The Reveal
000: Information
Attention, minion!
No, too formal.
Hey, how are ya?
No, too casual…
I’m sure you’re looking for information as to the circumstances of your transformation…Perhaps the reference desk will be of service?
It’ll have to do.
How exactly is one supposed to address a takobon? They didn’t cover this during training…
100: Philosophy & Psychology
I don’t know if they’re ready for this, but they have to be. They were chosen, prophesized prophesied, foretold, seen in my dreams…and I know they’ve seen me in theirs as well. It’s not pop psychology: it’s fate, it’s destiny, it’s entropy.
Will they hate me, or will they understand why I’ve done what I’ve done, what I’ve made them into something so much like myself? When the abyss stares back at them from the mirror, will they stare back? Or will they shut their eyes once more?
Probably shut their eyes at some point…they can’t keep them open forever, after all…
This is not a religion. It is a vocation, a calling from someone above, or something below, or somewhere east, or somehow west, or somebody nowhere at all.
Liturgies performed at altars. Powerful books housed in great treasuries. A ritual performed between visitor and host involving the exchange of money — at least, when the library books are overdue. Or, when it’s Pledge Month…it’s always Pledge Month…
This is not a religion. It just looks like one.
300: Social Sciences
The social sciences section…that’s next to the parasocial parasciences section…I don’t know how much time we’ll have for socializing, given the intensity of the mission. It seems important to this species, though — more so than it was for the others — so perhaps when dream-questing in unknown Kadath, it is best to dream-quest as the Kadathians do…
Oh, who am I kidding? I’m not worried about distracting them as much as I am worried about them distracting me. They’re just so adorable, with those squishy little pink brains…I could eat them up.
I remember the first mixtape they ‘sent’ me. Well, they didn’t send it to me, but, music is a universal language, and I knew that the record was meant for me. They didn’t have to be so shy — the cosmic equivalent of slipping a tape cassette into my locker instead of holding a boombox outside my bedroom window — but luckily for them, I was able to track them down.
I’m glad they called me. I’m just so excited to finally meet them face to face. I’ve been waiting. I’ve been watching. I’ve been hungry.
Library science: organizing and sorting information, making sure everything is in its place. They say not to trust a chef who doesn’t eat their own cooking. I suppose the same applies to librarians.
Do not trust librarians who do not eat their own cooking.
This newfangled technology gets my goat — sorry, Shubby — but I am going to have to learn to use it to be ‘hip with the kids,’ not that any children should be found anywhere near The Library. Whatever happened to using good ol’ fashioned alchemical tools like alembics?
700: Arts and recreation
There is an art to recreation, a degree of talent essential to mimicry. Camouflaging the self is one thing — but fully transforming another, into a form much like your own? An entirely different task indeed. When mirroring your form onto another medium — whether parchment, flesh, or canvas — you can often only replicate that which you can identify in yourself. If you do not see that you have spinach in your teeth, you cannot exactly implement that into your self portrait…
But that is not always the case. Sometimes, there are the defects, the flaws in the self that we cannot see, that we are either willfully blind to or that we simply cannot perceive, and those are the defects we pass to others even when we don’t intend to. These blemishes of the soul, like parasites, like worms…
800: Literature
The Miskatonic Occult Literature Library and Unusually Special Collections Department will be the perfect place to teach them about their abilities, their powers, and also…about the threats that sleep beneath the surface of not their seas, but their realities. There are worms in land, in sea, but also in books, in bodies…and in other spaces as well. A worm is just a mouth, and as everyone knows, in a library, it’s best to keep one’s mouth shut.
900: History and geography
We will make history together — here, at the bottom of their world. The journey will not be easy. There are treacherous forces that want to keep us apart, that want to keep us from fulfilling our mission — but they’re strong. Or, at least, they will be. I will make sure to keep them safe until they’re able to use their powers to do the same for me. Until then…I have to make sure to nurture them, to keep them close, and safe, and…