Claire Osbrook
December 21, 2021 8:13 PM
So, um...have a thing? (tag Verdillia) by Claire Osbrook
The holidays had passed quietly and pleasantly, just as they always did among her quiet, pleasant relatives. Mom had always seemed ready to go at a moment's notice, but that was normal. Dad and Graham had seemed more settled, which was also normal. Some interest had been added by visiting the Greenes - but that, too, was just as normal.Somehow, Claire had expected her first trip home after her first few months away to be a little more...noticeable, somehow, and it had come as a mild disappointment to simply slip back into her life as though she'd never left it. The biggest deviation in her holiday routine from previous years had been in having extra presents to make for people while she spent most of her time in the herb gardens with her grandmother.
Tissena had decided they were best friends, so Claire had made her a bottle of ink; Christopher and Verdillia were supposed to be her family-away-from-her-family, so she'd done the same for them. When she'd been doing that, it had seemed about as routine as the crafts projects she'd made for her family members, but now that she was back at school, she found that something, finally, was a bit different, a little unexpected. As she contemplated actually giving Verdillia the gift, she found herself fidgeting with the ribbons which tied on the tissue paper wrapping, suddenly...nervous?
Nervous was not a word Claire was used to applying to herself. Nervous people were the sorts who saw her mother professionally. Claire did not want to get referred to one of her mother's colleagues, so she tried to keep a level head most of the time. There was nothing level-headed at all, though, about being nervous about giving someone such a minor late Christmas present....
"Have a nice holiday?" she asked Verdillia as they settled back into their room. "I - um - I brought you something."
And just like that, she no longer wanted to delay the presentation. Instead, it felt like she needed to get it over with as quickly as possible, so she put the wrapped bottle of gold ink on Verdillia's nightstand. "I...made it, actually," she admitted, tucking her pale hair behind her ear. "Well, my grandmother made sure about the quality and stuff, I'm not good enough to be sure something's sales quality yet, but I did the blending and stuff."
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Claire Osbrook
So, um...have a thing? (tag Verdillia)
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Verdillia Scurlock
December 21, 2021 10:03 PM
Yes, you too! by Verdillia Scurlock
Christmas had been very enjoyable. Verdillia’s mother was very into marking special occasions properly, both within and outside of their home. The house was always transformed, with a huge fir tree, and evergreen decorations throughout, not to mention special plates to go with all the special food being served. There were also trips and treats a-plenty. This year had had the added excitement of trying to choose gifts for her school friends - and indeed, trying to decide which school friends to bestow them on. Verdillia felt that she was getting on more or less equally well with everyone that she’d spent time with, which was good, but she would really have liked to firm up a Close Friend alliance or two. Christmas gifts could be make or break when it came to that. It was hard, not knowing exactly which peers would deem her worthy of a present, nor what their likely budgets were. Therefore, her mother’s strategy had been to stock up on a variety, and to hope that Verdillia was not put in the position of going first in any exchanges. Of course, if everyone else was playing the same game, that would lead to a stalemate, but if she really wanted to court someone in particular, she could go first.This worked well when Claire offered her a Christmas gift. A home-made something. Something that was blended. Her face conveying that she was suitably intrigued, she pulled the paper off, giving a little ‘oh’ of surprise and delight as she found what was inside, and Claire’s remarks made sense. Well, started to make sense.
“Your grandmother makes inks?” she inquired, picking up the bottle and tilting it against the light to enjoy the colour. “And you help? That sounds fascinating! It’s a very beautiful colour, thank you,” she added, offering a genuine smile.
“Here, I have something for you too. It’s not home-made, I’m afraid.” That was hard to balance the books on, but ink she could roughly equate to ‘simple domestic gift’ so she picked one of those from her trunk, along with the pre-prepared name tag she had for Claire, sliding it in under the ribbon, all out of view behind the lid of her trunk. “Merry Christmas,” she said, handing it over. Once Claire had unwrapped it to reveal a scented candle with the word ’Cwtch’ on the side, she explained. “It’s a Welsh word. It’s a feeling of coziness and comfort. The candle’s supposed to give the feeling when you burn it.
“How do you make ink?” she asked.
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Verdillia Scurlock
Yes, you too!
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Claire Osbrook
January 01, 2022 6:41 PM
Thank you very much! by Claire Osbrook
A thousand second thoughts attempted to converge as soon as Verdillia had the bottle and Claire, therefore, did not. Was it weird to have gotten a present at all? Was gold ink tacky? Was it too cheap, considering Claire's access? Or....Then her roommate smiled, seeming pleased and interested, and Claire smiled back, blushing a little at the nice things Verdillia had said.
"You're welcome," she said. "And yeah, she does - my family runs a store where we have - quills, and different papers and parchments, and all that kind of stuff, so. We get in the usual stuff, but Gran makes a line of inks and papers." She felt like she was making it sound too much, so she added, "a really little line, but it's her thing, and she's taught me some about which plants to look for, and what to do with them, so."
Normally, Claire was kind of a little proud of that. She'd spent a lot of time memorizing arcane facts and doing repetitive boring little tasks over and over again until Gran had decided she was good enough to give the occasional more interesting thing to do, and while she maybe wasn't producing anything sales quality yet, she had gotten steadily better at it. So why did it now feel kind of awkward, like she was admitting something that would make her look bad? The heck with that....
Claire hadn't really expected anything from Verdillia or Christopher (why should they have bothered, after all?), and so her smile when Verdillia offered her something in turn was both surprised and delighted. "Oh!" she said. "Thanks!"
Another thing her gran had taught her was reading and writing, all in English unless they counted memorizing lists of Greek and Latin prefixes, suffixes, and botanical names. Her brain, therefore, assumed that the writing on the candle was some kind of maker's abbreviation, since there was a certain lack of verbs. There wasn't even a 'sometimes y' to latch onto in there, so the idea it was a word that could be said didn't occur to her until Verdillia said so. She suspected her face did the thing where she looked too intense again when Verdillia explained it was a word, and what it meant. "That's so nice, thank you," she said again when it was explained. "And that's really interesting." She was already wondering what components had gone into it to make the magic work...could she analyze them at all through scent when she lit the candle, or should she just ask Gran?
"Ink? It's...well, sometimes it's not very hard, but sometimes it is - there's all these different types," she explained. "Gran had to help me make sure that one would shimmer right, and all the shiny wouldn't fall to the bottom - that took some magic. Basic ink, though, you just find the roots or herbs or berries or flowers in the color you're looking for, and mash them up and boil them and put in just a tiny bit of natural gum to thicken them up and keep them from going bad. And there's powdered inks, where the customer just mixes up the color with water when the customer wants to - those are pretty easy. It starts getting more and more complicated when you go for certain colors, or effects like color-changing or scent and stuff...and I just talked way, way too long about ink. Did you have a good Christmas?"
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Claire Osbrook
Thank you very much!
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Verdillia Scurlock
January 02, 2022 4:57 AM
You're welcome by Verdillia Scurlock
“Oh, that sounds lovely,” Verdillia smiled, as Claire described her family’s business. She noticed, of course, that Claire had a family business, as they were in the house where noticing such things was rather important. The description Claire gave made her feel like they might really be peers, in a way that she wasn’t quite with some of the people here. Like her, Claire clearly came from a magical family, one with a decent amount of history in order to have a magical family business, and a very nice, well-to-do and well-off family, but without being in the elite socialite tier.“You’re welcome,” she said, glad Claire seemed to like her gift, as much as one could tell with these sorts of things. Claire then explained a little more about her inks and papers, and Verdillia listened avidly, right up until the point where Claire cut herself off, apologising.
“It’s interesting,” she assured her firmly, her Welsh accent rolling over the central ‘r,’ lilting the word up and down, as it often did on polysyllabic things. “We all use it, every day, but I’ve never thought about what it is or where it comes from.” She supposed, if she’d been asked to think about it, she would have assumed it was water and colouring, but where the colours came from or how they got mixed, especially for complex things like shimmery inks, she hadn’t thought about. She supposed she saw it like watered down paint. But then, what was paint? “I think it’s good to think about where things come from. It stops you taking them for granted,” she added. Her grandparents were into saying that sort of thing, being mindful of how you used things and not being wasteful. Sometimes they could be a little tiresome about it, when it was a resource that was easily available, but Verdillia also knew they had a point. And here, hearing Claire’s example about inks, she could appreciate the point a little more. It also cemented her feeling that she and Claire might really be a little bit the same, underneath it all. Of course, you couldn’t just come out and say that, not least of all because it was like admitting you were faking with everyone else, which Verdillia wasn’t, it was just… Just something felt a little cosy and familiar about this.
“My Christmas was lovely. We went to see the free elves caroling in Diagon Alley, and we went ice skating at this big old country house. That was more of a pre-Christmas trip, and then for Christmas itself we were at my grandparents’ house. How about you?”
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Verdillia Scurlock
You're welcome
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Claire Osbrook
January 12, 2022 7:14 PM
And you're very sweet. by Claire Osbrook
"It's cool thinking about it from the other side, too," said Claire when Verdillia talked about never thinking about where ink came from. "My grandmother taught me how to add and subtract with ink bottles, before I could get my head around numbers in the, what do you call it, numbers that don't go with anything. And I used to hate it when she'd make paper, because some of them smell - well, just horrible, and when you've got gloopy, bad-smelling stuff around and a big brother around...." She wrinkled her nose in distaste at that memory, and the associated memory of how she'd once gotten the stuff on her hands while slipping some in Graham's sock drawer for revenge.Free elf caroling in a famous magical historical site, ice skating at a big country house. Between this and her name and her hats, Claire wondered for a moment if Verdillia was actually a time traveler from the Victorian era or something. There probably hadn't been free elves anywhere back then, though, so that undermined the amusing visual a little.
"We went to Louisiana for a few days to see my grandparents, and Aunt Mariah," she said when she was asked about her Christmas holidays. "It actually got cool enough to wear long sleeves this year! Still no sweaters, but we can dream," she joked with a half-smile. "There was a pretty good party, enough people came over one night that we had some dancing, but we went home before New Year's." Mom and Dad disapproved of New Year's on the whole, she thought - they weren't even allowed to stay up to see in the new year at midnight once they got back home. Which just made them want to do it more than ever, of course, and look forward to the day when Mom and Dad couldn't prevent them from going to find out what was so crazy about the outside world then, but for now.... "So New Year's was really quiet, just me and my brother and my parents. Did you do anything for that?"
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Claire Osbrook
And you're very sweet.
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