LSRO: Chapter 76 - Restricted (Patreon)

And we'll have fun fun fun in the restricted vault of books oh yeah!

I mean, I know I would haha

~~

Chapter 76

Restricted

Quinn expected the restricted vault to simply appear in front of her. Sometimes the Library seemed to know what she needed, hence, it made sense to her that the restricted vault might operate the same way and just appear.

However, as she followed Lynx through the Library, they passed the kitchen and dining room area, the magical plant section that Farrow attended and the book infirmary. They even walked up the slight step and into the area where she'd first fought the bookworms, what seemed like a lifetime ago. But they didn't quite make it back to the training room.

Lynx paused in front of a very different double door. This one went up about 20 feet, but each door was only about three feet wide at the most, nothing like the majestic front door that was six feet wide per door. This was long and slender and had frosted glass as its main component, with wrought iron filigree covering it.

"Oh, I thought this was one of the entrance doors that people came through when they wanted to visit us," Quinn said.

Lynx flashed her a smile. "Nope, this is the restricted vault. If you would do the honors, Librarian."

Quinn placed her hand on the door handle and it swung soundlessly inwards.

She wasn't entirely sure what she'd been expecting, but she'd somehow thought the restricted vault would be much larger than it appeared to be. The room was maybe 20 feet wide and about 50 feet long, much smaller than she'd anticipated. It was also much cleaner and less cobwebby than expected.

It was actually beautiful.

At the far end, there was an extensive bay window that stretched from the bench to far above her and took up the entirety of that wall. There was padded seating all around the interior of the bay window.

The windows themselves had to be huge. And as she looked up, she couldn't even see a ceiling in here. It was too dark. From her vantage point at the entrance to the room, she could see little through the windows. But what she could see was  a darkness that resembled the night sky with some smatterings of silver pinpricky stars.

The view tugged at a sense of adventure she hadn't realized she possessed. She'd never seen the outside of the Library before because you only entered it through dimensional doors. It might be nice to see what the grounds looked like.

Quinn resisted the urge to run and gaze out, and instead turned her attention to the bookshelves. The books weren't laid out with a spine facing outwards. Instead, each book lay flat on a slightly inclined shelf that had a lip to keep it in place. The tomes revealed their covers to whoever perused them, but each book was individually locked behind its very own door. The small doors were made out of the same iron filigree as on the double entrance doors that let into the room.

"Are these really secure?" She asked Lynx as she ran her fingers along one of the doors. It obliged by opening for her. She frowned.

"Yes, they're secure," he answered, but continued straight away "but you're the Librarian, so these doors are already attuned to you and you can take anything out that you want to."

Quinn turned to Lynx. "Aren't you like worried that you might get a Librarian who wants to, I don't know, take over the universe? Wouldn't giving them unrestricted access to restricted knowledge be sort of counterproductive?"

Lynx blinked at her. "Well, no, the Library screens that."

"How? The Library didn't even realize that I was mostly resistant to chaos until a few days ago."

Lynx flickered in and out his eyes doing that strange thing that they hadn't done for quite a while. "There are fail-safes in place. You wouldn't be able to become the Librarian should you have nefarious motives."

Quinn let out a little laugh. "You know, or even know about the existence of the Library of Everywhere and have a whole grand plan in place just in case you become the Librarian."

"That too, that too," Lynx answered. Even so, he looked at her with a sideways glance and Quinn realized that he was probably mulling over exactly what she'd said. Because they all knew that just because someone was originally cleared by the Library to be something didn't mean that during the tenure as a Librarian you couldn't be compromised.

Quinn shook her head, wanting to dislodge the thoughts in there. She didn't like the turn they'd taken. This wasn't about trying to figure out how the last Librarian had done whatever she'd done, or how other Librarians had might have secretly fed into it too, or how it had happened in the first place.

Right then - This was about Quinn being introduced to the restricted vault.

"Anyway," Lynx said, "this is our restricted access vault. As I've said, all of the books in here are books that could alter the fabric of a world, that can ignite chaos, that can be used specifically to unmake creation in ways that may not require chaos knowledge. Some of the more advanced magic fundamental books - the ones that go into theory that isn't necessarily something the majority of magic users who come to the Library will understand the scope of."

Quinn raised an eyebrow. "So you're telling people what they can understand."

"No, we are protecting knowledge that in the wrong hands could be devastating for the Library. Knowledge is powerful, but there is a line between deliberately using it because one is selfish, or because they are willfully ignorant. It's the latter we try to avoid." Lynx shrugged. "This is a self-preservation room, shall we say."

Quinn flashed him an understanding grin. She looked through the books and noticed that each book underneath it had a little plaque with a name. There were a few that didn't have a door on them and there was no plaque.

Finally she made it through studying the books on the left side of the hall and down to the end where the glorious bay window was. She knelt on the window seat and looked out at the scene beyond.

It wasn't just a night sky. It was an inky, blue-black darkness speckled with stars. Some shone brighter than others, some shot almost like fireworks across the distance.

"This is amazing," she said. And even the hint of wonder in her voice was audible to her own ears. "That's so endless. It's like I'm looking out of a spaceship at the galaxy around me. This is breathtaking."

There was a vastness, an absolute to the whole thing. For just a second, as she closed her eyes, she felt like the Library was breathing. Slow and gentle, as it too took in the beauty of its place in the universe.

But when she opened her eyes again, everything was still, and the wondrous galaxy in front of her hadn't moved. It was a very strange sensation. She turned back to Lynx.

"This has to be one of the best places to sit in the Library." She gestured outside of the windows. "That is inspirational all on its own."

Lynx was smiling. He appeared to be slightly amused, but not in a condescending way. "That's not the reaction most people have. But I'm glad you like it."

Quinn grinned. "I love it. Now, how does the restricted section work?"

"Any person who wishes to enter the vault must first be verified and checked by the Librarian and Library." Lynx began. "Once they are, they are accompanied here and must peruse their books inside of the vault. They can only be admitted by a Librarian."

Quinn rolled her eyes ever so slightly. "Yeah, I got that by the whole 'only I can unlock it' thing."

"Well, yes, you or somebody you have specifically given permission to. They can take some notes depending on their level of clearance that the Library grants them or that you grant them. Depends on whether they're even able to absorb any of it. A lot of these texts are extremely advanced, so many people can't. The restricted vault doesn't exactly get a lot of traffic."

Quinn frowned. "If they have to read them in here, then how did the books on chaos get borrowed out by the Dabilians?"

"Oh," Lynx said, blushing slightly. "You see, that was a case of dire circumstance which the Library agreed was an exception. We stepped in after deciding the Dabilians would benefit most from sheer numbers of their people having intimate chaotic magic knowledge. Since they were all capable of understanding the books, we agreed to an indefinite term of borrowing. There are exceptions to every rule and the Dabilian homeworld crisis was one of them."

"What about the other books? Are they in here, the three that we had to retrieve initially?" She asked, finally tearing her eyes away from the amazing view in front of her.

"Yes, they are. See," he pointed to Mantis Leaf's advanced combat strategy, which was conveniently located right next to the window seats. "There it is."

"So, Milaro needed that for a crisis then?" Quinn raised an eyebrow. She didn't quite understand what constituted a crisis, especially with a martial art book that required practice after absorption.

"No, this tome was actually donated by Milaro's family, the royal lineage of the Seveshalls, and it was done so on the proviso that when they needed to train new descendants, they would borrow the book for a chunk of time. Which they did and I guess they would have borrowed it again if the Library had been open and they'd been able to return it in the first place so that they could train Malachi..." Lynx's voice petered out.

"Why don't they just make copies of them? If it's their family fighting style... I mean, isn't that their call?" She asked.

"No. Not with something that potentially lethal and transcendent." Lynx replied so quickly she realized she must have been accidentally projecting the question outside of her mind shields.

Quinn raised an eyebrow and nodded thoughtfully, leaving that line of thought alone for now. "What about the others? Or did they all donate them?"

Lynx shook his head. "No, they did not. Tarlegish's Dichotomy of Herbal Evolution was borrowed by Dinal because they had discovered an encroaching type of fungus that was trying to destroy their coastline. I do believe because they're still there a few hundred years later, that they got something from it that worked."

"Well, what about DeKarlyle's Thesis of Spatial Distortion?"

Lynx actually scowled. "As seen from the memories that we managed to retrieve from Aradie, I think it is obvious that specific book shouldn't have been loaned out. Especially given Kajaro's history of being reluctant to return any book at all."

"Yep, that seems pretty short-sighted to me. Pity you weren't around to stop it, but I sort of think that's the whole reason you weren't," Quinn said absent-mindedly. She looked around, and pursed her lips as she noticed several nameplated books with closed doors that held no books. "Some of these are empty."

"Of course they are. The empty ones are there in the event that we need to restrict new text or there's a new affinity that is too far advanced to be put into normal circulation. There are always ways to look at these books but this is the section we keep the ones that are just a little bit too edgy,"

"Yes, I think that would be a very apt term. But that's not what I mean by empty." She gestured to an actually empty one with no door or plaque. "I get that that's available for potential new tomes."

Then she moved over one diagonally above it. She could see how it would be easy to miss if you weren't looking for it. And most people would come in here with a very specific agenda. But the shelf didn't have a book on it, even though the door was closed and presumably locked. It also had a name tag. " I meant this type of empty. Are any of them loaned out currently that you know of?"

Lynx shook his head, and his eyes began flickering as he searched his archives. "They shouldn't be."

"Well, I haven't approved anyone to enter here since I became Librarian," Quinn said. "But I've found three so far that have nameplates but they don't have books in them."

"No, you have to be mistaken." Lynx said, the denial very clear in his voice. "Perhaps they've been shelved in the wrong place." But he stopped reading one of the names and gasped. He read the name off as if he needed to breathe, gasping as he did so.

"Chatfield's Force Fields of the Mind." And he moved to the next one. "The Dean Principles of Immortality." Even being a manifestation of the Library he seemed shocked.

In fact, Lynx managed to look panicked.

"I'm taking it some of these shouldn't be empty," Quinn asked.

"Definitely not these two." Lynx practically whispered while his mind was obviously racing through something else.

"Well, get to the bottom of this, Lynx." She tried to reassure the panicked Library manifestation.

"The worst thing is," Lynx said. "None of these books should be missing or borrowed without me knowing of it. But I have so many gaps. I gave you the list of the three that needed to come back. They had specific properties we required to get us started."

He paused, looking around as if he might discover they'd accidentally fallen on the floor."Nooo. These? I should have known they were missing. I would have had you recall these as well. They might not have been vital to recalibrating the Library until we could get other things in place. But they are still vital. The power they give off. The energy. And there are... we need to catalog the ones that are missing and we need to do it now. These have to be found, Quinn."

Quinn sighed. "I should have known things were going too smoothly. Guess it's time to leave for a while."

"Lynx shot her a withering glare. "First I have to figure out which books are missing, and since I can't do it from my system as well as I'd like, I need to retrieve archives. We're not going to be able to do anything until after the new assistants are hired... so consolidate your power. You're going to need it."

~~

TRAINING MONTAGE... sincerely though... I've been trying to work toward it for ages, but Quinn keeps throwing roadblocks in my path. You'd think she doesn't want one!

Much love

KT