Be honest: you have no idea what happened back at Hiro’s Hoot House. One minute you were in a moving box on your way to The Heart, the next that Serpent was out of control, the Masked Child was crying, and Urick…

God, Urick.

Suddenly, the massive volume you’re carrying in your arms feels a little too heavy, and you slam it down on your writing desk. Enough is enough. You’re going to find out what the hell is happening before any more of your friends get hurt.

…Wait, you have friends now?

You wave a hand before you, as if to cast away the thought. No time for sentimentalities – just books, just research, just, well, the meaning of this.

So, you search. Pouring through your books, you of course come across accounts of lost libraries: the Mayan Codices, burnt to the ground by Spanish friars; the Nalanda Monastery, razed by a general of the Delhi Sultanate; the Library of Alexandria, lost to war, fire, and time.

All of these, you figure, could have been capital-L Libraries at the time of their destruction. But who is to say? Your records are oft damaged and sparse, and none mention the presence of strange travelers at the time of their destruction. Those stories, if they ever existed, could well have been lost along with the Libraries themselves, you reason. What that means for you and your companions… you’d rather not give it any more thought.

Instead, you turn to your occult collection, which proves ever-so-slightly more useful. Specifically, you come across an odd story originating from a small village in central Africa, one that retells how its sister village was struck by lightning and lost just after their children began reporting signs of a strange, masked demon:

The otherwise invisible beast would play with the children, who spoke of the ways it would rise in the air like a lightning bird when a wrathful mood struck.

Well, you can certainly think of a little demon who fits such a description.

But with every book you put back on your bookshelf, the more obvious it becomes that your research does not seem to be yielding much in terms of usefulness. Your Personal Library, a place you once thought of as the pinnacle of human knowledge, is starting to show its limitations. But where could you find out more about these libraries? Waffle? What the future holds?

The future…

In a flash of realization and excitement, you are out of your study and in the misty Hub World corridors, clutching a singular book in your hand – the only one you really needed for this task, now that you think about it. As you walk, you scan every door you come across - Not here, not here, not here… - until you finally find yourself before the room that could hold the answers to all of your questions. You barely remember to knock this time.

“Paul!” You exclaim, barging in and brandishing the book you were carrying with you. “I need you to teach me how to use a computer.”

Admittedly, you already kind of know how to use a computer. The one you found in the Hoot House staff room was good practice, if nothing else. Still, the whole process proves to be much easier when Paul stops whatever work you seem to have interrupted and, with a sigh, fills in those pesky “Username” and “Password” boxes for you. His magical research box looks… well, a little clunkier than the one you found at the owl café, but you still can’t help but be amazed at its brilliance, both metaphorical and literal.

“So, uh, what did you want to do, exactly?” asks Paul as the machine blinks to life, a dark blue light illuminating the strange glass window you seem to be looking through. The bizarre wonder of it all makes you feel as if you’re travelling to a different world – and all of a sudden, you feel a little nervous.

“Research,” you stammer, giving Paul a rather delayed response. “I’d like to do some research. With this… invention. If you’d help me.”

“Okay, sure,” he says. “Now, er, if you’ll excuse me…” You watch as Paul clumsily leans over you and takes hold of a strange, oval-shaped object on the table you had ignored until now, thinking it to merely be a rather ugly paperweight. But now, you can clearly see that when Paul moves said object, a little white arrow on the computer glass moves too. Your eyes narrow.

“What’s that?”

“Oh, this?” Paul asks. “It’s a mouse.”

“Like the animal?”

“Yeah, I mean, the cable looks kind of like a tail, I suppose,” he says. Then he wiggles the mouse around, and you can clearly see it is connected to the computer through some sort of cable. However, you’re more interested in the little white arrow moving around inside the machine. You point at it.

“And what is that?” You ask.

“A cursor. You use it to click on things.” Paul says. “Like this.”

He then ‘clicks’ on a picture of a blue “E”, and gone is the dark blue background. Instead. you are met with a bright white page crowned with a singular word in red lettering, and a box entitled a “Search Bar”.

“…Yahoo?” You read out loud.

“Yep. You can just type whatever you want to search for here, and a bunch of results will come up. Then you click on the page you want and it will open it up for you. Like this.”

You watch as Paul types the word “cat” into the search bar and clicks on the image of a magnifying glass. After a few seconds, the image in the glass changes again, and you are met with a long list of titles related to cats – everything from taxonomical information, to care needs, to something called “catlovers.com”.

An entire library at my fingertips… you think. It doesn’t feel possible, real. No wonder your hands are sweating.

“So, there you go. You can use a computer now. Just, um, shout if you need anything, I guess,” Paul says, and moves to huddle in a corner of the room with pen and paper. Clearly, he wants to get back to his own work – a feeling you too can understand.

So, you take a deep breath, and type “burning libraries” into Yahoo!.com.

The hours that follow mostly encompass a confusing mesh of failed searches, Computers For Dummies referencing, and a general, unending feeling of confusion (What does “com” even mean?!). But somehow, after a series so extensive you cannot seem to remember it, you wind up in a rather strange “webpage” (a term you have only recently learned).

“TheThingsTheyHide.com” describes itself as a “forum of the occult”, but you really cannot see any Roman influence in its design. Instead, the darkly-coloured webpage is mostly composed of webpages of its own, “threads” (as they’re apparently called) entitled things like “Yeti sightings in Veromont??”, “I saw Elvis at the mall last week (Santa Fe)”, and “HELP CORN CIRLCLES STRANGE EXTRATERRESTIAL ACTIVITY E.T. SUPERNATURAL MORE”.

But as appealing as each of those strange strings of words sound to disentangle, what really catches your eye is a function entitled “Chatroom”. With Paul busy with some other work, you figure a chat with someone else might help you better understand this odd new world. So, you write down your name on the “username” box (what else would you write?), enter the chatroom, and type:

alwin: hello. i am here because i wish to learn about burning libraries or perhaps a masked child. thank you.

It takes you a while to type up the message, your fingers still getting used to the arbitrary nature of this so-called “keyboard”’s alphabet. But just a few seconds later, new text pops up on your screen:

ecklebergeye1 is typing…

You are intrigued – who is this person? Could “ecklebergeye1” really be their name? You wonder if this is how things are done in the future, but “Paul”, “Nancy”, even “Sarah” all sound comparatively normal to you…

But your train of thought is interrupted when you get the following response:

ecklebergeye1: Hello. What kind of library, like Alexandria?

ecklebergeye1 is typing… Then:

ecklebergeye1: And I’m intrigued about the child. Is this a ghost or spirit you have encountered? Can you say more about the mask?

It takes you a while to respond each time but, slowly, your conversation evolves thus:

alwin: yes like alexandria. libraries that burn across time and space. do you know anything about that cycle. and the child is not a ghost. their name is waffle and the mask changes but last time i saw them they were an owl. they appear in libraries and scream a lot.

ecklebergeye1: Well, hate to break it to you, but that sounds like a ghost to me.

ecklebergeye1: Salt can be useful for warding off spirits, but beyond that I can’t help much. Not much of a poltergeist guy I’m afraid. But others are if you want to make a thread about this.

ecklebergeye1: Oh and Alexandria was not a coincidence, I can tell you that for sure. Some real ancient knowledge was destroyed there. Stuff people didn’t want to get out.

ecklebergeye1: Same as Atlantis really.

alwin: what knowledge. what people. what atlantis.

ecklebergeye1: You don’t know Atlantis? Oh man, you must be new here. You’re in for some big learning, bud. Stuff the man wants to keep from you.

alwin: what man.

ecklebergeye1: THE man.

ecklebergeye1: Listen alwin, you’re clearly a kid, so I’ll be nice and fill you in: Alexandria, Atlantis, the Titanic, all those disasters were inside jobs. They were NOT accidents. They were orchestrated so the powerful could get more powerful, or so their secrets couldn’t get out. So if you’re looking for the truth, which I assume you are if you’ve found this forum, I have one piece of advice for you: Follow the fire.

ecklebergeye1: Are my messages reaching you? It shows here that you’re connection is iffy.

ecklebergeye1: alwin?

Their messages are reaching you but, for some reason, your replies do not seem to be getting through. When you call Paul over to investigate, he just shrugs.

“The Internet’s been slow lately. It’s a wonder it worked as long as it did for you…

For a second, his eyes fall on the still-open chatroom but, when he sees you looking at him, he retreats back to his workstation, his cheeks slightly red.

Unable to consult the rest of the threads in TheThingsTheyHide.com, nor create your own, you decide you have done enough research for a day. You wave goodbye to Paul and, with a swift turn of your heel, you are off, head spinning, wondering if there’s any truth to ecklebergeye1’s words.

“Follow the fire…” you muse.

Power can certainly be fickle.