LSRO: Chapter 108 - Almost 8000 Years (Patreon)

Soooo

This one was a heap of fun. Especially coming up with book marks. Makes my day lol

It's not a cliffy, it's another upbeat. Sure I hope you'll want to read on, but this doesn't leave you in despair lol

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Chapter 108

Almost 8000 years

Eric was uncharacteristically silent as he followed Quinn to her office. She could tell there was something on his mind, and her ability to read him had absolutely nothing to do with her connection to the Library. It was basically because she could read people and wasn't a complete idiot.

Her office felt cooler than normal, as if somebody had turned the air conditioning on. But that wasn't how the Library worked; it didn't have air conditioning, it just had magic. Which seemed to be much more environmentally friendly than freon.

She tossed a thought at the Library, emphasizing that she didn't like the cold, and almost immediately she could already feel the warmth starting to permeate the room. Nice. She glanced at her arm, noticing a tingle. Those irridescent golden glowing blue scales briefly shimmered over her skin again. She'd not been paying enough attention while she'd been attending to Kajaro to know if they'd popped up then. But... she was fairly certain this was her new normal. It came along with everything else since the Synchronization.

Still, Quinn liked being able to do things with a thought, even if that meant the occasional overlay of mana scales flared up over the skin of her arms and hands. She hadn't yet had the guts to use magic while she was naked in the bathroom, for fear that it lit up all over her body and it would freak her out ever so slightly. But that was another thing she was mostly certain of.

She flopped into her massive oversized desk chair and studied Eric for a few seconds, strumming her fingers on her desk while Aradie sat on the top of her chair and spammed Quinn with soothing and relaxing images. She sighed and waved her owl away, who indignantly went and sat on her perch, and then Quinn finally spoke. "What?" she said to Eric. Because before anything else, he was going to need to get whatever was in his head off his chest, or they weren't going to get anywhere.

He paused, hesitant, hovering right in front of her. His wings still made that faint buzzing sound that Quinn found oddly soothing.

"You know, you can sit on the desk if you want to," she said, wondering if he ever got tired of being airborn.

He raised an eyebrow and cracked half a smile, which was much more like the Eric she knew, but it didn't take long for that brow to furrow again and the worry to leak out of him.

Quinn's patience, which wasn't the most legendary thing, was wearing thin. "Come on, Eric, just spill it."

He sighed, and then the words rushed out like he was trying not to second-guess himself. "You used compartmentalization to segment off your emotions back there, didn't you?"

"Well, yes," Quinn said. "There was no way that I could have done what I needed to do while trying to feel everything that I was feeling."

Eric closed his eyes a moment and fluttered down onto the desk, crossing his legs in front of her. She marveled that the two-and-a-half-foot imp could manage to seem so much larger than life. He had such a commanding presence, and she was mildly concerned that his brimstone-esque body wasn't burning a hole into her wooden desk. Maybe she was just glad he wasn't.

"You need to be careful doing that. It can often backfire on you." He said softly. Gone was his usual joviality, in its place a seriousness he rarely exhibited.

Quinn raised an eyebrow this time. "Well, how so? I mean, I get it. It's not good to cut off emotions. I can't make myself into a sociopath. I'm not aiming to either. I just needed to concentrate. And when I need to concentrate, I need to get rid of the distractions. And the emotions are, at least when I'm trying to access all the information I need in order to make it out the other side of a battle, they're distracting. Right now, I don't know what I know well enough to simply command the information to come to the forefront. It's still a process for me, and with Tenejo as my opponent, I didn't have time to waste."

"Everything is easier and seems much more possible when you have no emotions to question or pause the actions you take, Quinn." Eric's gaze didn't leave her own. "Sometimes, it's just easier not to use them at all. And that can be very dangerous."

"You mean to say some people just don't amalgamate them again, they just keep them separate?" She asked, somewhat surprised. Why someone would want to live without emotions was a puzzle.

"You kept them separate, you didn't just kind of lock them away?" Eric asked.

Quinn nodded. "Yeah, I didn't get rid of them, I just pushed them to the side so I could concentrate. You know, compartmentalized."

"That's more like separation, which is a very important distinction," Eric said. "Still, be cautious. It can be extremely dangerous to lock off your emotions like that. There are... I have horror stories I could tell you when we have time."

"Maybe one of these days, you can tell me." Quinn smiled. She liked horror stories if they weren't about things that had almost killed her. "But I promise, I'm not going to get rid of my emotions. That would make life so colorless and dull. Ever so bland."

"Really?" he asked, his eyebrow rising up in surprise.

"Yes, really. Half the fun of any experience I have with others is feeling. Feeling the happiness, the frustration, the sadness, the glee. Heck, even feeling pain. And then there are new tastes that come with emotions of wonder and surprise and eagerness to eat more. And then there's new magic which is just amazing." Quinn sighed wistfully, suddenly feeling very hungry. "Without my emotions, I can't tease you. What reason would I have? I can't taste Cook's cooking to the fullest. I can't appreciate it. And I can't laugh at Lynx."

Eric chuckled at the last comment, but then sobered up and studied her before speaking. "Well, when you put it that way, just promise me that you'll be careful."

Quinn nodded. "I promise you that I'll be extremely careful when I compartmentalize my emotions."

"Well, good. About time you listened to me, you young whippersnapper." Eric gave her a wink and a grin, reverting to his usual self for a moment.

Quinn laughed, remembering that the imp was getting close to 8,000 years old and thus had a lot of footing to call her a young whippersnapper. She wished for just a second that she could have a cup of tea. Because she was suddenly very thirsty. But she wasn't about to summon one of the golems to bring her one. Instead, she turned to her owl. "Aradie, would you go and get me a drink from Cook?"

Aradie flew off her perch with a long hoot that pretty much told Quinn that she wasn't an errand girl and would only do this, this once. Quinn grinned. She was hoping Cook would send back some snacks too. She was famished after using so much magic back in the interrogation room. "Okay, Eric, now it's your turn. You need to talk to me about those missing books. And while you're at it, I'd like to hear all about your uncle."

Eric hesitated. "You want to know about my uncle? Why do you need to know about my uncle? He has nothing to do with the Library." The imp sounded so defensive.

"Ah," Quinn smiled at him, confident that she wanted the answers even more now, "but isn't he the one who had the list? Isn't he the one who originally donated the books that were my thing?"

"Yes, he is." Eric answered hesitantly.

"Is he part of the council?" Quinn asked, suddenly curious. She only knew that Milaro, Harish, and Siliqua were members.

"No, he isn't. But he'd probably help if they asked."

"So he likes the Library." Quinn grinned.

Eric rolled his eyes. "He wouldn't have entrusted the books to the Library if he didn't like it, although right now he's not in the best mood about it. I did tell him that it wasn't the Library's fault that the books went missing, but I'm not sure how much he believed me."

"Okay, well, who is your uncle?" Quinn asked, that minuscule amount of patience eroded already.

"He's one of the seven overlords of Halcius."

"Oh, does that make you a prince as well? Can we tease you about being a prince like you tease Malakai?" Quinn laughed at Eric's expression while she spoke.

"No, I'm not a prince." He answered quickly, and then continued after some hesitation. "I am technically extremely expendable."

"Oh, I thought you couldn't die," Quinn said, slightly confused. He wasn't just immortal, he was like impervious or something from what she'd picked up when they went to the Debilian homeworld.

"There are a lot worse things than death, Quinn," Eric said, suddenly more serious than she had ever seen him in the almost two months she'd known him. A shadow fell over his gaze and for a moment, he looked like a fiery, hellish, imp of legend.

"Oh," she said, "well, just so you know, the Library and I do not think you're expendable."

Speak for yourself, Quinn.

Shut up, she thought to the Library before continuing. "You stick with us."

Eric smiled and he actually laughed. "Well, thank you, Quinn, I appreciate that."

"Great," she said, clapping her hands. "Then how about we move on to this book list?"

"Okay, okay," Eric pulled out what looked like a notepad but turned out to be some type of magical little screen and it was tiny. It fit in his small hands and he peered at it for several seconds. "Okay, so you've already retrieved DeKarlyle's Thesis of Spatial Distortion and Machmüller's Theory of Dimensional Dissolution and Disintegration through Ritual Sacrifice."

"Yes, we have both of those in our possession and you know that, especially since you were there for the latter. So keep it going, stop stalling." Quinn kept her voice nice and easy.

"I'm not stalling, Quinn. It's kind of complex and you need to just let me work with this. Now the ones you're missing that are not on the list we have and that are not on the list that we're missing, so the ones that the Library has been somehow tricked into believing that it never had are the following. The Crown and Fall of Pocket Dimensions due to Spatial Interference. That's the first one."

"Yeah," he paused for a second, frowning, like the cogs in his brain were clicking together quickly. "That's not a good thing."

"I'm gathering that. Can we just get through the rest because I don't like the ideas I'm starting to have," Quinn said. She really didn't. The book names were just not a happy place to be when they were all put together.

"Okay, Ririn’s Dimensional Distortion through Sacrificial Means and finally the Parsneauvian Theory of Spatial Dimension Manipulation is the last one missing out of that series."

Quinn paused and pinched her brow. She didn't want to give voice to the thoughts running through her head but they were loud and clamoring to get out and the Library was sort of roiling in her mind, uneasy and brimming with concern. "So just let me spitball here," she said.

Aradie chose that moment to squawk back into the room and drop a bag on Quinn's desk before returning to her perch and giving her the evil eye.

"I'm sorry," she said, somewhat glad that the interruption gave her another moment to clarify her thoughts. "I'm just thirsty and hungry."

Quinn picked up a bottle, took a swig and went back over her thoughts. Nope, they were still pretty crap. "Just bear with me. The Library is in a pocket dimension, right? I mean, I'm correct, right?"

"It exists within its own temporally created spatial pocket dimension. So, yes." Eric answered.

"Great and it can be anywhere at any time summoned by anyone who can use the Library, is that correct?" Quinn pinched the bridge of her nose, trying to stave off the headache she knew was coming. Next thing she absorbed was going to be a plethora of healing tomes.

"Well yes, you've been there and you've used the doors. You understand it as well as I do, Quinn." Eric sounded impatient.

"Don't lose your temper with me. I'm making sure that I have understood everything correctly." But she could tell that she had because Eric's face was a lot paler. Somehow even his charcoal skin appeared a few shades lighter, which meant Quinn was probably on the right track. "And it's not good that all of these five books that have been missing, that we weren't entirely sure were all missing, that we didn't even realize the Library should have in the restricted vault, all have to do with some sort of spatial-pocket-dimension-y ritua- sacrifice-manipulation-thing."

Eric let out a longe-suffering sigh. "Yeah, I would say that's a very bad thing."

"Great," Quinn said, trying hard to stem the panic she could feel rising up within her. "This, for example, would be an absolutely opportune moment to compartmentalize my emotions. Except I also need them to help me judge how to react to this. So, what do we do?"

Eric shrugged, and then squirmed uneaswily. "You're the Librarian."

Quinn might have snapped a little. "Yeah, and I've known about magic and been the Librarian for like seven weeks. You've been alive for almost 8,000 years. You don't have any ideas?"

Eric burst out laughing. "You know, that's a really good point, Quinn," he said. "And I think I can come up with some ideas. But all flippancy aside, I think you should call Milaro and Lynx and make sure the Library is present. Because this has officially become a shit show."

"Great." Quinn said, biting into one of the donuts Cook had sent like they knew she'd need the sugar rush. "And here I was hoping I'd overreacted."

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Weeeeeee so much to get done lol