Welcome to Gaia! ::

It's... rather anticlimactic, actually. A warm, comfortable room that looks like a library or study area, exactly like you might find back at Amityville Academy. A cheerful fire crackles in the fireplace; the walls are paneled in dark wood, and elegant bookcases stretch up to the ceiling... though, weirdly enough, all the books appear to be identical. Volume IX of Hertail's Guide to Dating. Huh.

The room also has no windows and no doors. What happened to the one that led in here? Wherever you thought it was, it's gone now. Maybe one of the bookcases sidled over it when you weren't looking? The only obvious exit now is... the fireplace? And the fire is still lit, mind you, but you think you can see something etched on the tiles behind the leaping flames.




Once the fire is out, you can see that there is indeed an odd pattern to the tiles in the back of the fireplace.... and that, when you check the chimney, there's a very solid metal grate across it, preventing you from getting through. Darn.

Still, you find your attention focused on the tiles. They form a strange four by four grid filled with symbols, which have been warmed by the flame (i.e. Toby can see them too). The longer you observe the puzzle, the more the compulsion to try and solve it grows. It's as if the puzzle wishes to be solved. It looks like you can draw on the blank tiles with the leftover charcoal from the fire...

The room their group was directed to enter was very...warm. Shehk found herself having an immediate affinity for it, despite the crackling fireplace. Fire was still something she didn't find very safe, but she was more than happy to bustle up next to it, rubbing her hands together and attempting to suck up the heat from the room. Mmmm. She really liked this room. Yeah, she still needed to make sure she'd divvied out the Pumpkin Pills like she'd said she was going to, but..warmth. It had called to her cold dead body in a way that very few living obligations did. Not to say she didn't hold true to her obligations. She just liked being warm more.

Though she wasn't blind to the fact that the room was just...walls of books. There was something slightly stuffy about that and a look at the books left the pricolici pulling one off of the shelf and flipping through it. A few pages in, she began chuckling, wiping a tear of laughter from her eyes. "This is such a strange book." she noted with some amusement. "I mean... this stuff ..it's just.." she giggled again. Clearly Shehk was going to get the prize for being the first person in their group distracted by the contents of their room. Though she put it back after reading the table of contents and the first couple of pages.

"Wonder if we'd get in trouble throwing all these books in the fireplace." she noted, having not actually looked into said fireplace to notice the puzzle going on at the back of it. She was too busy pondering how long they could possibly stay in the warm room. She really liked the warm room. A lot.

Well, he hadn't really been expecting that. A moment after he'd finished slapping Nuk's hand off of his beltloop and the door swung closed on the dusky outdoors behind him, he found himself in eerily familiar territory. Had they gotten turned around somehow? This didn't look like the human world. Oh well, at least it seemed innocuous enough, not to question the trustworthiness of the appearances of strange rooms. Although from the wariness of the more experienced students, it seemed to Altair that he'd better keep his guard up. The incubus glanced around the room, blinking slowly, and a chill ran down his spine when he saw that the door they'd come through had disappeared.

Well, there was nothing for it now and not wanting to seem overly perturbed the demon sidled further into the library, dispersing with the others to move about the firelit room. As Shehk and Sammy began examining the books, making amused exclamations, Altair idly pulled down one of the tomes himself, before he noticed that every single spine was embossed with the same title.

"The hell is this? Some sort of joke?" he demanded, flicking the book shut with a thump and carrying it over with him to join the ghouls beside the fireplace. Squinting to try to peer past the flames and catch a glimpse of whatever they were seeing himself, he shortly gave up with a disgusted snort.

"I can't see anything with the damn fire blocking it," he answered Sammy. "And I ain't getting burned to find out."

"What the hell are you reading, Sammy??" Shehk flipped back to the table-of-contents with a baffled look on her face. "For the most part these books seem pretty straight forward." Shehk put the one back on the shelf before pulling the next one off of the shelf and flipping through it. She repeated this with a third. "The contents seem to be identical too..." she noted, before this look came over her face. "I swear, if we're supposed to find the one book that's like..minuscule in difference, I might break something in this room..." While she had a certain degree of patience, she didn't have nearly the amount required to scour the room for the one book that had the typo of 'the' in it.

However, the idea of a barbecue in a closed room didn't sound all that appealing to the Pricolici, who seemed to renege on her idea of throwing the books into the fireplace at all. "I guess that does sounds like a quick way to burn the room down completely...." she sighed, before pausing to take the box of pumpkin pills out of her bag again.

"Sammy, Toby. You should each put one of these in your first aid kit. Just to be safe and divvy them out so Altair doesn't have a heart attack over me having all of them." Not that the Incubus would actually have a literal heart-attack, but Toby didn't seem to have completely disowned him like she and Sammy had, so there was one small spot of salvation for him, right?

However, Nuk's quip at Altair made her chest burn and her ears drooped just a little bit. She didn't care who the Incubus kissed (as long as it wasn't her), but..... the entire idea of relationships was kind of rubbing salt in the proverbial wounds.

She swallowed that feeling down as much as she could, however, and pulled out a water-bottle, setting it down on the table by the fireplace. "I have two more of these.... though I'm not sure one bottle of water is going to be enough to put out this fire...."

Sammy turned to Shehk smirking, "Chapter 20; after courting. Was the passage I found that in, spoiler I like to check the last chapter of books to see if they get to some good juicy climatic ending." Taking the pill she reached down to her cargo pocket pulling out a small bottle of painkillers adding the black and orange pill to the top of the bottle.

When Altair and Nuk finally arrived she offered them each a quick wave of welcome. Again she turned back to the fire squinting at the marks on the far side. "Fraid it ain't joke boil. We're trapped in a library dedicated to the fine art of humans flirting and dating with the most extensive collection of the same book ever." Slowly she gesutred towards the fire again, "Toby see's it, get down a little lower and look past the flames."

Suddenly Nuk was behind them making suggestions that caused her to roll her eyes with a groan. "Please Fleabag, I have a ghoulfriend, and if I was going to kiss anything it'd be Shehk then Toby." She glanced at Toby offering a quick shrug and a relaxed smile as she rummaged through her pack. "Probably Shehk, it'd be rude of me to kiss a ghoul I just barely know on our first fieldtrip together."

Slowly she moved away running her fingers over each and every book. "No books on the fire; I like the fire in the fireplace and not burning the room down. As for putting it out with water, that seems like a waste of water in general." Lazily she grabbed at a random book. "Maybe we should just start tugging the books off the shelves till we find the right one. Could be like some of those movies you guys watch in that one club." She turned making the universal Halloween gesture for 'creepy crawly movie' wiggling her fingers, "You know like a good ol spook film." She paused when Toby revealed the claw hidden on her tail and she could only whistle at the display. "That might work, or we could end up setting the floor on fire when we tug it out..."

Without thinking she reached up to poke at another book aimlessly. Of course nothing actually happened. It was never that easy as simply tugging a random book down.

Shehk simply accepted the fact that she wasn't going to be giving Altair any sense of security. Not to say it didn't feel a bit like a jab to think that he suspected she'd leave him to rot. It wasn't fun to try and save people in vain and frankly she'd already died for enough people. Peh. Whatever. However, it seemed she also had some of the uncertainty about stomping out the log as well, lips tightening just a bit.

"Let's see if we can't find a clue before we do that. If we do set something on fire, then we won't have enough time before my panic button flips to find another solution." the pricolici seemed to agree that the books had to be something to do with that fire. Well.... "I mean, I can't imagine they put these books in here for no reason. Especially not so many copies of it. Unless one of the Boogeymen wrote the book and wanted to make sure all the copies sold." it was supposed to be a joke, but Shehk seemed to realize it wasn't as funny as she intended it to be as she reached up to pull a book off of the shelf she'd been investigating.


"Either that, or this is meant to jab at me." she added as a mutter underneath her breath, not really loud enough for anybody who wasn't eerily close to her to hear...and frankly, that person would probably end up getting elbowed. However, it seemed the book Shehk had picked up hadn't yielded any more results than anybody else's attempts to find anything.

Looking back to Toby, Shehk shrugged; "if you do try, save the water for after the fact in case something sets on fire...please...."