The Dark Talent: Alcatraz vs. the Evil Librarians (Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians) by Brandon Sanderson

Author:Brandon Sanderson [Sanderson, Brandon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466881532
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2016-09-06T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter

Melissa

Well, that last chapter was kind of self-important, wasn’t it? I blame the relative lack of footnotes.* As a reward for being a good girl/boy/robot and reading all of that gobbledygook, I’m going to explain the chapter names to you. Never say I don’t give you anything.*

You see, the chapters in this book are identified like they are to call attention to a growing problem in fiction, that of disrespect for chapters and their own individual desires. How would you like it if you didn’t get to have a name, but were instead assigned a number based on your order of creation? Instead of Samantha, Didgeridoo, or whatever silly name Hushlanders are using nowadays, what if you’d been named “Human Spawn Number One Hundred Eight Billion, Fourteen Million, Four Hundred Eighty Thousand and Two”?

I suspect you wouldn’t like that. Well, chapters don’t like it either. They never get to be themselves, you know? It’s always “Chapter One” or “Chapter Twenty-Seven” or “Oh, When Is This Stupid Book Going to End?”

To bring attention to this, I’ve allowed the chapters to name themselves whatever they want. (All except Chapter Four; I put my foot down when he insisted he be allowed to have an extra o in the middle of his name.)

I dashed out into the firefight, Dif and Shasta right behind me. The good Librarian force had pulled back almost to the building we’d used for our impromptu conference. They’d taken casualties; this fight was real. I won’t go into the gory details, but it wasn’t pretty.

Angry, I pulled out the Shamefiller’s Lens and pointed it at a group of oncoming Alivened monsters. I started glowing, and the Lens spurted out a ray of power.

My aim was off, and my beam hit the stone ground of the cavern.

“Oh, blast! I’m the worst section of floor ever! That person just stubbed his toe on a bit of my uneven rock. And I wasn’t washed properly! Their feet are going to totally get dirty walking upon me and—”

BOOOM.

Good enough, I thought as bits of burning paper fluttered down, bearing descriptions of bodices. A piece of me was amazed. Bastille had had trouble fighting one of these things, and I’d just taken out a group of them. Something was seriously wrong with my Oculator powers. I mean, it was awesomely wrong, yes, but the Lens I stuffed into my pocket was so hot to the touch it could have fired an egg.*

The explosion I caused made enough of a mess that my team was able to duck away from the main battlefield through a small alley between two archive buildings.

“So, Cousin!” Dif said. “What sort of zany, bombastic shenanigans do you have planned for us?”

“Find my dad,” I said, looking to Shasta. “How do we get an index for this place?”

“Only the most important of Librarians will have that kind of information,” Shasta said. “If this is like other high-level libraries, they’ll carry something called an authenticator. It will let them into important rooms, and probably will include a map and copies of the local indexes.

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