LSRO: Chapter 319 - Payment Plan (Patreon)

Hiiiiii

Here's another chapter. I really like this one.

I'm going to go to sleep now.

I'm aiming to get another chapter up tomorrow but it could just mean I post 5 next week, depending on the state of the hand.

State of the hand. That'd be a weird band name, right?

Enjoy!

~~

Chapter 55

Payment Plan

Quinn felt as though her head was a bass drum, pounding so loudly it was almost unbearable. As if someone had set up shop behind her eyes and was banging out a rhythm. She rubbed at her temples, staring at the murder board while Mal went to fetch them a late snack. 

His wish for sleep had gone unanswered because they’d only been gone a few hours by Library standards. 

It was late for her usual routine in the Library, even though the Library was always open and never seemed to sleep. Idly, she leafed through her list of affinities, curious to see if there was one that would just allow her to forgo sleep without any detriment.

It didn’t seem so.

Quinn sighed and turned her thoughts away from her procrastination topic and back to the matters at hand.

The Library had originally been organic. It’d been a cosmicisodracus. So how did it cope now with no sleep, now that it was an all-powerful-pocket-dimension-portal wielding Library? Quinn was a wreck after one all-nighter. She couldn’t fathom an eternity of them. Not that she really had any time for imagining anything at that moment. She realized she was going wildly off tangent.

She looked down at her hands that had once again clutched the letter from Dinal in her fingers. She read it over again.

Dear Librarian,

I can only hope that they found you. You are their one hope. I tell you this as an erstwhile friend of a Librarian. There are things I cannot say or write on pain of death right now. But as the latter is close anyway, I must at least try. So, please heed these words of warning, as well as I might give them. When all around you is frustrating and nothing quite adds up, the answer could be closer than you realize and nothing like you thought. Pay attention to your instincts once you have honed them. Remember, not all foes are enemies and not all friends are allies. And be careful, watch your back and know who to trust.

She had no way to parse that information, to understand exactly what he’d been thinking. It drove her absolutely up the wall. She rubbed her hands over her face after putting the letter down, just wishing she could sleep for a week right now. Except that wasn’t possible.

A whiff of something absolutely delectable reached her nostrils.

“Hey.” Malakai brought her a small tub of soup and sat it on the table in front of her. Then he placed down what looked like a dense piece of freshly baked bread. It smelled heavenly and was heavily smeared with butter. He nudged her to move over. “Cook said they felt like your current mood matched the goulash and they said to remind you not to inhale it, savor it, and see what you see.”

Quinn looked up at him quizzically. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Mal shrugged. “Cryptic does seem to follow you around, Quinn.”

She smiled, but she didn’t really think it reached her eyes. Not that she could see. She laughed at her train of thought. Maybe she should have insisted they sleep once they got back in. That time dilation always did a number on her, apparently. She sighed and dug in, wincing as she moved to get more comfortable.

“Are you sore?” Mal asked, concern tinging his voice.

She nodded. 

“Can I help?”

She looked up at him and shrugged. “Sure, if you think you can.”

He moved behind the couch and put his hands on her shoulders, beginning to work the knots out. Quinn breathed in and out, feeling like jelly for just a second before a sense of relaxation overtook her. Her shoulder tension lessened as Malakai worked, and Quinn turned to devour her food. It was delicious. She wasn’t entirely sure what meats or ingredients Cook used, but it definitely mimicked the Hungarian goulash she’d loved so much back at home.

Which reminded her she needed to check her phone. She hadn’t replied to anyone for a few days. She looked around for it.

“What are you trying to find?” Mal asked.

“Just my phone.”

“It’s over on your desk. Do you need it?”

“I’d like it.”

He chuckled and walked away to get it. Even though he was back a few seconds later, Quinn felt the absence of the heat from his hands. It made shivers run down her back because suddenly she felt cold. She took the phone in one hand while she ate with the other. The bread was already gone.

She frowned at the phone, scrolling through her messages. “Hmm. One from my stepbrother and one from Hallie.”

“She seems to send you messages quite regularly,” Mal said.

“Yeah, she does. Just check-ins. She keeps asking to have coffee. I keep telling her I’m out of town.”

“Technically,” Malakai said, “That’s not a lie.”

Quinn laughed. 

“You tell the truth.” 

“Do you know who else tells the truth?”

Mal shook his head.

“They were right, you know.”

He chuckled. “About?”

Quinn gestured vaguely. “Cook. About all of it. Especially dinner. They’re always right about dinner. Attuned to my moods.”

She knew she couldn’t keep delaying things. So she shrugged off Malakai’s massage, slurped up the last of her goulash, put her phone down, and pulled up the pillar controls through her HUD. She took a deep breath.

“Two more branches are about to open up, you know,” she said. “I need to give them power somehow.”

Mal didn’t say anything. Not that he really could have contributed to anything. Quinn activated it on her HUD. Eight pillars down, two to go. Ashiron being one of them made her palms sweat.

“Are we really any closer to a solution about Ashiron?” she asked, half hoping that Mal knew an answer to that and kind of half talking to herself.

Mal frowned. “Sort of, I guess. I mean, I know they’re working on it.”

Quinn laughed, absently paying attention to the HUD telling her that the system needed 24 hours to calibrate the new pillar activation. It was nothing new. It’s how it treated every new pillar activation. She’d have been more surprised if it had been different. Did the system know that they were nearing the need to activate Ashiron? From everything she’d learned from the system, it should realize that. After all, it was capable of deduction, and yet it didn’t seem worried. Could the system seem worried?

Or else, it just had complete faith they’d manage to restore Ashiron by the time limit that’d been set for them.

She turned around to Mal. “The system is a digital representation of what it takes to run and utilize the magic encased by the Library, right? I don’t think it can personally feel anything. But isn’t the Library the system?”

He seemed to mull that over as he munched on his own bread. “Technically, I think the system came from the Library. You should probably talk to the Library about that.”

She considered that, but something was bugging her. “But isn’t Lynx technically also the system?”

“Sort of, maybe?” Mal didn’t seem to want to guess at answers. “Isn’t Lynx more the Library?”

Quinn barely resisted the urge to put her head back in her hands. Maybe she should be asking Milaro these questions. “Either way,” she said, “the crafting branch can open tomorrow.”

Mal watched her carefully. “That’s a good thing, Quinn.”

She laughed again, but this time, even to her own ears, it sounded hollow and empty. She suddenly felt bereft, lost. “Is it really a good thing?” she asked.

Malakai watched her, seeming to form his words quite carefully. “You’re asking that a lot lately,” he said.

She watched him for a few seconds. “For good reasons,” she gestured around them and out into the Library. “Is this good? If we don’t figure out that damned pillar soon, none of what we’ve done will matter, because the Library will fall, anyway. We aren’t even going to reach or exceed peak capacity if the damned soul bomb takes us all out anyway, destroying anything of the Library, everything of the universe once chaos gets free. Nothing will survive in the end. I don’t care what those Sölem people keep saying.”

She sat down heavily, her head back in her hands, unsure of when she’d even stood up to begin with. Everything around her felt so heavy. What did it matter that she’d killed people now? What did it matter that friends she’d grown close to had died, that they’d been betrayed, when everything was about to implode, anyway?

She’d barely stopped since she came to this Library. She’d done everything she could, for everyone she could, whenever she was asked. Okay, maybe, just maybe, she questioned things, because she didn’t believe in going into things blindly. But the whole point was that in the end, she’d done what needed to be done. And here they were, right back at square one, with little to no hope for any type of future, because they couldn’t figure out the damned bomb.

The couch sunk a bit under Malakai’s weight as he sat down next to her. She didn’t even want to look at him. She didn’t want to look at anything. She really just needed to sleep. 

A few seconds later, he pulled her into a side hug. It was warm, and he smelled oddly like cedar and pine. with a faint undertone of leather and wax. She leaned into that hug, feeling so many levels of exhaustion just wash away as she did.

She wished she could pass the buck right now, give somebody else the responsibility to do what needed to be done, to figure out what they had to in order to make sure they had enough time to finish what needed to be done. Was the soul bomb even all they had to do? Was it the only problem they had to solve? If she could activate all ten pillars, would that even put them in a great spot to fend off anybody else who decided that sabotaging the Library was a good idea? That was ideal, wasn’t it? Wasn’t that what they were working toward?

She let out a huge sigh. Malakai might have been chuckling. At least his chest felt like he was. 

“Does it feel any better to get that out?” he asked softly.

She nodded, knowing he’d feel it. Neither of them seemed to have any idea what was going on. Neither of them spoke for a moment, but when he did, his voice was gentle. “So you can’t think of it that way, Quinn. How about you look at everything that’s happened in the last seven months, okay? Everything we’ve done, everything you’ve learned and accomplished, all the places you’ve been, all the people you’ve helped fix, all the information you’ve helped find. Think about it. Seven months, that’s it.”

Quinn processed that. Well, she guessed he had a point. She had been sucked into this Library from her university Library back home, which led to her discovering that magic was real and that she had magic and could wield magic. She could now wield multiple different affinities at varying levels. And could infer new skills from what she already knew and apply it to how to use other affinities. 

Not only that, but most solar systems and regions had magical planets. And Earth was simply one planet that didn’t. There were hundreds of thousands, probably millions, of different species and different variants of species. She’d met and made friends. 

She’d already stopped a few imminent universe meltdowns. And to be honest, now she knew more about her family, about who they were and where she’d come from, what her origins were, how the universe worked. That books didn’t just contain stories, but they contained levels of power that could benefit others. And well, everything was so much bigger. Her horizons were so much broader than they’d been only seven months ago.

Malakai watched the expressions on her face, looking down at her at an awkward angle. He’d probably have a crick in his neck later. Quinn glanced up at him and leaned against his shoulder again. He smiled. She wasn’t sure how she knew because she couldn’t see his face, but she could feel the change. 

“You’re usually so good at staying upbeat,” he said to her. “So how about I help lift you up until you can regain some of that positivity again?”

Quinn chuckled. More of her tension disappeared. “Sure, but what will I owe you after that?”

Mal laughed. “Oh, I’m sure we can work out a payment plan.”

Quinn, feeling lighter than she had only moments ago, thought that, yeah, they would be able to work that out.

~~

Say it all together: AWWWWWWWWWW

Much love

KT