LSRO: Chapter 24 - Acclimation (Patreon)

How are we at chapter 24 already? This is mind boggling. And so so cool. Just wait for what's coming up. I can't even wait for it!

This is rough, as usual ;)

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Chapter 24

Acclimation

It wasn't merely darkness that surrounded her; it felt an inky blackness. Suddenly, a stream of words flashed before her eyes. All she could think of was that it was the code she'd seen earlier. Except this time, she could understand most of the words she saw. Abruptly, lights began to flicker back on until the library was much brighter than it had been. A soft, low whirring sound echoed throughout the large hall.

Library system Reboot - Success

Library system reset - Minimum

Calibrating... Calibrating...

Guidance system available.

Return trolley available.

Golem creation beginning stages available.

Assistant seeker calibrating available.

Terrarium warmers recalibrating available.

Night owl habitat re-established.

Librarian status upgraded. Reactivating administrative permissions. Reactivating administrative access.

Links F-4-5-2 re-established. Re-establishing strength. Re-establishing links. Access granted.

Library status re-established.

Power levels low.

Power usage optimum.

The Library can reopen.

Quinn stood there, staring as most of the words faded from her eyes. All of these options sat in front of her. Guidance system. Return trolley. Golem creation. She didn't really understand it all, but there was no time like the present to dive in and start learning.

Lynx stood next to her, and she looked at him. He wasn't as translucent as he'd been. In fact, he seemed almost corporeal. She reached over and touched his finger, and sure enough, still smoky in essence, but more solid than he had been several minutes ago. His eyes lit up, their strange double eyelids working overtime. He must have been calibrating a lot of things himself. After all, wasn't he the library?

He finally focused on her. "You did it. It's... We're not gonna wink out of existence. You actually did it. Thank you." The relief in his tone was palpable, almost human itself. It gave Quinn second thoughts about what she'd expected from him in the first place. Maybe she'd been unrealistic, and that wasn't fair to him.

"No, Quinn, I owe you an apology. The guide you should have had upon entrance to this world is ready now that we've restored more functions and can be downloaded as soon as you're prepared to do so." He didn't even seem to notice that she hadn't voiced her thoughts out loud.

She scowled at him. "So I guess this is the part where you tell me now you can read my mind?"

"Oh, I'm sorry." He didn't sound sorry at all. Every word was punctuated with excitement. "I will set my parameters so that I do not read your mind without direction. Our connection has grown. It's where it should be now. You're finally a real librarian."

"Wait, I wasn't a real librarian before." She had to digest that fact for a moment. "So, I was risking my life and not actually a librarian."

"No, you were, but it was more low-key and interim because it didn't have enough power to connect you properly. Now you are. Now everything's going to work again."

Quinn wasn't sure how she should feel. It was a little bit anticlimactic. The library hadn't magically transformed back into an amazing architectural wonder. It was still musty, a little dim for her liking, but much brighter. And now, with the better lighting, she could see the extent of the damage. Still, Lynx's excitement was a bit contagious. "What happened here? Did like a whirlwind blow through?" she asked.

"No, that was rampaging bookworms about a hundred years ago." He answered focused on something only he could see. "Oh, yeah, I managed to sequester them in the wing that they were, and that's about as good as I could until you got here to massacre them."

"Wow, okay," He was much more talkative, much more expressive now the Library had more power. She liked this Lynx even more. "So, you keep saying that you'll explain stuff to me. What the hell is a golem?"

Lynx paused for a moment and pulled a screen up in front of her face. On it, an outline of a large figure rotated. Lines pointed to different parts of it, and a lot of description filled the right-hand side. The words "Library Golem Supervisor Required" were displayed prominently.

"Okay," she said, looking at the diagram. "Explain this."

Lynx blinked at her. "Oh, that's right. Here, first of all, I need you to swallow this." He held out what looked like a chip, like a plain old crinkled chip she could get at any supermarket in a massive bag full of them.

"You want me to eat a chip?" She raised an eyebrow at him and crossed her arms. "A chip is not going to make a dent in that gnawing hunger I'm feeling."

"Yes and no. It's not meant to fill you up. It's a chip as you are thinking, but as you chew into it and it breaks down, it will flood you with the information packet that you should have gotten a few days ago." His tone was filled with patience.

She took the chip and eyed it suspiciously. "You can't just tell me the contents?"

"Remember the information that flooded your memory and mind when you initially connected with the library core?"

"Of course I do," Quinn said, vividly recalling the scream and the pain that spread through her at the time. It hadn't been pleasant.

"Well, this will be very much like that, so you might want to sit down before you take that." Lynx sounded like it was just an easy stroll in the park.

"Thanks for the warning," she said, not at all grateful. But she thought it was about time she had all the information and everything in one place.

Lynx pulled out a rolling chair that she hadn't noticed before. As she looked around the check-in desk, she realized that while the rest of the library still looked pretty much dilapidated and torn apart, the desk itself appeared to be in much better repair again. The wood was more polished and a deeper mahogany. Even the carvings weren't flaking anymore. And the beautiful chair that Lynx offered her looked like it was going to be amazingly comfortable. It was the perfect place to sit and eat a chip that was probably going to rip right through her brain and inflict a lot of pain on her.

She couldn't believe this was her life. If she'd had a choice in the matter, she might be completely and utterly rethinking her life choices right now. She plopped down on the chair and put the chip in her mouth before crunching down and feeling it break into thousands of tiny little pieces on impact. And then, like fading into dust, they disappeared on her tongue.

A second passed.

And then another.

Just as she was about to tell him she didn't think this was working, an onslaught of knowledge poured into her head. It was agony, pain, and just this fundamental rush of things she couldn't understand yet. So much about the way the world worked, about the way the library worked, about how people were going to be able to interact with it. Different worlds, different species, gravitational pulls, dimensional rifts, dimensional frequency, which she didn't even realize was a thing.

So much raw information. It wasn't that she immediately understood any of it, but it was there, like a database for her to pull from if she needed to. Theoretically anyway.

This time, she was pretty sure she didn't scream, but it was a very touch-and-go thing. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, she blinked her eyes open, marveling at the bright light in front of her, and looked up expectantly at Lynx, who was watching her very closely.

"Did it work?"

But he didn't speak to her, his mouth didn't move. Instead, the words flowed into her mind. She started for a second, and then grinned up at him, nodding.

"Yeah, it worked, but I still prefer to speak out loud when possible. Thanks."

He chuckled. "Yeah, I thought you might. Okay, well, we have a lot of work to do."

Her head was pounding, not quite into bad headache territory, but it felt swollen with knowledge, about to burst. "I'm aware of this."

"No, no you're not. We need golems who can clean up the library. We have to make sure the guidance system is working correctly before we allow people to return to the library. We need to activate the return trolleys so that they can go about their business helping the golems do what they need to do. And then we also need to see if we can activate an assistant seeker." Lynx listed of a plethora of things, and Quinn knew, deep down, that wasn't even half of it.

"Okay, I'm going to skip over everything you want to say for now and go straight to the assistant seeker stuff." She tried to access information on it, but none of it was helpful. "What exactly does that mean? I thought you said nobody other than me had the library signature."

"Assistants should have the library signature because there's always a chance that they may need to step up and become a librarian, but not all of them have it. There are people who just want to work in the library. Those don't need a signature, but they do need a librarian to answer to." He paused, making sure she was keeping up. "But there is a certain criteria that they must meet and there are magical signatures that they are required to possess."

"How many magical signatures are we talking about here? Like, just give me a ballpark number." Quinn couldn't seem to figure out how to track that down in her head by herself yet.

Lynx raised an eyebrow. "You could technically research that yourself."

"Just tell me."

"Well, you're probably looking in the ballpark of about 1,700 different magical signatures. 1722 currently actually." Lynx's eyes did that weird color shifting again.

"Okay, so why did Kajaro seem so surprised that I could use ice magic?"

"Oh, well, first up, you're a human. Your body's molecular structure shouldn't really be conducive to using ice because you're made up of like, what, 70, 80% water or something like that. On the other hand, most librarians have a library-matching signature. Yours matches a lot more than the library. It kind of matches, like, everything. So he just wasn't expecting you to be able to wield magic that wasn't based on pure knowledge." Lynx smiled like he was giving her good news.

Quinn shook her head. "Wait, wait, wait. Rewind. I have what magical affinities?"

Links grimaced. "Yeah, I was hoping you'd let me kind of scoot over that. Look, I searched far and wide for any type of signature that matched the library. There isn't just one specific type. It's not the rarest signature; there are a lot more that are rarer. It's just that your signature matches every single type of magic that I have, that exists, that we know to exist. Maybe a few more that we haven't discovered yet, but that's neither here nor there. That just means that it's easier for you to quite literally learn every single thing the library has to offer."

Quinn stared at him. She didn't know how much time passed, but all she could think of was, how could she absorb every single book in the library. Wasn't that, like, impossible? She mulled questions about in her mind and finally settled on one. "Okay, so, but I am compatible with the library. What is a librarian usually able to absorb?"

"Usually they can absorb any book that is bound on knowledge. So let's say you encounter a minotaur, okay? Let's just use that as an example. You have read a book on minotaurs, you understand everything about minotaurs, how they come to be, what their skeletal structure is, how the nervous system works. That would enable you, the librarian, to literally unmake that creature, if you encountered them and they were a threat to you." He watched her expectantly.

Quinn blinked at him. "Yeah, that's, that's not much power at all, makes total sense."

He looked at her. "Yeah, I don't like that tone."

"Of course, you don't like that tone, because this is just ridiculous. How can that even exist? Unmaking things sounds ludicrous." And it was threatening, ever so slightly, to unravel her.

"You're asking that now?"

"That's beside the point," Quinn said. "Look, okay, so let's just not focus on the big elephant in the room. We can get to that at a later stage."

Lynx actually chuckled. "You know, that's like the first time you've said that and not have it be me."

"Great, I am so glad I'm amusing you," Quinn said. Taking a deep breath, she calmed her nerves and carried on. "Okay, where were we? Activating return trolleys? Do you think people are just gonna come and return the books once the library opens?" She conveniently glossed over everything else, because right now there wasn't time.

"Yes, they hopefully should, once the message goes out that the library is back in business. I'm hoping several thousand of those books will just return themselves." Lynx was so much calmer now than he had been before they restored the Library. It was grating.

"We need assistants, but before that, we need to activate the return trolleys. And how the hell do we build a golem?" All of her to-do list was flooding her mind and Quinn just needed to take a minute.

"Ah, excellent, excellent question. So we're gonna need to build the golems. We'll need a kitchen golem, a supervisor golem, we'll need a golem that tends to the creation of magical tomes, and we'll need maybe three or four shelving golems who can, you know, help shelve the books and tidy the library and keep everything in order." He listed them off like it was the most natural thing in the world.

"Okay, that sounds great. What do we need to do to activate all of these?" Quinn asked, looking at Lynx expectantly.

He avoided her gaze and moved a couple of steps to the left.

"Lynx." She followed him, boxing him in so he couldn't run away even though she technically knew that he could blink in and out at any given time.

He sighed. "We should have most of the ingredients I think. For most of them anyway."

"Should have?" She asked, not liking where it looked like that was leading.

"You may need to go out and fetch some." He paused. "Maybe."

"Okay, what do we have to do now then?" Quinn sighed this time. What she wouldn't give for a full belly and a good night's sleep right now. At least the timer in the bottom corner of her screen was gone.

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Come on, can't a girl sleep? Sometimes I wish I had more time for it haha.

Hope you enjoyed the chapter!

Much love

KT