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[rowancrowned]

 

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[wythersake]

Pity. He'd hoped for a bit more disarray. Somewhere convenient to stash a gift.

"I won't beat about the bush," He opens, by beating about the bush. "I'm considering a transfer from diplomacy."

Isaac rearranges his jacket, the better to lounge like an indigent without smashing anything fragile.

[rowancrowned]

That sharpens his attention. Well, wine and coffee are in short supply, but he has enough time to engender an air of hospitality, and he did point to the comfortable chair. He leans back in his own, hands loose in his lap.

"Are you expecting a seduction," wry, "or do you have some pet project in mind that would better benefit from my resources?"

[wythersake]

"Maker, no. I would have come to either better-dressed." A spindling gesture. "I hoped for your advice on where to go."

One finger ticks —

"I'm a terrible coward," As if that were a joke. (Would a coward be on the Ghislain frontlines?*) "So our Forces are quite out. And I've not seen Scouting accomplish much —"

A second, belated finger.

"— Which I can only take to mean they've done their job well. Perhaps too well for a fellow like me."


* Yes.

[rowancrowned]

He had a brief mental sketch of what he supposed had made up the largest portion of the mages, before the war: bookish, pale from lack of sunlight, greatest wound a paper cut. But Isaac isn't dead, so that particular assessment should be revised to be more flattering.

"What was your focus in the Circles?"

He stands, an unfolding of long limbs, moves to the shelves along the side of the room, does not expect him to follow.

[wythersake]

"Oh, healing, of course. If you can fuse a bone, you'll never lack for a task or twelve —"

He doesn't follow. He does shift a hand toward his pocket, hangs there by its thumb. Gauging the time available, before Thranduil's attention should turn.

"— There's money in it, of course not personally, Maker knows that a Circle doesn't fund itself. And an abundance of young men bashing each other with swords? Accidents will happen,"

He natters on. Fingers brush eggshell.

[rowancrowned]

Thranduil makes a noise that could substitute for a polite interjection, an indication that he's listening, even as he disregards his original section and makes for another, finally pulling a book free, holding it spine down so that the papers tucked between the pages do not slip out.

"Were you familiar with the Rifter Cosima? She did a great deal of work with the microscope," said with utter confidence, "and wrote somewhat of the healing in her world. There would be a great deal for a scholar to pour over in her writings, possibly derive new techniques. Or," and Thranduil says this even as he offers Cosima's notes to Issac, "if you have grown tired of blood and viscera, we have drier work with translations and general research."

[wythersake]

It sounds impossibly boring.

Probably not for someone else, for anyone who gave a shit, but scholarship has been Isaac's historic obligation; not ambition. It occurs to him as he takes the pad(shuffles a second hand beneath, concealing the egg) that Stark, Sawbones might make something of it.

Probably already have. Scholars.

"Afraid I'm dim as a pigeon for language," He tips the book and his head in gratitude, leafs for an open page. "It's a miracle that I ever managed Trade. When you say microscope — ?"

What is that, precisely.