Careful of the stacks - LIBRARY LOG

[libraryassistants]

Who: EVERYONE!
What: A bunch of Editors walk into a library...
When: October 31st - November 13
Where: The Unfinished Library
Content warnings: Please add them as needed in the comment titles!

Welcome to the Library, Editors.

As the new residents drop into the Library, they are bound to have questions. Unfortunately it seems no one (except perhaps someone on the phone) appears to have any answers. But there is a nice little cart with a carafe of too weak coffee, a pot of too strong tea, assorted creams and sugar packets, and what appear to be leftover boxed shortbread cookies. There’s a sign inviting people to help themselves but reminding them not to take any food or drinks into the stacks, or touch any of the books with their grubby cookie hands. But aside from this little display and the nametags they’re all given, which do reappear whenever removed for the first week (where do they keep coming from?), the Editors are more or less left alone.

The Library is eternal, or at least it seems that way, unbothered by its new inhabitants. It certainly does not seem like this is anything unusual within its operation. Are there other sections of the Library with Editors, tucked into a different part of the stacks? Have there been Editors here before, and the ones here are simply a replacement? It’s impossible to say, just that the Library seems quite prepared for them. The refrigerators are stocked with appropriate (if generic) foodstuffs, any tantrums in front of the circulation desk are completely ignored, and attempts to set the Library on fire fizzle out before anything can even catch.

However, after a few days, some of the scenery in the Library seems to be changing. Little singing bowls and white noise makers pop up on various shelves and counters, yoga mats appear tucked under the bunk beds (plenty for everyone, somehow), and some of the rooms have started playing relaxing, meditative music over unseen speakers. More confusingly, there are also small UFOs hanging by string from the lower ceilings of the contained rooms, which on closer reflection are revealed to simply be two paper plates glued together and painted silver. In the beginning they’re quite sparse, but by the end of the second week they are everywhere and impossible to ignore.

At the start of the second week, there is a possible hint as to why, for at least part of it. On the table by the circulation desk there is a sign: “This Week’s Recommended Reading: Invasion of the Body Snatchers!” Next to it, there is a sign up sheet: a waitlist to check-out the ‘reading.’ (There is no explanation or apology for it actually being a movie.)

[ooc note: The Library prompts from the TDM can be considered canon to the game. Remember any of the locations listed in the setting are fair game. Have fun!]

Comments

[wontforbidtherain]

"I'll count myself as lucky that I missed this one, then," Aphra said. "What would your experience recommend?"

[extrasaltypotato]

“Seek out friends and allies - from before your awakening if possible, and new ones where you can,” he says. “Do not dismiss it as dreaming or fantasy, and assume your actions retain their consequences. Secure your basic needs - food, drink, shelter, hygene; thankfully, these seem well provided for here. And never cease asking questions about where we are and why you’re here, even when you think you’ve found acceptable answers.”

It’s all practical, hard-won advice from his personal experiences.

[wontforbidtherain]

Aphra nodded. "Well, I don't think any of us were here before the first of us awakened. And I don't recognize any of you."

[extrasaltypotato]

“No,” Hikaru says, slumping a little in his chair - even shorter than usual. “I’ve met one person I know from my second world here, by reputation - but none of my friends from my Earth.”

[wontforbidtherain]

Aphra tilted her head. "Either that is a very common name for the world of one's origin, or we are from the same place."

[extrasaltypotato]

“Or,” he says gently, “we are from very similar worlds, or different eras. I’ve met a quite formidable woman from the Victoran age here, and my Earth is in what we call the Virtual era, 2047 AD.”

Says the winged gnome in the robes of a Renaissance college professor.

[wontforbidtherain]

She'll focus on that later. "I am from 1949 AD." The clothing can be explained as passing fashion. His size and wings... well, that Aphra was having more trouble with. While her people called typical humans 'men of the air', it was not meant that literally -- more that they lived their lives in open air, rather than under the see or in deep caverns.

But... well, she'd recalled the newsreels of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the constant rumors of Soviet spies seeking to duplicate the feat. Her people had some knowledge of the future, that humanity's tenure on Earth would last for at least a little while beyond 1949, but hearing that someone was from a century in her future was a reminder that maybe the new ways of fighting war wouldn't immediately doom the people she cared about (or at least those above water).

[extrasaltypotato]

“Right after the second World War? My condolences,” he says. “If it’s any consolation, my timeline has not seen a third, though we came distressingly close in the 2020’s.”

He shudders. The less said about his coming of age - and transitioning - during the Screaming Twenties, the better.

“This isn’t my first time being taken to another world, though I hope to return home as I was.”

[wontforbidtherain]

"I'm from America, at least," Aphra said. "I've seen footage from Europe and Japan. And know people who had family there. Hearing that we will not do such a thing again is... reassuring."

Not the 'distressingly close' bit, but... while Aphra expects to be alive in the 2020s, she also expects that she will have buried her on-land friends and family at that point, leaving only hypothetical descendants.

"As you were?" That required clarification.

[extrasaltypotato]

“I was born human,” he says, wondering how in hell to explain further.

[wontforbidtherain]

"And this isn't a normal part of human development," Aphra finished. It could be a dry joke.

[extrasaltypotato]

“A fine example of a mature Pixie, but not human.”

He takes a deep breath.

“The last time I tried to explain why this I only managed to confuse who I was talking to,” he admits. “Suffice to say that I and a legion of others from the west coast of the Americas were taken, waking up as an array of creatures from tales of sword and sorcery.”

[wontforbidtherain]

"I don't know that Howard ever mentioned 'pixies', but a hundred years is a lot of time for more books to be published," Aphra said. Look, her last job was selling books, which meant a lot of reading.

"But... I am in the process of moving from San Francisco back to my home town in Massachusetts, so I admit I'm curious where on the West Coast you are from."

[OOC: Slightly anachronistic for Aphra to understand that, as the first recorded use of sword and sorcery in print for a story in genre was in 1953, five years after Aphra is from, but I couldn't resist. This also makes me want to hit the library for an early-to-mid-century fantastic fiction review.]

[extrasaltypotato]

“San Francisco,” he said, with a laugh. “A city that’s suffered from its success. I was a mechanical engineer long before I became an actual wizard, and I’ve found the scientific method surprisingly useful in navigating things arcane.”

[wontforbidtherain]

"It's certainly one approach. I know of people who approach it through mathematics, instead. Is the arcane much talked about in 2047?"

[extrasaltypotato]

"If my Earth has magic it is of such a subtle nature that no one I know noticed it," Hikaru says. "Mundus, on the other hand, is absolutely charged with Pneuma and those who can shape it - an energy you may know as ruach, mana, prana, ki."

[wontforbidtherain]

Aphra recognized some of the words, and also knows enough Greek to derive 'pneuma' as coming from breath. She'd even done some work with Charlie mapping some of what she'd been taught into the metaphor of air, rather than water. "My tradition typically speaks about the Inner Sea. The connection between all living things to the waters of Earth. Or whatever planet they are from, I suppose."

Aphra knows that other planets exist, and has heard tales of what lives there -- some she even considers reliable. But she's at least twenty years out from the Apollo program, so they might as well be tales.

[extrasaltypotato]

"If it helps, Mundus may well be the Earth of it's cosmos - that's the plain meaning of that word, The World. Or it... may not. And my 2047 knows of other life-bearing worlds - we've sent a probe to a promising place called Trappist-1 - though as of yet, we have not found men, apes, or angels among the stars."

He smiles. "I think I like the metaphor of a vast ocean. In many ways, Pneuma behaves like water, as well."

[wontforbidtherain]

"I expect the truth is much stranger than men among the stars," Aphra said. "Unless you simply mean those who can build and write."

[extrasaltypotato]

“A mere Namer, as Mundus calls them, yes. I’m no xenologist. I was echoing a writer’s sentiment that the universe is so vast, and the span of human acheivement so relatively brief, that we’re more likely to find apes or angels out there rather than a civilization.”

He snaps his fingers and frowns, clearly searching for the author’s name.

“- Clarke. Arthur C. Clarke. Also the author of 2001, Rendezvous with Rama, and another aphorism I presently find amusing.”

[wontforbidtherain]

"After my time, I'm afraid, but I get the sentiment. Even on Earth, the timescales are so vast that it seems foolish to expect humanity to be the only 'Namers' in its existence."

A slight fudge: Aphra knew humanity was not the first civilization to occupy her Earth. But 'Namer' was a useful word.