Meeting Metody

[zippyknowsbest]

It was a busy day at the New York Public Library, as indeed most of them had been since the economy started to tank. Zippy scowled as she worked through a pile of books sitting on the reference desk counter, which some patron had abandoned there without so much as a 'I decided not to get these, could you put them back?' People. Bureaucracy.Library

Comments

[totheb0ne]

Metody had spent the past few weeks haunting Comparative Mythology and edging his way towards something related to a claustrophobic panic. It wasn't just that this world lacked a few things found in his own. There were whole countries gone, entire religions erased, creatures that never existed. A brief sidetrip into the hard sciences had confirmed that even the rocks here were different.

He'd known that Hans' world was nearly barren. He'd never realized how very hollow it was. Or how very different - everything he knew was so alien as to be meaningless in the framework what little he understood about Hans' world.

Metody's original quest had been to find out if there was anything else like him in this place - surely, somewhere in the teeming population of an entire world, there had to be other bone creatures. Cousins, if not brothers. But now he'd found something else he ought to learn about.

"Excuse me, ma'am?" He smiled sheepishly at Zippy. "I'm looking for something on - " Damnit, word, word. " - comparative world

[zippyknowsbest]

By good fortune, Metody had chanced on a combination of words likely to arouse Zippy's profesional and personal interest both, which did something to distract her from her brewing bad mood.

Her brows climbed above the gold rims of her glasses, and she mustered a smile for the pale young man before her. "Comparative world philosophies? Hmmm, Ninian Smart's World Philosophies is a good introductory text--" Zippy was already grabbing a call slip and starting to scrawl the book's call number and title on it; she'd used the text often enough herself that it was memorized.

"--if you haven't gotten to it already. There's a reference copy on the shelves in the Reading Room, so you don't have to wait for it to be brought up from the stacks. Are you looking for religions too, or is this an assignment strictly about philosophy?" she said, peering over the top of her glasses at the young man. And having already assumed he was a college student.

[totheb0ne]

He was relieved that she already knew the name and title of a good reference; it meant he wasn't the only one in the whole world to have this sort of problem. It had to be downright common, even, if she'd had a chance to memorize the call number.

" - religions, too, especially the more common ones. Um. And if there's maybe something that examines contemporary American and world culture, that'd be very helpful as well, please. Though I guess the world culture one doesn't have to be very in depth. Right now, I'm looking for a framework to build on later." He knit his fingers in an anxious gesture, color starting up in his cheeks. "I'm sort of - sort of approaching from a position of complete ignorance. It's a - it's a personal project." The color rose, showing easily through Metody's pigmentless skin, turning his cheeks red and his ears hot pink.

[zippyknowsbest]

Zippy tapped her chin with the pen she had in hand. "Another book by Smart, then-- Dimensions of the Sacred, let me check if that's in the reference or not--"

She turned to the computer and takka-takkad at the keys briefly. "Ah, no, that's in the stacks. You'll need a call slip for that..."

Zippy scrawled the call number and title down on this one as well, then looked back to her computer. After typing in a few search terms and watching the hundred on hundred of titles start racking up, she looked back to Metody.

"Mmmmm... That is a pretty broad request, contemporary culture," she said cautiously, noting his apparent awkwardness when asking about this. "Looked at through the lens of art? Literature? History? Architecture?"