If you asked a cityfolk where magic existed, chances are all you'd get were disbelief and ridicule. For those less world-weary or with more of a hint at why the City even engages with the outside rarely, you might get less skeptical answers. Maybe not magic, but technologies as impossible as Singularities, monsters with no logic to their construction. Doubly so for the Ruins. Incomprehensible to the point that labeling them 'magic' isn't far off from the reality of it.

But that isn't magic, Roland thought. Magic would have to be…free. Something that couldn't be constrained by a monopoly over the right tools and resources. It was only in children's stories, where the knight recieves a magic sword from a king and slays a dragon.

He did not think a voice in his head was magic.

"The only thing I can think of doing something like that is the Distortion Effect. It never required a person's consent or physical access to grant a person the capability to manifest their inner hearts."

Angela, sitting on the rim of a recently-recreated desk, didn't think it was magic either. Truth be told, he wasn't sure she'd take his admission of what he heard entirely seriously—he barely could. But then, he supposed she had little in the way of human preconceptions. By the same token…

"It didn't sound like a Distortion. We've both been through that. It sounded like my own voice, the similarities just about end there. It only popped in, seemed to notify me and vanished."

Angela grimaced, knowing exactly what he was talking about. She still remembered how it felt to lose all control, to lash out with the only thoughts in her head being memories of her prison of a stageplay, her wayward, neglectful 'father'.

"Maybe it was a brief instance? We've gotten past our—difficulties. Maybe you're manifesting your own E.G.O.?"

Extermination of Geometrical Organ, or E.G.O. The manifestation of one's mind with the Light inside. Gebura said in the past that her E.G.O. talked to her, whispered in her mind. However…

"You think my E.G.O. would be as an [Assistant]?"

Roland squinted, almost incredulous. Almost. Angela just gave him a blank stare.

"Of course. If you were to be anything in the world now, it would be my personal assistant. I told you I didn't need you to protect me back then. Now that everyone is gone, you're going back to organizing rather than delivering books. Maybe basic organization can help you there."

That earned her a glower. Roland didn't mind being an assistant, and even took well to it in his humble opinion. But the thought of a mysterious power welling up from deep within him informing him that his special ability was to push around books and papers was kinda…underwhelming.

"It's [Basic Organization]. You're saying it wrong."

"I refuse to give weight to the power of basic competence."

"Ahhh, that sharp tongue. Can't say I missed it."

Roland groused, shaking his head. Things had gotten too serious for that kind of banter when they became an Impurity of the City. It couldn't have lasted for more than two weeks, but with all that happened it felt more like months. Maybe he didn't miss that wit of hers that much…

"So, have you tried doing anything yet?"

That brought him out of his thoughts. Roland's brow furrowed.

"Are you kidding? I didn't touch it, insofar as you can avoid something inside your head. Seems to be working well enough so far."

"Is that so?"

"You don't just touch things you don't know. My friend lost his arm that way, y'know."

She gave him a dead stare. Shit, did she actually hear his conversation with Olivier back then? Even this far from home he wasn't letting him win that one.

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"I don't see the problem. I'm here to clean up any mess you might make."

"Can you bring me back to life anymore?"

"Do you think this is life-threatening?"

Now it was Angela's turn to sound incredulous. She could still do that manually with this human form. Someone had to.

"I don't even know what to do with it. It's a voice in my head."

"Have you tried anything?"

Roland glared at her, but she only glared back. Someone had to concede, and that someone was going to be him. He didn't really see a world where she didn't get her way eventually. He looked away, to the side, and scuffed his foot on the wooden library floor.

"...fine. I'm all ears."

Angela huffed, and stood up.

"Many books are gone, the ones that are left are all piled up. I was going to start replacing them once the walls were all standing, but it should be as good a time as any."

The state of Angela's library was still a mess. The walls were pockmarked with holes and damage, blackened and cracked and distorted from the seven day onslaught. Angela was slowly rebuilding, but her focus was on closing up the walls, a task she was making good progress on. Most of the bigger holes were sealed up with wood she created from Light, a resource she had lost much of but was slowly husbanding. She had hoarded an amount meant for half a city-state, even a fraction was enough to work with even if she was weaker for it.

But the inside was a mess too. Bookshelves overturned, books scattered then gathered in a big, unorderly pile, features like lamps and chairs vaporized or ruined beyond recognition. Much of the infinite expanse of books had been lost, but the majority were trivial. Before, the library could theoretically contain every book in existence, and most had been filled with nonsense. As she learned about the City she resided in, they began to fill with knowledge, but the vast majority was still irrelevant.

And yet, her guests were gone—challengers she had turned into books to grant their experience and abilities to her Librarians, it was what made her a Star of the City, in time. She was far from helpless, still as durable as the library she manifested, but that library was no longer inviolable and infallible.

It made Roland feel a pang of something. Regret? Nostalgia? It was a complicated feeling, and he shoved it aside.

"Alright Director. Off to work~"

He walked away from the desk. The books were indeed all in a pile, maybe two hundred of them. He opened one at random.

-processed and ground at a four hundred degree angle until made thick like butter. I walked two thousand miles to left away from the chapel she once felt in his in-

Right. Nonsense book. Put that in a pile.

Roland picked up another, more nonsense, and made to put it on top of the first nonsense-book. Instead, he reached under the first, wedging it up and placing the second under it. He barely noticed, merely moving on to the next one.

By the time 15 minutes have passed, Roland had skimmed 50 books and sorted them into orderly piles, perfectly aligned covers and in alphabetical order. Most went into the nonsense pile, but a few were comprehensible, and went into their own smaller collection to be sorted later.

As he grunted, picking up the first pile of seven nonsense books to place on a shelf, he realized it all felt easier, somehow. He didn't have to put any thought into how he sorted the books, and could manipulate the pile with ease to place a book right in the middle without undue displacement of the rest of a stack.

Was this his superpower? [Basic Organization]? It was underwhelming, but at least it seemed harmless. Maybe the catch was somewhere he couldn't see, like WARP trains, but he didn't have the underlying feeling of wrongness he'd have expected from having his memory and perception tampered with. Maybe it was too subtle.

"Nothing seems out of place, should I take that as proof of supernatural interference?"

Roland can practically hear a small smirk in Angela's otherwise flat voice as she calls out from across the library. He calls back, not taking the bait.

"It's a bit weird, that's all. Seems benign but it makes me a bit uneasy. Like what the thought gears felt like on borrowing 'em."

At that, she walks over. Interest painted across her features in a way he could pick out, miniscule to people who were looking for the wrong things but loud and clear to Roland. He didn't look at her eyes or listen to her tone. It was in what she said and how she said it, or in this case what she didn't. No 'I see' or 'tell me more'. Just a silent expectation that he continue.

"The gear people used other humans to make their gears. Most were just muscle, but some got made into gears that think. They didn't make them any smarter, not really. I don't think Eileen wanted that kind of thing in her sheep. It was…when I took on their pages, it was like I had a person whispering in my ear so I said what they said, but with my body, if that makes sense? The Skill is like that, but without the person in my ear somehow."

He still wasn't that eloquent. Roland wished he could be more descriptive, but that was his lot.

"I see…I hope I can get one of these 'Skills' so I may investigate myself."

"Maybe. Seems convenient enough for now."

Roland says noncommittally. He's seen enough of what powers the splendors and wonders of the City. This was probably the working of a lost technology in the area, given that there was no magic. He wondered what it cost, to simply insert skillsets into someone's head.

----------------------------------------

Working in silence wasn't awkward, but after having worked most of his time with fellow librarians, it was somewhat haunting. There was no avoiding the truth of it, though.

Roland wished he could say he almost went to find Netzach to cop a free beer off, but it never left his mind that they were gone. Maybe forever. Hopefully temporary, but it wasn't in his hands any more.

He wished it hurt more, but he was out of tears long ago, and his rage was spent. The only thing left was to remember, and pray.

Before he knew it, his feet were carrying him out of the library. Out the once-ornate door, down the cracked marble steps, and:onto the sands under the night skies. He just needed to clear his head a bit, and it didn't hurt to actually set foot in the outskirts.

He looked back, never having actually seen the library from the outside. Maybe it wasn’t as impressive like this, but—

“Oh bugger me.”

The library was flickering in his view. Wavering somehow. Roland stepped closer, and it stopped. Step back again, start. What…was happening?

It’s harder to breathe here, warmer?

Much more than warm. In fact, the more he stood outside of the radius of whatever was happening to the library, the more he realized that this kind of heat wasn’t just unpleasant, it was practically suffocating. He looked up, and realized something was very, very wrong.

The Outskirts were a strange place, dangerous. The Ruins, orders of magnitude more on both counts. But he didn’t think these were Ruins, and even there…

He was pretty sure the night sky wouldn’t shine with an extra moon.