I cannot quite follow all that is being said by the others, and it isn't just Syl's clipped words that I mean. Unfamiliar terms are being bandied about-- well, not that the words themselves are unfamiliar, but their usage suggests loadings that escape me completely. Terms like 'power,' 'circle of protection,' and so forth. I commit them to memory, falling still and quiet as I listen.
The strangest bit is, even though some of them don't even know each other, all of them are on the same wavelength, speaking the same shorthand, operating from the same basic assumptions. Something in that garbled jargon explained it all for them, and I realize that they don't even have to hide things from me: like a child being talked over by adults, I simply lack the knowledge to understand. It is incredibly frustrating, their certainty doubly so. No one asks anything like 'Even if someone in the center could somehow survive such a blast, what were they breathing in an inferno-created vacuum?' For them, the capacities of the central active mechanism are clear, therefore the question irrelevant.
Noma joins me after I find the blood, a salve to a wounded pride I hadn't even known I possessed. I'm about to tell her that with the blood having dried and then been reconstituted by rain, I would need a microscope-- and then Syl comes over and tastes the thrice-damned bloodstained grass. I think for a moment that I know what she's up to, tasting for the differences in iron and copper content that can differentiate human from animal blood, and I am impressed. Though I don't think it'll work. Too many of the trace elements would have been leached out by rain.
But her face hardens in --recognition?-- and I realize I'm off. Way off.
"Ought to be dead?" I repeat neutrally, running on autopilot as my brain continues to scramble. "Can I assume you mean something a bit more than just that he was recently lying prone and bleeding out in the middle of a pyroclasm?"
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Date: 2012-02-19 07:48 pm (UTC)The strangest bit is, even though some of them don't even know each other, all of them are on the same wavelength, speaking the same shorthand, operating from the same basic assumptions. Something in that garbled jargon explained it all for them, and I realize that they don't even have to hide things from me: like a child being talked over by adults, I simply lack the knowledge to understand. It is incredibly frustrating, their certainty doubly so. No one asks anything like 'Even if someone in the center could somehow survive such a blast, what were they breathing in an inferno-created vacuum?' For them, the capacities of the central active mechanism are clear, therefore the question irrelevant.
Noma joins me after I find the blood, a salve to a wounded pride I hadn't even known I possessed. I'm about to tell her that with the blood having dried and then been reconstituted by rain, I would need a microscope-- and then Syl comes over and tastes the thrice-damned bloodstained grass. I think for a moment that I know what she's up to, tasting for the differences in iron and copper content that can differentiate human from animal blood, and I am impressed. Though I don't think it'll work. Too many of the trace elements would have been leached out by rain.
But her face hardens in --recognition?-- and I realize I'm off. Way off.
"Ought to be dead?" I repeat neutrally, running on autopilot as my brain continues to scramble. "Can I assume you mean something a bit more than just that he was recently lying prone and bleeding out in the middle of a pyroclasm?"