Chapter 406: Theatre of the Mind

Belladonna laughed as she stuffed some snacks into her mouth, her eyes glued to the image being projected out of the Gramophone’s cone. It was such a wonderfully odd piece of technology, but it allowed her to indulge herself in old cartoons and rewatch the best moments without suffering through all of the ads or having to fingerprint verify, so it was definitely worth the oddity.

When the episode finished, Belladonna let out a sigh of relief before reluctantly standing up. She tossed her snacks to the side, letting them dissolve back into figments of her imagination, as she turned to the giant pile of books and random Compact Discs that were still unsorted.

If she willed it, Belladonna could pull whatever piece of information she wanted from the pile, which only encouraged the laziness inside of her to keep the pile as is.

But it would be such a waste to have constructed such a wonderful, albeit slightly ’inspired’ Library and then just leave everything on the floor. However at the same time, she was still lazy and didn’t want to sort them out by hand, or by thought.

So it came time for the best solution for any issue, have someone else do it!

This library needed its very own Librarian after all. Of course Belladonna’s experience of what a Librarian looked like was... limited, so when the Scribe once again responded to her subconscious thoughts and created her first thought, she was not too surprised by its appearance.

The Librarian that now stood before her was similar to the Librarian of the Tower of Mystica, although it was not an exact copy. It seemed that this was a more direct personification of her subconscious, and had thus been influenced by Belladonna herself.

So, the wings wrapped around this woman’s waist were not bright and fluffy, but were instead black and leathery. At a glance it looked like she was wearing some kind of shiny, nylon skirt that hugged her hips and was long in the back but short enough in the front that it showed just enough of her thighs to inspire wicked thoughts.

Her overall appearance was more dark and gothic, her shirt being black with ruffled cuffles that looked like they were designed after spiders webs, and her hair was like a waterfall of ink running down her back.

Much like Belladonna, she had pale skin that contrasted perfectly against this dark persona, and made the square glasses perched on the end of her nose draw the eye even more.

However the strangest thing was her eyes, which were pure white and clouded as if she was blind. Where that inspiration had been drawn from, she had no idea, and whilst she could change every part of the Librarian’s appearance if she so wished, these eyes were permanent.

It gave Belladonna pause for a moment, before she simply shrugged it off as yet another mystery she would have to sort with time.

The Librarian bowed her head respectfully to Belladonna, before turning on her high heels and clicking over to the pile of books, which finally started to sort themselves under the Librarian’s command.

It was a task that came naturally to this woman, as she was a direct personification of both Belladonna’s subconscious being combined with the power of the Akashic Scribe. In essence, this was the Akashic Scribe, and so to save herself the trouble of thinking ’The Librarian’ or ’The Scribe’ all of the time, Belladonna decided to name this personification, Aki.

"Aki, show me everything I have ever learned on mind control."

Aki nodded, sweeping her hand towards Belladonna, causing a torrent of books and CD’s to fly through the air, coming from both from the shelves and the pile.

They orbited around her, allowing Belladonna to study their covers.

A few of the books were filled with filthy material that definitely wouldn’t help her, and was slightly embarrassing to think that they existed in here. The CD’s were mostly old cartoons or TV shows, not helpful even if their situations were familiar.

In fact, as she scanned the books, Belladonna’s expression quickly soured as she realised nothing here was actually useful, and not one of them was a book with any magical instruction on Mind Control spells.

"This is it? I really haven’t seen anything about mind control in any of the books I have read?" Belladonna muttered, glancing over her shoulder towards Aki, who was silently sorting the books with waves of her hands like an orchestra conductor.

"Yes Ma’am, that is all. Of all the material you have seen, only this one discusses the practical application of mind control magic." Aki replied robotically, as she gestured towards Belladonna.

At that gesture, one of the orbiting books broke formation and slowly drifted down into Belladonna’s hand.

’Fell-Spawn: The Unholy power of the Betrayers’

Belladonna frowned softly at the book’s title. She remembered this one, she had briefly consulted it when she had been curious about her race, although she didn’t remember reading too deep into it, which became clear as soon as she opened that book.

There were pages and pages filled with nothing but inane, nonsensical jumbled words or even just childish squiggles that barely resembled words.

"Aki, what’s going on here? Surely the book wasn’t like this, right?"

"Correct Ma’am. However when you read it, you did not process the words. While I can assist you with memory, I can only store and categorise what you have understood. Without understanding or proper processing, I cannot store a proper copy. Knowledge is worthless if it is not understood."

That made sense... Although it wasn’t as good as she had been hoping for. She had already been considering skimming through all of the Libraries books and letting them be stashed with the Scribe, but that was a no-go. She would have to properly read them all and plenty of these books contained things that, even when she read them multiple times, she didn’t have a chance of understanding anything that it was talking about.

With yet another example of her own laziness and idiocy slapping her across the face, Belladonna cracked open the book and skimmed through the pages of squiggles and nonsense, until she finally found something that actually made sense.