fandomhigh | Library, All Friday

Entry tags:

library

Library, All Friday

To be perfectly honest, John had not left the library last night, with something crawling at the edge of his magical senses. Why go out and be a potential snack, when he could make it come here, to him, and a perfectly good ambush?

Radio had confirmed some of his suspicions, and then the distinctive pull of a second portal somewhere else started humming at him, and Constantine started hauling out the records of invasions past and stacking them on various tables.

That still didn't feel right, this energy felt too eldritch for most of these, but it was as good a place for the kids to start as any.

The Fandom High Library is open. Coffee's on, and if you ask nice, John'll whip you up a proper tea.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

For your basic library transactions.

If you've figured out it's time for the Big Brains to try and head this off before it gets any worse, this is the place for you to be.

He's already pulled everything basic and easily accessible about previous invasions, for those that need to catch-up on their Fandom History, but there's still plenty of tomes in the stacks, both magical and non-magical.

"I believe I may have found something pertinent to the current . . . strangeness," Jenkins said. He was carrying a thin book, and being followed by a second Jenkins, this one rather more battered-looking than the first and carrying a long gun.

"You found it, did you?" said the second Jenkins.

"And also this is happening." Jenkins shot a glare in his double's direction. "Delightful."

"Did I do a bad batch of drugs last night, or are there two of them?" Constantine asked the room at large. "Better fucking be the drugs."

"Alas, no." The second Jenkins gave Constantine a quick once over. "You'd be the . . . librarian, would you? I suppose you're as qualified as any of the others I've met."

Very, very many of the others he had met had died extremely quickly.

Yeah, well, he'd already gone and got the dying bit out of the way, and had a shiny new body to show for it.

"That's what my paycheck says, at least," he said, jamming his hands in the pockets of his trench. "Pretty sure the schoolboard keeps me on for my rugged good looks."

And, well, the layers of magical protections encircling the library, especially the complicated wardings upon the entrance to Special Collections.

And Jenkins would probably love to talk shop with John about those layers of protections most other times, but he was a bit busy just now being prickly and suspicious about his doppelganger. "I am sure that's all very lovely for you," he said, opening the book again. "Tell me, how familiar are you with 'primordial creatures' that are purported to live beneath this island?"

"We talking the rock elementals that are sleeping down there, or something else?" he checked. "Most of the primordial elementals tend to be fairly inactive, just phasing between planes, unless someone stirs them up."

"Giant slugs don't seem very rock-like to me," Jenkins said with a roll of his eyes.

"Mm, yes," Jenkins replied. "Loathe as I am to agree with my compatriot here, I suspect we are dealing with something rather more . . . squishy. Than rock elementals."

"Well, then, why didn't you start with slugs?" Constantine sighed, fishing around in his pocket for a smoke, if he was going to have to deal with both of them. "Haven't seen any, to tell the truth, though true primordial gastropods are generally a bad fucking sign."

"Rot, corruption, things waking that ought not wake, that sort of shite."

"Indeed," Jenkins agreed, not seeming to mind the cigarette in the least. Or even much notice it. "The sort of bad sign that has, apparently, been seen here before." He flipped to the end of the book. "And I quote: 'Last, the Beaste was found in the 1760s. We credit the Good Work of Sir Thaddeus Crowley, whose efforts vanquished the Creature before it could wreck its Terrible Havock upon us all. May God have mercy on us.'"

"First off, why would anyone trust a fucking Crowley to do what they say they did? Second... where, exactly, do we think he 'vanquished' them too? Is this the result of him pushing them forward into time, or are they just finally coming home from somewhere else?"

John ran a hand through his hair. "There's experts I could call in, but odds are they'd only make things worse."

Mister E always did SO GREAT around kids.

"That's just what we said," said Jenkins.

Jenkins ignored him. "I suspect, Mr. . . . Librarian. . . , that we are once again going to be best off dealing with this problem ourselves."

"And ourselves," said Jenkins. "That is why we've all come here, after all."

Jenkins probably should have taken the time to ascertain why his doppelganger had arrived, shouldn't he.

"You can call me Constantine." Because like fuck he was handing over his name with weird magic afoot. Who knew who was listening?

He turned to Jenkins-the-Second. "You couldn't have opened with the fact you're here to stop these fuckers, and aren't just the island playing twinsies for a day? Bloody fucking hell, what the fuck is wrong with you? Maybe instead of making us play guessing games, you tell us what you know."

"Must've slipped my mind," Jenkins said, examining his fingernails. He had enough memories from the last thousand or so years that the hollowing process was taking its dear sweet time with him, but new memories didn't have much chance.

"Honestly, Mr. Constantine," said Jenkins. "I wouldn't trust this man as far as I could throw him even if he did tell us everything."

"Some cultists from a hell dimension are here to end your world." Jenkins looked up, eyebrows raised, as though he'd only just recalled that information. "The slugs are a side-effect."

Jenkins threw his hands in the air and went to go look at some other books.

Amaya, bless her somewhat oblivious heart, hadn't noticed too much amiss with the island. All she noticed was that her garden was infested with slugs, and they weren't like any slug she'd ever seen before. Her usual methods of eradicating them weren't working, so she popped on over to the library to look into whether they were local or what or if she could find anything to get rid of the pests, especially since she noticed they were everywhere and they were rather...eager...to make her path a difficult one.

Too bad she didn't really know where to start, but she'd get there, having grabbed an armful of books from the shelves and settled down at a desk to start cracking.

Edited 2017-12-15 18:51 (UTC)

And, eventually, after Amaya took a moment to rub her eyes somewhere between Slugs, Snails, and Other Gastropods and Unusual Garden Troubles and How To Fix Them, she dove into another book that seemed a little confusing for her endeavors. With a frown, she flipped to the cover and read the title outloud, "Fandom Eldritch Chickens and When They Go Feral? How'd this get in there?"

But it was...surprisingly fascinating, so she flipped back out of weird curiosity, only to find one of the pages loose. She winched, hoping she hadn't accidentally torn one out, but, no, it was clearly from a different book. Head tilted, she read on, a few of the more interesting notes slipping past her lips as she ruminated over it.

"'Ritual That Summoneth'," she muttered, "a circle, two small chicks, a goat and a...bustier? Who wrote this, Chester Hobblepot?"

Nah. Not enough frogs.

She perched a finger of a note written near the bottom. "Ritual used by b? -- TC. So someone may have actually performed this before?"

She shook her head, flipping the page over to see if there was any more, but there wasn't, and she shrugged. "If it gets rid of toothy giant garden slugs, though, I'd be willing to give it a try myself..."

Peter looked over at her. "This might be related." He flipped past the pages and pages (and pages and pages) of information Thaddeus Crowley had left. "This ends November 1768. Jenkins found something saying he'd vanquished...something. Put them all together, and maybe this is what the others are trying."

He belatedly realized he didn't know her (he didn't think). "Oh. Hi, I'm Peter." He waved at the identical but cleaner and slightly younger man next to him. "So is this."

"Amaya," she said after a moment, her brow furrowed in thought. She glanced to her side, where there was distinctly no one at all, much less anyone slightly resembling her, beside her, and she shrugged. "Nice meeting you, Peter. And...Peter." She slid the loose sheet of old paper over to them on the desk, a gloved finger pointing out the scrawl of a note toward the bottom. "Think the handwriting matches? But this is to summon...eth...something, not vanquish it. Unless the vanquishing was in response to the summon..eth...ing. I wonder who this b person's supposed to be."

"That I couldn't tell you." Peter belatedly smiled at her, though it was strained. "Don't worry; he's the only one here usually. I came to help stop these people summon-eth-ing anything."

Aphra wasn't really a team player, or inclined towards heroics. That was the realm of dumb people. But she did have a finely timed survival instinct, that she even listened to sometimes, and knowledge kept you from getting shot in the face (or back), so she swung by the library.

Edited 2017-12-15 19:50 (UTC)

And Aphra's distrust of the survivability of heroic teamwork was proven completely right when the document she was (re-re-re-re-)reading on Special Collection wrangling suddenly burst into flames.

Good thing she'd been taking notes, though she could have sworn that those constellations, directions and numbers weren't quite so...wibbly around the edges earlier. Oh, well, she probably just needed a nap ~~it wasn't like she'd just rolled a 1 on her SAN check or anything~~.

Honestly, Paris was here because her classes were over and if she didn't have a project to work on, she became even more unreasonable to deal with.

"Oh, there's people here."

Two points for you, Paris.

Though why you'd want to, we don't know.

It was a solemn-looking Dante, long white hair and longer red coat, that walked into the library during the morning hours. Having just missed the radio broadcast that morning, he'd decided this was his best recourse.

"Constantine?"

"Depends on who's asking," he replied, looking up from where he had his feet up on a desk as he paged through a book written in a demonic language dead long before the rise of humans. "And what they want."

Hopefully the fact this Dante hummed with overpowered Nephilim energy for anyone sensitive to it wouldn't be a problematic factor.

"The island's in trouble," he said flatly.

So long as the answering hum of demonic blood in John wasn't going to be a problem either.

"No shit," Constantine replied, turning a page in his book. "It's a Friday, something malevolent has been slithering around since yesterday, and it's not pinging anything I've dealt with yet. Why do you think I'm actually working instead of placing book orders or chasing down children's books?"

"...You cause it?"

Not hostile, just checking.

"No, but people from my future have," Dante said. He sounded easy, drawling, his hands stuck in his pockets. "They want to bring about the apocalypse. I know, sounds like Tuesday."

"Why the apocalypse?" Constantine complained, rubbing at his temples. "Fucking unoriginal ponces."

"Can you tell me why do they want to trigger the end of the world?"

"Everything is fucking shit where we're from," Dante said idly. "So they decided that burning everything down ahead of time would be better. I'm not sure how, some weird demon summoning shit. Not a fan."

"'Summoning shite.' Which is why you walked into my library and not Zoe's office," he said sourly. "Fucking hells, let's hope it's just a demon summoning. We can shut that down fast enough once we get an idea of who they're after."

If it was something...older. They'd have a problem.

"A regular demon I can handle," Dante said. "Pretty sure they're going to go big and bad."

"Well, at least I'm in the right celestial sphere, then," Constantine quipped, gesturing to the piles of books to his left, all written in some Infernal script or another. "Any way to narrow it down, squire?"

"I don't know. You know anything that's full-on 'end of the world'? Start there."

Dante was all out of demonology books.

Hopefully the Jenkinses hadn't broken Constantine too much, because here came Peter...and Peter. One filled with demonic, angelic, and a bit of magic, and one pure human and a bit shabby but brimming with magic.

Fortunately, they got along with themselves a bit better than some.

They looked around and headed for John, pausing to look at his books. "Found anything yet?" the younger, cleaner one asked.

"Fucking hell, I'm still seeing double and I'm nowhere near high enough for this shite," John ~~whined~~ complained. "Nah, mate, nothing yet, besides the fact dippy-Jenkins says it's cultists and the nasty slugs are a side effect, and the white-haired kid says it's demonic and big. Actual 'end of world' sized demonic."

"They're both right," Peter said grimly. "The others came here to end the world early. Put it out of its misery or something. We came to stop them. Me, Dante, that Jenkins, and a few others. I assume that one, anyway, though it's the first time I've ever heard him called 'dippy'."

He glanced down at the demonic book on the table. "Want to split the load? I can read just about anything." He looked at this world's Peter.

"My Hell tongues are better than I'd like," Peter answered. "I'm good for it." He nodded to John. "Whatever'll help."

John gestured expressively to the piles of books in his office. "I already pulled most of the easily accessible ones in various demonic/infernal/celestial languages, so help yourselves," he said. "Only gotten through the three on my desk so far, so maybe the three of us will be able to go a bit faster."

He squinted at the slightly older Peter. "You got anything else to add, so we have a better idea of what we're looking for?"

"They're trying to end the world," Peter said. "The slugs are a byproduct. I think it involves summoning something." He spread his hands. "That's about all I know."

Let's save the world!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Library, All Friday

Mod Your Library

Research

Re: Research

Re: Research

Re: Research

Re: Research

Re: Research

Re: Research

Re: Research

Re: Research

Re: Research

Re: Research

Re: Research

Re: Research

Re: Research

Re: Research

Re: Research

Re: Research

Re: Research

Re: Research

Re: Research

Re: Research

Re: Research

Talk to Constantine

Re: Talk to Constantine

Re: Talk to Constantine

Re: Talk to Constantine

Re: Talk to Constantine

Re: Talk to Constantine

Re: Talk to Constantine

Re: Talk to Constantine

Re: Talk to Constantine

Re: Talk to Constantine

Re: Talk to Constantine

Re: Talk to Constantine

Re: Talk to Constantine

Re: Talk to Constantine

Re: Talk to Constantine

Re: Talk to Constantine

Re: Talk to Constantine

Re: Talk to Constantine

OOC