for all the world's a stage - LIBRARY LOG

[libraryassistants]

Who: The Editors
What: The Library changes once again...
When: January 9- January 22
Where: The Library
Content warnings: Please put them in the comment headers!

The Assistants have vanished into their backroom once again, leaving only the increasingly unbelievable “Back In 5” sign on the Help Desk, but at least they have attempted to impart some knowledge on the Editors before departing (or… attempted to do anything but, depending who you ask). The customary tea cart with drinks and increasingly stale biscuits is parked in its usual spot, though it seems that the quality of the tea at least has improved some. (Still waiting on coffee improvement.)

There’s a new crafting setup in the Maker Space, a table with an iron and machine for making vinyl designs, along with the instructions on how to use it, and a stack of t-shirts in various sizes. Usually there’s something in the correct size, but, well, mistakes happen. While this addition to clothing is a boon, there is the problem that the t-shirts can’t be taken out of the room until some sort of design is put on them. Get creative! Show off your style! Or maybe just steal one of the shirts that are there for display purposes. It’s fine, the Library can make more.

In the second week as the Library begins to change once more, the Lobby’s wooden floor shines with extra polish. The walls make an odd creaking sound as they shift, warping into brick covered with velvet drapings in a rich, dark red. Gold thread twinkles in the stitches, a sense of opulence woven through. The sound of ballroom music drifts by and, while in the Lobby, characters will be taken by the unusual impulse to dance.

Outside, in the Garden, the day/night cycle has paused firmly on a cloudless night. A full moon hangs in the air - literally. About the size of a basketball, it follows the first person who enters the Garden; hovering a couple of meters above their head. A white aura spreads from them, powered by the moon, and those who are caught in its light will find themselves unable to speak anything but the truth.

When the person to whom the moon is attached leaves the garden, the moon and its aura will leave them; and the moon will attach to the next person to enter instead.

On the circulation desk, there is a sign: “This Week’s Recommended Reading: Twilight!” The accompanying sign up sheet waits next to it for those wishing to check it out- though some will receive the movie instead of the book, with no particular rhyme or reason to it. Periodically someone might also receive something else entirely. Whoops? The Assistants at least will fix that quickly. Richard will be embarrassed, while Phillip will be trying not to cackle.

While not advertised, various iterations of different stories will be available throughout the Library. In particular, someone seems to have left the projector in one of the meeting rooms running, with a variety of different recorded plays. These range from professional productions, to parodies, to what appear to be high schoolers (of which one production features a sixteen year old version of Phillip running around being an absolutely nuisance.

Comments

[steelfeathered]

What! She didn't expect him to move like that. Hisako overshoots and flings herself full-force into the fence. A half-bubble of scarlet light edged with bright gold flares around her directly before impact. The fence shakes and makes a deceptively tremendous noise, as if getting hit enough would break it down. Hisako shield-bounces off it while keeping her momentum, spinning in a faster and more dramatic turn than banking.

She is a little concerned about doing some damage. Hisako's primary feathers are basically two arrays of lightweight, basically-unbreakable swords with ludicrously sharp double edges. Stormwings fight and kill with these. But she's warned him repeatedly and Sanguinius seems convinced she can't hurt him sooooo maybe some glancing incidental contact with the less-lethal feathers is okay.

That's her logic, if you sat her down and asked her to explain why she tries to shoulder check him and shield-bounce directly up. The shield prevents most contact and clearly she's not going to be able to get above him and closer to that moon with regular flying! She wants to seize it in her teeth.

[angel_of_baal]

In his defense, he's wearing armor, so her feathers might be whatever they were, but not much could get through ceramite and plasteel, especially not as a direct intentional blow.

"Hey!" Because what else do you say when someone uses you as a ricochet wall? "Is that cheating?" Because now it's SO ON, and he veers, to duck under her for the moon.

[steelfeathered]

Sang why are you wearing armor to read Fifty Shades, it's not that fearsome! All right in that case what she's worried about damaging is his wing feathers, because certainly they look like the kind of feathers that can be cut and then have to be either painstakingly imped back together or yanked out to make them regrow.

The moon is too large for her to catch in her jaws and she misjudged the location of some craters that could have been a tooth-hold, so she basically smacks it noisily with her mouth. It goes spinning off as if on a pendulum. Clearly, even a long neck can't always do the work of hands.

"Cheating! Me?! I'm fighting gravity and you with your arms!" Hisako half-shrieks, a metallic note in her voice that she's careful to avoid when on the ground. Humanlike voices just don't carry as well in the air.

The moon returns on its pendulum orbit and since she was the one who touched it to knock away, it takes up over her head. She has not noticed yet.

[angel_of_baal]

Well he's not going to sit in the public garden NAKED to read this abomination! People might think...things.

"All right, I won't use my arms either." Better? Is this all very silly, to the point where he's almost giddy and not sure at all what he's doing? Yes. But no one's around to see anything, so it's fine.

If nothing else, it was far better than the book, now discarded on the bench he had been sitting on. "Why are we chasing it?"

[steelfeathered]

That's what comes of always wearing clothes, you start getting weird about the default state of living beings.

"No, oriole, your feet are obviously useless. Keep your elbows to your sides and it's fine," Hisako says, making a snatching motion with her talons. If her legs are analogized with human arms, the toes being fingers, the ankles being elbows, she does have a similar range of motion to half-pinned arms. Her objection is to the ability to reach forwards and out.

"Why not chase it? Don't you know, 'play improves morale and group cohesion!'" she exclaims, apparently quoting someone. Something compels her to add: "And it looked kind of like a skull for a moment and if I don't act like a Stormwing sometimes, I get to feeling sad and off."

[angel_of_baal]

He's a mutant: he's allowed to feel self-conscious about his appearance. Giant ass wings will do that. Around his legion, clothes were optional because, well, they'd been fighting alongside each other for decades. Pants were definitely optional after a point.

"Very well." He can t-rex the arms. He might even give her an advantage, since this was her idea.

"I thought that was combat practice." That's how it was in his Legion--duelling cages were where friendships were forged. "But I understand. I have precious few skills this place finds useful, and many that would get me in trouble here."

[steelfeathered]

For all her indignation about how he moves through the air, she's 'hovering' right now with her wings outstretched and motionless, silhouetted with moonlight and traces of red fire.

"Wait and find out how long we're to be held here," she says, smiling, bright and flat. "If it's long enough you'll have to learn acceptable skills. That or convince yourself you are comfortable pacing the cage. Maybe both. It helps if it's both."

Then she blinks and shakes her head, less the side-to-side no gesture and more of a long-necked motion like she's trying to shake something off. The end of her long hair, bound to a human-looking lumbar vertebra made of softly silver bone, drops over her shoulder to swing down below her. "What am I saying? Sorry, it's better I keep that to myself."

[angel_of_baal]

Well, her indignation probably ratchets down a level or two as his wings miss a beat at her words. He only drops about a foot or so, but it was probably noticeable. "I am sorry for whatever experience gave you this knowledge, Hisako."

It was good, if hard won, advice, he thinks, and he hopes to never have to learn the truth of it here. And now, behold a primarch, engaging in primarchly behavior commonly known as hypocrisy. "Don't apologize. It is better to share one's burdens than endure alone."

[steelfeathered]

Hisako's shut her transparent inner eyelids, cutting the reflection from her eyes, dulling them. She snorts.

"You're one to talk. It's not a secret, it's just not relevant. This place is so much smaller than the Divine Realms, but I'm not hearing anything about being half-buried for a century getting dug up by the roots because you picked a blackberry without asking, so, that's nice," she says, and is shocked to hear herself sounding half-choked. Bitter. Furious, in an utterly bleak way. Her throat works silently for a moment before she can say, "...I don't just talk like this. What is... I don't get it."

She casts about again. "This is griffin-stuff but there aren't any griffins here, it's... really?" Hisako has finally noticed that the moon is following her now. "Tell me that's not it."

[angel_of_baal]

It might not be relevant but it clearly hurt, and that was something.

She was not one of his sons--anything but--but when they came to him with their struggles, their pains, he hoped he could help them, even if his help was simply in listening. "....I am sorry that happened to you. That is not right. That is not any sort of justice." That was an insane punishment over a single berry? His hearts hurt thinking of it.

He'd just thought it was, well, his trustworthy personality? that brought out her confidences? Perhaps not? "Not what?"

[steelfeathered]

Hisako grimaces. "No, don't worry like that. After it made its point it let me out. There were just too many of us there as exiles - refugees - who didn't know how things worked."

Her voice, tightly controlled for a moment there, starts rising as she speaks faster and faster. "What bothers me more is I thanked it, and I came back to it and played its game, and I can't hate it because this is how I work, apparently, I make nice with anyone who hurts me, with the worst people in the world, because I can't do anything else, and grab this stupid moon thing for me and let's find out!"

She draws her wings in closer and the red fire outline brightens and spreads, as her flight owes more and more to her magic and less to anything in nodding distance of flight mechanics. With that to slow and smooth the motion she glides right up to Sanguinius and extends her talons, trying to find purchase somewhere on the armor of his chest. That'll put the moon in reach of his arms, which, implicitly she's said he can use their full rotation now.

[angel_of_baal]

"It is not 'worry' to be outraged at injustice." Because that was injustice. If there were crimes, the penalty could not be death for a small infraction.

"Hisako, if I hurt you, I would rather know, to apologize." Can he boss her around that much? Because he hears real anger and hurt in her voice. To be bound to others, forced to behave their whims and bear their injustices--it was not something he wanted to perpetuate.

His armor is incredibly ornate, and there's no shortage of hand (or foot) holds for her. He has no idea why she is upset at the moon, but she has given him an instruction, so he reaches out, easily, palming it in one hand. "Does this mean I win?" This was some very strange game. But he was trying!

[steelfeathered]

"'Justice' is about what people deserve. Who decides what makes someone deserving? You only think I deserve better because you barely know me." She knows the taste, now. She could hurt him just by talking about these things that help no one to hear.

Her taloned feet don't really have the same dexterity of hands and Hisako isn't lightweight. Her claws slip and she grunts as her forwards momentum mashes her chest against his breastplate, pressing the ornamentation and the beads and ceramic flute she wears into her flesh. It hurts, in passing, but it's not anything she can't shrug off. She draws her wings in further so she can catch at Sanguinius with her wing spurs, the curved lengths of silver bone growing out of the stiff mitts that had been hands for a little while, that have supported her primary feathers for far longer. It's awkward and precarious but now she is able to get a foothold and not press up so close.

Hisako thinks she feels a shift when he takes the moon in his hand, an easing of some internal pressure, and wonders if that's psychosomatic. "Sure, oriole. I... that thing might be able to compel speech, that's what I've started worrying about."

[angel_of_baal]

"No. Justice should not be about knowing someone. That's favoritism. That's the opposite of justice. Justice is the same rules applied equally to everyone." That's literally what it is, isn't it?

She can clamber on his armor to her heart's content--maybe then she will realize he's not as fragile as she seems to think. It's sweet, in a way, though.

"It is why I fear for my Legion." His genetic flaw, passed to his sons. They're all at risk.

OH. OH. That's what she meant.

He tosses the moon away from him, but it rebounds, whizzing back around his head.

[steelfeathered]

"People aren't all the same, though. What's good for one person kills another. There's always judgement. Bias."

Wings don't tuck in quite the same ways as arms and her spurs very aren't grasping digits, so to keep them jammed against his armor Hisako has to have them spread wide and circled in, halfway to an embrace. It is not secure. She can feel him tense after he realizes what he's said. His topography changes when he tries to lob the moon away, and with an undignified little squeak she loses her clawhold and slips.

And yes, she can fly and will be fine, she would've bounced off already if she wasn't preoccupied by her outburst a moment ago, but alternately: Sanguinius, this is your cue! Put an arm around the bird!