Quinn instinctively put her hands up to cover her face and, in doing so, caught whatever had flung itself at her. Pushing it away from her face, she noticed immediately that it was triangular in nature. As if somebody had taken a large piece of square paper and folded it in half into a triangle.

She held it out in front of her to examine it, and tiny little eyes suddenly blinked up at her. Teensy little feet at the ends of the triangle sections on the bottom wiggled. Quinn almost dropped it, and then it opened its strange almost cartoon-like little mouth and barked at her.

Quinn blinked.

It barked again as the stubby little end of what was obviously not actually paper started to wag.

"What the..." Quinn said as it continued to bark in her face.

Lynx laughed and an expression of delight crossed his face. "Oh my gosh, it's a dog-ear. I haven't seen one of those in so long."

Quinn, still holding the creature away from her, turned to Lynx. "A dog-ear, like you do to a page when you crease it to mark your place in a book?"

Lynx shot her a horrified look. "Why would you crease a page? Quinn, it's a book. You don't want to crease a magical page! That is one of the highest fines we can give."

"Exactly," Eric chimed in. "Have you not read the Fine Accords? I know that Lynx brought that book up to you. You should have looked in it by now. Dog-earing a magical book is a majorly finable offense."

Quinn, still slightly in shock, looked at the two of them and realized they were being deadly serious. Then she looked back at the dog-ear that was actually ridiculously cute. As if in response to her thoughts, it struggled and strained and leaned forward just enough to lick her on the nose.

"Ah!" Quinn said, but she didn't want to drop it because it was too high and might get hurt, and she didn't really feel like putting it down yet because she had a bad feeling that it might hump her leg. Not precisely what she was aiming for with a newly discovered creature.

Lynx laughed again, morphed back into his human form, and reached out to scratch the little thing behind what Quinn realized were actual ears and not just drawn onto the paper. Although it wasn't made out of paper. Its skin or fur felt like good quality suede. It was soft and flexible.

The smile on Lynx's face only got bigger. "I haven't seen these little guys for thousands of years. I can't even remember seeing them before the Library shut down. So it has to have predated. How could I have forgotten about dog-ears?"

"In your defense," Quinn said as she decided to bring her arms into her chest and just hold the little dog-ear. It sat quite comfortably on her arms, panting like an actual dog, "given your history, I don't find it completely unexpected that there is some stuff that you kind of forgot due to having your mind messed with."

"You make a very valid point," Lynx said. But she could hear the sadness behind those words. The dog-ear took that second to leverage itself up and lick Quinn's cheek.

"If you don't stop that," she said to it, "I'm gonna put you on the ground where people can trip over you." The dog-ear sat down and she swore it was pouting.

Hal laughed, watching the creature. "You can't have looked much, Lynx. Did you really completely forget about dog-ears?"

"I must have. I just don't have recent memories of them." Lynx sounded subdued.

Quinn raised an eyebrow at Hal who nodded ever so slightly. She was glad Lynx wasn't watching them.

"Look," Lynx said, "I had a lot on my mind back then. You know, or my mind being wiped of a lot at the time."

The dog-ear started to squirm again. It wasn't very large, but it was pretty wily. Maybe the size of a miniature Dachshund. Quinn wasn't exactly sure. She'd never had a pet dog before, or a pet at all for that matter. It wouldn't stop trying to lick her. She could have sworn Aradie, sitting on the opposite shoulder, was laughing her owly butt off.

"Oi," she said to Aradie. "Stop that. That's not nice of you." But Quinn had to admit the dog-ear was growing on her.

"Do you have a little name?" She said to it. It barked ever so high-pitched again and she inspected it.

Name: Bellrose Doggie

Species: dog-ear

Age: Infinite

"Your name is Bellrose?" And it barked twice in quick succession. "I'm taking that as a yes because you didn't pee on me. Aren't you just adorable?" It obviously liked being called adorable. "Do you think it recognized me as the Librarian?"

"Oh yes," Hal said, still enjoying some joke that Quinn didn't understand. "Definitely got your Librarian scent, that's what that dog-ear did." He frowned and looked toward the still transforming Library branch. "It's sort of odd though. They usually travel in packs. But I don't see any others. Not to mention how it's withstood the last five hundred years, though it is bigger than usual."

Malakai moved forward to stand next to Quinn. He glanced at the dog-ear and reached over and scratched it behind its kind of ears.

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She gave him a mock glare. "It's not yours. It's mine. You have to ask if you can pet it."

"Can I pet it?" Malakai asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Of course you can pet it."

He laughed. "So now you have a pet dog and a pet owl."

Aradie, quite deliberately, pecked his hand.

"Okay, you've got a pet dog-ear and a comrade owl." Aradie hooted low in her throat.

Quinn laughed. "Is it supposed to be taking this long for the Library to do its thing?"

"No, now it's actually taking a while longer than I thought it would." Lynx sounded irritated.

"Yeah," Quinn said. "I don't understand. I'm not getting any alarms or any warnings." She closed her eyes and reached out with her senses. "I can't feel it properly. It's not registering in the way the rest of the Library does yet. Does that mean it still hasn't dimensionally shifted fully?"

Lynx shrugged. "I'm just a part of the Library too."

The Library spoke up. Quinn could practically hear the strain in its voice. This isn't normal. It's having difficulty manifesting from its dimensional shift. It'll get here. Just give it a little bit more time.

Quinn frowned, not liking how drained the Library sounded. And that's when the Bell barked again, very loudly.

Quinn laughed. "You are a little attention seeker. How did you survive these last few hundred years?"

Bell licked her cheek again. The rest of them chuckled. But Quinn couldn't help the growing unease in her stomach.

"Okay, little one," Quinn said, and put the dog-ear down. It quite literally stayed right at her heel, growling ever so slightly and yipping a few times. That's when she knew exactly what it reminded her of: those little Pomeranian dogs mixed with a miniature Dachshund. Now, Quinn felt better about the dog-ear, but not necessarily about the fact that something was still not right with the new annex.

She moved forward a couple of steps, hesitant to get too close to the still forming branch. There was a mist inside the whole section. It wove its way around in a way that still felt like it wasn't quite in synchronization with the entire Library. Given what the Library itself had said, she knew it wasn't worse than that.

Her senses couldn't pick it up yet. It wasn't a part of the whole, and despite the fact that she and the Library were linked so intrinsically together, she still couldn't reach out and feel it. There was a gap and missing knowledge. The books that had transformed with the Library were suddenly beyond her reach. Even the herbs, plants, weeds, and ingredients that had gone into it were no longer in existence as far as her senses could tell. Yet, her eyes kept lying to her, letting her know that it was sort of there, just beyond reach.

Lynx stepped forward slowly, his eyes flickering in that strange way they always did when he connected with the system fully. She wondered how that worked, but was fairly certain he just tapped into it and utilized it as a part of himself. He didn't look frantic, just concerned. The frown made his eyebrows furrow, and he tsked several times under his breath, which he only did when he was really annoyed.

Mal had moved forward as well, absently grabbing for the sword that wasn't there.

"This is unprecedented," Hal said. "Not that I've been here when many branches have been opened, and I do believe creating them in the first place was substantially different than what you're doing right now."

The dog-ear barked, bit Quinn's pants, and tried to pull her back. She glanced down at it. "You don't think we should move forward, Bell?" The dog barked two more times.

Aradie cooed, as if she was punctuating the statement.

Quinn glanced at everyone. "Well, according to these guys, we should stay right where we are."

"Are you sure?" Malakai said. "Do you think it wouldn't trigger if we crossed the threshold?"

"No," Lynx said, taking a step back, now his eyes had cleared. "We cross that threshold. We're going to do a lot more than trigger the Library to integrate properly."

"That sounds ominous," Eric said, and paused for a second before speaking again. "I could phase."

"What?" Quinn asked.

"I could phase," Eric repeated. "It's not hard. It's an imp thing. You wouldn't understand."

"No, I probably wouldn't, but what do you mean by phase? What will that do?"

"I can dimensionally phase, and should be able to align myself so I can assist pushing it through." He looked at the mist barrier critically. "I can sense it, it's just beyond us. It's not... It's like it needs to be kicked into place."

Do it, Eric, please, the Library said. There's something fighting against me pulling it fully into this dimension, and I need, I could definitely use, a push.

"No sooner said than done," Eric said. He cracked his knuckles, flexed his arms, stretched them, and suddenly didn't look like he was fully there. He passed through the shimmering entrance of the alchemical and medicinal branch as it was still forming, and was suddenly on the other side where Bell had come from.

The little creature was shaking at Quinn's feet, whimpering. "Hey, it's okay," Quinn said, reaching down to pick it up. "It's okay." She pet it, unsure why she was so attached to the tiny dog already. But it was helpless, or it seemed helpless, or it seemed to want their help. She still hadn't pinpointed that yet, but there had to be a reason it managed to phase shift out of the dimensional whatever this was.

Eric was frowning on the other side, and she could barely see him. He was out of sync and out of time with the rest of them.

Quinn could sense the power fluctuation, the pushing, the way it started to leverage itself past the mist, through the mist, until finally there was a resounding click, and Eric practically catapulted back across the threshold to where they were, as if he'd been released from a slingshot.

"Damn it," he said, shaking his head. "That wasn't what I expected."

"Was it just stuck?" Quinn asked, just before she noticed a shadow moving beyond them, behind the bookcases, around the new area

"No, there's something..."

Suddenly wind whipped around in front of them, and Milaro ported in, standing right next to Malakai, making sure he didn't move. The wind whipped his hair around him, and his eyes glowed silver as he channeled his power.

"Don't go near it. You can't walk in there."

Quinn hugged the now whimpering dog-ear.

"Why can't we?" But she stopped, because she saw the shadow again, slithering through the bookshelves.

"Something crossed over with the dimension shift," Milaro said.

And the alarms in the Library started blaring.