Unfinished Library Mod & NPC Account (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
libraryassistants) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
unfinishedlibrary2025-10-31 06:42 pm
libraryassistants) wrote in unfinishedlibrary2025-10-31 06:42 pm
Entry tags:
- !library,
- blade runner: kd6-3.7,
- bram stoker's dracula: mina harker,
- dracula: jonathan harker,
- hades: thanatos,
- original: illarion,
- sonic the hedgehog (film): shadow,
- the murderbot diaries: murderbot,
- the rising world: kaiisteron,
- the wonders of mundus: hikaru aozora,
- to be hero x: x,
- warhammer: sanguinius
Careful of the stacks - LIBRARY LOG
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!]
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!]
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No, it was pretty sure that the people that brought them here wanted them for something. It just didn't know what.
(It really, really didn't like not knowing what.)
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"It's very disconcerting, being here. But I can't say I've felt in any particular danger, either. Not yet."
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It doesn't trust that this is place is safe. Not one bit.
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Mina is a very practical-minded sort of person. Not having any indication of what sort of danger might be here, she doesn't see the point in worrying too much about it.
"I apologize," she says after a moment. "We haven't even been properly introduced. I am Mina Harker."
The strange person is too far away for a handshake, so she doesn't offer.
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"I'm Rin," it says. And it's a good thing SecUnit is too far for a handshake - both because it wouldn't recognise the gesture, and because it would recoil from it if it did. Touching humans was not something it liked, at all.
Then there's an awkward silence for a moment. (Since apparently they have weird rules about gender where she's from, it should probably find out which gender she has.) "What pronouns should I use for you?"
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And then Rin asks another wildly strange question, which throws Mina for a loop. No one has ever asked her such a thing before - why would they? But her training as a teacher, and her ingrained Victorian sensibilities, allow her to rally and find a politely neutral response.
“I’m a woman,” she says, “and therefore the appropriate pronouns are she, her, and hers.”
Rin must be from a very strange world indeed, to not realize that about her.
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(Ugh. Why did humans have to be so weird about their genders?)
"They/them," it says, with another awkward pause. "...For me."
It couldn't tell her to use it/its - humans didn't use that. Only bots and constructs did. But if it had to pretend to be a human with a stupid human gender, they/them was the least annoying of all the potential options available.
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“Very well,” she says, because there are people here who are blue, people who are dead and also someone who has features of a cat. In a broad sense, a third gender is a pretty minor thing.
“The door that leads to different places occasionally opens into a quiet spot for study,” she offers. “If you haven’t found it yet. It affords more privacy than this, anyway. I’ve been using it to write in my diary.”
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"I found it," it says. It makes another face; the fact that everything kept changing around here was annoying. It made it impossible for it to keep any kind of accurate map of the place. "Nowhere in this place stays fucking put."
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She does give Rin a bit of a quelling look - language - but takes their point. "I've been trying to find a pattern to it. The door, at least. I try it at the same times each day, and count how long it takes to cycle through all the possible rooms thus far. I can't find a pattern. It's very frustrating. I fear there is some power or - magic? At work here that is beyond all of us."
Since something or someone was powerful enough to bring them all here in the first place.
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"If the door has a pattern, it's still...undetermined," it says. So far, its own analysis hasn't brought about any conclusive results. "And it's not the only thing that changes. The stacks do too."
It just wasn't quite as obvious when they changed; it had taken discrepancies with its mapping to clue SecUnit into the fact that it was happening at all.
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"None of them are finished?" it says, looking utterly stricken at the thought. It hadn't tried to read any of the books yet - mainly because all of them were annoyingly physical, and trying to read them would be irritatingly slow. Also because it was too anxious about this whole situation to want to consume new media; instead it had just been watching the familiar and comforting Sanctuary Moon non-stop.
But the presence of so many books had been the one thing about this place that was actually appealing. It had thought that it might be nice, to read some of them later, if it could ever stop panicking about being kidnapped. Except that idea was a lot less appealing if none of them were finished.
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"I suppose I can't be certain that they're all unfinished, as there's no possible way I could look at all of them. But I've picked several books at random off the shelves over the last few days and they were all incomplete in some way."
Mina takes her journal out of her pocket, opening it to the most recent page.
"A few seem familiar to me - perhaps not exactly stories that I know, but similar enough that I could likely fill in the gaps if needed. Which I think is precisely why we've been brought here. To help finish the stories, or at least some of them."
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"I don't want books that I have to finish," it grumbles. And not just because its never written a book before. "Media is almost never as good after switching creators."
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She files that away and moves on.
“I’m no authoress myself,” she says. “But I wouldn’t be opposed to it, if doing so would help me earn passage back home.”
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"...Did they say doing it would get you back home?" It says. It knows the kinds of contracts that Contract Labourers often ended up saddled with. It knows better than to trust any promises. "And if they did, how did they define the timeframe?"
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“But it would be logical. We’ve clearly been brought here for some purpose, so it stands to reason that we might be offered an incentive to cooperate.”
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"They don't need incentives," it says eventually. It sounds...tired. Tired and quiet and sad. "They just need to make the cost of non-compliance high enough."
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"Surely incentives would be more effective than threats."
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Its just afraid that it probably isn't.
"They don't...think that way," it says. "Not if they're anything like the Corporates in the Rim."
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"What evidence do you have of that?"
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Neither did she, when she went and assumed their captors would readily offer them all a way home. But it's being nice, so it doesn't say that. (It just thinks it, really really loudly. In a way that telegraphs what its thinking right all over its face.)
"...They kidnapped us," it says. "And when I asked one of the people on the audio communication device what would happen if I didn't want to edit anything, they said: 'Good luck with that'. Whatever they plan to do with us, we're not being given a choice."
(There's a shift in its posture as it speaks; it withdraws further back onto the top bunk, legs brought right up to its chest while its arms wrap tightly around them. It looks like someone who is feeling a lot of anxiety, trying to curl in on themselves.)
It doesn't want to not have choices again.)
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"Of course we're not being given a choice," she says, because yes, that is self-evident. "However, I'm hoping our captors will see the logic in giving us incentives to help willingly." From her perspective, it could only be a good thing, for everyone.
She stands, smoothing her skirt in an automatic kind of way as she does so.
"In any event, I apologize for interrupting your solitude. If you're hungry, I always make far too many cucumber sandwiches for one person. You're welcome to them in the kitchen." She may not be able to do much here, but she can feed people. Too bad this one doesn't eat.
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