Time moves differently in the Library and in each of the separate universes. The Library strove to keep their days the same length as the days in Prime, for the sake of some consistency between two of the biggest universes that needed to communicate. Ideally, one day that passed in Prime was one day that passed in the Library, even if nothing of narrative significance happened in the Library that day. The agents referred to this as operating in Real Time, and by and large, the agents weren’t fans.
In their own universes, agents didn’t operate in Real Time, but rather in Narrative Time. Readers would get bored if they had to read about each individual day in which nothing out of the ordinary happened, and so Narrative Time allowed the universes to move their people forward from one important event to the next. It was possible that the people in the universe would have survived a long, hard winter, for example, but that didn’t mean that the people would have to live each individual day of that winter - they could simply skip to the end (or the middle, if something important happened), knowing they had survived something terrible. The consequences were real, but the time spent was simply ignored.
Because of this change in how time passes, by the next time the team members gathered, they had each experienced a different amount of time. The call to the Library came to them in different manners, appropriate to their home universes, but they were bound by their oaths to return as soon as they saw heard (or saw) the call, and were all given the ability to create a direct transit path to the Library from where ever they were in their universe.
Veronica, of course, had been working in Real Time, so she had lived through every day of the month it had been since the end of the last mission. Nothing much had changed at her desk, though there was a small bud vase holding a single red rose that had never been there before, and she smiled much more often than she had the last time the team had met at her desk.
Sofya was the first to notice both of these things, as she was the first to make her way to the team’s work area after receiving the call. Sofya’s stride always relaxed incrementally as she moved further away from her universe, as it moved her away from the pain she lived with day to day. By the time she was in the bull pen, she usually had folded up her cane and stored it away in one of her pockets, because she didn’t need it anymore. This time, however, the cane remained for longer, and she maintained a pronounced limp. After she and Veronica greeted each other with hugs, Veronica helped her ease her way into a chair at the round table and looked down her nose at her team mate. “So, something happened, I’m assuming?”
Sofya sighed, brushing the wisps of graying hair out of her face. Veronica noted that there were more grays than strawberry blonde these days. “Oh, yeah, something happened, and that ‘something’s’ name is Jery. When I got back home after the last mission, that was the first phone call I received - I hadn’t even had a chance to make a cup of tea! Speaking of which…” Sofya eyed the kitchenette at the end of the room away from the Report Center, then gave Veronica a pathetic look with her big, green eyes. “You wouldn’t be willing to get a cuppa for an old friend, would you?”
Laughing, Veronica straightened from the edge of her desk where she’d been leaning and started toward the kitchenette. “Only because I expect to hear all the sordid details about this ‘Jery’ character when I get back. It must have been quite something to cause you a lasting injury.”
Sofya settled back in her chair with a sigh, and tried to make herself more comfortable. As far as she was concerned, it had been about four months since the last time she’d been in the Library, and nearly all of that time had been spent trying to keep Jery out of jail, the newspaper, or the hospital. She’d been reasonably successful on the first, less so on the second, and had wound up in the hospital herself with the last misadventure. Sometimes Sofya wished that Jery would find some other friend with mystical powers to bail them out of the trouble they got themselves into, just for a change of pace. However, Jery was the protagonist in Sofya’s universe, so Jery’s plot armor kept them safe while most of the repercussions bounced their way to Sofya, and there weren’t many people willing to play straight person to that kind of behavior. Sofya managed to get her bum leg up on another chair at the table, relishing the stretch the change in position provided, and forced herself to take a few long, deep breaths. Spending a day or two in the Library would do great things for her spirit and her flesh.
Sofya had only closed her eyes for a moment, but it felt like she had been jolted out of a deep sleep when Nuereddin pulled the chair out from under her leg. She started, then yelped as the sudden movement had caused her leg and back to have an extremely poor reaction to her decision to move to rashly. Nuereddin started as well, caught off guard by her cry of pain.
“Sorry!” His voice was raspy, as it usually was when he first arrived at the Library. He had told the team once that he didn’t spend much of his time in his home universe speaking out loud, so it was like brushing the dust off his vocal chords when he met with the team. “I didn’t see your leg there. Are you all right?” Concern was shining through his eyes and what little of his face wasn’t covered by his beard.
“I’m all right,” Sofya gasped, then took a moment to breathe slowly and straighten out before she spoke again. “I’m all right,” she repeated, hoping to get Nuereddin to stop looking at her as though she were made of porcelain. “You startled me more than anything, is all. Please, sit.” She gestured toward the now-empty chair, and used the gesture to readjust her posture into something more comfortable all around. Sofya was already feeling the healing benefits of being in the Library, which made the whole interaction much less terrible than it would have been in her home universe.
Fortunately, Veronica’s narrative timing was exquisite, and she arrived carrying a mug of hot water and an assortment of tea bags and sweeteners for Sofya. She set them in front of the woman, smiling. “I know your tea preference varies depending on things that I have no understanding of, so I figured I’d bring you one of everything and let you figure it out from there.” She then turned to Nuereddin and greeted him with a short bow, which he reciprocated before finally taking the proffered seat.
Sofya felt herself relaxing a little more as she shuffled through the tea selection, finally choosing a black tea with ginger and peach for her first cup. She managed to open the small packet of honey without getting it all over her hands or her long, billowy blouse, which was an achievement all its own, and tipped half of the sweetener into the mug before setting the packet aside on top of a pink artificial sweetener package. She stirred the honey into the water to encourage it to melt, grateful that Veronica had thought to bring stir sticks, then removed the tea bag from its wrapper and dropped it into the mug. She looked at her watch to note the time and how long the tea bag should stay in the water, then leaned back in her chair, carefully moving the tea bag up and down in the water and watching the color of the water begin the slow change as the transformation began.
Nuereddin watched the entire process with a sense of awe. He knew what it was to hunt down and kill an animal for food, and there were certain rites that needed to take place to keep the gods in their spheres placated and ensure that later hunts would also be fruitful - everyone knew that. Still, he’d never seen anyone place so much reverence in the act of adding a bag of dried herb clippings into a cup of hot water. Only Sofya could make him even contemplate drinking something prepared by another person, and only because she gave the impression that she would consider it a personal and spiritual affront to sully the act with poison or some other adulterant. He’d heard her get into a rather heated argument with another agent once about the addition of milk to this beverage, and Nuereddin couldn’t get the image of the goddess of the harvest, coming to the Library to smite the disbelievers and the profaners. Nuereddin didn’t even understand why one would add milk to a cup of hot water with dried herbs, but he was certain that it was Wrong to do so.
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Veronica, meanwhile, went back to leaning against the edge of her desk, crossing her arms across her chest. “Glad to have you back, Nuereddin. Anything exciting happening back home? Or just you and Lomo wandering the wilderness?”
Nuereddin smiled, and what little skin of his face was visible flushed red. Veronica was one of the few women who could make him blush like a youth of eighty, instead of the middle-aged man of one hundred and twenty he was. “Oh, not too much. My brother has decided he’d like to move to town and start a shop, offering weapons and blacksmithing work to the heroes who come through the valley. He’s been dreaming about that for years and years, but I guess he’s gotten someone in town willing to rent him space, and he’s packed up and started business. I wish him all the best.” Nuereddin tried to keep his voice neutral, refusing to acknowledge the memory of the row he and Teodor had had when Nuereddin first heard the news. Their parents would have been so proud of him, Teodor had stubbornly insisted as he folded his clothing neatly into his trunk. ‘Proud’ was not the word Nuereddin would have used, and he told Teodor so, along with several comments about how many blacksmiths there already were in town and how there weren’t enough heroes to merit that many businesses and since when did Teodor know anything about weapons, anyway? Nuereddin had spent a month refusing to acknowledge his brother in any way, even ignoring the flyer that indicated Teodor was having his Grand Opening. At the last minute, however, Nuereddin forced himself to go to town and see what all the fuss was about.
Beale dropped his long, lanky body into a chair on the other side of Sofya, spreading out to take up as much space as possible. “Man, it is good to be back,” he drawled, stretching his arms over his head before dropping one hand on the back of Sofya’s chair. “How’s everyone doing? Oh, sorry,” he added, recognizing the stink eye Sofya had just shot him over her shoulder. “I didn’t realize I was interrupting service at the Church of Tea.”
Sofya sniffed with disdain, checked both her watch and the color of the tea, and carefully pulled the tea bag out of the water. While wrapping it around the stir stick to squeeze the last bits out of the bag, she replied to Beale. “You’re lucky that my tea had finished steeping, but hadn’t oversteeped. If you had caused me to oversteep a perfectly good cup of black ginger peach, we would have had An Issue.” Nuereddin involuntarily leaned away from the woman, wanting to make sure he kept enough distance between them that she wouldn’t associate the dwarf with the human man that had threatened her tea.
Beale sighed with exaggerated relief. “Thank the stars above! I would hate to be drawn and quartered for the sin of making undrinkable leaf water even more undrinkable.” He winked at Sofya, then turned his attention to Veronica. “Well hello, nurse! You’re looking especially Hepburn-esque today. New blouse?” He sat up a bit, straightening the collar of his light gray shirt that set off the amber tones of his skin to great effect.
Veronica straightened, but kept her arms crossed. “Only you would use Katherine Hepburn as an adjective, Beale, but yes, it is a new blouse. It’s sapphire blue, according to the catalog. What do we think?” She dropped her arms to give the team a decent view of the full blouse, which had a masculine cut and strong shoulders that avoided looking like football pads by the smallest of margins. The fabric was less brilliant than a color like ‘sapphire blue’ would indicate, but it was a lovely dark shade that brought out the green in Veronica’s eyes and looked wonderful against her olive skin. It tucked into the slim waist of her wide-legged trousers, which she managed to make look more feminine than any skirt or dress ever would on her. Sofya stifled a jealous sigh, reminding herself that her universe didn’t require a plucky young reporter or femme fatale type, so there was no concern narratively that she was not built like Veronica.
Nile stopped short in front of the table, startled by Veronica’s appearance as she modeled the blouse for the rest of the team. Veronica was the least demonstrative or showy person on the team, and so seeing her turn and walk around as though she were one of the models Beale had once told him about was unnerving. She was laughing, as were the other team members, and Niles didn’t think that they were being serious with treating her like a fashion model, but it bothered him for reasons he couldn’t articulate nonetheless. He cleared his throat loudly as he pulled out the chair at the table that had been reinforced especially for him, and found himself glaring at Beale’s guilty facial expression.
“Niles! Glad to see you’ve made it. Hail, hail, the gang’s all here,” Veronica said as she worked her way around the table to give Niles a hug of greeting. “You were just in time to see me show off my new blouse. I know it’s not the kind of clothing people in your universe usually wear, but what do you think?” She tilted her head back to look him in the eye as she pulled away and did a slow spin to show off the blouse.
Niles suddenly felt very warm, and swallowed hard as he tried to concentrate on her arms and elbows. Those were safe, non-erogenous, friendly parts of her upper body that he could look at without making eye contact with a more problematic portion of her anatomy. “It…it’s very nice,” he stammered, before sitting down heavily and pulling up to the table. “I apologize for my tardiness. Have we received the details of our next mission yet?” He deliberately ignored the snickering coming from Beale’s side of the table, but it was not easy.
“Not yet, but I think Haz is coming over now,” Sofya responded, allowing Niles to recover his equilibrium (and let the bright red drain from his normally pale face) and move things forward as though the last minute or so hadn’t happened. The poor thing didn’t really know what to do with women who had their own ideas of how to romance or be romanced, and he was always adorably awkward when faced with a woman who flirted even a little bit. It was one of his best qualities, as far as Sofya was concerned, and she knew Veronica felt similarly. Still, Veronica must have been in a good space mentally if she was playing with Niles even a little - she normally refused to allow anyone to see her as a woman more than a reporter or an agent of the Library, much less parade around the table, showing off a new clothing item. Sofya hoped that whoever it was that had improved her friend’s mood so much, they were treating her well.
Sofya had drained about half of her tea and was contemplating the tea bag to determine if it was worth re-steeping when Haz finally arrived at their table. While the alien had more limbs than most agents, it paradoxically made them move more slowly through the Library. Generally, they kept to the report center, but when a new assignment came out, they were frequently the one who provided the details to the team. “Hello, team alpha-echo-seven-one-niner,” they said without emotion, handing over a large manilla envelope to Veronica. “Within are the details of the next anomaly the Librarians request you investigate. As usual, please investigate as thoroughly and as quickly as possible, bringing back as much information about the anomaly as possible. The Librarians will require a report of some kind, whether it be a final report or one that is in-process, after one day Real Time. The forms required for authorization to enter Prime are in the envelope along with the details of your mission.” All of this was said in a monotone that was less robotic and more the voice of someone who has had to repeat themselves several hundred times over the last few days, and was reciting the lines on auto-pilot. They paused at the end of the standard disclosure to wait for any questions; once they saw that no questions were coming, they slowly moved away from the team and began moving toward the wall to make the journey back to the Report room.
Before Haz had left completely, Niles called “Thank you!” after them, and they froze. Sofya was startled to see a shift in the color and pattern of their skin - a wave of bright green spots climbed up Haz’s normally plain gray back, running up and down their torso and disappearing before Sofya could say anything. Haz looked over their shoulder at Niles and gave him a small nod, then continued back to the Report room. Their skin had a slight green glow, even with the spots gone, and Sofya suddenly wondered just what kind of creature they were, and if they had an equivalent to a blush. With a smile, she, along with the rest of the team, turned to Veronica to find out where they were headed next.
