The entire room continued to spin, and Quinn couldn't quite process where each and every person around her was. Her head spun like a top, and the disorientation was real. Not only did she have a sore throat, but her stomach started to swirl, inundating her senses with nausea on a level she hadn't experienced since she got food poisoning a couple of years ago.

In fact, it sort of felt like her stomach was trying to boil up out of her system and exit through her esophagus. It was not a comfortable or welcome feeling.

She frowned. Something was wrong. Something was wrong with her. Ever since she drank that tea earlier... her eyes fluttered open, even though she swore she hadn't closed. She could see Malakai sitting there, fanning her with something that didn't really resemble the fan she thought it should even if it was giving her a nice little bit of cooler air. It just wasn't helping enough.

She checked in as much as she could to make sure she still had the barrier around her. Each thought took more effort than she remembered. Her magic was still in place. The spell was still holding. Something else had to be sapping her energy.

She checked her energy levels.

2972/2985

Nope, energy levels were absolutely fine.

"Am I sick?" She whispered.

Malakai nodded. "Yeah, we think you drank something that didn't agree with you."

"Is it like a species thing? Should I not have?" But even the words were difficult to get out. All she wanted to do was sleep, just to drift away and preferably not wake up for quite some time.

Suddenly, she could feel vibrations in the floor beneath ever so subtly as large footsteps made their way toward them. She blinked and tried to push herself up, but her strength gave out.

"Quinn, sit." Hal's tone commanded.

"Trying," she said to Hal.

He frowned. "Malakai, help her."

Malakai raised an eyebrow. He'd never been the best at taking orders, but apparently taking them from Hal at that moment was acceptable. Which made Quinn all the more suspicious. And yet, she couldn't quite get the thought out into words.

She struggled, with Malakai's help, into a sitting position, leaning against the side of the couch.

"I'm so sorry," she said, her breath coming in short gasps. "I... I know everybody keeps telling me to sleep, but there's just been so much to do."

Hal actually laughed, but she could tell the expression didn't meet his eyes. In fact, his eyes looked positively stormy, like he was pissed off.

"What is it?" She asked.

"Let's just get this in you first." He said, holding up a cup for her.

Quinn noticed another satyr behind him. Hadn't he called for somebody? She couldn't place the name. But she was tall. Well, like most satyrs apparently, and sort of majestic. There was a sheen to her, sort of like an aura or what Quinn had always assumed auras would look like. It flashed in a soft lemon light around her.

Girilda ... that was her name.

"I'm so sorry," Quinn said again.

"Stop it, Quinn." He reached over to Girilda and grabbed a glass from them. "Here, you need to take this."

"Will it settle my stomach?" Quinn asked. As each second passed, she felt like her strength was being sapped even more. This was one hell of a food poisoning incident.

"It will," he said. "Now, drink."

"Fine," she said, and gulped down the drink. It was even more bitter than the tea which, in hindsight, she hadn't actually liked. She'd always been a fan of tea, but this one was not their best. The liquid hit her stomach like someone dropped a ball of lead into water.

She gasped. "Oh, that hurts."

"Just give it a minute, Quinn," Hal said. "Now, just breathe. I need you to concentrate on your breathing. Don't stop."

Quinn laughed. She couldn't help it. "Why would I stop?" She took a huge intake of breath and suddenly it was difficult to breathe around.

That was why he told her not to stop breathing. It hurt so bad. She almost passed out. She could see the little black dots forming in front of her vision but fought through valiantly because if it was this difficult to breathe, she wasn't sure she'd be able to involuntarily.

The agony prolonged her senses in such a way that it made time seem infinite. She really hoped hours hadn't passed and that in actuality it was simply a few minutes, and yet it just hurt so much it felt like forever. Her stomach roiled like it was boiling water and tried to exit out of her from every orifice, every pore. T

he pressure inside her built and built and built until she let out one massive burp.

Quinn paused. "Oh," she said extremely embarressed. "That... it's really weird. I am so sorry. I didn't... I didn't... I was just trying to breathe."

Malakai snorted behind his hand. She could tell he was laughing. He'd pay later. Hal simply looked relieved.

"That was a natural release of toxins." Hal gave her a half smile. "And I promise that I've heard far worse, Librarian. You have no idea."

Quinn realized she probably didn't want to know. Girilda simply flashed her a smile, and Eric fluttered down and put a tiny hand against her forehead.

"She's still sweating." the imp informed the room.

"Of course I'm sweating," she said. "It's hot here."

"Not that type of sweat, Quinn," Eric said in a clipped voice, before turning his attention back to Hal. "Anyway, what do you make of it? Do you really think?"

The looks that passed between Eric and Hal started to grate on Quinn's nerves. As every moment passed, she felt that a little bit better, a little bit more in control of herself like she usually was, and definitely still embarrassed about the after effect of the tea she'd consumed. "Okay, enough with the looks between you two. What are you not telling me? Was that somebody else's drink? Should I not have touched it?"

"No, Librarian, and I must apologize for this. That was a hundred percent your drink, and I do not understand how this happened, but the reality is that someone poisoned you." Hal's skin tone darkened and fire licked at his horns before he took a deep breath and continued. "I've already sent my guards to the kitchens to find out who procured, mixed, and made the tea. Luckily, I recognized the symptoms in time. I wish I'd have recognized them sooner. I simply thought you were fatigued from having to maintain the barriers required to keep you ventilated. I forgot, and still forget, of your heritage and the fact that maintaining a simple barrier like that isn't going to drain you to the extent it did."

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Quinn blinked up at the satyr and held up a hand, only just making sense of his words. "Wait, somebody poisoned me?"

"Yes," He said it like it was a common occurance. "It seems that even my domain is not immune to infiltration. We'll get to the bottom of this."

Quinn still couldn't process it though. Somebody tried to poison her?

"Then did it almost work?" she asked.

To that, Hal simply laughed.

"Well, it definitely could have," Hal said, "if we hadn't realized in time."

Quinn still wasn't getting it. Her head seemed to be fully of cotton wool again. She understood, in theory, that someone had indeed placed poisonous substances in her drink and that she was suffering the after-effects. But for so much of her short life she'd felt meaningless and unimportant, that wrapping her head around the fact that someone had found her important enough to actually get rid of was a very weird sensation. "Okay, so, technically, they poisoned me, and I should technically have died."

"Well," Eric said, "technically, they were trying to poison the human Librarian."

"Oh," Quinn said. "So, they didn't know."

"No, they didn't know."

"Does she know?" Quinn asked, nodding in Girilda's direction.

"Not precisely," Hal said, dismissing the doctor behind him. "We'll transport you to somewhere less open and have Eric fetch any other supplements that we need to feed you. Perhaps it might be better to open a door to the Library and get food directly from Cook for you."

Quinn shook her head slowly, trying to clear out the fuzzy feeling. "Don't you only have three doors?"

"Technicaly we have four. Three public doors. The fourth door is my door. I don't share well," Hal said, then chuckled. "Anyway, this seems like as good a time as any to move you."

He reached down andeasily plucked Quinn up. His skin was warm to the touch. She yelped, "What the hell, Hal?"

Hal laughed. "You don't have any energy yet. It'll take time for you to recuperate your physical energy, not your magical energy. I know you've almost got more magical energy than me. Let's just keep going."

He carried her to a room off to the side with a lock that he spoke one guttural word to and it opened. He placed her on another couch in a room that was very similarly furnished. It had high arched windows that looked out over a molten lava lake. He motioned to Eric, and they walked over to look out of the windows while they spoke.

Quinn sat quietly. She could feel her energy returning. Along with the energy came a bit of anger. She was pissed. Someone had tried to poison her with tea. Now she'd second guess every cup of tea she ever had.

"Are you doing okay?" Malakai asked.

"No," Quinn said, "not really. I'm trying not to be too angry. Trying to get over the fact that I still really want to sleep and probably shouldn't. Not to mention the fact that I'm trying to process the fact that someone tried to kill me."

"Well, to be fair," he said, "you've had Kajaro try to kill you, a demon tree try to kill you. Oh, even your new bestie Jasper tried to kill you. I mean, you should be sort of used to it by now."

Quinn laughed despite her mood. "Don't make light of it, Malakai. It's serious."

"Of course it's serious. But it's also kind of, you know, commonplace for you now. You think three attempted murders? Well, if you count Tenejo, it's probably four. And the mind bomb that Kajaro placed in you, it's probably five." He grinned at her. "If we really try, we could probably pile up a heap more of them."

"Thanks," she said to him, surprised at how much his words calmed her when it was about such a topic. "I appreciate your efforts in trying to make me feel better."

"Yeah, so you should," Malakai said. "Now, let's get rid of that dreary face and figure out what we're going to do."

"I'm slowly regaining my physical energy." She checked her magical stats again, double-checking her mana levels and checking her energy levels. "Nope, magical energy is still fine at 2974 now of 2985 because every now and again it ticks over and takes energy to maintain the shields and the breath masks that I've given myself. I don't know what to do, Mal."

He shrugged. "How about you drink some more of this disgustingly bitter stuff he called medicine and see if we can make you a bit healthier. Did you bring any food with you?" He asked Quinn.

"No," She shook her head. "But right now I won't be able to stomach anything. It still feels like its own lava pit down there."

Malakai chuckled. "Well, that's polite dinner conversation."

Hal finally walked back over. "Eric went to procure you some sustenance. I'm fetching it directly from Cook. And Eric has permission currently to use my private door to do so."

Mal raised an eyebrow. "You don't trust someone not to try and poison her again?"

"Not until I've weeded out who did this. Don't worry, I'll find them." Hal's voice held a low tremor.

The way the words resonated down Quinn's spine, she had absolutely no doubt in her mind that Hal was speaking the truth.

"In the meantime," she said, trying to lighten the mood somewhat, "What sort of poison did they use? Was it potent?"

"Oh, yes." Hal said, focusing back on her. "If you'd in fact been human, you'd have been dead in about 15 seconds."

"Oh," Quinn said, digesting that information like it tasted bad. "But it still affected me."

"Yes, it still affected you. Because like I said, you are an egg. You are a baby who shouldn't yet be in the position she's in." He took another deep breath.

Quinn realized at that point that Uncle Hal didn't have a problem with her per se, it was more than she should have been able to grow into her powers before becoming the Librarian instead of having it all forced upon her so fast. She had to agree with him for the most part, and appreciated his concern.

"I need to let go of my irritation at how things were handled, and we need to move on from there." He continued.

Quinn, very wisely, remained silent.

"Look, your heritage, your genetics mean that you shouldn't be evolving for another several decades at least. Maybe another eighty or ninety years." Hal paused, "You are, what, 20?"

Quinn nodded.

Hal threw up his hands. "Which is ridiculous. Your innate abilities make poisoning you pretty much moot point, but your evolution has not yet come far enough, especially since you were essentially created from nothing. Anyway - we need to train your senses to scan for poisons, and anything else that might harm you. Poisons are, for most types of dragon, not necessarily even just your type of dragon, something they can simply burn off. Once we've trained you to identify harmful substances, you should, essentially, be able to incinerate them."

"Like I did the infection on the books?" Quinn asked.

"Yes! Quite like that in fact, except internally," Hal laughed. "I wish Drevicia could show you this itself, but as it is I'll give you a few exercises right now that'll take your current abilities and hone them. You'll need to focus deeply on your sensory abilities. You need to learn to break down everything in an instant of observation to know whether things are safe or a danger to you. Just inanimate things. People are more complex, and Milaro was better suited to help you with that."

"Should I recover first?" she asked, despite already feeling much better than she had.

"Quinn, you're fine. The only reason you had any trouble at all was the dose size. And soon nothing will be able to threaten you... at least nothing your body can purge." He flashed her a grin.

Quinn cringed. There was no time like the present. "Okay, I'm ready."

Hal began walking her through some exercises to initiate whenever she was handed food, or beverages from people she didn't know well. It involved a fast tracked analyzsis of the air around the item, or person. And it took several tries for Quinn to understand fully what he meant. But by the end, Malakai could walk past with two cups and she could pick out the one with poison in it.

"That's a good start." Uncle Hal said, a huge smile on his face. "You're taking to it fairly easily. Now, I have some exercises to show you that you can do on your spare time, whenever you have a moment. Make this second nature and you won't even have to think about danger identification. It'll just happen naturally."

"I like the sound of that." She grinned at him.

"Now keep in mind, if you're in the Library, you also have the safety protocols in place there... so this just makes you doubly safe."

Quinn nodded.

But what he wanted her to do, Quinn didn't find out right then. Two sunset colored imps burst into the room, their orange-black wings fluttering frantically behind them. "We believe the prisoner is ready for you right now." they said in unison.

Hal raised an eyebrow. "What do you mean the prisoner is ready for me? I will see the prisoner when I am ready."

"No, sire... you need to see this." They spoke together again. "You have to see this for yourself. It would be a good idea to come down now."

"What's happened?" He asked. "Did you push the questioning too hard?" His tone took on an iron-like quality. The imps looked at each other.

They sort of shrugged as they wrung their hands. "We didn't think we pushed it too hard, but we may have inadvertently triggered a failsafe."

Hal sighed and it reverberated through the entire room. "Very well. I guess we go visit our prisoner now then."