Lost In Words: Chapter 1

I was lost. Not just "oh-no-was-the-exit-left-or-right" lost, either. Properly, seriously, starve-to-death lost. To be fair, I was unlikely to starve. Even if I did, I felt that death in a library would be a good way to go.

I'd read most of these books before. Most of the books I hadn't read were in that exclusive group of languages I didn't know. I traced the lettering on their spines, as if that would help me to understand the words. (Also some of the covers were fuzzy.)
I decided it was about time to attempt to leave the library. As fond as I was of the place, outside had food. When I have money, I buy books. If I have any left over, I buy food and clothing. I'd bought my fair share of books that week, and I really wanted tea and some cake. Holding that thought in my mind, I turned and set off on my quest.
I hit my head on something hard and, immediately after, I heard a loud thud and the flutter of pages. I saw that I had knocked a heavy, rather beautiful book out of the hands of a not-so-heavy, rather beautiful woman.
“Oh frak, sorry ma’am," I said, and immediately regretted it. Real smooth, Casanova. Have your second word be a Battlestar reference. Then call her ma'am, making her sound like an old lady. Well done, buddy. Well done. Despite, or perhaps because of, my awful word choices, I stooped down to help her, and, between the two of us, we managed to get the book back into her arms.
“Nonsense. It was my fault." (No, it wasn't.) "But are you ok? These are powerful poems, and from what I can tell, this wouldn’t be the first time they affected someone’s head. Well, it would be without them even being spoken.” Oh god, funny as well. I'll go away forever now.
“Yeah, I’m fine. I do, however, seem to have quite possibly misplaced the door. I don’t suppose you could…”
“Show you the way out?” she asked. I grinned like the Cheshire Cat on drugs and nodded, embarrassed. She shrugged.
“I’d be lying if I said I’d never been lost in here. I think most people would be. You, however, did not seem worried in the slightest. Are you certain you want me to?”
“I think so… what’s the time?”
She answered me by way of pulling an antique pocket watch out and holding it in front of my face. I noted the time and realised that the Spine was due to have been opened two-and-a-bit hours ago. My face must have fallen, because she spoke up.
“I take that as you are late?”
“Very.”
“Ah. Well, follow me then,"
She turned and gestured for me to follow. I did so. Anyone who knows their way around China's library is on roughly the same level as God in my eyes.
An unspoken question hung in the air. That question was: "How did you let yourself get so lost when you obviously had an appointment?" I decided to answer said question.
“It’s a library. I’m surrounded by books. How could anyone ever really be worried?” There is no easier place to lose track of time than in a library.
“Well, not everyone is like me. Us. You." Oh god, she was running her words together... How adorkable. "What I mean is, not everyone loves books, perplexingly enough.” Sadly, I knew what she said was true.
“You certainly look like you do," I said. Her hands were stroking her book's purple cover. She smiled at me.
“More along the lines of what they hold…” So, she was a fan of words instead of books. A woman after my own heart. We continued talking until we reached the door. I walked forward a smidge to open the door for her.
“Oh, merda," she said as she was almost out. She seemed upset by something, and she almost dropped her book.
“What?" I was half questioning what the word was, and half questioning what was wrong.
“Merda. It’s a dirty word in Italian.” That was one question answered, and one more word to add to my list of foreign swearwords.
“Good to know. But why?”
“Sorrows will end me if I leave with this and don’t tell her." I knew she was right. China is a lot of things, but forthcoming is not one of them.
I assumed this was a cue to part ways, and I stuck out my hand. “Niall Montblanc, at your service." Much to my surprise, she took it, and, even more surprisingly, she smiled.
“Venice Rain, at yours."
We shook hands, and I left first. I would have preferred to walk with her more, but that might have come off as clingy or odd or something. As I descended the stairs, I felt myself hoping to see her again. I also caught myself beaming. I couldn't remember the last time someone had made me smile so.

Chapters 10 AND 11

AN: Realised these were quite short, so stuck them together for you guys.


With nowhere else to run, and no hope of fighting it off, we ran through the door into the lab. The doorway was, thankfully, too small for the Thing to fit through, but it was straining against the wall, and I reckoned we had maybe a few minutes before the wall collapsed. Ven looked at me. "Anything useful in the manpurse?" "Nothing more exciting than pepper spray and a knife in there, but I did have the foresight to bring my gun. You're welcome." Taking said firearm out of a pocket in my jacket, I loaded a bullet, aimed it at the Thing's head, and fired. The bullet passed clear through the head of it, but the Thing didn't so much as flinch. I swore again, but it was a long, whiny, drawn-out swear. We busied ourselves with trying to find alternative methods of incapacitating the beast. Searching different sides of the lab, we scrabbled for something- anything- that would at least slow it down. It was Venice that found the thing we needed. "I can haz highly explosive chemicals!" she yelled. Don't ask me how she did it, but you could hear the misspelt word in her voice. She handed me the bottle, which did, indeed, have the safety symbols for "Highly Flammable" and "Explosive" on the bottle. "Anything vaguely fuse-worthy?" she asked. "I still have some rope, I think." Scrabbling in my satchel, I found some, and cut a section off, before handing it to Venice. She unstoppered the bottle and shoved the rope into the neck. "Matches?" "Better," I said, pulling out a lighter from my bag of holding. Ven lit the rope, and rolled the bottle towards the door, before we both retreated as far back into the room as possible. After a few rather anticlimactic seconds, the bottle of fluid exploded. The explosion was loud enough to make our ears pop, and we were confident the Thing was down and out. We were sadly mistaken. SP Fic: Chapter Eleven  The Thing was down, but it was most definitely not out yet. The blast had torn its legs completely from its body, but the thing was not quite dead. Lying flat on its stomach, it tried to drag itself towards us. I felt sorry for it, frankly. Looking at its face, I saw that its eyes were still very human indeed, and they were filled with sadness. As it tried feebly to force itself through the doorway, torso dripping blood, I clutched Ven into a hug. It was more for my benefit than hers, if I'm being honest. After a short while, the Thing slumped onto the floor and stopped moving. The eyes were now dead, and I clutched Venice tighter, partly in relief, partly in grief. I supposed I should have felt triumphant, but I didn't. Not at all. Venice wriggled out of the hug and looked at the recently deceased Thing. "Well, that's one less problem." She didn't sound particularly happy, either. As if to add insult to injury, the only way out of the lab was over the Thing's corpse. As we passed, Venice bent down to his head and closed his eyes. It was only fair. We clambered over him, and came out in the hallway. After a short time pondering, we found that there was simply no way back up through the hole. "Where to now?" I asked. "Only one place TO go," Venice said, pointing down into the dark corridor. "Yay," I said, deadpan.

Ink

This is a writing exercise. I tried to adopt a different voice than my usual sarcastic, slightly irreverent, Buffy-speaking, hyphen-filled tone. I was feeling content, so here is a moderately romantic short-story-type-thing that I hope you will all find to be nice. Just nice.
I intended to sit down and bust out a few paragraphs, but instead found myself absorbed in a world of my own making, and stayed up late transcribing this from the stray thoughts in my brain. As such, it's a little long. I apologise.
Also, it probably says something about me that this is my idea of a great relationship.



"We are part human, part stories."

Lucas pushed open the door of the library that time forgot, and paused to take in the scent. The musty aroma of old books and cardboard rushed to meet him like an old friend, and he was happy. As far as he knew, he was the only one who used the school's bookstore. It was a small room in which the school librarian stored the books nobody wanted to read.
That was, nobody but Lucas.
The room was Lucas' favourite place in the world. It was a room of books, nothing more, nothing less. He could stay there for hours just browsing, never opening a book, perfectly content simply to look and to feel and to smell.
It was his own personal space, the place in which he felt most comfortable. Tucked away in a forgotten corner of the school, he shouldn't really have been there at all. It was, technically, out of bounds for students. He certainly shouldn't have been skipping ninth-period Biology to go there.
The small section of school used for storage was truly forgotten, however, and there was little risk of being caught by a teacher. Even the cleaners left the place alone, for the most part. Besides the room he spent the most time in, there were several other rooms used exclusively for storage. One was for furniture, and it was from there he had taken the armchair which now sat in the center of the book-room. He supposed it had once belonged to a teacher, but he didn't care.
It was the best kind of armchair, the one that was old and broken and supremely comfortable. One of the legs was missing, but Lucas had remedied the situation by propping it up with a book of poetry. The cushions were busted and ripped, and they slid around quite a bit, so you frequently had to correct them.
Lucas loved that chair. Evidently, so did the girl that was curled up in its embrace, reading the aforementioned book of poetry. The armchair tilted to one side, and the cushions were dangerously close to falling off of the chair altogether. The girl seemed to neither notice nor mind this fact. She was curled up in the foetal position, her mouth silently forming the shapes of the words she absorbed from the paper and ink she held in her hands.
Lucas was surprised. He had thought he was the only person who knew about the room. Certainly, he had never seen another soul in there. The girl was wearing the uniform of the school, but Lucas didn't believe he had seen her around before. She was pale, with wispy, reddish-blonde hair and eyeglasses that were perched on the tip of her nose. She didn't seem to have registered Lucas' presence.
"Excuse me?" he asked quietly. The girl did not move, save for turning a single page. Lucas loved that sound; the rough noise as the pages caressed one another fleetingly. He repeated his statement, slightly louder this time. "Excuse me?"
The girl looked up in surprise and sat up slightly in the armchair. Her glasses still on the tip of her nose, she pushed them up in order to see who had disturbed her so. "Hello," she ventured.
"Hello," replied Lucas. Now that the conversation was initiated, he knew not what to say. There was silence for a while, and then the girl returned to the sanctuary of her poetry collection. She was not rude about it, and Lucas was not offended in any way. Still surprised by the very presence of another person, he went up to one of the shelves and removed the book he was currently halfway through. Settling down on a cardboard box filled to the brim with old science textbooks, he began to read.
The pair sat in silence, each enveloped in a world of words, until the end of school bell went. Lucas tore himself away from the allure of the pages he held in his hands, and made for the door. Remembering his manners, he turned to the girl.
"Goodbye," he said.
The girl, again, remained motionless, and made no indication that she had any intention of moving. Gently closing the door, Lucas sighed to himself.

* * *

Lucas went through the next day of school as best he could, attempting to pay attention in class, and trying to appear studious. No matter how interested he seemed, however, his mind was on other things. He still didn't know who the girl was. He had been keeping a close eye on every crowd he saw, scanning the corridors for a glimpse of that fiery hair, or a telltale glint of sunlight on spectacle lense. However, he saw neither thing.
After lunch, he could no longer stop himself from checking the room. Surely if she was not in the throng of students, she would be in there?
When Lucas reached the door he had seen so many times before, he did something he had never done before: he knocked. He did not expect a reply from the silent maiden of the room, but he felt a knock was fair warning. As he had expected, no reply came, so he entered.
Inside, he did not find the girl; instead discovering something altogether more surprising. Beside the chair he had moved from the other room was a different, equally decrepit leather armchair.
Despite himself, Lucas smiled.

* * *

A few weeks on, and Lucas and the girl had become firm friends. They had exchanged a grand total of twenty-seven words, and neither knew the other's name, but if you spend time with someone, even silent time, you pick up on their nuances and grow to know them well. Lucas had taken to skipping entire days of class in order to sit in the room.
Finishing a novel and setting it to one side, he reached for the next book. His hand was around it when the girl spoke.
"I don't think you want to read that one," she said. It was probably the longest sentence that had been spoken in the room.
"Why not?" Lucas questioned, surprised the girl had spoken unprompted.
"It's simply not very good." Lucas thought he picked up a trace of a vaguely upper-class accent that had previously gone unnoticed. "It's a bog-standard romance. The writer has an unremarkable style. The plot is clicheéd, the characters are flimsy and one-dimensional, and the sex scenes are badly written."
Lucas smiled. "I didn't even know it was a romance," he said truthfully, setting the novel back where he found it and picking up a different one. "I was just reading it for the sake of reading."
The girl smiled also. "That's the same reason I read it. How was that?" she asked, pointing at the novel he had just finished. "I was considering reading it next."
"I liked it," Lucas admitted. "I wasn't crazy about the ending, though. How's yours?"
"Decidedly mediocre."
They smiled at one another before blushing, and both resumed reading. They had realised simultaneously that they were having a proper conversation, and the thought had scared them just a little.

* * *

More weeks passed, and the conversations got progressively longer. They were always similar, but never boring. They were always about books, always. The pair had become remarkably close, and yet still didn't know eachother's names. The subject had never come up.
Mid-term break came, and Lucas found himself missing the girl and her silent company. He was grateful when the break was over, as it had felt more like a punishment than a holiday.
Upon returning to school, the first thing he did was head for the room. He reached it, but was distraught when he saw who was outside it. The girl was standing in front of the open door, tears welling up in her eyes but not falling. Lucas rushed over to see what the matter was, and was shocked to see that all of the books had been removed. The room was nothing more than an empty shell.
"I checked the other rooms," said the girl. "They weren't there. They're gone. All the books are gone. They cleared the rooms."
Lucas found his hand reaching for the girl's, and their fingers intertwined. He wasn't even sure he meant to do it; it just felt natural.
After a long period of silent hand-holding, he spoke.
"I'm Lucas," he said gently.
"Anya," said the girl, equally quiet.
"Look at me," said Lucas and the girl- Anya- looked at him. He wiped the tears from her eyes with his free hand, and smiled at her. "There's always the library, right? As long as there are books, we'll be fine. As long as there's ink on a page and words in our hearts, we'll be fine." And with that, Lucas pulled Anya into a hug, the first of many.



Author's Note: Feedback on my unedited melodrama would be much appreciated, thank you. How did you find the more sincere tone? Was it a bog-standard romance? Is my style unremarkable? Was the plot clicheéd, were the characters flimsy or were the non-existent sex scenes badly written?
Comment away, true believers.
(I, personally, dislike the second-last line. But, hey, I'm keeping it intact. It wouldn't be a writing exercise if you edited, would it?)

Magic and Modernity: Chapter Nine.

"What the hell, Errant?" I yelled. "What are you even doing here?"
"You know this thing?" hissed Venice at me.
Errant looked grave. "This is unfortunate, man, it really is. I met you before you found the lab, and I genuinely liked you. Shame I have to kill you now."
I tried very hard not to whine. "What are you doing in there?"
"Dude, this isn't a cartoon. I'm not going to give a final monologue to you just because I'm sure of my victory. I AM sure of my victory, by the way. No, you and your pretty little girlfriend are just going to be ripped apart by a very hungry... Thing. I don't really know what else you'd call it. I'm really sorry about this, man. The Stephen King book was great, and I'll miss that store..." He hesitated. "Bye!" he added chirpily, before turning on his heel and walking away from us.
"You have a terrible taste in friends," Venice said after a while.
"We have almost identical groups of friends."
"Shut up. What do you think he meant by "ripped apart by a Thing"?"
"I should have thought it was fairly self-explanatory. We may be ripped apart by a thing. Let's look for a way out of here before said "Thing" comes."
It was at that point a loud noise, like a bull's snort, came from the dark corridor opposite the lab.
Venice sighed. "You couldn't have kept your mouth shut, could you?"
The "Thing" lumbered out into what little light there was, and we saw that "Thing" was really the only word to describe it. With grey skin, and tiny hands, it was vaguely human-shaped, but the proportions were all wrong. It looked like a bull had had sex with a wrestler, and someone had pumped the resulting child full of steroids. Like the rat we had seen, its shoulders were remarkably broad, and its head was remarkably small. It was also much taller than any normal human, standing at a conservative estimate of nine feet, its head scraping the top of the hallway. It wasn't wearing any clothes, so we could see that it was male (Ahem.), but I couldn't assign it a gender. It would always be an "It." What semblance of humanity the man had had had been taken away from him by the experiments that had been  conducted on him in the lab.
It roared at us and charged, head down like a bull, towards us.
Venice and I swore simultaneously.

Magic and Modernity: Chapter 7

By popular demand, more fic:

The answer was very quick indeed. Barely five minutes after I called, Venice pulled up in her car. I hopped into the passenger's seat, and set my satchel into the foot-compartment-type-thing.
"What's the plan?" she asked me.
"Drive. Show up. Go down the hole. Hope we don't die."
"I like that plan. My favourite part is the bit where we don't die. Who do you want to pick up?"
"Chuck Norris."
"Besides him."
"Mr T."
"Be serious."
"Cthulu."
Venice sighed. "I said "be serious.""
"I am being serious. If we had Cthulu on our side, we wouldn't have to worry about anything. Regardless, let's stick with picking up Octa."
We drove off. Octa wasn't home. We kept driving. We tried to pick up other people, but with no luck. After a while, we just decided to drive on without backup.
As we pulled up to the house, Venice spoke.
"You know, I think this was just a cunning plan to get me alone in an old house at night. This is the part where you try to get me drunk."
"Gorshdangit, my clever ruse has been rumbled," I said jokingly. "We don't know what's going on down here, so we need to be careful. Serious sauce."
"Aye-aye, captain." Venice made off towards the door immediately, and I had to do that stupid little fast-walk to catch up.
We reached the door, and the entire hallway was in deep shadow. We approached the hole in the floor, and I tied some more rope around a pillar, as I had done the first time we arrived.
"Ladies first."
"Gee, thanks."
When Ven had reached the bottom, I slid down the rope in the most badass way I could manage, unable to resist showing off. Badassery, however, has its price, and I suffered some pretty bad friction burns for my trouble. I think I managed to hide the pain pretty well, burying my hands deep onto my pockets.
I was feeling relatively pleased with myself, until I heard a thud behind me. I looked up to see what had happened, and noticed Errant standing at the top of the hole, still holding the gardening shears he had used to cut the rope.

Chapter... 7? I dunno.

For Kal and Ven.


Horatio Backup Timothy Carlton Siger Wulfric Sherlock Garrus Stephen Benedict Kirby  JurassicParkTwo Montblanc (the Third) is a very content mouse with a very long name. I'm not sure if all mice are like this, but he's very chill. After rescuing him from That Strange Lab, I noticed that the fear he had shown down there had all but evaporated, and all he seemed to want to do was sleep and eat (Much like myself). The one and only strange thing I had noticed about him was the fact would not stay in his cage. Actually, no. The strange part was the fact he would stare at the bars, which would then part of their own accord. Funnily enough, once he was out, he would just lie down and sleep, which he probably could have done IN the damn cage.
He was the only animal we found there that was both safe to keep and not dead. We still had no idea what was going on in the house. I only really knew two things for certain. One: Something was going on in that old house. Two: I had gained a psychokinetic pet mouse with a really long name who liked to eat Doritos.
My lack of knowledge was the main reason we decided to go back. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it was a smarter cat when it died.
I called Venice to organise another "expotition" (Author's Note: Yes, that is a Winnie the Pooh reference. Deal with it, bitches.) to the house. She answered on the third ring.
"Hello, Niall."
"Howdy doody. Listen, I'm just going to cut to the chase-"
"Aww. No hilarious witticisms or impossible sarcasm?" Venice said, her own voice dripping with the latter.
"'Fraid not. Are you up for going back to that house?"
"... The one where you got Horatio?"
"That one, yes."
I felt her shrug. "Meh, why not? Do you want me to call Kal and Gepard?"
"I don't know... Maybe we should bring some other people instead... I don't think Kal would be comfortable in the house again, and I just don't think I'm in the mood for Gepard tonight."
"Tonight?"
"Yeah. How quick can you be here?"

Chapter the Sixth: In which a pet is acquired.

Gepard cautiously approached the edge of the hole in order to peer down, and the floor gave way beneath him. He fell a little bit, and I heard a thud when he landed. "I'm okay, too," came his voice, and I heard Kallista giggle a little bit. "You guys should come see this," he added. "It's really weird. Like, almost as weird as Niall."
"Shut up."
Venice shrugged and hopped into the hole. I removed some rope from my satchel and lowered myself down slowly.
I had to agree with Gepard. What was down the hole was, indeed, really weird.
The short drop ended in another hallway, perhaps even bigger than the one at ground level. It was certainly much cleaner. it smelled vaguely of chemicals, but not in the same way a hospital smells of chemicals. It was an altogether more unpleasant smell.
In front of us, the hallway ended in what I presume used to be a door, but behind us, it was too dark to see the end of the hall. Even as I lowered myself down the rope, Gepard was stepping through the doorway. If the hallway underneath a hallway was odd, what lay behind the door was even more so. On an oddness scale of one to Optimus Prime, this was pretty damn high.
The hallway led to a laboratory. It was by no means an abandoned laboratory, either, although the place had been completely wrecked.
It looked as I imagine a Victorian meth lab would have looked. Out-of-date laboratory equipment was strewn around the room, test tubes had been overturned, and there were several cages with animals in them. Some of the animals were even still alive, but most had either just died or had been ripped apart with terrifying brutality. Several of the animals that were still living looked mutated, like something out of a mad scientist's laboratory. I supposed that probably wasn't all that far from the truth.
There was one rat in particular that had impossibly broad shoulders and a face that was too small for its body. I tried hard not to retch, and began looking around the other cages. In one of the smallest, there was an entirely-normal-looking-if-a-little-undersized mouse hiding in the corner. I felt sorry for it, so I picked up the cage, intending to take it home with me. (Niall Montblanc, your friendly neighbourhood marshmallow.)

"Niall? You might want to take a look at this..." said Gepard. He didn't make a friendly jibe at me, and he wasn't hitting on either of the girls, so I knew it was serious. I walked over to where the others were standing, still carrying the cage: They were all staring at the a cage that was significantly larger than the one in my hand. It was perhaps 15x15x15 feet, and the door had been torn from the hinges as if they were paper.
"What are we dealing with here?" said Kal, no longer her usual bouncy self. She sounded scared, and, though I would never admit it, I was scared too.
"Let's not stay to find out," I said, before leaving the room and climbing back up the rope. (Better a live coward than a dead hero and all that.) I quickly found that climbing whilst holding a cage is fairly difficult, but I managed. The others followed soon after, and we were all eager to return to the car. It took a while before anyone noticed the cage I had acquired.
"What the frak is that?" asked Venice, turning around in the driver's seat.
"This is Horatio. He's a mouse."