Kent Library

It's a sunny late spring afternoon when you roll up on the library building. There's a local sheriff car parked nearby, the lights cycling blue-and-red. A deputy is sitting in the car with the windows open. He's watching two people who are sitting on the steps of the library.

The two people sitting on the library steps have an odd skin tone, kind of inhumanly pink like a bad shade of lipstick. Their heads are shaved or possibly bald. They wear white thigh-length robes over white trousers. They are barefoot. They seem to be enjoying the sunlight. They're sitting there silently looking at each other.

What do you do?

Janus circles the block. Historic houses (a plaque on one of them reads "1645" with an illegible name in smaller font), a lot that's so overgrown he can't tell whether it's vacant, and at the back of the library is a parking lot.

Another cop is here. She is taking photographs of the back doors of the library, which have been decorated with so much CAUTION and POLICE tape. She looks around at Janus. "This is a scene," she says, "it's a closed scene. Did you notice the car over there?" Janus had walked right past it. Glancing back he sees a standard issue sheriff's patrol car with its lights going. No obvious sign that he's in a crime scene. No other cops, either.

"We're from Novydom," says the man who spoke to Lili. His companion nods. "This is?" he turns and looks up at the front of the building. "Kent Library. Huhh. Letters are weird. ... Hey, what ... do you speak Seree?"

"Hey," the female deputy says in a completely disinterested way, "who are you?"
Joe circles the block counterclockwise as Janus went clockwise. He passes around the front, side, and back of a large white Methodist church on a fine green lawn with towering elm trees. The trees and the building have been there quite a while. On a whim, he cuts across the parking lot behind the church and heads straight to a gap in a wooden fence along the side of the lot. There's a certain smell from that direction ...

Stepping through the gap he steps into a line of pine trees that are planted right against the fence, and almost trips on a bleeding pink body that is dressed in very torn-up white garments. The body is torn up about as bad as the robe. The eyes are open. It's not immediately apparent whether the body is breathing, but first guess is "no."

Glancing up from the body, through the pine branches, Joe sees a parking lot with a couple of older cars, a book return bin, a sheriff patrol car with cycling lights, and the back of the library - he's sure about that because there's a sign that says Kent Library. He also sees Janus, who appears to be talking to someone out of his view in an alcove where the back doors probably are.

Joe probably can't be seen where he is.

"Yeah, we came outta there," says the so-far silent friend of the man who's puzzled by fonts. "Lotsa books in there, huh? Library. That makes sense. Yeah, we were at the library in Novydom and walked through the doors to the reading room and instead we were in this building here. We'd like to stay."

The "corpse" twitches and spasms and moans when Joe kicks it. Seems like it's not dead.
"Uh ..." the woman says to indicate that she doesn't understand what Janus is on about. "Right. I'm going to need you to leave the scene, mkay?"

Joe appears suddenly, in that way that he does. He's alarmingly quiet.

More alarming is the pink body he's cradling in both arms across his chest. It's wearing white clothes like the two men on the steps, but its clothing is torn up and so is its torso. There are smears of blood on the clothing and on Joe from carrying the body.

The body moans, apparently it's alive. The two pink people on the steps look frightened. The burly man gets up quickly and then stands awkwardly: he doesn't know what to do. The taller, slender man stands up more slowly "I'm a nurse," he says in that weird not-lip-synced "Seree" speech. "Let me see her."

The inside of the library is unremarkable. Fluorescent lighting with the weird slightly purple tint when the bulbs are starting to fail. Ugly short-pile carpet that probably came at a discount because no-one else wanted it. Yellowish wooden shelves, plenty of brightly-colored books. No people in here.

Wait.

Three people.

They're pink and they have crossbows. They look like they're doing what you're doing, just from the other side of things. One of them was more alert than the other two. She has her crossbow pointed at Chuck ... twang zip thnk.The bolt slams into Chuck's shoulder, where the vest doesn't cover. Bone stops it. Nothing vital. Hurts like a sumbitch, though.

Chuck yanks the bolt out. A little blood runs down his arm, but thankfully the head was smooth not barbed. He can use the arm.

Joe's fast. He ducks under the crossbow bolt that zips over his head and snaps in half when it hits the brick wall next to the doors.Lili ducks behind the bookshelf. The crossbow bolt knocks a book into her shoulder, but she doesn't even get a paper cut.

The three crossbow wielders cautiously lower their weapons. "What are you doing?" asks the woman who shot Chuck.

The wounded pink person appeared to have been savagely bitten by something about the size of a large dog.

Janus glances quickly at the crossbows. They look ... not modern? Not ancient? Vaguely steampunk or gearpunk or some kind of early industrial aesthetic / tech level. Victorian? Well made and with a flavor of "mass produced." Lot of cast metal and some kind of very light-weight, very hard wood.

The library looks undisturbed. The "outside" at the back door looks wrong, though. More like another layer of "inside." Less well-lit than the main part of the library, there are bookshelves where Janus thinks there ought to be a parking lot and a little brick-paved area and where is the annoying sheriff's deputy and her patrol car? Yep, that's the incursion.

Joe smells pinkies who used to be in this room. They got frightened and left. He doesn't know where they went.

Something moves among the shelving to the right. It's about the size of a dog. It's out of sight now.

The pink dog lizard collapses and dies.

The thing emits a shrill noise as its spine crushes against the bookshelf. It spasms and falls to the floor, twitching.

There is a moment to look around ...

One bloody mess of pink lizard dog thing. They bleed red. One other pink lizard dog that has stopped twitching and stopped breathing. Chuck must have hit its cervical spine just right.

A shelf of books with illegible writing on their spines. Spoken language seems to translate fine across the worlds, but writing not so much. Weird?

Everything stays still.

The Plumb continues to pull on Janus' neck, toward the doors where the pink fellow glanced in and withdrew.

The stone pulls up and to the right, kind of toward a corner of the big squarish orange building to the right of the crowd.

The crowd look at you all emerging from the door. They briefly talk to each other, then one of them steps forward a couple of steps. "Hey," she says uncertainly, "what ... what's going on?"

Two pink people with crossbows approach from the left. They're carrying the crossbows over their shoulders on slings, unloaded. They see you, and the crowd, and hurry their walk to kind of get between you and the crowd. They leave space between you all and the pink woman who spoke to you. They're looking at you inquisitively. They have not readied their crossbows.

The woman who greeted you glances over her shoulder. "Oh - that's the citadel," she says casually.

One of the two men with crossbows says, "We would like to seal this incursion. What do you know about these things?"