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"I don't even know if she is still alive. Call me what you like. 'Beast', if you can think of nothing better."

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"I - okay, if you like," says Belle. She's not sure why anyone would want to be named Beast, but she's not going to argue the point. "Why did she do all this?"

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"I often wonder," he says, shaking his head. "She told me I made her angry, but it's a long way to go to punish a boy for running into an old woman in the street and laughing when she falls down."

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"...You mean to tell me that not only there are people in the world who can make magic, cooperative castles and entire forests' worth of responsive direction away or towards same, but there are people in the world who will do that over trivial things like that? If that's the case how did I get to be seventeen without knowing magic was real?"

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"She was the first witch I ever met," he says. "Also the last. And I don't think she told me the whole of the story."

He smiles slightly, revealing a glint of fang.

"I was seventeen, too, come to think."
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Belle looks around at the library. "I was looking for my father, when I walked into the forest - he went missing - but if it weren't for that, I wouldn't mind being stuck here so much, especially now that I've seen this library... this is a nice castle. You say she was trying to punish you? With a nice cooperative magic castle and a prolonged lifespan and - well, I guess the entrapment and the cosmetic changes were probably unwelcome, but I dunno, I'd consider the tradeoff if I got to live to be a perfectly healthy hundred and seventeen." Pause. "The handwriting might be a problem if it was me. I write a lot."

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He looks away with a soft growl.

"I've been alone here for more than a century. I'd sooner be dead—I've tried to be dead. And the castle wasn't always so nice." He snorts. "I think I've charmed it, over the years."
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"...Then... why didn't you come looking for me sooner, once I showed up? If you're lonely?"

Belle gets lonely, but it takes a long time. Introversion has its perks.
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He runs his fingers through his mane and shakes it out with a sigh.

"Because—I do know why the forest brought you here," he says. "Or I think I know. And I hate it."
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"What is it?"

She wants to know. She always wants to know.
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"All this," he says, "this body, the forest, the castle - it's a curse. And the curse can be broken. She told me how."

He looks away, sighing again.

"True love. If I were to meet a person, and that person came to love me, and I to love them in return, the spell would be broken and I would be human again. And I could leave."
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"...I can't leave either," says Belle. "How - how long will it keep me, if - Wait, people get lost in the woods all the time. You said you've been alone. Why wasn't it steering you any people before? Why me?"

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"It doesn't write me helpful little notes," he says. "I don't know. But I think the spell brought you here because you're the first person who's had a chance of breaking it."

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"So -" Why not attempt levity, what harm can it do. "You're picky?"

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He throws his head back and laughs.

The sound is very human, even if the sight isn't.
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"Well," says Belle, giggling a little along with him and looking at the bookshelves. "I don't suppose there's any books on magic in here? Because if I were you I'd have tried to learn it and just directly disenchant the place, with a century and then some to do it in."

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He spreads his hands. His enormous, clawed hands.

"Mostly, I try not to touch them. Never ends well for the book."
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"Oh. Well. I'll just get started on that for you, then, maybe there's something."

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He grins.

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Belle sets about taking each book one at a time off the shelf, inspecting its title, and putting it back if it is not about magic. (Not without regret, as there are many interesting-looking volumes that have nothing to do with the topic in question, but, priorities.)

"So," she says, as she's halfway through the first section of shelf, "if you can't even handle the books, what have you been doing, out here all alone?"
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"Eat. Sleep. Yell at the walls. Talk to the furniture. I like the smell of this room," he admits, with a gesture to the bookshelves, "that's why I hid in here when I heard you."

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"Books smell lovely," agrees Belle. "Hmm, I think this section might all be fiction..." She abandons her book-by-book search for more of a random dip across the stacks, trying to triangulate the theorized magic section.

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Books about magic that aren't fiction take up the entire north wall; the ladder for the outermost shelves skates over on its rails to let her climb to the top, if she so chooses.

Many of these books are in archaic dialects, or other languages entirely.
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Belle can make some progress on the archaic dialects. She is not, alas, a polyglot, but she notes insofar as she can what languages they are in and makes a note in her notebook to check for instructional texts on those languages. After all, if this doesn't pan out soon, she might be here a long time. "I don't suppose you know how to read -" She rattles off the languages she's found that aren't intelligible to her.

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"I could, once," he says. "These eyes are no help."

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