Crystal Orc Name Generator

The story

Burr's son had written that a hat was unnecessary. Burr had bought one anyway. He was meeting the household his son intended to join, and he wanted some part of his appearance to look as though he understood the occasion. The hat had a broad blue ribbon, an excellent brim, and a habit of settling too far over his left ear. He adjusted it three times before entering the crystal arcade. Across the passage hung a lane board with two columns: a spool and a rightward arrow, a fish and a leftward arrow. Burr wanted the cloth lane, where the household kept its little shop. He was looking at his hat in a bright surface when he passed the board.

The surface belonged to the arcade's old crystal screen. It divided a resting bay from the main passage, though missing pieces left irregular openings around its edge. Burr saw a traveler carrying a basket on the other side. She lifted a hand to her head, paused, and lifted it again. He had just done the same thing to his hat. When he lowered his arm, her image kept its arm raised for a moment, then dropped it with an exaggerated sweep. Burr looked directly through an open corner. The traveler was studying a folded shopping note. She seemed to have lost interest in her joke with offensive speed.

He tapped the screen. Her image smiled. On the far side she looked up sharply, and now her actual expression was a frown. Burr pointed to his hat and shook his head. She pointed to her basket and made a motion he could not interpret. He said the name of the cloth shop. She said something involving a sound he could not reproduce. He assumed this was the local way of declining to apologize. His son's letter had been warm and precise. He wished he had followed its directions with the same attention he was now devoting to a stranger's manners.

The traveler was called Seli. Her note promised an opening price at a fish stall until the next market bell. She had come through the other arcade entrance and wanted the fish lane. Burr did not know this. When he drew a circle in the air for a spool, she thought he was asking her to keep repeating herself. She made a fish with her hands. Burr took the waving fingers for another commentary on his brim. The screen released an earlier view of his solemn head adjustment into a narrow upper strip. Seli saw it and answered with an indignant little bow. Burr saw the bow later, when she had already turned away.

They attracted a patient audience of two pigeons. Other people kept walking, except when Burr stood in the passage with his arms spread to indicate that mockery had gone far enough. A porter asked him to move. Burr moved, offended that the porter had not addressed the underlying injustice. He caught the brim against a protruding shelf. The hat fell, rolled, and landed with the blue ribbon underneath. By the time he retrieved it, Seli had put her basket on the floor and was searching her pockets. In the screen her basket remained on her arm.

Burr looked from the real basket to the stored basket. Seli raised an empty hand above a missing section, where he could see it directly. In the intact strip beneath, her earlier hand still gripped the handle. Then the old basket image vanished. A neighboring strip briefly showed Burr's hat falling, though his actual hat was already back on his head. He touched it to make sure. Seli watched the delayed hat and then looked up at the very present one. They stopped gesturing. The screen had held little pieces of earlier light from both sides and was letting them go at different times. Neither had been answering quite the person they thought.

Burr began to point out the mechanism, which threatened to become another argument about who had understood first. Seli held up her shopping note. There was a small fish drawn beside the stall's name. Burr took out his son's letter, with its spool-shaped shop mark. She nodded toward the fish; he nodded toward the spool. This did not tell either of them where to turn. In the screen's lower strips he could now distinguish part of the real lane board he had passed: a retained spool and the beginning of its arrow. Seli could see a fragment of the fish column from her side. The missing bands separated the marks from enough of the directions to make guessing tempting and unreliable.

They went around the screen and stood together in front of the actual board. Here the spool's arrow clearly pointed right and the fish's arrow left. Burr checked the spool against the mark on his son's letter. Seli checked the fish against her note. Their drawings had identified destinations; the current board supplied the turns. Neither the cracks nor their new willingness to cooperate had created a route. Burr looked back at the screen. It was still displaying a piece of an indignant elbow. Recognizing the delay had not repaired it or made it care whether they were late.

Seli found two thin scraps of card. She drew a fish on one and a spool on the other, then held them out to Burr. He copied the checked turns onto the cards while both could still compare them with the board. The flimsy corners curled at once in the passage draft. He took off his hat and considered its excellent blue ribbon. With Seli's small scissors, borrowed and promptly handed back, he cut a length to reinforce each folded card. The remaining ribbon was too short to make the neat bow it had made that morning. He could still have asked her for an apology. Instead he offered the spool card for her to check once more, and checked her fish card beside it.

They stepped out of the porter's way to finish. The cards were personal aids for two travelers, not new signs for everyone passing through the arcade. Burr took his shortened ribbon and spool card with him; Seli took hers. Nothing was tied to the public board. At the fork they compared the real lanes with the remembered marks, then separated. Burr arrived at the cloth shop after the first shared meal. His son met him at the door and said, before anything else, ‘What happened to your hat?’ Burr had prepared an explanation involving an ancient optical mystery. It seemed too large for the cut bow and the cold plate waiting inside.

He told the household that he had mistaken somebody else's gestures, lost time being angry, and used the ribbon to help find the right lane. They listened. A cousin offered to tuck the remaining end under the band, which made it less untidy without restoring its length. The meal could not begin again: two members of the household had already returned to work. Burr ate what had been kept for him and asked his son about the shop. Elsewhere, Seli reached the stall after the opening-price bell and paid the ordinary higher price. Recognizing a misunderstanding had not supplied either of them with the time spent on it.

Two days later Burr passed the arcade on his way to the return coach. The crystal was still fractured. Beyond its edge he saw Seli, her basket full this time, preparing to enter the fish lane. He waited until they were looking at each other through the open space and gave one ordinary wave. She answered immediately. They did not try to discuss the household, the market price, or the embarrassing bows. They still lacked the words. Burr touched his shortened hat brim in a different gesture and walked on before an old image could invite him to another argument.