Late Morning

Heliotrope LeJean was a translator. That was her primary job, as the Mermish Translator on Level Four’s Beast Division.

It was her mantra to get through the Sulesk & Ve’sker incident, given how things had stagnated with no signs of a human transfigured selkie. And Heliotrope being the overseer of the ‘guest’ down in the zoo’s tanks unable to give the captured sister any solace. Or avoid Sulesk’s scorn.

Perhaps Fournier was wanting to keep her busy. Or the incident had revealed the Ministry’s limited scope on merpeople. Whatever the case, Heliotrope had plenty of records to update. She had been keeping busy.

“Clear the lift doors, please.” She warned the wix pouring in from the Atrium as she pushed the book cart out. A cart with a staggering stack of tomes, reports, case files and translated texts. The stack wobbled, bending under the door as the books pitched to one side. Nothing collapsed, as once freed from the confines of the lift the stack righted itself as books swayed back and forth. Some jostled for new positions.

The remaining trek around the greater fountain’s circumference was easier, from where the library entrance was opposite the cafe. Heliotrope’s semi-quarterly drop off was heralded by a slightly soggy memo.

Near the entrance a cart wheel got caught in an irregular groove in the floor tiles. Heliotrope halted before pushing harder. Ran it back and forward. Then, with a wisp of shriek in Mermish, put her full strength into pushing the cart up past the threshold. Another display of the book stack nearly collapsing before righting itself.

Heliotrope paid the almost calamity no heed as she went to the desk. Recognizing a wizard a few years older than her generation, one of the part-time librarians. “Kelvin Watkins,” she greeted, finding herself sparse on ideas for small talk outside of her current business. Her smile was strained. “Intake today. Did you get fifteen across on the daily crossword puzzle?”

Kelvin had a stack of old papers next to him on the desk that he was working his way through for a witch on level six. He was collating all the information the library had on an obscure old law that he was pretty sure no one had ever heard of.  Other than the witch who needed the papers pulled of course. It was dull work, but it did occasionally lead to interesting little nuggets of information. Not when it was for someone on level six though.  Even for a history nerd like himself, Kelvin found their work to be the least interesting.

He heard a commotion from outside the entrance. Someone really should fix the floor outside the library, the number of times a day that a cart got stuck.  And Kelvin wasn't even there all the time. But before he could get up to investigate, the cart rolled through followed by Heliotrope. She had stacked an impressive number of materials onto the cart.  At least he knew what he was working on next.

"Heliotrope LeJean," Kelvin echoed her own greeting.  Fifteen across. "Porlock." The clue had been something about guardian horses. 

"Is this everything?" He motioned toward the pile on the cart. "They are keeping you busy."

“Porlock, porlock, stubby horse protectors,” Heliotrope was briefly distracted by the answer, checking the pockets of her robes. All these books and not a scrap of spare parchment, nor any of the waterproof ink’d quills from her office. Before that last tidbit from Creatures class left her mind she pulled up a sleeve. Tracing big letters on her arm to remember by muscle memory. P O R L O C K

“Thank you. Philo suggested trying the crosswords,” her yearmate from Kelvin’s house of Ravenclaw. “Because that sounds like an enticing pastime when most of my work is translations. More writing.”

The sarcasm didn’t quite stick with her delivery. She looked between Kelvin and the teetering charmed stack of books on the cart. “Yes, plenty busy.” Stating the obvious but her expression was neutral, somewhat tired. “Backlog, along with newly updated texts. Quota from January tenth to April tenth of this year. But it’s usually not this much.”

“I can wait if you need to finish the Department of Magical Transportation request,” she pointed, recognizing the level six stamp on some of the forms.

"He would," Kelvin said with a chuckle.  It didn't surprise him at all that Philo was suggesting people take up crossword puzzles. "It does seem like it would be a little too close  to translating.  Clues instead of another language." He was surrounded by books and papers at work and with school, and he still curled up with a good book when he had some downtime.

He nodded as Heliotrope explained the pile of work she'd brought in. "January tenth to April tenth..." Kelvin echoed.  "You know you can bring stuff in sooner when it starts to pile up."  He had to imagine that some of it could have been brought in a couple months before.  Maybe. He'd been known to amass a mountain of work around him.  But he also worked in a library.

He carefully stacked and stashed what he was working on when Heliotrope offered to wait, "No need, it can wait.  And I have no idea how long it will take.  Have to love when people need you to find their needle in their haystack." It could be dull, but Kelvin really didn't mind, despite the annoyance in his tone.

Kelvin beckoned with his hands for her to unload the cart. "Lets start with the humdrum and end with the interesting."

Crosswords were the easiest hobby talk from Philo, compared to some of the whirlwind rules in his favorite board games. And Heliotrope didn't consider herself as artistic when attempting some of Drea's pastimes, like drawing or creative cooking.

At Kelvin's recommendation, Helio's eyes grew wide with realization, half-turning towards the stack of books with newfound perspective. She craned her head towards the irregularly stacked top of the pile. She clutched a hand to her mouth (the non-PORLOCK arm) drumming her webbed fingers across her cheek.

"Sooner, right," she sighed, embarrassment plain on her face from eyebrows to chin. And down her neck, a ripple of her gills under her collar. "Sorry. I wasn't, um, pacing myself well I guess." Heliotrope took most idioms as they were written. "But can't you summon needles out of haystacks? Like in mid-level Charms class, when you start summoning an unseen thing out of a bigger thing."

As per the request to get started, Helio whipped out her wand to divert sections of the stack. Several books were extracted from the middle, as the rest jostled into new arrangement. "If you like humming & drumming," again, mistaken context, but she sounded more chipper, "these are all regional songbooks. Music notation was the hardest to get correct."

Unlike the very straightforward titles: Merpeople Folk Songs, Volume I - V.

"No, it's no problem," Kelvin hadn't been trying to embarrass her.  Now he felt bad, he wasn't trying to make Helio feel bad. "Just easier to bring it down here, easier to process for you and for me if you make more frequent trips.  There was this one guy who retired," Kelvin grinned as he recalled the story being told to him when he first complained to one of the other librarians about someone bringing in a few months worth of work like Heliotrope had.

"Apparently, he'd had years worth of stuff piling up that he hadn't gotten around to bringing in.  Took a whole team to go through it all."

He laughed at Helio's suggestion that he could summon a needle from the haystack. "If only," he muttered. There were some summonable things and charms that could get you a little bit of the way, but a lot of the research still came down to manual labor.  Which Kelvin was glad of, cause otherwise he wouldn't have a nice mostly cushy part time job that didn't interfere with Knareswick.

"If you like humming & drumming."

"That's..." When was the last time he'd interacted with the younger woman?  He'd forgotten what it was like.  "Sure lets start with those."  He pulled the texts to him and jotted down some notes for later.  There was less to do immediately with books.

Kelvin's story of the other worker who had years of un-turned-in work brought her own reciprocated laugh. Punctuated by a slow blink of her translucent eyelids, because it was more of a nictitating membrane. Just another unusual feature to mark Heliotrope's ancestry the more one got to know her.

"He just did all the work but didn't turn it into anybody?" Her laugh rang hollow towards the end, vowing to not go down the path of cross-level Ministry anecdotes. "How did he get paid? Or was it one of those, almost to close dead-end desks."

The funny story ran close to home for Helio. Not only had she spent the first few weeks of her first of years at the school not understanding homework deadlines, the Mermish Translation desk, as she had gathered, had a borderline dead-end job reputation like other shuttered offices. Or almost shuttered, like the reputation of the Centaur Liaison Office into the early Twenty-Teens.

Heliotrope was a lot more sociable than her stoic student years and semi-frequent Ministry passings suggested, although she still missed the boat on certain expressions. Like Kelvin's suggestion of 'humdrum' having nothing to do with music. "Most merfolk lore is passed on through music, so these should make associated references more recognizable. Although you'd need more singers, as the average merperson can sing four-part harmony by themself." Which is why the sheet music read as a heavily condensed stack of notes. "Do you play music? I have a hydraulophone packed away that's gathering grime."[1]

1.	Nothing like there being actual hydraulophones when the original thought was "like wind instruments but water based" to round out merfolk vocal music.

"No idea,"  Kelvin replied.  It didn't make sense to him either.  "We are just long term storage for most of the Ministry, I don't think we know what the rest of you lot are doing unless you got something from us."  At least that was how it worked as far as Kelvin understood it.  He was just the grunt doing the grunt work. Most days he had little to do and used the time and resources available to him for school work.

He flipped open one of the books and looked at sheet music, though it mostly unintelligible to Kelvin since he couldn't read music. He wasn't sure what references would be esier to understand with sheet music but he also didn't have much to do with merfolk besides the occasional run in with Helio. He jotted down that the books included sheet music and lore.

"If the average merperson can sing four-part harmony what can a talented merperson do?" He wondered aloud.  He was pretty sure that a human could only do one part regardless of how talented without adding charms or transfigurations into the mix.

"Nope, never had the chance to learn any." He loved listening to music but never felt the need to know more than how to listen to it. Kelvin did make a mental note to look up what a hydraulophone was, he imagined it was interesting.

“Long term storage,” Heliotrope said, “and you only know what we request out. Oh. Please remind me I have to pick up some references for my future quota, once we’re done checking these in.” Twisting her arm further, C H E C K  O U T  B O O K S was added above PORLOCK in her phantom writing, although she had to trace smaller letters.

Heliotrope had more or less found herself using a notation method similar to hymnals or other collections of old music. Where the lyrical translations were given a number for the table of contents, only it this case it also cited other improved references they had been working on back when Itzayana Grimlish first interned in the office. Verses that contained colony history, wars with land dwellers or dark beings, or what passed for novelty in the modern era. Like a warning sing-song for young spawnlings to “Don’t Crawl Up The Runoff Sluice, It’s Filthy.”

In her brief mentioning of certain titles as Kelvin flipped through the pages, Heliotrope took his question as a given. “I don’t share the talents of the best singers. Seven or almost eight part harmony is possible. The Great Utterances are songs that must be sung carefully. Like when Sirens lure the hearts of men, Selkies compel the storms across the seas, or Finfolk chill their enemies to the bone with terror.”

Those last two mentions caused her mood to visibly worsen. Heliotrope visibly deflated in posture, lulling her tongue across her teeth as if trying to remove a sour taste. As the song books were getting processed Heliotrope extracted another selection which unknown to her was closer to Kelvin’s original suggestion of humdrum. “The next batch is about migration routes and economic trade with some colonies.”

Still off put with her self inflicted mood, she had another question outside of their work upon hearing Kelvin didn’t play any instruments. “Do you have any creative hobbies? Something that takes your mind away from the job.”

"Will do," Kelvin said when Helio asked him to remind her to check out more books. He felt a little bad for her that she was dropping off so much and already planning on taking more back with her. No rest for the weary.  Clearly he had the easier job.

"Seven or eight... wow."  He wasn't sure why Helio seemed disappointed in herself for not managing that many.  One was more than he could.  And he was sure humans would be impressed even if a siren wasn't able to lure them their deaths or whatever.  Though that did make him wonder if it was all magic or if it did actually sound amazing enough to lure without magic.

He took the next stack of books with more typical ministerial bent and kept taking notes.

"I paint occasionally."  He didn't do it very often, but he dabbled every once in a while.  "Mostly, don't laugh, mostly I read."

Heliotrope watched as Kelvin made his notes. Preparations made for the processed, soon to be shelved books as she had the next stack fold itself on the other side of the desk via spell. It did seem quicker than all the effort she'd been putting into the translations with help from the occasional colleague.

Flexing her neck to work out a kink, Heliotrope brushed back her slightly dingy blonde hair as Kelvin described his hobbies. "I won't," she promised.

A librarian who reads for fun, she couldn't even place the humor in that. Although her eyes glimmered with curious interest when he mentioned painting. "What sort of things do you paint? Do you show anybody?"

She fingered the edge of one of the music volumes, feeling the pages, as she half-replied and half spoke aloud, thoughts that may or not make sense to Kevlin Watkins. "I'm just not that creative with artistic stuff. All the music here is just transposing. Drea lent me some coloring books but that's only choosing a crayon to fill in a shape. I can perform but not really make my own."

Kelvin was pleasantly surprised when Helio was true to her word and didn't laugh.  Some people still found that to be a reason to take the mick.  Even more so now that he'd added librarian to his resume.  But no laughing.  Not even a smile.

"Mostly poor attempts at fruit and flowers and random patterns." Did he show anyone? That was loaded.  He rarely admitted to even painting. "Not really.  Not on purpose, unless I'm in a class or something."

"I'm just not that creative with artistic stuff. All the music here is just transposing. Drea lent me some coloring books but that's only choosing a crayon to fill in a shape. I can perform but not really make my own."

Kelvin listened, feeling bad that she thought that wasn't creative.  "Don't sell yourself short."  He'd painted in drawings, it wasn't any easier than painting without the drawing.

Everyday emotions were mostly stunted for Heliotrope. Her muted stoicism made plenty of her responses come off as tepid, without the safety net of being among close friends or a large enough gathering to catch onto the 'proper energy' of a shared mood.

Yet now, during the elements of Ministry work processing books with Kelvin, there was a pang of something she couldn't find the correct label for with what she was feeling.

"But you like painting. Or you wouldn't keep doing it." Perhaps an overestimation on her part hearing Kelvin describe his pastimes. "There's an enjoyment, or something, even if you don't show anybody."

"Unless it's closer to visual transposition," given the subject matter of his classes. "You must know of a lot things with your position seeing the records." Heliotrope hadn't thought as much on Kelvin when he was 'the prefect from Philo's house' at Hogwarts. They weren't friends, by the technical definition, but it dawned on Helio they shared a lot mutual acquaintances. Distinct colleagues as both were employed by the Ministry, he studied at Knareswick Phrontistery much like Philo, and was a few doors down from Drea's flat.

So just as she was about to compliment him for giving advice, what he said next threw her for a loop. "What does height have to do with sales discounts?" She halted in readying the next books. "I know when they say half-off they actually give you the whole object, not half."