encoeurs:
@immortalgeass
Information was paramount, that much he knew and knew well by this point. He could gather it well enough on his own, but the ease with which it had been provided by those around him was a sorely-missed commodity. Still, he was hardly one to let himself fall into sloth simply because there was no easy way for something to be done. For the time being, he’d have to do the legwork himself. That this place’s library was open, much less still standing, was a godsend in that regard. Unfortunately, almost every book he found detailed places he’d never heard of, or ones he recalled vaguely from fiction. Shelving ‘A History of Eberron’ he moved to head to the next aisle, hoping to find something of more considerable informational weight. His fingers brush across the spine of something called ‘Cruel Britannia’ at the same time as someone else’s, and he pulls back only hesitantly, gray eyes finding themselves staring into a lean face and startlingly violet eyes. Huh… those couldn’t be real… could they?
“Sorry,” he says, fingertips lingering on the bottom of the bookshelf, eyes lowering sheepishly behind his glasses. “You wanted this, right? I can find something else.” It wasn’t, after all, as if he’d really intended to do more than simply page through it, after all.
It was startling enough that this building was still standing, given the squalor of the rest of the city, but even more so that someone else had chosen that exact time to seek out information. The coincidences had only continued when that person, who he had disregarded at first out of single-minded pursuit of his goal, reached for the same book as he did.
Cruel Britannia. Nothing could have better described his homeland...if this book was even referring to the same Britannia. He’d learned long ago that places like this could draw people from worlds that shared many similarities, names being the smallest thing that they could share.
Pulling his hand back from the book, he allowed his lips to turn into the same mask of a smile that he had spent so much time wearing during his school days.
“No, please. By all means. I was just curious to see if it was the same Britannia that I know. This library seems to have literature from all kinds of worlds, so it wouldn’t surprise me, but at the same time...well, it seems to be a common enough name in multiple worlds.”
