LSRO: Chapter 92 - Pound of Flesh (Patreon)

Tadaaaaaa

So, I got my chapters done. Which is a huge relief. Still pretty sick, but I soldiered on.

This is also not a cliffy, even if I hope you still want to keep reading.

Enoy!

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Chapter 92

Pound of Flesh

Quinn woke after what seemed like way too little sleep. Her eyes felt crusty, and she couldn't remember how much of a break she'd taken at all since the Final Countdown of the book return saga.

Frankly, with Aradie still obviously slumbering at the top of her headboard, Quinn couldn't even figure out how she'd woken up in the first place. The grime in her eyes started itching, and she finally pushed herself up in the bed, painfully aware of just how stiff her shoulders felt.

That's when she noticed another pounding on her door. It was light enough to call a thud really, and she groaned, knowing instinctively who it was through that pesky old deeper connection that she needed to investigate along with everything else.

"Come in Lynx." she said, smiling to herself. It was amazing how easy it was to feel at home in a place she'd been made for. It only bothered her mildly that she'd been so accepting of this fact. That was something to delve deeper into at a later time.

He pushed into the room, his usually styled hair with its runic accents was in far more disarray than she'd ever seen before. But his usually dark purple eyes were just shining. And in his evermore frequently solidified hands, as they had been since the filtration system was set to a third filter... Had they opened the fourth yet.

She pinched the bridge of her nose in a bit of frustration. She was losing her trains of thought here. They were derailing.

"What is that?" She asked of the massive tome he dumped on the foot of her bed. The thing had to be easily a foot thick, or more. Its pages were yellowed with age and that was even without opening them. The leather seemed to have a perpetual layer or grime across it, and was tattered, worn, and obviously very well-loved.

"This." He said, his eyes continuing to shine with a gleam she thought might even verge on maniacal. "Is the History of Fines."

Quinn frowned. "History of Fines." She looked it over and tried to tug it up to her. "That is heavy..."

He smirked at her. "Of course it's heavy. It's a handwritten history..."

"That thing is sincerely handwritten...?" She tossed him a bit of a skeptical look at that comment.

"Well," Lynx stared at it for several seconds. "I mean it started out that way, but as the stock of books increased, the affinities increased, and then -- of course -- the fines multiplied... sometimes it's like magically handwritten?"

Quinn laughed, despite still barely feeling awake. "And why, pray tell, have you brought the holy tome of fines up to my quarters instead of waiting for me to meander down for food?"

Lynx blinked, in that oddly reptilian way he sometimes had about him, "Because you've been asleep for over a day and I didn't want to wait any longer."

"What?" Quinn asked, quite sure she'd heard him wrong.

"We didn't want to wake you. You worked through the whole 96 hours the Library was counting down. Everyone thought you deserved some sleep." He shrugged, like it was self explanatory.

"Oh." Quinn felt oddly touched and slightly embarrassed. Still... "That's a lot of sleep. How do I still feel like so much crap?"

Lynx shrugged. "That I can't help you with, but I can tell you that we're not being that nice. You should come and eat and help get everything back in order. Plus! Now we get to levy fines! We haven't been able to take any books back because you didn't set up the system first."

"Have there been a lot of people turned away?" Quinn asked as she jumped out of bed, worried.

Lynx chuckled. "No. I activated a brief hold on new intakes while we organized the new changes. I think we had all of ten people try, and those have been noted by the scans you and Misha put in place to weed out any other potential threats entering the Library.

"Alright then. Give me ten. I'll be down."

"I'll have cook prepare your favorite breakfast and put it in your office." Lynx left, hefting the massive tome with him, a slight skip to his step. The Library manifestation appeared to be in an oddly good mood.

Quinn showered and dressed in record time and pulled on some simple soft jeans, a pair of sneakers, and a light button down shirt before tossing her still damp hair up into a ponytail and taking the steps two at a time down the three flights of stairs.

She could already smell the Cinnamon coming out of her office as she traipsed in. "I should have gone to get it from Cook myself... I swear I haven't seen them in ages."

"Cook isn't going anywhere," Lynx said, barely able to contain his excitement. "You on the other hand..."

Quinn scowled. "Really?"

"Well, not straight away, but soon. You'll get to go see worlds, I'll actually get to come with you..." Lynx sounded so contentedly happy that Quinn almost missed it.

"Wait. You can leave the Library now?"

"Yep." Lynx literally beamed. "Thought you might catch that. Now that we're at this power level. I can actually go places. As long as we maintain and increase."

"That's the plan." Quinn felt a whole lot better knowing Lynx could leave now too. Not that doing things on her own was bad, or with Malakai, but there were times when having the Library closer would be more comforting.

She sat down and pulled up her console interface while biting into a massive piece of what appeared to be cinnamon toast. It was thick-cut white bread and dripping with butter. Cook really knew how to match her moods perfectly to the food.

Quinn fiddled for a few moments with the console.

Library Fines Level One

Minor Fines

Standard Fines

Permission Levels: Not set.

Quinn mulled that over for a few. It made sense to allow the supervisors access to leverage Minor and Standard Fines to start with. She indicated so by adding their names to the list of supervisory staff.

Library Fines Level One

Staff permissions required: Supervisory Roles within the Library

Supervisory Staff further broken down: Malakai, Dottie, Lynx, Misha, Eric, Geneva, Jim, Bob.

Lynx leaned over her shoulder. "Not going to add in Narilin?"

Quinn raised an eyebrow. "Would you give her the power to smite someone who had dog eared a page?"

Lynx cringed. "Yeah. That's perhaps a wise decision."

"Just giving Eric Fine Access is already touch and go." She muttered as she double-checked the permissions.

Lynx chuckled. "He does seem eager. He's got a wee bit of a justice streak going there. Odd for an imp, but strangely perfect for him."

"That's a very accurate assessment." Quinn said as she accepted the changes. "Do you think those are enough to start with?"

"Well, as much as I'd like to think 30 days was enough to return books, there might have been extenuating circumstances. We should probably wait another few weeks before we start taking pounds of flesh." There was a cunning gleam that passed ever so fast through Lynx's eyes, making Quinn wonder just how kidding he was.

"Is that a literal fine...?" She asked, hesitantly. Sometimes she wasn't sure she really wanted the answer, but curiosity got the best of her.

Lynx winked at her. "It can be."

Quinn shuddered slightly, now seeing why Eric was perhaps so eager to levy fines. "But these levels should be fine, right?"

"No pounds of flesh yet, Quinn. I promise." The Library Manifestation grinned in that awful Cheshire way.

Quinn made a mental note to check any future unlocking of fines a lot more diligently.

"Fines are set, those ten people who tried to return their books have had their fines lifted... we don't need to be chasing those down yet." She mulled over what else lay in front of her, knowing they had to get down to the wire with the massive lists she had to work through. She frowned at the sheer number of books still missing when a thought occurred to her. "These are just the books still missing, right? Like... the Library has tens of thousands more books right?"

Lynx raised an eyebrow. "Of course it does. We'd be a pretty crap library if we only had like twenty thousand books or something."

"Yeah. Good point. Only... I mean it always feels so endless in here." She reached out with her heightened senses - to all the doors, the portals, the different rooms and potential branches. So much yet left to explore. "What about the branches? They're sealed, right? There are books in there too though?"

Lynx nodded. "Yeah. There are a lot of books in there. Once we've retrieved the books required for them to open up, there'll probably be even more missing. But right now I can't access those files as the branches were sealed off to protect both our power base for the Main Branch, and themselves."

Quinn suppressed the groan she could feel trembling at the back of her throat. That meant once they had all these books and opened all the branches, there'd still be more to collect. She bit into her cinnamon toast with a bit of viciousness that surprised even herself.

"Hey." Lynx said softly. "I hate to tell you this. But there will always be books to collect. Some will require your direct intervention... others will not. Some will be simple. Others will get lost. Some fines will be boring, and others will bring you all sorts of joy..." He grinned ferally at the last.

Quinn chuckled. "Fine. I get it." Then she blinked... and laughed. "Get it... Fine?"

He groaned. "I should not have woken you so early it seems."

She shrugged. "You've changed a bit. Since we got the Library back online power wise, since the timer ran out... since I synchronized more intimately with the Library. What gives?"

For a whole moment he just watched her, his eyes flickering in that strange way. She almost thought he wasn't going to answer, when he surprised her. "Before the filtration system was fixed, before the power helped us synchronize on a deeper level... I didn't think any of it was going to happen. I thought I'd doomed the Library to a fate worse than death... and if you ever see Chaos unmake something, you'll understand exactly what I mean by that..."

He shrugged this time and uneasiness in the action. "For almost 500 years, I thought I broke the Library. I really thought I'd doomed us. Even not knowing what happened with the sabotage, I simply assumed it had all been my fault. I made the decision to lock people out, to preserve what we could when I found nothing that could help me."

"But you're the Library too, doesn't that make you simply responsible for yourself?" Quinn tried to keep her voice gentle. She'd had no idea he'd been going through this. Perhaps she'd just simply thought of him as an algorithm attached to the Library, but she'd long since realized the Library wasn't a machine of any sort.

"You would see it that way, and really, most would." He looked at his hands. "But I'm not only the Library, as it is also not only me. Shutting it down after Korradine dissipated was one of the hardest things I've ever done. I had no way of knowing, not after years of already searching, that we'd ever come out of limbo again. What if I'd doomed the Galaxy, the universe, billions of species of people, plants, and planets..."

"Now though..." He smiled without that sense of Cheshire mischievousness. It was the first real smile Quinn had seen on him. Not a half-one, or a smirk. But one filled with hope. "Yeah, now though, there's actual hope. Sure, there's a few downsides too... but overall, I didn't doom everything."

"No, you certainly didn't." Quinn smiled back at him, and once again got that odd sensation of belonging. Of that heartbeat connected to hers, lingering in the back of her mind. "I'm glad too, because this synchronization has been great, but there are a few things I'm going to need to work through."

"Yep." Lynx agreed, and pushed the Fine tome in front of her, his Cheshire grin back. "And one of those is the great fine tome of doom... or so I like to call it."

"You're having far too much fun with this." she said, pushing it to the side. "We have other matters to deal with first."

He raised an eyebrow and then pouted. "Fine. You're no fun. Let's check on the book numbers first, and then we can get to the fines."

"So tell me." She asked, suddenly more serious again. "How are we coming with the books missing from the restricted vault?"

Lynx's face fell. "Yeah, those. I was hoping we could forget about those for a while."

"Why?" Quinn was legitimately confused. "I thought they'd be the most important."

"They are," he said. "It's just that with those portions of information still missing in their entirety, it's more difficult than I'd like to ascertain even approximate locations."

Aradie hooted.

Quinn turned to her owl. "Really?"

Aradie nodded solemnly.

"Problem solved, sort of. Aradie can retrieve owl memories for you to peruse and see if we can locate them that way. Or at least get some hints."

Lynx blinked, and some of the tension leaked out of his shoulders. "That's a bit of a relief."

"Excellent. Then..." Quinn grinned up at him. "Shall we get started?"

~~

This didn't start out as a Lynx Character development Chapter but it sure as hell turned into one. AMIRIGHT?

Anyhu!

hope you enjoyed it

Much love

KT