Diary of a Teenaged Mimic

Dear Diary,

So yesterday I gave you the virtual tour of my cell here at Phileo City Heroic Academy. That's really fuckin' hard to keep saying, so from now on it's PCHA. Anyhow, I decided to spend the three days between now and my first classes taking stock of the Library, the Practice Yard, and the Dining Hall. I'm actually gonna do them in that order, too, because I don't want to do the Dining Hall until there's sure to be a crowd in there, and sixth sevenths of the school ought to be back to classes by Monday, so most of them ought to be eating in the Dining Hall, right?

Anyhow, I like books, I'm going to the Library first.

I left my room for the first time since my brief trip out on Thursday to toss my bra and stanky panties down the laundry chute. Regarding that, kudos to whoever's on laundry detail, because when Marie delivered them back to me, I swear they were like new, except without the starch they'd normally have straight out of the package.

Before I left the girl's dormitory, I did a bit of searching around. The rooms on both sides of my hall, at least the ones I could see into, were near carbon copies of my own. The desk in one of them looked newer; not any different, the wood just looked a bit less well smoothed down from wear. Other than that, though, they were identical as far as I could tell. Two more halls flanked the one with my room; the ones that backed on my hall were more of the same; windowless boxes with furniture built to take whatever teenaged 'Heroes' could dish out.

The rooms on the far side of the halls were emphatically not the same as the inner rooms. First and most obviously, they were twice the size. Exactly twice the size as far as I could tell, since each was a two room 'suite' with one room opening onto the hallway and the other connected to the 'entryway' room. In both of the ones that were open for me to snoop into, the 'entryway' room held a desk, an open fronted armoire; I'd guess for hanging coats or jackets in. They each had also a desk and an umbrella rack, of all things. Both of them had another more traditional armoire and a bed in the second room. None of the furniture was the blocky, hyper-durable sort I'd seen in the cells. Instead, both rooms had their own unique matching furniture. In one case, the one with slightly shabbier stuff, the furniture even had a coat of arms carved into each piece, with painted highlights so you couldn't overlook it. The other suite didn't have that kind of personalization, but it looked both new and expensive.

Neither bed had any thicker a mattress than my own, but they each had multiple thick quilts piled atop them. I debated swiping one for my room, but each was distressingly unique; the owner would likely spot it at a glance. Nevertheless, I determined to get something softer on top of my bed as soon as I could figure out how.

A bit more snooping in the hallways and I discovered a stairwell in each corner of the dorm building; one floor above my own, plus another five below, although the bottom floor had an active laundry centered where the laundry room was on my own floor, and I saw a few other oddly proportioned maids moving around. They looked up at me the moment I stepped into view, but turned back to their tasks the moment they recognized my uniform jacket. The floor above that had the nurse's office taking up three of the outer rooms on one side; as Sister Siobhan had said, her name and title were right there under the word 'Infirmary'. Again, I had no idea what language or alphabet the writing was in, but I could understand it anyway. Weird as fuck. Anyhow, next to the Infirmary, between that and the end of the hall, with a door set so someone in the doorway could see the 'main entrance' of the girls' dorm, an office labeled 'House Mother, Sister Trease'. I had no desire to tangle with the house mother, so I took the long way back to my room, then headed out for the Library.

It took me a little more wandering than I'd like to admit to find it again, but that wandering got me a much better idea of the layout of the central part of the building. Seven floors, with the bottom floor definitely belonging to 'the help', as the movie put it. Despite wanting to stick around watching the cooks in the big central kitchen, or even the smiths banging away on stuff on one end, the looks I kept getting from the creepily-proportioned maids, cooks, and smiths let me know I wasn't exactly welcome. Okay, the smiths had an entirely different set of eerie proportions than the maids and cooks, not to mention looking somehow 'guy-like', but I still couldn't tell one smith from another, and they all had the same not-quite-human, 'uncanny valley native' proportions to them. At any rate, while I can't read a room with the best of them, I'm not completely tone deaf either, so after scoping out the other three big rooms in the basement; a woodworking shop and two storerooms, one for raw foodstuffs and one for weapons and armor, I left them to their work.

I mean, I palmed a knife while I was in the armory, but what with me losing the mace and balisong from my purse, I needed one, right?

Don't get me wrong; I'm not a fighter, but nine times out of ten if someone's thinking of mugging you and you flash a weapon, they back off. They're looking for cash and valuables, not a fight. For those of you saying something along the lines of 'but... Dragon?', I was pissed off, huge, and happened to be an octopus at the time. You see what happens when you're made of muscle and some overgrown salamander spits acid on you. Somebody's getting an ass whooping at that point, and it's not likely to be the one made out of muscle, y'know?

Anyway. Exploring. Directly above the kitchens sat the two-story-ceilinged Dining Hall; now that I knew what to look for I saw dumbwaiters in the corners, as well as sideboards tucked away under the tables that had been pushed aside. Out in the center of the room, where I assumed the tables normally stood, a few maids crawled along the floor polishing it with cleaning rags. That looked way too much like work for me, so I bolted and headed up another couple floors.

As an aside, on the first floor, near the entrance to the Dining Hall, there was a two-story entranceway that I assumed led to the street outside. To one side sat an office labeled 'Headmaster Miles' Office', on the other one that either read 'Security' or 'Guards'; as I watched it the word swam from one to the other in a way that should have made me queasy. It weirded me out that it didn't so I didn't stop to figure out which it was.

I didn't find an entrance into the middle of the building until I hit the fifth floor, and that led out into the Practice Yard, which was open to the sky. While my desk lamp and Marie were daily reminders that Magic Was A Thing, I really didn't think they could hide an entire library like the one I'd seen up in the sky, or in one of the towers at the corners of the building. Yeah, the building had towers at the corners, reaching up maybe three stories above the rest of the building, and even from the door into the Practice Yard I could see two people moving around in one of them.

I went down a floor and did a lap around the building, taking in the various rooms around the outside of the building. Each one was either a classroom or a labelled office. Either the faculty were off until classes resumed, or none of them had open door policies, and I wasn't really keen on seeing which was which just yet. I went down another floor and did another lap before I finally found the Library; if the big doors next to the Headmaster's office were the 'front' of the building, the Library had one entrance in the middle of the 'rear' hall.

Once inside, I took my time scoping out the place before really looking at any of the books. The library had been my favorite room back at Eastside, and if I spent as much time here as I did there, I wanted to be keenly aware of the layout of the place. It was divided into three floors, with mirrored lightwells in each of the front corners. Front of the Library, that is, which would be toward the back of the school, I guess. Anyhow, the lightwells and the mirrors lit the place up pretty well, enough that I didn't think I'd have problems reading at any of the study carrels set near them. A quick perusal showed the rest of that floor filled with bookshelves, themselves roughly three quarters full of books. A few hooded, robed figures moved around the room pushing little carts full of books, obviously re-shelving as they went. I ignored them, they ignored me, we got along fine.

The second floor was wall to wall, floor to ceiling bookshelves. More of the flameless camp lights at the end of each aisle lit it up well enough I could read whatever was printed on the edges of the books. My first really unpleasant discovery in the Library was that only about a third of the books actually had anything written on the spines. Pulling a few of the unmarked ones showed that maybe half of the remainder had a title on the cover, and all the rest had nothing on the covers or spines; to tell what they were I'd actually have to open them up and start reading them. What with all of them being heavy old tomes that seemed under-described by the word 'hardback', I decided to eschew that until I'd finished my walkthrough.

The barred, padlocked gate at the top of the steps was a suggestion that I might not be welcome up there, but it wasn't enough of a suggestion to stop me. A bit of work with my new knife and the padlock popped open; I hung it on the door while I explored. The far stairwell had a near-identical lock, and a long desk-slash-workstation took up the space between the stairwells. Books in various stages of repair clamped to bookbinding equipment, filled the space behind the counter. A quick scout around showed that flat none of the books on this floor had writing on the cover or spine, although quite a few had more than their fair share of decorative scrollwork or similar art. There were also far fewer books, as well; even though only the central half of the room held shelves, the books were racked two or three to a shelf, usually secured to the shelves themselves somehow. The few books secured with padlocks showed me that the padlocks they'd chosen for the books weren't any better than the ones on the gates, but I didn't even open any of the covers. The faint growls and glows from the books clued me into the fact that they might not have been padlocked to prevent thievery, so I locked the one I'd jimmied free back up and continued my exploration.

The back quarter of the third library floor had only one entrance, a door all the way at one end of the room, labelled 'Head Librarian McGowan'. It was locked, and I didn't see a keyhole, nor could I see anything between the door and the jamb, so I left that room alone and headed back downstairs. On my way I locked the doorway; it wouldn't do to have just anyone wandering around with carnivorous books, after all.

I spent about half an hour wandering through the Library, avoiding whoever or whatever was re-shelving the books, just reading titles and flipping open untitled books to get an idea what lay inside. A few things stood out. First, the books on the second floor looked to be textbooks, with multiple copies of each on each shelf. Second, even the textbooks were mostly hand copied; I saw a few that looked like they might have been printed on a press, but they were way less common; the only two of those where I saw what might be an abbreviated 'class set' were 'Law and Custom of Heroic, Phileo City Edition' and 'Historie of Phileo City'. Both of those looked kinda... basic. At least one illustration per page, fairly big font size, the kind of thing you expect in a grade school primer. I still nabbed a copy of both before I went back to the first floor. The books there were a lot more varied, but even after scouring the shelves I didn't see anything like what you'd expect from a 'fiction' section.

Okay, 'Principles of Heroic Magick' didn't really count, given the circumstances. I scooped it up anyhow. I also snagged 'People's of Midgard' and 'A Student's First Written Word Primar'.

If whoever wrote these got published with that kind of spelling, I swore I was gonna get my own book in here at some point. Like, one I'd written, not one about me. Not like anybody'd read that anyhow.

So I didn't see any kind of sign out sheet at the front desk, nor was anyone manning it, so I just left with my books and headed back to my room; it was almost dinnertime, and Marie hadn't disappointed me yet as regards to food. Silverware, yes, but food, no.

Tonight I thought I'd get a look at some books until I got sleepy, then I'd tackle the Practice Yard tomorrow.