Didn't expect to write another story so soon, but here we are! As always, I own nothing except my eager anticipation to own this series on DVD. Enjoy!
Ezekiel Jones was bored, and nothing good ever really happened when Ezekiel Jones experienced the soul-crushing boredom that he was experiencing at that current moment in time. The Annex of the Library was almost dead silent, a rarity for the normally bustling location. His sole companion, Cassandra Cillian, sat across from him at the center table, happily reading about astronomy and charting constellations. The tranquility was only broken by the occasional mutterings from Cassandra's lips as she worked imaginary equations in front her big blue eyes, but unless she suddenly hit the floor, watching Cassandra hallucinate was only mildly entertaining, and watching her chart stars was about as exciting as he imagined watching paint dry would be.
Stone, after a little too close of a near-miss with death on their last big case, had finally decided to go home for a weekend and check in with his family. Jenkins was surprisingly nowhere to be found; Ezekiel thought he was off in the main library somewhere. Baird and Flynn had left on a case that morning, and, despite the younger Librarians' protests, they had refused to let Ezekiel and Cassandra join them. That made Ezekiel think they weren't really away on a case at all, but he hadn't shared his growing suspicions with anyone yet. These circumstances had left him with nothing to do but idly spin Cassandra's constellation globe around, which was, again, about as exciting as he imagined watching paint dry would be.
Cassandra turned away from her book and towards her map, and Ezekiel snuck his hand across the table, moving her book just a few inches out of place. When she turned back to where she thought she had left her reference, she simply shook it off and moved it back where it belonged. When he did it again, a distrustful dirty look accompanied the book's journey back into position, and when she turned back to her map a few moments later to find her silver pens suddenly missing, she sighed.
"What?" she finally groaned with exasperation.
"I'm bored," Ezekiel said.
"Clearly," Cassandra replied. "You are in a library full of artifacts and history and magic; how can you possibly be bored?"
"It's not fun if all of those things are readily available to me," he said. His remark earned him what was quickly becoming a classic Cassandra eye roll.
"Do you want to help me with my maps?" she offered. "I mean, I don't really need help, but if you want something to do…"
"Stars and math?" he asked. "No thanks."
"O-kay , well, how about your book? Just because Colonel Baird and Flynn wouldn't let us go with them on their case, that doesn't mean you can't take a case of your own," Cassandra said. "Have you tried one by yourself yet?"
"Don't see much fun in that, either, to be honest," he admitted, and Cassandra nodded, thinking that was probably for the best.
"What if I go with you?" she offered. She sighed again when that was a no, too. "Then what do you want to do?"
Ezekiel shrugged. "I don't know."
She reached into her bag and pulled out her own little leather-bound book. "Come on, let's take a case. We can be like Flynn and Colonel Baird, only…we'd both be Librarians, of course."
Ezekiel snorted in amusement. "Not that I'm exactly opposed to the idea of being like Baird and Flynn, but I don't think you really know what you're proposing with that."
Confusion crossed the delicate features of Cassandra's face. "What do you mean?"
"Oh, I don't think they're out saving the world right now," Ezekiel said. "More like…rocking each other's, if you get my drift."
Cassandra thought about it for a moment before her eyes grew wide in realization. "They're…Flynn and Colonel Baird?" she exclaimed.
"Oh yeah," Ezekiel nodded.
"How do you know that?" she asked. "Did you catch them kissing or something?"
Ezekiel laughed. "No, thank god, but please, flirting over mummies and making googly eyes at each other…they're not exactly masters in the art of subtly."
Cassandra sighed. "Well, I feel stupid. I hadn't noticed."
"That's alright," Ezekiel promised. "I imagine the brain grape keeps you pretty distracted."
That remark earned him not an eye roll, but an angry glare as Cassandra slammed her recently recovered silver pens to the table.
"For the last time, can we not call it a brain grape?" she huffed. She suddenly fell silent, the wheels turning in her head as an earlier comment finally resonated. "Wait, what do you mean you wouldn't exactly be opposed to that?"
Cassandra's high-pitched question yielded a grin and a pair of raised eyebrows in her direction from Ezekiel. Her face almost instantly turned red, and her eyes widened again. Ezekiel chuckled to himself and made a mental note that his hypothesis was, in fact, correct – flustering Cassandra would never not have a place on the list of his favorite things to do. Cassandra quickly turned back to her maps, deciding to pretend that she hadn't actually heard that last part of their conversation.
Realizing his momentary fun was over, Ezekiel returned to mindlessly spinning the constellation globe. He began scanning the room for something – anything – more interesting to do when the large globe at the bottom of the staircase caught his eye. He looked at the globe, the double doors, the redhead across the table from him, and back to the globe.
"I know!" Ezekiel exclaimed.
"What?" Cassandra asked.
"Something to cure my boredom!" he said triumphantly. "Come on."
"Where are we going?" Cassandra asked, hesitantly standing.
"You said you were willing to come on a case with me," he said.
"Oh!" she excitedly exclaimed, snapping up her little book. "Your book or mine?"
"What? No, we're not going on a case," Ezekiel said. "But if you were willing to leave your project for that, you should be willing to leave for a bit of good, old-fashioned fun."
"I'm not going to help you steal something," Cassandra deadpanned.
"For once, that's not what I had in mind," Ezekiel said.
Curiosity won the war within her head. "Okay, I'm listening," she offered.
Ezekiel walked over to the globe. "This globe can connect to any door in the world, right? All we have to do is spin and walk through the threshold. So I thought…how about we make a game of it?"
Cassandra, intrigued, joined him by the globe. "What kind of game?"
"We blindly spin the globe, step through the doorway…first one to identify the location wins!" he proposed.
"Around the world in eighty minutes?" she asked with a grin.
"Look at you, already coming up with game titles!" he said. "You in?"
"I don't know…" she said.
Stone, Cassandra thought, would be great at this game. Flynn probably would be, too. They'd identify places immediately just based on the architecture or the culture. She wasn't great with culture or art, and she wasn't the world traveler that Ezekiel had been before coming to the Library, but she thought her heightened senses might give her an advantage at picking up on remote but identifying details.
Just as Cassandra's brain was gearing up for a launch into statistical risk analysis, Ezekiel said, in a goading and increasingly impatient tone, "I'll let you spin first."
"Okay, I'm in," Cassandra agreed. She threw her cross-body bag across her chest and gave the globe a spin as Ezekiel stood by the door. She joined him before the globe stopped spinning, and, when it settled, he pulled open the door.
"Why is it so dark?" she asked. "Did it work?"
"You've got your passport in that bag, right?" Ezekiel asked, nerves he'd never admit to settling in his stomach.
She dug through her bag until she found the little blue book. "Yeah. Why?"
"In case this goes horribly wrong and we need a more normal way home," he admitted.
Cassandra, suddenly scared, opened her mouth to protest, but before a sound could escape her lips, Ezekiel grabbed her hand and pulled her through the door.
Seconds later, they were tumbling out of a tiny, dark, window-less bathroom in a parked RV van. Cassandra immediately gasped and pulled him into a small closet across from the bathroom they'd just stumbled out of.
"Oh my god," she gasped. "What if someone's in the van?"
"And here I thought you were wanting to play Seven Minutes in Heaven," Ezekiel teased, feigning disappointment. He couldn't completely see her face, but he was pretty sure she had rolled her eyes at him again. "How about I go check?"
"Good idea," she whispered.
He disappeared for a few moments before returning to the closet with an all clear. They wandered outside of the van and found that it was parked on a beach at the edge of a dense, tropical forest. A quick scan of their surroundings yielded no people or buildings in sight. There was nothing but the van they'd climbed out of and a canoe resting on the sand. Ezekiel moaned, knowing there was no way he'd be winning their first round.
"We could be anywhere!" he cried.
Cassandra was quiet, looking around for clues as Ezekiel continued to simply look lost. She suddenly gasped, and, with a jump, slapped his arm.
"Madagascar!" she cried.
"What?" he asked. "How the hell do you know that?"
She pointed to a cluster of trees at the edge of the forest, where the flora met the sand. "There," she said. "Ravenala Madagascarieusis – The Travellers Palm, found only in the lowland forests of Madagascar. Does this mean I win?"
"Yeah, you definitely win this one," he conceded. He had no idea if she was even right, but he didn't have any better ideas.
"This is fun!" she exclaimed with a giggle. "What do I win?"
"The next spin," he said. "Let's get out of here."
When they returned to the Library Annex, she hopped over to the globe and gave it another spin. They barely made it through the door before Ezekiel claimed his first victory.
"Australia," he said. "Shall we go now?"
"Wait," she said, grabbing the shoulder of his jacket and pulling him back before he could run back through the door. "This just looks like a random town, could be anywhere…is this where you're from?"
A displeased expression at how interested she sounded followed her statement, and he said, "Not exactly."
They had landed at a bus station, and Cassandra kept her fingers curled into his sweater as they wandered out towards the main road.
"Home's about two hours that way," he said with a point. He pointed in the opposite direction and added, "The summer camp I went to when I was seven was about 40 minutes that way."
"How do you remember this place well enough to identify it so quickly?" she asked.
"Well, this is where it all began," he declared.
Her face fell from a look of astonishment to a look of condemnation. "This is the first place you stole from," she realized.
"That book store right over there," he said with another point.
"The first thing you stole was a book?" Cassandra asked. "I thought you stole for riches."
"It was more like a comic book, and then I went to that gas station and swiped a bunch of candy," he admitted. "Sold it in the back of the camp bus; I made a fortune…or, so it seemed to a seven-year-old, anyway." He clapped his hands together and added, "Well, that's enough Australian adventures for one day. That globe's not going to spin itself."
He practically pushed her back towards the bus station to return to the Annex, running to spin the globe before the door had even fully closed. When they crossed the threshold again, they came out of a supply closet and found themselves standing in a crowd waiting for an elevator with an 'up' button. They looked at each other and shrugged and followed the crowd.
The elevator deposited them in a room crowded with more people, two sets of double-doors on either side. They made their way outside of one of the doors, and Cassandra laughed.
"Manhattan," she said, immediately recognizing the skyline across the water from where she stood.
"Wait," Ezekiel said. "If that's Manhattan, where are we?"
She grinned and pointed up, knowing the answer without having to look. "Look up."
Ezekiel looked towards the sky and was met with the sight of a colossal green hand curled around a tabula ansata and points of a crown peeking out over waves of green robes. Cassandra giggled again, covering her mouth with her hand as Ezekiel stared up in wonder.
"Cool," he said. "Now, this is more what I had in mind."
A few hours later, on their eleventh round, Ezekiel burst through the teleporting door backwards with Cassandra wrapped around his back, piggy-back style. The eleventh spin had finally landed them in a war zone, and they, possibly, just barely made it back to the Annex. Ezekiel slammed the door shut as soon as they were firmly into the room, and Cassandra let out a whoop when she realized they were safe, having entirely too much fun, despite the danger. A Hawaiian flower lei rested around her neck, and a foam Statue of Liberty hat lie atop Ezekiel's head, tokens from their game around the world.
"That was a close one!" Cassandra said with a laugh.
"I told you I could outrun any danger," Ezekiel boasted as Cassandra slid off his back.
"You better start running then," Eve Baird said from behind them.
Cassandra turned around on a quick jump, eyes wide like a kid caught in a cookie jar. Ezekiel slowly turned to face the Colonel and the Librarian with a guilty, but definitely not sorry, look on his face. Baird stood across from them, arms folded against her chest. Flynn was next to her, leaning against the center table.
"Colonel Baird," Ezekiel said with a laugh. "She made me do it."
Cassandra's mouth dropped open as Ezekiel pointed to her. Baird's eyes traveled to Cassandra. She didn't really believe Ezekiel's statement, but she found it odd that Cassandra would have even gone along with whatever they had been up to.
"I expect crap like this from Ezekiel, but you, Cassandra?" Baird asked.
"He's a liar!" Cassandra said. "He is a child who completely does not appreciate the vast resources this place has to offer and needs constant stimulation to be entertained."
"No arguments there, but it looks like he's been appreciating the resources just fine," Baird replied.
"What's the harm in wanting to explore this great, big, beautiful world of ours?" Ezekiel asked.
"Well, Ezekiel, you…" Flynn started, pushing himself off the table. He looked confused for a moment, turned to Baird, and said, "Actually, I don't see the harm in that. What's wrong with exploring other parts of the world on their day off?"
Baird pointed at a monitor across the room, stepping sideways to it so as not to break her eye contact with the younger Librarians. The monitor listed on it the history of the globe connected to the teleporting door. "Eleven destinations in a little under three hours with no seeming rhyme or reason to them reads less like exploration and more like mischief," she said. "They did spend a while in Italy, though."
"We opened the door to a gelato shop," Ezekiel said, as if the explanation for their longer-than-usual layover were obvious.
Flynn joined Baird by the computer and said, "India, too."
"Tattoos aren't done in a few seconds," Ezekiel said.
"Tattoos?" Baird asked, looking up from the monitor in surprise. That was something else she couldn't see Cassandra doing. Cassandra held up the back of her hand, revealing a henna design.
"We walked into a wedding party," she said. Baird turned back to the monitor.
"Why does this say you went to the Atlantic Ocean?" Baird asked.
"Oh, we ended up on a cruise ship," Cassandra said.
"We didn't have a chance in hell of winning that one," Ezekiel muttered.
"The margaritas were yummy, though," Cassandra replied.
Flynn, now more confused than ever, finally asked, "What exactly were you two doing with that door?"
Cassandra and Ezekiel shared another look, and Ezekiel said, "I'm pleading the Fifth."
"This isn't a democracy," Baird said.
"Actually, if we're back in the Annex, then I believe we are in the good, ol' U-S-of-A, which is, in fact, a democracy," Ezekiel said.
"Fine," Baird groaned. She turned to Cassandra. "And you? Care to tell us what was going on here?"
"Ezekiel was just…helping to distract me," Cassandra stalled.
"Distract you?" Baird asked. Cassandra nodded. Baird looked over to her abandoned constellation project, still spread across the center table. "From what?"
"Oh, you know…" Cassandra said. An idea suddenly hit her, and she pointed to her head with both hands. "The brain grape."
Ezekiel chuckled with pride as Baird looked at Flynn with a deep roll of her eyes. It was a ruse, and she knew it, but how could she argue with the fatal tumor lying inside of Cassandra's head?
"Okay," Eve finally said. "You two are grounded."
"What?" Cassandra squeaked.
"You can't do that," Ezekiel said. "We're fully-fledged Librarians."
"And as your Guardian, it is my job to keep things in order and keep you alive, so until you learn that the Library resources are to be used and not abused, maybe we all need to take a little breather," Baird said. "No cases. One week. Goodbye."
Ezekiel waited for Cassandra to spill, to tell everything, to try and convince Colonel Baird to change her mind, but she didn't. She just nodded awkwardly and turned towards the exit. Ezekiel ran after her.
"Really?" Ezekiel asked.
"What?" Cassandra replied.
"One week, no cases, and you're just accepting that?"
"I've never been grounded before," she laughed.
"Again, really?" Ezekiel asked. Cassandra shook her head. "You never, not once, snuck out as a teenager and got caught?"
"No," she said. "The only time I snuck out was the time I didn't come back."
Ezekiel threw an arm around her shoulders in comfort as they walked, the mood having suddenly grown somber.
"Well, you were bloody brilliant," he said. "Pulling the tumor card? Who knew you had it in you?"
"Colonel Baird knew it was a card," Cassandra said.
"That just makes it more fun!" Ezekiel said. "Admit it; it was worth it."
Cassandra looked at him and said, "You didn't hear me apologizing, did you?"
He grinned and said, "No, I did not."
"So what now?" she asked.
"Well, I don't know about you, but all that globe hopping has left me starved."
"Pizza?" she suggested.
"Loser buys?" he proposed, thinking he was the overall winner to their game.
"I believe we're tied," Cassandra said.
"Damn cruise ship," Ezekiel muttered. He suddenly gripped her shoulder, pulling them both to a stop in the long hallway towards the exit. "Do you hear that?" he asked.
"What?" she asked, genuinely listening.
"The sound of a double cheese, extra pep calling my name," he said.
Cassandra rolled her eyes again, playfully this time, and looped her arm around Ezekiel's waist, leading them out of the Annex.
Thanks for reading! Please leave a review if you've got some time :-)