KeeperAbra Hi. Schedule update at end.
Late, late, late! Page was used to this by now—such was the cursed lifestyle of a late riser—but she’d never done such a horrible thing as being late on the first day on the job!
She burst through the saloon doors. By the time people turned to see who’d gone in, she was already in the hallway. Must’ve been the wind, everyone thought.
She reached the guild office and, head hung low and unable to breathe, she reached for the pen and dipped it in the ink. Her shaky hands signed her name and the time on the clock—11:55AM.
“Librarian Turner.”
Page spun about face on the manager’s—Alsae’s—words.
“It’ll never happen again I swear!”—
“Deckert is waiting for you in the archive room.” Alsae raised an eyebrow. “I’ll let you off this time.”
Alsae disappeared back into her private office. It was nothing like Page imagined, and Alsae was colored…just a tad too calm.
Page went back to the lobby and up the stairs. Now that she wasn’t in a hurry, she noticed just how vacant the guild was today. There were just two receptionists, one of them talking to someone placing a commission request.
She reached the archive room. The door was already opened, and Deckert was inside, organizing her desk.
“Oh. You’re here.” Deckert had her hands on her hip. At her feet were neat stacks of notebooks and documents, but even then, her desk didn’t have a single square inch of free space.
“Do you…need help?” Page asked. Deckert was a little gray today, and she couldn’t guess what it was about. At least, she wasn’t mad.
“About yesterday…sorry,” Deckert said, “for trying to stab you.”
Page nervously chuckled. “I don’t think you needed to say the last part.”
“Maybe not.” Deckert’s voice was still grave. She sighed. “Might as well get this over with… Come over here and close the door.”
Page did as she asked. She couldn’t detect any bit of animosity or nefarious plotting from Deckert, but the scenario as it was, she just couldn’t help but think she was about to be silenced.
“How do you feel about fighting?” Deckert asked.
“Huh? Like”—
“Venturing into the Monster Wall as part of the Company, for instance.”
“Oh! I’d”—Page toned down her excitement—“I’d like to do that at some point, yes.”
“Even if you’re a Librarian?” Deckert had hope in her heart.
“I-it’s weird, I get that, but”—
“ ‘Weird’ is a relative word, and I have no care for the relative. What’s your absolute feeling, Librarian Turner?”
“I, um, fighting…well.” No one’s really asked her about this before. “It’s unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before.”
Deckert raised an eyebrow, but anyway continued. “Look at this,” she said, handing Page a copy of the very same paper that she’d been caught peeking at: On the Concepts, Utility, and Implications of a Librarian in Magical Warfare.
“Isn’t this?…”
“I’d never had the opportunity to develop it. You can imagine, all the Librarians I’ve ever met are all pacificists.”
“Wait, what are you”—
“As an apology over yesterday, I’d like to, well, extend an opportunity to you. To become the first Combat Librarian in Lyrica, and maybe the world.”
The thrumming of excitement welled up from Page’s heart. She didn’t even know she was already skipping in place.
…But, huh? She still remembered how it felt like to be Excited, but compared to that, right now, she was just normally excited.
“What do you say?” Deckert asked.
“Huh? Oh, I mean—of course I’m in!”
Now that Page was hyper-aware of not being as excited as she once was, each exclamation mark just felt a little more disconnected.
“Great.” Deckert narrowed her eyes. “This is top secret.”
Page tilted her head. “But if it’s top secret…why is it just sandwiched between notes in the archive room”—
“H-hush.” Deckert turned away. “People misplace things all the time.”
“Now, I can’t have that! As the keeper of the archives, that’s going to change starting today!”
“F-fine, but only because I require your cooperation”—
“Oh, no no no, not just you.”
Deckert took a step back. “W-what’s with that face?” She was hallucinating bloodshot eyes popping out of Page’s face.
“You…all of you”—Page balled a fist close to her chest—“have such terrible organizing skills! Do you know why I took this job? To fix this mess!”
Page moved too fast for Deckert’s eyes to follow, and suddenly, Deckert’s face was cupped between Page’s hands, and the Librarian slowly pivoted the Researcher’s head to scan the disaster site of a room.
Deckert pushed her away. “Too bold! No one will listen to you!” Deckert hissed at her. “Heed me well, you youngin’!”—
“You look just a bit older than me, though?”—
“Researchers are feral creatures! You think to bring order to what is naturally chaos? Pweh, you fool.” Deckert took back the super-secret papers from Page’s clutches. “Go with me. First, I’ll have you understand what you need to do for me…then you can go back to your fool’s errand.”
“Why are you talking like that?…”
“A-ah…never mind. Force of habit.” Her mother talked like that a lot, so obviously she’d pick it up. “Focus! Let’s go!”
***
Page was led to a dark office with a dangling lamp that swung slightly to an unfelt wind. She was made to sit under that lamp, back straight and arms strictly placed on the armrest. Somewhere in her heart, she knew that Deckert would have made a terrible tutor.
“Tell me what you know,” Deckert said. She was already holding a maestro’s slappin’ stick, eyes narrowed and expecting the right answer.
“Uh…”
“Tell me what you know about Librarians.”
“Ah… Well, we organize things”—
Deckert slapped Page’s hands.
“Why!” Page complained, blowing on her hand.
“You’re not only an organizer!”
“I would’ve said more if you’d just let me keep going!” Page huffed. Deckert would have been a horrible teacher.
“So what else do you have!”
“We have Skills to transmit Collections! Happy?”
“Precisely!” Deckert slapped the chalkboard behind her, completely ignoring Page’s sour mood. “Extreme, high-bandwidth information sharing! This is the one special thing that Librarians can do that nobody else can!”—her eyes sharpened with a dangerous gleam—“and it’s the future of magical warfare.”
“O-okay?…” Page tilted her head for the warfreak weirdo. “Why did you have to slap my hand just to say that…”
“I see you are still a lost lamb…so let me explain.”
“I’m an upset lamb.”
“Mages ordinarily take decades just to be able to memorize a few hundred chants and recite them with speed and accuracy. However, there are thousands of chants, all of which are useful, and so to be able to use all of them, they must carry a spellbook with those spells inscribed as chants or magic circles.
“However!”—slap—“books are unwieldy. They can be lost, destroyed, or even stolen. Even worse, it can take precious time to search for the needed spell. Do you understand where I’m getting at, here?”
Page sighed. “You want to change out books with Collections, which don’t weigh anything and are easier to flip through, but to do that, you need a Librarian in the area…”
“Precisely!…but not only that. Imagine if a Ritual Spellmaker worked with a Librarian. If battlefield conditions change, the Spellmaker can create a new ritual, and the Librarian can instantly transmit the ritual to all mages in the area. Don’t you see? It’s the ultimate in battlefield flexibility!”
When Deckert mentioned ‘Spellmaker,’ Page’s thoughts instantly went to Kalender. If she could work together with him in that way…that’d be pretty neat.
“So… What do I do?” Page asked.
“Ah, well, you’re going to be my proof-of-concept. If I remember correctly, the Company’s next training expedition is…tomorrow? The next day? Whichever. It shouldn’t be too dangerous, and you seem capable of handling yourself for a Librarian, so I’ll try to slot you into the expedition tomorrow and work with some my colleagues to gather real-world data.” Deckert paused. “Train in the meantime, I suppose.”
Page stood up and stretched for a good second. She cracked her neck left, then right, then her knuckles, too. Before becoming anything like a Combat Librarian, she was a Librarian, and before she took up Deckert’s offer, she had a job to do here. “Oh, I’m going to train the people in this building, alright.”
Deckert was confused for a moment, before she snapped out of it and realized that Page was taking calculated steps towards her.
“L-librarian Turner, what seems to be the problem?” Her voice quavered.
“The back of my hand is still sore, and the archive room is still a mess,” Page said. “Why are you stepping away? You can’t run away from your messes forever, you know? You can’t just hit someone’s hand without consequences, right?”
For the next three hours, Page subjugated the local Researchers, and planted the flag of Some Nice Keyword Indexing on the discarded remains of their dilapidated notebooks.
***
Match: Librarian Page Turner vs. Researcher Deckert
Outcome: Researcher Deckert signed non-aggression agreement after getting into a knife fight with a cardboard knife-armed Librarian. Researcher Deckert acknowledges the Librarian’s superior fighting skills and far higher kill count of “four slimes.”
Match: Librarian Page Turner vs. Associate Researcher Jonathan
Outcome: Researcher Jonathan sent home with eleventy (110) papercuts and converted to the Temple of the Great Classifier.
Match: Librarian Page Turner vs. Head Manager Alsae
Outcome: Funding secured. Archive room renovations expected in one week. Office strangely organized; subordinate Secretaries stood down from initiating a “cleansweep rebellion.”
Match: Librarian Page Turner vs. Head Researcher Gale Grenadier
Outcome: Head Researcher Gale Grenadier finally flushed out of his laboratory-apartment after three months, after Librarian Page Turner nicked the ultra-complex magic circle guarding the door. It was later discovered that most staff simply regarded the circle as a bomb that would explode when touched, when it was, in fact, a soundproofing measure. Head Manager Alsae soon mandated full disclosure of magical mechanisms modifying any part of the building.
Announcement
...Guess who forgot to post updates. Heh. (Thanks Skylordandy for bumping with a comment. I genuinely forgot I hadn't been posting to SH this whole time.)
I'm just going through some motions right now. I'm doing my systematic best to make full-time writing a viable income stream, but it takes focus and commitment...on the level of dropping stories that just aren't working for me. (And also doubling my work hours, but I'm getting there.)
That said, Platonic Harem Isekai has survived selection, but it's gonna be on a drip feed of two chapters a month for a while. This is because I need to focus on rapid-fire posting new story concepts to figure out what works. Once I strike gold, I can chill and write Platonic Harem on the weekends.
For now, I'm just gracefully ending The AI VTuber is an Overlord by the end of this month. Looks like my other latest story (on RR) also flopped, so I'm gonna try fleshing out the not-John Wick isekai one.
—Jontaro Ponwick is a man of sheer-fucking-will.
Smh. It keeps me up at night.
Anyway, I'll post the next chapters on 27th and 3rd (23:30H UTC+8), and then two-week intervals after that.
2023-08-22
KeeperAbra Hi. Schedule update at end.
Late, late, late! Page was used to this by now—such was the cursed lifestyle of a late riser—but she’d never done such a horrible thing as being late on the first day on the job!
She burst through the saloon doors. By the time people turned to see who’d gone in, she was already in the hallway. Must’ve been the wind, everyone thought.
She reached the guild office and, head hung low and unable to breathe, she reached for the pen and dipped it in the ink. Her shaky hands signed her name and the time on the clock—11:55AM.
“Librarian Turner.”
Page spun about face on the manager’s—Alsae’s—words.
“It’ll never happen again I swear!”—
“Deckert is waiting for you in the archive room.” Alsae raised an eyebrow. “I’ll let you off this time.”
Alsae disappeared back into her private office. It was nothing like Page imagined, and Alsae was colored…just a tad too calm.
Page went back to the lobby and up the stairs. Now that she wasn’t in a hurry, she noticed just how vacant the guild was today. There were just two receptionists, one of them talking to someone placing a commission request.
She reached the archive room. The door was already opened, and Deckert was inside, organizing her desk.
“Oh. You’re here.” Deckert had her hands on her hip. At her feet were neat stacks of notebooks and documents, but even then, her desk didn’t have a single square inch of free space.
“Do you…need help?” Page asked. Deckert was a little gray today, and she couldn’t guess what it was about. At least, she wasn’t mad.
“About yesterday…sorry,” Deckert said, “for trying to stab you.”
Page nervously chuckled. “I don’t think you needed to say the last part.”
“Maybe not.” Deckert’s voice was still grave. She sighed. “Might as well get this over with… Come over here and close the door.”
Page did as she asked. She couldn’t detect any bit of animosity or nefarious plotting from Deckert, but the scenario as it was, she just couldn’t help but think she was about to be silenced.
“How do you feel about fighting?” Deckert asked.
“Huh? Like”—
“Venturing into the Monster Wall as part of the Company, for instance.”
“Oh! I’d”—Page toned down her excitement—“I’d like to do that at some point, yes.”
“Even if you’re a Librarian?” Deckert had hope in her heart.
“I-it’s weird, I get that, but”—
“ ‘Weird’ is a relative word, and I have no care for the relative. What’s your absolute feeling, Librarian Turner?”
“I, um, fighting…well.” No one’s really asked her about this before. “It’s unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before.”
Deckert raised an eyebrow, but anyway continued. “Look at this,” she said, handing Page a copy of the very same paper that she’d been caught peeking at: On the Concepts, Utility, and Implications of a Librarian in Magical Warfare.
“Isn’t this?…”
“I’d never had the opportunity to develop it. You can imagine, all the Librarians I’ve ever met are all pacificists.”
“Wait, what are you”—
“As an apology over yesterday, I’d like to, well, extend an opportunity to you. To become the first Combat Librarian in Lyrica, and maybe the world.”
The thrumming of excitement welled up from Page’s heart. She didn’t even know she was already skipping in place.
…But, huh? She still remembered how it felt like to be Excited, but compared to that, right now, she was just normally excited.
“What do you say?” Deckert asked.
“Huh? Oh, I mean—of course I’m in!”
Now that Page was hyper-aware of not being as excited as she once was, each exclamation mark just felt a little more disconnected.
“Great.” Deckert narrowed her eyes. “This is top secret.”
Page tilted her head. “But if it’s top secret…why is it just sandwiched between notes in the archive room”—
“H-hush.” Deckert turned away. “People misplace things all the time.”
“Now, I can’t have that! As the keeper of the archives, that’s going to change starting today!”
“F-fine, but only because I require your cooperation”—
“Oh, no no no, not just you.”
Deckert took a step back. “W-what’s with that face?” She was hallucinating bloodshot eyes popping out of Page’s face.
“You…all of you”—Page balled a fist close to her chest—“have such terrible organizing skills! Do you know why I took this job? To fix this mess!”
Page moved too fast for Deckert’s eyes to follow, and suddenly, Deckert’s face was cupped between Page’s hands, and the Librarian slowly pivoted the Researcher’s head to scan the disaster site of a room.
Deckert pushed her away. “Too bold! No one will listen to you!” Deckert hissed at her. “Heed me well, you youngin’!”—
“You look just a bit older than me, though?”—
“Researchers are feral creatures! You think to bring order to what is naturally chaos? Pweh, you fool.” Deckert took back the super-secret papers from Page’s clutches. “Go with me. First, I’ll have you understand what you need to do for me…then you can go back to your fool’s errand.”
“Why are you talking like that?…”
“A-ah…never mind. Force of habit.” Her mother talked like that a lot, so obviously she’d pick it up. “Focus! Let’s go!”
***
Page was led to a dark office with a dangling lamp that swung slightly to an unfelt wind. She was made to sit under that lamp, back straight and arms strictly placed on the armrest. Somewhere in her heart, she knew that Deckert would have made a terrible tutor.
“Tell me what you know,” Deckert said. She was already holding a maestro’s slappin’ stick, eyes narrowed and expecting the right answer.
“Uh…”
“Tell me what you know about Librarians.”
“Ah… Well, we organize things”—
Deckert slapped Page’s hands.
“Why!” Page complained, blowing on her hand.
“You’re not only an organizer!”
“I would’ve said more if you’d just let me keep going!” Page huffed. Deckert would have been a horrible teacher.
“So what else do you have!”
“We have Skills to transmit Collections! Happy?”
“Precisely!” Deckert slapped the chalkboard behind her, completely ignoring Page’s sour mood. “Extreme, high-bandwidth information sharing! This is the one special thing that Librarians can do that nobody else can!”—her eyes sharpened with a dangerous gleam—“and it’s the future of magical warfare.”
“O-okay?…” Page tilted her head for the warfreak weirdo. “Why did you have to slap my hand just to say that…”
“I see you are still a lost lamb…so let me explain.”
“I’m an upset lamb.”
“Mages ordinarily take decades just to be able to memorize a few hundred chants and recite them with speed and accuracy. However, there are thousands of chants, all of which are useful, and so to be able to use all of them, they must carry a spellbook with those spells inscribed as chants or magic circles.
“However!”—slap—“books are unwieldy. They can be lost, destroyed, or even stolen. Even worse, it can take precious time to search for the needed spell. Do you understand where I’m getting at, here?”
Page sighed. “You want to change out books with Collections, which don’t weigh anything and are easier to flip through, but to do that, you need a Librarian in the area…”
“Precisely!…but not only that. Imagine if a Ritual Spellmaker worked with a Librarian. If battlefield conditions change, the Spellmaker can create a new ritual, and the Librarian can instantly transmit the ritual to all mages in the area. Don’t you see? It’s the ultimate in battlefield flexibility!”
When Deckert mentioned ‘Spellmaker,’ Page’s thoughts instantly went to Kalender. If she could work together with him in that way…that’d be pretty neat.
“So… What do I do?” Page asked.
“Ah, well, you’re going to be my proof-of-concept. If I remember correctly, the Company’s next training expedition is…tomorrow? The next day? Whichever. It shouldn’t be too dangerous, and you seem capable of handling yourself for a Librarian, so I’ll try to slot you into the expedition tomorrow and work with some my colleagues to gather real-world data.” Deckert paused. “Train in the meantime, I suppose.”
Page stood up and stretched for a good second. She cracked her neck left, then right, then her knuckles, too. Before becoming anything like a Combat Librarian, she was a Librarian, and before she took up Deckert’s offer, she had a job to do here. “Oh, I’m going to train the people in this building, alright.”
Deckert was confused for a moment, before she snapped out of it and realized that Page was taking calculated steps towards her.
“L-librarian Turner, what seems to be the problem?” Her voice quavered.
“The back of my hand is still sore, and the archive room is still a mess,” Page said. “Why are you stepping away? You can’t run away from your messes forever, you know? You can’t just hit someone’s hand without consequences, right?”
For the next three hours, Page subjugated the local Researchers, and planted the flag of Some Nice Keyword Indexing on the discarded remains of their dilapidated notebooks.
***
Match: Librarian Page Turner vs. Researcher Deckert
Outcome: Researcher Deckert signed non-aggression agreement after getting into a knife fight with a cardboard knife-armed Librarian. Researcher Deckert acknowledges the Librarian’s superior fighting skills and far higher kill count of “four slimes.”
Match: Librarian Page Turner vs. Associate Researcher Jonathan
Outcome: Researcher Jonathan sent home with eleventy (110) papercuts and converted to the Temple of the Great Classifier.
Match: Librarian Page Turner vs. Head Manager Alsae
Outcome: Funding secured. Archive room renovations expected in one week. Office strangely organized; subordinate Secretaries stood down from initiating a “cleansweep rebellion.”
Match: Librarian Page Turner vs. Head Researcher Gale Grenadier
Outcome: Head Researcher Gale Grenadier finally flushed out of his laboratory-apartment after three months, after Librarian Page Turner nicked the ultra-complex magic circle guarding the door. It was later discovered that most staff simply regarded the circle as a bomb that would explode when touched, when it was, in fact, a soundproofing measure. Head Manager Alsae soon mandated full disclosure of magical mechanisms modifying any part of the building.
Announcement
...Guess who forgot to post updates. Heh. (Thanks Skylordandy for bumping with a comment. I genuinely forgot I hadn't been posting to SH this whole time.)
I'm just going through some motions right now. I'm doing my systematic best to make full-time writing a viable income stream, but it takes focus and commitment...on the level of dropping stories that just aren't working for me. (And also doubling my work hours, but I'm getting there.)
That said, Platonic Harem Isekai has survived selection, but it's gonna be on a drip feed of two chapters a month for a while. This is because I need to focus on rapid-fire posting new story concepts to figure out what works. Once I strike gold, I can chill and write Platonic Harem on the weekends.
For now, I'm just gracefully ending The AI VTuber is an Overlord by the end of this month. Looks like my other latest story (on RR) also flopped, so I'm gonna try fleshing out the not-John Wick isekai one.
—Jontaro Ponwick is a man of sheer-fucking-will.
Smh. It keeps me up at night.
Anyway, I'll post the next chapters on 27th and 3rd (23:30H UTC+8), and then two-week intervals after that.
2023-08-22
