Books And Covers Thereof (1.1)

It’s a quiet night, and twin moons shine down on the ocean, illuminating the permanently stationary fleet covering the bay.  The police corporal idly watches as lights begin to appear in the portcullises, like little fireflies on the water, bobbing up and down at the whims of strange tides.

So this is it, thinks the corporal.  Soon, the sun would come up, the moons would set, and he’d be home and in bed, sleeping the day away until he was called back on duty.  And no work that night, either - not until his squad was finally reassigned.  He should probably celebrate.

Celebrate.  That was a strange thought.  The lack of free time since joining the force had gnawed at him for a while, but now faced with it he was at a loss.  How did police officers celebrate?  Was it still acceptable to visit the dance clubs, even though they were packed with gangsters?  It seemed wrong, somehow.  Maybe they just got drunk and depressed.  He’d figure it out when he came to it.

A better question was exactly what poor fool they had gotten for day watch this week.  He’d take the night over the day anyway.  At least there wasn’t as much of a crowd.

“Hey, Dick!” shouts a voice behind him.  Corporal Richard doesn’t even bother to turn around.  He takes a drink out of his coffee mug.

“Hey, A.P,” he murmurs.

“It’s just Alex!” says the voice again.

Richard took another sip.  He refused to call Officer Alexander Pierce anything he actually wanted to be called, even in the unlikely event that Alex stopped calling him Dick.

“Wolf tribe pride!” shouted Alex suddenly, running up to Richard, his hand reared back to accept a high five.

Richard regarding Alex’s enthusiasm quietly.  Alex was a balding young man with a shaved head and a general fondness for guns.  Richard privately expected this was the only reason he’d join the police force. That and the fact that none of the gangs wanted him.

“Come on, man!  Slap one on me!”  Richard sighed and privately rolled his eyes under his glasses before stoically slapping Alex’s hand.

“Yeah!” shouted.

“You know what, Pierce, I’m gonna go ahead and go.  It’s about the end of my shift anyway,” Richard said, chugging the rest of his coffee after.

“Aw, man, sure you can’t stick around?  Maybe, uh, show me the ropes?  Dude?  Man?  Mandude?”

“Yeah, I’m sure.  Sorry.”  Richard grabbed his mug, checked to see that his pistol and sword hadn’t fallen off his belt during the night, and turned towards the street closest to home, and began walking.

“Catch ya later, man!” Alex called after him.

“Good luck with the morning rush.”

“What?”

“Later.”

In the distance, the well-maintained cruise liner that served as a de facto royal palace had lit up like a bright beacon.

                                                              *      *     *

Inside, a young woman yawned at her reflection in the mirror, groggily raising a hand to rub her eyes.

“No!  Oh, gods, sorry ma’am, I meant...your make-up...” Her favorite servant - though she didn’t like to think of it that way, and in any case it wasn’t her idea to have servants in the first place - stopped abruptly behind her, her voice shaking a little.  The woman squinted a bit closer at her blurry, tanned reflection, brushing aside her black-dyed hair from her face get a closer look.  This involved a great deal of squinting.

“Shall...I...get you your glasses, Princess Anilin?” her servant/friend said quietly.  “Sorry,” she added quickly and immediately.  “Sorry.”

The princess sighed internally.  “No, that’s quite all right Rhoda.  I just forgot you’d already put it on me.”  The princess puckered her pink lips in thought for a moment.  “I’m not awake yet.  You don’t need to apologize.”

“Sorry, princess.”

“Call me Annie.  Or Anne.”

“Sorry, princess.”

She went to rub her forehead in exasperation.

“PRINCESS!”

“Oh, right, sorry.”

“Sorry.”

“Sorry.”

“Sorry for causing you to say you are sorry, princess.”

“Don’t be.”
“Sorry.  I should be punished.”

“No, you shouldn’t.”

“Yes I should.  How will I learn?”

“By listening, silly.”

“Sorry.”

“What’s my schedule?” said Annie quickly, sensing the oncoming flow on the conversation and averting it.

Rhoda put down the hairspray, taking a moment to try and force a particularly unruly strand of Annie’s hair back into a proper curl.

“Umm...” she began, adopting a tone that Annie recognized as Rhoda thinking deeply.  “You are to attend breakfast with your parents and several of the city’s foremost nobles and businesspeople-”

“Nope.”

“-Then you, and, uh, your siblings are to, um, sit in the throne room as your parents listen to the, ah, concerns of all of the other tribes-"

“Ooh!  Neat.  Wait, are we allowed to comment?”

“Um, as I understand, no.”

“Oh.  Then nope.  I don’t suspect my brothers will be attending either.”

“Oh,” said Rhoda, her voice deflating slightly.  “Then you are to, um, attend lunch after, I suppose-”

“Rhoda, clear my schedule.”

“But-”

“Please, Rhoda.”

Rhoda sighed heavily.  “Very well, princess.  Um.  Are you going out, then?”

“Thank you, Rhoda.  And of course.”

“Oh.  I...don’t suppose you’d like the royal guard to come with you?”

“No, but thank you Rhoda.  I appreciate the thought.  I’m just going to the Library.”

Annie watched as Rhoda’s reflection in the mirror slowly turned upward, her eyes turning wide..

“Oh dear,” said Rhoda.

Through the reflection of the window behind her, Annie could see the day was beginning.  She watched as the sun glinted off the side of the Dragon’s Den Hotel, dominating her view of the landlocked parts of the city.  

The interesting parts.

                                                                   *     *    *

Not far away, in an apartment on one of the upper floors, a young man in his twenties, with long dark hair and light olive skin leaned against a wall, looking back out at the cruise liner.  One hand was pressed on the wall as if it was the only thing holding both the apartment and himself up.  The other was holding an analog phone to his ear.

His knuckles were white.

“I don’t see why we need a new model.  The current ones work just fine.  And so was the model before that.”

“That’s not for you to decide.  He’s asked you for a favor, you do it.  That’s just how it is.  You know this by now.”

He sighed, walking towards the window, then glancing back at the woman behind him.  She stood stoically, watching him with almost expressionless features.  While wearing a decidedly french maid outfit.

You couldn’t even hear the generator inside her.  He remembered being particularly proud of that.

“I just...Couldn’t I build other machines?  Isn’t there anything besides security and...Egh, entertainment we need?”

“That’s not how it works.  You’re not a kid anymore.  I can’t cover you.  When he asks you a favor, you do it.  We’re not a charity.”

He pushed his green shades up his nose to keep composed, but internally he wanted to throw the phone right through the window.  Again.

“Very well, I’ll get right on it after the ball.”

“Good boy.  Give your sisters my love.”

He wanted to say “Give them it yourself”.  He wanted to call him out on...Well, everything.  He wanted a confrontation.  He wanted shouting.

Instead, he just said “Yes sir.  Good bye” and hung up.

He watched below as, coincidentally enough, a probably-homeless person in torn, ratty clothes ran down a sidewalk.  Right behind him was one of the young man’s more..surly and burly and impeccably well armed children stomping it’s way after him.   

“Poor fellow,” he murmured.

The sun rose.

                                                                 *    *     *

Half a city away, bearing the brunt of the morning sun, was a Library.

The Library.

It was big.  It was old.  It had needed a good coat of paint long before the apocalypse, and it’s inheritors had constantly promised to get around to it, oh, but we’re so busy, there’s never enough time, we’ll certainly get to it later...

As with most endeavors began by smart but absent-minded folk, later never seemed to come.  Many an aging Librarian, on her deathbed recounting her life, would recall the curious failure to fix up the Library as her greatest regret among regrets.  Inevitably, just before she passed away, she would tearfully pass on the duty of Painting The Entire Outside Of The Library to her daughters.  And they would respond, as their mother faded away, that yes, they would certainly get around to it later.

The Passing Of The Failure To Paint The Library had, in lieu of a last name, become a long-valued tradition for the Librarians’ family line.  It was something you could leave for your children.  It was practically a metaphor about books and their covers, anyway.

Speaking of books and covers, there was a girl presently sitting on the roof, wrapped up in a ratty tiger patterned blanket.  Her long dark brown hair was untamed and unwashed, tangled up and knotted together from years of avoiding acknowledging it.  Her tanned skin was covered in dirt from years of scavenging and romping around wreckage and the occasional barely visible scar from years of getting injured by sharp bits and wild animals.

As the sun hit her face, her stomach rumbled.  She grinned wide.  Her teeth had seen better days.

She stood up,walked back to the skylight, opened a small latch in one corner, and dropped into the Library’s apartment’s living room.

Though she was on the edge of sleep, in her dreams Kitty could hear the creaking of a door.  Of course, since she wasn’t truly awake yet, she didn’t really react much.  She only made a kind of grumbling, gurgling noise and rolled over.

“Kitty,” says a voice at her feet, but in her dream it was a voice from someone towering over her.

“Mom?” said dream Kitty.  “Mmmmph,” said real Kitty.

“Kitty!” repeated the voice!  “(Breakfast!)” demanded the voice in the Tiger tribe’s language.

Dream Kitty wondered why Mom was shouting about breakfast.  Real Kitty drooled onto the feather pillow of her bed.

“KITTY!” repeated the voice, louder.  “Kitten! (Wake up!  Come on!  I’m hungry!)”  The voice’s owner began tickling Kitty’s exposed feet, causing her to snort and move her feet up.  Dream Kitty began wondering what she was standing in.

Exhausted of all other options, the voice’s owner reared back and leapt onto the bed.

Kitty awoke with a shout, rolling and looking upwards into her assaulter’s face. 

For Kitty, it was like looking into a mirror; by virtue of being sisters they were both of East Asian descent and both had taken heavily after their mother’s appearance.  Of course, this only extended so far; while her sister was tanned, Kitty was pale from spending too many years inside the Library.  Where her sister’s hair was wild, Kitty’s was short and styled.  And where her sister’s teeth and breath were somewhat...distinct, Kitty took great care to brush not only every day or after every meal but was prone to fits of spontaneous brushing out of sheer anxiety.

“(Good morning, sister!)” said the only-slightly-younger woman, moving back so Kitty could sit up. Kitty groaned and rubbed her eyes, focussing on her sibling.

“(Morning, Yu,)” mumbled Kitty, wrapping an arm around her sister and giving her a familial kiss on the cheek.  Yu chuckled and leaned on Kitty, hugging back.

“(I’m hungry,)” said Yu, looking up at her with that big, friendly smile.

“(I figured,)” responded Kitty, as their stomachs grumbled loudly in unison.  Yu gave her another grin, bounded off the bed, and ran out the hallway and down the stairs before anyone could raise the subject of baths this time.

Kitty sighs, standing up from the bed.  She’s presently still in her relatively clean button up pajamas.  Her room is clean; there’s a desk in the corner, neatly piled up with books of multiple languages.  There’s a mirror on the desk as well, along with a make-up kit.  Nearby is a personal bathroom - door presently closed.  A large white rug covers an otherwise unpleasant-looking cement floor.

It’s very early in the morning, and she’d better get her day started.  The Library’s not going to run itself, after all.

What will she do?