unfinishedooc | TEST DRIVE MEME #2

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TEST DRIVE MEME #2

Welcome to the Library

Those who are new awake in the stacks.

You’re not sure when you fell asleep, and the memories of the last things you were doing are hazy at best. But now you’re here, and all you can see is books in every direction, the bookshelves teetering high enough above you to reach to the sky.

A helpful sign points you in the direction of the main circulation desk, and even if you try to ignore it and go in any other direction, the desk is where you will find yourself. A figure sits behind the desk, not even looking up as they sort through books and other media; they look, to your character, to be the exact picture of what they expect a Librarian to be.

Trying to ask the Librarian a question will get them shushed, but they’ll point down a hallway to the side, leading to a kitchenette and what appears to be a dorm room, where they’ll find they’re not alone in this strange place. But once they’ve looked away, when they look back, the Librarian is gone.

The Lobby

Those who are already familiar with the Library will see the Lobby change for the second time. It’s not paper plate UFOs and metal walls this time. Instead there are cheerful garlands strung about, and a stack of books shaped into a Christmas tree taking pride of place. The Help Desk is closed, the ‘Back in 5’ sign once again a bald-faced lie, but there is a menorah sat behind in the window, conveniently just out of reach of anyone who tries to get it. The candles are lit in a… somewhat sporadic fashion, the correct order but with no rhyme or reason to what ‘night’ is being represented. Either time is strange here, whoever’s in charge of it doesn’t know what day it is either, or they simply don’t care. Or some mix of the three.

Those two particular winter holidays are not the only ones represented either; characters will find a smattering of decorations or festive accessories from a great number of holidays, from their own worlds and beyond. There is what looks like a cabinet with instructions to pick your fortune from one of the many drawers. For some reason, there are a number of what looks like a child’s toy ponies placed on and around the cabinet. There are also some posters declaring in bold, decidedly upsetting typeset: “THE GOD-EMPEROR WISHES YOU A FESTIVE SANGUINALIA!” complete with a picture of a certain Library resident in all his feathered, shining glory. (The poster is not remotely shiny, but there are helpful accent lines to show that he should be shining.) And, for some reason, there is also a giant straw goat in the garden now, surrounded by festive strings of lights. Please do not set it on fire.

The Kitchens

It seems the decorations are not the only thing in the holiday spirit. The kitchens, usually bereft of anything but the most basic foodstuffs, are now full to the brim with a variety of holiday foods. There is always a tureen with hot mulled wine and a try of sweet pastries near by it, there’s ham and latkes in the fridge to be heated up, jelly doughnuts, moon cakes, pies, and an assortment of other delicious things. If your character would expect to find a certain thing within the stash, they do, regardless of how niche it may be. Christmas chili? Of course there’s christmas chili!

Oh, and that mulled wine isn’t the only alcohol around either- champagne, sake, hard cider… again, anything anyone might expect to find. Just try not to overdo it too much, alright? Everyone still has to sleep in the same room, and the Assistants aren’t going to show up to hold your hair back.

Crafts and More

What good are holidays without crafts? The Maker’s Space has been specially supplied with anything you might need to make your festive crafts- this includes everything you’d need for a gingerbread construction! (You’d think this would be in the kitchen, but don’t kid yourself- those things are not for eating.) There’s strips of colorful paper rings and instructions on how to make your own, little things of clay and paint and directions on how to craft your own dreidel, ’stained glass’ paper lanterns, and more. Oh, and glitter. Obviously there is a lot of glitter available.

There are also snow globe kits, mostly generic winter themes- trees, presents, and the like. Strangely enough, however, when they’re complete and shaken, they’ll show a memory from the person who shook it- a memory of a holiday, or snow, or generally something that invokes the feeling of the season- light, and hope, and togetherness. It’s fragmented, almost stop-motion in between the falling bits of ‘snow,’ but once it has settled the normal, basic scene inside returns.

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Banging in the vents is indeed, very strange, and obviously must be very large rats. He keeps tabs on the sound but doesn't stop his patient dissection of the fruitcake to get at the bits that he actually wants up until a human falls out of the vent and onto the table rather noisily, vent dust and vent cover scattering.

He considers this for a long, silent, unmoving moment. Considers the young woman. His now contaminated meal. And resumes picking it apart. He's eaten far worse things than a bit of vent dust. "The little bits inside are interesting, but the medium they're suspended in is revolting."

... So what's going tohappen to the parts he dislikes? "What were you doing in there?"

She rolls over onto her side, propping her head on an elbow, just draw her like one of those French girls or whatever. "The cake? That's the best part. That's where the booze is!" Don't mind her, she'll help herself to the cake pile. Hand hygiene? What even is that?

Besides, stuffing her face with cake was a stalling tactic for the obvious question. Which he did ask. "Hiding." Listen, might as well admit the truth since he's giving her booze cake and all. When you're pint sized and bright lights hurt your eyes, the vents sure seem like safety. "There's some fucked up stuff going on here." Nyla Vereca, Lady Captain Obvious.

"It sticks to the mouth." He does not like! And .. has no problem at all with someone else eating the bits he's not. Waste not, want not, or ... something like that, he's going to keep picking out the fruit and nuts with hands he probably should have washed first and never bothered.

If she's not bothered by vent dust she's probably not going to care about that either. It doesn't occur to him that it should be otherwise.

Or, frankly, that she's not bothered by him either. "There certainly is. But you can't hide from it, so resigning yourself to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune is perhaps the better route. Welcome to the library, I expect the food will return to corpse starch and amino porridge soon enough."

"You could just get, ya know, fruit salad. All fruit, no cake. Or a smoothie." She's just saying, there are less work-intensive Options.

So they're both part of the Questionable Hand Hygiene club! She'd offer a handshake but...probably a bad idea because he is VERY much bigger than her and could probably crush her head like a grape.

"True facts. I was doing pretty well hiding, and then the vent betrayed me." Why couldn't she fall into like a luxury five star hotel room? A hot tub filled with cute people? Nope, on the table like she's a goddam entree in front of a guy who looks like he'd probably use her femur like a toothpick.

PLZ don't, tho.

"Nothing personal but corpse starch sounds grosser than cake." Maybe they just had shitty branding where he was from. Who knows? All she knows is if he's talking to her he's not looking at her as a light snack.

"I have seen neither." Besides, there's something more entertaining in dissecting his meal than just finding something intact. "But it isn't as if the rest is going to waste."

.. Not now that she's taking care of that part, anyway. That the furniture and kitchenette itself has resized a little to accomidate her presence, now no longer suited to himself or a normal human's size, is noted. But there's still plenty of room on the table, it hasn't shrunk that much. "Vents have a terrible habit of betraying those within, if not from tearing from shoddy work, the constant pop of flexing ductwork."

Curze knew she was around for a while.

And no move has been made to eat her as yet! Maybe he doesn't need a toothpick. Maybe things just don't get stuck in those teeth, any more than they do shark teeth. "It doesn't have much of a taste at all." It isn't even identifiable as an individual to his own senses, too mixed up and rendered down and blended with other things. "But, nutrition is nutrition. Enjoy the variety while you can."

"We can work on that." There's a freakin' orchard, buddy, you can get fruit on the vine! Stem! Whatever! Listen Daime was the hydroponics expert, not her. But she knew enough!

Hey, if she dies from this encounter it will be with a stomach full of cake, so, it's not nothing. But that was a serious consideration from someone who had obviously spent more than enough time on ships. "Most people go deaf to it at some point, or assume it's the heat kicking on or just some other random ship noise." Or ghosts. Rauth was always claiming everything was ghosts.

Nyla's theory is that as long as she's sufficiently entertaining, she won't be eaten. Besides, fruit or dust covered vent crawler? The choice should be clear to any palate. "Always. Good times never last." WELP this conversation could slide right off a cliff into Shit She Doesn't Wanna Deal With, so, topic change time!

"Is this the weirdest place you've ever been?" Because it sorta is to her but also...she's seen some weird shit.

He is not taking up gardening, unless it's to grow a plant in the corpse of someone he defeated just to give the plant to one of their relatives. As he's the only person currently in the library WITH relatives present... botany will have to wait. "Or I can continue what I'm doing." He gestures a bit with a fragment of walnut, as if this makes his point.

Maybe it does. He's already getting what he wants out of it. Even if things go back to nutrient paste later, he'll still have this! It's enough. "Most people wouldn't make it long in my fleet," he muses, "If that's true. It's a good thing this is decidedly not." Crunch. "But rest easy, the assistants here are certain to maintain what you need to survive."

Dust covered fruit or dust covered vent crawler is the choice! And he's eaten plenty of people, doesn't much care for the side effects. There are no side effects from a fig.

"...Define 'weird'."

FINE then, she will go on a mission. Prepare for a fruit bouquet or something. Because that's a better edible arrangement, in her mind, than a tiny space captain. "I didn't say you should stop. Just that there's other things you could try, too." Because first: more cake dissection = more cake for her, but also, hahahaha all she has is a tiny plasma cutter and in terms of weaponry, she has a feeling he'd be in the range of 'that tickles but also irks me' if she tried to use it.

She's in no rush to die, kthx.

"Some noises the ship wants you to ignore. It's like burping." Have some manners! But this guy sounds serious which means he's one of those 100% intensity 100% of the time types. To wit: the intensity with which he is tackling that fruitcake. "You'd be surprised how long you can make it if you're small enough to be ignored." Which was her usual strategy.

She's used to surviving on her own, honestly, so the assistants can probably stuff it. But she's not gonna say that out loud in case this place likes to make her eat her words as well as slightly dusty cake.

"I don't know, how do you define weird?" She suspects they are very different.

It's probably fine. He's not inclined to kill anyone who isn't blatantly breaking the law, and so far she's ... not. Not doing anything at all, really, besides working on making things he intended to discard disappear. Maybe she actually liked the alcohol taste, he didn't know. For a moment there's a sharp-toothed smile, something apparently amusing him in what she's said but he doesn't remark on it, instead patiently working a dried bit of pineapple from its spongy, booze-soaked prison with one ragged nail.

"It's been a long time since I was small enough to be ignored, I'll have to take your word for it." A very long time, primarchs grew fast. Maybe..by four or five, he couldn't hide very well anymore? Not that he'd needed to, by then.

Finally retrieving his prize, he points the piece of pineapple at her. "Come now, you ventured the question, you must clarify its meaning. Strangeness is a spectrum."

Well, she's probably breaking about a million rules in food handling safety, but then again, so is he, so that's just a wash. She's sat up, crossing her legs in front of her because it gives her an extra foot of height this way and this way she's almost--almost!!--level with his shoulder.

Nyla doesn't like the taste of alcohol--she'd worry about anyone who did--but she's very much in the 'see something, say nothing, and drink to forget' camp, and she's seen a lot, so let her have her boozy cake.

"I kinda doubt a brick wall like you was ever small enough to hide some places I've been." Nothing personal but what the hell did you EAT, big boy ~~she probably doesn't want to know the answer.~~.

"See, by my account, you're kind of on the weird spectrum. Big, kind of murdery looking," It's the teeth, okay? WHO DOES THAT. "And eating a fruitcake like it's the best thing you've ever tasted." Did trip the 'weird' scale, gotta admit.

"But I think I meant more like 'something that rattled your belief that you kinda understood how the world worked'. Somewhere in that." Small talk? That's how it's done in the Expanse.

"I was an infant once." He didn't pop out of his gestation pod this big!

And he ate literally anything he could catch and kill, for a while. Maybe it's for the best no-one ever extended a kind hand to him, he'd have eaten them out of house and home in short order. The truth of why with few exceptions only the wealthy seemed to pick up a primarch foundling, perhaps.. "Only 'kind of' murdery looking," is the murmur as she explains he is the weirdness scale, sounding a touch disappointed.

Honestly. This is what he gets for interacting with mortals, they're learning to not be terrified of him. Familiarity breeds contempt!

But the actual explanation, of things that shook his sense of the order of the universe, draws a long moment of still, silent contemplation. "No." The conclusion is inevitable, a soft negative that's half exhale and half word. "All I have encountered has matched expectations with very little variation. Even what might seem strange on the surface, with a little study, reveals itself to be aligned with known quantities."

The key there is 'encountered'. He's heard of some things that were disturbing to consider the implications of, such as daemons, but he'd never actually experienced one.

"Once." Was that supposed to be reassuring? Because it kinda wasn't. "Like a normal sized baby or a big terrifying baby with claws and shark teeth?" Just trying to create the mental picture here.

HEY she heard that. "What? You want to be MORE murdery looking?" She tilts her head back, studying him like she's a makeup artist. Check: haunted dark eyes, which like...how do you see out of those? Check: murderteeth. Check: greasy hair and a sort of bathing-optional approach to hygiene. Check: claws. "Honestly? 10/10, no notes. Absolute Murder Unit."

If he could hear her heartbeat it might be a little fast, sort of like hummingbird on crack fast, because despite the words, she's very aware he's an Absolute Murder Unit who could have killed her for fucking up his snack with precisely zero effort and about as much remorse, but he hadn't. YET.

"Maybe your expectations are too high. Or low. I don't know." But she's not questioning his answer. "You know what I'm NOT gonna ask you in this conversation? If you've ever killed someone." Because...probably obvious. "Instead, you're gonna guess why I won't ask it." It's like a game! About murder talk!

"Most things are infants only once," is the genial response. "The teeth are cosmetic." He prods them briefly with his tongue, thoughtful. They're sharp enough to cut himself on easily, but they weren't that way naturally. "A local custom. It took a fair amount of effort to get them this way."

A custom he shouldn't have indulged in, perhaps; dabbling in gang traditions only encouraged them, after all. Absently he sucks on his now-cut tongue; it won't take long at all to heal.

While it's absolutely certain he can hear her heartbeat, he's also saying absolutely nothing about it. Any terror induced is purely incidental and not actually the goal. She seemed harmless. Brave enough to still be sitting there in spite of any fear she might have. He could respect that. "Ah, so not much more murdery looking possible, then? A new goal has been set."

He'll put on his armor later. Maybe. The power level on it was rather low, so keeping it on standby seemed better.

"..I suspect my expectations are too low. I set the bar on the floor and yet things always manage to match them." He gestures at an invisible, nonexistent floor-bar by way of evidence before working on digging out another piece of fruit. This one he doesn't recognize, and it takes a bit of excavating from its cake prison to free. "Hm. What you do not know you cannot ever give away. If you don't ask, none can demand the answer of you later."

"Well, the teeth sure are a...statement." She'll go with that. She's going to guess that he doesn't do a lot of kissing. "But I guess once you start something like that, you have to continue. You know. Committed to the course. Don't back down! Never surrender!" Okay she's babbling but he just cut HIMSELF with his teeth like it was nothing and there's a good bit of brandy in this cake.

Besides, someone with half-filed teeth? DORK.

"So what have your expectations been for this place? Because I gotta say if you expected someone to fall onto your snack today, I think maybe you're more psychic than nihilistically accurate." Is 'nihilistically' a real word? Who cares.

Not only did he cut himself, it's already mostly mended! Sometimes he had no regrets at all over being what he is. "Indeed. You could potentially only file the top but then the look is incomplete. I shouldn't have indulged, I know. But it does make a statement."

Back to destroying the cake with metholodical purpose. There's raisins in here, he knows it. They're just small enough to blend in. "Are the two mutually exclusive?" He is nihilistically accurate AND psychic! "I have few expectations here either. Sooner or later I will be returned to my proper place and until then, little good comes of it." Or when he returns, for that matter. "...Excepting present circumstances, worse things have fallen on my meals. What are you called, and where do you come from?"

Yeah, okay, cutting yourself on your own teeth is freaky, but insta healing? Freaky squared. Good thing he's a fruitarian, right?

RIGHT?!

"Hey, sometimes you wanna disambiguate yourself from the normies. I get it." If it's voluntary, so much the better.

"I guess not, and now that I think about it, our resid--my old spooky guy was kinda both, too." Minus the filed teeth and general murderhobo vibes. Former spooky guy. No longer affiliated. "Maybe the future just sucks."

Well, her immediate future certainly had. Did. Whatever. Before coming here. "Point of order: I fell NEXT to your meal, not on it." Because falling on a plate, and smushing the cake? Probably would have ended with a lot more screaming, mostly hers.

"Nyla Vereca, Captain of the Not Scrap." Clearly a ship with dignity and grace that isn't at all held together by duct tape and Rauth's prayer papers. "I think I got sucked into some anomaly crossing into the Expanse." Because...no ship, no crewmates, eve the new guys the Militia had forced on her. She didn't really miss those guys too much with their weird bald heads and mandatory stick up ass posture and attitude. "How about you? OR should I just call you Murderteeth? Sir Murderteeth?" The Honorable Most Excellent Murderteeth, Esquire?

Comfortably considering omnivory counts as being semi-fructivorous. Probably. He'd never put much thought into eating fruits, they weren't much available on Nostramo and his interest in imported delicacies was utterly nil. "I don't think I'd blend in much with 'normies' whether I tried or not."

'Old spooky guy' must have been, by context, a shipboard psyker. Their navigator? Astropath? "Unfortunately the future does indeed, 'suck'. Fire and darkness and death." He waves a raisin as if it is in fact proof of this. "So enjoy cake while you can, it'll be rationed going forward for the next six centuries." He sounds absolutely certain of that, but it's possible it's also a joke. Probably. "But fair enough, you did not land on it." Who would know something like that?

About cake specifically, too. He doesn't look to be the sort that monitors interplanetary cake economics.

"Well. Captain Vereca of the Not Scrap, regretfully I must inform you this seems to have nothing to do with the Immaterium and everything to do with an alien Librarius with dubious ideas of what an archive needs to run." None of them seemed like they fit the bill. "I am Night Haunter." That's an actual name, the only one he's interested in answering to. "Anyone who says otherwise is to be ignored. I do not generally kill with my teeth so 'Murderteeth' is rather less accurate, but will do in a pinch."

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TEST DRIVE MEME #2

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