Sorting through the records

 -report continued-

 

Over breakfast, I asked Guide Maslan about the light. Rather than giving me a straight answer, she told me another of their tales. Elleka claims that long a ago, a family of Sani Sabik hid in the depths of the Book, fleeing persecution. They survive from eating the leather of the book bindings, and feast on rats and on the occasional visitor they can catch, although they are wary to eat Guides, afraid of the repercussions. My Guide also claims that in the area up where I saw lights, there is a statistically significant anomaly: too few rodents. That, according to her, is hard proof of the hidden Sabik. She says they reverted back to a feral state, and in the passing of generations have grown inbred and became horrorible to behold.

 

I objected that if the system can detect vermin, surely they can detect human beings wandering about. She just scoffed, telling me it's easy to avoid the cameras. I was not reassured. You see, in these inner layers of the book there is no telling that it was morning, it is always dark except for the spot of motion-activated light where you are. So, it again felt like a campfire tale, for breakfast.

 

We made it rather soon to my destination the second day. Keeper Thadron had given me a list of records to check. Every record contains basic data such as date of birth, partents, marriages, children, date of death. If the children on the written record do not match the digitized version, this means either an error or one of them got stricken. I could check this by locating the "missing records", and verifying if the line containing that name was indeed crossed out. My task was to tally up the missing branches of the Accadis lines.

 

Although my Guide was doing some maintenance in the neighborhood, I did not feel safe. Also, I was not comfortable. There were not chairs or desks to sit at, so I had to stand or sit on the ground and walk about to find the records within the confines of my section. I'm embarassed to admit I hid when the lights came closer, and only came out of hiding once I could see that it was Guide Maslan who had come back to my spot.

 

I took me four or five hours to complete the task, handling each book with records carefully, with gloves, and putting one back before taking another. But in the end it was a success, there was indeed one of the lines rife with heretics. If any Accadis would have fled Amarr on cryoships, it would be these ancestors. After I collected my documentation, we made our way back. This took the entire rest of the day, as Guide Maslan navigated a route that allowed her to pick up dead rats from some traps.

 

It was a strange sensation to be in there, and stranger to exit it back to the outside world. As if I had jumped into some strange pocket universe, with its own physics and its own concept of space. I am deeply grateful I had this unique experience, one that I will not likely forget. 

-end of report-