I didn’t know about Charles but I was was feeling a bit hungry, and asked Charles “Can we get something to eat at a nearby tavern?”

He thought about it for a second and replied “I have to do something at noon, would you rather I take you to the library or a tavern first? You can follow me back or go to somewhere else on your own, and if you want to go on your own I’ll give you some coin to explore the city with. I will only ask if you remember the way back to the tower?”

“Yes, on second and seventh street right?”

“Correct, let me take you to the library and after I’ll give you some coin.”

He lead me down two more streets, while still being in the nice part of town and we arrived at a building with massive stone pillars in front of it holding the roof up. It was quite crowded around us compared to before and there were many people going in and out of the library.

We walked up the stairs and were stopped by two guards. Charles showed them a badge of sorts and they let us through. “This, is the library.” Charles walked around in a circle with his arms out and a few people looked at him weirdly, including the librarian. “Whether it be history on the kingdom, maps of the four great duchy’s, or just some urban legends this place has it all. Except magic books of course.”

He guided me to the librarian and asked the young woman “Madam, may we get a library permit for the young lass?”

“Of course, that will be one small silver coin paid every month and one large silver upon the first month.” Although I knew Charles had a lot of money, I was surprised to hear that it cost so much just for basic knowledge, some of which you can already hear on the streets.

Charles handed the large silver coin to the girl who gave them back a small shiny metal card with a magic circle engraved upon it. He pressed his thumb against it and asked me to put my thumb against the circle.

I looked at it curiously and Charles chuckled lightly and explained “That basic magic is to prevent forgery. It is something that you will learn soon and most real wizards already passed a long time ago. Only wizards desperate for money would work on such low magic.”

The librarian looked at him strangely for recognizing the magic so easily, and he ignored her and walked off. I quickly tried to keep up and we started exploring. I realized soon that there were five main sections of the library, the history area, ranging from folklore to official documents, to the more recent events. They also had a section for training manuals for most professions and a small section of books on recent inventions. Then there was the scholarly research paper section and last but not least a restricted area section which had three guards by a steel door. Charles looked at me and said “I’ll show you that later, first pick some books you want.” He smiled at me and I went off to the training manuals and started browsing. At first I looked in the daggers section, but I was discouraged by only seeing stuff for the bandit professions. Eventually I went to some of the long range professions and one caught my eye. It was a book labeled “A squires guide to the sparkfire. Repair, Maintaining and Firing your gun.”

For some reason, the word ‘Gun’ Resonated with me, reminding me of an explosion. Deciding I had nothing to loose I took the book off the shelf and dusted it off. It had a LOT of dust on it and I started coughing and waved the dust out from in front of my face, and decided to not open it until later. I went to go and grab a swordsman’s basic training manual and walked to the next section which peaked my interest, which was the books on recent inventions. At first I thought I would find something more detailed but it was mostly just tools for blacksmiths and leatherworkers and a few scholarly articles detailing some ideas that seemed to have little ground. I skipped through most of those until I found two books that caught my interest.

“Timekeeping, a possible future or an elf's tale?” and the book “A scholars research on guns.”. Both seemed to be unused for a while and both were on topics I was interested in. Lastly I went to the research documents section, which seemed to be more fiction and speculation than fact, but I managed to find one article on something called the “Void” which I thought might be interesting.

I took my stack of books and went to Charles, who was sitting at a table in the middle of the library reading one of the books he brought from earlier. He saw me and got up, gesturing for me to follow him, and we went to the restricted section.

A guard saw us and was about to stop us, but Charles pulled out a crystal like badge from his pocket and the guards immediately parted ways and one of them pulled out a key, and unlocked the door.

They all did a slight bow as we passed them and we entered the restricted area, which only had one other person in it. It was a man that appeared to be old, wearing a monocle and a set of traditional butlers clothing. Charles passed by him and he ignored us, and after passing him he looked at me and asked “So where would you like to go first? The only sections left in here are historical or about research that isn’t released to the public yet.”

After pondering it for a minute, I decide “I want to see the unreleased research.”

Charles nodded and we went down the sections until we reached a section which was labeled “Void”.

“The void is a more popular topic nowadays so I wanted to show it to you. I saw you already had a book on it, but more knowledge never hurts.”

Charles watches me as I comb through all the books available and I spotted one that said “Are we alone or surrounded by life? A study on life in the void.” Thinking it sounded interesting I pulled it out.

Charles was rather surprised and explained “Life in the void is a research topic that has been long abandoned. It just isn’t worth the investment so most nobles don’t bother with the subject. Its an interesting topic for sure but I’m surprised you picked that one out of all of them.”

“I just thought it would be interesting to read. Also I think I have all the books I need for a while, can we leave now?”

“Sure, we just need to check out our books.”

We walked back through the hallways back to the main library and Charles showed me how to check out the books, which just required me to put my card on the back of the book and the librarian to use a press on the book to activate the process. After that she told me “You have nine moons to return them. Anytime later will result in fees or removal from the library. Also,” She looked at me “I wouldn’t recommend looking into guns too closely. They are terrible at short range compared to even a beginner knight and at long range can’t compare to any archers firing rate or a wizards spells. They simply aren’t worth it for most use cases.”

“Thank you for the advice” I replied, but completely disregarded the advice as we left.