The Faculty of The Crèche for the Gifted
Part 2: The Archivist

Student Psyker (Diviner Stream) Ponderous Stubbs was in trouble. There was nothing particularly out of the ordinary about this. At 15 years old "in trouble" was practically a basic state of being for boys. In the last month alone he'd been in trouble for setting fire to Ekatarina's hair during Intermediate Pyromancy, got caught trying to sneak into the Chief Victualler's pantry during the night to steal sweetbriar pastries, and his entire dormitory had collectively gotten into very big trouble for setting off several alarm wards while trying to scry the Handmaiden's bathhouse.

This however was a very urgent type of trouble. The type of trouble where the punishment wouldn't just be scrubbing the Crèche's quadrangle with toothbrushes, or plastering up the holes in the walls left by Headmaster Cully when he decided to do impromptu target practice with his bolt pistol, or even being paraded in front of the equally beautiful and terrifying Councilwoman Krystabel in order to collectively stammer out apologies for violating the privacy of her sisterhood. He was late returning a book to the Crèche's Librarium.

This may sound insignificant. In many Librarium's around the galaxy, such a violation would at most earn a small fine and a withering look from the codifier on duty. But the Crèche's Librarium was… special. Hence why he was pelting hell for leather through the corridors, his overdue copy of "The Warp and You, Mastering your Own Mind, by Councilman Jafar (With foreword by Ferrik Jurgen)" tucked under his arm, in the vain hope that being slightly less late would somehow make things better when it came time to pay the piper.

Barrelling through the outer doors and into the quadrangle, he passed the four chapels to Tzeentch, Slaanesh, The Omnissiah, and The Emperor (Although he was born on a former Cardinal world, Ponderous's family had adapted well to the reformed and liberal form of the Imperial Cult practiced on Slawkenburg), and the little shrine to Khorne.

He passed between the pair of large copper spheres at the centre of the quad intended to discharge excess Warp energy in the Orkish style, referred to by wannabe comedians all across Cainopolis as the Psyker's Balls, and approached the Librarium's doors. Impressively large but so well balanced they could be easily opened by the weediest of scholars, they were inscribed with the Rules.

1. Silence
2. Books must be returned no later than the date shown
3. Do not meddle with the Warp while within the Librarium

These Rules were as inviolate as it was possible to be within an institution which was in the habit of pushing back the bounds of what was possible. Even the headmaster obeyed them with a certain amount of grumbling. Ponderous just had to hope that things were in his favour beyond those doors. As gently as he could, he pushed on one of the doors, and slipped through.

Inside, he paused and looked around. The Librarium was empty at this time of day, and he could only hope that included the powers-that-be. The large circular building was topped by a great armourcrys dome that refracted the sunlight in fascinating ways yet still provided perfect light levels for reading from dawn to dusk, a creation of the Professor of Abstract Lumomancy. He looked towards the great desk at the head of the room. Unmanned. Maybe he could get away with this after all. Hardly daring to breathe, he crept towards the returns cart.

A very large orange furred hand with a couple of augmetic fingers landed on his shoulder.

"Ook!"

Ponderous slumped. He'd been made. Turning around, he looked up into a face like a rubber sack filled with water, with a bionic eye of astounding complexity dominating it. The Archivist looked back down at him, with what could only be described as a stern expression.

The Archivist was a bit of a mystery to the people of Cainopolis. The story of his arrival was well documented, but his existence before then, and why he chose to stay and assume the position of the Crèche's Archivist, was completely unknown.

The first thing that needed to be acknowledged was that he wasn't human, but was in fact a large male Jokaero, although this was something that the residents of the Crèche had grown so used to that it often surprised them when newcomers pointed this out.

The Xenos had arrived some years previously, when a badly damaged ship of unknown but obviously alien design slipped back into the Materium on the outskirts of the Slawkenburg system. Upon it being boarded by the Protectorate United Navy's Voidsmen-At-Arms, they had discovered the bodies of numerous Drukhari and rather fewer Jokaero, all of whom had evidently died in brutal combat. The only survivor was found in the room that was assumed to be the bridge, surrounded by the bodies of dozens of Drukhari, slumped unconscious over the controls and severely injured. At the Liberator's order he was brought back to Emeli's Gift, and was treated to the best of the ability of the BORG's Xenobiologists.

Upon waking and after a few… misunderstandings were rectified (Upon meeting Bloodward Malicia for the first time he famously tried to tear her limbs off), he proved to be very amicable, and quite uninclined to depart. The fact that he was physically and mentally incapable of speaking Gothic did not deter him in the slightest, although oddly he seemed to comprehend it just fine.

There was some debate about being hospitable to a Xenos, but the Liberator pointed out that even the Imperial Inquisition gave leeway to the Jokaero for their sheer talent with technology and the fact that they were not hostile to humanity, and that in the creed of Liberation there must be acceptance, and so this strange Xenos was offered citizenship of Slawkenburg.

However, his tendency to modify any systems he came across at random proved somewhat unhelpful in the vast space station, so he was brought down to the surface. It was while he was being shown around the Crèche that he found his calling.

The Librarium had been built to contain a limited number of books, and as the Protectorate had expanded, the previous trickle of warp knowledge had turned into a flood as the new member worlds contributed their most precious grimoires, and the graduates of the Creche had produced many papers containing new psionic research, completely overwhelming the available space, to the point that the scriveners who ran it were simply unable to cope.

One look at the vast unorganised piles of tomes, scrolls, and data-slates dominating the great Librarium chamber, and the Jokaero had reportedly ooked in a dismayed tone, chased everyone else out of the room with a few insistent eeks, and shut the door firmly behind him. Over the next few weeks there were a number of minor thefts around the grounds, mostly of machinery, raw materials, and fruit, so the culprit was fairly obvious. Nobody really wanted to argue with a 300 pound Xenos with fists like the head of a thunder hammer and an unknown array of augmetic weaponry, so he went unchallenged.

Then one day he had knuckled his way into a meeting of the Crèche's faculty, and had indicated he would like to be followed. He had led them into the Librarium, and had proudly showed them the wonderous creation he would come to be known for. He had constructed a great metal lattice around the walls and roof of the building, which flexed and moved without any external input, in ways that looked like they shouldn't be possible. What's more, the mountains of books were gone. Instead, well-arranged tall wooden shelves covered the floor area, although spaced in such a way that they could not see to the far side of the room.

Upon being questioned about this, the Jokaero simply led the faculty into the shelves. It only occurred to them that something was amiss when they had been walking in a mostly straight line for 5 minutes, when they should have reached the other side 3 minutes before, and that they were still under the centre of the dome. Upon the room later being examined by the BORG, who had studied the Jokaero ship at length, it was established that the Jokaero had adapted the strange technology that his race used to travel through the warp by physically changing the shape of their ships to somehow stretch the dimensions in the centre of the room. The Librarium still had a circumference of a few hundred yards, but there was now no knowable limit to its radius.

Upon being shown the newly infinite room (without Malicia), the Liberator was reported to have expressed mild concerns about what would happen if the newly dubbed "Lattice" should malfunction or stop working, and appointed the Jokaero as Chief Archivist of The Creche for the Gifted on the spot, charging him with always keeping The Lattice in good working order. The newly appointed Archivist accepted this role with apparent joy, and soon was running his new domain with a firm but fair hand. It was discovered that if you walked far enough into the centre of the Librarium you would find bare shelves stretching away into the distance, allowing for the continual flow of new books to be homed correctly. 4 cardinal markers were placed high on the walls so that they could be seen from any point on the dimensionally expanded floor, allowing scholars to navigate back to where they came from should they get lost. The Archivist also emphatically banned all use of psychic abilities inside the Librarium, apparently being unsure how they would interact with the stretched space, and not wanting to find out, a stance that the Liberator reportedly gave his full backing to.

The BORG had held a Concilium to discuss the theological implications of this Xenos technology being in Slawkenburg, but swiftly came to the conclusion that the Jokaero must be blessed by the Omnissiah itself to be able to create such wondrous mechanisms, and turned the event into an Ordination ceremony, inviting the Archivist to take Holy Orders in the Cult Mechanicus, which he accepted with apparent bemusement, but received his red robes of office (which he only wore on ceremonial occasions or just after he'd bathed) and Omnisian Axe (which usually stayed propped up in the umbrella stand by his desk) with good grace.

The rest was history. The Archivist hadn't built anything of real significance since then apart from his notorious fruit peeling machine, being too busy running the Librarium to spare the time. More wisdom of the cosmos kept flooding in, all of it finding a home in the great building. All who wished to study the nature of reality and unreality were welcome in its walls, apart from Eldar, who the Archivist did not like at all, and not just Drukhari.

This was discovered when a Harlequin Troupe showed up out of nowhere (as they do) on some incomprehensible errand, and were cautiously accepted as diplomatic visitors. Upon the Troupe leader being shown the Librarium, which it compared with interest to something called The Black Library, the Archivist initially kept his distance and simply ooked darkly to himself. Then the Harlequin referred to the Jokaero as a "Mon'Keigh", to which he reacted… poorly. After bouncing said Eldar off the walls and floor a few times, and breaking both its arms, he concluded by slinging it out the doors with an "EEK!" of finality. A major incident with the Troupe was only avoided by explaining the Jokaero's previous experience with their dark cousins, which was fortunately accepted with ill-will and bad grace, and no Eldar had ever been let anywhere near the Archivist since, and all such visitors to Cainopolis were given a very emphatic warning about using THAT WORD, just in case.

And none of this knowledge was going to help Ponderous. The Archivist reached out with his other arm and plucked the book from Ponderous, looked at the cover and the date stamp inside, and then turned his half-mechanical gaze back to the boy.

"Ook!"

"I know sir, I'm so sorry, stave fighting practice overran yesterday when Lord Hektor showed up to practice dueling with Headmaster Cully and everyone wanted to watch so I just forgot to bring it back in all the excitem…"

"Eek!"

"Yes sir, that is no excuse, I apologise again!"

"Oooooookkkk…"

"Oh, please sir, not that, its only one day late…"

"Oook!"

Ponderous was gently but insistently propelled out of the doors and around the side of the building, towards the large garden where the Archivist cultivated his own fruit. The boy resigned himself to losing all his free periods for the next three days to stabbing his fingers on daggerfruit leaves while pruning them, getting sore arms from checking ploins for insect infestation, and worst of all, shovelling grox dung onto the Archivist's ackenberry plants. He'd reek for weeks, the smell just wouldn't come out of a psychic bodyglove, and the other boys in his dorm would make him sleep in the bathtub until the pong went away.

Ponderous sighed. He really had to try to stop getting in trouble.

I attribute anything and everything even slightly good about this Omake to the late great Sir Terry Pratchett, who's wonderful ideas I have ripped off here, and before whom we are all worms under the foot of the Greatest Titan of Fantasy Comedy. All credit belongs to the man whose books taught me how to laugh, and who gave me an imagination of my own. GNU.
Oh, and Zahariel of course, they're good too.