Young Justice: Poseidonis

September 17th, 2010

For being located more than a mile beneath the surface of the Atlantic ocean, the Conservatory of Sorcery boasted a rather impressive library. Sure most of the ‘books’ were collections of thin tablets rather than books of bound paper, but there actually were some real books mixed in, each one covered in a plethora of protective spells to ward off the cold, salty water around them.

It was also a rather well organized library, or so I’d thought. The top twelve floors of the building were neatly divided by topic and organized in a way that typically made it rather easy to find what you were looking for. Zatanna and I had spent long hours swimming between floors and browsing the many rows of shelves. I’d even copied a few of the choice works for my own budding collection.

However, though we’d thoroughly explored the top three-quarters of the massive, spherical building, the bottom four floors had been barred from us during our time at the Conservatory. They, like the Restricted Section at Hogwarts, were reserved only for those with specific permissions.

Permissions that I now possessed. After assisting in capturing Black Manta, I’d earned a lot of goodwill from the Queen and part of my reward had been the opportunity to access the thirteenth and fourteenth levels of the library. At the time I hadn’t really had the opportunity to make use of that new access, but now that I’d decided to briefly come visit the undersea kingdom, it seemed like the perfect time to take a look.

By the time I finally made it to the Conservatory, Zatanna and the Queen were both gone. Mera had apparently taken Zatanna and a few of her other students with her on a short excursion into the open sea beyond the city’s boundary. I probably could have joined them––they weren’t intending to go far and catching up wouldn’t take too long––but ultimately I decided to let Zatanna enjoy her lesson in peace.

My presence would have just served to distract her. Mera was an excellent teacher and I wanted Zatanna to get the full benefit of her tutelage. I was certainly interested in expanding my hydromantic abilities further myself, but unlike me, Zatanna was limited only to the magic of this Plane. My attempts to teach her wand magic had gone nowhere and Glynda told me that her attempt to unlock Zatanna’s aura felt like trying to do so to a rock.

Thus, while I would have happily joined in on Mera’s lesson, it was better to allow the Queen to focus her efforts more fully on Zatanna. Plus, if I was there, Zatanna would no doubt spend some portion of the excursion paying attention to me and not whatever knowledge the Queen was trying to impart onto her students. The stronger and more flexible Zatanna became, the more comfortable I would feel leaving her alone as I further explored the multiverse. There would be plenty of time in the future to receive pointers from Mera, particularly if I was able to create a Blueprint of the woman.

Certainly I was looking forward to seeing Zatanna, but there would be plenty of time for that later. There was a fresh bag of clothing lying on the bed in the waterless dorm room that had been provided to us at the Conservatory, which meant that Zatanna was likely planning to spend the night here instead of heading back to Shadowcrest. We could catch up over dinner and enjoy a proper night together again after far too long.

Thus, instead of following after Zatanna, I instead headed towards the library. I swam down through the entrance at the top of the building, down past twelve floors of books and scrolls connected by a vertical shaft, and stopped at the round door at the bottom of the shaft where an elderly Atlantean man floated behind a round desk of sorts, his focus consumed by the scroll of treated seaweed in his hands.

I cleared my throat to get his attention and passed him my student identification card. He spent several long seconds studying it, then tapped it against a smooth dome of green stone resting on the desk beside him. There was a soft hum and a pulse of green light flowed over both the card and dome. The man nodded, passed me back the card, and then gestured down to the new gap in the floor where the door had slid smoothly and soundlessly open.

I swam down and looked around. The thirteenth floor looked much like the twelve above it. Endless rows of shelves, small reading nooks and tables, and there were even a handful of students swimming around or talking in hushed voices.

After a moment of thought, I decided to keep going and once more descended down to where another member of the library staff was guarding the entrance down to the fourteenth floor. The green-haired woman with a dusting of scales on her cheeks, hands, and neck accepted my card, scanned it, then waved me down.

The next floor was a lot emptier than the one above it, and a good bit smaller as well. There was only one other person browsing the shelves that I could see, a shark-headed boy I thought I recognized from one of the lectures I’d attended here previously. Instead of a librarian, the door leading further down was watched over by an armored guard with an expression of focus on his face and a dangerous-looking bident held firmly in his hand.

Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

I grinned as I looked at the shelves loaded with tablets, scrolls, and the occasional ancient-looking book. Now this looked promising.

Two hours later I was feeling somewhat less optimistic. Sure the table I’d claimed was covered in various reading materials I’d pulled aside, but annoyingly I’d come across an issue much like the one I’d experienced the first time I’d been allowed into Hogwarts restricted. I couldn’t find anything.

Okay, I was exaggerating. I’d found an interesting history book written in an odd-looking dialect of Old Atlantean that mentioned the Planeswalking Sphinx Azor by name. There was also a slightly tattered spellbook detailing what I was pretty sure was Chaos magic, an interesting treatise on something that seemed like the Atlantean equivalent of Occlumency, and even a book on Atlantean tattoo magic that I was certain Zatanna would be interested in.

The problem was that, unlike the top floors, all the books here seemed to just be shoved onto the shelves with no real rhyme or reason. There seemed to have been some attempt to organize things alphabetically, but since modern and old Atlantean did not use the same alphabet, that was doomed to fail from the start. Furthermore, some of the books were organized by title, others by the name of the author, and yet others were pretty clearly not at all where they were supposed to be.

I briefly spoke with the other student I’d noticed among the shelves, and he’d told me that it had apparently been like this for years. There were no librarians dedicated to this floor of the library and, while some attempts had been made over the years to sort and catalog everything, none of them had gone far.

The thirteenth floor was apparently slightly better––it saw a lot more traffic and thus had more resources put towards improving it––but not by much. Finding a specific book if you knew exactly what you were looking for wasn’t too hard, but if you just had a topic in mind, it could take ages to find what you needed.

That kind of sucked. Especially since I didn’t know exactly what I wanted. Thus I was left blindly pulling interesting-looking books off the shelves, skimming a few pages, and then deciding whether or not they were worth examining in more detail. I silently resolved to never allow my own collection to fall into such disarray.

That was how Zatanna eventually found me, floating beside a shelf holding a four-inch-thick pile of thin tablets and staring blankly at the complex diagram inscribed into the dark stone.

She swam up behind me and peaked over my shoulder. “What are you looking at?”

I glanced over towards her. She was wearing a tight blue and purple top much like the yellow and blue one that Tula often wore, paired with a matching sarong-style skirt that I’d seen many of the women and girls at the Conservatory wearing. I blinked. The clothing wasn’t quite sitting right. And it looked a lot like something our guide and tutor would have worn.

I leaned over and kissed Zatanna lightly, the bubbles of air around our bodies briefly intersecting. “I like the new look. Did you raid Tula’s closet?” I asked curiously.

Zatanna blushed and looked away. “There was uh, a little accident. Luckily Tula had a change of clothes with her.”

Huh. I knew Zatanna was fully capable of fixing and cleaning her own clothing with magic unless they’d really gotten ruined. Zatanna looked rather embarrassed so I decided not to ask. “Well, you look great.” I kissed her again and turned to wrap an arm around her waist, my hand landing lightly on her rear and giving it a squeeze before I pulled away. “Did you have a good lesson.”

“Yeah! It was great!” Zatanna’s face fell slightly. “I’m sorry you missed it.”

I shrugged. “It's alright. You can tell me all about it later. It's my own fault for coming down so late.” I’d been rather distracted by the Lamp and time had gotten away from me.

Zatanna’s smile returned. She put a hand on my arm, the other drifting down to her belly, and looked back at the tablet I was examining. “So, did you find something interesting?”

I looked at the tablet as well. “You know, I have no idea. I’ve looked through half this pile and I still can’t tell what in Merlin’s name this is supposed to be. I’m pretty sure it's a schematic for something, but the stupid thing doesn’t have a title or any non-technical notes that I’ve come across so far.”

“So it could be like, a fancy toilet, or something?”

“Maybe? Probably not a toilet. I think this bit…here,” I shuffled through the pile and grabbed one of the tablets that had been at the top of the stack, “is supposed to explode. Or maybe just catch fire? Or boil some water? Something to do with a lot of heat all at once, but I’m pretty sure these things were all out of order when I found them.”

Zatanna stared at me for several long moments. “Hydrys, how long have you been looking at this thing?”

“Uh…” I considered the question. “Like twenty minutes maybe?” My fingers were actually starting to get a little tired from stretching to hold the entire stack at once. They weren’t super heavy, but it wasn’t a very comfortable grip.

Zatanna carefully pulled the stack out of my hands and shoved it back onto the shelf. “You can come back and look at it later. Dinner is going to be over in half an hour and I’m starving.”

I looked between the hopeful smile on Zatanna’s face and the bookshelf beside me. My stomach growled softly.

“Let me just grab a few things and put the rest of my books back.” I could come back some other time.