fandomhigh | Library, Saturday

There's caf! Decent caf too. Let's hope that Loran guy never comes looking for it.

On top of the giant rabbits, they seemed to be in the middle of fucking nowhere. The rabbits, he'd leave to those that enjoyed punching shite, but figuring out where they were? That, John could manage.

He started with the card catalog, given all the computers seemed to be fucking bricks. It was all older shite, but at least it was a starting point.

It was a good two hours into his searching and muttering to himself that he paused, taking a card out of the drawer and disappearing with it into Archives before returning with some battered, faded, archival boxes labeled in spidery, smudged handwriting.

Historical Records [Dates Unreadable]
Fandom Island
Travel: Magical, Mechanical, Other

If you were going to start at the very beginning, you might as well start at the very fucking beginning, and that usually meant archives.

It was much, much later that a shout came up from where John was pouring over the files and pages and photos from the archives. "Well that explains my massive fucking headache, and why my wards didn't understand what the fuck happened..." he said, holding up a folder. "Right magical surge, but we didn't fucking land anywhere, so the spell didn't complete correctly."

"Bless fucking archivists. We got ourselves a meticulous record of the island's movements during its first impromptu vacation trip... including the magical readings for each jump and it matches. It fucking matches."

"Matches what?" Kathy asked, looking up in confusion from her archives stack.

"Magic requires energy, is energy," he said, waving the folder. "Just like your microwaves or light or sound, that energy had patterns. Signatures."

"And the magical signature of what happened to us today matches the one from your folders?" Kathy guessed.

"Not just type of magic, or same level of output, but same time," he said, tapping it on the table. "Midnight, and the spell triggered. Right time, right type, right power levels. I'll need to get into the nitty-gritty of the spell, see exactly how much my wards and such recorded before they reset, but I'd even bet it had the same star-chart coordinates plugged in, except it... misfired, for lack of a better term. Something caused the spell to terminate prematurely, which is why we're in the middle of fucking nowhere."

"Can you figure out where we were trying to go?" Kathy asked. "Or why the spell triggered right then?"

"If I could get hands-on with the spell from last night, sure," he said, "--but I was asleep at the time, and the magical protections I have up around this place and my apartment didn't record anything besides 'magic flare' since the spell didn't complete itself."

Kathy nodded. "Okay," she said, "that makes sense."

Well, what he was saying sounded logical. Kathy didn't have enough of an idea about magic to know whether that fit into the proper framework of it.

"Should we add this to the notes?" she asked, looking around to see if anyone had started a 'Pertinent Information' list. "...I'm gonna buy this place a whiteboard for emergencies," she muttered.

On Tip's first trip outside today, she'd learned about the enormous rabbits. On her second, she'd learned that enormous rabbits were just close enough to Boov to be affected by the "comasleep" setting on her gun, though not for very long. ("Tummy trouble" did nothing, and she wasn't about to set it to "erase" without much more of a reason for it.)

On her third, she headed for the library. And went looking for books on Leporidae. She seemed to remember "lepus" as a name for giant bunny rabbits. . . .

Kenzi was talking on her phone (http://nookiepowered.livejournal.com/707.html?thread=486083#t486083), then hanging up with a disgruntled sigh. "Bunnies, bunnies, bunnies," she said, like it was a curse. "Was anyone expecting this?" She kind of felt like they'd deserved more warning than this.

"If they did, they kept it real close to their chest," Tip grumbled. "I'm guessing this isn't a regular Easter thing?"

"If it is, I slept through it the last whatever-many years." Which, not impossible if she'd been hungover, but man. "I think there were cute tiny bunnies that gave you hugs one year, but nothing like this. Ugh." She frowned at the girl and said, "I'm Kenzi, I don't think I've run into you before."

"Gratuity," Tip said, offering her hand. "I spend most of my time at the school. Or the post office, I guess."

Kenzi snapped her fingers at that, and reached out to shake her hand. "Yeah, that's it, I think I saw you one time when I went in for stamps or something. I work at Caritas on Mondays. And Luke's on Wednesdays. Makes sense I haven't seen you around before." She sighed and looked at Gratuity's book contemplatively. "No luck in the books yet, hunh?"

"I've learned a lot more about the life style of the snowshoe hare than I ever knew before," Tip said. "And found something about a 'prince of a thousand enemies'. But no."

"Prince of a thousand.. oh. Right. Everything wants to eat it." Kenzi considered that then observed, "Bringing in giant wolves does not seem like a good answer here. Or giant foxes. Or giant-any-other-predators."

"The island's a little full of mega-fauna as it is," Tip agreed. "You've been here awhile, right? I mean, in Fandom."

"Graduate of the class of '13," Kenzi confirmed, then clarified, "2013. So yeah. I mean, I've seen lots worse than this, but still. Would be nice if we knew what to do, other than go out there with swords and bazookas." She smiled a little. "Were you around last semester? Or is this your first encounter with random stuff showing up?"

"You mean for the evil creepy non-doubles?" Tip asked. "Yeah, I was here for that. And got turned into a pony this summer. I have a gun -- sort of a raygun kind of thing? It can knock them out for a few seconds, but I don't want to use the more powerful setting on them unless I really have to. That . . . tends to do a lot of damage. And it'd be really bad if I missed."

"Preach," Kenzi said fervently. She gave the books a look of non-enthusiasm, then admitted, "Finding a way to stop it is probably better. And the answers have just about always turned up here, at least partly." She picked up one of the books in resignation. "If you see any in Russian, shoot them over to me."

"You read Russian?" Tip asked. "Cool."

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