OOM: The Aftermath of the Unremembered

[herr_bookman]

Autor looks upon his study in shock today. For one, the door is in splinters, and a double-headed axe rests on the cobblestones outside. Autor steps inside gingerly, ducking through the hole. He almost slips in the spatters of dried blood on the floor--and leaps back, gasping at their discovery. He plucks up his unbroken glasses from the floor and sighs in relief. Screwing up his courage, he creeps further into the room, past a bookshelf that was clearly another victim of the axe.

The study is a mess. The desk is nearly split in twain--again by the axe, he surmises--and features a coat of blood and ink. Papers and broken quill nibs liter what remains of the desk. Haphazard piles of books cover the floor. He doesn't know where to begin.

Truthfully, the boy barely recognizes the study as his fathers. There are hundreds of books lining the shelves that he doesn't recognize, and a tea set similar to the one he has in Milliways that he thought he'd picked up there. The couch his father gave him a long time ago is still present, thankfully, and there's a family tree spread out against the shelves with names in his handwriting that he swears he's never heard of before.

And then his gaze falls upon his sylladex in the corner. "Oh," Autor says, and his mouth dries out. His faithful journal lays open on the floor, rent nearly in half.

"Seriously?" he whispers, gingerly picking it up by one of the corners. He's shocked that his strife specibus--which gives him the ability to summon books without a couplet--still works.

"Wretched in this alone, that thou mayst take all this away, and me most wretched make," the boy recites, trying to summon his journal. It works, but only partially--the leather-bound book appears as if it has been sliced in half. He codes it away quickly with the same couplet, and tries for his food bag, with the same result. He quickly recites every couplet on his list, only to find that even Miss Kuriyama's flowers have been carefully bisected.

Autor groans, frustrated, and keeps himself from throwing the broken sylladex at the wall. Then he has an idea. "Wretched in this alone, that thou mayst take all this away," he recites, and the top half of his first aid kit shows up. Interesting.

"... to be death's conquest, and make worms thine heir," Autor says, and the bottom half appears. He codes both halves back.

"Wretched in this alone, that thou mayst take all this away, to be death's conquest, and make worms thine heir," he says quickly, and the first aid kit appears whole, without its items cut in half.

Cheered, he barks out a laugh, and gets to work discovering which mishmash of couplets he needs to retrieve his items.