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Aya is little used to having the opportunity to set her own priorities, but she likes it. She's not hurting for any material resources, and the organization of the attic would produce those more than anything else; and she has this entire bookshelf closer to hand. So the attic, which may or may not contain ghosts, languishes; and she steadily works through the book collection. Right now she is on the third in a series of myths from the old religion; this volume is about Aelare, the trickster.
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It giggles again, if that was a giggle.
namesthesky
Aya goes back downstairs (carefully, carefully) and looks to see if the nameless son of the Duke is in his room.
anotherbreeze
Technically he has a name. Just not one he wants.
He is in his room; the door is closed.
He is in his room; the door is closed.
anotherbreeze
The door opens.
"Hi," he says. He looks generally rumpled, like he was just napping, and has neglected to put on a shirt.
namesthesky
"Magic human turned into a set of standing tower pipes. Can apparently hear. I'm going to work out a code so it can communicate complicated information."
anotherbreeze
"...I definitely didn't expect that," he says. "I wonder - where it's from, how long it's been that way. Is it that huge one that kind of looks like it fell out of a magic? I always thought the designer was just really eccentric. It's never sung around me."
namesthesky
"It's the hugest set of tower pipes up there. Do you want to see if it'll sing around you now?"
namesthesky
Aya collects papers and pens and goes back up, presumably with him following.
The pipes greet them with a cheerful little tune.
namesthesky
"Hello again. So, I'm not much of a musician and definitely not blessed with perfect pitch - you?" she asks her companion.
anotherbreeze
"As you can maybe tell from the attic full of instruments I don't play, I'm not that musical either."
namesthesky
"For all I knew you used to take lessons, or sometimes go through phases where you sing - the question is how good we are at distinguishing pitches, it'll affect how complicated and therefore how fast the code can be." Aya starts writing out the letters of the alphabet. "For myself, I think I can tell apart - anything actually too low for me to sing, anything I'd have to sing more in my chest than up in my throat, anything higher than that still in my range, and anything too high for me to sing. So that's four possible recognizable starting pitch groups, and I think this set of pipes easily exceeds what I can get out -" Aya sings aaah as high as she can, then as low as she can, demonstratively.
The pipes echo her with a pair of notes respectively much higher and much lower. So that's a yes.
anotherbreeze
"I'm not sure what I can tell apart just listening," he says thoughtfully. "But we could watch the keys, too, couldn't we?"
namesthesky
Aya peers at the keys. "That might work too, but I'd want to label them. Whistle once if you object to that, twice if you don't?"
A soft huff of air through the tower that doesn't sound a note in any pipes, and then two high notes.
A lot. And, strangely for a designed instrument but reasonable for an embroidered one, some of them are inside the tower formed by the pipes - totally unreachable by human fingers.
Counting just the ones outside: thirty-seven. And someone sitting directly in front of the tower could see them all at once.
Counting just the ones outside: thirty-seven. And someone sitting directly in front of the tower could see them all at once.
namesthesky
"There's enough to have one for every letter in the Esevi alphabet and then some. Are you literate in Esevi?" asks Aya.
The pipes choose to answer this question by piping a popular alphabet song.