On closer inspection, the courtyard was less of a courtyard and more of a tiered amphitheater, though the tiers were long and shallow. It reminded him of brown bag concerts at the zoo during summer vacation. The tiers descended off to his left, and all he could see at the bottom was a pile of rubble from a collapsed building. Had a stage once stood there? He couldn’t tell. But he couldn’t very well envision what it once had been.

The giant library stood on the other side of the courtyard, and Kaldalis made his way across towards it. From up-close, the building looked large and ominous. He could now see the frescoes painted into the pale columns, and they depicted an unbroken chain of otterlike humanoids holding hands. The splotchy art style began at one end of the building, near the top of the column, and ran the length of the arch, until two columns met, where their fuzzy little hands reached across that barrier, holding hands to continue the chain up the next archway. They were all dressed in loose cloth wrappings, like what he’d seen on the statue, but in every color of the rainbow.

Kaldalis stepped up to the nearest visible door. It was a big door, suited for dramatic entrances. A fifteen-foot tall double door made of thick green stone, with no visible lock or latch. He set his hands against each door and pushed, letting the door give him the dramatic entrance it begged for as he stepped inside.

After exploring the rest of the city, he was shocked at the state of this building. It looked much like a library, which he expected, but what he hadn’t expected was that it appeared to be nearly untouched by time. Wooden furniture not just intact, but pristine. Rows and rows of shelves filled the building. But unlike what Kaldalis was used to, the stacks looked more like racks than shelves; crossed wooden planks stuffed with leather tubes that he guessed must hold rolled scrolls.

“H-how?” Kaldalis stammered, looking around as he entered the room. “How is this all still intact? Everywhere else, there’s nothing left but stone or metal. But leather? Wood? Maybe even paper? How is this all still here?” He considered for a moment, and shook his head. “Of course. It’s so that the plot can happen. Silly me.”

As he approached the nearest shelf, he got a better view of the rest of the room. The racks ran along the walls, with more running through the room defining a series of separate aisles. Despite the diminutive stature he guessed the denizens of this civilization must have, they reached up to the ceiling almost twenty feet up. As if in answer to his confusion, he saw that there was a rolling ladder nearby leaning against one of the shelves. He made his way to the nearest rack and gingerly pulled one of the scroll cases out.

Despite the anticipated age, the leather felt soft and smooth under his hands. He expected it to be dry and flake away at his touch, but it just felt worn and well-used. Tentatively, he unscrewed the cap and looked inside. Despite the intact leather case he had pulled off of an intact wooden rack, he was still surprised to see an intact scroll inside. He poked it with one finger to make sure it wasn’t going to crumble before he pulled it out.

The scroll was made from papyrus, as Kaldalis could feel from the rough texture, and see from the fibrous lines that ran up and down and side to side of the sheet. He carefully unrolled it, and though it resisted and curled from being rolled up so tightly, the scroll was perfectly intact and readable.

Or it would be, if he could understand what language this was. For a moment, the text swam in front of his eyes and he expected it to resolve into something readable, but then he realized that was just because it was a bunch of tiny little squiggles. The swimming came from how small the text was, each row of squiggles barely more than a tenth of an inch tall. The writing was made up of little curving strokes built together in characters of a style unlike anything Kaldalis was familiar with. He couldn’t even guess what Monsoon’s inspiration had been for this writing. Of what he was familiar with, it looked most like Japanese, but the characters were all made of the same curving strokes, necessitating the characters to be extremely complicated in order to have enough unique letters for a proper alphabet.

“This feels embarrassing to admit,” Kaldalis said, “but I’ve been in this world for almost a month and I don’t remember if I ever read anything. Is this an arcane language requiring a raid tier’s worth of time to translate, or am I Jared, 19, and I never fuckin’ learned how to read?”

Without anyone to discuss it with, all he could do was tuck the scroll back into its case and put it into his inventory. A part of him wanted to grab them by the handful and take as many as he could carry, but as soon as it went into his inventory, he got a new quest on the right side of his vision.

Does This Look French To You?

Deliver the Ancient Scroll to a researcher.

“Alright then,” Kaldalis said after a moment’s pause, “I’ll leave the rest for future adventurers to collect.” He looked around at the thousands of scrolls filling the room. “Though maybe I’ll be back to grab a second one sometime. Or six. I have a couple of more charms to replace.”

Despite himself, Kaldalis found himself perusing the stacks as he made his way through the building. Everything appeared to be labelled and sorted, but he couldn’t gauge that at all. He couldn’t read the labels, even if he knew what the scrolls were. The labels, at least, were printed a little larger than 8 point font, and while they were still just random markings, he got a slightly better view of them. The marks were very precise, and almost looked to have been painted by machine. Perhaps they were. Here, in the depths of the world and faced with unreadable lore, he had to wonder if perhaps these were all just generic assets that Monsoon would copy and paste every time there was a library. Maybe the library in Baimer looked the same, with these same markings and even these same scrolls.

He checked a few of the different aisles, finding them too similar for his eyes to tell much difference. He thought that the different shelves had different markings on their labels, but they were so strange and alien, he couldn’t be positive.

“I’m hoping that the stream is archiving all of this, and cryptography nerds are hard at work deciphering all of this,” Kaldalis said to the empty air as he turned the next corner. “Because I don’t really have the skillset to try it myself.”

He found a staircase at the back of the room, behind all the aisles, and decided to climb, exploring more of the building.

The stone stairs led him up into another library room much like the one he had just left, with the walls lined by racks of scrolls, and a few more racks running the width of the room, but these racks were much lower, only about three feet high, giving him a clear view out over the whole room at once. Instead of more shelving, the far side of the room was lined with long wooden tables. He made his way over, seeing that there were piles of empty scroll cases and unfurled bits of papyrus strewn across a few of the tables.

“I’ve seen this before,” Kaldalis said, approaching the nearest table and casting his gaze across the familiar scene, “this wasn’t just a library. This must have been a school.” He reached out and touched a piece of papyrus that was only partially covered in that curvy scrawl he was coming to think of as Otterscratch. Not too far to one side was a tiny green reed brush, the tip stained black with ink. He crouched down beside the low table, looking at the little tooth marks in the brush handle, just like he’d seen on a thousand cheap ballpoint pens in college. “These were someone’s notes. Preparing for a big test. But then why would they leave it all behind?”

He remembered, once, when the fire alarm had gone off in his college library during finals week. The librarian had been a huge stickler for the rules and had started yelling at people who were gathering up their things, ordering them to leave it behind and come back for it after. Something had happened here. Something awful.

A tragedy had struck this civilization, that much was true. Otherwise, this city wouldn’t be made of dessicated husks of buildings as far as the eye could see. Had these students been here when it struck? Was there an alarm for them, driving them to amble away from their work at a brisk pace, until they realized that it was no drill?

What happened here?

What happened to these people?

There was a door off to his left, leading farther into the building, and he hoped that he might find answers here, in the one place where everything hadn’t been rotted to nothing.