of her way. Qhoroali recovered easily, and twisted Setsiana’s arms with unexpected strength, forcing her back through the door. Still holding Setsiana back, Qhoroali backed into the door and slammed it shut with the weight of her body. She let go with her right hand in order to fish the key out of her pocket and turn it in the lock behind her, without taking her eyes off Setsiana. Setsiana grabbed for the key with her freed arm, but Qhoroali held it tightly in her clenched fist, and Setsiana could not prize it open. They stood at an impasse for a moment.
“I don’t want to keep you locked in your room,” said Qhoroali, and her voice had a hard edge to it that hadn’t usually had. “I know we eventually become friends, so I wouldn’t treat you that way by preference. But if you do much more of this, I might well lock you up for a while, until you learn to settle in. So it’s up to you.”
Setsiana took a breath, and drew back; Qhoroali looked at her for a moment more, and then put the key in her pocket and strode back across the room. This didn’t seem to be a particularly effective plan of action; even without Liselye there, she hadn’t been able to escape. Getting locked behind another door would not help her. She needed a new idea.
She retreated back to her chair. Qhoroali and the tall woman had both gone to stand by the strange machine. The newcomer had eyes so dark they might as well be black, but her short hair, which was so curly as to appear to be mostly frizz, was only a very dark brown color. She stood a full head taller than Qhoroali, but then stooped down to peer through the slot Setsiana had seen on the side of the machine earlier. A clunk sounded, and when she drew her hand back she was holding a piece of the thing’s siding. “Well, there’s no paper jam,” she said. “Of course not. If I check for a paper jam first, it’s always something else. If I check something else first, it’s always a paper jam. When Talamäcuti was giving gifts to the world, that is the divine gift he gave to copiers.” Her QuCheanya was grammatically near perfect, but with a strange, sharp accent.
“It doesn’t even make its sounds anymore,” said Qhoroali, sounding mournful. “Can you fix it, Peatäro?”
“Doesn’t it, now?” Peatäro moved behind the thing, where Qhoroali had stood earlier. She, too, poked at it a few times, and then said, “Huh. So it doesn’t.” She cast her gaze to the iridescent black box behind it on the desk. “You didn’t forget to put the solar hub out in the sunlight again, did you?”
“Of course not. I put the other one up in the garden last night, and then brought this one down just this m—” Qhoroali stopped suddenly, clasping her hand over her mouth in realization. “Oh, I absolutely did forget. We were busy last night, and then she’s been making my life hard and wrestling me for my keys…” A vague gesture at Setsiana accompanied this last comment.
“Who is she, anyway?” asked Peatäro. “Or is that above my pay grade?”
Qhoroali seemed to consider this for a moment. “No, I think it’s fine,” she said. “I think you have a right to know. Cyaru would have been furious if we hadn’t told him. Well, more furious. It’s kind of a long story, but she’s a junior priestess that I bumped into at the Fair about a year ago and she told me I should kidnap her, so I did. Of course, that hasn’t happened for her yet, so she’s got no idea why she’s here, which is a little inconvenient.”
Peatäro looked at Setsiana with her very dark eyes and said, “So. You engineered your own kidnapping in a self-fulfilling time loop. Very impressive. I did something similar once, but… kind of the exact opposite, actually. That’s quite funny. I like it.”
“We’re not telling her about… all the stuff yet.” Qhoroali waved her hands in the air expressively. “It’ll make her impossible to work with. We have to wait until she trusts us more.”
Peatäro just shrugged. “Well, as it happens, I did predict that you might have done this and brought along a charged solar hub, just in case.” She reached for the shimmery black box on the table and yanked on the cord, which came away easily from it. From out of a bag that she’d put on the ground by her feet during Setsiana’s scuffle with Qhoroali, she brought out a seemingly identical one, and somehow attached the orphaned cord to it. She moved behind the machine again and poked at it. A loud chime sounded, along with a strange whirring noise. “There we go,” said Peatäro with satisfaction. “Just a power issue. Easy peasy.” Suddenly she frowned at the box. “You’ve been messing with the buttons I told you not to touch.”
“No I haven’t!” said Qhoroali indignantly.
“You have. Look, I can tell, the settings aren’t the same. Here,” she poked furiously, and the machine emitted a staccato of beeps. “Ok, now it’s all fixed. Don’t touch those buttons again, and it’ll all stay the way you like it.”
“I only touched one once, and it was an accident,” Qhoroali muttered. “But— thank you. I’m sorry I forgot the solar hub again.”
“Not a problem,” said Peatäro. “What did I go to university for, if not to spend my days unplugging things and plugging them back in again?” But she sounded amused, rather than annoyed. She picked up the now cordless black box and put it in her bag.
“Setsiana, look here,” said Qhoroali, with some excitement. “Watch what this can do!” She repositioned the book slightly, and then poked once, decisively.
There sounded an elongated screech and a light flashed somewhere on the other side of the cocked lid of the box, and after a few moments, a piece of paper was ejected from the slot on the side. Since she seemed to have been invited to do so, Setsiana approached and retrieved it.
The paper was mysteriously warm. There was nothing on it that she could see, until she turned it over. On the other side was a page of printed QuCheanya, the first page of a paper by the priestess that Qhoroali had mentioned the day before — Mureiyo. Setsiana peered into the clear glass of the machine. She couldn’t see anything that looked like type, but then again, she couldn’t much of anything at all. Automatic type-setting; the thing must make a huge number of mistakes. How could a dumb machine rival the accuracy of a trained type-setter? She scanned the page for them, but it seemed disconcertingly competent. Finally she noticed, halfway down, an error where a piece of type had been set slightly crooked. She pointed to it. “Looks like it made a mistake.”
“Oh, no,” said Qhoroali. “The machine didn’t make any mistake. That was the original type-setter.” She turned the book over, and showed Setsiana the original page. It had the exact same mistake, the frame of the character set at the exact same degree of crookedness.
“How…?” Setsiana was at a loss for words.
“It takes a picture,” said Peatäro. “A precise photograph. It’s just an image, there’s no type in there. Life is too short for movable type.”
Leaving aside for the time being the concept of the creation of a picture in the space of a few moments, or what a photograph might be, Setsiana thought about the long hours of the large number of juniors who set type back at Taleinyo; the machine had done their work almost instantly, with no type at all. What would the temple be like if that work did not have to be done? If they had all that time free to do something else? What wonders might they accomplish instead?
“This is why I love you guys,” said Peatäro. “Every once in a while I get sad because I can’t boot up my machine and go raiding on Warriors of the Divine Light IV but then I remember that if I’d stayed, I’d be dealing with old farts who hate technology and think it has it out for them specifically, and rant about oh, why can’t we just go back to doing things the old and stupid way like we did when I was a kid, and let me tell you, it withered my soul. But you guys think this stuff is the best thing since sliced bread. Oh, who am I kidding,” she said suddenly. “You don’t even have sliced bread. The only decent wheat bread around here is an expensive import from somewhere or other, and it’s definitely not sliced. It’s all cornbread and rice-cakes.”
“That’s not true at all,” said Qhoroali. “You can buy wheat bread from the shop across the street.”
“If I showed you the multiple grocery aisles full of a thousand different brands of dirt-cheap identical pre-sliced sandwich bread you’d lose your minds,” said Peatäro. She picked up the bag at her feet. “I think it’s all working now, yes? Let me know if you have any other issues.” She and Qhoroali walked back to the double doors, and Setsiana didn’t even try to follow them when Qhoroali let Peatäro out of the room again.
Story: The Fulcrum
Colors: Ecru #19: Replace
Styles and Supplies: Vaudeville
Word Count: 2239
Rating: G
Warnings: Time-travel-induced schizo tech
Characters: Setsiana, Qhoroali, Liselye, Peatäro
In-Universe Date: 1911.7?8?.?.?
Summary: Qhoroali experiences technical issues.
Some time later in the day Liselye returned, with a small stack of books that Setsiana recognized as having clearly been bound in a temple. Setsiana moved to stand by the double doors, ready to jump at her chance when she left again.
Liselye put the books on the desk. “Make copies this time,” she said. “It’s a waste of all our energy to steal things multiple times.”
“New information has come to light,” said Qhoroali, thankfully without elaborating on anything Setsiana had said to her the day before. “But you’re right, I will make copies this time.” She shifted her attention from the papers to the books.
As she approached the door, Liselye focused her gaze on Setsiana and gave her a truly winning smile. “Come now,” she said. “Do you want to spend all your time trying to fight your way out of this door? Believe me, Rou will come to her senses, we just have to wait her out.” As she said it, she took Setsiana’s hand and lead her over to a chair, sharing a more personal smile with her, like the two of them were sharing a secret. “Just don’t cause too much trouble and you’ll be out of here in no time.” She stooped down a bit so she was level with Setsiana in the chair and said, smiling and conspiratorial: “Shall we make bets on how long it takes? Personally, my bet is two months. Think about it, and be sure to let me know yours later.” Then she stood and sprinted back over to the double doors, left, and locked them again.
A feeling of dread and helplessness descended on Setsiana. Some traitorous and stupid part of her wanted to stay agreeable with Liselye, in the hopes that she would get to know her better, and maybe share more funny stories and laugh together as they had that morning. She had to remind herself that none of them were her friends here - they were holding her captive, Liselye just as much as Qhoroali. She felt in her soul that when push came to shove, she would never be able to will herself to truly fight Liselye, and she might well have to do so in order to escape. Regardless of what the other woman said, she had no confidence that Qhoroali would ever let her go of her own free will. Sapfita had promised her that she would return to 1647, but she could not see the path to that from here.
Qhoroali was standing behind the desk and had opened the hinged top of the large box, and the lid had gone back as far as it could and stood stationary at a forty-five degree angle. “Do you want to see how the copies are made?” she asked. “This is an amazing machine, it’s future stuff. Look, you just put the book like this—” she took one of the books and opened it to a page that she’d been holding the place of with her thumb, and placed it face down on top of the open box, such that the page lay flat and the other side of the book hung down the side at a right angle— “and then—” she poked at a part of the box Setsiana couldn’t see; nothing happened. She frowned, and poked some more. “Oh, soulwrights take this blasted thing, it’s broken again.” She strode to the door and left; Setsiana heard the click of the lock before she could even rise.
A little while later, the door opened again to admit a very tall woman who was not Qhoroali. Setsiana had stood waiting next to it in anticipation of it opening, and didn’t even spare the new woman a second glance before trying to push her way through to freedom.
She met Qhoroali coming the other way, and Setsiana tried to grab her arms and force her back out and out of her way. Qhoroali recovered easily, and twisted Setsiana’s arms with unexpected strength, forcing her back through the door. Still holding Setsiana back, Qhoroali backed into the door and slammed it shut with the weight of her body. She let go with her right hand in order to fish the key out of her pocket and turn it in the lock behind her, without taking her eyes off Setsiana. Setsiana grabbed for the key with her freed arm, but Qhoroali held it tightly in her clenched fist, and Setsiana could not prize it open. They stood at an impasse for a moment.
“I don’t want to keep you locked in your room,” said Qhoroali, and her voice had a hard edge to it that hadn’t usually had. “I know we eventually become friends, so I wouldn’t treat you that way by preference. But if you do much more of this, I might well lock you up for a while, until you learn to settle in. So it’s up to you.”
Setsiana took a breath, and drew back; Qhoroali looked at her for a moment more, and then put the key in her pocket and strode back across the room. This didn’t seem to be a particularly effective plan of action; even without Liselye there, she hadn’t been able to escape. Getting locked behind another door would not help her. She needed a new idea.
She retreated back to her chair. Qhoroali and the tall woman had both gone to stand by the strange machine. The newcomer had eyes so dark they might as well be black, but her short hair, which was so curly as to appear to be mostly frizz, was only a very dark brown color. She stood a full head taller than Qhoroali, but then stooped down to peer through the slot Setsiana had seen on the side of the machine earlier. A clunk sounded, and when she drew her hand back she was holding a piece of the thing’s siding. “Well, there’s no paper jam,” she said. “Of course not. If I check for a paper jam first, it’s always something else. If I check something else first, it’s always a paper jam. When Talamäcuti was giving gifts to the world, that is the divine gift he gave to copiers.” Her QuCheanya was grammatically near perfect, but with a strange, sharp accent.
“It doesn’t even make its sounds anymore,” said Qhoroali, sounding mournful. “Can you fix it, Peatäro?”
“Doesn’t it, now?” Peatäro moved behind the thing, where Qhoroali had stood earlier. She, too, poked at it a few times, and then said, “Huh. So it doesn’t.” She cast her gaze to the iridescent black box behind it on the desk. “You didn’t forget to put the solar hub out in the sunlight again, did you?”
“Of course not. I put the other one up in the garden last night, and then brought this one down just this m—” Qhoroali stopped suddenly, clasping her hand over her mouth in realization. “Oh, I absolutely did forget. We were busy last night, and then she’s been making my life hard and wrestling me for my keys…” A vague gesture at Setsiana accompanied this last comment.
“Who is she, anyway?” asked Peatäro. “Or is that above my pay grade?”
Qhoroali seemed to consider this for a moment. “No, I think it’s fine,” she said. “I think you have a right to know. Cyaru would have been furious if we hadn’t told him. Well, more furious. It’s kind of a long story, but she’s a junior priestess that I bumped into at the Fair about a year ago and she told me I should kidnap her, so I did. Of course, that hasn’t happened for her yet, so she’s got no idea why she’s here, which is a little inconvenient.”
Peatäro looked at Setsiana with her very dark eyes and said, “So. You engineered your own kidnapping in a self-fulfilling time loop. Very impressive. I did something similar once, but… kind of the exact opposite, actually. That’s quite funny. I like it.”
“We’re not telling her about… all the stuff yet.” Qhoroali waved her hands in the air expressively. “It’ll make her impossible to work with. We have to wait until she trusts us more.”
Peatäro just shrugged. “Well, as it happens, I did predict that you might have done this and brought along a charged solar hub, just in case.” She reached for the shimmery black box on the table and yanked on the cord, which came away easily from it. From out of a bag that she’d put on the ground by her feet during Setsiana’s scuffle with Qhoroali, she brought out a seemingly identical one, and somehow attached the orphaned cord to it. She moved behind the machine again and poked at it. A loud chime sounded, along with a strange whirring noise. “There we go,” said Peatäro with satisfaction. “Just a power issue. Easy peasy.” Suddenly she frowned at the box. “You’ve been messing with the buttons I told you not to touch.”
“No I haven’t!” said Qhoroali indignantly.
“You have. Look, I can tell, the settings aren’t the same. Here,” she poked furiously, and the machine emitted a staccato of beeps. “Ok, now it’s all fixed. Don’t touch those buttons again, and it’ll all stay the way you like it.”
“I only touched one once, and it was an accident,” Qhoroali muttered. “But— thank you. I’m sorry I forgot the solar hub again.”
“Not a problem,” said Peatäro. “What did I go to university for, if not to spend my days unplugging things and plugging them back in again?” But she sounded amused, rather than annoyed. She picked up the now cordless black box and put it in her bag.
“Setsiana, look here,” said Qhoroali, with some excitement. “Watch what this can do!” She repositioned the book slightly, and then poked once, decisively.
There sounded an elongated screech and a light flashed somewhere on the other side of the cocked lid of the box, and after a few moments, a piece of paper was ejected from the slot on the side. Since she seemed to have been invited to do so, Setsiana approached and retrieved it.
The paper was mysteriously warm. There was nothing on it that she could see, until she turned it over. On the other side was a page of printed QuCheanya, the first page of a paper by the priestess that Qhoroali had mentioned the day before — Mureiyo. Setsiana peered into the clear glass of the machine. She couldn’t see anything that looked like type, but then again, she couldn’t much of anything at all. Automatic type-setting; the thing must make a huge number of mistakes. How could a dumb machine rival the accuracy of a trained type-setter? She scanned the page for them, but it seemed disconcertingly competent. Finally she noticed, halfway down, an error where a piece of type had been set slightly crooked. She pointed to it. “Looks like it made a mistake.”
“Oh, no,” said Qhoroali. “The machine didn’t make any mistake. That was the original type-setter.” She turned the book over, and showed Setsiana the original page. It had the exact same mistake, the frame of the character set at the exact same degree of crookedness.
“How…?” Setsiana was at a loss for words.
“It takes a picture,” said Peatäro. “A precise photograph. It’s just an image, there’s no type in there. Life is too short for movable type.”
Leaving aside for the time being the concept of the creation of a picture in the space of a few moments, or what a photograph might be, Setsiana thought about the long hours of the large number of juniors who set type back at Taleinyo; the machine had done their work almost instantly, with no type at all. What would the temple be like if that work did not have to be done? If they had all that time free to do something else? What wonders might they accomplish instead?
“This is why I love you guys,” said Peatäro. “Every once in a while I get sad because I can’t boot up my machine and go raiding on Warriors of the Divine Light IV but then I remember that if I’d stayed, I’d be dealing with old farts who hate technology and think it has it out for them specifically, and rant about oh, why can’t we just go back to doing things the old and stupid way like we did when I was a kid, and let me tell you, it withered my soul. But you guys think this stuff is the best thing since sliced bread. Oh, who am I kidding,” she said suddenly. “You don’t even have sliced bread. The only decent wheat bread around here is an expensive import from somewhere or other, and it’s definitely not sliced. It’s all cornbread and rice-cakes.”
“That’s not true at all,” said Qhoroali. “You can buy wheat bread from the shop across the street.”
“If I showed you the multiple grocery aisles full of a thousand different brands of dirt-cheap identical pre-sliced sandwich bread you’d lose your minds,” said Peatäro. She picked up the bag at her feet. “I think it’s all working now, yes? Let me know if you have any other issues.” She and Qhoroali walked back to the double doors, and Setsiana didn’t even try to follow them when Qhoroali let Peatäro out of the room again.