The Senior Common Room is unusually quiet. No television. No newspaper. Just three cups, cooling.
Elowen (thoughtfully):
Do you ever feel… rehearsed?
Blottisham:
Rehearsed?
Elowen:
As though the arguments arrive already shaped.
Quillibrace (smiling faintly):
All arguments arrive shaped. That is what makes them arguments.
Elowen:
No. I mean us.
(A small pause.)
I. The Comfortable Positions
Blottisham (half-laughing):
Surely you’re not suggesting that I have been cast as something.
Elowen:
Have you not noticed? You defend. Professor Quillibrace dismantles. I inquire.
Blottisham:
That is simply our temperaments.
Quillibrace:
Temperament is a convenient name for structural function.
(Blottisham frowns.)
II. Managed Disagreement
Elowen:
We disagree, but within boundaries. The pattern never truly fractures.
Blottisham:
It would be chaos if it did.
Quillibrace:
Indeed. Civil discourse depends upon stable roles.
Elowen:
But what if even our dissent is patterned?
(A longer silence.)
III. The Frame They Inhabit
Blottisham (slowly):
Are you implying that we are… managed?
Quillibrace:
Managed is too strong.
Elowen:
Framed?
Quillibrace (after a beat):
Let us say that our positions are highly legible.
Blottisham:
Legible to whom?
(Quillibrace does not answer immediately.)
IV. The Gentle Unsettling
Elowen:
If a citizen who refuses the script introduces noise… what would it mean for us to refuse ours?
Blottisham (uneasy):
And say what? That democracy is flawless? Or irredeemable? That would be absurd.
Quillibrace:
Precisely.
Elowen:
So even our range of deviation is bounded.
(Blottisham looks around the room, as though the architecture might confirm something.)
V. The Final Question
Blottisham (quietly):
If we are framed… does that invalidate what we have said?
Quillibrace:
Not necessarily.
Elowen:
But it changes how we hear it.
Quillibrace:
Every system generates its own critics. The interesting question is not whether criticism exists, but whether it exceeds the structure that produced it.
(A stillness — not dramatic, simply aware.)
Elowen:
And have we?
(A long pause.)
Quillibrace (softly):
That depends on who is reading.
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