Momo Side Story – Black and White 2 – Find her own worth (Patreon)

‘It is therefore unknown why Lorylim concentrate their efforts on the middle east in particular. Increased activity in southern India, western Australia and eastern Madagascar are easily explainable through the ripped continent of Lemuria having disappeared in the triangle between these three locations. Although details of that event are scarce to come by, only orally passed down the generations and eventually carried together in another report, it is clear that the Lorylim were involved in Gaia taking such drastic action.

‘Much like we don’t know why exactly the Lorylim act or what makes them focus on certain areas of the world, we fail to understand what they are. Their otherworldly appearance makes it easy to think that they, like whatever creatures’ blanks are in contact with, stem from somewhere outside of this world. All evidence points to the contrary. In the way they enter the earth tethered Protected Spaces, they behave exactly like elementals.

‘We can compile a small list of facts. Lorylim were originally quiet, murderous monstrosities in a very limited number. Over time, they changed into a more corrupting, insane force that spread itself into tinier creatures. Their minds work unlike a human’s and seems to be a swarm consciousness in perpetual disagreement with itself. Their bodies generally include things describable as mushroom-like and/or eyes that transform into jagged-teethed mouths when they blink. A relation to common mushroom people could not be established.

‘Their remain more questions than answers…’ That typo was the point at which Momo closed the book and put it back into the shelf with a heavy sigh. Slowly, she hovered back down to the floor. She had been in the library for days now, if not weeks. The fact that she didn’t need to eat or sleep had meant that she simply stayed inside in her endless search. It had been an effective way to get over her relationship problems. By now, she was only thinking about Ria every now and again, tendency going even lower.

It felt like she was finally over her, which was good. By now, Momo herself was in love with this system of archives. Sure, the initial stages had been… utterly infuriating. The whole thing was separated into areas that were anything between a single shelf chamber to the main complex, where Momo currently was, that was like a kilometre wide warehouse, massive shelves stacked twenty metres high, with books covering every surface available.

Well, not just books. The oldest records around were stone tablets with hieroglyphs that were the attempt of one person using their own writing system as none had properly established itself yet. Nobody knew how to translate that one. It could have been anything between the secrets of the ancient world to a list of tax deductibles. Then there was all the paper and papyrus before proper binding was a thing, the actual books, magically eternalized records written into glass orbs or other such gimmicks, all the way up to modern saving methods like USB-sticks.

And all of that was assorted into one of many different organization systems. The catalogue was so gargantuan that every head of the library who had wanted to organize these things had seen at best 10% of it done before he or she kicked the bucket, the next head came in, thought a different system would be better, and thus the game began again.

Unless one was looking for very common references, it was basically impossible to find anything in a sensible amount of time. There were entire wings of this thing that hadn’t seen light in years, books that hadn’t been opened in centuries. All of this in total darkness, as sunlight could have bleached the records given enough time.

Once Momo had gotten over the frustration of needing to search around on her own, with only incomplete or long discontinued ordering systems to work with, the treasure hunt had turned out to be quite enjoyable. The idea of being the first person to look at some dusty pages in anything between a day and a millennium was quite exciting. Her fireflies and ability to hover around on her energy wings also made this whole thing a lot easier.

All she knew from her original hint was that there was a staff called Tialoyst and that it was located inside a barrier in a treasure city south of Babylon. The name of the city was lost, but that it was described as a city and that she had the rough location already helped. By now she had found a couple of proper candidates.

‘Of course, the easiest way to get more information on this would be to just get me a new phone and call Metra through John,’ Momo thought and immediately dismissed the idea. Not only would that be too easy if it worked, the artificial support also doubted that Metra knew. ‘She would probably say, ‘Why the fuck would I know where a weapon that doesn’t have a single blade is?’ or something along those lines.’

So that was out on principle and on likely outcome. Anyway, Momo would have liked to stop stumbling over Lorylim reports whenever she was looking up things about barriers in the area. The overlap was highly distracting.

‘Here goes hoping there won’t be one where I am going,’ Momo thought and grabbed another book with a promising title. Carefully opening it, Momo got to reading once she was sure that no face made from ink would scream at her. It was written in ancient Sumerian, an orderly collection of tablets. The language was crude, since writing was still stuck in early, unrefined stages, but Momo had spent a good amount of time reading texts of this variety.

‘North of Nippur, carried grain to his majesty’s secret treasure city… how do I translate that?’ Momo wondered, looking at the symbols etched into the clay. ‘Chamberfall Star… no, Starfallen Chamber?’ In any case, this was exactly what she was searching for. Nippur was a city southeast of Babylon, so that limited the search area somewhat. It still wasn’t reasonable to try and find this place without further hints, but at least she now had a lead.

Looking further through the book, always on the search for this Starfallen Chamber, the artificial support eventually got herself what she needed. For a so-called city, there were very few records on this barrier. Much less than Momo had originally anticipated anyway. This one record was the first thing she found mentioning it in some detail.

The biggest problems would now be that many of the landmarks mentioned were probably no longer around. Either she now moved out and just hoped to find them or she had to find records confirming their existence and detailing where they would have been. Something she had to repeat doing until she could finally tether the location, roughly at least, to a modern city in Iraq or to one of the persisting natural marks, the rivers of the fertile crescent came to mind.

That took her another… Gaia only knew how long, since Momo still refused to leave the library. Surrounded by so many books and words, the artificial support just lost herself in one of her favourite past time activities. Periodically, she allowed herself to read something else interesting. One time she caught herself on some detailed sexual exploits of famous historical lesbians. Had gotten her pretty close to masturbating, but this really wasn’t the place.

Then, one day, Momo found that she was done. Her pen added some more notes to a copy of the map of Mesopotamia she had glued into her notebook and finally reduced her searching area to a twenty-kilometre radius. Not the best, but narrow enough that she felt she could search it all quickly enough.

She looked through all of her notes one final time, mindlessly going over all of her other projects. Bureaucratic reforms of Ria’s courts that she would have wanted to do, designs of little devices, theories on magic and the details of spells she wanted to learn. They were all inside here, and with every bit of knowledge she carved out of the world, the once white paper got filled more and more.

Maybe, one day she would give the world her own book? That sounded like a way to establish her own worth, leave behind something like all the other people had left books behind for her. ‘Another project for another day,’ she decided, putting her note back into her inventory.

Now, if only she could remember where the exit was…

_________________________________________________________________________________

Momo crawled into the sunlight. Literally. It wasn’t the main entrance she had finally found herself at, no, instead she had to fight some sort of golem made from pages that kept screaming things in Finnish, a language that she did not speak, and ultimately emerged in some sort of ever narrowing shaft that finally spat her out like thirty metres above the ground at the side of a perfectly smooth wall.

Any sane person would have turned around when seeing the golem, but Momo had the feeling she may have gotten some permanent damage out of this enigma cube of archives. Squeezing herself out of the hole, she manifested her wings as she fell. Black limbs extended past her back, less even than the skeletal frame of birds. Sprouting from them came large hexagons, white feathers made from energy and only maintaining the rough outline of their biological counterparts. The three corners at the top had only small lines between them and were perfectly attached to the black outgrowths on her back. Towards the lower end, they were long and looked somewhat sharp.

The flat energy wings didn’t need to flap for Momo to slow her fall, mana oozing out in black and white particles that quickly dispersed in the air as her fall reversed. With a pirouette, she raised up towards the… cloudy sky, the sun was only peeking through the grey mass here and there. Her swarm of fireflies followed her, as they always did when Momo didn’t have direct orders for them.

She made her way towards one of the many spires to leave the city. It was noticeably less of a hassle to leave than it had been to get in. Probably because they now had their file on her in order. Alternatively, because they were less concerned about people leaving. Whatever it was, Momo came out back in reality and immediately began weaving together a spell.

Being separate from John had its perks, the biggest of which, in her opinion, was that she could decide what spells to learn herself. No decisions made by John (even if he had always listened to her requests) from a menu picked out by Gaia. The drawback was that she didn’t learn new things instantly and that they weren’t quite as potent or unique. Instead, she had to work herself up from the basic things in every school of magic. Thanks to her rather advanced Intellect, that wasn’t too hard, but needing to practice had been a bit odd at first.

What she was casting now was something she was well familiarized with already, being the very first spell she had learned. Mundane Ignorance, as it was called, a spell at the bottom of the tier list in the school of trickery and illusions. All it did was make her invisible to mundane people. In this, it was useless to most normal members of the Abyss, since mundane people could still perceive their presence otherwise and hearing disembodied steps or something of the like was a pretty easy way to get Gaia’s ire. Even easier was seeing an apple get picked up by nothing and disappear as the spell extended onto it.

In other words, it was too weak to effectively hide people walking through crowds. It took more investment into that school of magic before somebody could reliably get through the mundane world without getting noticed. For Momo, however, it was enough, since she didn’t aim to walk around.

Invisible to the people around, she flew over the city of Istanbul and the strait connecting the two halves. Up in the air, she had nothing to be afraid of. There were no humans to perceive any sound she made that high up. The only risks she had were birds and airplanes. The former could still see her while the latter she would have to be a moron to miss.

This spell was what allowed her to fly freely through the real world. Well, pretty freely at least. She was nowhere near as adept at that school of magic as Herman had been, her talents lay with other schools anyway, but it did the job and Momo was very happy about feeling the air stream over her face.

Reaching into her inventory she pulled out her e-reader.

Might as well read something else while she was on her way east.