《Cloudsea - Fool's Edge Book One》Chapter 22 - Imbroglio

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The Librarian is among one of the oddest interdimensional rulers. Unlike the Abyss lords of Abzu, the Ruined Kings of the Scarlet realm, or simply being the largest protozoa colonies in Elysium, The listener (as it she also known as on ocasion) is not simply the ruler of her dimension. She is also the backbone of it’s organization and is directly responsible for it’s existence. Similarly, while she does have a line of succession, it is purely theoretical. In the estimated 140 million years that the legendary keeper of books, not once has she ever been in danger. The only one who has ever done something similar to that in terms of uninterrupted existence would be the Scourge known as -

Remains of a first-edition Omnic Bestiary on interdimensional beings. This is among the last of the entries, and it is unknown what the nature of this “scourge” the book references may be.

Silk almost ran into victor. For some inexplicable reason, he had stopped.

“What’s the holdup?”, wrote Silk after she had retrieved some parchment and a pen.

“Well, we can’t just run into the constantly shifting wall of bookshelves, can we? We’d get squished if we didn’t know what to do.”, replied Victor.

“There’s nothing there. Are you seeing things?”, Silk furiously scribbled.

“I am confident I am not. Besides, even if we made it through the barrier of erratically moving book containers, this would happen.”

Victor then proceeded to take out a small book from one of the bookshelves at the edge of where the maze of structures stopped, and throw it into what appeared to be a spot clear of obstructions. To her surprise, the book suddenly got slapped around furiously, before having part of it’s cover flattened by two invisible forces. The book then proceeded to yowl in the voice of a young man, and then got flipped around by something right before it hit the ground past what Silk assumed was the “moving bookshelf area”. Immediately after getting flipped over by who knows what, the book wildly mutated, it’s skinlike covering immediately spintering and stretching as tumors wildly grew random organs and appendages surrounded by muscle mass. After it imploded and collapsed in on itself with a sickening splunch, the book then proceeded rot away into a pile of brown, crumbly goo until there was nothing left but dust in the wind.

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“see how that tentacle mutated the living book and made it die? I think that after it got hit by what i’m assuming is a sorting mechanism for this place that you can’t see for some reason, the book - which I think used to be a person, but the jury’s still out on that conjecture - then got itself sped up and injected with mutagenics.” After that block of text was scrawled out by Victor’s handwriting and read by Silk, she flipped over the piece of parchment and wrote on the other side of it.

“I can’t see the tentacle either. How are you seeing this?”

“I don’t really know. Is there any difference between you and I that could be the explanation of this?”, replied Victor.

Several thoughts flashed through Silk’s mind, most of them resurfacing insults about Victor’s dubious mental stability from the depths of her subconscious. However, she noticed the glint from Victor’s ring right before she put her thoughts to the piece of parchment and reconsidered making a quip.

“We never did figure out what that ring did aside from slowly sinking small needles into your finger and discouraging you from removing it at the cost of pain - I’m still not sure why you didn’t take off that obviously cursed artifact by the way. It’s practically part of your finger at this point. Maybe if you take it off, you’ll be just as blind as me. Human beings like you or I can’t really see past our plane of existence without aid, and we do know from the books that the Omnic Empire did expand into other reality layers. Try it out.”

Victor winced before he removed the ring from his finger forcefully and with a great deal of pain despite the lack of blood such a wound should have caused. He then waited for a moment, and frowned. “It’s not working. Either that’s not the cause of it or the effect takes a while to wear off”.

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“Walk away and wait for a while. Maybe the effect wears off over time”, Silk signaled for him to sit down roughly three metres away from the ring.

Sure enough, after roughly an hour passed, Victor saw the images of the shelves slowly fade out as his ability to perceive the light blurred. It wasn’t completely gone, but it was definitely harder to see it out.

Victor walked back to silk and wrote down a confirmation before putting on the ring right back onto his index finger and watched it sink back into the small holes in his index finger, covering the removed skin and looking like a discolored part of his skin once more.

“Well, now we know what that does. I think we should just go through it.”

“And how are we going to do that, victor? I can’t exactly see it, and judging by how that ring works it takes at least a couple of days for the effect to start working.”

“I think i’m strong enough to carry you now. I’ve recovered a bit - you always did say I healed freakishly quickly - and I think I should be able to carry heavy objects and move quickly once more.”

Silk read through the note, then frowned and covered her hand with her sleeve before hitting Victor with a mighty yet silent slap.

“OW! What the hell was that for?”, wrote victor with enough pressure to leave a lasting indentation in the parchment.

“That’s for calling me a “heavy object”. You can’t just call a fair and refined maiden such as myself heavy.”, wrote Silk.

Victor was about to remark on how Silk was neither refined nor a maiden, but thought it best to note of her delusions after thinking of the consequences that would happen after the fact.

Victor then wrote one last thing, somewhat crossly now. “Alright, point taken. Now, how would you like me to carry you through the obstacle course sorting machine?”.

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