For the first time, Anika wasn’t completely exhausted by the time dinner was over, so she asked Sinaya to point her towards the library Leka had mentioned her first full day on the planet. The three days since her arrival had gone by in a haze of new experiences, including the athletic ones she would have never dreamed up for herself. She was curious about her new world and was hoping that the library would allow her to learn more information at her own pace. She didn’t really enjoy having to constantly ask what people meant or how things worked - she would rather do the research herself.

  As they entered the library, just a few stone-shaped halls over from the dining room, Lily squeaked in delight as she ran into the room having a new experience and acting like the child she was. Anika had to admit that the library was impressive, even compared to some of the libraries in movies. The room was easily five stories tall, the stone ceiling smooth despite the cavernous size of the room.

  Wood tables and benches as well as plush arm chairs dotted the space in clusters or alone, often in partially walled alcoves, providing options for those who wanted to read in solitude or work together on research. The walls were lined not with wooden bookcases, but with shelves carved directly into the stone. Large sconces with bright lights dotted the space between shelves to illuminate the contents. Books of all sizes and colors lined the stone shelves, a collage of excitement waiting to be opened. Anika was in love.

  “Wow! This room is huge!” Lily managed to scramble clumsily onto a low, padded footstool in front of a plush, green arm chair a short way into the room and continued to crane her neck to look around, though the footstool barely provided her any additional height as a vantage point.

  “I love libraries, but this is one of the biggest I’ve ever been inside.” Anika spoke with reverent awe, looking around for a clue of how the library was organized, as she had no idea how to find books that would be helpful to her. “There is no way I will be able to find anything in here without some kind of catalog system. And I’m not sure how we reach the books on the top shelves. There are a bunch out of reach.”

  “I can pull them down!” Lily began levitating some nearby books off a shelf.

  “No, we can’t just randomly pull stuff down! We would have to remember where everything is to put it back!”

  “Oh, right.” Lily let out a sad sigh at not being able to showcase her magic skills, but put the books back on the shelf.

  “Based on the time tablet they gave me and all the magic rituals and enchantments they use, there is probably some kind of cataloging system on a similar tablet of some kind. Or maybe just a list of items and then some enchantments that just use magic like the spatial bag to let you draw out what you want. We should look around!” Anika immediately headed towards the first of the alcoves, assuming that whatever system was used to keep track of books would be built into an alcove rather than on an open table.

  “Right! I will look for a tablet!” Lily jumped off the footstool and headed away from Anika and deeper into the large room.

  The first alcove Anika entered held two small grey armchairs and a low table, clearly intended for a pair of the halfling-size Degeta. She continued walking towards the right side of the room, checking alcoves on the way, and finding nothing but more collections of chairs and tables. She doubled back to check the left side of the room, and still found nothing. If there wasn’t a system near the front of the room, Anika assumed it would have to be towards the center of the room. It would have been fun to just roam through aisles of shelves like she could at the public libraries growing up. She loved looking at interesting covers and titles and just choosing a book that called to her.

  Anika had hoped that this new fantasy-esque world she was in would have rows and rows of shelves to browse. Not being able to see the titles of most of the books due to the size and height of the room was disappointing. Then again, she was used to it, since the library at Georgia Tech didn’t have any books in it.

  She had always been slightly annoyed that the school had nothing but chairs, tables, and study space in the library and any books she wanted had to be requested from some off-site storage. What was the fun in that? She supposed here she could at least browse the lower shelves of books, which was better than nothing, but she wouldn’t know where to start browsing. She wanted to at least get an idea of what type of books were here and prioritize things that would help her understand magic or dungeons or monsters.

  “Anika, over here!” Lily’s voice sounded from further into the room.

  “I’m coming!” Anika turned and moved towards Lily’s voice. Lily had made a beeline for the center of the room, which seemed to be the correct choice compared to Anika’s intended systematic search starting at the entrance. After weaving around a few alcoves blocking her view of the center of the room, Anika found Lily.

  Lily stood next to a large console that looked straight out of a 70s Sci-Fi movie. It was clunky and large, a monolith of black, shiny stone. It was wider than it was tall, around 8 feet long and 5 feet high. Glowing gold symbols carved along the top and bottom of the stone glittered in the bright light of the room. As Anika approached, she thought it was interesting that the language comprehension enchantment that had been cast on her allowed her to read and write the language of Etalan, but the gold symbols used for magic rituals and enchantments did not hold any meaning.

  She wondered if it was a different language that, for some reason, was not covered by the enchantment, or if the symbols didn’t have consistent meanings. Maybe they had no meaning at all. That didn’t seem likely though. Anika felt like a magic system had to use symbols that meant something, but maybe the meaning was too complex for the enchantment. She supposed it was one of many things she would need to research.

  “This could be what we are looking for… though I’m not sure how to use it.” Anika looked over the giant stone, not sure how to access whatever secrets it contained.

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  “These magic runes lit up when I got close!” Lily nudged the glowing symbols at the bottom of the monolith.

  “I guess you turned it on?” Anika stepped closer to the stone and didn’t see anything she recognized from other ritual enchantments in the temple so far. Tentatively, she reached out and poked the shiny, obsidian surface. The surface of the stone instantly lit up and gold text appeared on the screen, a long list of words and phrases.

  “Nice, it’s a touch screen! This looks like a category list.” Anika skimmed the list and read aloud, “Arts and Culture, History and Government, Magic…it looks like I can select a broad category. I want to learn more about dungeons but I also want to learn more about this place. I wonder if I should look at history or magic first.”

  “Look for magic first! We can learn more about dungeons!”

  “I want to know more about dungeon monsters, but I also am curious about how dungeons exist and how magic works. Like… how do we regenerate mana? Why do we have specific magic affinities? Why can’t we just use all the magic or pick magic to learn? I guess maybe some of that isn’t likely to be explained in the book. It would be like asking how the universe started, and at this point I’m beginning to doubt the whole ‘Big Bang’ theory.” Anika hadn’t thought about it up until now, but the fact that there was magic in the universe and actual gods on this planet made her doubt all the ‘truths’ she had thought she knew about the wider cosmos.

  She would have considered herself agnostic on the subject of gods and religion before - how could anyone possibly know about the existence of a magical greater being. Of course, the huge variety of religions on Earth all claiming vastly different things, or even similar things like all the different varieties of Christianity, made it hard to believe in any of it. But here there seemed to only be the one religion that everyone followed. And real gods. Was it even a religion? It was more like a system of government guided by the gods. Deocracy? Theocracy? Was that even a thing?

  She supposed most religious texts often had rules and laws to be followed as well. But it didn’t quite seem the same here. Of course, she hadn’t actually seen the gods. She just had to trust that the gods had been involved in the summoning. How had the people of the planet even known about other worlds full of people if there weren’t gods with some greater knowledge though? It was a lot to think about.

  “Anika! You are staring and not listening!” Lily pushed her broad nose hard into the side of Anika’s leg.

  “Oh, right! Sorry, I just got a little distracted. There is a lot to think about... it’s so different here, I don’t know if I will even be able to find a book that makes sense!” Anika had probably missed some of Lily’s comments based on her claiming Anika wasn’t listening, so she felt bad for ignoring her companion.

  “Just pick something that sounds interesting and if you can’t understand you pick a different one!” Lily’s matter-of-fact statement made Anika feel a bit silly for not just diving in.

  “Right, you’re right. I’m way overthinking this.” Anika looked at the screen and selected ‘Magic’. The text on the screen shimmered and faded before a new column of text appeared. The options that appeared made sense, categories like ‘Primary Magic’ and ‘Enchantments.’ One of the options, thankfully, was ‘Dungeons’ and Anika quickly selected it.

  ‘There are a lot of categories here… but this one says ‘Dungeon Creation’. That sounds like it would give me some basic information about how the dungeons were formed and how magic works in them, right?” Anika knew Lily had a lot of knowledge from the gods, though she didn’t always act like it, but figured that Lily would be able to guide her in picking the right category.

  “That should be a small category! We can probably find something simple there for you. And I can help you understand if you need help.” Lily looked up at the screen, trying to read the list from her low vantage point.

  Anika tapped the category and another list showed up. This time, it looked more like what she would expect of book titles than categories. There were a lot more books than she expected on this subject. That said, some looked like the titles of college textbooks or academic research while others looked more like the titles of a children’s book.

  “Hmm.. there are a lot of options. Some of these sound really complicated! Like ‘An Examination of Ambient Magic in Regions with Multiple Dungeons.’ Sounds a little too specific, I definitely don’t think I am ready for that book just yet.”

  “Yeah, that one sounds really hard to understand.” Lily replied sagely, causing Anika to stifle a giggle at the capybara’s tone.

  Anika continued to skim the list of titles. “These can’t be for adults ‘Where the Wild Dungeons Are’, ‘The Little Dungeon That Could’, and ‘The Very Hungry Dungeon.’ What do those even have to do with dungeon creation? I wonder if books can be in multiple categories, because this sounds more like a made up story.”

  “Those all sound interesting to me, but I don’t think that is what you are looking for. …’The Little Dungeon That Could’ sounds like it might be a fun book to read anyway!”

  “Hmm… Maybe we can try that one another time. It might be a good bedtime story.“ One of the books caught Anika’s eye, “this one might work! ‘Dungeons and the Magic Cycle: A Primer.’”

  “Ooo that sounds perfect!” Lily hopped a little in excitement, which Anika noticed primarily due to Lily landing on her foot. It was a good thing she was small!

  Anika pressed her finger against the title of the book and another screen appeared to give a summary of the book and list relevant categories. It looked like the book was classified under ‘Dungeon Creation,’ ‘Dungeon Magic,’ ‘Ambient Magic,’ ‘Chaos Magic,’ and ‘Magic Cycle.’

  “This does look perfect. The summary says: ‘Designed for acolytes and other young teens, this book summarizes fundamental elements of magic including how the gods created the dungeons and the dungeons impact on ambient Chaos magic and the natural magic cycle.’”

  “You definitely should read that one.” Lily affirmed.

  The book looked like it would be a good introduction to magic principles as well as the dungeons, both of which Anika could benefit from. The screen didn’t say where the book was stored, however, and didn’t offer information on how to find it. There were two symbols near the top of the summary that looked like back and forward buttons, so she clicked the latter.

  As soon as she pressed it, she heard a whooshing sound like air escaping a balloon. Nothing showed up on the screen, but something small and white shot up from the top of the monolith. It whirled through the air towards one of the shelves near the back of the room, about midway up the wall, and stopped to hover in front of a book. The brown book slid out of its spot on the shelf and was encased in a translucent white bubble that floated back down towards Anika and passed over her head. She whirled to watch the descent of the book onto the table, noting that it lined up perfectly with the screen area she had been using on the stone. As soon as the book touched the table, the bubble popped and dissipated.

  “Oooo that was so cool!” Lily cried, trying to jump up to see the book on the table.

  “Yeah, that was not what I expected. I wonder how we put it back.” Anika scooped Lily up into her arm and then grabbed the book from the table with her other hand. “Let’s settle onto that couch over there and start reading!”

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  ~Avelyn