066 ☣ rubbing together white sticks of your own ribs

[Open spam, library, first couple of days]

[She is easily ensnared. Not because she is weak-minded, but because she is too comfortable with darkness. Not because her resistance would be easy to shatter, but because she does not really try to resist. She slides along shelves like a shadow, fingers hovering over spines. She avoids the ones that sing to her most sweetly, that try to reel her in with threads as strong as spidersilk and slender as razorwire. Partly because she knows the ones who need prey will have the brightest lures - but mostly, mostly because it is the ones with no breadcrumb trails that will have been seen by the fewest eyes, contain the rarest secrets.

Sometimes, she is utterly mad. Sometimes she races between the stacks, hissing, whimpering, eyes darting like a rabbit's, sometimes she barrels into you, claws at you, or circles you like a feral dog, fearful and hungry. Sometimes she knows the names of the ghosts that are following you.

Sometimes she is scavenging the dead, nibbling crackers and nudging the open books that devoured them with someone else's bare-boned finger. Sometimes, after her water runs out, she scribbles an incantation on the floor, the pops the resulting ice chips into her mouth. If she sees you, she'll hold them out, a glassy dripping handful. Whispers, as one should in a library -]

Thirsty?


[Open video, laterish, the chess board behind her]

After this you only have to push through some vertigo and you'll be back to the ship. If you can get this far, I'll get you across. I promise.


[OOC: you can also spam her in the gamesman's hall if you want to ICly confirm someone getting across. I will not be calling out actual chess moves but they can talk while narratively dramatic chess is vaguely happening. ]