“The English, in their stupidity, let us stay. We’ve been paying them back for that favor ever since.”

There are moments in my life that are so vivid, I only need to close my eyes and think briefly about them before all the details come flooding up to the surface.

Me locked in the middle school bathroom, sobbing for hours.

My mother’s body draped in a sheet on the morgue table.

There were others, too few of them happy.

And now, I would have to add this one to the list.

The next thing I remembered was Polly grabbing my wrist and pulling it away from the shell, as if I was a child who had touched a hot stove. I brought my hand up to my face and wiggled my index finger to make sure that it was still attached. It was. But before I could dwell on the stunning development of the magic shells, Polly began pulling me down the street.

“W-what are you doing?”

I yanked myself free and we continued walking away from the corner.

“What does it look like I’m doing? Getting us the hell out of there. You promised you wouldn’t scream, remember?”

“I did, but you could have warned me!”

We walked to a grocery store at the end of the block and I followed Polly inside. Only when we had reached the middle of the cereal aisle did Polly finally stop and set down her bag, into which she tossed the shells.

“I didn’t think I needed to. It looked like you had figured it out on your own.”

“You said it yourself though; I’m newer than a noob; how was I supposed to know that you somehow created a tiny rip in the fabric of the space-time continuum?”

“The what?”

“You know, a wormhole.”

Polly shook her head.

“I don’t know what the heck you’re talking about. It’s just some vervorium painted on the bottom of each shell.”

Oh, of course. Some vervorium painted on the shells. Her tone made it sound like she was describing how to make a sandwich.

“I don’t mean to sound like an idiot, but what is vervorium, exactly?”

“Vervorium, Jade, is a very rare but incredibly useful prima materia used to link two places together. It’s hard to make and you need a lot of ingredients. Like the spleen of a freshly killed rat, for one.”

She did it again. Prima materia. Available in your local bodega next to a can of chili.

“So that was you I was delivering the rat to?”

Polly smirked.

“Nope. This vervorium I stol-err, borrowed from my dad. Whoever wanted your rat was someone else and not necessarily to make vervorium. Rats are very useful. We keep a ton in our garage.”

A clerk walked by with a cart full of cereal and we headed in the opposite direction towards the freezer section. I tried to process these new revelations and wanted to ask a million more questions. Was this real magic? Or some incredibly complex science that had been concealed from the world by a select few? At some level, it didn’t really matter, as one of my favorite authors, Arthur C. Clarke, had once opined, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Polly still owed me the answer to one question, so I wracked my brain for one that would reveal the most information.

“All right, time for my question.” We stopped in front of a case of frozen fish sticks. “So the Quests are just some cheap labor to fetch ingredients for your magic potions, is that it?”

I had formulated my inquiry with just the right level of ridiculousness in the hopes that Polly would relish the opportunity to disabuse me of my misconceptions by talking too much. But to my disappointment, she did not take the bait.

“No,” was all she replied. I waited for more but she suddenly turned quiet and began drawing doodles on the freezer case.

“That’s it?” I said.

“Look, uhh, I’ve already told you way too much for a level one. Here’s your iron. Good luck to you.” She forced the tokens into my hand and then ran off before I could say anything more. For a second I contemplated chasing her out of the store, but realized the optics of that were abysmal and would likely get me arrested.

I kicked myself for asking too big of a question. There was clearly something greater going on here than just a bunch of random fetching; my finger tip floating in mid-air was proof of that, but all that I had to go on was a bunch of tokens, a crazy message board, and an even crazier story about a teleporting ball.

With a sigh, I started to walk out of the store when something on the freezer case caught my attention. What I had thought were mere doodles were actually numbers, six numbers in fact, separated in the middle by a period. It read “949.278.”

I stared at them, trying to figure out what they could mean, then kicked myself for not recognizing the sequence immediately. After all, I had spent every summer since I was 15 through college working in the Borough Park Library. I could hear my old boss Ms. Bakadet’s voice in the back of my mind, berating me for not remembering the Dewey Decimal classification for 17th century Celtic literature, and I couldn’t imagine how many months of stack duty she would have assigned me for my transgression just now.

But thanks to those hours she spent hammering into my brain every single Dewey Decimal number, I was sure I could figure out at least part of this one without resorting to what Ms. Bakadet referred to as the “idiot terminal.”

900 was history. 940 was the history of Europe. 949 was the catch-all for the random parts of Europe that people didn’t care too much about. But the three numbers after the decimal remained a mystery, as there was only so much information I could store in my brain. And having not worked at the library in five years, there was no reason to remember this stuff any longer. The 2 would be the country, but which one I had no clue. The 78 would be some other topic and time period as it related to this country, though again I was stumped.

I pulled out my phone to cheat, only to be bombarded with a flurry of Slack messages. Evidently, Ross, Russ’s replacement, had picked up Russ’s bad habit of fixing one bug by introducing two more. I quickly answered that I was on my way back from a doctor’s appointment and ran out of the store, but not before snapping a picture of the cryptic numerals and then wiping the glass clean.

It took me the rest of the afternoon and well into the evening to undo Ross’s mishap and between that and the haunting visage of my finger that appeared whenever I closed my eyes for more than a second, I had no motivation to tread back into the world of library numbering systems. But, I still wanted to see if my level-up had gone through and so I clicked over to the Quest Board and logged in.

I took out the two iron and set them in front of my keyboard, as if offering them to the Questing gods. My profile screen loaded and a big pop-up window appeared in front.

“Congratulations! You’ve reached level two!” it said in fancy green script. I closed the window to check out my new stats:

“Quests completed: 12

Tokens earned: 23 wood, 4 iron

Level: 2

Token experience: 31

Level up: 100”

One hundred experience to get to level three? What the heck! It had taken me 10 weeks just to get this far. I didn’t want to count how many more rats I would have to bludgeon to get close to level three. There had to be some way to take on more rewarding Quests or I would be stuck getting sneered at by the Pollys of the world for the next three years. But, to do that, I would have to get smarter on the subject of Questing.

So, the next day, on my way to work, I stopped at the midtown library to look up the mystery number. I wasn’t sure how a book about the history of some random country was going to help, but I had a hunch that the decimal was chosen more for its obscurity than for its relevance to the subject matter.

My theory was spot on, as a search of the library’s digital holdings yielded nothing with that number. Not a good sign. But knowing how the library system worked, I was sure that their hard-copy card catalog was lurking around the building somewhere.

After several annoyed librarians gave me conflicting answers, I finally found the six-foot tall structure in a poorly lit corner of the basement. The handwritten labels were brown and peeling, and of course the drawer I wanted was just out of my reach, so I located a rickety wooden chair, leaned it against the cabinet, and stepped up. It held.

A cloud of dust sprayed my face upon opening the relevant drawer and I began flicking through the cards. Finally, I reached 949.278 and was rewarded for my diligence. I pulled out the section number and the two cards that followed it, carefully stepped down from the chair, and took my prize over to a small table nestled between two stacks.

Someone had written the name of the section on the first card in cursive, the blue ink of the letters scrunched together so that they barely took up any space. I studied the writing several times before I could make out what it said:

“The history of Dutch settlement in North America.”

That was … not what I was expecting. I looked at the other two cards, hoping the book titles would shed some light on the relevance of what was turning into a wild goose chase. But instead of titles like I was expecting, there were only numbers.

Fine, I thought. I’ll just go back to the stupid computer upstairs and type in the numbers and voila, books located. But the computer failed me again, bringing back nothing at all.

Finally, I gave up and went to the reference desk. My run of luck continued, as a woman who could have been Ms. Bakadet’s twin was hammering away at her keyboard when I approached. I stood in front of her, remembering my training well.

“Never interrupt a librarian mid-thought!” Ms. Bakadet had said. “She could be on the verge of locating a long-lost book that the next Nobel Prize winner needs to complete their master work!”

As much as I highly doubted that this scenario had ever occurred, I waited patiently until the clacking ceased.

“Umm, excuse me?”

The librarian turned and glared at me above the spectacles on her nose, as if it weren’t her job to help people locate books.

“Yes?”

“I was wondering if you could help me locate these two books.” I handed her the two cards. “I searched the regular catalog but couldn’t find anything.”

She snatched the cards out of my hand with the speed of a cobra.

“Where did you get these?”

“I, umm, they were in the card catalog in the basement.”

“And you just decided to rummage around in the meticulously organized card catalog that dozens of librarians spent years creating and maintaining?”

Uh oh. It was becoming apparent that I had unknowingly walked into a bear trap and I needed to pull my foot free before this woman attacked me with the ferocity of a rabid dog.

“Well, uh, no. I just looked at these two cards. And I used to work at the Borough Park Library, so I know how important it-”

“Oh, so you think because you used to work in a library, you can just waltz down to our card catalog and take out cards to your heart’s content?”

“No, but, umm, look, I’ll just put them back, so they don’t get los-”

“You will do no such thing, young lady! I don’t want you anywhere near my card catalog. The fact that-”

“Look, are you going to help me or not?”

The rudeness of my question knocked the wind out of Ms. Bakadet’s twin and she just stared at me, unblinking, for several seconds. Then, in what I could only chalk up to a minor miracle, she relented and began searching for the numbers on the cards on her computer.

“Hmm, I can see why these didn’t come up for you. Someone must have transposed the book numbers incorrectly in the computer system. Fortunately for you, I’ve seen this before, or you would be out of luck. Ah, here we go. Oh.”

“What happened?”

“So, I found your books. It’s just that I don’t know where they are.”

That made not one lick of sense to me, but maybe it did in librarian speak.

“So, they’re lost?”

The librarian glared at me.

“We don’t lose books. These two happen to be checked out at the moment, but by who and for how long, I don’t know. It might have been a week or two or 12 years. Whoever loaned these books out did us both the disservice of not properly documenting those transactions. But, I’ll put you on the waitlist and when they do come back in, we’ll let you know. Have a good day.”

“I, uhh, OK. Thank you very much.”

As much as I wanted to find out more about these missing books, I knew when I had overstayed my welcome and walked out of the library with even more questions and no answers.

Next: Jen goes in search of answers and kindred Questing spirits.