Byrgenwerth had definitely seen better days, Balyn thought. The main administrative building was ivy-crusted, the grounds were unkempt, there was a large empty patch where the general campus layout strongly implied there ought to be a large building (a dormitory, perhaps? Or some kind of lecture hall?) and the gate hinges definitely needed a good oiling to judge from the ominous squeal of metal on metal they made when opened.

On the other hand, the porter who'd opened the gate had been a human being rather than a fly-like monster with an engorged, eye-filled head and vestigial wings, so it could also be said that Byrgenwerth had seen worse days. Balyn was more familiar with those, as it so happened, so all in all things were looking up. And though it was a warm day, the shadowy interior of the observatory building was dark and cool.

"Hello? Is anyone there?" Balyn called, his voice echoing up through the partially open second floor above him. The place was rather cluttered, and if he just barged on in he'd probably trip over something. Which, with his luck, would end up with the crate he was carrying shattering on impact with the floor. "I have a delivery from Mensis Educational Publishing."

"Just a second; I'll be right with you!"

The female voice echoed down at him. Almost at once he heard the rhythmic thumping of feet rapidly descending a latter, then pattering across bare wooden floorboards. A moment later, he saw a figure in a high black scholar's cap and a white robe descending the curving staircase, and Balyn felt a clench of fear deep in his gut as visions of exploding stars flashed before his eyes like something out of a nightmare.

When she got a bit closer, though, he was able to see even in the dim light that her eyes were uncovered and the robe was just an ordinary smock worn to keep dust off her clothing (something the many smears and stains indicated it was working hard to accomplish), and he breathed a sigh of relief.

"Sorry that no one was hear to greet you; it's hard to get good help out here. If it wasn't for the boat service from Hemwick finally being restored I'd probably have to start hiring the snakes."

"Wait, there's boat service over the lake now?" Having to set the box down every hundred feet or so to free up a hand for his rifle spear to fend off passing snake balls had definitely slowed down Balyn's delivery time. Fortunately, Mensis didn't care too much so long as things got there before dawn. "We won't let the night end until we're finished!" was their company slogan, after all.

His host ignored Balyn's ignorance of local transportation options and went directly to business.

"So which delivery is this one? Is it the biology textbooks? We really need those; whomever was maintaining the etymology section in particular must have been completely vacuous given the mess they left behind. Provost Willem was really slipping there at the end, I think."

"They didn't tell me. There's a shipping manifest tacked to the top, though."

"Oh, good." She ripped the paper off the tack and unfolded it. "Darn it; these are the experiment logbooks. We won't need these for another two weeks when we get the new laboratory rooms converted. Oh, well, better early than never, I guess."

"Where do you want me to put them?" He glanced around the room, looking for a spare corner.

"Eventually they'll go in the Lecture Building Memorial Lecture Building—"

"The what, now?"

She made a face.

"I know, right? But the trustees insisted that they name it that. I guess they figured that since the actual scholars were more or less idiots rushing on ahead into things they weren't meant to trifle with, the true victim of the incident was the building itself and so we get that ridiculous name that we have to explain literally every time someone hears it."

"At least the architects will be happy?"

"That makes someone, at least. Anyway, we can't store those logbooks in here; we need the space for everything that's actually going in this building. We'll put them out in a temporary storage shed out by the lake."

She was already walking before she finished, so Balyn shifted his grip to take a little weight off his shoulders and scurried along after.

"I'm sorry about the long walk," she said as they went back out the door. "Why under the cosmos they decided to put the doors on either end of this building but none in the middle of the long sides for easy access I'll never understand. They must have hired a Yharnam architect when they built the place, and when they couldn't figure out a way to stack buildings on top of each other and have main thoroughfares be tiny side passages winding around, under, and through other buildings, they did the best they could to make the design make no sense."

"I can see that. They must have hired the same people who designed the lecture building with two floors but no staircase between them, only a ladder."

She paused and turned back to him.

"You know what the lecture building looked like?"

Balyn paused, trying to make sense of that thought.

"It's odd, isn't it? I have a clear memory of it, but it feels like I saw it in a dream. Was there supposed to be a giant spider as a doorman?"

"…You probably want to stay away from the blood cocktails. Outsiders can have some pretty strange experiences with them, as I understand it."

She took him outside the building, then around onto the broad, stone-flagged terrace that overlooked the lake. The view from the college building's lower windows had been blocked by three temporary structures built of planking—not shabby, per se, but clearly not meant to stand up to the test of time or to serious weather.

"We've been keeping everything that we weren't ready to actually put in its proper place out here. The indoor storage spaces are overfull as it is," Balyn's guide announced. "Since the ground is covered with the terrace flagstones here, it helps prevent things from getting wet." She walked right past the first shed, doubtless due to some organizational system, and opened the door to the second.

"In here," she said.

"Does it go in any particular place?"

"Just don't set it on top of any other crates; books are heavy and some of them contain glassware or other breakables and I don't trust the quality of some of the packaging. Ever since the Blood Moon, the employment situation in Yharnam has been a little haphazard and businesses have been cutting corners."

"Well, it can be a bit hard when half your employees are on medical leave for mental health concerns. I think it's made people a little over-sensitive and on guard about that, too. Or at least that's the impression I've got from some of the looks I've gotten from my employers since I started doing temp work."

She blinked at him.

"There might be a different reason for that beyond general suspicion."

The prospect made Balyn a bit uncomfortable, but he recalled good advice that he'd once received and tried not to think about that too hard.

"So you said anywhere on the ground is good?" he moved back to the topic of the job. "How about next to those experiment jars over there on the right? If nothing else, they're probably tired of staring at blank walls, so some books might make a nice change."

"Staring?"

She stepped past him to look at the big three-foot-tall glass cylinders, not unlike bell jars, sealed over with wax and filled with eyeballs extracted from creatures of all sizes. They were a fairly creepy thing to find just lying around, but Balyn figured that they were going to be used in scientific research, perhaps in the same classes for which he'd brought the logbooks.

"Oh, damn it!" his host began, and rapidly moved on to more inventive profanity.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"Biological samples need to be kept in a controlled environment! I told those idiots four times that we needed the eyes on the inside!"