Fandom High School

How were they literally a week out from Christmas? Arden was not prepared. Arden was the opposite of prepared. And Arden wasn't about to get any more prepared during her shift today. Yes, the candles that had shown up today were very pretty and she loved how not flammable they seemed to be, but she didn't love how hard the gremlins were working to test that inflammability.

So yeah, her day was spent running around and keeping gremlins from trying to light the library, the books, the furniture, and themselves on fire.

"None of these things are the lights of Hanukkah, you jerks!" she seethed.

Arden had meant to be very productive and get everything tidied up and put away before leaving for California after her shift, but then she'd gotten distracted by some guy's weird bricks supposedly "inspired by the blockchain." Or rather, she'd gotten distracted by everyone in the comments covering their eyes and saying, "Oh no" to every new detail that came out about how this guy was building his house.

Did she know anything about engineering, or construction, or building history? Nope! But she was learning!

"Oh look! His Reddit post..."

Huh. There were a bunch of music books out around the library. Arden found one for guitars, basses, drums, even keyboards. Books about music, books teaching people how to play the instruments, books about caring and maintaining them. Even books about cutting a demo and sending it around to record labels.

Arden wasn't sure if the gremlins were starting a band, or there was something else in the library that was thinking about it (possibly even the library itself?), but all afternoon she heard strains of music coming from different areas, sometimes just warmup exercises and chords, sometimes whole songs.

Couldn't find the musicians when she went looking for them, of course. But could definitely hear them.

"Hey!" she called at one point. "Seven Nation Army?"

A long moment of silence, and from over near the biographies section, the slow reverberations of a bass guitar. Bum bumbum bum bumbuuuuumbuuummm. Bum bum bumbum bum bumbumbuuummm...

It was two days from Halloween and rather than try to get the gremlins to focus on books and studying, Arden had remembered that the library also rented movies and other media, too!

So she pulled down the big screen, set up the DVD player, and started playing some Halloween movies from last century. The All Hallow's Eve Tree, naturally, and The Least Good Witch, The Bad Dream Before Yule, and Abracadabra to name some of the classics from the olden days. Hopefully the movies would be able to keep them quiet and entertained and not tearing the library apart looking for candy.

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!

It was still technically summer, so Arden was really confused by the creepy snow monster that had tried to attack her on the way to school today. She'd been alone, so she'd grabbed as many chords of magic as she could and shoved them at the monster - which had poofed into bitty snowflakes.

Which, in retrospect, might have been overkill. Especially since she was immediately hit by the exhaustion that came from using up most of her energy at once. She managed to drag herself the rest of the way to the library, but now was doing her best not to pass out at the counter.

She also wasn't moving from this chair, because if she did, she was pretty sure she'd end up falling over flat.

The last thing Arden remembered before her sudden finching was the library being a complete wreck, so she was very grateful to discover that, at some point in the intervening two weeks, someone or something had cleaned it all up. She couldn't swear that the mess had been the reason for her transformation, but she couldn't completely disregard the possibility, either. Today, however, that seemed unlikely to be a concern either way; the library was spotless. In fact, the circulation desk was practically gleaming in the light.

Hey, wait a minute--

Arden marched over to the desk and examined it closely. Yep, someone had smeared Vaseline on the surface of it. And there were thumbtacks on the chair she normally sat in. And a bucket was perched precariously over the door to Mr. Constantine's office.

Someone had been in the mood for pranks, it appeared.

[ocdless!]

There was a small, personalized rainstorm over Arden's head. It had appeared the minute she'd stepped into the library and she'd be freaking out about her powers if several of the gremlins hadn't also had miniature weather patterns over their heads. One, who was grinning, seemed to be in a perpetual sunbeam. Another two had rain like she did. A fourth was glaring and dark clouds roiled ominously above its head, with occasional flashes of heat lightning.

She was just going to sit here and pretend like she had no idea what weather went with what moods, and definitely like she didn't notice that it rained harder whenever she thought of her depressing showing in class yesterday.

At least the rain disappeared before it hit anything that wasn't her. Like the books.

Arden hadn't been sleeping well for the past few nights. Bad dreams - not nightmares, just unpleasant and uneasy dreams. They weren't the kind of dreams that made it impossible to go back to sleep once you woke up from them, but they were the kind of dreams that kept happening every time you closed your eyes.

Normally, Arden tried to be a good worker here in the library, but it was summer, and Shenanigans. Maybe nobody would notice if she curled up and took a nap under the blanket she kept for when Gray got Sloth'd...

Another library shift, another afternoon of research. This time, however, she was researching restaurants. Two weeks in a row at number one was pretty awesome, and Cal really did deserve to go somewhere nice. Arden was still uneasy about going into Baltimore, considering that was how Callista had found her, but there were other cities full of restaurants. New Orleans. Louisville. Atlanta. DC. New York. And that was just the East Coast. Any of those cities would have amazing restaurants, it was just a matter of finding which one had the best meals that matched up with her budget. Thank the goddess they lived in a civilized age where she could just look up menus online, rather than having to actually, you know. Call someone. Like a monster.

It was break week, which meant Arden was going through their collections, checking over books for damage and wear and tear, and setting aside the ones that looked like they maybe weren't up for another year of use. Considering some of these books had never been published (or even written) here, Arden wasn't sure how they were going to replace any of them, but that sounded like a librarian problem. Maybe Constantine was gonna magic them back into pristine condition?

Again, librarian problem.

Fortunately, Arden's headache from yesterday had gone away, so she was back at her post behind the circulation desk, poking at her phone. She'd tried on a bunch of dresses in her closet this morning, snapping selfies of each of them, and now she was flipping through each one, trying to figure out which dress she should wear Friday night.

And sometimes checking her phone to make sure she hadn't missed a message from Gray about how...his weekend...had gone.

It was story time in the library today. Not Arden, no, but the Irish mythology section had gotten together to act out the gripping saga of the Táin Bó Cúailnge. It was silent, the whole story being told via relevant cover art, titles, and very dramatic acting. Which, you know, considering they were books, was an impressive feat all by itself.

Arden and the gremlins were all pretty transfixed on the show. Honestly, the only thing they were lacking was popcorn.

Arden had a serious case of the dun-wannas. She blamed leaving vacationing in Barbados for a wonderful week. So instead of doing anything productive, like keeping an eye on the gremlins, glaring down the bats who flew low enough to graze her hair, or interrogating the books on how they'd ended up with beads, Arden was sitting behind the desk, doing sudoku.

Possibly sulking, just a little.

Arden came into the library slowly, yardstick in hand just in case the library books hadn't gotten the message that the pollen was over and they needed to behave themselves again. "Hello?" she called. "Y'all good?"

Coming further inside proved not only were the books back to behaving normally, the area had even been cleaned up, leaving it good as new. She held onto her suspicion for the first half hour of her shift, just waiting for whatever fresh madness was going to start just when she let down her guard.

It wasn't until she looked up and spotted a small, dark, winged shape fluttering through the air that she let herself relax. Bats? Sure. Bats were fine. She didn't know how they'd gotten into the library or when or how many, but now there were bats here and she was just gonna roll with it.

Arden had been dreading heading into the library today, unsure what she was in for. Would the gremlins be having a speeddating event like 3MD? Would there be safer sex displays holding lectures? Would the safer sex book displays be lecturing speeddating gremlins? She didn't know. All she knew was that the library would absolutely, positively refuse to be normal about this week.

And she was right.

Not about the book displays or the speeddating gremlins. Instead, there were just a thousand different romance genres everywhere. Shifter romances were flirting with erotic myth retellings. Historical romances were fluttering their pages invitingly at post-apocalyptic ones. Romantacies were insisting to their friends that they could 'fix' graphic celebrity tell-alls. Glossy art books featuring nudes canoodling with cheaply-printed translations of BL light novels. Everywhere she looked, there were piles of books an the susurration of paper brushing against paper, the scent of ink heavy in the air. Worse was when she'd accidentally glance somewhere and catch the books delicately sliding their pages together in an intimate--

"N-no thank you! Absolutely not!" she snapped, knocking two books (an overly-sexualized murder mystery and a copy of Lady Chatterly's Lover) apart with a yardstick she was keeping handy for just this purpose. "If you wanna do any of that, there are any number of private bookshelves available. Go on now, shoo."

She needed to talk to Constantine about hazard pay for this week.

Well, the heat had been fixed. Sort of.

The good news: the library was no longer a frigid wasteland. The bad news: it was now a sweltering mess instead. It seemed like the heat had been turned all the way up and then broken off. Even having the windows open wasn't doing a damn thing to cool the library off.

Of course, Arden had dressed preparing for another week in Antarctica, not a sauna, so she'd come in wearing a thermal shirt, a sweater, a fleece, and a thick winter jacket. Which was why she she could be found in just her bra and her jeans behind the desk today. Because she wasn't going to get heat stroke just so nobody would get the vapors with her wearing something that covered more than her usual bikini top.

Thank the goddess she was wearing a cute bra today. It was the little things, okay?

It was December now, which meant time for Arden to start making a holiday gift list and checking it twice. She had a lot more people to buy for this year than she had last and that thought made her almost glow slightly with happiness. Not literally though. She'd checked.

Still it was amazing how much could change in just a matter of a few months. Hells, she'd only run away from Callista's house not even a full year and a half ago? And now she had friends, a boyfriend, a best friend, mentors...

Families.

It was practically dizzying.

...And so was the number of people now that she had to buy gifts for, but still. What a problem to have, right? Much better than the alternative.

The real question though - did she have enough creativity for shopping for all these folks?

Ooof.