Basics of the Job

Ara made sure she hadn't forgotten anything inside her suitcases, then walked to one of the doors and opened it. There she found the bathroom. Another cubical, rather large room, with white walls and ceiling. The floor had a decorative, blue pattern over it. Aside from the obvious toilet and shower, this one being comfortably big and with glassy, matt walls, there were a sink with a mirror right above it, a bathtub large enough for two or three people to comfortably be inside together, a drawer and a wardrobe identical to those in the main room, as well as an unusually high number of towel rods. The room was lit by a rather high number of candles, maybe because the two windows there were rather small. Overall, a rather pretty room.

Ara walked out and went to the other door. She opened it and found herself in an hallway, tough this one was much shorter than the one at the entrance of the house and had only two doors. Lit by candles just like the other rooms were, it had windows, but oddly enough they had been walled. She walked through the corridor and to the other door. Behind it she found a room roughly three time larger than hers. But that one looked like a mix of a few different chambers, mixed together: she could see elements of a kitchen, a parlor and a... ballroom? She wasn't really sure. There was some sort of order: what Ara guessed to be the dance floor, an irregular, wooden-floored area which spread randomly all over the room, with dark purple and red lines going over it without a real scheme, wasn't occupied by any furniture. The dining table, big enough for six or eight people to sit at, was close to what clearly was the kitchen, next to a short wall placed, for whatever reason, roughly in the middle of the room. The furnishings had the same style of those in her room, and was overabundant: a total of four tables, at least sixteen chairs, several drawers and, for some reason, five wardrobes. Not to mention the six, large bookshelves which, for some hidden motive, were hanging from the ceiling. There were twelve windows: three on the wall on Ara's left, and nine on the long wall opposing the one she had come from, on which was also another door. The other two had none, tough the right one could be explained by it being adiacent to the library's wall. Ara also noticed what seemed to be a large, black screen hosted on the wall, in the parlor-like area of the room, which was where most of the furnitures had been placed. In the middle of that area was a large table, with no chairs around it, and apparently made of black glass. The oddest thing, however, was the spiral staircase, placed almost in the middle of the room, close to the lone wall. Apparently, there was not only an attic but also a cellar.

... no, maybe there wasn't any order in that. The place wasn't messy enough to label it as chaotic, but it sure had a confusing set up.

Oberon was sitting on a chair, reading a book, but he stopped when Ara walked in. With the book still in his hand, he stood up and turned to her.

"Was the room to your liking? Most of the rooms in this building haven't been used for a few years, and I wasn't sure how to rearrange them"

"No, it was really nice"

You overdid it a bit with the furniture, I'd say, ... maybe more than a bit...

"There's just one thing... why are there walled windows in the hallway?"

"Because blocking them with bars proved to be ineffective"

"... what?"

At the same time, Rose walked in. She gave a quick glance at the room, whistling softly, raised an eyebrow a little after seeing the hanged shelves, then turned to the two of them.

"The room looks like the one of an expensive hotel, it's far better than what I'd hoped for. Tough the amount of windows inside here and their placement leaves me puzzled"

"I agree that it's unusual. They were already there when I started working here tough" Oberon replied before looking at the staircase "There's only the basement and the loft you still have to see inside the house" he said as he walked to the stairs "Which one do you want to see first?"

The two girls looked at each other for a moment.

"The loft?" Rose asked to Ara.

"The loft is fine"

"The loft then"

And with that, Oberon led the two of them upstairs. The trapdoor leading to the attic seemed to be made of matt, grey glass. It slid open without a sound. The three of them found themselves in a large, tough somewhat low room, it probably wasn't two and a half meters high. After a brief look, they understood the loft was a single room, probably as large as all the rooms below put together. And it was... a garden. There was nothing but grass, bushes, short trees, flowers, creepers and even a few plants neither Ara nor Rose could actually identify. There were no candles there: light was provided entirely by the flowers and partly by a few trees and creepers, which were glowing. There were no windows, which seemed almost weird given how many there were pretty much everywhere else in the house.

"Pretty" Rose commented. She seemed quite hard to really impress.

"I've only come here three times, this room doesn't have a real function. Don't wander off on your own here. This place is much larger than the downstairs. The flowers also have some unusual properties, so it's better if you don't smell them"

Ara was about to ask how such a garden could be there, but then she remembered that they were in a gargantuan library inside an incredibly smaller building. And that it was raining indoor. No, a garden being there really wasn't that much weirder. So, after not asking that, she started walking in circle around the entrance, looking at the place. The grass was quite high, reaching her knees, except around the trapdoor, where it barely reached her ankles. There was a particular atmosphere there, maybe because the place wasn't completely lit, giving it a somewhat gloomy look. Each flower and tree glowed with a different shade of color tough, painting it's surroundings with his light. The creepers, instead, all emitted a dark blue light. Those which glowed, that is. Where more flowers or glowing trees were close together, the effect was almost hypnotic, since the intensity at which they shone wasn't costant but slightly intermittent. And then there were the scents. Several different fragrances mixed together, somehow in a perfectly harmonious way, each one fading into the next one in an oppressive succession of perfumes, a succession far too well-made to possibily be casual. It made her feel light, somewhat relaxed... maybe a bit dizzy.

You know, this place is'nt that bad.

Eun's voice brought her back to her senses.

"Please keep quiet" she whispered as she walked back to the trapdoor.

"Say, why do you never come here?" Rose asked at Oberon while partly covering her nose "Is it because of the scents?"

"I'm pretty much indifferent to them. I can filter them if I find them too strong, or I can simply deactivate my olfactory system"

"... what?" Ara and Rose asked almost in unison, but Oberon had already turned to the trapdoor.

"The basement isn't as sensorially impressive as the loft, so it will probably be quite disappointing compared to this room" he said as he walked downstairs.

The two girls followed him down the stair, closing the trapdoor above them. Ara didn't give it much importance, mainly because hearing Eun brought her mind to other thoughts, but Rose was curious about what Oberon said right before leaving the garden. But she decided to ask about that later. After a relatively long walk down the stair, roughly five minutes, they reached a large, wooden door. Oberon opened it, and they found themselves looking at a pitch black space. He briefly ran his hand over the wall right next to them and pushed a switch, lighting the candles inside. What they saw then was a quite small, depressingly empty nad plain, octagonal room with stone-grey wallsm, two candles placed on each one, and a total of eight simple, wooden doors, one being the one they came from. Compared to the rest of the building, that place seemed even emptier than it really was.

"This is, basically, the warehouse" Oberon said as he walked to the first door to their right. Ara and Rose followed him, a bit disappointed. What lied behind the door, however, was more in line both with the rest of the library and with what they had expected.

A very large room, probably larger than the whole building was when seen from outside, filled to the brim with every kind of furnishings imaginable, and a lot more whose function wasn't too clear. They were amassed together without a real order. The room was, probably, al least fifteen meters high, and most of the piles reached all the way to the ceiling. Unlike in the other rooms, the candles illuminating the place were slowly floating around, rather than being placed on the walls or in a chandelier. Taking something from there to the upper floor would have probably been impossible, since most of the furnitures there were too big to pass trough the door, let alone fit on the stairs.

"This is used to transport things upstairs" said Oberon while pointing to a small pedestral, probably made of marble, hosting a black book on its top. The cover had a small sentence written over it. "Keep the book empty when not in use"

"And... how do you use this to... carry a wardrobe?" asked Ara.

"This way" he replied as he took the book and walked to a large bed half-buried beneath a load of other furniture. He opened the book at a random page and placed it on the bed, which glowed for a moment. It then turned into a mass of floating, ink-made phrases, which flowed inside the book. Everything that was resting over the bed started to fall, but slowly, as if gravity in that room was almost non-existent. So slowly, it was hardly noticeable. Oberon then walked back to Ara and showed her the book. On the page he had opened it at was a long and almost maniacally detailed description of the bed. He then put his index and thumb on said text, grabbed it and dragged it out of the book, as if he was grabbing a bundle of strings. In his hand, the ink started to turn back into the bed. Handling it like it had no weight, he placed it back where it was, since the things which were resting on it had yet to fall more than a whole half-centimeter.

"That sure is handy" commented Rose.

"I guess I should stop expecting things to work normally inside here... wait, can you put even people inside there?"

"The books in the warehouse only work with inanimate objects. And those in the libraby only work with what's already inside them, so there's no risk of us ending up inside one. At least, that's what I've been told. I've never tested it"

"That's comforting..." she replied with a bit of irony mixed in her voice.

"You mean every book in this library works like the one you're holding now?" asked Rose.

"Not exactly. But that is basically what our job is about" Oberon said as he placed down the book and began walking back to the living room. Or kitchen. Or ballroom. Or whatever that room was.

"The books inside the house, with the only exception of the seven black books in the warehouse, aren't different from the ones you can find in every bookstore. As for the others, our work here is to make sure things go back to their book when they get out"

"What can come out of them?"

"Pretty much whatever you can think about. And more, depending on your imagination"

"And how do you send them back?"

"There are two ways. The first one is to simply kill whatever comes out: they're sent directly back to their book when they die outside. There's a technical explanation for that, but I'll leave that for another time, since it actually sounds more like philosophy than an actual explanation"

"Was Eve the one who told you that?"

"No, it was the owner of this place. You'll meet him sooner or later if you keep working here"

"I thought Eve was the owner"

"She's a friend of his"

"And what kind of person is this owner?" asked Ara.

Oberon paused for a moment before replying "I'm quite sure he's not a person"

"Why did I kind of expect that?" asked Rose with a not-so-concealed sarcasm in her voice.

"Going back to the subject, the second way is to make them touch the pages of the book. Not the cover, the pages. This method isn't really practical with particuarly large creatures, since an open books acts like a portal, and fitting something six meters tall inside a book is rather problematic. However, it's possible to convince them to go back on their own if they happen to be intelligent"

Oberon looked out of a window. It had stopped raining.

"There's a couple of things left, at least for what regards the fundaments"

He walked to one of the doors, the one which apparently led outside. There weren't many bookshelves in that area. Trees, on the other hand, were abundant, tough most of them were rather short, at least compared to those reaching the second, if not third, floor. But one stood definitely out. Placed at a dozen of meters from the house, it was around four meters tall, and it seemed to be made of ivory. There were no leaves on its branches. And there was a door in its trunk. Oberon walked up to it, and stopped right in front of the tree.

"That" he said, pointing to the ground. A bit farther than the tree was the same orange line they had crossed when going from the entrance of the library to the house "encircles a few areas inside the library, and it forms a barrier. Those who come from the books can't normally get past it"

"So, it's a sort of safe zone"

"Pretty much. There are actually some things which can get past it, but they're quite rare to encounter"

Having said that, Oberon opened the door on the tree. From inside came a bright light which prevented them from seeing what was inside. He walked in, and they followed him after a brief moment. They found themselves inside a large, cubical room made of crystals, trough which was visible the night sky. Everywhere. Even below their feet. Also, the room was filled with ivory-made trees.

Space doesn't mean much inside here, doesn't it... thought Ara.

"This place is the Linker, as it's been named. There are thirty-one trees here, and each one goes to a small safe zone in the library, placed at constant intervals. You can use these gates whenever you want. The one going to the house is easily recognizable, since it's the only one with no leaves"

Once he finished talking, the two girls both looked around for a while.

"There's just one thing that bothers me" said then Rose "How do you know if someone gets out of his book?"

"Either by running into it, or by having it run into us. The safe zone also works as a sort of attractor. As long as at least one person is inside, it send a mental call to the rest of the library. It's not as effective with inteligent beings tough"

"That's handy" commented Ara.

"And that's all"

Which wasn't really true. There were some things he hadn't told them yet. But he felt like saying anything more straight away would have been a bit excessive. Besides, most of what he hadn't told them either wasn't necessary to do the job, or wouldn't have been necessary for quite a while.

It had been a couple of hours since then. Ara was curious about the other six rooms in the warehouse, so she had gone back there. The first one she examined was as large as the one Oberon had showed them, but was filled with books, placed in alphabetical order and divided by argument, inside stone-made shelves. She had wandered around inside there for at least an hour, and found out most of the sections were about things which sounded completely crazy, or simply didn't make sense at all. There was also a fiction section tough. After that, she had gone to the third room from the right, which wasn't smaller than the previous two. That looked like a stock of spare parts. The third room she examined, which was noticeably smaller, turned out to be the pantry. As she walked out and headed to the fourth one, Rose walked downstairs.

"Here you are. Dinner is ready"

Ara stopped for a moment, then answered "Ah, right, I'd almost forgotten about it"

They walked back upstairs. The table was already set, but only for two people. By the look of it, steaks with potatoes was the course. There were also several bottles, some with a peculiar shape.

"Where's Oberon?"

"He said he had a few things to do. Seems like we'll eat by ourselves today. By the way, he's the one who cooked, not me"

Dinner went... worse than expected, in a way. Or at least it started that way, since for some reason, neither of them spoke for around five minutes. And Ara took that as a bad sign. Why, she wasn't sure herself. The one to restart the conversation, however, was Rose.

"So, what did you do before coming here?"

"Well, nothing special. I lived with my brother. But since he recently got engaged, I thought it'd have been better to leave the house completely to him. I didn't want to be in the way"

People leave their houses for this kind of reasons where you lived? Rose thought.

"You mean you two lived by yourselves? What about your parents?"

"My mother died giving birth to me. As for my father, I've never heard of him"

"... sorry, I didn't mean to..."

"Don't worry, really. What about you?"

"I think you can say I was a mercenary"

And then there was silence. A brief one.

"... really?"

"Well, I was more of a bodyguard than an actual mercenary, to be honest. The pay wasn't bad"

"Why did you quit then?"

"I just didn't really like that work. That's all. And this job sounded interesting"

After that, they kept talking about trivial things for a while. And found out the one they thought to be wine was actually some sort of juice. Of what fruit, neither of them could tell.

Meanwhile, Oberon was on the roof of the building. He had opened a panel, under which were what looked like electrical circuits, tough they were half-transparents. That was something he had been working on since a couple of months ago. Something in the tracking system went wrong, which meant the only ways to know if something left its book at the moment were those he had told Ara and Rose about. The tracking system checked the library daily in search of open books, and gave the general location in case if found one. At first he thought the problem, whatever it was, was something in the software, and he spent a month and a half going trough its code. But that seemed to be fine, so there had to be something wrong in the circuits. Luckily, the tracking system was installed only in the house, which meant the damage had to be there. Checking the whole library would have required years. After forty, maybe fifty minutes of working on the cables and components, he closed the panel. There was nothing wrong there. There weren't many places left to controll tough. Two week at most, to check them.. He stood up and looked at the library. The sun was setting, dying the scenery with shades of orange and yellow. A sight he had seen for many, many years. Then, he noticed something, on the seventh floor. It was far, to the point an human, a normal one at least, wouldn't have seen anything. A small flock of birds -fake ones, since there weren't real animals inside there- took flight from a tree. Which meant someone or something got too close to them. He sat down on the roof, and simply stood there, looking at both nothing and everything. Whatever it was that scared the birds, it could surely wait untill the next day.

He wondered about his two assistants, like Eve had called them. That word had a weird sound to him. What he was thinking about was how well they could handle things. They had been selected by his mistress, which meant they weren't normal people. If things went smoothly, he would have seen them at work the next day. After a while, he took a small book out of his pocket. He had yet to finish reading it. On the cover was written "Study of the social structure of wyverns in their natural habitat and their relationship with dragons, fifth volume"

Second done.

Overall a longer introduction than I thought it would be.