Vitas had never met the previous archivist, but if he had, the Norse demigod would have held no reservations with telling the person exactly how he felt about the obvious lack of proper organizational skills. This stranger, however, if he was so inclined to practice his skills of inciting anxiety and unease within the new archivist, would indeed find himself in for a bit of a challenge.
Though his left eye was blind, it still stared at this patron with the same intensity behind its cloudy iris and pupil that the right did with its midnight clarity, not murky as the brown and 'dirty' colors of the individual standing before him--as though the blindness brought him insight into OTHER things. Being the son of the Norse god of death and war, the king of his own pantheon, brought with it a certain...air; not so much of superiority, not arrogance, just...
Unyielding may have been a good word for it. Determined.
It was the sort of stare that wordlessly announced: I see you.
In every meaning of the words.
Whatever displeasure this stranger did have toward the archivist's explanations did not register with Vitas despite the subtle changes in expressions. However, eventually, that stare shifted away in favor of his monitor again as he continued to type, still not missing even so much as a keystroke. Not looking at the guy, Vitas missed even more expressions such as a furrowed brow or any widening eyes. But he did hear the confession that his company did not, in fact, read Greek. A small nod echoed in response. "Noted."
And when this stranger requested to have the documents translated to Russian, he again nodded. "Acknowledged." With that, fingers tapped a few more keys, saving his current progress and closing the program, locking the screen to simply be a bland, generic Mount Phoenix Library screen saver. He waited then, for the name. And when he received one--Dimitriy Zolotov--he just accepted it.
Something this stranger did not know--because how could he, they had just met--was that Vitas did not like liars; in fact, he detested them, finding them to be the lowest of the low when it came to scum of the earth. However, he did not mind being given an alias--hell, even Vitas used an alias from time to time. That was the one exception to his rule--if only because he knew that names had power and many cultures had deep-rooted superstitions when it came to giving names to strangers. And Russians he knew, especially, were a very superstitious lot.
So this Dimitriy wanted everything they had on the Oneiroi? That was quite an extensive collection. However, that did not bother Vitas in the slightest; he opened one of the side drawers of his desk to retrieve two pairs of gloves, one he set on his desk, pushing them into Dimitriy's direction before he pulled the other pair over his delicate, skeletal hands. "You have paid the toll, yes," he said of earning access to the vast knowledge of the archives. "And 'good' is relative, by the way," he added dryly with regard to the question of whether or not they were 'good'.
"Put on the gloves and follow me," he said as he stood, using his right foot to tap the lever at the base of his chair, causing the seat to sink so he could lightly kick the rolling chair and have it tuck neatly into the space beneath his desk. "I do not expect you to take less than a day to consume fives shelves and two cabinets worth of documents written in fifteen different languages in their entirety, but there may be materials that...call out to you louder than others. I cannot hear those documents for you."
Perhaps that made no sense to the patron, but to Vitas, it made all the sense in the world. There had been times in when he had been met with a vast wealth of resources regarding a subject without any indication of where he should begin--but sometimes, a certain book or scroll just drew his attention more than the others and that was usually his starting point.
But he could not 'hear' that call for Dimitriy.
What he could do, however, was gather materials for translation, and as he passed an empty book cart, he casually grasped the handle with both hands and pushed it ahead of him as he made it through aisle after aisle of shelves reaching from floor to ceiling. Eventually, however, he stopped in a row of boxes and cabinets, a tall rolling ladder on either side. If Dimitriy had followed, then without looking to him, Vitas would simply gesture to the shelves across from him and wait.
baratheonpilled
titsay
