Fandom Library, Wednesday, October 30th

[afraid_of_marshmallows]

"All right, y'all, basic rules," Arden said sternly to the gremlins gathered around the circulation desk. "First rule is no hurting anything. That means no knocking things over, breaking anything, tearing anything apart, or doing any of the same things to people, got that?" She looked at them very sternly. "Second, no running around, no fighting or roughhousing, no making a lot of noise or a lot of fuss. This is still a library and if this gets too out of pocket in here, I'm gonna call an end to things early. Third, trying to cheat me gets you banned from participating at all. The last rule is that if you're gonna eat your treats here in the library, you can only eat them at that table over there." She pointed. "I find crumbs or smears of chocolate or anything else around the library, this'll never happen again and it'll be all y'all's fault. Got that?"

The gremlins all nodded solemnly and Arden was just gonna hope for the best. "So I've hidden a bunch of puzzle pieces around the library," she said. "Anyone who shows me a puzzle piece gets a bag of candy." She held up a treat-sized bag of M&Ms. "If you manage to get all the pieces and put the puzzle together before the end of my shift, you can have whatever candy I have left."

The gremlins cheered. But quietly.

"Okay, so ready, set....go."

The goblins scattered and Arden settled back with a book and the promise of at least a little bit of quiet time.

Comments

Mod Your Library

[afraid_of_marshmallows]

Read, study, hunt for puzzle pieces, whatever!

Talk to the Aide

[afraid_of_marshmallows]

Come chat! So long as you didn't interfere with the important puzzle-piece-for-candy line.

Re: Talk to the Aide

[napking]

"Hi, Arden!" Gray called to her as he headed toward the stacks.

Wait. Hadn't he been here before they went to Quebec, too? Had Gray become...studious? Sounded fake.

Re: Talk to the Aide

[afraid_of_marshmallows]

"Hey, Gray!" Arden said, her assumption that he was here to chat proving very wrong as he kept walking by. "Hey, uh, need some help finding...something?"

She was pretty sure Gray wasn't spending his precious Sloth-free time on schoolwork, but then what...?

Re: Talk to the Aide

[napking]

Gray froze like he'd been caught, then said, "Oh, I'm just looking for...stuff..."

Vague, Gray. Very helpful. Very not at all suspicious.

Re: Talk to the Aide

[afraid_of_marshmallows]

Yeah, that was an eyebrow being raised in your direction, friend. "Well, lucky for you, we have all sorts of books in stuff," she drawled.

Re: Talk to the Aide

[napking]

"Yeah..." Gray agreed as he drifted over toward Arden and the desk. There were a lot of books, and he didn't really know where to start. Especially when the books declined to be organized by anything as prosaic as a card catalog or whatever they were using in this century.

"Actually, maybe you could help me figure out what to look for first?" How prepared were you to be appalled, Arden?

Re: Talk to the Aide

[afraid_of_marshmallows]

Could it possibly be any worse than his pickup lines?

"I can try," she said, leaning against the desk and offering him some M&Ms. "What are you looking for?"

She was not prepared for this.

Re: Talk to the Aide

[napking]

"So, uh," Gray said. "I need to either figure out how to cure unspecified cancer, or to break a soul bound. Somebody else's soul bond. Not mine." Important to clarify that, he thought. "Or...possibly both. Both would be good.

Ooh, M&Ms.

Re: Talk to the Aide

[afraid_of_marshmallows]

Arden blinked. Several times. "...You think you can find a book that will let you heal cancer better than a hospital full of oncologists can?" she asked making sure she'd heard that (and that he'd heard that out loud) right. "And what's a soul bond?"

Re: Talk to the Aide

[napking]

"I mean, maybe?" Gray said defensively. "I don't know what you've got in here!" It was a magic library. It was possible!

Wait. Huh. "Do you not have fated mates in your universe?" he asked. "I know humans don't, usually, but supposedly all supernatural beings in my world have a fated mate and my player wants to fling herself out a window just typing that...or you could say soulmate. Most people never meet theirs so I have no idea if that's true or not. But when you do, there's like a..." he gestured vaguely. "Bond."

Re: Talk to the Aide

[afraid_of_marshmallows]

"How does that even work," Arden asked. "Like, if a vampire or a shifter turns a human, then what happens? Does a fated mate just magically appear in the world? Was it always going to happen, so the fated mate already existed and was just waiting for them to get turned? I don't understand the metaphysics here."

And you shouldn't, Arden. Be glad.

"But back to the cancer briefly, we're a magic library, yeah, but I would think you need big magic for that already."

Somewhere, Constantine's ears were burning."

Re: Talk to the Aide

[napking]

"Oh, no, vampires and shifters are born that way where I'm from," Gray told her. The player was pretty sure, anyway. If that vampire-centric spinoff ever happened it might contradict that, who knew? "But I don't really know how it works. Clearly it doesn't make any sense..." And not just metaphysically. "That's why I need to figure it out. So I can fix it." Fix what, buddy?

"So like the cancer thing might be a Special Collections ask...?" He wasn't giving up. This was too important.

Talk to the Librarian

[afraid_of_marshmallows]

Who hopefully didn't have a problem with this...

Re: Talk to the Librarian

[talentforlying]

The librarian was in his office, mostly cursing out ancient cursed tomes that needed to be rebound in more ways than one. And was mostly trying to ignore whatever the kids were doing or talking about, because, well cursed tomes.

Although the words 'magic' and 'cancer' absolutely caught his interest, and he nudged his door open a bit wider with his foot the next time he passed by it. What? Eavesdropping was a time-honored way of collecting information!

Re: Talk to the Librarian

[afraid_of_marshmallows]

Eventually, after their conversation had shifted from fated mates which was not a phrase Arden was going to get over very soon, she went and tapped on her boss's door. "Excuse me? Sir? Do you have a minute?"

Re: Talk to the Librarian

[talentforlying]

"If it's whatever spell you used to make the bloody gremlins behave, tape a copy to the front desk so the other aides can use it too," John quipped, binding the last book with an iron band all the way around it that sealed itself. "Bloody hell, Finch, you don't have to call me 'sir.' Constantine is fine."

Re: Talk to the Librarian

[afraid_of_marshmallows]

"It's the magic of bribery, ssss...Constantine," she said. Look, lifetime habits were hard to break. "I might spend half my paychecks on candy and arts and crafts supplies, but they don't bite and they don't wreck anything, so I count it fair," she added with a soft laugh.

Re: Talk to the Librarian

[talentforlying]

"I'm aware how fond you are of the law of equivalent exchange," he replied with a grin, gesturing for her to come in and take a seat. There was another chair... under a stack of papers. He quickly got up to scoop those out of the way, dumping them into the never-ending stack on his desk. "You're looking better than before the break. What's this about?"

You know. When she looked like she'd gone a round or two and lost. John didn't like making assumptions when kids started looking like that, but he knew from personal experience it was rarely innocent.

Shit like skateboarding accidents and mono were for normal kids, not the Fandom ones.

Re: Talk to the Librarian

[afraid_of_marshmallows]

"Mostly, I just like knowing in advance if I'm putting myself in debt to someone else," Arden said, as she sat down. "Before they spring it on me as a surprise."

At his mention of before the break, she winced slightly, left hand unconsciously coming up to cover the inside of her elbow. "Um, it's not about that," she said. "It's about--well, does Special Collections have any information about curing cancer with magic?"

She asked. John Constantine. While the world laughed.

Re: Talk to the Librarian

[talentforlying]

The world laughed, and the Laughing Magician stopped smiling.

Constantine leaned back in his chair, regarding Arden. "In my years at Fandom, you're the first to come looking for a magical solution for the mortal condition," he replied, which wasn't an answer. "Magical plagues, sure, but not so much the more mundane -- though no less terrible -- ends."

"You understand why something like that would be in Special Collections, if it exists at all, yeah?"

Hypocrite, thy name is Constantine.

Re: Talk to the Librarian

[afraid_of_marshmallows]

"Well, I've got a couple of theories," she said steadily. "I mean, I don't have--" She stumbled and tried again. "I don't know anything about witches or mages or anything like that, but I'm starting with a guess that it's because it takes a lot of magic to pull off. Healing people--" She rubbed her arm again "--at least as far as I've ever seen takes a lot of energy and effort and that's just basic injuries. Something as invasive as cancer, if it's beyond where doctors can get it out, means hunting it all down and...that sounds hard. Sounds like the kind of thing that could kill somebody if they didn't do it right. Also, not even counting how hard the magic would be to do, the hu--the body is really finicky. Doctors have to study for years before they do anything. It'd be really easy to ffff--" Wait no, that was okay "--fuck up and there aren't a lot of systems that you can mess around with and still have them turn out okay. Keeping them out of reach of people who are 'solve problems first, ask questions later, inadvertently create more problems' just seems smart."

Re: Talk to the Librarian

[talentforlying]

"You're not wrong," John agreed. "Bodies are complicated things, and cancer isn't some outside splinter easily removed. It's the body itself, twisting and going out of control."

He sighed and rubbed his eyes. "Is there a reason we are jumping directly to magical means, rather than medical treatment? Magic should never be viewed as the 'easier' way out of things."

Re: Talk to the Librarian

[afraid_of_marshmallows]

Gray had been planning on leaving a note for Constantine anyway, so she doesn't feel like she's betraying confidences to name drop him. "I think that's what they're doing right now," she said. "But Gray thinks that if it is some kind of complex magic, starting to find and figure it out now seems like a much better idea than when you're already counting down the clock."

OOC

[afraid_of_marshmallows]

So many things, so little brain.