Welcome to Gaia! ::

The storm crackled outside the place she'd made her home on this planet. There were holes in the roof that she could see the sky through, but since it wasn't raining, it didn't bother her as much. Something was different; the air felt charged, and the storm gave her an unsettling sense of familiarity. Looking at the device she'd gotten off one of those cats, she stared for a long while between it and the sky.

After seeing the trainwreck of a thing that Asmodeus had to deal with, she wasn't too keen on visiting her world, but that familiarity gnawed at her as did something else. Of the thousands of books, she knew hers was still up there among the piles of tomes. Even if it wasn't useful anymore, it was still hers, and she didn't want to have anything of hers tied to that sad excuse for a world.

While she didn't really like Earth much so far, it was a new place she could do as she pleased at. That and she'd been picking up things from the books that the half blind woman had been leaving for her. The first pen she had, some sort of technical thing, had made it easier to grasp the language but the context was still something she was figuring out. Most of the books explained the city and history behind it, showing architecture and photos of things. Some of them were language books, things to help her understand how people referred to things.

Clicking her tongue, she grabbed one of the bags that had been left recently and emptied the new books out onto the floor next to the other stacks. With it empty, that meant she could take what she needed while keeping a visible record as she went through things. If she could manage what she needed on one trip, she was going to do it. It already had her pissed that she needed to go back, that she'd forgotten things, but it wasn't as if she'd known her confinement was going to come to an end the way it had.

Stepping outside and locking the door behind her, she tapped at the device and closed her eyes. When she opened them, she was back standing in the thick grey air of her world, staring at the still standing library ahead of her. Crackles of lightning struck the ground further off, and she internally cursed at how unlucky she was that none of them had seemed to hit the library. Again and again things popped up to bother her, only the one human woman seemed to understand that she didn't want to be bothered with the problems of others. The rest continuously tried her patience, agitating her when she was trying to figure things out.

The rotted door still hung open from when she'd made her escape, the worn path in the floor was just as she'd left it, and that deafening silence still hung in the air as she moved past the main area of the library. The side room took some effort to get into, the door bending and warping as she pulled but fought to open it. Groaning, she kicked at the door and it finally relented and swung slowly open.

Even if she hadn't spent much time in this part of the library, she still remembered where some of the books were. The shelves had held up fairly well, proof that things had been built to last far longer than others had expected. The towering shelves seemed mostly undisturbed, only a few books having fallen to the floor and recovered in dust. The continued thunder and lightning didn't bother her but did remind her of what she was looking for. It hadn't been important, probably still wasn't, but that nagging in the back of her mind needed to be placated.

Dragging her nails over the spines of the journals and logbooks, she pulled a few free until she found one that had fared better than the others over time. Flipping through it, she saw the scribbled reports of a trader before tucking it away. More books on travels and one on Earth came with it, she might as well pull what she could. The air was thick with dust and miasma, and she didn't want to waste time.

Once she was satisfied, she walked back to the main room and looked over the piles of open books. Each one had the same warped and muddled black ink on it. A cipher she had no clue over how to solve. As it stood, she couldn't even tell which was her own book anymore. Kicking a few closed with her heel, she picked up a few of them to bring back to Earth. It was a long shot but maybe she could find if anything from the blue planet she was staying on might help her decipher things.

She felt nothing for this place as she looked around at the decorated prison she'd been caught in. If there was a way for everything to burn, she'd do it herself, but as it stood, she wasn't sure if the miasma would hinder or help her goal. Lighting a match, testing things, it flickered weakly for a moment before puffing out. It couldn't be that easy, just her luck.

Stepping back outside, she wanted to avoid coming back. There wasn't much for her here, and she didn't like testing things to see if she'd continue to be able to leave. That lingering worry about getting trapped here again gnawed at her, and she quickened her pace and pulled the phone back out. Tapping at the thing, some sort of version of what she knew was a cell phone, she made her way back to that house. She wouldn't call it a home; it wasn't that, but neither was Portia. She wasn't quite sure she felt like she had one, something that she knew others longed for based on the reading she'd been doing.

It was a place to be, nothing more than that, and if the journal was right, then, unfortunately, it might not be a place to exist for much longer.

WC: 1,034