LSRO: Chapter 349 - Three Tomes

Hey there wonderful people

Told you I'd be posting more. And even more to come over the weekend as I get them all through a quick edit. Gotta write while the words flow. Editing takes a minor back seat to that.

Anyhu - onward we go.

I'm actually having a ball writing this. Frankly - I'm tying in threads I introduced boooooooks and boooooooks back hahahaha

You know how it is. That whole tidy ending thing

Hope you enjoy it!

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Chapter 12

Three Tomes

“Dottie, I have some personal questions I need to ask you.” Quinn hoped she kept her voice nice and even, not accusatory. She wasn’t trying to make Dotty feel bad or anything, but there was so much she still didn’t understand, and that included the fact that Dottie couldn’t leave the Library and appeared to be tethered to the Library. Something about stability or some such. 

Just that... even with her deeper connection now, there was no reference that remained for Quinn to interpret. Asking the source was the best idea, anyway.

Dottie trotted over and settled herself next to Quinn’s huge comfy chair. “I’m all ears, Librarian,” she said with a hint of humor in her voice.

Quinn couldn’t help but smile. “Thanks.” She paused, trying to gather her thoughts and just how to phrase it. “I think... or at least I’m fairly certain I understand why it is you can’t leave the Library. But I need you to explain it to me like I’m a child.” Quinn was glad Hal wasn’t in the room. He’d have chimed in with how she was a little egg or something.

Dottie paused, the sensation an odd one as it washed through to Quinn. “That’s a tough question. One I can answer, but the answer won’t be as enlightening as you expect.”

“That’s okay,” Quinn said, trying to reassure the bench. “I just want to understand.” And she wanted to rule out the nagging suspicion she held in the back of her mind. Not that she believed it for a second, but Quinn was worried about spies. They’d been sabotaged so many times now, she couldn’t shake the feeling she’d missed someone, and likely someone obvious.

Dottie drew in an audible breath, which made Quinn wonder where the superellux futora kept her lungs. That was an anatomy lesson she should crack a book for.

“Superellux Futora are a confined species. As in, we don’t do well outside of our own atmosphere. The magic it costs for us to maintain our life-force outside of the specialized world we’re from is vast. If we’re gone for too long... we leech our own life-force and, as a result, we basically live ourselves to death, if you will.” Dottie was choosing her words, speaking slowly, as if speaking to a five-year-old.

Her effort helped quell the chill in Quinn’s heart at the words she spoke. In a universe where interdimensional travel was as common as blinking, and magical creatures existed everywhere, she couldn’t imagine how upsetting it would be for the magic you had to kill you if you left your home. She reached forward and softly petted the top of Dottie’s ... body? At least, she did so trying to lend some comfort.

Dottie shuddered slightly, as if it wasn’t something she enjoyed thinking about. “The Library is one place that doesn’t begin a countdown on our magic immediately. Generally, we can leave our home for brief spurts of time, but a couple of days in and we begin our own depletion. The Library? It has so much magic, is made of magic, practically leaks magic, that - especially when it’s at peak capacity - our being here can actually help. Both Carty and I have been here longer than I can remember. We don’t need a lot of magical power to offset not being on our world, but we need it.”

“So you’re here because you have to be, and because if you leave then you’ll basically die unless you go back to your homeworld?” Quinn asked, cringing at speaking the words so bluntly out loud.

“Sort of,” Dottie said fondly. “Only in this instance, I bound myself to the Library while it was in stasis. I...” She let out a deep breath.

And suddenly Quinn felt queasy, her mind easily skimming all the possibilities and not liking the outcome.

“I helped feed power to the Library using my core. Just a trickle, just enough to make an ever so slight difference. The Library had helped me for so long. I had to try to help if I could. Surely, being generous with my power was the best option.” She sounded slightly lost as she spoke. “It wasn’t enough to drain me because even then the Library helped sustain me, and once you came along and the Library regained power, it also replenished my core. In doing what I did while we were in emergency power mode, I inextricably bound myself to the Library, and now I can’t leave. If I do, I’ll crumble.”

“Oh, Dottie,” Quinn said, not quite knowing what else to do but throw her arms around the bench she’d so rudely sat on in those first hours of her arrival.

“I’m okay, Quinn. I knew what I was doing.” Her voice was muffled by Quinn’s arms, but neither of them seemed to mind. 

After a few moments, they separated, and Quinn wiped a tear from her eye. “Thank you for telling me.”

“It’s okay. There’s a lot more to it of course. I balance out the Library, assisting in regulating some of the flow of power to certain areas. I sort of ended up integrating my magic into that of the Library. It’s just a tiny sliver, but I’ve helped balance unstable areas more than once.” There was pride in Dottie’s voice. Well deserved at that.

“Thank you.” Quinn meant it. She’d only just fathomed what it meant to be the Library, and any help when shouldering all that responsibility was appreciated.

“Did it answer your questions?” Dottie asked, her voice hesitant.

“Yes, thank you.” Quinn smiled. “At least that one, anyway.”

Dottie laughed. “If you have more, I’m here now, I may as well answer them.

“Nothing dire, just wondering if you’ve noticed anyone’s behaviour to be off. Could be our spy, could be a saboteur.” Quinn sighed and crossed her legs in her chair. She knew what they had to do; she knew how much easier it would be to find any infiltrators amongst them. But she didn’t think their luck would hold.

Dottie, however, hummed as if she were thinking. “Well, there’s not much to report. We’re still getting a lot of the books back from the newly opened branches. We’ve catalogued all the books that are still waiting for their branches. There are several big households prominent on their worlds who are holdouts. As in, being stubborn about returning what they borrowed. But I’ll probably ask Hal to duck over to those when he has time. I think he’s more intimidating than Eric.”

“Don’t tell Eric that.” Quinn laughed.

Dottie chuckled. “I didn’t plan on it.”

“Anything else?”

The bench paused for a second, hesitating, as if she was unsure she should say anything. “I don’t know why, and I can’t say how, but there are certain aspects of our book processing that feel... sluggish. They seem slower. We have much longer lines despite having so many more employees than we used to have. The patrons have increased little since the last branch was opened, and we have such a smooth system of returns and borrowing that we rarely have a bottleneck, anyway. Only now... everything seems to plod along.”

Quinn frowned. “That’s mildly concerning, but I’ll look into it.” She pushed it to the back of her mind, determined to check over the system in her own time and see what she could find. Or maybe she’d ask Drevicia to look over it. It’d probably be easier for it to tell just what was out of the ordinary. Quinn still felt too new to have a good basis for comparison.

“If there’s nothing else, Librarian, I really have to get out there and organize our assistants. It seems both Eric and Geneva have taken off to different places to begin their book retrievals already.”

“Thank you, Dottie,” Quinn said as the little bench trotted out of the room. She wondered where Betty was, but she allowed the staff days off, and the sprite was well within her rights to have some time off. It just seemed downright inconvenient right then.

Just before the door closed behind Dottie, it was pushed open again. Quinn watched the entrance curiously until Narilin peeked into the room. Her eyes found Quinn’s, and her delicate, willowy body maneuvered into the room. Even though Malakai and Milaro made no show of recognition or greeting, Quinn knew they were both aware of the new entrant into the room. 

“To what do I owe this visit?” Quinn asked, genuinely surprised. Narilin and Quinn reached an understanding recently, and Quinn rarely saw her outside her Book Infirmary anymore. 

“Librarian,” the Salosier said with a faint smile. She seemed comfortable enough in the room. Her cascade of blossoms had grown and swept down her back majestically, but when Quinn waved for her to sit, Narilin had to loop her vined hair around her arm to do so. “Apologies. It’s been a long few days. I haven’t tended to my appearance lately.”

The comment made Quinn determined to find a book on the Salosier culture and maintenance. “Perfectly okay. What can I do for you?”

Narilin, just like Dottie before her, took to pondering over a question that Quinn didn’t think was hard at all. But at least this time she could see Narilin’s expressions. 

Finally, the Salosier answered. “I have had to expand my workspace.”

“That’s absolutely fine...” Quinn began, only to be interrupted.

“I did not think it would not be,” Narilin gave a soft laugh, “That is not the reason I am here. Not the main reason anyway. You see...” Another pause, a contemplative one. Perhaps the need to phrase things correctly and inoffensively. “When we open new branches, I always, inevitably, have books added to the repair listings. When this happens, I always assess each book individually. Some will require much more attention than others. Those that are rudimentary, I hand to my assistants, and those that are more difficult, I execute myself.”

Quinn nodded, following so far. She’d enjoyed helping repair some books back when she felt like she had time to do so.

“The new branches are not the only times I receive books that require repair. As we get busier, I receive more and more of them from the general parts of the Library, and the magical tome areas.” She paused again, and Quinn could practically see the cogs turning in her head. “Lately, I have been receiving more newly damaged books than I feel is necessarily standard. Some of these were damaged in such a way that it almost feels deliberate. That someone is desecrating the books and the knowledge we have with some sort of agenda. At first, I thought I was just giving in to conspiracy theories. But then I found this.”

She pulled two books out of some sort of dimensional storage Quinn didn’t quite see, laid a strangely silicon-looking covering on the desk, and placed the books down.

Quinn didn’t need to see them to know something was very wrong with them. The aura came off it in waves, black, sluglike... reminiscent of the chaos sludge from the chamber.

Narilin opened them gingerly, and it was only then that Quinn noticed she was wearing gloves. “Cannot afford to touch them right now. It appears to dislike organic matter.”

The books, spines cracked beyond any hope of salvage, were just as messy as the aura. Pages turned into sludge; wasteful goop decorated the insides.

“These books,” Narilin began, her voice raw with barely suppressed emotion were already in the Library when it reopened. They had been checked out and in multiple times. Only recently, Tom brought me three of them. All looking just like this. One of them, I could re-create through the system. That results, as you know, in lost magic, but at least allowed me to use the template stored in the system to generate another. These two, I am lucky to have scanned the spines before they disintegrated, as you can see now. But I do fear that if more of them emerge, re-creating them if their deterioration has already progressed too far might be impossible. That and..." she paused and took a shuddering breath. “That and, we have been lucky. So far, these have been on a single shelf of the return area. They have not touched other books.”

“Oh, no...” Quinn did not want to hear the rest, despite being certain where Narilin was headed.

“If they touch other books, I fear contagion. I am unsure how to approach this. But with three tomes already mangled, I am worried that whoever has done this is only just getting started.”

~~

OH NO! Have I introduced more crap! Yes... yes I have.

Much love

KT