Alonso has a lot of free time, in general. At least in the way capitalist society defines free time. IE: Time not spent toiling in wage labor. It gives him plenty of time for personal pursuits and self-improvement. Tonight, he's sitting in the back room of the book store, his backside on the couch, and his boots up on a chair. He's got his laptop on his lap, and is reciting back conversational snippets of sephardic Hebrew. He's already pretty well spoken, it would seem. This is clearly a mastery course. Putting the finishing touches on a studied language, perhaps. Or refreshing one that's gone out of practice.
It's rare that Iris goes anywhere and doesn't just waltz in like she owns the place, so when she strolls into the back room of the bookstore, kicks her sandals off of her taloned feet by the doorr, and heads toward the Keurig she does it like someone who just arrived home, not like a guest who is there for her second time and doesn't actually know her way around. In addition to the sandals that she's not actually wearing any more, she only has on a brilliant emerald green maxi dress, loosely fit to be comfortable over the wings on her back (which fold in pretty close to her body anyway, like a bird) and the tail on her butt. She also has a satchel slung over a shoulder.
"Hi there!" she says toward Alonso as she's passing through the room. "Since you haven't met me yet, I'm Iris. Well, I'm Iris even if you had met me, I suppose." She pauses mid-step, her foot still in the air, balanced semi-precariously, and then reverses the step to put her foot back on the ground and turns to look at Alonso. "What are you studying? Something about it sounds familiar."
Closing up the shop, Gisa trundles back into the back room once she's finished balancing the till and all that tediousness. She pauses in the doorway, listening to the snippets of Sephardic Hebrew -- the sort spoken in Israel, natch -- and the corners of her lips curve up. She crosses the room, leans down, and kisses the top of Alonso's head. There are no words of praise or thanks for his work on her native language -- he knows, she thinks. A pause when Iris lets herself in, but the golem's smile only widens all the further. "Shalom, Iris," she greets, and goes to get her usual glass of wine, and to make a coffee for Iris. "This is Alonso. Alonso, Iris. I have been hoping for you two to meet."
The Spaniard is apparently accustomed to people wandering through at odd times, so this is not especially noteworthy. Though the tail does get a double-take when first he notices it. His attention takes a few moments to steer Iris's way in general, however, due to the lesson in progress. He manages to pause it after three attempts, as the mouse seems to be misbehaving. "Ah. Hello. Yes." There's another pause when Gisa comes to give the top of his head a kiss, an action that sees her rewarded with an unguarded smile. His teeth are obnoxiously white and even, continuing with that off-putting orderly perfection he seems to have been unjustly rewarded with. "It is, ah. Hebrew. Sephardic Hebrew, of the sort spoken in Israel. Gisa's homeland. And, to a lesser extent, in Spain. My homeleand. I picked it up... before. Grew rusty. So I thought it might do to better my skills with it." Alonso sets his notebook aside and folds his hands over his stomach, concluding towards Gisa, "And now we are met."
"And Shalom to you too, Gisa," replies the dragoness, while smiling at the golem with a mouth full of sharp, reptilian teeth. "You don't have to make coffee for me, you know. I appreciate it, and if you like to play host by all means, but you're welcome to make me do it myself." She turns her gaze toward Alonso again, and as her nictitating membrance slide briefly across her eyes and back she smiles more widely. "I've heard good things about you, what with your being the fully automated luxury queer space communist sort of person. A pleasure, Alonso." She gets hit with a though then and opens her satchel. "Gisa," she says. "I had this thing in my hoard and I didn't know what it was. I thought you might be able to help me identify it, given..." she pulls something out of her bag. "Well, it's probably self explanatory." She holds up a mezuzah that looks like it was made out of pure gold, beautifully molded and decorated. And, since it has a Shin on it (as its only writing), why she thought to ask Gisa about it may be pretty obvious. She glooks at Alonso again and asks, "there's more than one kind of Hebrew? I didn't know," but she sounds pleased that she does now. "And you're from Spain? I don't know enough about your homeland, so I'd like to learn more some time."
"I find it pleasing to play hostess, yes," Gisa agrees simply enough, making up coffee for Iris. "Hospitality is an important part of having people in my home. The shop is just a shop, yes, but this is my home." She finishes the coffee, in the blue mug, and carries it over to Iris. "You know where the milk and sugar are, make it as you like it."
And before she can put down the coffee mug, when the mezuzah is produced, she nearly drops the coffee mug. Quickly, she sets it aside, and almost greedily, her hands reach out toward it. She doesn't answer the question about more than one kind of Hebrew or anything like it. "... where did you get this?" The shin on her forehead and the flames in her eyes flare brightly. Hungrily, almost.
"Catalonia, to be precise. Northeastern Spain. I was born near Barcelona, albeit in the countryside. I fought with the CNT during the civil war. An Officer in the Durruti Column until we were absorbed into the regular army following his death. I ended the war in Madrid." Alonso concisely offers his communist bonafides and a small overview of his life in Spain all in one travel size blurb. One gets the sense he's given that blurb a lot over the years. He gives the mezuzah a glance and is about to provide the answer to what the object is, but he stops short of doing so what with Gisa's reaction to it. His eyebrows lift slightly, appearing a bit like lens flare over his lightning flecked eyes. "That didn't answer her question, Gisa."
First Iris springs into motion, so squickly and accurately that if Gisa hadn't caught the coffee cup she probably would have. If it wasn't already obvious she wasn't human that would certainly give up the game, because there's zero chance any ordinary human could move that fast. Then the golem reaches for the mezuzah, and she has the reaction one might expect of a dragon who thinks someone is trying to snatch a piece of her hoard. The crest of long, rainbow feathers that substitutes for her hair flares widely and she lets out a thereatening reptilian hiss as she draws the it back. It takes her a moment to relax, and slowly, almost reluctantly, she holds it out for Gisa. She doesn't apologize for the reaction, or look particularly sheepish about it, but she does get over it. "I traded for it at a Market," she says. "It's hedgespun. I never gets dirty or tarnished. It has a little scroll inside, but I can't read it." And fortunately she hasn't yet managed to accidentally turn it into a token that does something bizzare by sleeping on top of it or something. Hopefully. "I'll let you borrow it for the evening in return for the coffee?" she suggests, extending her other hand so that Gisa could put the cup in it, and then she turns to look at Alonso. "Northeastern Spain? Near the French border, then. It sounds like you probably have quite a tale to tell about the experience, or a number of them. What was the Spanish civil war fought over?" After a momentary pauses she asks, "and when?"
"It's... it's a mezuzah case. The scroll inside it is the mezuzah. Jews put it on our doorposts." Gisa gestures with one hand to the doors into and out of this room, which each have mezuzot on them. Both of them are far more plain, but unmistakably the same thing -- thin, with the shin on them. One has a Jerusalem skyline painted on it, the other has pomegranates painted on it. Neither are as beautiful as this. Gisa freezes when Iris flares and seems as though she's threatened -- totally still -- and then takes it when the trade is offered. "Agreed. I will return it to you at the end of the evening." She turns the thing over in her hands as if Iris had just offered her a two-thousand-year-old copy of the entire Babylonian Talmud. "I wonder where this came from," she adds quietly. "These ... we take them with us."
Alonso has a sort of coiled spring energy to him at his most relaxed, but there's definite tension when Iris flashes the frills and starts in with the hissing. He doesn't leap from the couch, or anything, but he's certainly about ready to do so when things calm down again. It takes him several more seconds to ease back down to his prior uneasy lassitude. "If you do not handle it too extensively, someone with extensive use of the Omen contract should be able to tell you more about its provenance, Gisa. Wrap it in silk until that time." Alonso then clears his throat and considers Iris more purposefully. Having a Darkling staring might unnerve people who are not fabulous dragons. A decision is made, it seems, before he decides to answer the questions put to him. "It depends upon who you ask. I can only tell you why I chose to fight. I chose to fight because the legitimate will of the people had been violated when the rebellion began. I chose to fight because outside powers were interfering in our leftist experiment. I chose to fight because I believed in my fellow comrades in Catalonia more than I believed in the government in Madrid, or the will of the capitalists. Or in God. It was fought officially between 1936 and 1939, and ended in a victory for the Franco regime, which had been heavily backed by Italian fascists and Hitler's national socialists in Germany. Spain was left to bleed by the governments in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. As Russia would be in the years to come."
The bargain is struck, the trade is made, and Iris has a cup of coffee while Gisa has the mezuzah, and the dragon no longer looks alarmed, threatening, or hostile. Well, no more than she usually does, what with the scary teeth and razor sharp talons. "I don't know its history," she admits with a shake of her head, while she heads over to find a seat near Alonso. "I get the impression that it's not right that I have it, though? What would you do with it, if you could do anything? It might be possible to track down the hobgoblin that I got it from. If you think it's important, I would be glad to help how I can." She turns back to the Darkling, who she does actually apologize to. "I had hoped to meet you, and now I've been distracting myself and Gisa by bringing mysteries and over-reacting a bit to eager hands. I'm sorry, Alonso. I *am* interested in what you had to say, and appreciate you sharing it." She thinks about what he's told her. "I could see why those would be reasons to fight, too. People concern themselves far too much with wielding power over others, and act like that's the way that things must be, simply because they typically have been. Or because they profit by it, and don't want that to end."
Taking Alonso's advice, Gisa goes to one of the cupboards and gets a silk napkin; she wraps the mezuzah in it almost reverently. Certainly she's more than a little bit overwhelmed by having this sort of thing just ... appear... in her life out of nowhere. She carries it -- and her wine, which she's just remembered -- to her chair, stitting down and cradling the object as if she's holding a child. An extremely small, golden metal child. "I would find out whose it was, and what happened to them," the golem answers, her lips pressing together. "This is not the sort of thing that we leave behind," she reiterates. "Or ... just randomly sell. Which makes me think that perhaps whoever it belonged to, something happened to them. And if they were taken somewhere, or killed, I want to know who they are." Pause. "And then I would put it back into use, on the home of a Jew." If only she knew the dragon who brought her the mezuzah was one. She's heard some of Alonso's stories before, so she doesn't talk over them, just sort of... looks bewilderedly at the silk-wrapped object in her hands.
"Power and profit, yes, are the great motivators of capitalist imperialism. Exploitation and alienation. But. Best not to get me started, or I'll start quoting people and slamming my fist on tables and so on. Suffice to say my present situation-- being a changeling --changes the nature of the dialectic somewhat. I'm freed from exploitation and alienation by the ability to simply pledge for money if I need to. It's entirely divorced from labor values on my side of the equation, even as I trade it for the use value of other objects. The whole cycle of the process is broken. So I'm no longer a typical worker in the marxist sense. None of us are, truly." Alonso eyes his computer screen for a short span of moments, then rolls up to his feet. Apparently it's time for a drink, because he's headed for the liquor cabinet. "So consequently I use my unique liberties to try and improve the material conditions of others to the extent I am able. After I returned from Arcadia, I aided Israel in its war for independence. Cuba. San Salvador. Congo. Afghanistan. I got around. But the revolution business is messy and ugly and tiresome. It wears a fellow down after a while, which has led to my present status as a day laborer, vagabond, and general layabout."
"Then we have a quest," Iris says as simply as that, because apparently if she has this thing, and it's important to Gisa that she find out who it belonged to, then that's enough for the dragon. "It's a good thing I brought it to you to ask, isn't it?" There's a faint tone of 'aren't I just awesome for that?', a hint of the draconic arrogance, but she also seems rather pleased at the opportunity to do something good, as well. "I have a feeling," she says as she turns back to Alonso, "that I would rather enjoy hearing you get started, but maybe another time would be best. It is interesting to hear you talk about using your liberties in those ways, though. I work toward similar goals, even if I do it in other ways, by lending both my money and my voice to social causes. I have a youtube channel with a considerable following, and a good deal of wealth to use to support the causes I feel important, and a talent for tending to get what I want, eventually. Largely, those causes I support are any where people are made to suffer for simply being who they are. There are, unfortunately, no shortage of such causes."
"We have a quest," Gisa answers. She's heard Alonso go on before, and she gives him an affectionate, albeit brief, look aside. This item in her hands has almost all of her attention. It is almost literally like someone handed her a lost baby. "This is yours," she asserts to Iris. "It came to you. And I will help you, but it is yours." Her head tips up, and she tries to pay attention to the conversation going on about money and dialectic, but ... golem.
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