Close Encounters of the Absurd Kind

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“Admit it – we're lost.”

Twilight rolled her eyes and turned down another corridor lined with vast, towering shelves, all packed tightly with books, scrolls, and grimoires. “We're not lost, Spike! You know how big the Canterlot Archives are.”

“Yeah, I do – and that's my point! Come on, Twilight, we've been walking for more than two hours! The Archives are big, but they're not that big. And when was the last time that you saw somepony else?”

“We've been walking?” Twilight asked pointedly, bouncing a few steps and making Spike grab frantically at her mane.

“Yeah, OK, point taken,” he said, scrambling to resume his seat on her back, “Still, you can't deny any of the rest of it.”

“I told you that it'd take quite some time to find the spell-book I was looking for. You could have just stopped at Donut Joe's, you know.”

“Yeah, why didn't I?” he muttered, before cupping one paw to his mouth and calling out desparingly, “'The thread, Ariadne, the thread!'”

Twilight laughed, stopping briefly to read a sign tacked onto the end of yet another avenue of massive bookcases. By this time, the Dewey Decimal classification had resovled into a distinction so fine that a second piece of paper was taped on the end of the first to capture the entire number, “Oh Spike, we've only met one Minotaur but he was all right once you got to know him. He still writes to Fluttershy, you know.”

“Yeah, figures – he was a nutcase! Why are we doing this, again, when I could be elbow-deep in a glazed cruller with extra sprinkles?”

This time, Twilight turned to glare at him, “Because, Mister Grumble-guts, Princess Luna asked! No, she practically begged me to help her. I couldn't possibly tell her, 'No'.”

“You could have told her to stop being such a weirdo about a stuffed toy,” Spike grumbled, crossing his arms.

“It was one of her only possessions for a thousand years, Spike, no wonder she's attached to it! It's not just a stuffed toy, to her it's a symbol!”

“Yeah, a symbol that she's lost her plot. Why doesn't she just zap it down to herself, if it's so important? I mean, the moon is her domain, isn't it?”

“She's tried,” Twilight explained patiently, “She doesn't know its exact location and she claims that she was never the best at teleportation magic-”

A large, reddish-brown blur flitted past the corner to Spike's eye, making him shriek and nearly fall off Twilight's back. “What was that?!” he squeaked in a voice several octaves above normal.

“What was what?” asked Twilight, “That girly squeal you just let out?”

“That was a manly exclamation of shock! Didn't you see it?” Spike exclaimed, his head jerking back and forth as he tried to look in all directions at once.

“Obviously not. As I was saying, we're here because Princess Luna asked us to help, and there's a very old spell-book down here with an affinity-based location spell which I should be able to cobble together with a crystal array and a standard teleportation spell-”

Spike tuned her out as she lectured primly on the sort of arcane hocus-pocus that only she, a couple of crusty old Professors at Canterlot University, and the Princesses themselves actually understood. Instead, he eyed the shelves warily, noting the moss dripping down the sides of a couple, and even what looked like lianas hanging down from the ceiling. Despite years as Twilight's assistant dealing with the sort of occult, uncanny, and inscrutable shenanigans that she regularly got caught up in, he was starting to get that vibe that things were rapidly departing the realms of the cult, the canny, and the scrutable – again – and he started to sweat.

He made one final try, “Look around you, Twi, nopony's been down here in centuries! It's probably crumbled to dust by now!”

Twilight stuck her nose in the air. “It's in the catalogue,” she insisted loftily, as if that trumped his pessimism.

Giving up, he sat back and watched in resignation as Twilight turned down yet another avenue of lichen-clad shelves. Wasn't it getting warmer here? And the air had a humidity that was certainly uncharacteristic of the many, many libraries that he'd been in.

“Huh, we could be back at the palace by now, doing something sensible like convincing Luna to ask her sister to help her.”

“She insisted that Celestia wasn't to be bothered about this,” Twilight snapped, before adding in a more reasonable tone, “It's something to do with the whole Sun and Moon thing, I think. Celestia doesn't intrude on the moon, and Luna leaves the sun alone, and they respect each other's domains unless it's unavoidable. I think she might also have been a little embarrassed.”

“Huh. Great. You know, what we could really do with about now is a librarian.”

There was a whistling thump and a huge, reddish-brown mass landed on the dusty floorboards in front of Twilight. She screamed and reared, scrambling backwards on her hind legs and tripping over Spike, who'd fallen off over her rump. The monster didn't approach, however, just looked mournfully at them through small black eyes almost hidden in a wide face above two drooping, naked cheek pouches.

“Ook,” it said in a deep voice.

Too frightened to move, Spike just stared at it, saucer-eyed, while beside him he could hear Twilight hyperventilating. A long, long arm covered in sparse hair reached carefully out and hovered just in front of him, the black, callused paw upturned. Tentatively, he reached up to touch it and the powerful fingers gently gripped him and lifted, setting him back on his feet.

“T-thanks. W-w-what are you?” he stammered.

The creature frowned. “Ook,” it said disapprovingly.

“Well, obviously you're a librarian,” said Spike, before his brain juddered to an abrupt halt and he wondered how he'd reached that conclusion from 'Ook'. Behind him, he could Twilight scrambling to her hooves.

“Uh, h-h-hello, um, sir? It is 'Sir', isn't it? Um, I'm, uh, kinda looking for a book.”

“Ook!” said the creature approvingly. There was a brief silence, “Ook?”

“Well, actually, it's Geranium's Stable Affinities – Magical Association Through Mental Imprinting, but it's been out of print for more than three centuries-”

The creature sighed and turned away. Both long, long arms reached out and placed their paws knuckle-down on the floor before it swung its body forward in a fluid, balanced motion, then repeated the action to bring itself to the bottom of a bookshelf. In a flash, it had shinned up the shelves and swung itself out of sight.

There was a long silence after it had gone.

“Oh,” said Twilight into the stillness.

Spike thought that summed it up pretty well. Taking a few steadying breaths, he reached out and laid a reassuring paw on Twilight's trembling shoulder. Twilight blew out a deep breath and giggled nervously in response.

With a heavy thump, the creature returned every bit as suddenly as it arrived. Twilight had bolted half a dozen steps in the general direction of 'away', knocking Spike into a heap again, before realising that the creature was proffering a large, dusty-looking book in a heavy canvas-covered binding. Panting, she returned to help him up before sidling up to the librarian. She squinted at the cover for a second, then her eyes widened in shock, “How did you find it?”

“Ook,” it said rather proudly, passing the book over to her.

“More to the point, where is this place,” said Spike. “And where did you come from, anyway?”

The creature sighed noisily, then reached behind a nearby shelf and produced a little pamphlet which Twilight took in her magic and levitated closer. She scanned the cover briefly and her jaw dropped. Taking it out of her magical grasp, Spike glanced over it carelessly.

“L-Space and You”, he read aloud. “Well, whatever. Thanks for finding the book.”

“Ook,” said the librarian. A long, long arm reached out and snatched the pamphlet, opening it to an inside page. A finger surmounted with a long, ragged nail jabbed at the second entry in the text within a black-bordered box.

(1) Silence.
(2) Books must be returned no later than the last date shown.
(3) The nature of causality must not be interfered with.

“Uh... sure? Will the usual Canterlot Archives Returns bin do? Because to be honest, there's no way I could find this place again.”

“Ook,” said the librarian approvingly. A long, long arm reached out and passed Spike a banana, then the creature turned and knuckled away in a leisurely fashion up the row of shelves. It turned the corner and was lost to sight, although seconds later he heard the whoosh of something heavy swinging through the air. Very much like whatever-that-was on a liana, thought Spike.

“Uh, Twilight? You've got your book, now can we get out of here before we run into something even weirder? Please?”

Twilight didn't move.

“Twi-light?” Spike sing-songed, waving a paw in front of her eyes.

The a little snort, the Unicorn snapped back to the present, “L-space!” she announced happily.

“Uh, yeah, sure. Can you freak out while walking?”

“L-space, Spike!” she exulted, shaking him vigorously in her magic.

“Yeah, you said, now stop that!”

She swung him up onto her back and started to trot back the way they had come, “You don't understand, Spike! L-space is supposed to be a myth, a legend amongst certain branches of the Guild of Librarians! Papercut the Second postulated that all libraries that exist – or ever existed anywhere – are connected in L-space through the sheer weight of knowledge that they contain, and that a very few selected librarians, the very greatest librarians, are able to enter and travel through this realm. Think of it, Spike! Access to knowledge throughout the ages!”

“The dust! The boredom! The endless re-shelving!” he mocked.

“Don't you see, Spike? Papercut the Second was right!”

“She should have been more careful after that first papercut,” Spike said sarcastically.

Twilight rolled her eyes, “Canterlot University's greatest ever archivist, Papercut the Second! Descendent of the equally-famous Papercut the Fourth!”

Spike blinked, “Eh? Descendent of Papercut the Fourth?!

Twilight made a face, “Apparently there was an accident with a contraceptive spell and a time-travelling spell. Don't ask – faculty parties must have been a lot wilder back then!”

“Oh, boy,” muttered Spike. He peeled the banana and took a large bite as Twilight carried on gushing excitedly about her hero.

It was surprisingly good.

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