Chapter V - Brimstone

[TennyoCeres84]

Meris couldn't help but chuckle at his absurd behavior, but her expression became genuinely puzzled as she looked up at the Curator. "From Nereus' recordings, he stated that you had appeared recently enough. He made it roughly around 1825, so that might give you some basis for when you might've gotten on your feet enough to start perusing the library. I don't recall you being here when I would come here with Delmar, and that was between 1500 and roughly 1600, give or take a few years as the actual year was a bit murky when I reached the surface. "

She then crossed her arms speculatively, and her brows furrowed. "You might've been some bookworm who had forgotten himself, but it strikes me as odd that you never had a body ever. Even if you were some half-gone relic, you'd probably at least try to simulate some semblance of your life before. Even spirits attempt that in the Shadowlands. The only thing I can suggest is that you came here when you were a very young Void Weaver. That'd also explain why your personality and form is so elastic and larger than life," she mused with a light shrug.

"As for the Speaker, you're right. He's too busy keeping things running in Dalarath that I doubt he's concerned. The spirit within the Speaker's body is Nikolaas Buck, a human cultist. The Chamberlain must've taken a shine to him enough that he shoved his consciousness into my son's body, while his spirit is somewhere else."

[IamLEAM1983]

The Curator remained buff for a few instants. "One moment," it said, still sticking to its Fake Arnold voice, "the filing system is in need of domination - I will not rest until the Black Library knows the glory of the Dewey system; hwaugh!"

The last book put in place, it looked back to the group while removing its sunglasses, voice seemingly returned to normal. "Right - Buck. We'll be in a better position to discuss him once we get to where we're going," the protean Weaver said, body more or less deflating back to Ike's borrowed bookish frame. He then dusted off his robes. 

"Okay, we're a ways away from traffic, I mentioned we had quite a bit of infinite terrain to cover... Let's get to falling, shall we?"

Eir was about to voice her complaints, Anjali had barely any time to add a strangely adult-sounding whinge of displeasure, owing to her falsely mature Void Weaver seeming, that gravity slowly began to shift away from them. Again, some unseen and massive gears were heard clicking and grinding in the distance, most people in the group reflexively scrambling to find purchase on anything they could reach. Archie ended with his cane's pommel pushing his top hat down on his head, with his free hand grasping a candelabra for dear life. Strangely, none of the light fixtures or shelves seemed to be affected, the books either slumping against one another to thumping to the floor when disturbed, which obviously miffed their strange guide.

"Aw, not the Prolegomena to the Third Eye's Rending, this is the only copy we've got!" protested the Curator.

Aidan, in the meantime, had managed to clamber onto the sides of a few bookshelves and stood atop them like the rungs of a ladder. "Excuse us for freaking out!" he quipped, "Not all of us are used to Inception-style mindfucks!"

Anton, who looked more used to this, simply stared down at this new "void" - effectively the unseen end of the corridor - from the shelf he'd clambered onto. "Trust me Aidan," he said, "by our standards, this is the equivalent to a gentle caress of an exposed knee! We're nowhere near cognitive assault yet!"

The Curator rolled his eyes. "This is why we don't let tourists in; even the allied ones!" he said, raising his voice over the final thuds of whatever cosmic machine had shifted gravity. "We can belabor this for as long as you want," he said, "or you can follow right along and be done with it! Like this!"

He then hopped down, gravity immediately whisking him down into the greenish fog of the unseen depths of the corridor-cum-tunnel. Delmar looked down, a grin shyly waiting behind his tendrils. "I haven't done this since my first few weeks as a hatchling," he remembered. "I'd find any excuse just to retreat to an empty corner and BASE-jump my way to the vaults."

[TennyoCeres84]

While the suddenly appeared corridor-cum-tunnel had seemed daunting initially, Meris grinned to her friends. "Try to think about it, and let go! Think of it as a slide and let your inner child take over!" she encouraged them, stepping off the edge with a lithe hop.

"I'm beginning to see why your great-grandmother was able to handle the Black Speech; she's already a little mad!" Crystal nervously said to Neasa, steeling herself.

The younger selkie smiled wryly. "Maybe so," she replied, taking the plunge. Chuckling, the werewolf gripped Archibald and Anjali's hands reassuringly. "On the count of three, we'll go. One...two...three!" she exclaimed, then leading the disguised automaton and child down the eldritch rabbithole.

[IamLEAM1983]

Archie's "Tally ho!" had a bit of a despair-laden lilt, if it wasn't his ethereal stomach quailing at the ensuing vertigo. Three didn't so much as scream, instead choking on an abortive yelp as his limbs windmilled in a futile effort to keep him straight. Anton more or less flopped himself downwards, tentacles whipping every which way as he spun around, while Cuthbert and Nereus' shade both attempted something more worthy of a trained skydiver's controlled starfish posture. Vernon and Eir clung to one another, eyes tightly closed, as if death loomed somewhere ahead.

As one could've expected, all that sheer emotional baggage chipped away at their assumed appearances, their true selves coming out the way colors bloomed out of a developing Polaroid. Not that there were any risks of their being spotted; all attending corridors were barely-seen apertures that flashed past them once terminal velocity was attained. If anyone else saw them, they'd be seen as a vague blur, like a trail of mist, stretching out into the protective infinity leading out into the vaults' secluded corner.

After what might seem like an eternity, the distant details of the farthest wall came into view, much like a floor racing up to meet with them. They weren't slowing down, however. They weren't slowing down - only to find that the far wall had the consistency of ballistic gel. It gave away and rippled under their combined impacts, ripping open in a few places to reveal some sort of gray protoplasmic goo under the wrenched wood and stone. They sank into it as their gained momentum was progressively nullified, gravity somehow righting itself somewhere in the process.

Panting, Three only realized they'd stopped once he found himself with a cheek to the floor's cold marble, the only discomfort he felt reminding him of the patches of sore skin left on one's thighs after standing up from a too-long stay in a pleather sofa. The wall had adhered to them to completely that being carefully dropped to the floor had left half his face and his left arm briefly flaring with a sharp prickling sensation.

"Holy fuck," he gasped, "holy shit! I'm gonna kill whoever suggests we do that again!"

Predictably enough, the Curator looked to be the least disheveled of the group. "That's too bad," he said, shrugging, "I was about to suggest we reverse polarities for the trip back down the corridor..."

Three ignored that. "We're really at the end of an infinite hallway?
- It'd be more fair to say we moved too fast for the looping points to kick in," admitted the Curator, "but yeah. You're at the end of every endless Hanna-Barbera corridor loop; you've brute-forced your way past a few other Curators who get paid to pop-quiz whoever who wants to make it this far. You'll have to excuse the, er, lack of resolution, considering."

Three looked around. As their new guide had said, all surfaces were all flat, matte and uniform. Everything felt oddly cool to the touch, as even the books along the bookshelves looked like nondescript brown slabs with barely-legible Black Speech on the pages and covers.
- Is this data compression of some kind?" asked an inquisitive Knight Commander, which left the Curator to reply with a wavy so-so hand gesture. "The Darkhallow's like YouTube," he explained. "It runs on our collective brainpower and draws from the Others, but it's more cost-effective to compress whatever doesn't get accessed often. Nereus built his access to Point Dume in the Dream Cache, as I call it, because nobody goes there. It's where every heretical scroll the real Nereus penned ended up. Every amorous recounting of romantic evenings, every tolerant philosophical discourse Lulroth entertained..."

The protean Weaver shrugged. "But it's okay, seeing as the rebels know to scavenge what they can from here. It's our little collective Rakotis, Dalarath's literary garbage dump of things they think is trivial, where you can infer entire spans of our culture from things like denied stabs at lucid understanding."

Three frowned. "Rakotis? Wasn't that Vlastos' old haunt?
- Ayep," said the Curator, "and it's also Egypt's dumping ground of everything from grocery lists to courtroom briefs, private hieroglyphic erotica or shitty poems Nathaniel Hawthorne ended up obsessing on. We lost Alexandria but retained the Second Empire's worth of table scraps."

[TennyoCeres84]

Meris groaned, having felt the impact somewhat despite her more eager disposition. Ever on-point to get to her destination, she gingerly ventured over to the Curator. "Do we find the Dream Cache in one of these books, then? I doubt Nereus would have wanted it to be blatantly obvious to anyone, other than those he trusted," she mused.

As though agreeing with his owner, the re-manifested Cailean gave a slightly uncertain bark, as though he was unfamiliar with this new terrain. He immediately began sniffing around as any living dog would in an attempt to find its way.

Watching the Lapphund meander his way about the room, Crystal asked, "Is it at this point that Cailean comes into play? I believe you said Nereus's recording said to bring him along to help us find your man?"

"I would imagine so," the Archmage replied. "Even still, the access to Point Dume might still have some form of traps to keep interlopers out, so we should still be careful," she advised.

[IamLEAM1983]

The group fanned out, the impossible distance between them and the rest of the Black Library giving them free license to root around. If any other Curators had noticed anything wrong, and if Arbiters had been notified, Meris and the others were too deep inside Dalarath's guilty conscience to be so much as bothered. Cailean, however, didn't look like he knew what to make of this strange, almost low-polycount environment, with no visible doors or levers to pull. A few rounds, and he soon found himself sitting in front of Meris, head cocked to the side and an indecisive whine escaping his throat.

"Alright," said Cuthbert, "so the dog needs a little help... How do we search for anything in a place that's as barren?
- Beats me," admitted the Curator, "all I know is the path to Nereus' old shade of Miami is in here somewhere. Fake Nereus over there never gave me direct access to it."

The Augur's shade grunted slightly. "I'm only his resolve, Curator," he said. "I'm not the craftiness he's trying to drown out in despair. Knowing him, though, he found inspiration with one of us, here. What can be found in a place that has so little detail?"

A few minutes passed, and then Anjali, oddly enough, piped up. "Easter eggs, maybe?
- Beg pardon, darling?" asked Archie. 

The girl nodded and pressed on. "Easter eggs. People actually do have games in Heaven, you know. A lot of Cherubs told me people had the right to write, read or play violent stuff if they wanted to - if you're in Heaven, you're mature enough to handle being mad. So, I saw people playing video games, sometimes. Old stuff, stuff that hasn't come out yet - there's always secret rooms in games, where people never go. Doors you can open without handles; that kind of stuff."

Three nodded. "We're in a corner of the Black Library where almost nobody ever goes, and the last person to come here with a serious plan was probably Nereus proper. Meris' singing defused the shade below the dream house they shared," he deduced, looking back at Crystal, "so he would've gone for a different trigger, here."

Vernon ran a hand along the wall. "False bookshelves and the illusion of books... Perhaps, due to a trick of the light..."

He didn't finish, but kept running his hand for a few moments, until he found his hand dipping through what had been a featureless dark patch under his fingers. As he did, colored fog again coalesced in the middle of the group, this time showing them a strangely non-descriptive tidbit: Meris and Nereus in happier times, sitting in their living room in their manifested house, contented silence stretching out; only broken by the occasional sip of a coffee mug and the turning of a page.

The Winter Lord then quirked an eyebrow at Meris. "What would an Archmage consider as casual reading material, I wonder?"

[TennyoCeres84]

Meris scoffed with a smile. "Oh, he geek ed out when I would write theoretical spells in the Darkhallow, before I became an Archmage. I mean, we read the classics of the time, or new songs I was working on, " she explained.

[IamLEAM1983]

Vernon pointed to the hole. "There's an empty spot here, enough for a paperback, I'd say."

Eir smirked back at Meris and looked at the looping projection. "You're not the Danielle Steele type, that much I can deduce..."

She peered closer. "Okay, so Nereus is the American Architect type...
- Hm," lightly grunted Vernon as he joined her. "Georgia O'Keefe, eh? Your beloved has a thing for Modernism, it seems. Not quite Googie Raygun, I'd assume, but definitely not my usual fare. I'd assume that still-nonexistent magazine subscription is itching in the back of his mind."

Archie nodded in the negative. "This is too big to hold a single magazine, and knowing Nereus, he would have focused on Meris."

The Curator nodded in the negative. "No - the obvious answer is our trying to put in something of Meris'. If anyone else had made it here, that would be the first thing we would've tried to put in.
- So we put something of Nereus', instead."

The Augur's shade nodded hesitantly. "It could be worth a shot, yes. It wouldn't be any object I was designed to have a rational grasp of, or any of his books and scrolls as the Augur. The Chamberlain had his first ones disposed of. His copies of the Black Books were filled with chunks of entropy. Liner notes dripping with Reason in what was meant to be shards of pure Chaos. Nereus' work turned to what we'd call genius and what the Prelacy calls sacrilegious."

He hesitated. "He tried to turn Amaxi's screams into wind and birdsong, he tried to hack at madness to find spontaneity and grace, whenever he wasn't talking to you or performing his duties," he said, looking to Meris, "he was editing the Black Books, filling pads and scrolls with notes as long as his stamina allowed him... You must've at least seen a volume of his at least once, right?"

Anjali looked at the hole. "We have the keyhole - we just need a key. Cailean can take us the rest of the way. If you can make anything you want in this place, you should be able to will a copy into being, right?"

[TennyoCeres84]

At Anjali's mention of being able to make a copy, Meris smiled down at the girl. "You're right, I can."

"I do recall a time of him of putting quill to parchment and writing of turning detrimental properties into beneficial and positive qualities, then being formed into building materials. Even parts of nature could be applied with the same principles."

She recalled that time of Nereus working tirelessly at scribing the ingenious methods down to his medium of choice, so that he might be able to use it in the future. Her memories began to coalesce into a thick book of parchment with all of his whimsical yet surprisingly practical techniques for construction based off these tenets.

[IamLEAM1983]

Upon seeing the tome taking shape, both Delmar and Three stepped forward. They briefly stopped and eyed one another, amused by their similar interest in the spawned object.

"Er, may we?" asked Meris' friend. "I know we're supposed to place it in its slot and move along, but this is a unique opportunity. Aidan's never seen Nereus' works, or Lucian's notes. He's never seen yours either, apart from those you brought back up to the surface."

Three shook his head. "At the risk of repeating myself, Tom would love this.
- That is, if Nereus' unedited passages don't tear his mind apart," reminded Delmar. "Not everyone here is like you, myself or Meris, Aidan."