Chapter 23: Words & Ink

Chapter 23: Words & Ink It turned out Bran was completely right about Coral’s handwriting. He had to ask no fewer than five different individuals to read the note before they found someone who could make sense of it. The hero was a woman running a little vegetable stall down one of the alleyways just off from the main market - said her son was a bit of scholar. She had an eternal scowl but turned out to be quite nice and even wrote out another copy of the note in her own, relatively more easy-to-read handwriting. It word ’relatively’ should be noted here as to Misha, her scrawl was as indecipherable as Coral’s, but Bran thanked the woman anyway. Back at home, Misha watched Bran write the characters down again into his notebook then pull out a dictionary and start flipping through it. At first, Misha was highly attentive, carefully watching as Bran counted out the strokes of the first two characters of the book’s name that he didn’t know and searched them up in the radical index - Misha knew that’s what they were called because he asked - but as time went on, and the number of failed attempts to find the characters increased, the little dragon’s attention waned and he turned to washing eggs in the kitchen (There was a big sale at the local supermarket. Buy one pack, get the second one 20% off!). Misha liked eggs. You could do many things with them - fry them, boil them, stir fry them, fry and roll them... "Misha." Misha ducked his head out of the kitchen. "Yeah?" "I need to go to the library. My dictionary isn’t good enough." ...Which was how Misha ended up trotting up the stairs behind Bran into the local Kowloon City library. The tunnel-like passageway that had led to the library was completely tiled with grey-white square tiles and combined with the tiled floors of a similar colour, had made Misha feel like he was about to walk into a public bathroom. As it turned out, instead of urinals and nasty smells, there was a modest little doorway with an illuminated sign above it that read ’Kowloon Walled City Public Library’. The floors were linoleum, and the furnishings looked to be a few decades old, but the place was rather homey feeling with bright coloured signs and a light topping of that nice musty smell of old books, and, apart from the hum of the florescent lights, it was silent. Bran adjusted his glasses though that did little to hide the quiet happiness in his normally blank eyes. Misha hid his smile. It made sense the guy liked libraries. Without a phone or computer, where else could he get entertainment from? "Where to now?" Misha asked quietly. "You can look wherever you like. I’m going to the reference section. That should be..." Bran looked down the library directory by the door, "one floor down." They agreed to meet down there in half an hour then went their separate ways. Ten minutes later, after a full lap of the entire library, Misha ventured down to the reference section. It was up for debate whether the library was just small or if his legs were too long, either way, he was done with the place. It was probably just too quiet for him. Like the rest of the library, the reference section had people yet very little noise. One difference was that the vaguely pleasant musty smell of books was, here, far more potent and Misha had to take a few moments to gather his senses. How did people stand it? He spotted Bran’s blond head in the far corner and went over. Find anything? he’d planned on asking, but clearly, from the looks of the table and Bran’s own furrowed brow, the answer was a definitive ’no’. "That bad, huh?" Misha said instead. Bran sighed and pushed back from the table. "I probably copied it down wrongly..." he mumbled. He looked very disappointed, and this tugged at Misha’s heartstrings. "How about we try looking it up on the computer? Maybe they’re new words that haven’t been added to the dictionary yet," said Misha. Bran looked skeptically at him. "...I shouldn’t really touch the computers. They don’t have enough IT staff here to handle them all crashing." Misha grinned. "That’s what I’m here for," he said. They went back to the stairwell, consulted the directory there, then trooped up three floors to the Computer Room. There was a fleet of about a dozen computers pasted all-round the walls and another dozen arranged in an island in the centre. Almost all of them were occupied but Misha spied a youngish looking person noting down the location of a book from a search result. He stood behind them, then immediately slid into the seat when they were gone. He turned and waved to Bran who walked overlooking a little queasy. "You alright?" Misha asked him. "Fine," replied Bran. He leaned on the back of Misha’s chair, set down his instrument case, and pointed at the screen. "I think that’s the dictionary." Misha booted up the program then lay his hands on the keyboard. "Tell me what to type." "I don’t know what to type, that’s the problem. I don’t know how the words are pronounced." "Oh." Bran pointed at a submenu within the dictionary. "I think that should be where you can handwrite in the characters. There should be a small writing tablet somewhere." Misha looked around a bit and found a small beat-up tablet awkwardly slotted on top of the main brain of the computer. He pulled it out and gave it a go... "No, you wrote it wrong." "The third and fourth strokes are connected." "No, that’s the wrong order." "You have to go faster or else the computer will think you’re done writing." Misha threw down the stylus, leaned back with his hands on his face, and groaned. "Why is this so hard?" Bran was about to say something when a different voice spoke up. "Please try to keep it down," the voice said. Both Bran and Misha turned to find a librarian standing behind them. He was tall, young, and very handsome, definitely in Misha’s top ten. "Sorry!" Misha immediately said, blushing a little. Bran scowled but said nothing. The librarian turned to go then stopped. "Do you need help looking for something?" he asked, pointing at the computer screen. "We’re trying to find some specific words," said Misha. He held up Bran’s notebook for the man to see. "This..." Bran pulled out the original scrap of paper that Coral had written her wish on and dropped it on top of the book. "That’s the original." "Ah, oh I see." The librarian gave the book and paper back. "I know what book you’re looking for, but I’m sorry to say that this library does not have it." "Do you know who would have it?" asked Bran. The librarian gave a sad smile. "I’m sorry to say that I don’t. No one does actually. Some people think it was never actually published, only marketed many years ago." "So... it doesn’t exist?" asked Misha. The librarian gave an apologetic smile. "I suppose you could say that." Misha looked to Bran with the expression ’what now?’ written on his face. Bran thought a moment, then turned to the librarian. "Could you tell me the name of the book anyway?" "Of course," said the librarian. "Although, I can only write it. I’m afraid I’m not sure how the words are pronounced." "But you know what they mean?" asked Bran. "Roughly, it means, The White Mist Annals of Sea and Mountain," replied the librarian as he wrote out the five characters anew on Bran’s notebook with a pen he pulled from his shirt pocket. His handwriting was as elegant as his manner, and he reminded Misha more of a gentleman from eras past than a librarian at a small local library. Bran picked up Coral’s wish paper and stared at it. "Those words mean ’white mist’?" he said incredulously. "It’s a specific kind of mist found around Yunnan. It doesn’t exactly just mean ’white mist’ but that’s as close as I can get. The characters themselves are derived from Ancient Shu script, if I’m not mistaken. That should be why you weren’t able to find them in the dictionary." Bran took his notebook and snapped it shut. "You seem to know a lot about this." "Oh, hardly. I just have many passions." At that moment, a little boy made his presence known by tugging down hard on the librarian’s trousers. Thankfully he was wearing a belt and merely wobbled awkwardly. He addressed the boy and the boy said something while pointing at the computer he’d been using up until then. It had bluescreened. "Sorry," the librarian apologised to Bran and Misha then hurried over to aid the poor child now deprived of watching cartoons about a pink pig. Bran casually put a hand on his instrument case and tilted it away from the offending computer. "Did you just...?" began Misha. "Not on purpose," said Bran quickly. "C’mon, let’s go." Together, they hurried out of the library. When they were out in the air and far away from any modern technology, Misha turned to Bran. "What now?" he asked. "What do you think?" replied Bran. His tone said that this was a genuine question, not a petty comeback. "I think..." started Misha, "that librarian knows more than you." Bran kicked him. "And?" Misha hopped away, grinning. "And I think that it’s really weird that Coral would want a book like this. Like, why would she even know about it? I can maybe see Melody knowing about this book, since her family runs a bookstore and she looks like the bookish type, but Coral? Nah, I doubt she even reads outside of what’s set at school." Bran adjusted his instrument case, and they began to walk down the tiled passageway toward the northern quarter of the Walled City. "I think, deductions about character aside, you’ve got a point about Coral and the book. I can’t imagine what she’d want to even use it for." "I bet that librarian would like to get a copy of that book though," said Misha. "Did you see the way his eyes lit up when he saw the name?" Bran glared at him and hurried on. "Aw, don’t be like that Bran," said Misha with a playful grin. He caught up to Bran threw an arm over his shoulders. "You’re still my number one!" Bran said nothing to this though his hackles seemed to go down. Misha laughed. And from somewhere near enough to see the pair, but far enough to avoid being seen, gazed a pair of watchful eyes.