Library: Episode 13
The plane landed on the Library runway with it’s signature bang thump whump sound, it’s single passenger cowering under one of the nice, padded leather seats in first class. Because of it’s small size, first class was the only class, but it was still a nice padded leather seat that he fit under rather nicely. Of course, 12-year old boys usually fit almost anywhere. They’re easily compactible, much like teenage theater going girls, just minus popcorn. He poked his orange dyed head out from under the seat, revealing just enough neck for several spiked collars to be visible. None of them were quite tight enough, but that wasn’t important. What was important was that the inflight movie, “Bambi vs. Godzilla,” was over. He sighed in patent relief. That had been horrible, terrifying, the worst thing he’d ever seen. Including Martian Bob on a rampage. It had been kinda cool the way Bambi went splat in the first ten seconds, but the overly cute little deer’s presence had been enough to curdle the film.
He crawled out the rest of the way, brushing lint off his black jean jacket, which clattered with several lengths of chain, an unidentifiable piece of metal that used to be a master lock, and his lucky rabbit’s foot. It was dyed peach and green. His jeans were shredded in a few places, chains artistically drapped between pockets, clattering just short of the tops of his very well worn-in Docs. The rolled up sleeves of his jacket revealed leather bracers extending halfway up his forearms, short silver studs arranged in diagonal lines across them. He wore a black t-shirt under the jacket, and a collection of thick ball chains. He’d come to visit his cousins.
“PYLAAAAAAAAAAAAA!” Reea’s lightsaber had gone missing again, and there was only one fiend in the Library who stole weaponry. That fiend, was Reea’s sister and co-conspirator. Pyla snickered, and then she heard, through the bookcase she was crouched behind, vibrations from the runway. Forgetting in an instant about needing to hide from her murderous sibling, Pyla launched herself out of hiding, three feet behind her sister, screaching.
“DANNNNNNNNNYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!!” Her favorite kid cousin had come to visit. Reea, disconcerted by the sudden blood-curdling cry from a mere yard to her rear, whirled around, lost her balance, and fell on her butt.
“HUH?”
Pyla was too busy racing up the stairs to the runway level to realize that the proof of her crime was hanging on a belt loop. Her sparkly combat-booted feet slapped on every third step of the staircase. Reaching the top, she arrived just in time to see her pipsqueak punk of a cousin disembark, a ratty duffel bag over one shoulder. He had precisely three nanoseconds to realize what was about to happen to him before his much larger and much older cousin knocked him head over heels, leaving him feeling as though the entire defensive line of the 1998 Green Bay Packers line-up had just sacked him.
“ouch...” He suddenly lacked the energy for capital letters. “my spleen...”
Pyla was oblivious to her beloved cousin’s discomfort. “DANNY!” She was screaching in his ear, unheeding of his steadily dimming hearing capabilities in her joy. Reea shortly trekked up the stairs, glowering at her sister’s behind, which was all she could see. That and a pair of Doc Martin-ed feet. Attached to a pair of legs in ratty black jeans. There was only one person in the multiverse that Pyla would tackle and who dressed like that. “DANNY!” She joined the pile-up on poor Danny’s pointy little head. The Librarian arrived in time to save Danny’s life, though his spleen was long since beyond respite.
After an hour in the med bay, where Hawkeye’s mutters of “magnificent” and Gabrielle’s insistence on cauterizing wounds wasted about 45 minutes, it was determined that nothing, including Danny’s spleen, had been wounded irreparably. Pyla was almost disappointed, until she remembered that she actually liked this cousin and didn’t want to hurt him. Badly. Reea was looking decidedly sheepish that she’d lost her composure so completely. So she didn’t get to see Danny often. That didn’t mean she had to go absolutely ape when she did. It wasn’t like he was her long lost boyfriend or anything. Just a kinda cute kid cousin she saw every now and then. Danny was just glad to be alive, despite the needle Gabrielle kept having to save his posterior from. The Librarian sighed.
“Are you satisfied that he is all in one piece and not about to change in the near future? I don’t think even these girls could damage him permanently in so little time. They were too busy hugging him. I’m rather surprised they didn’t break his ribs.” Both twins looked decidedly sheepish.
“We’re not quite satisfied that he hasn’t suffered some sort of dental disfunction as a result of the sudden redirection of kinetic energy developed by Pyla’s rapid acceleration once airborne.”
“English, please.” The Librarian’s voice had a hard edge in it.
“We think he might have chipped a tooth when Pyla tackled him.”
“Oh. Well why didn’t you just say that?” Hawkeye shrugged. The Librarian groaned. “Out. Get him out of that straitjacket and into the guest quarters. He’s fine.” Hawkeye opened his mouth to protest, he still hadn’t administered the proper inoculations, but the look in the Librarian’s eyes was sufficient to dissuade him from that course of action. To be blunt, he clammed up, and Danny found himself liberated from the constraining, white garment. It clashed with his usual look anyway. And who in their right mind would put spikes across the shoulder and cuffs of a straitjacket? Assuming, of course, that they could find the cuffs?
The guest quarters were nice enough. A bit bland, and Martian Bob had obviously already visited as evidenced by the green spray paint marks on the carpet. The twins had done a good job cleaning up after him, though, and none of his other trademarks were visible. With a grin, revealing a pearly set of fangs that his cousins had somehow failed to notice in their hurry to reduce him to a grease spot on the runway, he produced three cans of spray paint from within his jacket and shook them. Within moments, the prepubescent spray paint artist was working on a massive mural in black, red, and blue. The Librarian walked in just in time to see him put the finishing touches on a massive Death’s head with the words “Stop Saying That!” written across it’s forehead. She passed out in a most un-Librarian like fashion, the alarm in the twins’ apartment disrupting Reea’s daily feeding of her albino alligator, and spoiling her plans to introduce the beast to Danny.
“Damn... never fails. She always wants us when I’m busy.” The two female immortals trekked down to the guest quarters, saw the mural, and grinned.
“Niiiiice...” Pyla offered, taking a purple can of spray paint from one back pocket and beginning work on an Oriental dragon on the back of the door. Reea nodded her agreement with her sister’s eloquent declaration and produced a can of paisley spray paint. At her co-artist’s questioning looks, she shrugged.
“You guys weren’t doing anything to the cieling. Ceilings look good in paisley.” The other two in the room resolved not to ask.
While the three spray paint artists were thus occupied, and school was in session so all other diurnal occupants of the Library were occupied there, and Connor and Ramirez were doing their daily patrol of the sewer system under the planetary building complex, a black clothed, black haired man with a striking resemblance to a certain blonde nocturnal resident of the Library was on the roof, cutting a hole in the stained glass sky light. He took great care not to set off any alarms, not that there were any to set off, and then promptly tripped a trip wire as soon as he dropped through the hole in the ceiling on a thin wire that, truth be told, didn’t look like it really should be able to hold his weight. Muttering under his breath that someone named Ambrose was less troublesome than this bunch, he grinned like a fool and dropped the rest of the way to floor, hovering spread eagled above the floor, for no apparent reason, for a few minutes. Perhaps he was fascinated by the new tile flooring Pyla and Reea, but mostly Pyla, had recently installed. It was very nice marble. Whatever had riveted his attention on the floor, he finally snapped out of it, dropped to his knees on the floor, unhooked the wire, and watched it fly back up through the hole in the glass. He unholstered his gun, fully expecting someone to respond to the aggravating trip wire. Pyla, Reea, and Danny shortly accomodated his expectations a la roadrunner, zooming into the room and stopping on a dime. Reea meep meeped as Pyla reached under her boot and picked up the dime. “Yessssss!” Danny blinked, then turned his gaze on the former biological chandelier.
“Hey, I know who you are...” He was cut off by his indigo haired cousin.
“Lestat, what are you doing up and about during the day? And what did you do to your hair?” The black haired Lestat look alike blinked.
“I’m.. uh.. not Lestat.” He grinned like a fool, revealing that, indeed, he couldn’t be Lestat, he didn’t have fangs.
Pyla smacked her cousin in the back of the head. “He’s not Lestat! Just like Louis isn’t Jeffrey!”
Reea rubbed her head and muttered, “thank the gods,” under her breath. “Then who, my all knowing sister dearest, is he?”
“I’m Dimitri.”
“No you’re not.” Pyla was very firm about this.
“Yes, I am. I’m Dimitri.”
“No, Mr. Hunt, you are not. However, if you keep claiming to be this Dimitri guy, I can always turn you over to our in house physician for a shot. He thinks it clears up everything, and there really is no arguing with Hawkeye.” Ethan Hunt shuddered. He had watched M*A*S*H.
“Ok, ok... you’ve caught me. I’m not Dimitri, I’m Ethan Hunt.”
“Yes, we know, I said that already. Go to your room. We’ll have a job assignment for you within the hour.”
“But I.. I came to do a mission.”
“Uh huh. You finally came across the impossible one. You’re not leaving.”
Ethan sighed in defeat. It was an unfamiliar sensation, but he knew when he was beaten. “Alright. Where’s my room? Is it fully stocked? I require an attractive female lead.” Reea opened her mouth to answer, but was cut off by Pyla. And Danny’s hands. Reea was at a loss for a way of removing the appendages from her face, giving Pyla the needed time to inform the distraught Mr. Hunt that he would have no attractive female lead until he found one for himself. And that, no, there would be no bath tub scene.
After sending the still despondent secret agent off to his room and arranging for it to be locked as soon as he closed the door, Pyla and Reea skipped off to consult the big book of jobs. There were always openings for new people in the Library, and they could always find something for new people to do.
“Hmm... book retriever?”
“No, too easy. Mystic book retriever?” By this, Pyla did not mean books about things mystical, she meant the books guarded by mystical incantations and other assorted booby traps, and therefore exceedingly difficult to catch.
“Part time?”
“Yes. Not enough people check out the mystical books. We have to keep him busy or he’ll complete his mission. We can’t have him returning the books we loaned to his boss. We’re living off those fines.”
“Ohh... OOO! Used car salesman! I’d buy a car from him...” Pyla slapped her sister out of her not quite clean reverie.
“You’d buy a car from Maul and Lestat too, and I don’t trust either of them any further than I could throw a bookshelf. You know how they drive.” Pyla graded people on their driving and considered it a very revealing aspect of their personality. “But... selling used cars is very difficult... and we don’t truly have any “Impossible” assignments... he can do that.”
Later that evening, a tomato popped through a trap door in the ceiling that Ethan was sure had not been there before. There was a small speaker embedded in it’s side, and from it came a message.
“This is a recording. Were it not a recording, someone would have fallen through the cieling for you instead. We are sorry, but we are fresh out of disposable free-falling biological chandeliers. Your mission, whether you like it or not, is to sell used cars to the denizens of the Library. You may not choose your coworkers, and you may not assemble your IMS team. You must work with normal people, like the rest of us. See how you like it. When business gets slow, you are to defeat the mystic books and retrieve them for Giles. He needs them. He’s talking about the world ending for the 17th time this week. This tomato will explode, redecorating your room in a way you didn’t know a tomato could, now.”
The message ended, and the tomato did exactly as promised, leaving the room entirely covered in red, soggy tomato flesh, and one very distraught Ethan Hunt standing in the middle of it, hands on his hips, no longer grinning like a fool.