Zachary and Luna fight emus in the Library

Characters in this scene: Zachary, Luna

November 2021

Reese and Oak watch as Mia, blue-suited, blue-haired, blue-eyed steps into the bar, as Briallen falls bloody to the floor, her skin sanded away. They watch in horror as they realize it is Leon that puppets her. As battle erupts in the Buggane Bar.

Meanwhile, Luna and Zachary wait, one standing guard at the hall connecting the Library to the State Library of New South Wales, while the other roams the labyrinthine halls and stairwell of the Library.

Kara's claws sink into Mia's chest, and the lights in the Library flicker briefly, their steady white light for a brief moment shining an electric blue.

A beam of light floods out of Mia's dead eye, so blue as to be white. Kara's book, hand, arm, and shoulder disintegrate, and it feels good. The *whumpf* of fire as blue flames erupt about the Library and die the next instant, leaving long, ugly scorch marks in their wake, still flickering with embers. The lights flare, briefly-blinding, before dimming to a faded blue glow.

Something has gone terribly wrong in the Library.

Kara's voice echoes through the corridors, her words briefly emblazoning themselves across the spines of books.

**"Leonard Robertson, you have wielded Mia Dunaway as a puppet, and with her *you have destroyed a book*."**

The bookworms begin to trill, like cicada song, like an alarm, like a symphony and a swarm.

The song of the Mother-Home's Hunt.

Zachary had been standing near a wall in the Library, fencer's mask on and staff on his back as he tapped out a beat on the wall, playing a call and response game with a bookworm while he waits. As the lights turn blue, he keels slightly into the side of the wall, thoughts turning to pleasant daydreams of what he's going to do when they're done with Mia's rescue. This Library isn't such a bad place to be. He can see himself exploring it with Reese, mapping out its highest reaches and lowest depths, maybe stealing away under an alcove to --

The lights go back white again. Zachary stumbles, mentally berating himself. He's on a mission here, there's no time to be distracted by things like that.

"Hey, what's going on?" he yells out, voice slightly muffled from the mask. "What's the blue thing, are we under attack?"

The bookworm that Zachary was playing with skitters away, called off to *hunt.*

"To right the countless wrongs of our day," ~~not~~ Luna’s voice begins.

A glittering figure dances through the torchlight. It titters merrily, merrily, as it traipses through the rumbling halls. "We shine this light of deepest satisfaction," ~~it~~ she continues.

A sharpened shield spun, a delighted dance careening towards trembling, towering shelves but just as suddenly spiraling away. "That this world may become as paradise."

The figure finally stops in front of Zachary, her full-moon mask hastily lifted to reveal a pair of bright blue eyes that wink at him before the mask is dropped back in place.

"What a wonderful world such would be..."

"Yo, what the fuck," Zachary says, taking an involuntary step backwards. He opens his Sight, checking that his radar is empty of anything to be flagged before turning it on Luna herself. The mask, chain and silver bangle are highlighted as interactables, probably with some magic effect going on there. Her status effects read Waning Crescent, Vestige, Undead, Ogre, so much more that he can't read... and Blissed.

The ceiling lights around them have turned dim blue. Whatever it means, it can't be good. Zachary looks around for an overhang, a table, anything that can be used to shield from the light.

The figure holds out a hand to Zachary as invitation, but seems to lose patience just as quickly, dancing a waltz with herself to a melody only she can hear.

"To right the countless wrongs of our day," ~~it~~ she intones, "we shine this light of deepest satisfaction, that this world may become as paradise."

She glances blissfully over one shoulder at Zachary as she dances and spins. "What a wonderful world such would be..."

It's deeply inappropriate for the situation, but Zachary can't help but be reminded of childlike games of hide and seek as he scrambles over to a reading table, which is surrounded by a ring of chairs. He makes a small *vroom* sound as he pushes one chair away, driving it in front of him like a car.

The feeling vanishes as he dives under the table, out of the light. Something fucky is going on.

Zachary opens his phone, speed dialing Geoffrey's number. The call should also be going through to Luna too, but he doesn't know how much help she'll be like this.

"Geoffrey, get everybody to a place with no lights, I think there's some emotion attack going on making it hard to take things seriously. Luna's speaking nonsense and dancing randomly, think she's been affected."

As he speaks, he flicks his karambit at a ceiling light, sending a bolt of hail to try to break it.

A light bulb shatters, scattering glass.

The book worms sing their slaying song, trilling in complex, incomprehensible melodies.

Geoffrey's response can barely be heard over the clamour of the bookworms.

"On it!"

Another sound echoes down the hall, a solid tap-tap-tap. Moments later, the hammering is joined by the sound of cracking wood.

A creature rounds the corner of the hall. Tall, tall as Zachary, long-necked and round-bodied, with two spindly legs ending in heavy talons. Baleful blue eyes shine above a sharp beak.

It is an emu.

"You. Bird thing," Zachary says from under the table. The phone has been dropped onto the ground on speaker mode, and he prepares his grip on the knife. "Leave now, and I won't beat your feathery ass into the ground. Your choice."

He's not sure where it came from, but he's definitely sure it's not supposed to be there. Just in case, he opens his Sight, and sees a mass of bright yellow all in the 12 o'clock region. Whatever it is, it's brought friends.

The bird tilts its head, eyes bright with malevolence.

Then, stepping out from around the corner arrives another emu. Only... it isn't.

The creature is a snake - a taipan - body distorted and enlarged, serpentine neck to a bulging body, tail splitting to become two legs ending in fang-talons.

Then another. An octopus, soft yellow with bright blue rings spotting its body, stretched out into an emu's shape.

Another, a platypus writ large into a mockery of an emu's body, forelimbs where vestigila wings should be, jutting with venomous prongs.

Another still, a funnel web spider's eight-eyed face atop a too-long neck, eight spindly legs jutting from a rotund body.

The distorted emu beasts hiss at Zachary.

Instead of yellow, Zachary retags them all as red, for enemy. Each of them have health bars twice as segmented as what he sees for the average person, meaning that they're twice as tough. Hopefully they're twice as stupid to make up for it.

Zachary rises slowly from the table, under the section of broken light where the faint blue tinge doesn't exist. He stands on top of it, trying to appear as big as possible, staff in his left hand and karambit in his right.

"I GAVE YOU A CHANCE TO LEAVE! THIS IS ON YOU!" Zachary bellows.

He hurls his staff forwards like a javelin, where it'll shock any creature that it hits.

Emu and its distorted oddemu follows squawk and hiss in fury as Zachary bellows, and as he hurls his javelin they *scatter*.

The blue ringed emu's legs split into tentacles as it ascends the side of a bookcase, followed behind by the funnel web emu. The taipan emu crouches low to the ground, movement an obscene slither, wrapping itself around a bannister and slithering along a railing.

The emu and the emutypus charge Zachary, beaks bared, coming at him in arcs to avoid the lightning-charged staff

Zachary won't let himself be outdone by a charge. He runs forwards at the emus in a countercharge, slashing the karambit through the air to pelt the evil not-birds with hits of ice.

Just as he's within two meters of the charging creatures, Zachary jumps to the side and runs away, trying to kite the emus out.

Ice pelts against emu and emutypus, but as Zachary leaps away, they wheel about. Not towards him, but away. They seem unaffected by the shards of ice.

The scattered emus begin to tear at bookcases, to rend bannisters, to scratch at wallpaper, to peck at lightbulbs. Beginning the work of demolishing the Library.

Shit. Zachary runs after the nearest closest creature he sees and ignites his fire sword.

"Luna, Luna, Luna! If you want the benefit of the doubt, then fucking show up and defend the Library as you commited to doing!" Zachary shouts.

Lost in her misty trance, the Moonlit Knight seems blissfully ignorant of the enemy even with Zachary’s call.

...right up until the octopus-emu reaches for a book.

Defying all physics, Luna’s chain arcs gracefully over the enemy line to pluck the literature out from in front of the creature’s reaching tentacle.

"To right the countless wrongs of our day, we shine this light of deepest satisfaction, that this world may become as paradise." The tone is chiding, a rebuke of a naughty child. She places the book next to a passing bookworm, dancing back and seamlessly raising her shield above her as a convenient bridge between shelves for a handful of other bookworms; she herself seems as unaware of the bookworms as the bookworms themselves seem to be of the attempted destruction.

"What a wonderful world such would be..."

With a hiss, the blue ringed emu charges the Moonlit Knight, tentacles reforming into legs as it leaps from shelftop to shelftop. Venomous beak stabs forward.

The funnel web emu continues to climb, ascending the outside of a spiral staircase.

The taipan emu constricts around a wooden railing, rending it with a crack.

The emu pushes its weight against a free stranding bookcase, and it begins to rock back and forth, books spilling from shelves.

The emutypus wheels about once more, charging directly for Zachary.

Yet another emu-shaped monstrosity rounds the corner. A reshaped crocodile, it looks more ancient dinosaur than modern bird.

As the emutypus comes for Zachary, he holds the fire sword in front of him, and then jumps up, flinging his body up and over while still keeping his arm down to score a line through the emutypus.

The emutypus hisses in pain, beak snapping in Zachary's wake. The taipan emu uncoils, regaining its birdlike shape as it charges towards the still airborne Conflict Dabbler.

Zachary lands in a backwards roll that breaks the connection between him and the taipan emu, giving him a few seconds to get up onto his feet with the sword in front of him to threaten the emus with.

Taipan emu and emutypus circle Zachary as Luna duels the blue ringed emu. They prove fearless of burning blade and silver chain.

The emu topples one bookcase into another, while the crocemu charges to join the assault on Zachary.

The spider emu sends books raining down from above.

There's so many of them around now that Zachary can't manage them all. He needs to split them up somehow. The hallway is tinged in slight blue from the ceiling lights, making his thoughts slide towards finding the fight itself joyful, regardless of safety or sanity.

Zachary quickly bends down to score the knife along the ground, flicking it towards a section where two bookcases meet. A wall of slippery ice several inches thick sprouts in the direction that the knife moved towards, walling him off with just the emutypis and the taipan emu. The ground freeze trick, applied vertically.

"Luna! You're missing out on all the fun! For God's sake, get your drugged up head out of your ass and do something!" Zachary shouts out.

The blissful figure, meanwhile, is too busy plucking bookworms out of the path of the rampaging octo-emu to pay much attention to the heated gamer moment. She leaps joyfully into the air to save a shelf-ful of books sent flying by an enemy smashing the shelf upon which they had been stacked, a similar-looking silhouette of blue light catching her from the fall before the full-color figure mirrors the silhouette’s movements in reverse to fling it back into nothingness.

"To right the countless wrongs of our day, we shine this light of deepest satisfaction," ~~it~~ she comments idly. She casually slides another bookworm out from under the octo-emu's incoming blow. "That this world may become as paradise. What a wonderful world such would be..." ~~it~~ she concludes, setting the stack of books gently atop the worm's carapace for it to carry away.

The octu-emu, blue ringed, is wrought from one of the world's most venomous creatures, twisted into the shape of a bird that once bested Australia's military. Yet Luna dodges reaching tentacles and lashing beak all the same. The spider-emu descends from above, mandibles sweeping down at the Rakshasa.

Zachary, meanwhile, is forced to contend with taipan emu and the wounded emutypus. The two charge at Zachary with a honk, one biting high at his face, the other lunging low for his legs.

Meanwhile emu and its crocodilian twin topple bookshelves.

If these animals refuse to respect the fire sword, Zachary will give them reason to. He stabs the sword into the emutypus going for his face, stepping sideways to avoid the taipan emu.

There's a hiss of steaming blood, and the emutypus's brain is lasered clean through, viscera spilling onto the ground.

The figure swings a chain in a wide arc, a fading retreat leaving the spider-emu to descend directly into the anchor's path and the blue-ringed emu's blow into the spider-emu.

Bookshelves tremble. "To right the countless wrongs of our day--" a shield, braced against a falling shelf "--we shine this light of deepest satisfaction--" pure Bliss, raidiating down the Connection, a creeping paralysis of desire to move, to act "that this world may become as paradise." A bookshelf, righted, if empty; stacks of books, neatly placed not upon shelves (never upon shelves, she is not the Librarian to do so) but sheltered beneath a shield. A tentacle reaches towards them, and the shield slams down, the tentacle severed by the sharpened edge. "What a wonderful world such would be."

"Yes! Thank you!" Zachary says to Luna, on the other side of the ice wall.

The spider-emu staggers from the combined clash of chain anchor and emu comrade crashing into it. It stumbles, as the joyous paralysis begins to seep through its limbs.

The emutypus collapses to the ground, but the taipan shows no fear of death, kicking with fang-talon feet at Zachary. No doubt venomous. I mean, they're in *Australia*.

The blue-ringed emu takes the opportunity to leap from a high bookshelf, directing tentacular talons directly towards Zachary. Death from above.

Emu and croc-emu sprint and bound and crash through the quickly melting wall of ice. They pay Zachary no mind, pinned down as he is (for the moment) by the taipan emu. Instead, they charge further into the Library, away from the defenders.

Zachary launches himself into another connection-breaking roll. This time, the timing is off, and the taipan-emu's feet graze Zachary's pants. Luckily, the fencing pants take the blow for him, the fabric tearing but protecting his skin from contact. The blue-ringed emu stumbles at the last moment of its jump and lands far short of Zachary, crashing into the ground.

He needs to deal with these creatures, but his heart isn't really in it. Zachary wants to sit back and relax and throw on a casual fighting game tournament with friends, and the more he thinks about it, the more brainpower is dedicated to building up that fantasy, not on the very real fight that's going on right now. At least he's good at multitasking.

He swears and swings his knife at a lamppost above, to get rid of the blue light in this area.

A glittering figure lands from above, sharpened shield and the blue-ringed emu said shield plunges into cushioning the figure’s fall. "To right the countless wrongs of our day," ~~it~~ she intones in amused disappointment. "We shine this light of deepest satisfaction, that this world may become as paradise." She glances in the direction of the fleeing foes, then tilts her head curiously at Zachary. "What a wonderful world such would be."

Sharpened shield's edge plunges through invertebrate body, bisecting the octopi imitation of an emu.

Another lamppost shatters, darkening the already dim corridor further. The taipan emu takes the opportunity to charge Zachary, using its body as a battering ram. It holds its head high, ready to dart out wherever he might dodge.

Deeper in the Library, emu and croc-emu tear at shelves and send a statue of Kara tumbling through a railing, crashing down three stories.

Another mockery of an emu steps around the same corner from which the others emerged. Another distorted snake body, this one a brown snake.

It hisses, a noise at once avian and serpentine.

The aggression of these emu-things, attacking without fear of death or injury, is terrifying to some level of the primal lizard brain in Zachary that still remembers the jungle. At the same time, it makes them extremely predictable. Zachary thrusts forwards into the path of the taipan emu, and slices clean through its neck. Its head flies off to the side. By sheer stubbornness, momentum, and spite, the rest of the body continues barreling forwards, but with another flick of the wrist, Zachary divorces leg from leg, serving up a platter of twin snake-drumsticks, still very raw.

The remaining emus scatter from Zachary's flaming blade, the brown snake emu circling around him and Luna to chase after the emu and croc emu wreaking havoc further into the Library.

Above, the funnel web emu lays still atop a bookcase, paralyzed by the Moonlit Knight's corruptive Connection.

The glittering figure casually wraps her chain around the paralyzed emu's limbs, weighing down what she couldn't reach with shattered shelves. As the bookworms continue to swarm, she casually continues to clean up what mess she can, though she is careful only to stack displaced books, not to attempt to reshelf them. She seems thoroughly satisfied by her own efforts.

"To right the countless wrongs of our day, we shine this light of deepest satisfaction, that this world may become as paradise. What a wonderful world such would be..."

She shoots Zachary an expectant look, glancing briefly in his direction before continuing her efforts.

"Hey, can you... go after the rest of them? Please?" Zachary asks, panting slightly with effort.

He glances around with sight and Sight, making sure that the nearby area is free of emus. He knows that several of the creatures are still rampaging around freely, but he needs a break. Better to take a 30 second breather now than to exhaust himself out chasing them, only to be too tired to fight the creatures when he gets there.

As he walks forwards to retrieve his staff, mind miraculously free of intrusive daydreams, it finally occurs to Zachary to wonder where these creatures all came from. He'd been periodically checking with his Sight while waiting, so shouldn't he have seen them on radar before the emus were within visual identifying distance?

Zachary unsummons his fire sword to pick up the staff, poking it into the nooks and crannies around him. "Luna, I think there's some connection fuckery going on, we should check --"

Ahead of Zachary, down a side corridor of the hall connecting the Library to the State Library of New South Wales, a bookcase has been toppled. Behind it, the wall of the Library is cracked open, wood panelling smashed open from the other side of the wall.

Only, based on Zachary's patrols, there *shouldn't be* another side to this wall.

"-- this out," Zachary finishes.

The gap in the wall yawns. More than a gap. **Ginnungagap**. The void beyond the world.

A hole in the Library's wall opens onto void, and beyond that expanse, at once adjacent and infinitely far: another broken wall, another hole in all that is.

Donald Robertson stands in a backroom of the New South Wales State Library, dressed in a workman's outfit, the room 'closed to the public for renovations.' He holds a mattock in one hand, an emu's egg in the other, chanting in one of two diagrammatic circles. In the other, a censer belches green flames, surrounded on all sides with body parts harvested from Australia's fauna.

Donald's eyes meet Zachary's and widen with surprise and fear.

Zachary grits his teeth and jumps into the void.

Zachary floats through emptiness for eons. Zachary collapses, no space between his cells. Zachary explodes, his every molecule separating by a hundred thousand miles. Zachary crosses the gap in no time at all.

Donald yells out in surprise as Zachary appears in the archival room, landing in a tumble that sends his summoning censer spilling over, fire extinguishing as the circle is disrupted.

In one swift, practiced motion, Zachary is back up on his feet. Donald backs up, towards the door of the room, but he isn't fast enough. Zachary swings the staff into Donald's leg, just below the knee, and then again in an overhead strike. The leg bends at an odd angle, and Donald crumples to the ground with a cry. The emu egg cracks against the ground. Yellow yolk oozes around them.

Zachary bends down by Donald, shucking the staff aside to fully pin the other down and wrench the mattock out of his hand. He presses his knife into the underside of Donald's neck, cold blade caressing vital arteries. If Donald tries anything, he'll be dead before he can finish speaking.

"Surrender, and I'll let you live," Zachary demands.

Donald chokes out the words, far less brave than his emu monstrosities. "I... I surrender!"

"Good," Zachary says. He sets his foot on the break in Donald's leg to make sure Donald won't try to run, and lifts the knife to scratch a basic circle on the ground around them. "Explain to me everything you were doing to the Library I just came from."

Donald screams, the connection blocker set at the door to the archival room flickering with the effort.

He tries to curl into a ball as the binding circle completes, trying to cradle his ruined leg.

"Leon... Leon's ordered me to set up here. Break a hole between realms." He gestures vaguely towards the fallen mattock. "Send my oddemus to destroy everything on the other side." He gasps in pain, his leg broken.

With the binding in place, there's less need to physically hold Donald down. Zachary steps outside of the line and squats down near Donald, still brandishing the knife. "Swear to me that you will call off the oddemus as fast as you can."

"They're called off!" he cries, trying to wiggle away from the knife. "You toppled the censer! You broke the egg! They should all fade away!"

"How long?"

"Seconds! I'm not uncle Leon! I need concentration for them to last!"

Leon. The fucker who kidnapped and operated on Mia, who might still be operating on her even now. Rage flashes through Zachary.

It takes effort to keep his voice level. Shouldn't being the attention of Innocents into here. "What do you know of Mia Dunaway? Did you do anything to her?"

"You... you mean Leon's pet project?"

The air heats up around Zachary's hand as the fire sword tries to push into reality where the karambit already is. He flexes his fingers uncomfortably.

"Sunlight Practitioner. White girl who looks like a 20 year old, has a bunch of diagram tattoos on her head and other places. *Does that sound like her?"* Zachary says tightly.

"I... I don't work with humans much! I do animal work! She's one of his client's vestiges, Lord Everingham gave him free reign with operating on her in return for keeping her functional, and-"

Donald's phone begins to buzz loudly.

Zachary reaches in for the source of the noise, and takes the phone out of the circle. It's one of the newest models out there, with a leather case and a fancy triple camera system. He sets the knife down to the ground, by the staff, and with a quick flicker-flash of the fire sword, cuts right through it like butter. The scent of burnt electronics fill the air.

"Tell me what Leon fucking did to Mia, and tell me what you did to her."

"I didn't do anything to her!" His voice raises into a shriek. "It was Leon! I don't even know all the details! Making her one of his Franks!"

"Fucking useless piece of shit," Zachary snarls. "Don't even --" he stops. "Explain what a Frank is."

"Like.. like Frankenstein's monster. People suits he can wear. He has a whole set of them!"

Zachary swears a long string of curses focusing on Donald's parentage that would almost feel juvenile if not for the context.

"Will there be any more attacks on the Library? There was a blue emotion attack light, what do you know about that?"

"I don't know! I got told to set up here, then I got a message that the Library was hunting uncle Leon - whatever that means - so I should start tearing it down!"

"You really are useless," Zachary repeats. He sighs. "Fine, tell you what. Swear that you will never attack Kara Pilgrim's Library again, nor aid in any effort to attack it. Swear that you will never operate on a human being. If you really have a focus on animal work, that shouldn't be a big problem. Swear that you will wait quietly in this room and make no attempts to contact other people for the next five minutes, and then afterwards you can leave. If you commit to all of that, you're free to go."

Zachary looks Donald in the eyes, trying to impress the seriousness of his intent. Instead, he notices for the first time just how bad the nearby broken leg is, how much it's bruised and swelling. Staff really doesn't have a lot of in between options for damage and nothing. He drops his eyes awkwardly.

Donald cringes away from Zachary. He looks like he wants to quibble, to argue wording. He is, after all, still a practitioner facing extensive oaths. But in the end, the pain of his broken leg and the looming threat of the knife overwhelm all other thought.

"...I so swear."

Zachary picks up all his things -- staff over his shoulder, knife onto his belt -- and takes a few of Donald's things as well, the mattock and the censor. He leaves the destroyed, yolky egg mess on the ground.

"Your past owner has no more claim to this. Your strength to mine, your power to mine, your experience to mine," Zachary murmurs to his newfound loot.

Then he turns to Donald, and the binding. Zachary brings out the fire sword again to cut out a small piece of floorboard where the binding line is, and then pries it out to break the circle.

"Five minutes, and you can leave. Get medical help, go back to your animal fuckery, whatever. Just remember your oaths," Zachary says.

He looks at the gap in the wall, the impossibly large and tiny void in between reality and the Library. Isn't there supposed to be some other way to get from the Library into Sydney? What was it that Geoffrey had said, lose sight of the entrance and he'd go back to the Library? All things considered, he'd rather not make that jump again.

He can't go out into Sydney dressed like this either. Can he?

Zachary retrieves a whiteboard marker from the side of the room to scribe a quick connection blocker onto himself, one of Justin's simpler designs, and then leaves the conference room with Donald still in it. From there, it's a brief walk through the shelves of the New South Wales State Library, and then he's back in Kara's Library.

Though there are no emus to be seen anywhere, the lights still shine a faint blue. Zachary sighs, and resigns himself to another round of blissful daydreams on the path to retrieve his phone and tell all the others that the attack is over.