"Hahhhhhhhh!" gasped a voice. A shape covered with dark black tendrils burst from the water, and two hands emerged to brush away the tendrils and reveal a face that was gasping for air, happy to finally be able to breathe again. It was an extremely annoyed face, the face of someone who had just been dumped unceremoniously in a river and was now forced to tread water.
"Seriously?" another, quite feminine, voice added. "The best plan you could think of was to drive through the railing?"
"Well, they're not chasing us anymore, are they?" replied yet another voice, much more masculine. The figure turned and began swimming in the direction of the other two voices. It was rather easy, seeing how they were downriver of her.
"True, but if you haven't noticed, the bus is busted!" she called out. Her sister, as well as the former driver, turned around from the piece of metal they had been sitting on and utilizing as a makeshift raft.
"Get on!" called the man. "Not all of the bus fell apart! And most of our stuff was in the waterproof compartment, which should be drifting by any moment now!"
"Well, at least you had that much forethought," muttered the woman, dragging herself onto the piece of metal. It was quite crowded, with the three of them squeezing together.
"How are we going to reach the rendezvous now, though?" she added. The man shrugged.
"We'll think of a plan when we need to!" She just sighed. Well, this wasn't the worst situation they had got themselves into, at least.
11) Memory
"We are the keepers of memory," Kirak read off the document. It was above the entrance to the archives, and located on the letterhead of almost all the place's stationery. Right now, he was reading from one of the histories of the archives, which also had the famous quote on the title page.
"Of course we are!" snapped Miss Shrike. "If it wasn't for us, much of the world's knowledge would fall into oblivion, unknown and unappreciated!" She was in a bad mood today, probably because a patron had brought her children along, and they had completely decimated one of the tunnels playing hide and seek. Luckily, most of the documents could be salvaged, but actually rebuilding the tunnel would take a while. Kirak had offered to help, but Aral had told him that he was actually meant to read up on the archives' history today. Not that he minded...there were interesting things about them.
"Do you mean that literally? Surely there are other lib-archives around, aren't there?" asked Kirak. He had nearly made the fatal blunder of calling the archive a "library," a term Miss Shrike hated. Well, at least he had caught himself in time, and she hadn't seemed to notice.
"Yes, but none of them are as good as ours! All our knowledge has been extensively catolouged, perfectly organized to make every single fact easy to find. And our archives are also physically superior. None of those others have as extensive a tunnel system, or as organized a shelving system, or as skilled shelvers as ours!" The last line was directed straight at Kirak, who blinked in surprise. Had he just received...a compliment?
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"Yeah, that was a compliment," said Aral. "She never gives out specific compliments-always gives a general statement. But you can tell when it's about you-like you said, she'll look you right in the eye." She nibbled at a biscuit that she had just dipped in tea. "You must be quite a talented worker, Kirak, to earn her favor so fast."
"Oh, I really don't do anything!" muttered the dragon, now embarrassed. "I just do as I'm told, and try to do it as fast as possible."
"But you also do it well," pointed out Aral. "If you didn't, she certainly wouldn't have looked at you when she said that, or possibly she wouldn't have mentioned it at all. She's odd like that. But you'll get used to her eccentricities."
"Oh, right, and about the slogan-"
"Ah, you wonder about it, don't you? But once you've come to work here more, you'll feel it." Aral leaned forwards, her biscuit placed down on the table and forgotten as she stared into Kirak's eyes, making him shudder with confused emotions. "You'll feel the pulse in the tunnels, the knowledge of the earth. The archives are memory. Even if you were to destroy all the documents, the archives would remember...and they would act." And with those ominous words, she leaned back and took another bite of the biscuit.
"You will learn, Kirak, don't worry."
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