fandomhigh | Fandom Library, Wednesday, September 24th

Yeah, Arden had come in and immediately had to break up a fight between gremlins, which was a truly harrowing experience. Aggressive gremlins were bitey gremlins, and Arden was not interested in wandering around thinking she was a Southern belle again. Or whatever weird hallucination her brain and gremlin venom might cook up together.

After a couple of very close calls between her flesh and gremlin teeth, she'd finally discovered the reason behind the fight: they'd been fighting over whose music was going to be played while they were in the library today. Arden was pretty sure the answer was supposed to be be 'nobody's music, it's the LIBRARY' but there was still the fear of biting.

So instead, she'd come up with a different option and that was why the library was hosting its first ever (probably?) Silent Rave. She'd managed to scrounge up enough phones, mp3 players, walkmans, discmans, and even cassette players (okay, people REALLY needed to go through the lost and found more often) and had handed them out to all the assembled gremlins, so everybody could listen to their own music without bothering anybody else.

And hey! She got to listen to music while tidying up the library, so...bonus!

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Feel free to listen to music through your own headphones or whatever!

As she dances around the library.

Luma had more books to return to the library, and Eleanor had said she wasn't going to do it for her anymore, she had to get used to doing it herself if she was going to keep borrowing them, and so here she was, with a stack of mostly romance novels that looked a little worse for wear.

Although Luma would like to point out that she had been better with this batch. Still a big dog-earred and overhandled, but...better.

She set the stack down on the desk and looked around for whoever was working, tilting her head a little when she spotted Arden and...

Waited for her to finish dancing, she supposed. Wondering if she could just leave them there while she went to go pick out some new ones.

"Ack!" A very dignified noise, to match the very dignified dancing she was doing, yup. "Shit! I mean, hi Luma! Err...been...waiting? Long? Sorry."

Awkward. So very awkward. "We're having a silent rave, so like...yeah..." She was just going to try to paste on a smile and hope for the best. "Uh, how can I help?"

"I've only just arrived," Luma...well, assured wasn't really the right word. She simply just informed Arden. Then sighed slightly. "Eleanor says I need to be better about returning my library books, so..."

She gestured toward the stack. She would hope Arden could put the rest together, although she was less sure about what Arden meant.

"What's a silent rave?"

"A rave where all the music is pumped through headphones instead of speakers," Arden said, moving over to the returns counter to start checking them in. "So there's no ambient noise beyond the sound of people dancing and moving. You know, in case you wanted to talk or if you're in a place with noise ordinances."

Like, say, a library.

"It was the easiest way to stop a fight this morning," she added, gesturing towards several dancing gremlins. "Oooh, this one's good," she said, holding up one of romance novels. And frowning slightly at the condition of it. She might need to go through and make a list of books that needed updating and care. "Did Belle recommend it to you? She did for me."

Luma was frowning, brow furrowed, as she listened to Arden's explanation and considered the gremlin.

"So a rave is a sort of...dance?" she guessed, since she knew what silent was, Arden, silent wasn't the part she was having trouble with....

And when she considered the book Arden had picked out of the pile, she shrugged a little. "She might have recommended it to Eleanor," she said, "I think that's one of the ones she came back with. I haven't really...talked to Belle much."

Or anyone, really.

But she was working on it. Right now, in fact! A thought that spurned her to even add:

"Do you have any you can recommend?"

Right, right. Raves weren't really a thing way back in the 70s, were they. Arden kinda forgot that, since they were so old, but they were more of a 90s thing or whatever. ~~Sentences that hurt my own feelings~~ "Oh! Oh, yeah, sorry. A rave - damn, Stewart would be the best person to explain raves - like a dance party, usually in clubs or a warehouse or something," Arden offered. "Usually they'll have DJs performing remixes or something. You get a lot of, like, dubstep or house or techno or electronica music there. I've got a couple of good rave music playlists if you're interested."

She flipped through a few more of the titles that Luma had borrowed. "There are a bunch of books I can suggest. Have you read ~~meta-for~~Blood and Chocolate? It's the story about a wolf shifter girl who falls in love with a human boy while her pack is going through a bunch of turmoil, following the loss of her dad, the pack's previous alpha. It's kind of a cautionary tale about getting involved with humans; I know the shifters in my world liked it a lot. Hmm. What do you like to read about, and what makes you wanna toss a book across the room?"

And even if they were a thing, it wasn't as if Luma would be going to them, either.

Her shoulders seemed to sag a little more the longer Arden went on, one unknown term stacking on top of the other as if weighing her down, too many follow-up questions to keep track of, so she didn't even bother. She would just look into it later, like she had with when Billie told her about Jimi Hendrix, if she could remember it.

The books were a more immediate focus anyway. But even that made her twitch a little in exasperation, albeit in an entirely different way. Did Arden just think she'd be interested in a book about wolf girl because she was one herself? What made her think she was the kind to just throw books across a room??

(Ignore the evidence of exactly that right in front of them).

But at least she could answer her questions.

"I can't stand," she said, "a book where the main characters make stupid choices the whole time. I especially can't handle it when the main character makes stupid choices when everyone is telling her not to. And I....I don't like Happy Ever After endings as much az I used to, but they're still better than endings were everything is terrible. I like a lot of the old Victorian ans Regency stuff, with either creaky mysterious houses or delicate courtship, and I find love triangles to be espcially tedious. I little bit of action, but sometimes they get ridiculous."

She knew like five things about you, Luma, and that was the biggest one. "Austen's the best for the stuff you mentioned, especially Northanger Abbey, since it's got both delicate courtship and a creaky mysterious house, but you've probably read all her stuff already. Let's see..."

She set down the books into the returned bin and wandered towards the stacks. She figured Luma would either follow her or not, but either way, she figured she could snag an armful of books to suggest.

"House of Salt and Sorrows, the Dark Gothic series has a number of books in it...Mexican Gothic because we don't only need to read books about white people...House of Shadows is, like, hella tropey, but sometimes that's what you want..."

There. That seemed like a good place to at least start.

Luma did follow, especially since she rarely needed a reason to want to go wandering through the shelves. Her grandfather's library was impressive enough, but stuffy and dusty and filled with things that didn't interest her much. Her fingers trailed almost dreamily over the spines as they passed them by, and she nodded along with each of Arden's suggestions.

"And the Chocolate one," she said, because she was interested in it, Arden hadn't been wrong, it had just been the principle of the matter. "And I should get at least one unwieldy book of silly dry poetry that doesn't even rhyme for Eleanor while I'm here, too."

Sue Arden for thinking you might want representation! Which was why she'd mentioned that the shifters in her world had all been fans!

"Ellie likes "The Wasteland," yeah?" Arden said. "I don't know much about poetry, but I put together a list of poets from around Yeats's time--" she pronounced it like it was spelled, yes, "for Kams one time to try to impress her. Ezra Pound might be a good person to snag, since he sorta helped Yeats write it or something."

Who might be listening to music, or might be watching the dancing and asking what the hell was happening in his library.

Lightswitch raves >>> silent raves

Unless you're my neighbors.

Fandom Library, Wednesday, September 24th

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