793.8.025.110.393 - Getting to Work
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xp_logsThe group pair off to accomplish various tasks to get the library sanctum up and running again, and run across various...dimensional oddities.
-
Doug and Marie-Ange investigate trying to draw new plans to help organize things.
"So, do you think this place has architectural plans?" Doug asked Marie-Ange. "I mean, at least it's not a never-ending series of hexagonal rooms, but I kinda doubt any planning was put into place for this."
"I think any plans that exist have been out of date. There are too many design styles stacked on top of each other..." She pointed to the room they had come from. "Your base of operations for whatever you and Amanda are doing, that is rather in this century. This room, this is the seventeen hundreds at the latest, and that entryway Topaz and Amanda had to defuse? Before the Magna Carta, certainly." She set her stack of papers down on a table. "The furniture is just as haphazard. This is an Ikea table." She pointed to the distinctive hexbolts on the side of the table, where it could be unfolded to expand. "There are your hexagons."
Doug blinked. "Ikea." He blinked again, still not believing it. "In a magic library." He shrugged. Not like it was the weirdest sight they'd seen yet. "Which then begs the question - is there a closet full of allen wrenches hiding somewhere in the stacks?" He couldn't quite stifle a giggle at the thought of some stuffy old person in robes opening the wrong door and getting buried under a cascade of small bent steel rods.
A brief frown, and the Marie-Ange reached into her shoulder bag and handed Doug a lira coin. "I thought you were going to sing the song, and I bet on it." She also pulled a trio of allen wrenches from the bag. "There was, but just a drawer of them, all sizes. Another of screwdrivers." She had pinched a few of those too. "I think, if we do not want to end up living here and starting a book cult, we are going to have to draw our own plans."
"Maybe there's good money in book cults. I mean, we could probably talk Topaz into being our first disciple..." But then they'd have to create dogma and hierarchy and all that sort of nonsense, Doug's train of thought went on internally. And that just seemed like entirely too much hassle. "Okay, so where are we going to find paper in this crazy jumble?"
"It is a library. Of course there is paper." Marie-Ange had already found pens and pencils, and - now that she thought on it, dug a carefully tissue-paper-wrapped pencil from her bag and handed it to Doug. "Here, I went to London and all I got you was a very old pencil with Latin on it. There was a whole box of them." She was already off, opening drawers and cabinets. "How opposed are you to the paper we find not being graph paper?"
Doug looked at the stylus and burst out in a guffaw. "Did you actually read these?" he asked his girlfriend. Come to think of it, he vaguely remembered reading about these being found in London. "I mean, they basically say 'I went to Rome and all I got you was this lousy pencil because I'm broke as fuck'." He was going to be giggling about this for entire solid week.
"I know Latin." She had sort of guessed, but it was not difficult. "I know a little Latin." Marie-Ange waved off Doug's look. "Stop making me hand you things, if I give you a third thing I have to wonder if you are the fae, I think that is the ooh, parchment!" She almost squealed, and pulled out a whole stack of thick rough-edged sheets. "Real parchment, not faked, this is real, this is ... " She turned one sheet over. "I am drawing a map on this, and I swear if you make one joke about sorting hats..."
"Hsst!" A woman leaned out from behind a set of shelves and raised a finger admonishingly at Doug and Marie-Ange. The ornate feather on the front of her pointed hat bobbed as she smoothed the front of her robes and leveled a stern look at the pair.
"You!" Marie-Ange dropped her parchment and a knife, silver and obsidian grew out of nothing to fill her hand. "If you had any sense of responsibility, you would have destroyed those books instead of tying them to chains where any properly sneaky person could get them!" She pointed at knife at the witch. "and libraries are for scholarship not silence, you absolute..."
"Oh hell." Doug had actually forgotten about the ranting threats Marie-Ange had made in the wake of whatever weird stuff had happened with the Danger Room upgrade. Even leaving aside the question of whether the people they were seeing and hearing in snippets and snatches were real, he had no idea how the semi-aware nature of this place would react to the very real murder that was about to happen. Doug took several lunging steps and grabbed Marie-Ange around the waist as she hurdled over a chair. Forty extra pounds ago, this would have led to him bearing his girlfriend to the ground in a heap, and then possibly raised eyebrows and making out. In the present however, this led to him barely redirecting her vector of motion so that they crashed into the edge of a table, Doug panting as he grabbed the edge of it.
It was just enough, and the knife went flying and Marie-Ange went down to her knees. She swore, popped back up, and the woman was gone, leaving behind a quill and ink bottle. Marie-Ange swore again, and only then turned to look at Doug. "I was not going to kill her!" She was not going to do murder, not if she could get information. "Just threaten."
"You..." Pant. Wheeze. "...have been a little..." Huff. Gulp. "...too stab-happy lately for me to risk it." Doug's legs picked that moment to give out on him, and he just barely managed to catch the seat of a chair with his arm and wind up in a sitting position, his feet sprawled out in front of him.
Marie-Ange ignored this in favor of patting herself down, all her pockets and then reaching for her bag and emptying it out methodically. "No wand, so probably not a slip into a universe where we went to Hogwarts." She stood, and brushed herself off. "I refuse to believe either of us would be squibs, so this cannot be that."
Doug shook his head. "We've been seeing and hearing weird shit all...day?" That was the other part, keeping track of time was extremely difficult the longer they spent in the place. No outdoor windows, at least thus far, so who knew. "Something something wibbly-wobbly something something timey-wimey," he muttered to himself.
"Really you are much more Crowley than Ten, if we are picking David Tennant roles, but given what just happened, if a giant snake appears I am killing it, not you." Marie-Ange said. "Here, the very worst librarian has left me real quills and ink, we should make a proper Marauder's Map, and see if we can get Amanda and Topaz to really make it talk back to grouchy wizards."
Doug held up his hand. "I solemnly swear that I am up to no good." And then the 'solemn' piece was broken by his delighted giggling.
-
Doug and Topaz reshelve things, and give their best try at coming up with a new classification system for magical books.
Doug raised an eyebrow at the pile of books that was clearly the 'to be reshelved' spot of the absolutely haphazard library they were attempting to impose order on. "How the hell do all these wizards keep track of where a particular book is?" he asked with a shake of his head. Then he sarcastically answered himself. "Oh, I know, maaaaaaaaagic," he drawled, wiggling his fingers. "Who needs organization when you can just 'accio Necronomicon'."
Topaz weighed the book in her hand, frowning, then held it up to show Doug. "I'd throw this at you if I didn't object to violence against books. And also I don't want to actually hit you." Marie-Ange and Amanda might object if she gave Doug a concussion with a book. Maybe. "Accio start sorting. By language is probably the easiest place to start."
"Aw, you got your snark back!" Doug chirped and clutched his hands together over his heart. "Dr. Grim will be so ~proud~!" He began putting books in various piles. "I mean, would it kill someone to have made a card catalog?" He cocked his head at Topaz. "Huh, you'd have to come up with a completely different classification system for magic books, I'm thinking..."
If one watched very closely (or just had an almost mutant-like ability to read body language), one would see the split second of absolute joy in Topaz' expression at the thought. "The Dewey Decimal System goes up to nine-ninety-nine." She spent far too much time in the library. "Going into one-thousand would get too messy, and also it's magic so it needs to be absurdly complicated." At some point during that she had gotten a notebook and pen from her bag. "If we organize by language first it'll be easier to divide up categories from there - history, dark magic one-oh-one, how to turn yourself into a frog and hopefully how to turn yourself back if you read that far..." Scribble, scribble goes her pen as she writes. Not everything she's writing is making it to her mouth. " Instead of going into one-thousand, start with one-point-zero-one, up to one-point-zero-nine, then start over at two for the new class.... for divisions another decimal. I mean it's not perfect but I'd like to see this lot come up with something better..."
"Did you know Melvil Dewey was a serial sexual harasser and suuuuuuuuper racist?" Doug asked conversationally. "I mean, i-d-k any other classification systems, except maybe the Library of Congress? So I guess Dewey Decimal makes sense, but..." He trailed off as he saw movement out of the corner of his eye. "...was that Andy Samberg?"
"If we're technically just riffing off his system to make our own, I'm sure we can rename it." She looked up, tapping her pen against her chin. "Can't think of anything witty involvin' my name, though. Shame. Sorry, who'd you see?"
Doug sometimes forgot that not everyone was as massively pop-culture savvy as he was. "Eh, just forget it." That particular reference just had a -lot- of layers to unpack. "So, hm. Wizard Decimal System? Magical Number Shit?" This was going to require some thinking.
"Hm." She set the notebook aside to keep sorting books. "I suppose it doesn't matter, once we leave no one is going to bother to maintain it. I'm sure they'll trap us here again in ten years or so to clean up again for them."
"How very cynical of you." Doug paused. "Probably not ~wrong~, but definitely cynical." He looked at the book in his hand. "So we're going to be dividing things up by subject matter rather than language, right?" He started back through the small pile they'd already sorted, setting things on a counter. Then, without either of them having set a volume down, there was a thud at the end of the counter. As they looked up, a man in impeccable tweed rounded the corner and walked away, leaving a thick tome bearing the word "VAMPYR" on its cover behind.
"Oh COME on," Doug shouted loudly into the vaulted rafters.
Topaz looked up from her work, biting down a sigh. "Brilliant." She raised her voice. "Bit rude not to introduce yourself before you drop an ominous book on us."
A faint "Rupert Giles" echoed back. "Oh and he's British. Delightful. Tosser. So what he'd leave?"
A strangled noise erupted from Doug's throat and his head thumped down on the table. "I can't even with you right now," he muttered.
"Are you talking to me or the library?"
"Por que no los dos?" Doug asked, still shaking his head. "You systemize, I'll organize."
-
Doug and Amanda try and kitbash a way to get wifi to work in a magical space.
Doug's fingers twitched toward his pocket for about the seven thousandth time since they'd entered the magic library. "Seriously, what is with magic and technology not working together? You'd think somebody would have found a way for them to play nice by the year twenty-bloody-nineteen," he groused to Amanda.
"Oh, there's technomages about, just not many. And the Ancient One is... well, old school. Ancient school, even," Amanda replied a little absently as she ran her fingers lightly over the books on the shelves next to her. George the werelight was zipping around in excited circles, like a puppy being taken for a walk, going off to explore higher shelves or dark corners before bounding back again at Amanda's whistle.
"So what, because he's a doddering wanker, technology doesn't work here? Like some sort of perception shaping reality thing?" Doug tickled his fingers at George as the light went zipping past his face. "What if we did some kind of little reverse Faraday cage thing? Like instead of keeping EM out, it would keep it all -in-."
"Pretty much, yeah. But that isn't to say introducing the concept to this place would hurt, you'd just have to figure out a way to get it to work initially..." Amanda looked over at Doug. "Which is completely what you just said, isn't it? Create a sort of bubble so we can get some kind of tech working and then... introduce the library to it?"
Doug nodded animatedly. It made sense... "I mean, the same as you'd introduce new hardware to an existing system. Bring it up in isolation, and then slowly link it in, making sure everything works together at each step before taking the next one."
"And hope nothing goes boom," was Amanda's wry addition. "Or we wind up stuck in fictional universes again." She cracked her knuckles, considering the tast. "My shielding bubble should work as your Faraday cage, right? My power sources are all messed up in here, but I have enough juice for that."
"That should work, I think." Doug pulled his very slim 'on the go' laptop out of his shoulder bag. "Let's do a little proof of concept - I mean, it's not like I brought a server rack in here with me." He giggled, remembering that his messenger bag was named for the classic D&D Bag of Holding. "I mean, you can't bring a Bag of Holding into an extradimensional space!" He shook his head when Amanda cocked her eyebrow at him. "Anyways."
"Just when I think I've figured out your references, you pull a new one out on me," she said with a nose scrunch. "Hey, did you see where George went?"
George came around the corner at his name, bobbing around the head of another person, almost herding him along as the man swatted around his head. "Goddamit stay still!" he growled at the werelight. "You're making me nauseous, you freaking Tinkerbell-ass..." He trailed off when he realized he wasn't alone, sizing Doug and Amanda up. "Great, what do you fuckin' nerds want?"
Doug cocked his eyebrow at the lanky dark-skinned man, his facial hair somewhere between five o'clock-shadow and goatee. He was pretty sure he knew who this one was, but he kind of wanted to see how Amanda was going to react to that question.
Amanda raised her eyebrow at Doug. "Another imaginary person?" she asked quietly, before gesturing for George to come back to her. The werelight obeyed, bobbing warily around her head. "I'm assuming we want the same thing you do - out of this whole crazy library."
"Amanda Sefton, meet Penny Adiyodi. And vice versa." Doug nodded between the two. Penny grunted, then raised an eyebrow at Doug. "Doug Ramsey," he introduced himself.
"So how did you two wind up in the Neitherlands?" Penny asked. Doug shook his head.
"I don't think this is-" Then he paused, and considered what he knew about The Magicians, especially without necessarily knowing what point in the series' run this particular Penny was from. "Actually, I suppose it's possible," he allowed. "I mean, extraplanar repository of knowledge?" But then, if television series were real in other universes... "Oh, the metaphysics of this are going to give me -such- a headache."
"Well, aside from the fact it's obviously possible since we're here, basically we're dealing with a cranky library. Know anything about those?" Amanda asked, giving Penny the once over. She had to admit, he was very pretty.
*vip*
And where there was one Penny, now a second, dressed in an impeccable gray suit and pocket square, was standing. "Loads," the second Penny answered the question. "Been stuck there for a while."
"Well, that answers that question," Doug observed. He'd been wondering where exactly in the show's timeline Penny might have arrived from. "40?" he asked, pointing at the suited one. "Mhm," came the reply.
Doug turned to Amanda. "So, uh, there's this whole thing with a timeloop and trying to kill a Big Bad. This one's from the 40th version, and that one," he pointed at the more casually dressed Penny, "is from timeline 23, I'm guessing." He chuckled. "We had our own little bit with one of those, but ours only went three loops," he told the pair.
"I wasn't there for that one," was Amanda's somewhat absent reply as she looked from one Penny to the other, her thoughts most definitely not on timeloops or mystical libraries. "Ahem. We - Doug, actually - had an idea to try and help things. Or at least a way to bring some order to the place?" She looked expectantly back at Doug, just the slightest hint of pink in her cheeks.
The pair of Pennys were looking away from Doug, and he cocked an eyebrow at his friend. "Should I..." he mouthed, making little walking motions with his fingers. He couldn't really blame Amanda for being 'horny on main', as it were. He sort of felt an obligation to wingman for her, really. "Er, yes," he muttered as she finished and the two men looked back at him. "We've been reorganizing, modernizing, and so on. Stands to reason if the place has some rudimentary awareness, and it seems to be cranky, we help it do what it's supposed to?"
Penny-23 and Penny-40 made similar thoughtful noises, then shrugged practically in unison. "Can't hurt, at least," the suited one said. "Consider us two pairs of extra hands, as long as we're here."
-
Doug and Marie-Ange investigate trying to draw new plans to help organize things.
"So, do you think this place has architectural plans?" Doug asked Marie-Ange. "I mean, at least it's not a never-ending series of hexagonal rooms, but I kinda doubt any planning was put into place for this."
"I think any plans that exist have been out of date. There are too many design styles stacked on top of each other..." She pointed to the room they had come from. "Your base of operations for whatever you and Amanda are doing, that is rather in this century. This room, this is the seventeen hundreds at the latest, and that entryway Topaz and Amanda had to defuse? Before the Magna Carta, certainly." She set her stack of papers down on a table. "The furniture is just as haphazard. This is an Ikea table." She pointed to the distinctive hexbolts on the side of the table, where it could be unfolded to expand. "There are your hexagons."
Doug blinked. "Ikea." He blinked again, still not believing it. "In a magic library." He shrugged. Not like it was the weirdest sight they'd seen yet. "Which then begs the question - is there a closet full of allen wrenches hiding somewhere in the stacks?" He couldn't quite stifle a giggle at the thought of some stuffy old person in robes opening the wrong door and getting buried under a cascade of small bent steel rods.
A brief frown, and the Marie-Ange reached into her shoulder bag and handed Doug a lira coin. "I thought you were going to sing the song, and I bet on it." She also pulled a trio of allen wrenches from the bag. "There was, but just a drawer of them, all sizes. Another of screwdrivers." She had pinched a few of those too. "I think, if we do not want to end up living here and starting a book cult, we are going to have to draw our own plans."
"Maybe there's good money in book cults. I mean, we could probably talk Topaz into being our first disciple..." But then they'd have to create dogma and hierarchy and all that sort of nonsense, Doug's train of thought went on internally. And that just seemed like entirely too much hassle. "Okay, so where are we going to find paper in this crazy jumble?"
"It is a library. Of course there is paper." Marie-Ange had already found pens and pencils, and - now that she thought on it, dug a carefully tissue-paper-wrapped pencil from her bag and handed it to Doug. "Here, I went to London and all I got you was a very old pencil with Latin on it. There was a whole box of them." She was already off, opening drawers and cabinets. "How opposed are you to the paper we find not being graph paper?"
Doug looked at the stylus and burst out in a guffaw. "Did you actually read these?" he asked his girlfriend. Come to think of it, he vaguely remembered reading about these being found in London. "I mean, they basically say 'I went to Rome and all I got you was this lousy pencil because I'm broke as fuck'." He was going to be giggling about this for entire solid week.
"I know Latin." She had sort of guessed, but it was not difficult. "I know a little Latin." Marie-Ange waved off Doug's look. "Stop making me hand you things, if I give you a third thing I have to wonder if you are the fae, I think that is the ooh, parchment!" She almost squealed, and pulled out a whole stack of thick rough-edged sheets. "Real parchment, not faked, this is real, this is ... " She turned one sheet over. "I am drawing a map on this, and I swear if you make one joke about sorting hats..."
"Hsst!" A woman leaned out from behind a set of shelves and raised a finger admonishingly at Doug and Marie-Ange. The ornate feather on the front of her pointed hat bobbed as she smoothed the front of her robes and leveled a stern look at the pair.
"You!" Marie-Ange dropped her parchment and a knife, silver and obsidian grew out of nothing to fill her hand. "If you had any sense of responsibility, you would have destroyed those books instead of tying them to chains where any properly sneaky person could get them!" She pointed at knife at the witch. "and libraries are for scholarship not silence, you absolute..."
"Oh hell." Doug had actually forgotten about the ranting threats Marie-Ange had made in the wake of whatever weird stuff had happened with the Danger Room upgrade. Even leaving aside the question of whether the people they were seeing and hearing in snippets and snatches were real, he had no idea how the semi-aware nature of this place would react to the very real murder that was about to happen. Doug took several lunging steps and grabbed Marie-Ange around the waist as she hurdled over a chair. Forty extra pounds ago, this would have led to him bearing his girlfriend to the ground in a heap, and then possibly raised eyebrows and making out. In the present however, this led to him barely redirecting her vector of motion so that they crashed into the edge of a table, Doug panting as he grabbed the edge of it.
It was just enough, and the knife went flying and Marie-Ange went down to her knees. She swore, popped back up, and the woman was gone, leaving behind a quill and ink bottle. Marie-Ange swore again, and only then turned to look at Doug. "I was not going to kill her!" She was not going to do murder, not if she could get information. "Just threaten."
"You..." Pant. Wheeze. "...have been a little..." Huff. Gulp. "...too stab-happy lately for me to risk it." Doug's legs picked that moment to give out on him, and he just barely managed to catch the seat of a chair with his arm and wind up in a sitting position, his feet sprawled out in front of him.
Marie-Ange ignored this in favor of patting herself down, all her pockets and then reaching for her bag and emptying it out methodically. "No wand, so probably not a slip into a universe where we went to Hogwarts." She stood, and brushed herself off. "I refuse to believe either of us would be squibs, so this cannot be that."
Doug shook his head. "We've been seeing and hearing weird shit all...day?" That was the other part, keeping track of time was extremely difficult the longer they spent in the place. No outdoor windows, at least thus far, so who knew. "Something something wibbly-wobbly something something timey-wimey," he muttered to himself.
"Really you are much more Crowley than Ten, if we are picking David Tennant roles, but given what just happened, if a giant snake appears I am killing it, not you." Marie-Ange said. "Here, the very worst librarian has left me real quills and ink, we should make a proper Marauder's Map, and see if we can get Amanda and Topaz to really make it talk back to grouchy wizards."
Doug held up his hand. "I solemnly swear that I am up to no good." And then the 'solemn' piece was broken by his delighted giggling.
-
Doug and Topaz reshelve things, and give their best try at coming up with a new classification system for magical books.
Doug raised an eyebrow at the pile of books that was clearly the 'to be reshelved' spot of the absolutely haphazard library they were attempting to impose order on. "How the hell do all these wizards keep track of where a particular book is?" he asked with a shake of his head. Then he sarcastically answered himself. "Oh, I know, maaaaaaaaagic," he drawled, wiggling his fingers. "Who needs organization when you can just 'accio Necronomicon'."
Topaz weighed the book in her hand, frowning, then held it up to show Doug. "I'd throw this at you if I didn't object to violence against books. And also I don't want to actually hit you." Marie-Ange and Amanda might object if she gave Doug a concussion with a book. Maybe. "Accio start sorting. By language is probably the easiest place to start."
"Aw, you got your snark back!" Doug chirped and clutched his hands together over his heart. "Dr. Grim will be so ~proud~!" He began putting books in various piles. "I mean, would it kill someone to have made a card catalog?" He cocked his head at Topaz. "Huh, you'd have to come up with a completely different classification system for magic books, I'm thinking..."
If one watched very closely (or just had an almost mutant-like ability to read body language), one would see the split second of absolute joy in Topaz' expression at the thought. "The Dewey Decimal System goes up to nine-ninety-nine." She spent far too much time in the library. "Going into one-thousand would get too messy, and also it's magic so it needs to be absurdly complicated." At some point during that she had gotten a notebook and pen from her bag. "If we organize by language first it'll be easier to divide up categories from there - history, dark magic one-oh-one, how to turn yourself into a frog and hopefully how to turn yourself back if you read that far..." Scribble, scribble goes her pen as she writes. Not everything she's writing is making it to her mouth. " Instead of going into one-thousand, start with one-point-zero-one, up to one-point-zero-nine, then start over at two for the new class.... for divisions another decimal. I mean it's not perfect but I'd like to see this lot come up with something better..."
"Did you know Melvil Dewey was a serial sexual harasser and suuuuuuuuper racist?" Doug asked conversationally. "I mean, i-d-k any other classification systems, except maybe the Library of Congress? So I guess Dewey Decimal makes sense, but..." He trailed off as he saw movement out of the corner of his eye. "...was that Andy Samberg?"
"If we're technically just riffing off his system to make our own, I'm sure we can rename it." She looked up, tapping her pen against her chin. "Can't think of anything witty involvin' my name, though. Shame. Sorry, who'd you see?"
Doug sometimes forgot that not everyone was as massively pop-culture savvy as he was. "Eh, just forget it." That particular reference just had a -lot- of layers to unpack. "So, hm. Wizard Decimal System? Magical Number Shit?" This was going to require some thinking.
"Hm." She set the notebook aside to keep sorting books. "I suppose it doesn't matter, once we leave no one is going to bother to maintain it. I'm sure they'll trap us here again in ten years or so to clean up again for them."
"How very cynical of you." Doug paused. "Probably not ~wrong~, but definitely cynical." He looked at the book in his hand. "So we're going to be dividing things up by subject matter rather than language, right?" He started back through the small pile they'd already sorted, setting things on a counter. Then, without either of them having set a volume down, there was a thud at the end of the counter. As they looked up, a man in impeccable tweed rounded the corner and walked away, leaving a thick tome bearing the word "VAMPYR" on its cover behind.
"Oh COME on," Doug shouted loudly into the vaulted rafters.
Topaz looked up from her work, biting down a sigh. "Brilliant." She raised her voice. "Bit rude not to introduce yourself before you drop an ominous book on us."
A faint "Rupert Giles" echoed back. "Oh and he's British. Delightful. Tosser. So what he'd leave?"
A strangled noise erupted from Doug's throat and his head thumped down on the table. "I can't even with you right now," he muttered.
"Are you talking to me or the library?"
"Por que no los dos?" Doug asked, still shaking his head. "You systemize, I'll organize."
-
Doug and Amanda try and kitbash a way to get wifi to work in a magical space.
Doug's fingers twitched toward his pocket for about the seven thousandth time since they'd entered the magic library. "Seriously, what is with magic and technology not working together? You'd think somebody would have found a way for them to play nice by the year twenty-bloody-nineteen," he groused to Amanda.
"Oh, there's technomages about, just not many. And the Ancient One is... well, old school. Ancient school, even," Amanda replied a little absently as she ran her fingers lightly over the books on the shelves next to her. George the werelight was zipping around in excited circles, like a puppy being taken for a walk, going off to explore higher shelves or dark corners before bounding back again at Amanda's whistle.
"So what, because he's a doddering wanker, technology doesn't work here? Like some sort of perception shaping reality thing?" Doug tickled his fingers at George as the light went zipping past his face. "What if we did some kind of little reverse Faraday cage thing? Like instead of keeping EM out, it would keep it all -in-."
"Pretty much, yeah. But that isn't to say introducing the concept to this place would hurt, you'd just have to figure out a way to get it to work initially..." Amanda looked over at Doug. "Which is completely what you just said, isn't it? Create a sort of bubble so we can get some kind of tech working and then... introduce the library to it?"
Doug nodded animatedly. It made sense... "I mean, the same as you'd introduce new hardware to an existing system. Bring it up in isolation, and then slowly link it in, making sure everything works together at each step before taking the next one."
"And hope nothing goes boom," was Amanda's wry addition. "Or we wind up stuck in fictional universes again." She cracked her knuckles, considering the tast. "My shielding bubble should work as your Faraday cage, right? My power sources are all messed up in here, but I have enough juice for that."
"That should work, I think." Doug pulled his very slim 'on the go' laptop out of his shoulder bag. "Let's do a little proof of concept - I mean, it's not like I brought a server rack in here with me." He giggled, remembering that his messenger bag was named for the classic D&D Bag of Holding. "I mean, you can't bring a Bag of Holding into an extradimensional space!" He shook his head when Amanda cocked her eyebrow at him. "Anyways."
"Just when I think I've figured out your references, you pull a new one out on me," she said with a nose scrunch. "Hey, did you see where George went?"
George came around the corner at his name, bobbing around the head of another person, almost herding him along as the man swatted around his head. "Goddamit stay still!" he growled at the werelight. "You're making me nauseous, you freaking Tinkerbell-ass..." He trailed off when he realized he wasn't alone, sizing Doug and Amanda up. "Great, what do you fuckin' nerds want?"
Doug cocked his eyebrow at the lanky dark-skinned man, his facial hair somewhere between five o'clock-shadow and goatee. He was pretty sure he knew who this one was, but he kind of wanted to see how Amanda was going to react to that question.
Amanda raised her eyebrow at Doug. "Another imaginary person?" she asked quietly, before gesturing for George to come back to her. The werelight obeyed, bobbing warily around her head. "I'm assuming we want the same thing you do - out of this whole crazy library."
"Amanda Sefton, meet Penny Adiyodi. And vice versa." Doug nodded between the two. Penny grunted, then raised an eyebrow at Doug. "Doug Ramsey," he introduced himself.
"So how did you two wind up in the Neitherlands?" Penny asked. Doug shook his head.
"I don't think this is-" Then he paused, and considered what he knew about The Magicians, especially without necessarily knowing what point in the series' run this particular Penny was from. "Actually, I suppose it's possible," he allowed. "I mean, extraplanar repository of knowledge?" But then, if television series were real in other universes... "Oh, the metaphysics of this are going to give me -such- a headache."
"Well, aside from the fact it's obviously possible since we're here, basically we're dealing with a cranky library. Know anything about those?" Amanda asked, giving Penny the once over. She had to admit, he was very pretty.
*vip*
And where there was one Penny, now a second, dressed in an impeccable gray suit and pocket square, was standing. "Loads," the second Penny answered the question. "Been stuck there for a while."
"Well, that answers that question," Doug observed. He'd been wondering where exactly in the show's timeline Penny might have arrived from. "40?" he asked, pointing at the suited one. "Mhm," came the reply.
Doug turned to Amanda. "So, uh, there's this whole thing with a timeloop and trying to kill a Big Bad. This one's from the 40th version, and that one," he pointed at the more casually dressed Penny, "is from timeline 23, I'm guessing." He chuckled. "We had our own little bit with one of those, but ours only went three loops," he told the pair.
"I wasn't there for that one," was Amanda's somewhat absent reply as she looked from one Penny to the other, her thoughts most definitely not on timeloops or mystical libraries. "Ahem. We - Doug, actually - had an idea to try and help things. Or at least a way to bring some order to the place?" She looked expectantly back at Doug, just the slightest hint of pink in her cheeks.
The pair of Pennys were looking away from Doug, and he cocked an eyebrow at his friend. "Should I..." he mouthed, making little walking motions with his fingers. He couldn't really blame Amanda for being 'horny on main', as it were. He sort of felt an obligation to wingman for her, really. "Er, yes," he muttered as she finished and the two men looked back at him. "We've been reorganizing, modernizing, and so on. Stands to reason if the place has some rudimentary awareness, and it seems to be cranky, we help it do what it's supposed to?"
Penny-23 and Penny-40 made similar thoughtful noises, then shrugged practically in unison. "Can't hurt, at least," the suited one said. "Consider us two pairs of extra hands, as long as we're here."
