fandomhigh | Library: Friday [16.11]

In Special Collections, this could be anything.

Several hours had passed, time in which the sudden glimpses of pink became more frequent. As Karal came around the end of an aisle, he saw a shadow, reaching for him, but when he flinched away, there was nothing there.

It was the flinch that caused his eyes to fall on the book. Bottom shelf, shoved between volumes far larger, it was leather bound, looked hand-made, and had Home Island, 1707 scrawled in faded ink on the spine.

He pulled it off the shelf with hands that shook slightly and opened it, carefully turning pages. He went pale as he read. "I've found--" His voice cracked, and he cleared his throat. "I found something," he called, possibly a bit louder than he meant to.

Abandoning his search when he heard Karal, Peter rushed over. "Something good?"

Karal looked up from the book. "I don't know how to answer that."

"By this stage knowing what's going to cause our slow painful demises probably qualifies," Zack pointed out.

Hearing voices after it had been quiet for so long, Rodney found his way over to Karal. "What? What is it?" He asked anxiously.

"Anything magic-related?" Willow asked when she joined the group. "I'm all for things of a spell-type nature."

And that would be Adah, limping as quickly as she could toward the sound of Karal's shout. In truth, it wasn't very quick at all, especially with the hours of drawing circles and getting absolutely and utterly no where wearing down on her. Yes, that had to be it. The hours, wearing her down, and then trying to hurry, something she should never do. She let out a soft breath, relieved just to find somewhere to lean against when she found where everyone was gathering.

Ed paced Adah, sometimes dawdling slightly behind as a book or folio caught his eye on the shelves. He also was trying to be terribly discreet about keeping an eye on her. One might have even said he was worried. They'd be wrong, of course, according to Ed.

"Magical asbestos? Or just ground up bones?"

"Neither." Karal looked up, meeting Chris' eyes as he arrived. "It's--" He shook his head. "It's a journal, of the island's leader. Dated November 1707," he said. "Simpler just to read it." With a deep breath, he began.

"We should have known something was coming.

It was Atavis who fell ill first, terrible coughing and fevers, his skin as red as berries. We thought it of no concern. Our healers have cured far worse than that, many times before, and it was the work of mere hours to set him once again on his feet.

We should have known. The signs were there, if we'd cared to look. The birds disappeared; the small deer retreated into the depths of the woods. The horses were restless and flighty, and would not be calmed. Something unnatural had been loosed upon our island.

It took Atavis' death to open our eyes, but by then it was too late. We tried to send for help, though we doubted our neighbours would be pleased to see us, but we couldn't cross to the mainland. Attempts to send a message by magic failed. One after another, my people have fallen ill and died.

There are few of us left now.

It has been decided. We will use the last of our power, those who have it, to save the children. A boat has been made ready, scoured with muscle and magic, so clean that even this sickness could not withstand it. Mikael, the Magister's oldest, is a fine sailor. He will see them safe.

We will send them out over the sea, in the hopes that they might survive."

He fell silent for a moment. "There is more, an addendum, in a different hand."

Peter listened and frowned. It sounded familiar. It looked like they had certainly found the right plague, at least. "Go on," he said.

Rodney waved his hand in a circular motion to indicate a continuation.

Karal nodded, all his reactions carefully locked away, while a vague memory tickled at the back of his brain. "It is the nineteenth day of November in the year 1707. My name is Joseph Smithson. I have come to the island from the mainland.

There is no one left alive. My people are responsible for the death of this island. The Pater unleashed a sickness on them, but I helped, we all helped. I did not know this would happen. I thought it would bring them into the fold, so they could learn the rightness of our ways.

I was wrong. It was the magic that doomed them, magic which changed it. They weren't supposed to use magic. They were supposed to come to us, so we could give them aid and teach them the right way to live. The Pater didn't tell us this until it was too late. Magic had been used and the island was gone from our sights.

I have been waiting for the path to open again. With no one left sick, there was nothing to sustain the wall. If anyone ever finds this, know that we were wrong in what we did. Humility and Grace. Together they will protect you from the sickness. Taken together, you will be safe."

Willow looked horrified. "There's nothing wrong with magic in the correct, non-world-ending circumstances!"

Even feeling as she did, even with the situation at hand, Adah's eyes couldn't help drifting from Karal to Willow with a slight air of satisfaction. In correct, non-world-ending circumstances, indeed, but in her world? She knew all that magic was not the right approach, so it was a good thing that those who did seem insistent didn't take it this far.

She was also thinking that, oh, Dog, the melodrama. Literary criticism aside, though, Adah frowned, feeling a little turn in her stomach (should eat something soon). Humility and grace. More melodramatics in the style of the period to appeal to some sort of higher virtue for salvation (which, by the way, almost never, ever worked)? Then why would she be latching onto it like this? Especially since Humility and Grace were the two things she knew absolutely nothing about.

"Organized religion," Rodney huffed. "This is why I prefer science."

"No kidding," Ed agreed. He looked back at Willow thoughtfully. "Nothing wrong maybe but...obviously the wrong way to go here."

He wished he knew medical alchemy. "So, we already did the same thing they did and used magic which made it worse. What the hell, humility and grace? that's no help at all."

Obviously Ed had little of either.

"Can I just point out the irony of being told to use humility and grace by a bunch of people who were too smug to save the original settlers of this island?" Willow asked. "Because I feel it needs mentioning. Possibly because I think the non-savers are kind of jerks."

Karal wasn't...quite glaring at Rodney. "You cannot judge one by all," he said stiffly, hand closing around his Vkandis medal. "I've no idea what humility and grace are, but there's something..." He closed his eyes, thinking, and there it was. "The boat. There was a boat. Bart, the boy who died, Katara told me he found a boat, had been exploring it, before he got sick."

A soft sound, somewhat of a grunt, something of a held-in groan, slipped out of Adah. She would have wanted to believe it was for Karal going back to the source of the virus, after she'd felt it was pretty clear that the cure was not in the cause, but she would be lying if she allowed herself to believe that was it. The turn in her stomach had gotten worse, and she was starting to wonder if the clouds in her head were not from the frustration of the research but something else instead. And she didn't remember it being so hot in here before.

Grace and humility. She blamed, at first, the repetition of it by the others for her focus on it, but then she started to wonder if she hadn't actually...Biting her lower lip as she felt a slight shift in her perception, she leaned more heavily on the bookcase as she shifted her bag, went to retrieve one of her notebooks. She was certain now that she'd come across that before; how many times, after all, do you come across "grace and humility" together when studying virology, biology, pathogens and plagues? You remembered something like that, wrote it down, and then let it go as insignificant. Maybe if she could find it...

Chris was taking everything in and trying to process exactly what it meant. "So... it doesn't sound like there's actually a cure," he frowned. "But... maybe we need to find the boat and destroy it?"

His mind was already searching for words that rhymed with boat for a vanquishing spell.

Zack stared at Chris for a very long time. "Viruses don't work like that."

"We could search the boat for the virus though," Willow said. "Or something that caused it. And if it's a virus, maybe there's anti-virus? And if it's bacteria I vote we douse the whole thing with bleach, gracefully or not."

Ed stared at the ground, opening and closing his right hand as he thought. "No, there is a cure or the guy Smithson wouldn't have bothered to write that note. And he wouldn't know about the boat cause they were stuck on the mainland, they couldn't help. So it's got to something with the grace and the humility. Religion? Or...some type of alchemical reaction?"

"Maybe a task of some kind?" Willow suggested. "You need to be graceful to do it, then humble after? And... then you get the cure? Admittedly we'd need to figure out how to fill in those middle bits."

Library: Friday [16.11]

Something is found

Re: Something is found

Re: Something is found

Re: Something is found

Re: Something is found

Re: Something is found

Re: Something is found

Re: Something is found

Re: Something is found

Re: Something is found

Re: Something is found

Re: Something is found

Re: Something is found

Re: Something is found

Re: Something is found

Re: Something is found

Re: Something is found

Re: Something is found

Re: Something is found

Re: Something is found

Re: Something is found

Re: Something is found

Re: Something is found

Re: Something is found

Re: Something is found

Re: Something is found

Re: Something is found

Re: Something is found

Re: Something is found

Re: Something is found

Re: Something is found

Re: Something is found

Re: Something is found

Re: Something is found

Re: Something is found

Re: Something is found