Quinn slept for hours. This time, the Library didn't wake her, nor did Aradie or Lynx. Nobody did. She woke up when the real sun would have probably been high in the sky and stretched languidly. She stretched, got up, and headed for a wonderfully hot shower. It was almost like its own room, with rainfall heads that kept the waterfall even and welcome.

This morning, she wasn't in a rush.

Afterwards, she got dressed, pulling on a comfortable pair of fleece leggings because she felt a slight chill in the air. She also pulled on a big, loose hoodie. One of the best things about the Library was being able to get any type of clothes she wanted, anytime she wanted them. She shoved her feet into fleece-lined slippers and hovered down the stairs. Slippers were just asking for her to trip, and now she had a foolproof way to travel around without falling flat on her face, which was, as always, much preferable.

She trundled through the Library, waving vaguely at the front desk and smiling at patrons as she walked past them into the kitchen. Cook took one glance at her, reached over, and grabbed a paper bag and what looked like a travel mug. He handed them to her.

"What's this?" she asked, slightly surprised.

"Malakai has explained coffee to me and I have, I do believe, replicated it quite successfully," Cook said. "Plus, you looked hungry, so there are some donuts for you. I will have lunch sent over to you, brought over by one of my assistants, so that you may work in peace."

Quinn raised an eyebrow. "How do you always know exactly what I need to eat and what I'm about to do?"

"You are not as good at hiding your intentions as you would like to think," Cook replied.

"Am I telegraphing?" Quinn asked, suddenly scared that she might be inflicting her sensory abilities on people again.

"No, but you are in cozy clothes and you look like you have a lot to do."

Quinn grinned. "Read my mind, Cook. Thank you," she said. She walked toward her office. Just before she entered it, Aradie swooped down and landed on her shoulder, cooing incessantly.

"What? You weren't there when I woke up." she said. The bird cood again. "Well yes, I know you were trying to let me sleep."

Quinn pushed through, closed the door behind her, and sat cross-legged in her massive office chair, pulling her food up to her. The coffee tasted rich and wonderful. She practically devoured it. And then, realizing she couldn't put it off forever, Quinn pulled up her HUD.

"Bring up list interfaces," she said, and cringed as several lists splashed across her vision. Multiple lists with many things crossed off and quite a few things still to do. None of which helped her organizational abilities because the lists were so messy it was hard to remember exactly what she needed to do when.

So, on the tail end of lull they'd just had, Quinn was taking the time to rearrange all the Library lists into a form that she could actually execute. Since she'd been in the Library closing in on six months now, she'd discovered so many fascinating things. First of all, magical books, different alien species, galaxies, solar systems, interdimensional doors, and pocket systems. But most of all, she'd recently discovered delegation. And that, was the most beautiful thing of all.

See, Quinn might be the Librarian, which she'd originally thought meant she was in charge of everything and had to be responsible for everything. But she'd very recently realized this wasn't the case. She blamed it all on Hal. He probably didn't know what he'd started by surprising her with retrieving so many books through his own initiative. Books that she didn't have to go and retrieve. Books that he took an assistant with him or sent with Eric or probably other imps or satyrs or whatever other creatures he was sending to retrieve them.

The point was that Quinn hadn't had to retrieve them herself. And while she'd been aware of this on some level, she'd felt a heavy responsibility to manage everything alone or let Dottie and Geneva contribute minimally.

It meant she didn't have to be present for begtinner book retrieval. Probably not even for the intermediate books. She could see how she'd have to be present for some of the books like the Ririn's they'd retrieved from Kajaro. Books that not every species could touch. Books that could corrupt people if they did so. But beginner books weren't like that. Which meant she could and now would delegate.

And so with that in mind, she moved all of the book repairs completely over to Narilin and dropped them into her to-do list. To be fair, Narilin had already pretty much been in charge of that. But Quinn now made her the delegating supervisor. However, when she sent the list over, she also made sure to offer her own services for some of the level one and two book repairs that needed to be done. So that Narilin didn't think she was just fobbing off her responsibilities.

Even if Quinn kind of was.

Next, she checked if she could rope some of the golems in. While she was fairly certain she could message them, it did take her a while to figure out how to access Tim and Tom's contact within the system. And so she sent them the probably very obvious tasks of maintaining new and old branches and making sure that the books were kept in tip-top condition and anything damaged was immediately sent to Narilin. The bleeding obvious needed to be said so she knew she'd said it.

Her brain worked in wonky ways sometimes.

With that out of the way, she turned to the item requests from both Farrow and Misha. Misha was another problem she'd have to deal with but that was a different list. These were for the storage room for Misha and for the bug and plant room for Farrow. There were several different types of seeds for Farrow as well as many different alchemical and medicinal requests for the new branch. There were also several components for different types of armor and apparatuses that the storage room required replenished. Those were made by Misha.

She sent messages to Milaro who handled most of their trade negotiations and thus that task was also delegated. Then she appointed Finn the supervisor in charge of patron personalized environments which took that off Quinn and Lynx's hands and put it into the little ilgonomur's. It would also mean that Finn would have their own little area in the middle of the Library close to where many of the species specific rooms were allocated which meant that Finn could spend their time surrounded by all the books they wanted in the middle of the Library. Most of all, visitors wouldn't port there directly, thus making it safer for Finn given the circumstances where they were still avoiding their family.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

Quinn frowned as she looked at her lists. Speaking of Finn, they were someone she needed to sit down and have a chat with too. She needed to double-check and see if the family had tried to reach them, see how they were fitting in, and if they were feeling safe.

She fiddled with the list a bit more, realizing that she'd already finished some of the tasks, and reallocating things to other people. She put the responsibility of Beginner Tome retrieval onto Dottie and Geneva, with some assistance from Eric. Hal's word apparently carried a lot of weight when it came to retrieving books. She thought that might be something good to reinforce.

Quinn frowned as she looked at the slowly forming personal lists. Now condensed, it was much smaller.

Delegation was her new friend.

Now that she'd taken care of the day-to-day necessities that had been consuming so much of her time, she looked at the rest of it and got down to the nitty-gritty.

There were several books still missing and unidentified from the restricted section. They had realized these books should be there, but they were not, and they still had no recollection of what they were. Quinn frowned because she really didn't know how to address that other than hope that the Library and Lynx regained their memories. It was an important milestone though.

They did, however, have the list of books that Milaro had given them that were missing. The Seveshall Lineage of Mind Healing and How to Break It, The Ashelan Mind Capitulation Device, and Chmlienko's Guide to Dimensional Complacency were three books Quinn knew shouldn't remain out there. It was just that Hal's books were that one notch more dangerous. She made a note to get Jasper to help her locate those ones as well. Milaro was wary of those books, so that pushed them high on the priority list.

Speaking of which, she needed to contact Milaro for mind training and to power herself up more in that aspect. Even though she'd become fairly advanced in mind manipulation techniques, she didn't want to use them on other people. She was all for using it as a defensive mechanism however, if people attempted to attack her or her friends. And she needed training in projection.

Besides, Milaro's health had her worried. She wanted to double-check how he was doing. Not to mention, she needed to speak to Hal about Adrito and Kajaro's interrogations and figure out if they could actually extract any of the information about those books from them, or their plans, or what Dravishk was doing.

Or if they had even placed the Parseauvian book near the sleeping dragon, which... Wait! Technically wasn't the dragon her aunt? Sibling? Quinn had no idea. It was very complicated, but she was sort of looking forward to meeting another dragon. One who wasn't trying to kill them. One who was maybe in dragon form? That would be so much cooler.

She shook her head, trying to get back on track after the tangent she'd veered onto. The Parseauvian book had to be retrieved, but because it was with her aunt, sibling, whatever, Lynx was still figuring out the logistics of the book retrieval.

This brought her to the memories. How were they going with the memories? What was the progress like so far? Was there anything she could do to assist them in retrieving those memories? Quinn wasn't entirely sure, but she added that to the list as well. This probably meant she should talk to Siliqua and Harish and double-check how the process was going.

She didn't even know if Cadre was still in the Library. She checked, stretching out her senses trying to see if he was there, but she couldn't find his signature. Maybe he'd left for a bit. Perhaps he'd done everything he set out to do for them. Quinn made a mental note to check in and thank him for his help.

She did, however, sense Nishpa in the area, and that just made Quinn feel guilty. She'd managed to pawn Library supervisor off to the little Firionas healer as part of a liaison to the hospital wing to assist Quinn in figuring out the Bardocian root fiasco. They had to know if it was a part of the Sölem's whole scheme, and if it was, things ran deeper than they'd initially expected.

The connections just seemed to be piling up everywhere.

Quinn sighed, ran a hand through her hair, and looked down to see a glass of fresh juice and a sandwich sitting next to her. She blinked. Aradie cooed.

"Seriously, they came in without me noticing?" Quinn frowned. She needed to set an alert around herself so she never missed anybody. There had to be a way to do that. It shouldn't take too long to figure it out. After all her sensory perception within the Library was beginning to ramp up with the Library's strength. She jotted down work on sensory net as well.

So, looking at the roots, dealing with Sölem, and how to keep magic and the Library safe, not to mention find out who the spies were in the Library, even though Quinn had a fairly good idea about one of them. They'd already taken action to restrict their access to many of the Library's informational archives. They didn't have access to the owl's observations anymore, and they couldn't access the Library's security observations of the interactions and actions of patrons. A talk with her supervisory golem would happen sooner or later. She added it to the list.

The next problem was the bomb inside Ashiron. Quinn had no idea how to address that issue, what to do, how to figure out how to defuse it, but it went on the list because it was utterly important. If that accidentally leaked out, the Library was history.

Quinn sat back and looked at the list, frowning, just knowing she'd missed something.

"Damn it!" she said and quickly added synchronization with the Library asap to the list. After which she sat back and surveyed her list.

She was probably forgeting something too...

She'd set up most of her supervisors for tasks, which left Danio, Eric sometimes, Dottie, and Geneva if they weren't too busy coordinating the retrieval of a heap of books. Quinn frowned. Lynx was always busy, he was still trying to retrieve memories. The Library, well, the Library had to take care of the day-to-day goings-on and energy sources and allocations and running everything.

She mulled over the list in front of her.

* Locate other 3 books - Talk to Jasper

* Milaro - mind reinforcement

* Milaro health

* Talk to Uncle Hal about Adrito and Kajaro

* What about Uncle Drav?

* What about my Aunt Dragon and the Parsneauvian book?

* Check with Siliqua & Harish

* Help with Memory Retrieval

* Thank Cadre

* Work on sensory net

* Spies!

* Synchronize with the Library

"If only I had another supervisor," she paused, wondering if her latest idea was a good one. Then there was a knock at the door. Quinn knew who it was before she said. Her face broke into a grin even before she answered. "Come in."

Betty's tiny head popped around the doorframe and she spoke in her sunshiny little voice, "Hello Librarian. I have a proposition for you."