Library System Reset: Overdue (Patreon)

Right now I'm working on this new story idea. The world in my head is massive, and I have a few chapters written now, and won't start posting regularly until I get back from Dragon Con, but I wanted to show you all that I am, in fact, still creating... and show you the beginning of my latest project. One, I'm so, so excited for.

I'll be writing it under Arithion for a while because I will be serializing this eventually. Hence, like I've mentioned previously, I'll be revamping some tiers and putting legacy tiers in place. But for now, I wanted to show everyone who has been here all along just what I'm working on.

Chapter 1

The world shook with all the vigor of a wet dog.

There was no better way to describe it.

Quinn looked up from the desk, startled by the movement, only to notice that no one else had even budged. Odd enough, but it wouldn't be the first time she'd suffered vertigo and thought the world might surreptitiously be ending.

She waited a few more moments before shrugging and flipping to the next page in the course catalogue. Declaring majors was never fun. How did they expect nineteen-year-olds to decide what they wanted to do for the rest of their lives? And how was she supposed to tell if what she was choosing even had a hope in hell of getting her the sort of money she'd need to survive?

Taking a deep breath, she centered herself.

Mum always told her it was better to do something you loved as long as you could put food on the table.

Which was all well and good, but if Quinn had any say in it, she also wanted to travel overseas, have some nice vacations. So the bare minimum just wasn't an option for her.

Even taking all her future wishes into account, why did Quinn feel this odd urge to pursue something like Library Sciences... or at least something along the lines of information science and systems? Yes. That might work. She stared at the page, raising her pen to her lips and nibbling on it absent-mindedly. Of course there was an online catalogue, but this way it felt like a tangible choice.

More weighted.

"Although..." she muttered out loud. "What sort of job would I even get with those qualifications?"

"You talking to yourself again?"

The voice startled Quinn, and she glanced up, squinting against the light pouring in the window. A smile crossed her face. "Hallie. Good to see you too."

Her quasi-friend shrugged. They'd shared a couple of the same classes the first year of college, but Quinn wouldn't exactly call them friends. Frankly, she wouldn't really call anyone a true friend. She'd left those at home when she crossed the country to get as far away from her foster parents as possible. Not that they hadn't kicked her out the moment she turned eighteen. After all, she didn't bring them income anymore. But distance was still preferable. Just in case.

Still, Hallie was nice enough. The other girl flopped into the seat across from her and opened her course catalog too. "Any ideas?"

"You know you can't copy my career, right?" Quinn quipped, raising an eyebrow. Hallie hadn't precisely cheated off her, but she had on rather frequent occasions borrowed her notes, rarely taking her own. In a way the girl had sort of cheated herself.

Hallie stuck out her tongue in that super mature way. "I know. I know. Don't remind me. I was thinking I'd just do like a business major. Or something."

Quinn shrugged. "Pretty large scope there. Lots of possibilities."

Hallie leaned over the table and asked, "So, what are you going to do then?"

Quinn glanced at her. "Well, I'm leaning toward something to do with libraries, but we all know you don't like to read books that much. So you probably wouldn't understand."

Hallie at least had the grace to laugh. Then she sighed, and a few seconds of silence lapsed. "But eventually, wouldn't libraries disappear? Even our textbooks can be digital these days."

This time Quinn paused. That was a super accurate observation, and she knew, deep down that it was accurate too. So why in the seven hells was Quinn considering something with likely limited longevity? It didn't make any actual sense.

Probably misinterpreting Quinn's silence, Hallie continued on. "Well, I mean, I guess it's time we have to get serious, right?"

Quinn sat back and gave Hallie a long look. There was something different about the girl today, but Quinn didn't really have time to delve into that. So, she just shrugged and gave her the best possible response she could think of. "Sure, we have to grow up, but you need to pick something that you're not going to be miserable doing. Make sure it's something that you can at least love a little bit, if you have to be doing it for the rest of your life. You know, and make money. Simple as that."

Quinn kept her eye on Hallie, pretty sure she'd just given really good advice. It was something that she remembered her mother telling her before her mum died. But those weren't nice thoughts, and she didn't really want to think about them at all.

Luckily, Hallie smiled and nodded. "You know, you're right. Screw the business major. I'm not going to be a business major. I'm going into theatre."

Quinn laughed softly, mindful of their location in the library and not wanting to make too much noise. "That suits you. I think you're going to do fine."

And that was when the world shook again.

This time, it didn't stop.

Everything around Quinn shook - the tables, the bookshelves, even the people. Vibrations spread across the entire area, climbing up her spine until her teeth tingled.

The people trembled in a way that made them appear flimsy, intangible. They wavered around like warped images on an old-fashioned television with bad reception. They flickered in and out, black and white, static interference, there one moment and gone the next. It was as if no one near her actually existed. Like everything she'd experienced had been a broadcast solely for her.

She jumped up from the table, her course catalogue falling to the floor, suddenly winking in and out of existence along with everything else in the room. She held her hands up in front of her face, checking to see if she too had become incorporeal. But her hands were just their same pale shade of boring.

Alarmingly solid.

The library walls rippled like waves on an ocean as if the walls were made of rubber. The glass-paned windows crackled like someone had flicked them and shattered all the glass, yet they remained clear. Yet the sound of crunching glass permeated all around her. Like a car driving over a shattered pane.

Overhead, the chandelier that hung down in the main lobby of the library entrance warped and fizzled. Electrical sparks shot out, disappearing in the rising hum all around her. The white noise made her eardrums ache right through to her jaw. She thought for just a moment that her ears might be bleeding.

If this was vertigo, it was one hell of an episode.

She tried to take a step forward but stumbled to her knees even though she should have hit her head on the table next to her. But it was gone, yet there, ethereal, as if it wasn't actually real.

"Hallie?" she called out, but nothing answered except for a strange buzzing through the air, like a swarm of hornets about to attack her.

Darkness spread throughout the library, reaching for her like the fingers of shadows. They extended toward her, through the bookcases, past the books, through the walls and the windows, through the people who should have been there, who were there moments before, but now were just static images in her mind. Ever lengthening in their desperate attempt to reach her.

The roar of hornets buzzed around her head while the smokey tendrils yearned toward her.

Shadows reached for her, bending, twisting, churning almost, like something under the water trying to come up and grab her. The floor began to warp, cut through by static lines of black and white.

Her entire surroundings went dark, and the ground beneath her heaved violently once more.

And then, just as suddenly as it had started, it stopped.

Silence hung heavy in its wake.

Slowly, Quinn calmed herself. Even if calmed might be a tad overselling it. She did, however, stop outright hyperventilating. So she chalked that up as a win and looked around, taking stock of her predicament.

The library was empty. No books were scattered anywhere. There weren't even books on the shelves. The shelves themselves had morphed into the wall in twisted ways that should have broken the wood or at least made it crack. But it was smooth, something out of a dream.

Quinn couldn't quite wrap her mind around it, not like the way the table in front of her had somehow wrapped around some of the chairs. So much so that it was no longer classified as a table, but something else she couldn't identify.

Looking around, she took in everything. From the darkness and severe lack of windows, to the cavernous ceiling she could tell reached far above her despite the lack of illumination. She wasn’t in the Library anymore.

In fact, the windows were gone, replaced by a strange wooden wall. It wasn't like that horrible '70s paneling that was in vogue so many years ago. No, the walls here reminded her of the beautiful trees in the forests of Europe, of those huge Redwoods in California. Beautiful and mighty.

Ancient.

But the air around her felt stagnant as if no breeze had graced this glorious wood for more time than she could perceive. The cavern stretched out in front of her. Even if she couldn't see it properly, she knew that much

The absolute silence was weighted and heavy. There was no whisper of even a breeze from the ceiling fans that should be going full blast in the hot summer months like it was now. There was no noise coming from anywhere and there were no people anywhere around her.

Hallie had disappeared along with everyone else. Quinn's course catalog was gone too along with the choices she was making for the rest of her life. For just a moment, Quinn wanted to collapse. She'd spent days on this fruitless future quest. And now it was all gone.

Gone.

Because this place wasn’t her college campus. It wasn’t anywhere she could even remotely identify. Why the hell would a course catalgoue and major choice even be remotely important right now.

Anymore.

She wanted to sit there on the floor that she couldn't identify in this strange, weird area that she'd ended up in and pause and stop and just breathe. Maybe she'd fallen asleep. Maybe this was a dream.

She pinched herself and it hurt.

Like, that was going to bruise tomorrow sort of hurt.

Okay, maybe not a dream. She obviously wasn't lying there with her head on her hands on the desk. Maybe she'd been knocked out. Except that bruise should have woken her even in that event. Thus that was another unlikely conclusion.

So if this wasn't a dream, what was this?

Gathering up courage, she looked around trying to get a better sense of where she was. It was extremely dark with nothing but a dull greenish-blue glow to the whole area. The light suffused the area, lending it a more relaxing atmosphere despite the circumstances she'd yet to figure out. As much as she tried to look around, she couldn't discern anything. She could make out shapes in the distance, but they were shrouded in shadows. At least the latter weren't moving anymore.

It was like the whole area was an optical illusion like it was trying to trick her into believing something was there when it wasn't. She took a few steps forward and it was like the floor moved with her, almost like an escalator that she couldn't see, except it stopped when she stopped, mirroring her actions.

"Hello," she called out and the sound echoed back to her in the way it does if you're standing in a mountain range. Where the sound just bounced off every single mountain in the area. But she wasn't in some hilly region, she was in what seemed like a cavern... a wooden cavern.

The thing was, now she was getting a little pissed off.

"Hello!" she called out again, more insistent this time, and received no response. She stomped her foot on the ground, getting really irritated by now. "Okay, that's enough, you've had your fun, what is this?" Because it was either a really, really bad dream and she was not waking up from it, or somebody had kidnapped her. Maybe it was a prank. Why would somebody kidnap her? She'd never offended anybody on college campus. Hell, she'd barely spoken to anybody on college campus.

She took another breath, calming her nerves, and this time tried to keep the irritation out of her voice when she spoke. "Okay, if this is a joke, that's fine. Just tell me so I can get out of here and get home. I've only got till midnight to declare my major."

Another several seconds passed without a sound. Taking another few steps forward, she realized her footfalls didn't even make a sound. Almost as if the ground absorbed every single movement. And only when she spoke would it echo back at her.

Just when Quinn was about to speak again, a light flashed in front of her eyes, like a holographic screen. It appeared in front of her, and a voice echoed throughout the chamber, yet sounded almost like it was inside her head.

"Projected energy expenditure exceeded. Stand by for emergency protocol."

"Low Power Override."

The sound echoed through the wood-lined cavern she found herself in and the subtle glow changed from bluey green to red.

And once again, the world shook.