Nimbus Library

[Kereth]

The Nimbus library is a monument to the city founders. It is a place where the academic and theological members of the magus community come to discuss, debate and share theories on the elements. It is also a warehouse for some of the most enlightening and bizaare writings in all of the Retroverse. The community of Nimbus prides itself on being the leader in hermetic studies and the library is the pinnacle of that. The city does not have a university, instead uses the guild tower as the training place for students. This library, however, is public and can be used by magi, or the common citizen. The walls are lined with leatherbound books that seem to be preserved to perfection. Row upon row of oak shelves line the marbled floor and create a maze of literature. Small chambers have been placed along the southern most wall to give guests a quiet place to study and reflect. A sign is posted near the entrance.

[Kereth]

Kereth scratched idly at an itch with his left paw. His right continued jotting down text in the large, leather volume spread open on the table before him. Outside of his little cubicle, the library was characteristically still. The occasional turn of a page or shifting of a chair were all the disturbed the peaceful atmosphere.

[Urthdigger]

Urth snuck into the library, glancing around constantly for the next place to hide. He wanted to know more about the Hands, about what they did. History seemed the best way to do so. He knew Kereth was transcribing a history of one of the Imams in this library, but he also knew that the Imam was incredibly unstable. He glanced with disdain at a corpse that hadn't been cleaned up yet. One day he'd have to talk to the psychotic coon about the finer points of subtilty, but for now he hoped to escape unnoticed. He glanced around one of the shelves and could see Kereth's back to him. Hopefully it'd stay that way. The Gifted One section of the library was a bit deeper in than the cubicles, and Urth found it with minimal difficulty. Another corpse was on the ground, a look of horror on it's face and blood all over it's back. It's hand still rested on the first volume of Not Only Raji...

Urth started to sigh but stopped himself before he made any noise. The hand had already stiffened in place, making it impossible to move without shifting the body. Urth glanced around for any witnessess, then pulled out a dagger to cut it off. There was a loud snap as he went through the bone and he stopped in fear. He had a number of tools to get him out of this mess, such as a capsule that would make a loud bang, a bright flash, spray smoke, and make the surrounding area smell strongly of peppermint upon impact, a statue that would warp whoever broke it back to the mage's tower, and of course his skills as a Hand. None of that would be useful at all if he was snuck up on however. Nobody seemed to be coming, so he cut the rest of the hand off and removed the volume from the shelf, whincing at the noise it made as it slid out from between the other books.

[Kereth]

Nature called.

Kereth set his quill down and slunk out of the cubical. His first inclination had been to head down to the cubical farther over that he had been using to answer such calls so far, but as he stepped out of his work area, he had the misfortune of stepping directly in some patron's unwashed entrails.

There was a body lying directly outside his chamber.

Wasn't that just the way with dead bodies? Once they stopped moving they couldn't just go away, they had to hang around and muck up your path whenever you attempted to get anywhere. Kereth, naturally, had a great deal of experience with such things, having created a sizable stack of corpses during his time. Over the years, he had fashioned a number of haphazard means of disposal, ranging from eating the corpse to letting it fertilize the fauna, to leaving it for the custodians to take care of. None of those would really have been applicable in the library here, save possibly the latter, but that didn't matter anyway:

This corpse wasn't his.

Well, obviously it wasn't his, but it wasn't left behind by one of his exploits either. This one still had the head intact, something Kereth was careful not to do. Somebody else was killing in this library, it appeared, and they were being terribly inconsiderate about where they left their garbage.

Impressive though, that they had done it without him noticing. Kereth owed his compliments to the killer on that account.

The body wasn't alone. Kereth debated momentarily between going to speak to the management or trailing the line of corpses back to wherever they happened to lead to. In the end, he settled on the latter, picking his way along the line of mangled carrion, down one aisle and up the next, until it led right to where his had been shelving his volumes. . .

Aha! he thought triumphantly.

[Urthdigger]

Urthdigger looked up in time to see Kereth walk around the corner. He'd been heard, there was no other explanation to it. Judging by the recent corpses lying around the place, his leader had been having one of his moments lately. Now was really not a good time to be here.

"Erm, hi Kereth. Lovely weather we're having- Hya!"

He tossed the capsule at the floor, averting his eyes to avoid the flash. The bang temporarily knocked out his hearing, and smoke was quickly filling the area. Time for a getaway. The smoke was filling up the place far faster than expected, and with it an extremely strong smell of peppermint designed to throw off scent. It also had the side effect of overloading the senses of those with sensitive smell. A sharp jolt of pain racked Urth's head, like snorting liquid fire, and he stumbled in the ensuing confusion.

"Ok... smooth... flat... this is the floor." he thought to himself. He tried to get up, and succeeded in crashing to the ground. "No... that was a bookcase... this is the floor."

The smoke was obscuring his vision, and it was getting very hard to concentrate. He dropped to all fours for increased stability and speed and took off in a random direction. He went about 20 feet in two seconds, or he would have were it not for the wall three feet away. Instead he crumpled to the ground in a heap. The getaway had failed, and he could see Kereth approaching through the clearing smoke, clearly to chop him up into little pieces. He tried not to think about what would happen after that. He had wondered why the alchemist had chuckled when he ordered something to disorient an arakun, and he had to admit the worksmanship was very nicely done. He'd be doing business there in the future, preferably with things not prone to backfiring so easily. The smoke had finished clearing as Urth fell unconcious, and with it the smell of peppermint dwindled to a lingering odor.

[Kereth]

Kereth only caught the briefest glance of Urthdigger before the smoke started rising, filling ever inch of the expansive library. The smell of the peppermint smoke made him gag and draw back immediately.

What manner of lunacy is this? he thought, while at the same time, Ack! Bard breath!

He covered his snout firmly and squinted his eyes, doing all in his power to maintain focus through the smoke. This wasn't a whole lot worse than a bad dose of haschish, really, except that it was a little more consistent- the repugnant odors didn't have a tendency to alternate between the refuse of various dimensions from moment to moment.

He closed his eyes, unable to see anything anyway, and pressed himself down against the floor, slowly crawling forward while he waited for the smells to clear away. It took several moments and a passing asphyxiamancer's subtle intervention before they really started to do so. He stepped through the smoke to find Urthdigger lying on his back, facing the nearby wall. Kereth approached and leaned over him, drawing a sturdy dagger from his belt. He waved it over the prostrate arakun.

"Sloppy," he said, "Sloppy." but Urthdigger was already out cold.

[Kereth]

Kereth shook his head slowly and fetched a random book from the shelves. It was some sort of textbook on the use of blood rituals for communication. Ironic. Kereth tore out some pages and spread the out across the floor in front of the unconscious Urth, then dipped the dagger in the nearest corpse, as one would a quill into an inkpot. He began scratching out a message in blood on the torn pages, doing his best to keep the letters thick enough to be legible across the existing type. The message read:

Urthdigger-
Clean up your mess.
Watch out for walls in the future.
Bathe. You smell like a bard.
Oh, and try to keep it down. We're in a library.

-Kereth Midknight

He followed this up by laying out trails of pages towards each of the corpses, marking them with a big, red arrow, hopefully to indicate the mess being referred to. Once done, he lay the dagger down next to Urth's still form and wandered back to his target cubicle, muttering something under his breath about Fidais.

[Urthdigger]

OOC: Ack, forgot two parts of dialogue. That's what I get for not double-checking the copy job.

Urthdigger wakes up shortly after with a splitting headache. The bleeding gash on his head was declared the culprit. He was amazed to still be alive, but he was annoyed at Kereth's general obliviousness in the letter left for him. "Keep it down, we're in a library.". Like he cared for other people. He knew all too well that the Imam didn't have any emotions, or if he did compassion for others was not one of them. The body's still had their heads oddly enough, so he followed orders and removed the heads, dumping the bodies into a nearby cubicle that already smelled like a trash heap. Kereth was working in a cubicle nearby, and while interrupting him again would probably result in his death, especially given the subject matter, he considered since he should have died back there that it wouldn't be much of a loss.

"Well, I cleaned up YOUR mess. I suppose I should be thankful in a way, even if they probably didn't deserve it. I have to wonder though, is there a reason I'm still alive? I'm taking your book, you're obviously in one of your moods, and that bomb couldn't have possibly felt good."

"You cleaned up MY mess?" exclaimed Kereth "Eww. Why didn't you just stick to your own and leave that for the janitors?"

"Well, it is in my best interests to take care of a bunch of corpses. You're getting sloppy, first you leave the heads intact, then you can't even remember doing it. I just came in here for a book and came across a crime scene, I didn't make a mess at all."

Kereth gave him a deadpanned look. Urth flinched a little, mistaking it for a look of annoyance. His paws closed around the statuette in his pack, but Kereth remained in his chair to talk. "If you're still talking about me using that other cubicle as an outhouse, I don't even want to KNOW what some of that stuff refers to. I mean, 'leaving the heads intact'?" He shuddered.

Urth had emotion, and felt free to show it, giving Kereth a look of abject horror and surprise "What? No, jeeze, I didn't even go in there it stunk so bad. I'm talking about the dead guys all around the place."

"Oooooh, alright. For a moment there I thought I had discovered a new reason for why Ciang always keeps the restrooms locked back at the guild... Oh, right, and about the bodies. . . you didn't leave those?"

Urth snorted derisively "You know me better than that... or at least I'd think you would. No, it wasn't me.

"Ah. Good. I was afraid I'd have to have you reprimanded or something. Nice to know."

"You're joking right? You, reprimand me, for going on a killing spree?"

"No. I'd reprimand you for leaving bodies lying around in a library. Fidais are supposed to exhibit courtesy among their exemplary attributes."

Courtesy. There was that false sense of compassion again. Stabbing someone just for being there did not seem like courtesy. Doing stuff because you felt like it, without regard to what other's thought or how they felt, that wasn't courtesy. "Courtesy... courtesy... I never would have guessed from the behaviour of any of the others. Anyway, if you say you didn't kill them, and I definitely didn't kill them, then we have a problem on our hands. Someone is running around killing innocent people... someone I can do something about" He shot a dark look in Kereth's general direction. He didn't seem to notice.

"If I didn't kill them, and you didn't kill them, and you don't know who did kill them, how do you know you can do something about it? Come to that, how do you know they were innocent? Whoever killed them did it quietly. Didn't even disturb me from my writing. That's courtesy right there. I think they're the good guy."

Urth twitched a little as he turned his back to the cubicle. What right did that morally bankrupt coon have to determine if someone was right or wrong? There was that admiration for 'courtesy' again, not like it ever saved anyone from him. Most victims never got the chance to be courteous, they never knew him, never wronged him or the guild before they were killed. He was afraid the Imam was right about whether he could do something or not, but at least he could try in this case.
He invoked a spell and leapt to the rafters to read in silence and keep an eye on the remaining people in the library. He had gotten much better at controlling Hand Spring over the years, and neatly landed on the wooden beam without hitting the ceiling or even falling any more than a foot from the peak of his jump. He took the copy of Not Only Raji... from where he had stashed it in his pack. He was tempted to burn it, and momentary thoughts of burning the entire guild to the ground along with Kereth, Powint, and all the rest flickered through his mind, but he couldn't do that. Not until he got his arm fixed anyway. Instead he opened to the first chapter and started to read.