A glimpse of eternity, a moment to breathe

three of them

Had the carpet not already been stamped and stomped and stained to the point where it was difficult to place what the original colour once had been, Abigail Rook would have surely paced a pathway across it a good ten minutes before, leaving the rest of the pacing to just reiterate the matter further. She'd not said a word since she started her pacing, the sleeve of one shirf being worried to excess, the newly acquired stormy grey of her eyes blazing with something difficult to quite identify. There had been a time where she had thought Jackaby's pacing had been a little excessive, but she had quickly come to realise it made for the most efficient way to work through some of the perpetual clutter of information that she had yet to figure out how to get to slip into background noise.

She had yet to get to the hopping over furniture following an idea stage yet, but the new Seer had gotten dangerously close to walking into things so Jackaby had assumed it was only a matter of time. 

 In the time she had started pacing Jackaby had the time to make them tea, occasionally wafting the steam from their cups into the path of the pacing woman until he had finished his cup and her's - more brought in for the presence of the beverage hopefully being a calming concoction for whichever senses it reached - had cooled to that weird lukewarm state that tea got when it was sitting around forgotten for too long. That said, in one of her loops, she had gotten close enough to notice the beverage and so swooped it up and drained the cup in a single dramatic slurp. To perfectly neutral fortune. She set the cup down with slightly more force than she intended.

"That was awful," she bemoaned, "What was that?"

"Tea," came the reply, "Now, have you quite finished with whatever that," he paused, waving a hand in the general loop she'd been pacing, "Or shall we try and work out a solution?"

"That's the problem, there isn't a solution," Abigail said, her exclamation heavy with sighs, "And I know what you're going to say, something about there always being a solution to things if one can only find the right way to go about it-"

"That wasn't what I was going to say, but carry on."

"You've made a huge mistake." said she, letting the weight of the statement leave her leaning against the table.

"I'm sure I've made more than one huge mistake at one time or another, Ms. Rook," Jackaby returned patiently, "That is just one of those things that happens in life, it is what we do about it that's more important. But I digress," a beat, "What are we talking about?"

"About me," Abigail began gravely, "I know you didn't really have much of a choice, but you clearly thought too highly of me. I'm not cut out for any of this. I can't figure out what I'm seeing, let alone what it's supposed to mean! I don't know what I'm doing and I keep messing everything up because no matter what I do, I'm not you and I can't get it right. I keep trying to do all the things I saw you doing, but I just can't do it and I just know I'm going to get somebody hurt or mess up in some way that'll prove that I'm just incompetent and that I was the wrong person for this!"

Rather dramatically, the woman let herself crumple to the ground. Unlike the dramatic heroines dashing across moors in thunderstorms only to swoon daintily once the horrors were manageable, there was very little elegance to this. In fact, it was less of a crumple and more of an undignified flop, her arms being joined on the table by her forehead with a solid thump. 

"I can confidently say that you got one of those correct, Ms. Rook. You're right, you're not me," the man began, "But that is not the detriment that you are treating it as. Do you not think that, perhaps, the stumbling blocks you are allowing to trip you up like this are not a defect of yourself or your competency, but instead because you're not allowing yourself to be yourself? Certainly, if you were trying to do things as I did it, the best you would manage would be to make approximations of what I was doing based on what you could observe with your previously limited scope of understanding. If you were to do it like you, however that might be, you might just be able to find a way to make it work. You're not me, you're you, so you should find out what it means for you to be the Seer, and all that means for you."