GRATIA // PSL

[birdsbirdsbirds]

"The Archive", as people call it, is the single-greatest collection of written information in all of Skeleton City. It is a massive, multi-leveled cylindrical chamber filled with concentric rings of tall, imposing shelves made from wood, metal, and occasionally, the cave walls themselves. Large platforms are suspended on stone bridges above and below the main level, allowing for study spaces and the occasional, separated collection. The space is hushed, as these spaces usually are, with most of the sounds of shuffling feet or conversation reduced to muffled background static between the rows of soft binding and thin parchment. High up in the ceiling is a large, back-lit, stained-glass window, which casts the entire chamber in dim, gently-shifting colors.

Despite all this, it's actually rather boring. There are very few actual books in this library, and most of those are recently-written biographies, historical accounts, philosophical texts, or extremely repetitive business ledgers. The rest of the space is taken up by scrolls, loose files, and what amount to simple index cards. A significant chunk of the Archive is taken up by identification records and police procedural. You could probably look up any recorded crime from any day in the past three decades, but good luck finding simple field guide or a scrap of poetry. The only people who frequent this building are religious scholars, hired detectives, and the spies who actually know how to read.

There are treasures to be found, of course, interesting folk stories or old books that have been lovingly hand-copied by someone onto a six-part series of scrolls, but the effort is not worth the prize for very long. The Archive also has a significant lack of information regarding magic or the existence of monsters, which is why it has taken Robin so long to find anything even remotely relevant to his current plight.

He's still where Tek left him, tucked into a desk near the edge of the room, mostly out-of-sight of the main walking paths but not so hidden away that he couldn't be wandered-upon by another visitor. At this point he's amassed several stacks of old-looking articles, genealogy charts, and weathered journals, and has slowly progressed from sitting like a human to hunching over some written account with his legs crossed and his head propped up by a gloved hand.

He hasn't found the answer he was looking for. He has some ideas, vague scraps of information that he could scrape together into a cover story... But if worse comes to worse, he'll be going up against someone almost as smart as he is, so vague ideas will only buy him time. They won't fix the problem.

The big... dragon-shaped, magic-using, monster-attracting problem.

He's not actually confident on the causality of that last one, but his research into that has not gone much better than his research into a new cover story. He's very wrapped up in his own busy thoughts by the time his aforementioned problem comes looking for him.