unfinishedlibrary | so good night unto you all

Entry tags:

so good night unto you all - LIBRARY RETURN

Who: The Editors, one and all
What: The fight is over, the pieces remain... and the Editors head back 'home'
When: ~~Dawn of the Final Day~~ Sunrise after the attack
Where: Leaving Montica, back to the Library
Content warnings: Please make sure to put CW in headers!

By the time morning comes around again, the fires are beginning to die down, thanks to the many efforts of the citizenry to keep them under control. The rebel vampires too have been largely dealt with. These two seemingly insurmountable obstacles were only possible thanks to a combination of factors: the Umbra not being as blind to their human servants as their opposition would have thought, defectors from the Orlocks who were able to counter-act some of their magic, the following Amalia gathered and deployed from Laurelthirst, some suspicious (though welcome) help from suspiciously new arrivals, and of course, House Guildulf throwing their own into the fray to ally with the vampires for this confrontation.

A unity the likes of which Montica has never truly seen.

As the sun rises, there are few left who are able to fight at all; the rebels are beaten, and even the forces built up by both the vampires and werewolves are exhausted or diminished, leaving no one able to take advantage. Citizens of both sides flee indoors, and the remaining rebels are forced to vanish into the woods once more, weakened and unable to strike again any time soon. But there are still repairs to be done, physically and otherwise. Will this unity last beyond tonight? Will young love and youthful hope prevail? Those are the questions that settle over a weary Montica, as light pours into the city once more.

And then, the world begins to fade, static taking over the senses, as the Editors return to the Library.

Welcome back, Editors

It looks much the same as they left it, though the makings of a masquerade are no longer arranged as finely, a few scorch marks here and there, and for some reason there’s some amazing optical illusions on the floor panelling that makes them look like actual manhole covers. Alas, no sewers lay beneath. It may still take Actors a bit of time to shake off the old-new memories, and for some reason the fluorescent lighting seems harsher on the skin than it has any right too. Good thing that the stacks cast long shadows.

The customary tea cart is set up in the Lobby again, and it seems some improvements have been made. The coffee still isn’t strong, but’s far more drinkable than it has been, and there’s an added decaf option now! The tea has still been overstepped, and the stale cookies have been replaced by scones that are hard as rocks, but clearly someone’s getting the message that there are improvements needed. Clearly the tea cart was the place to start.

If someone for some reason doesn’t want stale scones, there’s also a child sized food truck in the lobby, with a sign out front boasting a variety of tamales, including: black beans and cheese, birria, chicken, fire scorpion, man suffering to death via battle wound, and beef. Upon approach, what look like fuzzy puppets pop up to… take your order? They don’t say much, or rather, they make a single noise over and over that seems to be them communicating, but the tamales are good. Just… don’t try to look in the truck. They’ll screech, vanish, and then no tamales for you.

Meanwhile, the bulletin board has a cheerful sign decorated with colorful blocks, declaring: “Join us in the Children’s Area for Lego Club!” Upon locating the room in question, Editors will discover boxes among boxes of legos of various shapes and sizes. There are some ‘how to’ guides for various builds (including a ‘research space ship’ and a ‘vampire’s castle’), but also plenty of encouragement for people to make their own creations! Unlike normal creations, these will actually stick around for a while after they’re finished, and there’s a nice little table where people can display and share what they’ve made.

The Assistants, it seems, are nowhere to be seen: the ‘back in 5’ sign is still in place at the help desk. Still, even without their ‘helpful’ guidance, some facets of the Library may come more easily to some in the aftermath of Montica’s troubles.

[Due to the resolution of the Story, any skills tagged Archivist in the skill tree cost one less skill point (minimum of 1) until the next Story. This can stack with a normal Archivist bonus!]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Tucking her head far enough back that she can cover it with her wing without lacerating her skin or hair is a skill and it's reassuring, Hisako tells herself, that it came back immediately. It is not actually very comfortable, but the coolness of steel against her face is something to focus on.

He of the many names stops by, the unctuous rich flavor of whatever it is he's going through stronger than the last time they crossed paths, but it still has that trapped-under-a-heavy-lid quality to it. Like she can just dart a little spoon in here and there. Even that is something against the all-consuming ache. She should get him to linger a while.

Also. Her nose is stronger than it had been in the Story. Something smells... really good, actually. Hisako considers for a moment, and raises her wing far enough to pull her head free without injury.

"Hey yourself, moorhen," she says, more subdued than usual. "You're a helper-at-the-nest today?"

Illarion's cause to pause at that name -- not moorhen, but helper-at-the-nest -- and then give a little huff of something like amusement. "Been a long time since someone accused me of acting paternal. At least these won't need pre-chewed."

Elves weren't mammals, after all.

He looks around them, then snags an unused exam tray to set his offerings on one-by-one. "Grain on the outside. Different meats inside -- chicken, birria," he rolls the r's enthusiastically, "fire scorpion." A pause, before he sets down the two he's withholding as a kind of joke.

"'Man suffering to death via a battle wound.' Human man, I'm thinking, but I can barely taste it." It could've been a funny name for pork or monkey!

Good for his sake it's not.

"I don't know, it could be big sibling behavior," she says, which stings her. She blinks her transparent inner eyelid a time or two, resenting that it stings. Jadis hadn't really been to Sigwulf and Sigrid what Hisako had been to her younger siblings, except in that she'd taken the role of another parent. ...No, no, it has to be different.

She scents the air, her neck starting to extend. Some things she can identify.

"That's maize, isn't it." A grain from a continent she'd never heard of, as a girl living in Tortall, but in the Divine Realms she had traveled, seeking new things. Eating new things, she'd done a lot of that! Maize had been fun, even if those gods were deeply strange. Birria was-

"Is that what that smell is?" she demands, and she should be horrified, Jadis is fresh enough in her memory that she understands why someone would object to that being on the menu. But... it's... She starts to bite her lower lip and has to stop, ow! Instead she stands up and finds that she's quivering. "Let me sniff it."

That's -- interesting. There's a softness there about family, and even if he wasn't the direct cause of that discomfort he feels a transient urge to dig in. To cause more.

Instead he shifts his gaze away from her and says only, "Wouldn't know. Never had any nest-mates." Younger or older. Mother had only wanted him.

"It's maize. You've had it before?" Seemed an awful lot of foods were similar across worlds, which shouldn't be surprising if Generation had dreamed mostly humans to eat them ...

Though, he imagines that taboos on cannibalism -- or just eating other thinking kinds -- are also about as universal, so eagerness (that's eagerness, right?) instead of disgust at his odd meal choice is also notable. But then -- she said she was made for war's horrors too, didn't she?

He picks up the dead-soldier tamales, offering them up for her to smell without hesitation. "Can get more," he says. "They're yours." He doesn't think it necessary to add if you want them.

No siblings but maybe he's been a father, she infers. That... seems like it'd go very tragically with what else he's alluded to.

She wouldn't turn down the more conventional tamales. Reminded of her hunger, Hisako was probably about to return to the bad habit of eating anything and everything for the temporary relief. Things like rocks and fine chain, she'd found, sat in her stomach longer until she found herself gagging them back up, as sick as a Stormwing ever gets. Even as she got used to it, if she saw something of the right size... But, real food is more pleasant. "Now and then," she says absently. "It's from a part of the world without horses or pigs."

Extending her neck Hisako pretty much shoves her face into his hand so she can press her nose right against one of the offerings and inhale deeply. Yes. Under the sweetness of the masa, yes. When she pulls back it's only by a foot or two and she can't look away. There's a faint rattling; she's trembling enough to that wing feathers are moving against the feathers of her sides. "Can you-" she has to swallow, "Could you peel these for me?"

She can eat them wrapped but husk will get stuck in her throat, and even if her esophagus and trachea part ways a lot higher up than is the case for humans so she wouldn't choke, she has enough self control to remember that she doesn't like stuck leaves. At the moment Hisako would fumble using the art of the grasp, and while the idea of taking the bundles in her teeth and thrashing around so the contents scatter is really appealing-

Edited 2026-03-28 15:23 (UTC)

How ... long, exactly, had she been starving for? Illarion's no stranger to hunger that profound -- much of his first year in the Unearthed had been in its shadow -- and he won't trouble her with further words while she's in its grips. (As much out of a sense of self-preservation as anything; he's also the corpse of a person.) He nods to the request, husking both of the tamales before holding one up to her in his fingers.

It's a strangely intimate gesture, more than he'd like it to be, but it seems better to offer it that way than in the little paper boat they'd come in. That felt too much like expecting her to feed from a trough, like an animal. Bad enough to be overmastered by hunger for something most of the Library would be disgusted by without adding that indignity to it.

Right?

Even now, if it had been recognizable as a human corpse then Hisako would have paused a while longer. A piece of flesh wrapped in masa and steamed, though? She shuts her transparent inner eyelids, as any carrion bird would do tearing at a carcass, bites it in half - watch those fingers! - and barely tries to chew the overstuffed mouthful before throwing her head back to make it easier to swallow.

There is actually, oddly, not a lot of taste. The maize portion is sort of bland and muted, merely a shadow of what the Flayed Lord offered. The meat is a bit stronger, sort of gamy and tough, but not particularly seasoned or marinated. This does not remotely matter. It's compelling, like the scent was compelling, in a way that's hard to describe. As if something that was askew is righted. Something broken and rattling is pressed back together and wrapped up. She's been enclosed and has just managed to open a crack to light and fresh air.

Hisako bolts both tamales in record time, looks for more, would have hopped off the bed to lick up any dropped fragments of meat. There don't appear to be any in evidence, so she licks her lips and, after a moment, sort of sags back, wings drooping. For a moment there she'd had exactly one thing to think about and it had occupied her completely. ...She does feel better, some ways. There's a warmth. The pain is less.

"Thank you. I haven't... I suppose you'd like to talk about that," she says, dredging up a dry tone.

Losing a finger would be inconvenient -- would the Library put it back to rights if he did? -- but it's not Illarion's first time feeding something (or someone) with more hunger and sharp teeth than caution. He's more careful with that second bite, and the second tamale, to keep his digits out of the way, and soon enough it's over and he sets aside the inedible remains of the meal.

(There's a small, deeply elven part of him that feels cleaner to set the little paper boat down. Disposable dishes? Made for one use, from a killed tree, to be thrown away to rot?

At least it can rot; there were things in the kitchens and at the little food stall resembling galalith that he was certain couldn't, and likewise seemed meant for a fate in a midden heap. He'd be angry about it, if he could.)

To her thanks -- once she's come to her senses -- he nods, once. The implied question after gets a twitch of a smile and a one-shouldered shrug. "I'm curious," a desire, or shadow of one he could have, "but was thinking of getting you a few more. Clear enough you haven't been fed right for a while."

A very long while but it crossed the Veil to let on he knew that.

Luckily her mouth is, besides teeth, basically human-shaped, and she's taking bites that are really big only by the standards of such a mouth. She certainly could eat more - the hunger's not gone, and she has no sense of how to regulate it, how much is a meal etc - but she's more clearheaded now and not going to act like a dog hearing a key word.

(right c'mon banana leaves are right there and already used for wrappers sometimes)

"Never. Not since I turned," she says, and can't help but sound tired in doing so. Hisako doesn't specify how long that's been, but she'd told him when they met that she was nearly four hundred. "There was a great work done on another continent. This consortium of mages came up with... something."

She could speculate, if she felt like it. Hisako's spent considerable time scrying on the universities where magic was formally taught. Entry level lectures were often not entirely shielded against distant eyes, and pressing against the bruise of I wanted this so badly and can never have it now, even if I could go there in person was something to do that didn't require talking to anyone.

"They compelled us, all the Immortals, to enter the Divine Realms, and then created a barrier that kept us from returning. Mortals can go there, but rarely, and they can't stay. I didn't starve, because I can't." She shrugs, working her bare shoulders and folded wings.

"Four centuries," he supplies, having remembered. And what was his one year against that? A pinprick. A sand grain.

Not that he can -- overtly -- feel much of anything about either fact, but the way he sets his fangs against each other and his ((outfeathers)) ruffle suggests he might be -- angry, on her behalf. Down in his dead and hidden heart. Who had the right to do that to whole peoples? As bad as Domitian's imperial projects to civilize their neighbors.

"You didn't starve, but it did you no good either. Somehow suspect if your people hadn't been shuffled off, a lot more humans would burn their dead -- not so?"

So rare, the cultures at peace with the idea they were meat, too. Though cremation had lately become far more popular on Nephele even among those -- like the elves -- who gave their dead to the dragons and the birds, since the Unearthed were not welcome at that sacred feast.

More for what -- and who -- they'd bring back, than any reason of cannibalism.

Her narrow metaphorical spoon, sneaking through a gap into the mostly-inaccessible fount, returns with a coating of... outrage? That might fit with the set of his jaw. For her, for Stormwings? She blinks slightly out of sync, inner eyelids closing a bit faster than outer. It's not the kind of anger suggesting a threat to her, regardless.

"Pretty close." What's two or three decades at this point? The time stretches on, flowing like water through her hands. Talons.

"Heh. Our poor mortal cousins do their best, but ravens and vultures just don't strike terror in the same way, and they can be warded off." Making a pyre for the war dead is still common, she's been told - she does not scry for these things - but she expects it's more out of practicality by now. "They've forgotten us. Humans, I mean."

She considers a moment. Should she tell him about the population crisis, the few children hatching, the eggbound deaths? Maybe not. What could he or anyone possibly say?

There's enough similarities between their people -- at least, in terms of the role they play for their respective worlds -- that Illarion could conceptualize the Stormwings as very distant cousins. Except they had been made to be what they were, as innocent in their choice of diet as the ravens and vultures were, and that made animosity against them worse somehow than what shrikes faced.

Shrikes, after all, had chosen to become horrors.

"Or poisoned," he mutters, of the birds. That -- also -- is a source of anger, though it's a far older wound. "That was the point, wasn't it? So they could forget you."

Well done, in that case.

He drops his gaze the other -- inadequate -- tamales he brought. He'll eat them later, so they won't go to waste -- animal flesh was still flesh, as far as his ability to heal went, but it's not the best for that purpose -- but ...

"We need to freeze some of the others. For later. Or otherwise find a way to keep -- "

A pause. " ... The flesh of thinking beings is enough for me. Is it something different, for you?"

This is now a problem to be solved. Part because she's close enough for a cousin (for flock), part because there's something older, instinctive, in him that says she can bear eggs and he can't and therefore it's his duty to see her provisioned well enough that she could have a nest in some far-off time. When conditions were better than they are.

Poisoning carrion birds so they can't feed on the dead left after battle is so on the nose, any poem she wrote on the topic would clunk.

"In the lands around where they held the consortium, mortals and Immortals fought often. The kinds of Immortals who aren't ravening monsters, I mean, and can choose and have leaders, and ideology, and armies. So the idea wasn't something petty, I think. I have no idea if they chose the scope. Immortals humans don't find threatening, little winged horses and so on, were caught up in it too." She shakes her head. "It's how it is."

Hisako's found some sense in it like that. Stormwings from the region tend to be particularly bitter about all sides involved but as she said, she was far away.

Freeze them... he's thinking of her, and beyond a moment's charity. Huh. She shifts her weight, re-puncturing the bed she's on.

"Why do you have to eat anything, if you're dead?" She knows he had some, she can smell it on him, a little. Hisako wrinkles her nose. "It's specific. Warriors killed in battle are the only certain ones. Past that we've got a lot of arguments about the rules. Old soldiers, warmongers, profiteers, there's a rolling debate about who counts as profiting, it's all just chewing the same bone long after there's no taste left."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

so good night unto you all - LIBRARY RETURN

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these two could get into a weird "feeds on suffering" codependency loop

mmm tasty pain

scrumptious!

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now with slightly weird digression on plastic products

he's right and he should say it

sometimes the old man is yelling at more than clouds

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