“Take these to the copier,” says the Cerulean Principle.
Jane takes the stack of papers that the witch holds out to her. “Anything else?” she says, and is waved boredly away.
The Cerulean Principle and the Grasp Unseen Which Holds in Place are — well, witches, with everything that implies. Married, perhaps, in whatever sense is implied when speaking of witches. Rivals, certainly. Enemies, possibly. Concerned, in myriad scheming and undermining ways, with each others’ designs.
Jane is an intern of the Grasp Unseen. And so, now, she has been directed to attend an interview, identity and past sealed behind occult mirages, and also been taken on as an intern of the Cerulean Principle. The Cerulean Principle occupies a towering metaphor of tallness and modernist glass, teeming with bodies doing endless work without discernible goal or benefit. Some, like Jane, are people. Many are dolls. Some number are…other.
Jane may have been lobbed in here as saboteur or grenado, but she doesn’t know which or why or what she’s meant to do. Meaningful instructions are hard to come by, from witches; and often, in any case, lies. She takes the paperwork. If the copier is slow, she thinks, this might stretch all the way to lunch; but she’s not sure, because this is a new and frankly, weirdly mundane way to waste her time. She’s seen other people coming and going with stuff to copy, but not yet needed to do it herself.
In the copier room, she comes up short, then thinks: of course, with eye-rolling irritation at herself and witches and everything. There’s no photocopier, of course there isn’t. There’s a doll with a drafting table and a lightbox, a wastepaper basket piled to the top with dead pens plus a partly-worked-through pallet’s worth of boxes of new ones behind it. To one side, a stack of papers requiring copies; to the other, completed ones.
“You’re the copier,” Jane says wearily.
“This one is the copier!” it confirms, not ceasing; head turned midway between its drawing and the original on the lightbox, pen endlessly scritching, painstakingly replicating each letterform of the original as a tiny ink drawing in a precisely-observed matrix of tiny ink drawings.
The original, as far as Jane can see, is a printout of an email.
“These are for the Cerulean Principle,” she says, hefting the papers in her hand. “Is there a priority system, or do I just add them to the pile and wait?”
“This one will interrupt its usual work after finishing this page,” the doll says. “If those are for Miss, they must be important!”
Jane watches it finish drawing a copy of the page and put it aside, and hands it the stack. The doll places the top sheet on the lightbox.
“This is what you do all day?” Jane says.
“This one is the copier,” the doll says.
She should leave it alone. “It’s just,” she says. “It seems inefficient to have made something with legs and a voice just to have it sit without speaking to anyone all day every day—”
One hand busy with the pen, the doll reaches with the other to tweak the hem of its skirt up, just a little, with the other. “This one only has one leg,” it says.
Jane stares at the empty balljoint socket alongside its good knee.
“What happened to the other one,” she says.
“Miss took this one from a doll rescue!” it says cheerily. “Its first witch used to impale it on rebar so it could learn to come from penetration!”
…That’s perfectly plausible as witch shit, yeah.
“And did you?” Jane says, after a pause, because if she’s going to make the copier make conversation, she’s not going to let it put her off.
“Oh, this one was never given permission to come.”
“Uh-huh,” Jane says, pinching the bridge of her nose. “Is this going to take long?”
A week later, Jane is without warning assigned to do things with the dolls, because of “interest”.
It certainly answers how closely everything is surveilled, anyway.
“Do what with them?” she says dubiously, standing in front of the Cerulean Principle’s desk, as the witch looks out of her parody of a skyscraper boardroom window.
“They’re dolls,” the witch says.
Jane waits. “But do what with them?” she says, after a while, and the witch turns around and looks at her.
“The existence of schools,” she says, “leads people into the terrible cognitive framing that teaching and learning are both purposeful and self-contained. Like riverbed eddies grinding pebbles against stone, driving circular holes that catch more pebbles and firmly house the vortex to drive ever further downward; most people shouldn’t be left in charge of children or animals because everything teaches, everything is learned. Not parcelled into lessons with a moral or a point or a testably retained factoid; structurally internalised.”
“They fuck you up, your mum and dad,” Jane mutters, and the witch smiles.
“Imagine a puppy perfectly okay to kick,” she says. “Imagine a child it’s perfectly okay to fuck up. Dolls are an enrichment activity.”
At her side, Jane runs her middle fingernail under her thumbnail. End to end, as if worrying out dirt.
“The what isn’t that important,” the witch says. “They simply need to be…prevailed upon. Like a person needs vitamins.”
“Uh-huh,” Jane says.
“Well, I don’t know why you get special projects,” Fleur huffs. Fleur is another intern. She, Jane thinks, is the kind of misguided where she wants to be a witch, and thinks this will get her any closer.
“Yeah, well,” Jane says, stretching until her neck pops. “Not like it gets me out of this, is it?”
If dolls are an enrichment activity for witches, there are other things in the building which need enrichment of their own. In this basement room, the shadows solidify in the absence of light, alive and slithering.
Once a week, to keep it calm, it gets one of the interns overnight, the only bulb in the room turned off from outside.
Fleur grunts, and pushes a paper bag with a muffin in it into Jane’s hands as she lets her out. “Rough one?” she says, with gruff sympathy.
Jane yawns. “Napped for a little around three,” she says, and Fleur gawps.
“Napped?” she says.
“Only so many hours I can read AO3 fics off off my phone to it,” Jane says, shrugging.
“PHONE?” Fleur says. “You have your PHONE in there? A LIGHT SOURCE?” She looks furious.
Oops. “It doesn’t mind as long as I keep the brightness down,” Jane says. “How else am I going to read to it?”
“DO YOU KNOW WHAT IT DOES TO ME IN THERE,” Fleur demands.
Well. Yeah, Jane has a pretty good idea what kind of tentacular marathon Fleur goes through; why else would she have worked out other things it likes?
“Uh,” she says lamely, and Fleau snatches back the muffin.
“IT LIKES CHOKING!” she says furiously. “I SPEND ALL NIGHT IN THERE GETTING WRECKED WITH ANOTHER TENTACLE WRAPPED ROUND MY NECK SO TIGHT I CAN BARELY TELL WHETHER I’M STILL CONSCIOUS, AND YOU’RE READING IT BEDTIME STORIES—”
“Nobody said I couldn’t!” Jane says, and Fleur won’t speak to her all week.
“I made you a replacement leg,” Jane informs the copier, and then when it tries to refuse, cunningly adds, “of course I’m not a witch, so I’m sure it isn’t the same. More of a prosthetic.”
It’s functionally identical, but thus placated, the copier allows her to fit it, psychosomatically limps around the room to test it, then cheerfully tries to sit back down forever.
“What do you do all night when nobody’s here to ask you for copies?” Jane says sweetly.
“This one waits for them to come back in the morning!”
“Uh-huh,” Jane says. She has a feeling about her next night shift, or more accurately, that Fleur is cooking some tattletale scheme to drag her down to penetrable equality. “Do you miss your first witch training you?”
A doll is a thing, like a puppy, that learns what to want from what you choose to make it receive.
“Yes, Miss,” it says.
Next shift in the Dark Basement, Fleur is waiting triumphantly at the door to shut her in and turn off the light, the Cerulean Principle beside her. Clearly, Fleur imagined this was going to ambush Jane: her face screws up in horrible, confused dismay when she sees the doll with her, certainty that Jane was going to be taken down a peg instantly dissolving.
“The copier’s old witch,” Jane says sweetly, straight past Fleur to the Cerulean Principle, “was training it to orgasm from penetration — should it be permitted. If Fleur feels the Dark Basement isn’t getting sufficient enrichment — although it’s been perfectly agreeable with me — I have a solution that gives it both what it’s accustomed to and the activities I’ve been developing for it.”
It dangerously skirts daring the witch to say that there’s no such fucking thing as a doll rescue. Of course there isn’t; witches are generally the sort to make sure their things don’t survive them, and if the occasional one falls through the cracks, nobody but another witch would or could take them in — and it wouldn’t be rescue. Not in general, and surely not by the Cerulean Principle.
Like a child, of course, you can teach a doll to believe whatever you’d like it to.
“I see,” the Cerulean Principle says, eyes glittering.
“Of course, I’m not a witch,” Jane murmurs.
The thing needs to be amusing; needs just a little of the spice of cruelty, somehow, and not just in any tiny power struggle between the interns.
“So,” she says. “I’m sure I wouldn’t have the authority to give it any permission....”
And there: the witch smiles.
