fandomhigh | Library, Wednesday [November 18]

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Library, Wednesday [November 18]

Her conversation with Mat yesterday was still on her mind, so Gabrielle was perusing a book on pressure points behind the desk. That would explain the random poking at the air she seemed to be doing from time to time, at various points in a vaguely human-sized space.

If you knew what she was doing, anyway, which meant that she basically looked like she was poking at empty air.

In the name of self-defense practice.

This would go so well.

[OOC: The OCD fled when she tried to practice on it.]

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Despite being exposed and enthralled by the Giver's collection of books, Jonas had yet to visit the library on the island. His excuse, such as it was, was that the amount of knowledge would most definitely overwhelm him to the point of panic.

Today, thought, today he decided he was ready to try. He missed books and while computers were handy, he was still rubbish at handling them. He was afraid he'd make one explode.

So, he was pushing into the library, eyes already widening at the sight of so many books stretching as far as his eyes could see. The sight of the girl poking at something that wasn't there brought his attention away from the books and now he was wondering if the library was haunted.

If he said as much to Gabrielle, she might start getting ideas. Actually, she didn't need a whole lot of encouragement on that front. As it was, she turned toward the doorway mid-imaginary poke at a point that would supposedly render someone's entire arm temporarily useless and saw him.

"Hello," she said, turning the poke into an awkward sort of wave. At the look on his face, she smiled. "First time in the library? You look like I felt when I first came in."

"Hello. And yes, this is a first for me," he said after a moment's pause to let that thought about the library being haunted linger. He shook his head, pushed it to the back of his mind. "I've never seen this many books in my life. I didn't know so many existed."

"It really is amazing, isn't it?" The look Gabrielle cast around the library, for all that she'd worked here all semester and had time to get used to the place, was only marginally less awed. "There must be lifetimes on lifetimes of stories and knowledge on these shelves. I can't imagine ever being able to work my way through them all."

"Have you read many of them?" Jonas asked, taking careful steps towards the desk where the girl was like any misstep might disturb the legions of books.

"Not half as many as I'd like." Gabrielle tapped a finger against her lips, looking regretful. "Barely a fraction, really. If I wanted to plow on through them as quickly as possible I might have made more inroads, but I like to savor a story, you know?"

"I haven't read many--" He shook his head. "--any stories, really. Where I'm from, books weren't very plentiful. They were rare, in fact. I only saw them in the last year I was there."

"Oh. I'm sorry," Gabrielle said, frowning. "We don't have books as such where I'm from -- not yet, we still use scrolls -- but I've always had stories of some kind. Are they hard to come by where you come from?"

"They just weren't available to the majority of people," Jonas explained carefully. The Giver had books, his mother and father had some but they weren't stories for the most part. He'd never even examined them. "They weren't allowed."

Jonas could only imagine reactions to things such as fiction.

"Not allowed?" Gabrielle looked horrified, and a little sympathetic at the same time -- the scrolls of philosophy and astronomy and other such subjects that she'd read so avidly growing up in Poteidaia hadn't been expressly forbidden, but her interest had been frowned upon by a good portion of the village.

That -- wasn't a good sign, she didn't think. It was always the towns where people in power had the most to lose that had rules like that in place for most of its people, at least in her experience. Still, she wasn't about to jump to conclusions, so she simply nodded. "So you have a lot of reading to catch up on, then. Do you have any idea where you'd like to start?"

Amazingly, she was very close to the mark. The Elders held the power and they controlled the Community down to the tiniest detail. It was frightening when you realized what they were doing.

"I don't," he said and blushed. "I just--I couldn't stay away any longer or I'd end up thinking myself a coward. I don't know a lot of things so perhaps something easy. A lot of things on this island are too complex for me to understand with concepts I haven't learned yet."

Gabrielle was very good at looking utterly non-threatening (that was frequently an asset on the road) and reassuring when the situation called for it, so she shoved her pressure-point book aside without a second thought, and gave Jonas one of her friendliest smiles. "I'm three thousand years after my own time. I understand the feeling. Now, all the non-fiction books are arranged by subject." (She'd spent an exhaustive amount of time studying the Dewey decimal system. Some days it was better than fretting over writer's block, but then she fretted over why fiction got shelved separately so often when it was part of the system.) "Computer science and information, then philosophy and psychology, religion, social sciences, language, and so on."

"That makes sense," he said, giving his brain some time to weave the new information into what he had. "It would make sense for books about one thing to be spread out. Do you have recommendations? Something that someone with little to no knowledge of this place might read that would be helpful?"

"Well, I think that would depend on what you want to learn about it first," she opined, tapping a finger against her chin. "History is always a good start, if you want to understand how a place got to be the way it is. But that can be a little dense, too."

[OOC: So very sorry about the slowness. Crazier than expected today.]

"Admittedly, most everything is dense to me," he said, laughing ruefully. "If the writing in a book is easy enough to understand, I can manage to piece together concepts and ideas if the words aren't incredibly difficult to understand."

Jonas wouldn't have thought vocabulary would be a huge roadblock but it was proving so. If he knew the words, he was able to find situations where he'd used the word and could put things together fairly well from there.

Gabrielle nodded again in understanding. "I've noticed, sometimes, that people tend to respond better to stories than to more scholarly types of writing. If you give them characters they can relate to, and situations to take an interest in, they get more engaged in what they're reading." She grinned quickly. "We might want to take a look at the fiction section."

"Fiction is...something that's not true, right?" Jonas asked, curious but fairly confident that he had it right. "Something that someone makes up but doesn't have much truth to it?"

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Library, Wednesday [November 18]

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