Chapter 23: Words & Ink
It turned out Bran was completely right about Coral’s handwriting. He had to ask no fewer than five different individuals to read the note before they found someone who could make sense of it.
The hero was a woman running a little vegetable stall down one of the alleyways just off from the main market - said her son was a bit of scholar. She had an eternal scowl but turned out to be quite nice and even wrote out another copy of the note in her own, relatively more easy-to-read handwriting. It word ’relatively’ should be noted here as to Misha, her scrawl was as indecipherable as Coral’s, but Bran thanked the woman anyway.
Back at home, Misha watched Bran write the characters down again into his notebook then pull out a dictionary and start flipping through it.
At first, Misha was highly attentive, carefully watching as Bran counted out the strokes of the first two characters of the book’s name that he didn’t know and searched them up in the radical index - Misha knew that’s what they were called because he asked - but as time went on, and the number of failed attempts to find the characters increased, the little dragon’s attention waned and he turned to washing eggs in the kitchen (There was a big sale at the local supermarket. Buy one pack, get the second one 20% off!).
Misha liked eggs. You could do many things with them - fry them, boil them, stir fry them, fry and roll them...
"Misha."
Misha ducked his head out of the kitchen. "Yeah?"
"I need to go to the library. My dictionary isn’t good enough."
...Which was how Misha ended up trotting up the stairs behind Bran into the local Kowloon City library.
The tunnel-like passageway that had led to the library was completely tiled with grey-white square tiles and combined with the tiled floors of a similar colour, had made Misha feel like he was about to walk into a public bathroom. As it turned out, instead of urinals and nasty smells, there was a modest little doorway with an illuminated sign above it that read ’Kowloon Walled City Public Library’.
The floors were linoleum, and the furnishings looked to be a few decades old, but the place was rather homey feeling with bright coloured signs and a light topping of that nice musty smell of old books, and, apart from the hum of the florescent lights, it was silent.