“Here we are, Mr. Stigandr,” the librarian quietly declared. “This is our geography section. I personally recommend Mueller’s Continental Atlas, it’s the blue one over there. A little further down here we have geopolitical works. The ones by Dwight Sanders have the best maps. And that entire section from over here all the way to the end is history.”
“Wow. That’s, uh, a lot,” Ozzy mumbled in disbelief.
“I am partially to blame for that. I quite fancy the subject, so I made sure our collection on it was expansive,” Eva admitted with a bright smile. “Is there any specific period that interests you?”
“Oh, erm… Last fifty years or so, I suppose,” he took a shot in the dark.
“Recent history it is, then. Local or international?”
“Local. I’m new around here and want to make sure I don’t, you know, do or say something that might get me in trouble.”
“Let me guess,” she leaned over conspiratorially. “Goblins?”
“… Yeah,” he admitted.
“If that’s what’s got you worried then you need to start a bit further back than fifty years. Let’s see…” she traced a finger across the shelves. “You’ll need Accounts of the Great Unification, The Miracle of Capitalism, A Hard Look at Human Oppression - take that one with a pinch of salt, the author’s quite biased - and… Ah, there it is. Goblins, and What to Expect, by I. P. Knightley.”
Miss Applebee plucked each tome out of its spot as she named it and then handed it off to Ozzy. None of them were even remotely close to ‘light reading.’ Between the four books on history, the druid instantly found himself saddled with well over a thousand pages of the blandest writing on the planet. Which wasn’t to say that these time periods were boring. Quite the contrary. The events that led to greenskins integrating within human civilization were heavy with racial tension, armed conflict, widespread strife, and great leaders. The issue was that the format this information was presented in sucked all the life and excitement out of it. There were more dramatic representations of these periods, of course, but Eva preferred factual accuracy over entertainment value when it came to history.
As for Ozzy, he just didn’t know any better.
“That should cover all the basics,” the librarian said. “Anything else?”
“Yes. I’ve got my hands full, so could you get those two atlases for me? The ones you mentioned first?”
“Of course.”
She happily got the geopolitical and geographical works and added them to the druid’s pile.
“There you are.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re very welcome. Would you like me to explain our borrowing policy?”
“Not right now, I’d rather get right to it if that’s alright.”
“Of course. Feel free to take a seat at one of our reading tables. However, since this is your first time here, I need to explain a few rules,” her tone rapidly grew stricter. “Do not disturb the other visitors. Do not vandalize the books. That includes scribbling in them. Once you are finished, drop them off at my desk or my assistant’s desk. Do not put them back on the shelves, do not hand them to me directly, and do not leave them at the reading table. Have I made myself clear?”
“Absolutely,” he respectfully replied.
“Great,” her chipper self returned. “I still need to finish re-shelving yesterday’s share, but feel free to get my attention if you need… anything.”
She then gave Ozzy a wink before returning to her duties, leaving the man to find a seat and start delving into this Great Unification. However, the druid rapidly found it was immensely difficult to focus on the text. This was partly because bookworming wasn’t his thing, but mostly due to the superbly distracting sight of the lovely Miss Applebee as she drifted up and down the library’s aisles. It didn’t help that she kept throwing him glances, their eyes meeting on more than one occasion. Even if he tried to avoid looking at her, the sharp click-clack of her high heels on the tiled floor echoed through the quiet hall, making him constantly aware of her presence. His nose also caught whiffs of her perfume, which smelled an awful lot like honeyed apples. It was a scent perfectly suited to someone bearing such a sweet name.
No, this wouldn’t do at all. His trained senses kept focusing on the librarian despite his best efforts. He’d never get anything done like this, and he couldn’t take these books back to the inn. He knew for a fact he’d never be able to concentrate there, otherwise he would’ve borrowed them from the start. So, he needed to figure out a way to get her out of his head. On second thought, maybe the reason he couldn’t do that was precisely because he tried to ignore her. The human brain was ass-backwards like that sometimes. Rather than trying to exclude her, perhaps he could try and focus on her instead until his subconscious had had its fill. No, wait, that would just make him come off as a creep. Even though she seemed to enjoy his attention somewhat, there was a line in there that he really shouldn’t cross if he hoped to remain welcome here.
“Mr. Stigandr? Is everything alright?”
The way Eva leaned over next to him and whispered into his ear would’ve made Ozzy jump in his seat if he wasn’t already distinctly aware she was right there.
“Yes, yes, I’m fine.”
“Are you sure? You seem a bit on edge.”
“What makes you say that?”
“You’ve been tapping your foot for the past while.”
“Oh, sorry. It’s just… this book,” he lied. “I’m not too used to reading so it kinda goes in one eye and out the other… Wait, that phrase doesn’t work like that, does it?”
“No, it really does not,” she held back a chuckle. “Well, my advice is to relax and take it slowly. Just take it one sentence at a time.”
“Hm, I suppose it’s worth a try. Thanks again.”
Ozzy did as she suggested, and was surprised to find that it actually worked. As weird as it seemed, the slower he read a passage, the quicker he learned it. Once he got into it he was able to tune out the distractingly delightful librarian without even trying. He still wasn’t going to read the whole thing, of course. There was no way he’d remember all the sordid details of the Great Unification, so he tried to grasp the gist of it. To make a long story grossly oversimplified, it was a series of drawn-out and bloody conflicts that centered around one ancient nation conquering the whole continent. This campaign was a success that united all peoples under one banner for the first and last time in history, giving rise to the Ostor Hegemony. The super-nation inevitably fractured five centuries later due to internal conflict, splitting up into New Ostor, Old Ostor, and Definitely Not Ostor.
“… Wait, what?”
The druid rubbed his eyes and double and triple checked the text, but that was most assuredly what the book said. The oddity of that naming convention made him take a step back and reevaluate exactly what he was doing. None of this was of practical use to him. Well, almost none of it. Accounts of the Great Unification didn’t focus on it, but it revealed that widespread enslavement of ‘lesser’ races - especially goblins and orcs - was common in the Ostor Hegemony. The practice was apparently still alive and well in Old Ostor, but was abolished and outlawed in New Ostor shortly after its founding. That somewhat explained why the two greenskin communities were so buddy-buddy with one another. Nothing brought people together like a common enemy, and the Hegemony was one the orcs and goblins had shared for centuries.
This uncomfortable history was important to know, but didn’t seem to offer anything that would help the druid reconnect with his friends. However, it might prove useful down the line when it came to interacting with other races and foreign people. Ozzy suddenly had a more intimate understanding of what Cassie meant whenever she said that most of her research was a wasted effort. There was no way of knowing what information might be needed ahead of time, so the prudent and responsible thing to do was to gather as much of it as feasibly possible.
The other books would need to wait, however, as the druid had been at it for about three hours straight. He needed to rest his eyes, stretch his legs, and fill his belly, so he left the library and went for a walk around the city centre. He saw a food stall offering something called ‘hot dogs’ and bought one out of morbid curiosity, only to discover it was just a weiner sandwich with a misleading name. Still, it was pretty good, so he had himself another four while his brain cooled off. Ozzy returned to the library about an hour after he left, feeling both refreshed and less apprehensive about books in general.
However, when he went back to his seat, he was annoyed to discover that his reading materials were gone. Not just the tomes that Miss Applebee had kindly picked out for him, but also the brand new notebook he’d been using as intended. Ozzy sighed and grumbled for a bit before deciding to bring this matter to the head librarian. He looked towards her desk and found her sitting behind it. Her attention was occupied by whatever document she happened to be working on, so she seemed oblivious to Ozzy’s presence. She also didn’t notice him approach her desk until he was just a few heavy steps from it, at which point she looked up at him with a mixture of disapproval and bewilderment.
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“Mr. Stigandr,” her stern side greeted him. “Did I not warn you to not leave books at the table?”
“Yes, you did, and I had every intention of dropping them off at your desk when I was finished with them.”
“So, why didn’t you?”
“I… wasn’t finished with them.”
Eva’s expression rapidly turned to one of realization, sprinkled with a bit of embarrassment.
“Oh, my,” she held a hand up to her lips. “I am ever so sorry, Mr. Stigandr. You were gone for so long that I just assumed you weren’t coming back.”
Whatever mild frustration Ozzy might’ve had instantly melted into a puddle of sympathy. The big softie suddenly felt bad for putting the lady on the spot like that. Hers was the natural response to his extended absence, wasn’t it? That and she apparently hadn’t gotten around to reshelving the missing materials. She got the books out from somewhere under her massive workstation and stacked them up in front of Ozzy, along with the notebook she’d grabbed for safekeeping. Given that it was an honest mistake that was so quickly rectified, there was no way the druid could stay mad about it.
“There you are,” she patted the stack of books. “Again, I’m so sorry for interrupting your work.”
“It’s quite alright. Happens to the best of us,” he smiled reassuringly.
“Still, if there’s anything I can do to make up for it, do let me know.”
“Actually, there might be. If I remember right, you were something of an expert on history, weren’t you?”
“Ah, an expert? You flatter me, Mr. Stigandr,” she gave a shy smile. “I am a hobbyist at best.”
“Well, you know a lot more about it than I do, so I was hoping you could tutor me for a bit.”
The druid had been tossing the idea around in his head since it first came to him during his long lunch break. The more he thought about it, the better it seemed. Rather than poring through over a thousand pages while trying to figure out what was and wasn’t relevant to his situation, it was far more efficient to seek the aid of someone already familiar with their contents. And who better to help him out than the enviously knowledgeable head librarian?
“Come now, Mr. Stigandr,” she gave him a coy look. “There’s no reason to beat around the bush.”
“… Excuse me?”
“If you want to ask me out on a date, then you can just come out and say it.”
“N-no. That’s, uh, that’s not… what I meant,” he was severely taken aback. “I actually, genuinely, would like your help with this.”
Eva’s presumptuous smirk slowly faded from her lips as she hid her face in her palms. Her earlier embarrassment was nothing compared to the shame enveloping her at that moment. It was so bad that her ears began to visibly redden.
“I’ll just… go back to my seat…” Ozzy said in a low whisper.
“Okay,” she answered in kind through her palms.
The druid grabbed the books and briskly returned to the table while shaking his head. In all honesty, an evening in Miss Applebee’s company sounded positively delightful. It wasn’t as if he had a special someone waiting for him back home, and the librarian was just his type to boot. However, that wasn’t at all why he was here, and he was planning on skipping town as soon as he had a clear destination in mind. Pursuing any sort of relationship was completely out of the question.
Thankfully Miss Applebee handled the rejection wonderfully. She approached the man several minutes later, offering both an apology and her help with his search for knowledge. The woman seemed mature enough not to dwell on things, so Ozzy followed her example and accepted both. The head librarian quickly proved to be a rather poor teacher, however. One of the issues was that the duties that came with her position pulled her away constantly. Even if she was only gone for a few minutes at a time, the frequent interruptions were quite disruptive. That aside, her biggest flaw as an educator was her propensity to go off on tangents that she personally found intriguing but were ultimately irrelevant to the druid’s questions. He quickly discovered that this bad habit of hers had caused her to recommend history books that were only tangentially relevant to his needs.
For instance, The Miracle of Capitalism spent two hundred and twenty pages explaining that goblins were inherently greedy creatures with an unhealthy obsession of shiny things. A Hard Look at Human Oppression was a greenskin’s three-hundred-page take on ‘your ancestors were dicks to my ancestors.’ Goblins, and What to Expect was a study on their culture and behavior with an emphasis on their strong sense of community and innate predisposition for teamwork. None of that had anything to do with Ozzy’s quest to reunite with his friends. Furthermore, he already knew most of this stuff from Einhar. The only thing that reading all that accomplished was to confirm that the goblins in this world, though significantly more civilized, cultured, and amicable, shared many similarities with the ones he had grown up with.
The point was that the librarian’s recommendations had completely missed the mark, though Ozzy’s inability to accurately express what he wanted was partly to blame. He realized too little too late that he had made it sound like he mainly cared about avoiding racial tensions with greenskins. What he actually wanted were crash courses on world geography, recent history, international relations, and foreign cultures. Once that was made abundantly clear, the librarian was able to guide him far more effectively. She also didn’t question why he was so ignorant of what she considered to be common knowledge. This was partially because she didn’t want to make a fool of herself by assuming things again, but also because it didn’t matter why his education was lacking. The important thing was that the man was making a genuine effort to better himself without trying to cover up for his faults. How could Eva call herself the head librarian if she couldn’t even guide a lost lamb on the path to enlightenment?
Okay, admittedly tutoring wasn’t actually part of her duties, but it wasn’t as if she had anything better to do with her afternoon.
“So you see,” she traced a finger across the atlas map between them, “there’s no direct land route to Weisslicht. You need to cross into Old Ostor via Definitely Not Ostor and then take a ship from Port Karen.”
“Hm, alright,” Ozzy jotted this down. “What about air travel? Can’t a flying ship take me straight there.”
“I think you can take one to Port Karen, but I wouldn’t recommend them for transcontinental travel.”
“Why not?”
“The air over the Emerald Ocean is rough and unpredictable, making it difficult to maintain an aerial course,” she explained. “Variable air pressure’s another issue. Then there’s the weather. A freak typhoon or lightning storm can damage the airships’ balloons and force them into the water.”
There were one or two words that Ozzy wasn’t familiar with, but he got the gist of it from the context.
“But, if that happens can’t they just ride the waves?”
He knew very little about those vehicles, but the shape of their hulls certainly made them seem seaworthy.
“Well…” Eva paused as she pondered that question. “I think they’d float, but definitely not sail. But even if they could, you might as well have taken a normal ship to begin with.”
“Right. Good point. What about flying above the clouds and avoiding the bad weather altogether?” he raised his hand over his head to illustrate his point.
“I suppose they could do that… if they wanted everyone aboard to suffocate from the lack of air,” she said with a bemused tone.
“Oh. I see.”
“Why is it you’re so fixated on Weisslicht, if I might ask?” Eva changed the subject. “From what I hear there’s nothing down there but ice, stone, and xenophobic dwarves.”
“Sorry, xenophobic?”
“They hate foreigners,” she clarified.
“Huh… Anyway, an old friend was headed there and I want to pay them a visit, see how they’re doing.”
That was technically the truth. Based on Ozzy’s estimate, the closest of his teammates must have landed somewhere far south of where he did, and the landmass known as Weisslicht - or ‘White Light’ in the dwarven tongue - seemed like the most likely candidate. The locals being wary of outsiders meant that whoever landed there would have left a trail no matter what. In many respects, Ozzy was lucky to have arrived in a civilization of people that, for the most, both looked like him and spoke his language. Whoever landed in Weisslicht would have a much harder time blending in, but he wasn’t worried. All of his teammates were far more resourceful and soft-spoken than he was, after all.
“Is it a… special friend?” Eva inquired suggestively.
“W-well, no. I mean, they are precious to me, but not in that way.”
“Hmmm,” she raised an eyebrow. “Good to know.”
There was an all too familiar ring from her desk, signifying that yet another visitor required her attention.
“Oh, drat. It was just getting good too,” she mumbled, then stood. “I’ll be right back, Mr. Stigandr.”
“Take your time, Miss.”
Ozzy smiled at her as she sauntered away, then turned his attention back to the atlas and stared intently at the world map. It was nothing like the ones he’d seen of Einhar, which was only to be expected. However, he hadn’t counted on the difference between them to be this staggering. Whereas the realm he hailed from was a single landmass with a few orbiting islands, this one had no less than four major continents, each of which was either similar or greater in size. In other words, this world was big. Like, really, really, really big. To make matters worse, the directions he saw the others fly off towards meant that it was entirely possible they all wound up on a different continent each. Or they could’ve been dropped in the ocean, perhaps even kept flying until they circumnavigated the globe. He had no way of knowing, and that was the biggest issue. Even if long distance travel was faster, safer, and more accessible than what Ozzy was used to, that was still a lot of ground, air, and sea for one man to cover.
A certain thought then dawned on him that made him reconsider his overarching plan of action.
Each member of his adventuring party was remarkably independent, so much so that they seemed to have no teamwork whatsoever from an outside perspective. That obviously wasn’t the case, but their different outlooks and abilities often caused them to bicker and argue about how to handle any given problem. Ozzy and JJ often preferred direct approaches over subterfuge, but the druid was a lot more willing to get his hands dirty than the idealistic paladin. Cassie favored systematic methods that led to long-term solutions, but she occasionally looked so far forward that she failed to see what was right in front of her. As for Happy, his ideas were so incredibly outlandish and ridiculous that they sometimes actually worked.
However, though their methods differed, the Chuckle-nut Quartet’s goals were always the same. Ozzy had no reason to believe this situation they found themselves in would change that. Knowing those guys, it was safe to assume that they would all, in their own way, strive to accomplish the same thing he was aiming for - to reunite and find a way home. The issue with that was that if they all set out to look for one another at the same time, they’d never meet. Not in a world this ridiculously huge. Ozzy thought back to his youth, when his parents taught him that the best thing to do in case he got lost in the mountain was to sit still, make a fire, and wait for one of them to find him. Well, the druid most assuredly was lost, and the closest thing he had to a parental figure in this world was Lady Cassandra Weathersax.
In other words, rather than running off on some globe-trotting adventure like the gung-ho simpleton that he was, it was perhaps much wiser for Ozzy to remain in Last Flag. He also reconsidered his stance on staying low. Avoiding trouble was important, of course, but making a name for himself would make it a lot easier for either Cassie or his other teammates to find him should they pass through this city. He had no idea how to go about doing that just yet, but it was a far more achievable goal than what he originally intended. This new approach also had one more benefit over the old one. It was a minor boon, but a welcome one nonetheless.
It seemed like he’d be able to spend more time with the lovely Eva Applebee after all.