Celeste Academy - Reading with Lexa (Patreon)

In the Hartnell Memorial Building Library lie many urban legends gossiped about and embellished by the many freshmen and sophomores of Celeste Academy. 

Students love to hear about the tales where stepping on the thirteenth missing step in the stairs to the third floor may be an entrance to the supernatural or reading a secret book stashed in the archives could transport you to another world. Most are fiction, but there is one that is real and she is walking around the halls right now: the beast of the library.

It is of course an exaggeration to call any librarian a beast, but this one particular librarian now slithering through the aisles is worthy of such a reputation. Everyone knows about her because she is the sternest of the librarians. But at the moment, she is not doing her usual duties of surveying the library for troublemakers. Her eyes stop at a book and she picks it up. After whispering a few words of her Attunement, she allows the book to float above her hand. The pages start flipping very quickly. Hisses and whispers emanate from the book as she levitates it closer to her eyes. Her eyes roll. Nothing. She sighs, lets it fall to her palm, and closes it.

She walks further into the abyss of the library where the tomes of Celeste Academy can be found. But her ears pick up a couple making out by the aisle. One is leaning against the shelf while the other has their right hand over them.

    “This is a library, not a movie theater!”

The couple looks at the librarian and begins to flee. Before she tells them to stop running, they had stumbled into some shelves and made a hasty escape. She sighs and picks up the books that have toppled over.

As she picks up the books, a title catches her attention: The Creatures Grimoire. She swallows. She hurries sorting the books back and briskly returns to the librarian’s desk with the book.

The librarian flips through the book. She finally notices how thick the book is after flipping through the index and finds what she is looking for. She smiles as she flips to the corresponding page.

“Um, excuse me? Are you Lexa?”

A voice she has never heard of has spoken her name.

Lexa sighs. She slides in a purple bookmark and glances at Carida.

“I guess you are the person I’m supposed to be dating, huh,” Lexa says, “just to let you know: I’m in a terrible mood. A very terrible mood.”

Lexa is grimacing while she rests her chin on her hand. The book she seemed to be reading before Carida interrupted her is beside her. Her eyebrows twitch. Even though she has reluctantly invited Carida to the staff room, she doesn’t seem to be in a talkative mood.

“I’m, um, sorry.” Carida says before bowing in shame. “I’ve never been here before.”

“Huh. Thought you were going to graduate soon.”

“Yes, but...”

Even though the library is a symbol of the academy, Carida has never been inside it since her department has their own mini-library. The Hartnell Library’s where one could find anything esoteric and niche about Attunements and more. Most students who breathe in this dusty air are usually going to be working on specialized subjects.

“Oh boy,” Lexa says, “got myself a non-reader. Sure love dating apps.”

“No! I mean, I do read books.”

“Recipe books are barely literature.”

Carida bites her lips. Lexa must’ve read her profile thoroughly and noticed her Attunement.

“Why did you choose me anyway?”

“I-I think you are cute.” Carida looks down and wonders if that’s the right thing to say. “Your description sounds um, mysterious.”

“Huh? Mysterious?! My friend forced me to make a profile and tried to take a picture of me.” Lexa pouts and starts toying with her pigtails before looking to the side. Her cheeks are blushing. “That’s why I was grumpy and not even looking at the camera. How am I supposed to be an attractive choice?”

“I don’t know. I chose you because I thought, um, you are compelling.”

“This has to be some mistake,” Lexa says before sighing, “I’m just a librarian. There must have been better choices.” She slides her chair backward and starts to stand up. 

Carida knows that if she lets Lexa leave, the date will be over. She should say something, but she has no idea what.

Just say something. Anything to save the date.

    “Y-you can read the book,” Carida says, “I’ll just sit here. I want to watch you read. That will be -- that will be our date.”

Lexa drops the book back onto the table out of shock before uttering a “What?”.

She’s sitting up straight and her head’s tilting down slightly, so she can see the whole book laid out on the table. Every flip of the page is crisp and echoes inside Carida’s ears. Lexa whispers a few words of Attunement and make the words like “critters” pop up a bit in front of her face. Her eyes have not blinked once either. So on first glance, Lexa’s concentration indeed looks like what one would assume of a trained librarian. 

But that’s not always true: she’s breathing somewhat erratically when she is not chanting her Attunement. Sometimes, she clears her throat. If Carida doesn’t blink, it’s possible to make out how Lexa’s eyes shift and make eye contact with her before going back to the book. Carida realizes in fact Lexa’s just glancing back and forth between the book and her.

For some reason, it makes her smile.

“What’s so funny?”

Lexa turns her hand around and looks right into Carida’s eyes.

“Nothing really. I just realized there’s more than meets the eye sometimes.”

“Hmph.” Lexa pouts and goes back to the book. Her cheeks redden. 

Carida thinks this is the perfect time to get to know her since Lexa is becoming more relaxed with her. She says, “Are you reading the grimoire for something?” 

“Yeah.”

“May I ask what you are reading it for?”

“No.”

Carida leans toward Lexa. “I think you are hiding something from me.”

“Yeah. Of course. We’re strangers.”

“That Attunement ... It’s for skimming and searching up keywords, right?”

Lexa looks up from her book and raises her eyebrows. “Yeah, the basics of Library Science. I use it for my research.”

“So what are you researching?”

Lexa looks away from Carida. “It’s nothing, really.”

“I’m curious.” Carida says, knowing that she has found something that is dear to this librarian’s heart. Lexa’s also interested in her, but the librarian is just being dishonest with herself. “I’d like to know about who I am dating. You didn’t say much in the profile.”

Lexa looks back at Carida and pouts a bit. Her eyes are shifting left and right.

“I really want to know.”

Lexa lets out a sigh. “Promise me, you don’t tell anyone about this. Okay?”

She chants a new phrase of Attunement. If Carida recalls correctly, this Attunement is used by artists who have too much material to carry around so they deposit their stuff into another dimension and retrieve them at any time they want. A spark zaps into existence and then, Carida hears a large thud on the table.

A stack of large papers filled with colorful pictures appear before Carida.

    “I am writing a picture book,” Lexa says, her head so low Carida cannot make out any expression on her face. “It has always been my dream.”

Lexa looks up and reveals a nervous but wholesome smile.

“Carida, c-can you read this for me?”

Lexa’s picture book is about a little gray mouse who likes to shake their tambourine. However, the mouse’s family tells them to play somewhere else because it is such a ruckus. That is why the mouse always plays the tambourine in the park and everyone there loves it.

One day, an elephant with an acoustic guitar starts playing and taking the mouse’s audience away. To be fair, the elephant knows how to strum so well it makes even the coldest of hearts flutter. The mouse becomes jealous and decides to make a devious plan.

While the elephant is taking a break, the mouse makes sure no one is looking and crawls into the elephant’s ear. The mouse screams, “Twee!” The elephant wakes up, panics, and runs into a tree.

The mouse hops off the ear and starts laughing. “What a silly dumb elephant.” The mouse just can’t stop laughing and tries to make their way back to the tambourine when they trip over something.

It is the elephant’s acoustic guitar. It’s broken because it was smashed by the elephant when they were panicking.

“My grandfather’s guitar!” The elephant hurries to the guitar and begins to sob loudly.

The mouse is overwhelmed with regret. They have done something horrible. No amount of apologies can ever restore the heirloom again.

The gray mouse decides that it is their duty to make things right again, even if it means a bit of sacrifice. They go to the music shop and beg the owner (a zebra) to fix the guitar. It will cost as much as selling the tambourine. The mouse looks longingly at the tambourine and agrees. The next day the guitar is fixed.

The elephant plays the guitar and everyone is happy. Except for the mouse. They are forlorn over the whole ordeal.

Then, the zebra comes up to the mouse and says, “I’ll give you back your tambourine if you play it with the elephant. I just want you two to be happy.”

The mouse gets their tambourine back and shakes it while the elephant strums their acoustic guitar. The end.

“That was adorable.”

Carida realizes those words have just left her mouth, but those are indeed her unfiltered sincere thoughts. The drawings of the mouse and the elephant smiling at the very end are so charming they make her feel like she is a child again. And the story ... is surprisingly cute.

A bit like Lexa in a certain way.

“Do, do you think so?” Lexa says, “I’m just curious. That’s all.”

“Mhmm, I would read this to kids.”

Lexa’s beaming and her cheeks are so red. “Thank -- thank you!” She bows her head in appreciation.

“No, no, it was just a fun read. Really. It was cute.” Carida is grinning from Lexa smiling.

Then, she hears sobs. Loud sobs coming from Lexa. Lexa’s not looking up.

“I sent this manuscript to a publisher.” Lexa says, her voice muddled by her whimpers and wheezes. “They rejected it. Said kids these days don’t like books like this. They want something scarier. I -- I was devastated.”

When Lexa finally looks up, Carida can see how much her tears are welling up in the eyelids. Some of her tears are dropping onto the grimoire where the pages of a grotesque creature are spread out. It seems like she was intending to use this creature for her stories and that would not work out. She’s squeezing her fists and biting her bottom lip hard. Her body’s shaking a bit as if ready to explode.

Carida feels a tinge of something that makes her heart skip a beat. She is not sure what emotion it is, but she can only gasp from it. Without realizing, Carida starts stroking Lexa’s cheeks with the back of her right fingers. She blinks and both Lexa and her are looking directly into each other’s eyes.

    “Your story is perfect as it is.”

Carida clears the tears off Lexa with her right thumb and Lexa begins to smile.

Alone once more in the staff room, the beast of the library exhales a breath of relief and starts to reflect on her life. Her left cheek resting on her left hand, Lexa uses her right hand to pick up a fork and slice a small bit away from the strawberry shortcake. Carida has baked this for her before going back to the dormitory because she believes it will give her the energy boost Lexa needs for her project.

Maybe dates aren’t too bad after all.

She brings the cake to her mouth and munches it.

Well, maybe it was just once in a blue moon thing.

She closes her eyes and concentrates on the taste of the cake before swallowing it.

And that blue moon is Carida.

Lexa lets the sweetness of the vanilla cream stay in her mouth.

Her heart is beating. The minute she had received a notification from the Wondr app and saw who picked her, her eyes became fixated on how Carida was making the sweetest of smiles. It was just too unreal for her to be chosen by someone so pretty. The whole thing must have been a dream, but the date actually went through. There was that one time she did want to leave out of embarrassment ... then Carida stopped her by letting her read. Carida was just too kind... Lexa could not stop taking small peeks at how cute Carida was. When she remembered how Carida leaned so close to her as if their cheeks were almost touching, she can’t help but imagine what it would have been like if they touched.

And Carida also liked her work too... She didn’t say it was childish or immature of Lexa to keep on writing picture books. She even encouraged it and did not want her to back down from approaching in that style. More importantly, she also liked seeing Lexa happily discuss her favorite picture books. Not even Lexa’s best friend can handle a minute of that but Carida could for hours.

This is the first time she has let someone other than her only friend and literary publishers read her work. And of course, this is the first time she has crushed so hard on someone. When Carida waved goodbye and left the library, Lexa wanted to ask her not to leave.

But Lexa has a new manuscript to begin.

The new work will be a sequel. The mouse and the elephant want to make a band, but they need a conductor. For a long time, Lexa is unable to think of what the conductor should look like.

But after meeting Carida, Lexa starts sketching out a puppy who will be the conductor of the band. The puppy has short, flappy ears that can hear any cries of distress. Courageous, they are ready to lunge into action. 

Their eyes are of the same color as Carida’s.

From afar, the beast of the library looks vicious and irate at her work.

But up close, she is grinning about a beautiful girl she has just met and having the time of her life scribbling the daydreams she has never relinquished since childhood.

Once in a while, a little hum escapes from the beast and it echoes inside the library, manifesting a new urban legend. This time, it is more along the lines of a fairy tale or a dream: Whoever hears that rare melody from the beast will be enchanted and find their true love in the library.

Like most urban legends, it is a stretch to believe that is true. However, believing in them makes everything more romantic and that is why people are drawn to the aura of the library.

Lexa is sleeping. She is dreaming of the little puppy conducting the mouse and the elephant.

A rainbow appears over them and everyone lives happily ever after.

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