damned_institute | Day 27: Library

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Day 27: Library

Libraries, he'd found, were rarely as dull as people made them out to be. Though he felt no magic in these tomes, they were still full of useful information. Maybe some of them could tell him a little bit more about this world he'd landed himself in.

For that matter, why hadn't he run into any of the others yet? They'd all been fairly close together when they'd left Rekord, but he hadn't seen a trace of any of them. He was able to communicate easily with the people here though, which led him to believe Mokona was within a mile or so. Unless the ones running this little game had some other way to let all these other-worldly people communicate amongst themselves. In which case, the others could be very far away indeed.

The library had that wonderful smell of old books, and Fai traced his fingers along the shelves, skimming titles and pulling books that struck his fancy. Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, The War of the Worlds, and with a smile, he found Bram Stoker's Dracula as well. Raven had been telling the truth then, in spite of his own lies. Ought to be a good start. He sat leisurely at one of the tables and began flipping through his selections.

[waiting for Tamaki~]

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Thursday nodded, faintly surprised by the young woman's apparent maturity. Then again, she didn't give kids these days all that much credit - her own son had been attempting to save the world for months and she'd only thought he'd been skipping school because he was a budding delinquent. It was kind of embarrassing, really.

"Oh, don't apologize," she said quickly. "You were trying to help, and I appreciate it. Pleased to meet you, Ms. Hinamori - Thursday Next's the name."

She gestured at the two books on the table in front of her. Jane Eyre was still half open where she'd dropped it. "I'm a bookjumper," she said, pausing slightly. Was there any chance Momo had heard of them? Thursday had only met two other Outlander bookjumpers besides herself, and one of them had been Japanese. "Er. That is, I can enter a book if I read a passage from it aloud. I was thinking I might be able to get help, but I should've known it wouldn't be that easy."

"A pleasure to meet you, Next-san," Momo said finding the woman's name very odd, but assuming it was backwards just like all the other Western prisoners here.

As Thursday seemed somewhat recovered from the backlash, Momo stopped rubbing the woman's back and turned the book toward her. She skimmed the page briefly before looking back to Thursday.

"I am unfamiliar with bookjumpers," she said, "but that sounds like a very interesting ability." How was Thursday planning to get help from inside a book anyways? "Whomever has imprisoned us has a vast amount of power available to them and any contact to our own worlds as well as any outside help are cut off."

Momo's expression turned frustrated. "The ability to contain some of us so is very... unsettling."

Thursday nodded, smiling slightly. "It sounds pretty weird, doesn't it? I had a hell of a time convincing my colleagues back home I wasn't just vanishing into thin air every now and then." She was kind of thankful Momo hadn't asked about how exactly the BookWorld worked. It was hard enough to explain to someone who was from her world, never mind someone who wasn't. Land hadn't even believed her at first, and he was a bloody author.

The expression on Thursday's face matched Momo's for a moment. Bookjumping was a pretty rare natural ability; how on earth had they found a way to suppress it?

"I take it your powers have been restricted too, huh? What are they, if you don't mind my asking?"

Momo chuckled lightly as Thursday spoke of her time with her colleagues. That certainly would be hard to explain to regular humans that weren't aware of such things. She was curious about this bookjumping but didn't feel the need at this point to inquire further about it.

"I don't mind at all," Momo replied to the woman's question. Momo theorized that if this woman was such an avid reader that she can enter book themselves, she may have read books about the Japanese legends and such and would therefore know the term.

"I am shinigami." She idly wondered if Thursday would know humans usually weren't capable of seeing shinigami should she even know what one is.

"Shinigami?" Thursday's knowledge of literature was mostly limited to the English canon, but that hadn't prevented her from hearing the word once or twice. She'd been to Japan a few times before, and she'd considered it fairly important to read anything concerning the culture that she could find. Which hadn't been all that much, of course, but...

"The term sounds a little familiar," she mused. "They're kind of like our Western Grim Reaper, aren't they? Ferriers of souls to the underworld and all that?"

"Something like that," Momo confirmed. "Shinigami are death gods, responsible for maintaining the balance of souls and protecting humanity from spiritual threats."

Momo sighed. "Humans normally cannot ever see shinigami, much less interact with them. Here, we are trapped within bodies of flesh and severely limited in our abilities."

Thursday looked more interested than anything else. "I have a friend back home who'd probably be dying to meet you if he knew. Well. Probably not literally. He does something similar in our world, except, uh, he's human and his work is mostly limited to dispatching vampires and stuff."

She had the feeling that most people would probably react more violently to someone announcing that they were shinigami, but what with all the times she'd done rounds with Spike...well, it was unusual and pretty cool but not exactly mind-boggling.

"Must be a bugger getting stuck in a human body," she added, frowning slightly. "At least I'm used to that. I can't imagine what it'd be like if I weren't."

Now that was a first - someone finding out she was shinigami here and not disbelieving her or looking at her blankly. How interesting...

Momo smiled. "It would be interesting to meet a human that did similar work. I find the things humans create and their tremendous ability to adapt fascinating. It must be the limited lifespan. They burn bright while they can."

The shinigami shrugged. "It is.. inconvenient and makes interacting with things feel weird. Like, I know I'm touching something because I can feel it, but the sensation is as if coming through a filter. My senses are all screwed up here."

"Shinigami usually only adopt the gigai when they have to interact directly with humans. It's not normally needed, so any time spent in a gigai is limited." Momo sighed. "I think this is the longest I've ever been in a gigai."

Thursday grinned. "I guess you're right about that." It was interesting how those with longer lifespans always seemed to say that about humans. In her opinion, it could be a good thing or a bad thing, though she'd seen enough to lean slightly towards the latter.

She listened attentively after that. Gigai, presumably, was the technical term for the physical body in which Momo was currently trapped - but she had another question.

"You said 'we' earlier, didn't you? How many shinigami are here?"

Momo's eyes unfocused as she counted and checked the various reiatsu she felt.

Shiro-chan, Renji, Ran, Ichimaru, Rukia, Byakuya, the ryoka, Uruhara... And two others she didn't recognize.

"Eleven, including me, though two of them aren't from my world," Momo answered, her eyes refocusing on Thursday. "It's an alarming amount given the majority of us are officers. Containing us so speaks greatly of the vast power out captors."

She tilted her head at Thursday. "Have you met anyone you know here?"

"Eleven?" Thursday said in disbelief. "Considering I have yet to met anyone from my world - yeah, that is a hell of a lot."

She leaned back in her chair and frowned thoughtfully. "That isn't to say I haven't met anyone I know, though. I've recognized plenty of people - Alec Trevelyan, Harry Potter, Severus Snape, and I'm pretty sure I saw Armand St. Just and Javert writing on the bulletin board earlier. The problem is - well, in my world they're all from books, and Trevelyan's from a movie that came out a couple years ago."

Momo's eyes widened at that last bit. "There are people form books here?"

She cast a look around the library to see if she recognized anyone from the books she'd read. Well, aside from Alucard she didn't know of any. "Dracula's here, but Bram Stoker's version of that tale was far-fetched and not accurate."

"I wonder what these book people would think if there was a copy of the book they were from ion this library." Momo paused a moment. "This certainly does give more creedance to the overlapping worlds."

Thursday paused to make a note of Dracula in her journal. "I wouldn't know, I'm afraid; I've only met the version in Bram Stoker's book."

She sighed. "That's the problem, really. The - people I've spoken to here don't seem to be aware that they're in books - at least, not until I or someone else mentions them. Back in my world, people in books are fully aware they're in books - kind of like actors on a stage who know they're in a play. They are the characters they portray, but when they aren't being read they're sometimes different people entirely."

Now that she thought about it, the play analogy worked better than the rambling explanations she'd been throwing up on the bulletin board, even if it was still pretty confusing.

"I worked in Jurisfiction - that's kind of like being a stage manager - you know, doing stuff behind the scenes and making sure everyone knows their lines. Arriving here and realizing that no-one from the BookWorld actually knows they're from the BookWorld is kind of like talking to the actors one moment and then talking to them again a few minutes later and finding out that they've completely and totally become the characters they portray. It's...well, it's kind of creepy."

The stage analogy Momo could understand. This Jurisfiction sounded tremendously fascinated and she wouldn't have minded walking a day in one of their operative's shoes for a day.

"You have a very interesting job, Next-san. It sounds much more relaxing and enjoyable than mine," the shinigami stated. "I can understand how that would seem creepy, but think of how creepy it is for the book people to suddenly find out they are from a fictional universe or something similar."

"The general consensus is that the prisoners are pulled from several different Earths and some from places that don't even resemble Earth. If I weren't shinigami and aware of multiple realms, I might have a hard time accepting this fact." She gave a tired smile. "I can't imagine how the average human would handle it." Thursday was definitely not a normal human in the shinigami's eyes.

Thursday smiled. "There are days when everything goes wrong and then you've got all of English literature at stake, but it definitely has its perks." Not everyone could say they'd ridden unicorns. Or danced with Darcy from Pride and Prejudice. Or clung white-knuckled and screaming to the side of a Porsche as Miss Havisham of Great Expectations fame roared down an open stretch of highway at over a hundred miles an hour.

Okay, maybe the last one wasn't a perk.

"Yeah, I guess I would feel pretty weird if random people came up to me and told me they knew everything about me ever." She'd had a book series written about her, but those had been so far removed from the truth as to be pitifully laughable.

"I've heard about other Earths - but only once, and that was a long time ago." Thursday shook her head. "I had no idea that there are so many, though - and that they're so different. Most of them don't even have time travel yet." Of course, her own technically wasn't supposed to have time travel yet either. But that was beside the point.

"You save English literature and I keep corrupt spirits from feasting on humanity," Momo said. "I wonder what the world would have been like if English literature was written differently considering how much impact certain works have had on humanity as a whole. Such as Mein Kampf or the works of Scrates and Homer."

"In my line of work, I deal with four different realms, but I've not heard of time travel in any capacity than fantastical ideas humans concoct." Momo shifted her position as she knelt on the floor to sit lotus style. "I find it very hard to theorize how time travel works. It is possible to become so fast that quicker than the blink of an eye one can be a great distance from where they had been, but time travel itself..." Time was always something Momo thought of as a constant.

"I've always held to the knowledge that while time is a constant and one cannot manipulate time, one can certainly manipulate oneself within time."

Thursday nodded. "Changing what was intended to be written's dangerous," she said seriously, though not without a twinge of guilt. "We have to protect every work of literature, no matter how much we disagree with it. It's in the Oath, and frankly I wouldn't have it any other way."

She grinned then, shaking her head. "I can't pretend to know how time travel works either. Not everyone can do it in my world - it's more of an inborn talent. But Dad's stopped time on countless occasions and it seems Friday - he's my son - is a natural at surfing the timestream, so presumably it's possible."

Her voice drifted off at that. Friday. And Landen. Did they know she was gone? Had the people in charge of this place gotten hold of them, too? Her nurse had said her family had put her here, but she didn't believe that for an instant.

"We all must maintain impartiality in our line of work when it comes to the basic premise. A matter of honor. On cannot simply choose not to cleanse a hollow just because it hasn't devoured a soul yet."

"There is a man here that claims to be a time traveler and has a great amount of knowledge," Momo said. "I'm nit sure how much to believe, but he is a very pleasant conversationalist."

The shinigami's eyes twinkled for a moment. "And one of the few men in this place that has any natural flirtatious talent. It's... refreshing to partake in such indulgences here, especially after a bad night. It helps lighten the soul's burden with so much despair and death around."

Thursday grinned. "He sounds like an interesting guy, I'll give him that. I may have to chat to him sometime." It was the time-traveling bit that caught her ear more than anything else, of course. Part of her still hoped there might be someone else from her world here; in her mind, any time traveler had the potential to be ChronoGuard, and while she was hardly on friendly terms with them back home, knowing one might be better than nothing.

Maybe she'd be lucky this time. Maybe it was Dad. Or Friday.

"I only got here just before lunch, so I don't have much experience in regards to what happens at night, but it sounds absolutely awful. I'd imagine keeping up everyone's spirits would be a tough job at best, and anyone who manages to do so definitely has my respect."

Momo nodded. "His name is Captain Jack Harkness," she said since Thursday was interested in speaking with him at some point. "I'll be having breakfast with him tomorrow if you want a face to go with the name."

"The nights are hard, especially for those not of an active lifestyle. Monsters, experimentation, brainwashed prisoners, taunting over the intercom... sometimes it's more psychologically damaging than physically. This place likes to play upon one's fears," the shinigami said. "I continually amazed at how the children trapped here manage to handle themselves and bounce back. They are... tremendously resilient."

"Captain Jack Harkness," repeated Thursday thoughtfully. The name wasn't familiar, but the 'Captain' - could he be ChronoGuard? Or, at the very least, a member of a similar organization in another universe? There was no doubt about it - she'd have to talk to him sometime.

"They'd have to be, wouldn't they? I can't believe the staff had the nerve to put kids in here." Thursday's fist clenched involuntarily at the thought of her own children stuck in a place like this. "All the more reason to get out, then - "

Thursday looked up as the intercom crackled to life and slowly pushed back her chair when the Head Doctor's message ended. She grinned slightly at Momo.

"Well, that's that, I guess - thanks for talking to me. Good luck tonight."

"You too," Momo said with a tired smile. "I'm sure we'll cross paths again."

With that, Momo allowed herself to be guided out of the library.

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Day 27: Library

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