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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.
-
Topaz and Amanda feng some shui and assess magical energies.
"Unhappy library is still unhappy." Topaz sighed. She was slouched against a wall, eyes closed as she tried to filter through everything else and figure out how the library was feeling. And it was sad that wasn't the strangest thing she'd said that day. Or week. Who knew. "Not as unhappy, though. I think we're getting somewhere."
Amanda snickered a little - if anyone knew the weirdness about talking about the emotions of inanimate objects and places, she did. "So we're helping? I just wish we knew what more it wanted, besides tossing random fictional characters at us."
¨Honestly? Part of it feels like the library wants attention." Topaz opened her eyes. "It doesn't seem like it gets much TLC. Not surprising for the Ancient One and his clan. And I would to love to just put all this on them, but something had to trigger this reaction. Or it's a teenager."
"We could always blame Xorn?" suggested Amanda. "I know since the whole... thing, gaps between dimensions have been dodgy. But that still doesn't give us much of a gameplan." She pondered the situation a bit. "Okay, you're a librarian. You spend a lot of time with the books. What sort of things make the atmosphere of a library feel..." she waved her hands vaguely. "Relaxed? Happy?"
"When in doubt, blame Xorn," Topaz agreed, rocking back on her heels and thinking. "Organization is a big thing. The less chaotic a library is, the better it is to be in. Ambiance. Part of what makes Avalon so creepy is the lighting - I mean, the bigger part is the vague telepathic presence that messes with people's senses, which this place also has. But Avalon was created to be that way. We can probably fix it here. Better lighting, somewhere to sit besides the floor, get rid of the fictional characters wandering around... or at least the creepy ones." She grimaced, thinking of the Night Vale librarians.
Amanda looked around her at the piles of unshelved books on the floor, the general neglect. "So, what... we tidy up? Do some filing?" She grimaced. "That's going to take forever in a place this size."
Topaz tsk-ed, sounding insulted. "A little magic and a plan for a filing system, it won't be that bad. And I happen to have both. A lot of this can be resolved on its own or as we work - like getting rid of whatever these things are wandering around. As things fall into order, they'll hopefully fade away."
"Such hubris, you lady. Tsk." The voice was most definitely not Amanda's, but belonged to the tall, thin man who had emerged out of thin air, apparently. He was dressed in an old-fashioned brown suit with a ribbon tied in a bow at the neck, rather than an actual bow tie and his ears were pointed. As the two witches turned, he bowed. "Lucien, of the Dreaming, at your service."
"Ah..." Topaz looked the newcomer up and down, tilting her head. "My apologies, sometimes my mouth gets ahead of me." She was surprisingly sincere. "Topaz. It's a pleasure."
Amanda blinked. "Another of the library's pretend people?" she asked rhetorically. At the stiffening of Lucien's already incredibly proper posture, she held up a hand to stop any response. "Sorry, I wasn't meaning to be rude. Things are just a bit... weird in here. And I don't have the pop culture references to know who I'm talking to half the time. Amanda Sefton."
Lucien inclined his head, accepting the apology, and then peered through the glasses perched on the end of his long, pointed nose at Topaz. "But you are correct, Miss Topaz, both about what the library needs and the impact it will have. The library saw potential in the four of you for assistance, but needed voices to articulate those needs. Hence, myself and the other 'pretend people'."
"It must have mostly picked Doug's brain for ideas," Topaz murmured, more to herself. "So it's speaking through all you. Can you tell us anything? Has the library always been like... this?" She waved her hand to indicate the general mess and the dark atmosphere.
"Not always. But there have been many disruptions to the fabric between dimensions, much tumult and confusion. The Library is sensitive to such things."
"The Frankenberry Cat," supplied Amanda, looking over at Topaz. "I guess you can't make a new universe without breaking a few worlds, eh?" She turned back to Lucian. "So the Library got all muddled up and it needs... what? Grounding?"
Lucian allowed himself a stiff smile. "Something like that. It needs, how would you put it... tender loving care? The Ancient One and his people have been rather neglectful of the Library's needs of late, hence what we heard you describe as a 'temper tantrum'."
"The Ancient One? Neglectful? Nah, doesn't sound like him." Topaz turned in a slow circle, eyes moving like she could see something no one else could. "So it's upset and neglected. A nice makeover is a start, but it needs emotional care too. Oh blimey." She resisted the urge to slap her forehead. "The library needs therapy." This was the perfect group for that, wasn't it?
-
Topaz and Marie-Ange examine documents and restore damaged ones.
The library provided, apparently, if you put in some effort to both look for the things you needed, and politely complained. It didn't even seem to need you to complain in just one language, and Marie-Ange was half sure that switching between English and French with occasional breaks of Italian and Spanish convinced the library that she was sincere in her need for some very specific types of paper and cotton and cotton swabs and one hour of blessedly fast internet.
That last might have not been the library, if the texts from Doug were accurate but she was giving the library some of the credit because she had a dozen kinds of paper including some lovely nearly transparent rice paper from Japan and she was taking the rest of it home if she had anything to say about this. She had ink. She had real beeswax. She had an entire tacklebox with labeled compartments full of tools and solvents and if this situation had not been so stupid she would have been in her art history happy place.
Honestly, she probably was there anyway, given the deep sigh of satisfaction that came out of her mouth as she opened the tacklebox.
Topaz couldn't do art. She had small, neat, precise handwriting, and almost pretty, loopy cursive, but anything more complicated and she was out. Which had relegated her to the floor, salvaging what she could from what she supposed was once meant to be a filing system. If she was being generous and giving any credit to the people who had run this place. Assuming anyone had ever run it and they hadn't just tossed books into this mad bubble dimension where nothing made sense and physics were a suggestion at best and god she hated the Ancient One and all of his lackeys. "You think if I take pictures and show them to my professor I can get extra credit for hands on work?" she asked dryly, setting another freed page aside. "She is unsurprisingly unimpressed by my inability to draw a simple circle and something something can't depend on memorizing facts from books for the rest of my life." She paused for a moment, frowning at two pieces stuck together. Delicate, delicate fingers gently worked the bits apart without ruining them. "Presumably she also didn't enjoy my honest answer to 'why are you taking this art class?'"
"Why are you taking an art class?" Marie-Ange asked, entirely distracted by the idea. "I think if it is art history, yes. If it is any drawing class that does not have you doing art in historical media, then it depends on the professor." She began painstakingly unrolling a paper that could not be - such a thing did not exist, the sketch of Starry Night that Van Gogh did before his painting was in Russia - but it was, and she itched to just take it home with her, hang it on the wall, donate it to a museum where it could be seen and loved, and not rolled up! Rolled up! in a musty library. "Also please check if this has magic on it because if it does not I am doing a murder on a magician. Possibly."
"Requirement, mostly." Topaz shrugged, standing to check the scroll. "I have to take at least one artsy type class. It was that or music theory. Adviser said the art class is probably more useful to me and what I want to do. No magic, murder away."
All thoughts of art restoration were put aside for fifteen seconds of achingly frustrated gesturing and exclaiming about this particular sketch, why it belonged in a museum and why someone who was old enough to need to be dead needed to be dead. Then Marie-Ange put the sketch aside, and settled into the piece she was actually trying to restore - an actual hand-written scroll of the library's founding, and the spells - though they were not called such at the time - settled into it's original foundation. "If I can make this legible, and Doug can translate..." The poor thing was so filthy that she was worried about losing the writing as she removed the dirt. "Perhaps you and Amanda can determine some of what makes this library tick..."
"I've been keeping an eye on that as we've worked," Topaz said thoughtfully, carefully picking through some more pages. "Seeing how it reacts to certain suggestions or how it feels about things we're doing..." She froze mid-flip as the sound of chittering and clanking chains reached her ears. "Oh you have got to be kidding me..."
She was disturbingly familiar with that sound considering she had only ever heard it once. But it was the kind of sound that stuck with a person. She looked over her shoulder and could see the vague outline of humanish-bug-like shadows creeping on the edge of the light. "Bloody hell." She cast a few shining orbs to drive the shapes further back. She turned to look toward the more shadowy area behind Marie-Ange and cast a few more orbs. "Unless you lot have working appendages and know how to restore ancient art and scrolls, you can stay right where you are."
Marie-Ange looked up at Topaz, followed one of the orbs with her eyes, and then pulled a jet black knife out of nowhere. "If they tell you to shush, I will find out if I can stab something in this library." She had one miserable encounter and a bruised knee already. The clattering chains quieted, and a single name tag with "Randalll" written on it fluttered onto the table.
"Yeah, librarians in the library, very clever," Topaz said, eyes darting around warily. They were holding the perimeter, but not going into the light. That made her feel slightly better. "So this is... what? Are you trying to tell us we haven't done anything to offend you yet?" She wasn't sure if she was talking to the librarians or to the library. Both, maybe. A little more chittering, but mostly silent. "I don't.... think you'll need to stab them," she finally said, looking back at Marie-Ange. "Not that I trust them. But if we leave them alone they'll probably leave us alone."
"Do they have any advice for how to remove the dirt on this parchment? It is actually parchment. I think sheepskin." Marie-Ange said, slowly, carefully. "I am not sure I speak ... ah... Randall the shadow librarian's language." She picked up her bag from the table and began digging through it. "Cotton swabs. I have alcohol, probably too harsh. Makeup remover is much too harsh... " She pulled seemingly random items from the bag - a knife, pencils, another knife, a packet of biscuits. "I am not above bribery, but I have no idea what these things are."
"I think they mostly like people. I dunno about you, but I don't currently have anyone on hand I'd mind feeding to someone." She paused. "Maybe one of the Ancient One's lot if they show up again."
"No one on hand, no." Marie-Ange said, carefully, after a moment of thought. "Should I ask why you are so familiar with alien shadow librarians? Is this one of your mysteries in the chapel?" She kept pulling bits from her bag, a cloth that unrolled into an art kit, a bag of cheese crisps, a paperback novel that she turned over a few times in her hands. "I most certainly did not buy this book." It seemed to be an unauthorized biography of Helen Hunt. "This should be a very bad airport spy novel."
"Maybe the library thinks you need to expand your range," Topaz said absentmindedly, looking back at what she was sorting through. "No, they're from a podcast I like. The fictional characters are meant to be a way of communicating with us since the library doesn't have a mouth. Maybe it's trying to show us that it has a sense of humor."
"Doug and I saw one of the horrible Rowling adults." Marie-Ange offered. "She shushed us, while we were starting that self-updating map. And... left us with ink and parchment. What do these librarians do in your podcast? Perhaps we can puzzle out what the library wants."
"Uh... they run the summer reading program and kidnap children." Topaz pulled apart a couple more documents. "Mostly they guard the library, I think. We are messing with some pretty old things. They might be a warning not to hurt anything or, ya know..." She waved a hand at the shadows, which her lights were still keeping at bay.
"I would ask for pizza, I am told that summer reading programs give free pizza but." Marie-Ange glanced at the shadows from the corner of her eye. "I think not. Well at least this time we are not getting shushed."
-
Marie-Ange and Amanda clean out some closets and wind up busting some no-kidding ghosts.
Closet of coats. Closet of hats. Closet of boxes. Closet of keys - they had transferred all of those keys into boxes, and were labeling them, because several dozen unlabeled keys was a good way to die of mortification before you found the one that unlocked the loo.
"Someone must be sorting some of this, or the library itself is." Marie-Ange suggested, carefully marking "Lost and Found - keys" on the rough version of the map she had been working on for hours. "I am guessing the library because no moths in any of those coat closets."
"It does seem to be pretty self-cleaning," Amanda agreed. She reached for the knob of the next closet and opened it, sending George in first to give her some light. "Uhhh, closet of... occult stuff? There's a lot of bones and boxes in here."
"Doug and I found all sorts of paper earlier. I think I may try to salvage some of the documents in the room that had all the water damage." Marie-Ange said, as she was already coming over to look over Amanda's shoulder. "Oh, that is... yes, that is at least... " She counted distinct sets of bones. "Two people, maybe three, if that jaw and skull do not go together." She blew loose hairs off her face, and shoved both hands into her trouser pockets - she had cards in each, naturally. "I suppose the question is, are they meant to be stored here, or did someone stash them here? This is a terrible place for a body dump."
"There's way too many skulls for a regular serial killer thing. Plus serial killers generally don't paint occult symbols on the bones. Or maybe they do, who knows these days?" Amanda shrugged. "I'm getting more of a houdon sort of vibe here than body dump." She reached in to take hold of a bag made of bright yellow cloth and marked with what she considered "African" sort of symbology, but before she could pick it a skeletal hand, glowing an eerie blue, reached out of the mess and grabbed her wrist. Amanda yelped and jumped back, dragging the hand and arm - but not a body - with her. "Aah! Getitoff! Getitoff!"
Marie-Ange's knife - and she was really getting a lot of mileage out of that one image on this trip - passed through the ectoplasmic glow, but her hand did not. The weapon faded as she flipped her wrist and pulled the bones away from Amanda, dropping them to the floor.
Well - she tried to drop them to the floor. They fell, alarmingly slowly and drifted back towards the closet to clack up against the rest of a skeleton piecing itself together bit by bit. "Oh for God's sake... "
Amanda rubbed her wrist, where finger marks showed white on the skin. "Fucking hellfire," she grumbled, a trifle embarrassed about the yelping. "So now we have actual skeletons in the closet."
The said skeleton continued to assemble itself... and then ropes and strings of ectoplasm began wrapping themselves around the bones, forming muscles, organs, skin, clothes... A woman dressed in a Victorian era gown, her hair piled on her head, roses woven into it stood before them, looking at them with an expression that was, to put it bluntly, completely and utterly evil.
"Found our serial killer." The words slid out of Marie-Ange's mouth as she stepped in front of Amanda and called up the image of a flat metallic disc from her tattoo. It covered her arm in a semi-circle, and she swore as the ghost rushed her. It was as solid as any of her images, and icy cold as it met the half formed shield.
"At least it's not Jack the Ripper," was Amanda's reply as she reached for her lighter. Normally she could just conjure fire, but the library was messing with her powers and she preferred to give herself a boost wherever possible. She flicked a spark and created a fireball, which she lobbed at the ghost's head. It went out with a sizzle as it connected with the woman's transparent form, but it certainly drew her attention away from Marie-Ange. "Okay, strike one for fire. Possibly not the best thing in a library, now I think about it..."
"Do you think so?" The sarcasm was more solid than the ghost, minus it's bones. "What else works on ghosts?" Marie-Ange swept the half-made shield from side to side, ignoring the freezing chill up her arm. "Iron? Salt? Prayer? I am a very bad Catholic, I hope it is not prayer!"
"A bad Catholic and a bad Wiccan, or whatever the fuck witches are supposed to be. Brilliant. But you might have something there..." Amanda reached into her other pocket and pulled out the marker she used for warding spells and a receipt from a bookstore, scribbling rapidly on the back of it. "I read about this in a book on Chinese mythology..." she continued, finishing the series of characters. "Now I just have to get close enough to stick it to her forehead." A gout of green ectoplasmic slime met that last as the ghost turned and projectile vomited at her.
Marie-Ange's poorly centered shield did little to block the slime, dissolving under the impact, and it soaked both women - Amanda down the front, and Marie-Ange down the side and arm where the shield had been. She swiped her arm clean and pulled an image of a spear from nowhere. "You exorcise, I distract." She said, with a disturbingly cheerful grin as she swung the spear. "This one will not dissolve."
"This is so disgusting," Amanda muttered, wiping goo off the front of her jacket. Fortunately her makeshift ward was still clean. She watched as Marie-Ange engaged the ghost with the spear, waiting for her opening.
Each lunge that connected with the ghost made a wet slurp as the spear sunk into the ectoplasm, followed by the ghost's echoing scream, and a taunting laugh from Marie-Ange. Her shirt and hair grew progressively more soaked with slime, but despite the goo, she kept at it, jabbing and skipping away whenever it got close enough to reach out with it's skeletal hands. Each stab came with a little side-step and the spectre turned to follow Marie-Ange, ignoring Amanda in it's unholy effort to retaliate.
There! Amanda ducked past the shrieking ghost and slammed the ward onto her forehead with perhaps a bit more force than was needed. Immediately the spectre went immobile, hanging in mid-air like a transparent pinata.
"Oh good," Amanda said. "I wasn't sure that would work."
Marie-Ange poked the ghost several times with the end of the spear to no effect, and then found a wall and slid down it, exhausted and covered in greenish-grey slime. "I am too icky to be sarcastic." She said, after swiping her hair off her face. "Please pretend I said something clever. I want a shower, or a sink. I would take a pond, even." She sat like that for several seconds until a bright blue towel was dropped next to her, followed by a face cloth in the same colour.
"Amanda where did you get..." She unfolded to stand up, looked up but instead of blonde Brit, she saw a tall woman with a truly impressive mass of curly brown hair wearing what was unmistakably a spacesuit. "Who are... "
"Shh. Spoilers sweetie."
-
Topaz and Amanda feng some shui and assess magical energies.
"Unhappy library is still unhappy." Topaz sighed. She was slouched against a wall, eyes closed as she tried to filter through everything else and figure out how the library was feeling. And it was sad that wasn't the strangest thing she'd said that day. Or week. Who knew. "Not as unhappy, though. I think we're getting somewhere."
Amanda snickered a little - if anyone knew the weirdness about talking about the emotions of inanimate objects and places, she did. "So we're helping? I just wish we knew what more it wanted, besides tossing random fictional characters at us."
¨Honestly? Part of it feels like the library wants attention." Topaz opened her eyes. "It doesn't seem like it gets much TLC. Not surprising for the Ancient One and his clan. And I would to love to just put all this on them, but something had to trigger this reaction. Or it's a teenager."
"We could always blame Xorn?" suggested Amanda. "I know since the whole... thing, gaps between dimensions have been dodgy. But that still doesn't give us much of a gameplan." She pondered the situation a bit. "Okay, you're a librarian. You spend a lot of time with the books. What sort of things make the atmosphere of a library feel..." she waved her hands vaguely. "Relaxed? Happy?"
"When in doubt, blame Xorn," Topaz agreed, rocking back on her heels and thinking. "Organization is a big thing. The less chaotic a library is, the better it is to be in. Ambiance. Part of what makes Avalon so creepy is the lighting - I mean, the bigger part is the vague telepathic presence that messes with people's senses, which this place also has. But Avalon was created to be that way. We can probably fix it here. Better lighting, somewhere to sit besides the floor, get rid of the fictional characters wandering around... or at least the creepy ones." She grimaced, thinking of the Night Vale librarians.
Amanda looked around her at the piles of unshelved books on the floor, the general neglect. "So, what... we tidy up? Do some filing?" She grimaced. "That's going to take forever in a place this size."
Topaz tsk-ed, sounding insulted. "A little magic and a plan for a filing system, it won't be that bad. And I happen to have both. A lot of this can be resolved on its own or as we work - like getting rid of whatever these things are wandering around. As things fall into order, they'll hopefully fade away."
"Such hubris, you lady. Tsk." The voice was most definitely not Amanda's, but belonged to the tall, thin man who had emerged out of thin air, apparently. He was dressed in an old-fashioned brown suit with a ribbon tied in a bow at the neck, rather than an actual bow tie and his ears were pointed. As the two witches turned, he bowed. "Lucien, of the Dreaming, at your service."
"Ah..." Topaz looked the newcomer up and down, tilting her head. "My apologies, sometimes my mouth gets ahead of me." She was surprisingly sincere. "Topaz. It's a pleasure."
Amanda blinked. "Another of the library's pretend people?" she asked rhetorically. At the stiffening of Lucien's already incredibly proper posture, she held up a hand to stop any response. "Sorry, I wasn't meaning to be rude. Things are just a bit... weird in here. And I don't have the pop culture references to know who I'm talking to half the time. Amanda Sefton."
Lucien inclined his head, accepting the apology, and then peered through the glasses perched on the end of his long, pointed nose at Topaz. "But you are correct, Miss Topaz, both about what the library needs and the impact it will have. The library saw potential in the four of you for assistance, but needed voices to articulate those needs. Hence, myself and the other 'pretend people'."
"It must have mostly picked Doug's brain for ideas," Topaz murmured, more to herself. "So it's speaking through all you. Can you tell us anything? Has the library always been like... this?" She waved her hand to indicate the general mess and the dark atmosphere.
"Not always. But there have been many disruptions to the fabric between dimensions, much tumult and confusion. The Library is sensitive to such things."
"The Frankenberry Cat," supplied Amanda, looking over at Topaz. "I guess you can't make a new universe without breaking a few worlds, eh?" She turned back to Lucian. "So the Library got all muddled up and it needs... what? Grounding?"
Lucian allowed himself a stiff smile. "Something like that. It needs, how would you put it... tender loving care? The Ancient One and his people have been rather neglectful of the Library's needs of late, hence what we heard you describe as a 'temper tantrum'."
"The Ancient One? Neglectful? Nah, doesn't sound like him." Topaz turned in a slow circle, eyes moving like she could see something no one else could. "So it's upset and neglected. A nice makeover is a start, but it needs emotional care too. Oh blimey." She resisted the urge to slap her forehead. "The library needs therapy." This was the perfect group for that, wasn't it?
-
Topaz and Marie-Ange examine documents and restore damaged ones.
The library provided, apparently, if you put in some effort to both look for the things you needed, and politely complained. It didn't even seem to need you to complain in just one language, and Marie-Ange was half sure that switching between English and French with occasional breaks of Italian and Spanish convinced the library that she was sincere in her need for some very specific types of paper and cotton and cotton swabs and one hour of blessedly fast internet.
That last might have not been the library, if the texts from Doug were accurate but she was giving the library some of the credit because she had a dozen kinds of paper including some lovely nearly transparent rice paper from Japan and she was taking the rest of it home if she had anything to say about this. She had ink. She had real beeswax. She had an entire tacklebox with labeled compartments full of tools and solvents and if this situation had not been so stupid she would have been in her art history happy place.
Honestly, she probably was there anyway, given the deep sigh of satisfaction that came out of her mouth as she opened the tacklebox.
Topaz couldn't do art. She had small, neat, precise handwriting, and almost pretty, loopy cursive, but anything more complicated and she was out. Which had relegated her to the floor, salvaging what she could from what she supposed was once meant to be a filing system. If she was being generous and giving any credit to the people who had run this place. Assuming anyone had ever run it and they hadn't just tossed books into this mad bubble dimension where nothing made sense and physics were a suggestion at best and god she hated the Ancient One and all of his lackeys. "You think if I take pictures and show them to my professor I can get extra credit for hands on work?" she asked dryly, setting another freed page aside. "She is unsurprisingly unimpressed by my inability to draw a simple circle and something something can't depend on memorizing facts from books for the rest of my life." She paused for a moment, frowning at two pieces stuck together. Delicate, delicate fingers gently worked the bits apart without ruining them. "Presumably she also didn't enjoy my honest answer to 'why are you taking this art class?'"
"Why are you taking an art class?" Marie-Ange asked, entirely distracted by the idea. "I think if it is art history, yes. If it is any drawing class that does not have you doing art in historical media, then it depends on the professor." She began painstakingly unrolling a paper that could not be - such a thing did not exist, the sketch of Starry Night that Van Gogh did before his painting was in Russia - but it was, and she itched to just take it home with her, hang it on the wall, donate it to a museum where it could be seen and loved, and not rolled up! Rolled up! in a musty library. "Also please check if this has magic on it because if it does not I am doing a murder on a magician. Possibly."
"Requirement, mostly." Topaz shrugged, standing to check the scroll. "I have to take at least one artsy type class. It was that or music theory. Adviser said the art class is probably more useful to me and what I want to do. No magic, murder away."
All thoughts of art restoration were put aside for fifteen seconds of achingly frustrated gesturing and exclaiming about this particular sketch, why it belonged in a museum and why someone who was old enough to need to be dead needed to be dead. Then Marie-Ange put the sketch aside, and settled into the piece she was actually trying to restore - an actual hand-written scroll of the library's founding, and the spells - though they were not called such at the time - settled into it's original foundation. "If I can make this legible, and Doug can translate..." The poor thing was so filthy that she was worried about losing the writing as she removed the dirt. "Perhaps you and Amanda can determine some of what makes this library tick..."
"I've been keeping an eye on that as we've worked," Topaz said thoughtfully, carefully picking through some more pages. "Seeing how it reacts to certain suggestions or how it feels about things we're doing..." She froze mid-flip as the sound of chittering and clanking chains reached her ears. "Oh you have got to be kidding me..."
She was disturbingly familiar with that sound considering she had only ever heard it once. But it was the kind of sound that stuck with a person. She looked over her shoulder and could see the vague outline of humanish-bug-like shadows creeping on the edge of the light. "Bloody hell." She cast a few shining orbs to drive the shapes further back. She turned to look toward the more shadowy area behind Marie-Ange and cast a few more orbs. "Unless you lot have working appendages and know how to restore ancient art and scrolls, you can stay right where you are."
Marie-Ange looked up at Topaz, followed one of the orbs with her eyes, and then pulled a jet black knife out of nowhere. "If they tell you to shush, I will find out if I can stab something in this library." She had one miserable encounter and a bruised knee already. The clattering chains quieted, and a single name tag with "Randalll" written on it fluttered onto the table.
"Yeah, librarians in the library, very clever," Topaz said, eyes darting around warily. They were holding the perimeter, but not going into the light. That made her feel slightly better. "So this is... what? Are you trying to tell us we haven't done anything to offend you yet?" She wasn't sure if she was talking to the librarians or to the library. Both, maybe. A little more chittering, but mostly silent. "I don't.... think you'll need to stab them," she finally said, looking back at Marie-Ange. "Not that I trust them. But if we leave them alone they'll probably leave us alone."
"Do they have any advice for how to remove the dirt on this parchment? It is actually parchment. I think sheepskin." Marie-Ange said, slowly, carefully. "I am not sure I speak ... ah... Randall the shadow librarian's language." She picked up her bag from the table and began digging through it. "Cotton swabs. I have alcohol, probably too harsh. Makeup remover is much too harsh... " She pulled seemingly random items from the bag - a knife, pencils, another knife, a packet of biscuits. "I am not above bribery, but I have no idea what these things are."
"I think they mostly like people. I dunno about you, but I don't currently have anyone on hand I'd mind feeding to someone." She paused. "Maybe one of the Ancient One's lot if they show up again."
"No one on hand, no." Marie-Ange said, carefully, after a moment of thought. "Should I ask why you are so familiar with alien shadow librarians? Is this one of your mysteries in the chapel?" She kept pulling bits from her bag, a cloth that unrolled into an art kit, a bag of cheese crisps, a paperback novel that she turned over a few times in her hands. "I most certainly did not buy this book." It seemed to be an unauthorized biography of Helen Hunt. "This should be a very bad airport spy novel."
"Maybe the library thinks you need to expand your range," Topaz said absentmindedly, looking back at what she was sorting through. "No, they're from a podcast I like. The fictional characters are meant to be a way of communicating with us since the library doesn't have a mouth. Maybe it's trying to show us that it has a sense of humor."
"Doug and I saw one of the horrible Rowling adults." Marie-Ange offered. "She shushed us, while we were starting that self-updating map. And... left us with ink and parchment. What do these librarians do in your podcast? Perhaps we can puzzle out what the library wants."
"Uh... they run the summer reading program and kidnap children." Topaz pulled apart a couple more documents. "Mostly they guard the library, I think. We are messing with some pretty old things. They might be a warning not to hurt anything or, ya know..." She waved a hand at the shadows, which her lights were still keeping at bay.
"I would ask for pizza, I am told that summer reading programs give free pizza but." Marie-Ange glanced at the shadows from the corner of her eye. "I think not. Well at least this time we are not getting shushed."
-
Marie-Ange and Amanda clean out some closets and wind up busting some no-kidding ghosts.
Closet of coats. Closet of hats. Closet of boxes. Closet of keys - they had transferred all of those keys into boxes, and were labeling them, because several dozen unlabeled keys was a good way to die of mortification before you found the one that unlocked the loo.
"Someone must be sorting some of this, or the library itself is." Marie-Ange suggested, carefully marking "Lost and Found - keys" on the rough version of the map she had been working on for hours. "I am guessing the library because no moths in any of those coat closets."
"It does seem to be pretty self-cleaning," Amanda agreed. She reached for the knob of the next closet and opened it, sending George in first to give her some light. "Uhhh, closet of... occult stuff? There's a lot of bones and boxes in here."
"Doug and I found all sorts of paper earlier. I think I may try to salvage some of the documents in the room that had all the water damage." Marie-Ange said, as she was already coming over to look over Amanda's shoulder. "Oh, that is... yes, that is at least... " She counted distinct sets of bones. "Two people, maybe three, if that jaw and skull do not go together." She blew loose hairs off her face, and shoved both hands into her trouser pockets - she had cards in each, naturally. "I suppose the question is, are they meant to be stored here, or did someone stash them here? This is a terrible place for a body dump."
"There's way too many skulls for a regular serial killer thing. Plus serial killers generally don't paint occult symbols on the bones. Or maybe they do, who knows these days?" Amanda shrugged. "I'm getting more of a houdon sort of vibe here than body dump." She reached in to take hold of a bag made of bright yellow cloth and marked with what she considered "African" sort of symbology, but before she could pick it a skeletal hand, glowing an eerie blue, reached out of the mess and grabbed her wrist. Amanda yelped and jumped back, dragging the hand and arm - but not a body - with her. "Aah! Getitoff! Getitoff!"
Marie-Ange's knife - and she was really getting a lot of mileage out of that one image on this trip - passed through the ectoplasmic glow, but her hand did not. The weapon faded as she flipped her wrist and pulled the bones away from Amanda, dropping them to the floor.
Well - she tried to drop them to the floor. They fell, alarmingly slowly and drifted back towards the closet to clack up against the rest of a skeleton piecing itself together bit by bit. "Oh for God's sake... "
Amanda rubbed her wrist, where finger marks showed white on the skin. "Fucking hellfire," she grumbled, a trifle embarrassed about the yelping. "So now we have actual skeletons in the closet."
The said skeleton continued to assemble itself... and then ropes and strings of ectoplasm began wrapping themselves around the bones, forming muscles, organs, skin, clothes... A woman dressed in a Victorian era gown, her hair piled on her head, roses woven into it stood before them, looking at them with an expression that was, to put it bluntly, completely and utterly evil.
"Found our serial killer." The words slid out of Marie-Ange's mouth as she stepped in front of Amanda and called up the image of a flat metallic disc from her tattoo. It covered her arm in a semi-circle, and she swore as the ghost rushed her. It was as solid as any of her images, and icy cold as it met the half formed shield.
"At least it's not Jack the Ripper," was Amanda's reply as she reached for her lighter. Normally she could just conjure fire, but the library was messing with her powers and she preferred to give herself a boost wherever possible. She flicked a spark and created a fireball, which she lobbed at the ghost's head. It went out with a sizzle as it connected with the woman's transparent form, but it certainly drew her attention away from Marie-Ange. "Okay, strike one for fire. Possibly not the best thing in a library, now I think about it..."
"Do you think so?" The sarcasm was more solid than the ghost, minus it's bones. "What else works on ghosts?" Marie-Ange swept the half-made shield from side to side, ignoring the freezing chill up her arm. "Iron? Salt? Prayer? I am a very bad Catholic, I hope it is not prayer!"
"A bad Catholic and a bad Wiccan, or whatever the fuck witches are supposed to be. Brilliant. But you might have something there..." Amanda reached into her other pocket and pulled out the marker she used for warding spells and a receipt from a bookstore, scribbling rapidly on the back of it. "I read about this in a book on Chinese mythology..." she continued, finishing the series of characters. "Now I just have to get close enough to stick it to her forehead." A gout of green ectoplasmic slime met that last as the ghost turned and projectile vomited at her.
Marie-Ange's poorly centered shield did little to block the slime, dissolving under the impact, and it soaked both women - Amanda down the front, and Marie-Ange down the side and arm where the shield had been. She swiped her arm clean and pulled an image of a spear from nowhere. "You exorcise, I distract." She said, with a disturbingly cheerful grin as she swung the spear. "This one will not dissolve."
"This is so disgusting," Amanda muttered, wiping goo off the front of her jacket. Fortunately her makeshift ward was still clean. She watched as Marie-Ange engaged the ghost with the spear, waiting for her opening.
Each lunge that connected with the ghost made a wet slurp as the spear sunk into the ectoplasm, followed by the ghost's echoing scream, and a taunting laugh from Marie-Ange. Her shirt and hair grew progressively more soaked with slime, but despite the goo, she kept at it, jabbing and skipping away whenever it got close enough to reach out with it's skeletal hands. Each stab came with a little side-step and the spectre turned to follow Marie-Ange, ignoring Amanda in it's unholy effort to retaliate.
There! Amanda ducked past the shrieking ghost and slammed the ward onto her forehead with perhaps a bit more force than was needed. Immediately the spectre went immobile, hanging in mid-air like a transparent pinata.
"Oh good," Amanda said. "I wasn't sure that would work."
Marie-Ange poked the ghost several times with the end of the spear to no effect, and then found a wall and slid down it, exhausted and covered in greenish-grey slime. "I am too icky to be sarcastic." She said, after swiping her hair off her face. "Please pretend I said something clever. I want a shower, or a sink. I would take a pond, even." She sat like that for several seconds until a bright blue towel was dropped next to her, followed by a face cloth in the same colour.
"Amanda where did you get..." She unfolded to stand up, looked up but instead of blonde Brit, she saw a tall woman with a truly impressive mass of curly brown hair wearing what was unmistakably a spacesuit. "Who are... "
"Shh. Spoilers sweetie."
