By the time the third meal rolled around, Aya had already used up over half of her notebook. Her skill continued to rise significantly with persistent use, now proudly hovering at ‘Medium Slow’. She wondered if she would advance past the ‘slow’ realm before her sentence was up. With a little over twenty library hours left, she was worried she was going to run out of space in her notebook before either finishing the sentence or leaving the slow realm.

Her transcription speed had improved remarkably, much faster than she even thought possible. Sometimes, she would catch her hand almost slipping through practiced motions. The skill worked like a system assist and explained her speed, but it was unnerving nonetheless to work at a pace not achievable in the real world.

Without Henry attached to her arm, the cramps had become a lot less frequent and her work had gotten both faster and more precise. Every now and then, she still took some time to stretch out her shoulders while she checked on new documents to transcribe. The small room always felt too cramped, especially since the librarians had taken to locking her inside. It did not occur to her that the new restriction was the result of the one time she had stuck her head out to investigate the hallway.The junior librarian in charge of her meal times showed up while Aya was busy trying to dislodge a ladder from its spot. The rusted tracks it rested on meant that they had theoretically been mobile once upon a time, but the longer she pushed and shoved on the metal, the more she doubted it. The way the tracks ran around the circular room in front of the shelves encouraged her to keep going, even as sweat dripped down her face, stung her eyes and blurred her vision; she would be able to reach even the highest manuscripts if she was able to get the stairs moving.

When Aya showed no signs of noticing him, even as she took a break to catch her breath and wipe the sweat away, the forgotten junior librarian cleared his throat She jumped at the unexpected intrusion and swiveled around to find the beady-eyed man looking at her with a look akin to fright. He twitched as he waited for her to walk past him. It was obvious she made him uncomfortable, probably because of her status, though her penchant for unusual activities was probably not helping.

‘One would think that you couldn’t do much else, other than read, in a library…’ Aya smirked at the thought as she walked out of her small room into the deserted corridors of the library. The silent steps of the junior librarian creeped her out a bit. She hadn’t heard or even sensed his approach. She was just grateful the man hadn’t walked into her doing anything worse, like, say, stealing top-secret library secrets and hiding them away in her notebook.

Aya shrugged, not seeing how the secrets of the Dalfyr mating season were of interest to anyone other than the Dalfyrees themselves.

The stuffy corridor was like a breath of fresh air compared to whatever it was she and Henry had been breathing in their small room for the last eight hours. She sighed in relief and took the time to stretch her shoulders on her way out to the mess hall.

As she walked down the library’s empty hallway, the damn bird still followed behind her, pecking at an unseen particle on the ground every now and then. At least, she hoped it was a particle; otherwise, the bird would be adding ‘extreme stupidity’ to its already extensive list of negative attributes.

He looked pained, as if he didn’t want to follow her at all but was compelled to. Every now and then, her Mana would take a hit of a hundred points or so and Henry would squawk in pain before rushing to her side. Aya grinned every time it happened. She would need to take time to look up the exact nature of the bond, manic creatures and mana… she had a lot of things to work on when she got out.

In the mess hall, she quietly picked up a meal and sat at an empty table to consider the day. She had worked out that, by the end of the real day, she would almost, but not quite, be done with her sentence in the game. It was both good and bad. It would give her a chance to work out the implications of some of the things she had learned during the day, but it also meant she would have to come back the next day to finish things off. Part of her wondered if she would ever be able to make up the ‘lost time’ in the library and another part of her wondered just how much she was losing out on. She should be out there in Era, proving her worth as a player and learning from Donovan. Aya wondered if he had taken on another ‘partner’ and if she would ever find out what quest it was that he needed help with.

Knowing him, she knew it would have to be something that literally required you to be in two places at once. For anything less, the boy would have found a way of doing it himself. Thinking of her own skills, she wondered if there was a skill that allowed such a thing in Era.

She sighed and pushed her oatmeal around. It reminded her too much of the prison’s gruel. Another part of her wondered if Donovan had even looked for her after she disappeared. It had taken her a while to figure out she couldn’t send any other players messages while serving her sentence. She had first tried contacting him when she landed in jail but he hadn’t shown up on her friend list as online and she hadn’t been able to send him a message. When she had logged on again the next day, he still hadn’t shown up as online and, although she set up an alert to notify her should it change, he never did. Added to the fact that Asterix and Obelisk never came online either, it made her realize that as long as her sentence was ongoing, she would not be able to contact any players she didn’t directly interact with.

Aya was debating whether she should eat the gruel or ditch it when Henry squawked uncomfortably from under the table. He liked making his temper known. She rolled her eyes, intending on ignoring him, then noticed that his hunger bar was only three quarters full. Aya smiled. Even bonded, she couldn’t shake the urge to mistreat the bird. Not after what he had put her through before and even since the bond.

His feathers almost unplucked themselves when Aya grabbed onto them. She hauled the bird forcefully into her lap. After clamping an arm around him like a vice-grip, she tried to feed him the oatmeal. At first, she treated him like a pesky kid who didn’t want his vegetables, reminding Aya of the very early fights she had with her sister after their parents’ death. Drowning in grief, Rin had refused to cooperate with any of her early attempts. Eventually, the young girl had succumbed to their lifestyle change. Aya still smiled when she remembered the speech her sister had given.

Rin had stomped up behind her with all the indignation a ten-year-old could muster. She had tapped her on the shoulder and waited with crossed arms, scrunched brows and pursed lips, until Aya turned around. Then she had delivered the most vehement words a ten-year-old could: “You’re not my mother. I can take care of myself. Stop telling me what to eat, how to dress and what to do. You don’t have any power over me, I’m not a little kid you can boss around. If you have anything you want to say, just say it. From person to person. Jus’ cuz I’m younger doesn’t mean I’m stupid.”

Without even waiting for a response, she had turned around and walked away. Aya, not knowing how to respond, hadn’t. But she needn’t have worried because, from then on, Rin became a different person. She took careful care of her hair, braiding it carefully like her mother had. The first couple attempts had resulted in sloppy and uneven braids but the little girl hadn’t let it deter her. From then on, her clothes were always neat and tidy and even her mannerisms changed. No longer the young girl she once knew, her sister started behaving like a little doll and even talked more correctly than Aya herself did.

At first it bothered her a bit, to see her little sister have to grow up so quickly. Life hadn’t been kind to either one of them but, with time, she learned to see it as her sister’s strength and drew on it to create her own survival mechanisms. Not having another choice, they had coped, kept going day after day until… the day Eddie McKlose died.

She gritted her teeth at the memory and her thoughts came rushing back to the present. All vestiges of maternity had left Henry’s feeding a long time ago. Instead the scene looked like something straight out of a torture chamber. He was screeching loudly and flapping violently about, having at some point gotten free of her vicegrip. Aya could feel fresh scratches on her face, oozing with warmth. A quick wipe with the back of her hand confirmed it was blood. She glared at the bird and set out to reaffirm her dominance.

The commotion had long since gotten the attention of the entire room. Everyone looked on, in communal shocked silence, as she nearly strangled the bird to death, holding his head down on the table with her knee. She climbed on after him, repositioning herself so each wing was under one of her knees. Using the rest of her body weight to anchor his body to the table, she used her freed hands to grab for the gruel.

Seconds later, Henry was receiving days of pent-up rage in the form of spoonfuls of oatmeal. He squabbled, refusing to eat the food. His diet had been substituted by blood for too long and he was no longer able to stomach normal food like he should, not when the bloody meals made him feel more alive than he ever had. He would rather starve than succumb to the irate figure on top of him which had caused him so much grief, first tearing him away from his family, then refusing to feed him for days and then addicting him to the vile grease of beasts. Shame washed over him at the thought of his mates seeing him this way.

As the next spoonful of mush came his way, he refused as much as he could, clamping down his beak with as much force as he could. Unfortunately, the small girl that loomed over him had her own stubborn streak and plugged the air holes on top of his beak. With both refusing to give in and an appalled audience looking on, the bird eventually passed out. Instead of seeing it as her win, the girl on top of the bird grinned sadistically and stuffed more oatmeal down its beak.

The bird never swallowed though and when, a couple minutes later, all that she had accomplished was a pile of oatmeal near his head, she threw in the towel, glaring at the passed-out bird as she sat down to finish the gruel. When the girl picked up the spoon she had been using to so viciously force-feed one of Era’s creatures to stuff herself, the group of librarians erupted.

Their silence was replaced by murmurs of disapproval which gave way to protests of behavior and rising voices. It took Aya a moment to realize she was the source of the commotion. She watched on in horrified fascination, still feeding herself the rest of the gruel. Part of her knew she was about to be kicked out and took the eye in the storm as her last moments of getting a free meal. She still had at least another three meal times left in the library and if they didn’t actually feed her during those meal times, she would definitely have issues with hunger and would probably end up sharing her blood flasks with Henry.

Her stomach revolted at the thought but she kept a steady stream of spoonfuls directed at her mouth. Five minutes later, the room was in upheaval, the normally stoic librarians unrecognizable in their agitation. More and more librarians rushed in to see what the commotion was about. At first, they tried subduing the ones present but they too were soon shouting and screaming. Minutes later, others would try subduing them. The cycle continued until the initial dozen or so librarians had turned into over fifty.

The last of the oatmeal scratched its way down Aya’s throat. The window where she usually dropped her plate off was behind the mass of librarians. She was unsure whether or not she should just leave her things on the table and leave but the door was also covered by the horde of angry librarians. Although she had seen most of the spectacle develop, she had no idea what she had done to incite the librarians so much.

“Outworld Filth!”

One of the librarians called out from within the mass. She couldn’t see who it was but the voice seemed to rouse Henry out of his unconsciousness. He twitched a bit before slowly struggling to his feet. The bird’s movements silenced the room so that the only thing that could be heard was the breathing of a large group of unhappy people and a LayHen struggling to his feet.

Aya watched in silence as Henry got back on his feet. The bird eyed the librarians to one side of the rooms lazily before he turned his attention to the nemesis of his life. For the first time ever, it seemed like he was on equal footing, eying her at the same level as he stood on the table before her. He craned his neck up, holding himself proudly. Aya thought she saw the bird direct a glare of pure hatred at her, but decided she had imagined it. A bird couldn’t possibly feel as much as she saw reflected in its black eyes. Especially not when she was the victim in the relationship.

As if to reaffirm her thoughts, the bird suddenly lunged at her, attacking her face as he used his feet to cling to her hair. Stunned in surprise, her body didn’t immediately respond as the bird attacked, pecking at her bloodied face.

All thoughts of the audience around them were immediately forgotten and Aya began a counterattack of her own. She was too busy subduing the bird to notice Aizan entering the room to begin his own subduing campaign. All she knew was that when she finally managed to get Henry under control five minutes later, she was alone in the room with the man.

The look he leveled her lacked a gram of understanding but more than made up for it with a ton of irritated indignation. He opened his mouth as if to say something, but immediately clamped it back shut and instead raised a shaky hand that pointed to the door. It was obvious she had done something really wrong. She hadn’t forgotten the crowd of onlookers, though she did wonder how they had disbanded so quickly. She still had no idea what had upset the librarians so much but she wasn’t about to throw away a get-out-of-jail-free card. She jumped to her feet and headed out the door as fast as she could with the struggling bird still in her arms.

As the door clanked closed behind her, she came faceto-face with a couple librarians who directed glares at her, particularly at the bundle in her arms. Sensing Henry was the source of displeasure, she dropped him to the ground and scurried off in the direction of her small room. The bird followed closely on her tail, her mana diminishing quickly as it forced Henry on with audible cries of pain. She made it back to her room in record time. The junior, however, was long gone and she didn’t see anyone outside her room in charge of locking her in.

Feeling safer in the familiar space, she heaved a sigh of relief as she leaned back against the closed door. There was a constant cloud of fear hovering over her because of her use of the notebook, but that fear was nothing compared to the paralysis she had felt in the mess hall. She only realized it now, but she had been incredibly stupid. It was already quite obvious that she didn’t have a favorable reputation with the members around the library. She shouldn’t have done anything to antagonize them and give them extra reason to want to get rid of her.

Although she didn’t know what exactly had turned them against her, she knew for sure it had something to do with her treatment of Henry. She shot the bird at her feet a vicious glare. It strutted around non-responsively. Rolling her eyes, she pushed herself away from the door and back towards her workstation. She would strive to keep a low profile from now on. She had to make sure she didn’t get kicked out or increase her sentence. Being stuck in the library was definitely not the best use of her Era time but it sure beat the more time-consuming alternative.

The junior had already taken away all of her recent work, along with the matching original documents. She trailed through the emptied shelves with satisfaction. It was good to see her work amount to something. After another minute of self-congratulation, she returned her attention to the rusted staircase. It was ornate in its detailed carving and reached all the way to the top shelves of the little room.

Before she uncovered it from the almost waist-high pile of scrolls that now rested beside it, she hadn’t even been able to recognize it as a set of stairs. The only reason she had unburied it in the first place was because of a particular scroll she had sighted in the opposite side of the room. She had been working on one of her transcriptions when something shined in her eye. Aya had looked around trying to find it, but couldn’t spot anything amidst the piles of paper that had a reflective surface.

After resuming work, she had been interrupted again, minutes later, by the same gleam. She looked up but again, she hadn’t been able to find anything. The same process had repeated itself a couple times before Aya had finally had enough. Dumping her quill into the ink pot, she had stood up with such force that her chair had been knocked back. She stomped around the room, scouring it for anything that could have reflected light into her eyes, but found nothing. Eventually, when she had been about to give up and attribute it to a trick of the light through the grimy windows, she caught the reflection once more.

Only, as amazing as it might seem, it didn’t turn out to be a reflection at all. She hadn’t believed it herself at first but in the highest shelved alcove of the small room, a scroll glowed as if aflame. Aya had blinked, trying to clear her vision, but as much as she tried to dispel it, the scroll remained. She tried climbing the shelves to get a closer look but, although most of the shelves could take the weight of her slight frame, two from that column of shelves had creaked so loudly she had been too scared to proceed. She tried circumventing it by climbing the nearest column, but, with her small body, was unable to get high enough to reach the middle of the highest shelf next to it. She was about to give up on the enterprise when she spotted the stairs.

She had thought it was a mere bookcase placed in the packed room for additional storage, but as the scrolls came off of the stairs, they revealed themselves for what they truly were and Aya’s excitement began to grow. If she were able to use the stairs, she would be able to reach a much greater number of scrolls and have a much bigger selection at her disposal. As it was, she was already running low on interesting material. In fact, her most recent set of transcriptions revolved around the laws, etiquettes and ancestry of the aristocracy of the region.

So now Aya stood in front of the cleaned-out stairs, still unable to budge them from their location. It had initially seemed like a worthy use of her time, but as she was still unable to get it to move an inch, she wondered if she was better off just getting back to work. She looked up to see the scroll in the opposite side of the room still glowing. Sighing in resignation, she headed to her workstation to relieve herself of the bags she had rarely parted with since the beginning of the game. Aya had known herself long enough to know that, in the long run, her curiosity would get the best of her so she might as well resign herself to it now instead of letting it distract her for the next couple hours. Especially knowing she’d end up doing the exact same thing, only later.

Unburdened by the weight and awkwardness of her pack, Aya was able to move around more freely. She shoved at the ladder without fear of breaking her own belongings. Aya was in the process of ramming into the stairs with her shoulder when the door slammed open with a loud and echoing bang. Surprise skewed Aya a little off-course, causing her to hit the stairs at an awkward angle, which then sent her tumbling into the shelves like a ping-pong ball. After painfully smacking her head into one of the shelves, she ended up sprawled on the ground with scrolls cascading on top of her.

Aizan stood by the open door. It was obvious from the red shades of his face that he was not very pleased with her. But as she watched them darken into purple, she realized her tomb of scrolls had only made it worse. She began to carefully extricate herself from the scrolls around her, trying to appease the librarian with the special care she took.

“Stop!” he screamed at the top of his lungs. The word crashed into the room with such force that its echoes caused aftershocks in the scroll dishevelment and even escaped into the open hallway behind the librarian.

Aya stilled, knowing any movement, even the right one, would upset the librarian in his current state. The man was sweating and out of sorts with the breath huffing out of him in a ragged rhythm. It was strange to see a man, that was usually so well put together, come apart like that. Even stranger knowing she was the one responsible, though she still wasn’t quite sure how.

Henry chose that inopportune moment to cluck noisily before making a dash for the exit. Unfortunately for everyone, the distance activated the mana leash that zapped the bird every time he left her side and he squawked painfully after flying two feet in the air.

Aizan clenched his fists at the sight, swiveled around and banged the door closed behind him so Henry couldn’t attempt another escape. The action seemed to calm the man a little and although the purplish hue still dominated his expression, he had regained control of his breathing and shaking limbs. He folded his arms and stared her down before addressing her.

It had the desired effect. Aya swallowed, feeling like a misbehaving school girl who was about to be told off in front of class.

“What were you thinking?”

Aya knew from his expression that he expected her to know what he was talking about. She thought that asking would infuriate the man but the longer she thought about what to say, the more his brows furrowed and she ended up sputtering her initial response, “About what?”

Not the right answer.

“About what!?” he yelled. “About your abhorrent behavior in the mess hall! You’re here under my recommendation! Anything you do is a reflection of me!”

She didn’t know what to say.

“The only reason you haven’t been kicked out after treating a sacred creature of Era the way you have is because of your uncanny ability with the quill.”

He looked around the room accusingly.

“Though it seems you aren’t putting that to use like you should either.”

“That’s not what it looks like, there’s this scroll that—” she began, pointing at it.

“I should have let them take you back,” he cut her off. “I thought it was a sign. You had been doing so well… I was going to offer you a more permanent… Well… That all doesn’t matter now.” He sighed heavily while he considered her crumpled form.

“I’m sorry for… whatever it was I did,” she tried again.

His eyes hardened and her words faltered. She knew she was just making things worse but both her silences and her apologies were not helping and she didn’t know what else to do. Aya felt like a guppy; opening and closing her mouth, but unable to say anything.

Henry strutted in front of her, trailing his tail behind him like a lizard. An unusual behavior for the bird who always proudly held it up high. It slithered behind him and smacked into the base of her carefully erected pyramid of scrolls by the stuck set of stairs. They tumbled to the ground in disarray. She glared at him and could have sworn he returned her look with a sneer.

She wanted to jump up and tackle the bird that had gotten her into the position in the first place, but decided to just sit still lest she make things worse.

“What you did,” Aizan said, “is attack a creature of a species that is going into extinction.”

Aya couldn’t help but eye the librarian dubiously as she watched Henry be his usual petulant self.

“And you chose to do it in front of a crowd that values the preservation and spread of knowledge above all else. You chose to do this knowing you are unwanted and unliked by most. And you chose—”

The librarian scrunched his eyes closed and pinched the bridge of his nose as if trying to fend off a migraine.

“You know what? It does not matter. You were very stupid today….”

The man veered a look at Henry whose head was under his wing, plucking as his leathery feathers.

“I thought highly of you… With your skill… And your apparent regard for the prized LayHen and its unlikely regard for you…” His eyes turned sad and he added, “I was mistaken.”

Aya didn’t know what to say. It didn’t seem like a good idea to voice her thoughts on any aviary matters and before she could think of anything else, the man’s irritated resolve returned.

“Perhaps I am the stupid one. To trust a petty thief…”

“But I—”

“Your mess hall privileges have been suspended,” he cut her off in a clipped tone. “You will carry out the remainder of your sentence in this room without interference. I hope you have learned your lesson, but know this: Should you give me a reason, any reason whatsoever, I will make your life hell. You will wish you had never stepped foot into this world.”

And with that he turned around and left the room in an angry rustle of robes. The door slammed shut behind him and the lock ‘thunked’ loudly into place not soon after. For a moment Aya was unsure if she should move or not. Henry had no such inhibitions as he continued to strut around the room. From his attitude, one would think he laid eggs of gold, when in fact he didn’t lay any at all, useless male that he was.

Aya stood up, carefully trying to disrupt as few scrolls as possible. Across the room, small group of scrolls dislodged themselves from their high position in the shelves and tumbled unceremoniously to the ground. Aya decided she should be a good girl and give up on her wild-goose-chase, focus on transcribing more legal aristocratic rights, lest she get an increased sentence. It was time she behaved more like herself, more like ‘Chris’. She organized the fallen scrolls into piles and was walking toward her workstation when a gleam caught her eye.