Chapter 38: Forgotten Techniques in the Library

Melissa couldn't help but feel a skip in her step as they finally drew near the Branton Public Library. She had very dim positive memories of the place from her childhood, Uncle Frank taking her there on one of his rare visits. Since then she'd done more of her research at school or on the internet. The idea that there was potentially such a valuable resource still available to her...

"You know," she said as she glanced over at her brother, "it's odd that they didn't talk about the public libraries more in school, if they're such a great resource."

"Yeah, it's odd." Rick frowned as if to himself and did his usual little half-shrug when he wasn't quite sure. "I know some people say that it's because so many sects and corporations have influence on the public school system. They still don't like the fact that libraries make so much information free, so they try to hinder them. I haven't researched it a lot, but..."

"A corporate conspiracy, then!" She shook her fist in mock rage. "Let's fight the power, brother!"

She thought that'd get at least a smile from him, but her brother just looked thoughtful. There was definitely something he had in mind that he hadn't shared with her yet. His brow was a bit furrowed, not as if he had a serious concern, but something was definitely distracting him. Odd that it had just appeared now, since he'd seemed fine on their way over.

"Rick... is something actually up?"

"You just made me think of my meeting yesterday. It was weird." He glanced around, but not like he was thinking of hiding something. After a while, he gave her an odd look she hadn't seen before. "Damian is, uh... a character. I should tell you more about him sometime, but not here."

"Huh. Okay." She narrowed her eyes at him, trying to figure that out. Either he needed to figure something out or he had a strong reason not to get into it.

"But hey, I got a very nice pill out of it that I'll take when the right time comes. It's called the Great Wheel Heaven and Earth Realmshattering Pill."

"Are you serious, or...?"

"Serious."

"Geez, they really went all in on that name." Melissa looked ahead to the library as they finally reached the grounds. "But I guess we can pop pills later. For now, I'm curious to meet this side chick you won't tell me about."

Rick stared at her with a baffled look that made her giggle. "Side...? Listen, I barely know Heather. She's helped me with techniques a few times and that's it."

"Mmhmm. Sure. A likely story." She smirked, glad that she'd gotten her brother out of his weird funk. This could be a really fun trip, or at least she hoped so. "So anyway, where's the secret technique vault?"

They passed the front reading area, desks, computers, and other things. It all seemed like normal stuff and Melissa had to wonder if a place like this could really contain anything that valuable. Obviously she trusted her brother's judgment... it was just a bit hard to imagine.

Eventually they caught sight of Heather - it was obviously her, just from her brother's short description. She had short neon green hair and a black top that she managed to make look really cute. Her arms were covered in vine-like tattoos, some of them ending in flowers with skulls. What actually caught Melissa's attention most was a pin she had on her belt, a bright pink anarchy symbol.

"Rick!" Heather grinned when she saw him, though not in a remotely flirty way. "Fuckin' A, I'm glad to see you! Please, tell me that we can open the technique archives... this place has been really damn boring lately."

"We're headed there, but not for me this time." Rick stepped aside and gestured to Melissa a bit stiffly. "Heather, meet Melissa."

The woman seemed to see her for the first time, looked between them, then smiled. "Oh, hi. Is this your girlfriend?"

"Seriously?" Melissa gave her a side-eye. "Do you not see the family resemblance?"

"Oh, shit, sorry. So she's your mother?"

Melissa decided that she liked Heather. Unfortunately, Rick didn't seem to find it nearly as funny, just saying, "Melissa is my younger sister."

"Shit, I'm being a bad influence... I mean... shoot. Darn it."

"Oh my!" Melissa covered her mouth with one hand and grabbed her brother's sleeve. "Brother, she said a naughty no-no word! She must be some sort of... brazen strumpet!"

Heather grinned back at her. "Okay, I have no idea what you want, but I'm game. Let's fucking do this."

They headed into one of the back hallways of the library, which looked perfectly normal... until there was a huge freaking metal door. Heather picked through keys at her belt before wrenching the door open. Melissa noted that it didn't come easily and was probably heavier than it looked. She didn't have her brother's habit of checking out generation rates, but she suspected that Heather was no lightweight.

Inside, the lights revealed a huge collection of books, scrolls, and even some animal hides. It was an impressive display that looked way more like what Melissa had been expecting. Yet just a quick walk away, there were teenagers trying to get around porn blockers on the public computers. Life was funny like that.

"Alright, so what are we looking for?" Heather turned around to face them and put her hands on her hips. Melissa glanced to her brother, but when he just looked back at her, she decided that maybe she could take the lead after all.

"I just finished my CLAT and I'm hoping to join the Young Lucrim Artists of America. But right now, my portfolio is really mundane. I need something that will use what I have to help me stand out."

"Well, that's vague as hell, but I'm happy to work with it. Anything else, oh elder brother?"

Rick shrugged. The obvious issue Heather needed to understand was her lucrim void, but he wouldn't just reveal that. "She has a decent combat core and some excess generation rate to put to use, but not enough for a full set of specialized combat cores. The ideal technique would be something that can function well on its own but wouldn't be made obsolete by future development."

Dang, he'd really thought it through. Melissa had paid attention in LE classes and thought she had a good grasp of lucrima theory, but her brother had the right instincts. Meanwhile, Heather just nodded in response. "That's a tall order, but not impossible. I'm sure we can find something. I'll start by pulling up some basic techniques and we'll see if any of them catch her eye."

"Great, thanks." While she moved away, Rick turned to her and spoke in a lower voice. "I don't have to go yet, but if you're fine on your own, I'll leave for work."

"Yeah, you can definitely go." Dropping any act, Melissa reached out and squeezed his hands briefly. "Thanks for making the introductions, Rick. I'll probably ask for your advice as I try to make a decision, but I'm not going to decide in a day. So don't let me keep you from work."

He nodded and left quickly, leaving Melissa smiling after him. She'd managed to stay lighthearted and she really had enjoyed their walk, but truthfully she was nervous. Emily had called her to comment on this Jack character, and Melissa thought that Emily was right. Her brother was too accustomed to the more violent end of fighter culture and might be underestimating the threat.

If she wasn't going to be a liability anymore, Melissa needed to start by picking a great technique. She looked back around the room, then eagerly went to go find the librarian.

Heather brought her a set of different techniques and Melissa spent a while just reading through them. There were a lot more crazy things than she expected, and some of the names she tucked away in her head for later, but none of them really jumped out at her as the one. She worried that might make her seem too picky, but Heather wasn't even slightly bothered. Apparently she'd just gotten the first set to get a sense for what Melissa liked.

Over the next several days, Melissa spent most of her time at the library, both meditating in preparation and looking over various techniques. Heather couldn't always help, since she had an actual job to do, but Melissa came to enjoy the search on its own. The archive room was surprisingly large and filled with little corners that would be fun to explore just on their own.

One day, however, she was just sitting back in one of the chairs and balancing a book on her head. She'd found a technique called the Hellfire Wreath that sounded amazing, but it was crazy difficult. Not just something she'd need to train for a long time to use, it was something that would require her to dedicate her life to a specific path of combat.

Being able to protect herself was one thing, but devoting herself wholly to combat when life contained so much else... Melissa was glad when Heather walked into the archive.

"Well, I see you're busy." The older woman smiled down at her. "That's some great fucking balancing right there."

"My clan has trained for generations in the art of balancing books on our heads!" Melissa plucked it off her head, in too somber a mood to be amused by her own joke. "Honestly, I'm just realizing that I need to make decisions. When you graduate and get good scores, they talk about how you can do anything. But eventually you have to do something, and that means turning down all the other things."

"Yeah, I know how that goes. But you have to choose or you won't live at all."

Though Melissa glanced at her, deciding if that line was cheesy enough to mock, she decided not to. No, her mind was actually moving in a different direction. "Heather, your job seems pretty cool. You think I could be a librarian?"

"I'm not saying you couldn't do it, but..." Heather sat down beside her and shrugged. "It's not just sorting books all day. To enter the true librarian program you need to have some serious martial competence."

"Say I don't care about that and I just want to do normal stuff here. Could I start with volunteering to do stuff around the library and work my way up?"

"You'd think so, but no. You need a degree to even apply for jobs here, and I'm not talking an easy one. Probably six years minimum."

"Ugh, higher education is such bullshit." Melissa grabbed a different book and headbutted it. Meanwhile, Heather just smirked at her.

"Such language! I'm corrupting the youths!"

They were quiet for a while, Melissa just holding the book to shade her eyes and keeping them closed for a bit. She had tons of good options, so she wasn't really that frustrated. But she was young and didn't have a huge generation rate to waste. If she wanted a truly great option, it seemed like she'd need to make sacrifices of some kind.

"Melissa..." Heather's voice sounded strangely serious, prompting her to sit up properly and look.

"What?"

"Where did you get this book?" The librarian held up an old volume and Melissa squinted at it a bit before remembering.

"Oh, that one was in a really dusty stack in one of the corners. Not of the main part, but of that little room. What's the purpose of that room, by the way? It wasn't labeled or anything."

"Ah. Those books are... well..."

Sensing a target, Melissa sat forward and grinned. "Banned? Illegal? Secret forbidden techniques that should have been consigned to the flames to destroy their dark powers?"

Heather laughed awkwardly. "Not like that, just... techniques that have fallen out of favor." She flipped through the book, which Melissa hadn't really had a chance to look at much, and then held it open to one page. "Take a look at this. The skill is called 'Slavecatcher's Gambit' - you want to take a guess when it was created and why it's not exactly popular anymore?"

"Oh, wow." Melissa stared at the drawing, which featured a ring of aura with spikes pointing inward around the neck of a man. "Yeah, I get it. Is... uh, is the technique itself actually bad in some way? Like, in history I read that they did some pretty brutal stuff during slavery."

"It's not one of those. As far as I know, it's a pretty good technique for binding someone. But if you seriously tried to use it these days, you'd be torn apart by a mob." Heather glanced at the drawing herself and gave an awkward shrug. "Well, not literally. But you'd be making enemies for no reason, and maybe some friends you didn't want. Why deal with that when there are modern techniques that can do similar things without the baggage?"

"Yeah, I completely get what you're saying there. But..."

"Oh dear, am I going to regret leaving you alone in here?"

"Hear me out!" Melissa raised her hands and looked over the other books she'd taken from that corner. "Would it be possible to take one of those techniques and rework it so that it didn't have any bad associations? I mean, I'm not saying that I could do that, but a lucrim engineer." She almost said that her brother was dating one, but wasn't actually sure if Emily would help with something like this.

"In theory, but it'd probably be more trouble than it's worth." Heather narrowed her eyes. "Yeah, I think I'm going to regret this so fucking much."

Melissa just grinned and then adopted as innocent of an expression as possible. Once the librarian left, she began looking through the section of forgotten books. Some of them were outdated, some offensive, and some just bizarre, but she had a theory. If she wanted something distinctive, what better place to look than in techniques that had been ignored for a long time?

It started with a striking picture: a woman striding across a field, surrounded by a burning aura. Normally the diagrams were not the best place to start, but as Melissa read the surrounding text, she found herself increasingly fixated on the idea. The creator of the technique believed in a lot of nonsense, yet it seemed that the technique itself merely brought forth what was in a person's innermost being.

She was glad she was alone, because Melissa was sure she was grinning.