LSRO: Chapter 315 - Unimpressed (Patreon)

So I have these queued up while I'm recovering from surgery. You'll have to excuse my lack of usual banter. But I still think you're all awesome and appreciate every one of you.

Hope you enjoy

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Chapter 51

Unimpressed

Despite the best laid plans, the next day didn’t dawn quite as Quinn expected. Instead of waking in the morning to have breakfast and then confront her relatives about what they weren’t telling her, Quinn was woken by a very eager owl. 

However, the owl wasn’t Aradie, who seemed to be in the process of waking up at a ridiculously slow pace. The night owl blinked as if complete and utter confusion ran through her. 

No, it wasn’t Aradie. It was that tiny, pale owl who’d had all those nasty images implanted way back when they’d been trying to piece together the Library events through the observations of others. It was the little one that Harish worked with, trying to piece together those memories and figure out which ones were actual memories and which ones were fabricated. He’d been such a tiny thing then, like such a young thing, even though Quinn was fully aware he was probably hundreds of years old.

Funny, she really thought the owl stayed with Harish, which suddenly made Quinn sit up as if hit by lightning. “Harish?” She blurted out. The little owl practically squeaked, and it definitely wasn’t a hoot or a coo. 

Suddenly, all this information in the form of images bombarded Quinn’s mind, and she nodded. “Okay, I’ve got this, I think.” Her brain was still sorting through all the pictures of Harish’s room, Harish’s screens, Harish with a decidedly manic-leaning smile on his face. It only spurred her on. She threw herself out of bed and was up and dressed in record time. She shouted to Aradie, “Come on, go get Mal. We need to head to Harish’s office.” 

And before the bird could even respond, Quinn had taken off down the stairs, landing softly by cushioning herself on the floor. A part of her wondered why she didn’t just jump off the landing every day. It saved, oh, easily 20 seconds. She didn’t stop to look at anybody else. She didn’t stop to assess the Library or the check-in desk. Instead, she ran straight for Harish’s office and burst in.

The door was open when she got there and Harish was inside, pacing. His office had changed. The center console was more compact now and had floating holographic images all around it, turning pictures that she didn’t recognize or understand on a consistent basis. Along the walls were HUD images, she guessed, running a whole plethora of equations that she couldn’t fathom for the life of her. It looked like futuristic computer images against the dark stone walls, sort of like she’d seen in movies before back on Earth. A pale blue glow suffused the entire room, giving Harish an almost fanatical glow.

She’d been in there several seconds when Aradie landed on her shoulder and the low hoot she greeted Quinn with made Harish turn around and focus on her. “Librarian,” he said, and she’d never heard such a joyous tone from him. 

“Yes, your owl fetched me,” she said cautiously. He seemed to be happy and not maniacal. At least the sense of his magic felt like that.

“Oh, fantastic,” he said, his eyes bright and smile wide. “I’ve figured it out. Now, these screens that you brought me were really challenging. Their consistency was off, though, as if somebody had tried to overlay them, make them disappear, combine them even. There were faint traces, you know, implanted traces, ones that were meant to fend off anybody who looked even partially close at it. Now, I’m terribly sorry this took me so long, but you have to understand that unravelling different magical essences and signatures from each other does take time.”

Quinn blinked. She’d never heard him speak this much. In fact, she was fairly certain that this was the most he’d ever spoken to her, probably combined. He didn’t seem to notice her startlement. He carried on and the way he gestured, the way he spoke, it was captivating. His eyes lit up, his magic scrolled through all the diagrams as he spoke, showing her what he meant.

“As you see here, I had to separate out the different strands. They had really intertwined them, but there is one thing. In human science, I believe, on your planet, you have blood. I mean, we all have blood or the equivalent, but... anyway, it can be mostly washed away by certain chemicals. Magic doesn’t do the same thing.” And even as Harish spoke, the magical threads he was showing her that looked similar to DNA strands, but were obviously different, spiralled around, demonstrating to Quinn how they joined together to form a total entity, but one that could be recognized by experts as being a jumbled mess of more than one.

Quinn frowned at them and Harish continued, “Now, magical traces are even more finicky than your blood. They require delicate handling and you can never really hide the signature. We don’t have chemicals that can wash them clear, even though that also is not necessarily always foolproof, but I digress. As I was saying, if somebody knows what they’re doing and I know what I’m doing, they can’t hide behind the traces, you see.” He laughed as if he’d made a joke.

Blind sided. 

That’s what it felt like seeing this person appear completely other than what she was used to. 

In fact, she was beginning to wonder if he’d maybe taken something or perhaps he was just completely sleep deprived. There were massive shadows under his eyes, but he still continued. “So you see, the essence you extracted from the tree ended up being the key to it all, even though that was mightily difficult to separate. You have to understand that there were hundreds of years of magical signatures, traces of people dead and gone.”

Quinn listened attentively, “But not all of those traces were complete inactive despite how much effort was put into making them appear so.” His energy levels seemed to spike. He was getting more and more worked up, and Quinn had no idea how to calm him down. Granted, she could probably figure out something with one of the tranquility-related affinities, but she didn’t know enough about them yet. She wasn’t about to start experimenting on the scientist that was, well, helping them uncover pretty much everything.

And that’s when she felt this overwhelming serenity settle around her. A calmness. A split second before Siliqua walked into the room with Mal and Milaro in tow. Harish paused his explanation and the smile that overcame his face, though tired, was brilliant.

“I told you to wait until I’d retrieved the others,” she admonished him, her tone slightly exasperated but definitely filled with a sense of fun as she looked at her husband. She turned to Quinn. “He’s a little worked up. Loves a good puzzle, you know. And this one you gave him? This one’s kept him up at night. He’s probably been babbling to you. He gets really into it.”

Quinn shook her head. “No, not really. Maybe a little fast and probably a bit of information that I didn’t need to know, but overall, mostly coherent.” She gestured around at the walls and the diagrams. “I must admit, the pictures helped. So I didn’t really have much trouble following along.”

Siliqua laughed. “Excellent then. I’m glad they’ve done their job. Although I dare say you didn’t necessarily need the images to be able to understand.” Siliqua walked a couple of steps forward and turned to her husband. “Sit down, love, and rest. I’ve got this. Don’t worry.”

Harish’s face practically glowed with relief. When he sat, his robes almost swallowed him. Quinn could practically feel the waves of fatigue rushing over him. She glanced at Siliqua who shook her head almost imperceptibly. Well, maybe she didn’t need to worry about him. That didn’t mean that she wouldn’t. But Siliqua got her attention back, turning around to them, clapping her hands.

“Sorry, I didn’t anticipate you arriving so fast, Quinn.”

Quinn grinned. “Well, I need to know who and what we’re facing and figured this was the best way to get an answer. Took me a while to get to it though.”

“Obviously,” Siliqua said. “I mean, otherwise, you wouldn’t have had those other vials. Correct?”

“No, we wouldn’t have. Do you know what happened that caused them to step in?” Quinn knew that Siliqua knew that ‘them’ in this case meant the Chroniclers.

And Siliqua shook her head. “No, I don’t understand why they stepped in.”

And that’s when Quinn made a note to continue looking through those journals she’d been given. There’d be information in there on Korradine’s species and how they navigated, getting her specifically the role of Librarian. It was still something she didn’t completely understand. Quinn also didn’t add that she really was dying to know who set them up. Who’d done this? Because she needed to discover who set Jasper up to take the fall. That was a bit of a personal vendetta though and shouldn’t come down to the Library itself.

Malakai slipped his hand into hers and squeezed as if he could read her mind. He probably could. He could probably at least read her facial expressions and knew her well enough by now to understand that she was thinking brooding thoughts. She squeezed back and didn’t let go of his hand. It was a comfort.

“Anyway,” Siliqua said, “where were we?”

“Oh,” Quinn piped up. “He was explaining the complexity of magical signatures as how they can like never be completely wiped away, only mostly overwritten, and then he sort of had to, I think, unhook or unravel the signatures that had got caught together in order to pull out the definitive ones.”

Siliqua raised an eyebrow. “That’s a very good summation. Yes, that’s exactly what happened. They really tried to cover these signatures up. It wasn’t just a passage of time, although that did contribute to some of it in regard to the... what did you call it, death tree?”

Quinn chuckled this time. Even though in hindsight, it wasn’t exactly funny, just all of it was overwhelmingly nervous. “Yeah, death tree. Good nickname.”

Siliqua cringed. “Anyway, they really tried to cover up several of the signatures. Korradine’s, Adrito’s, and even Kajaro’s signatures were layered over the top, but along with the severely degraded signatures that you brought with you, there were also those in the little jars that the Chroniclers gave to you. Those were crystal clear. Well, in comparison, crystal clear. So much that I... we’ve retested and retested them. We weren’t entirely sure why we’d been given them until we unraveled the ones from the tree, which is why it was the key. Did he tell you about the key?”

Quinn shook her head. “He mentioned it but didn’t elaborate.”

“Hmm,” Siliqua said. “Well, there are several signatures in the vials given to you by Carafax, and we have your sample, and we have everybody else’s sample who works here. We have Malakai’s, Milaro’s... everybody’s. So that we could differentiate and make sure that we weren’t crossing our wires, since so many people went over the tree area after the fact. But when we were unraveling the tree’s, those signatures contained in the vials were under so many layers and yet clearer and less muddled than the ones that had been there obviously the longest. The other two that we confirmed were Ardenil.”

Malakai gasped. “Yeah, I’m sorry, Mal. I wish it wasn’t her as well.”

He shrugged. “It’s not like I know her. It’s not like she knows me. It’s just that she’s related to me and that automatically makes me feel guilty.”

Siliqua chuckled. “That is like the curse of family sometimes. Anyway, also Karella.”

Quinn paused and held up a hand. “Wait a second. Karella? The mother we rescued from the Balisor incident? Are you sure?”

“Yeah, we’ve gone over it numerous times. I actually went to check on her and her daughter, but they’re gone, and the doctors didn’t release them.” Siliqua didn’t seem impressed.

Quinn sighed. “Well, I have to admit, I wasn’t expecting that. 

“I know you... you’re a little close with them.”

“Not exactly. I mean, we saved them, or at least I thought we’d saved them.” Quinn mulled it over in her mind. Maybe she could see how it had all been what she’d wanted to see. “And I’ll tell you, Karella is one hell of an actress.”

~~

Much love

KT