The Domesday Book: A Great Survey of all Angels, Humans, and Demons within the Realms - Many beings through the eons have obtained a warped perception of the Underworld.

Is there a reason for joining back up with the Witch so soon after breaking off into two groups? Don't we have to flank the Magic Men chasing after her? Leonie thinks to themselves in the lead up to jumping onto the soon to pass train.

Down the long stretch of boxcar after boxcar Smith leads the Witch and company, on occasion slipping through across a set of tracks in the break between trains. After a few minutes navigating around many sets of trains, Smith settles on one in particular, and opens on of the middle boxcar doors.

One by one the Emperor Penguin leads each and every fascist out into the mountains of their mad nightmares, taking them to their inevitable deaths.

Standing outside a boxcar two Academy personnel in plain tan canvas work uniforms take control of a large levitated box from two other uniformed personnel inside the boxcar.

"Have you given any thought to your past, where you came from, the people and place you once called home from before you came to the Library?" Ernest asks Bishop Clement.

Leonie looks between the Private Eye and the woman wearing glasses as both stare the other down, the Private Eye with a look of shock and the once a Cat now a Human Ailuros delighting in the shock. Leonie breaks the silence speaking to the Private Eye, "Is she not Ailuros? What is going on?"

From the lift the Lead Man and two Agents 5 and 17 exit from the maintenance room through a door into the rail tunnels beyond. Down in the tunnels underground light is sparse. The Lead Man casts a lighting spell, a ball of pale light gets thrown from a wand up into the air for the three Magic Men.

Upon arriving at the lift to the underground maintenance access, Leonie, the Private Eye, That-Came-From-Before, and Ailuros pause. The building shakes with hits from magical strikes, and the Private Eye stands in front of the lift call button to prevent anyone from pressing it.

Beneath the large tree of heaven growing in downtown Brooklyn a cavernous space exists, interpenetrated with great roots running along the ceiling and walls, with smaller offshoots forming a web that form great patterns, art formed from life itself. Along the edge a cavern wall, two Fairy's meet.

I'm going to be on a short hiatus. Forgive me, but I am working on other projects at the moment. I will be back, next week at the latest.

As they fly in towards the Academy Leonie watches the skies as the Academy Sky Corps stream in towards the flying ants in formation, trails of magic shooting out towards the insect invaders. Numbers of ants fall out from the sky, but the swarm itself doesn't react. The numbers are simply too large.

The second shot fired on the barrier protecting the Academy from the Library beyond rips through the barrier, and from the opening, energetic cracks form in the magical cover. One of the cracks forms larger than the rest and runs quickly up the barrier to the top.

The Library: A Broadway Story Our story opens in the second to last absolute monarchy in Europe, a cold, mountainous country ruled with an iron fist by the second to last absolute monarch Hugo Leopold, Esq.

"That is the most absurd request I've ever heard. You will have no such thing." Says Executive #1 to Lor. Lor, always smiling, meanders around the conference table to stand before the executive who just spoke.

In New York City in one of the precinct buildings now occupied by the Fey, a Fairy pushes through all of the mail that began pouring in after they set up shop. A delicate hand thumbs letter by letter until one in particular pulls at the hand. The Fairy picks up the chosen piece of mail and opens it.

Standing on the Western Wall facing the largest horde of ants they've ever seen, two Academy watchstanders mull the situation after the Lead Man's walk-through moves on to bother the next set of poor folk manning the wall.

For a striking blow to puncture a well built defense, one needs to know the spells involved in the defense. The Witch knows the walls of the Academy well, many drafted from the Southern District become intimately familiar with the spells that separate the Academy from the wider Library.

Along the top of the Academy's Western Wall the Lead Man paces. The two men he sent out with the Private Eye both entered one of the Campus Between the Wall's older building and were found passed out in a basement room. Neither of them remember a thing from the day, nothing of the Private Eye.

Little did Leonie know the Cat was listening to Leonie in more than one way, "I'm not the reason the Witch stopped calling you apprentice, you know?" Taken aback, Leonie shifts in flight enough to draw a passing glance from the others.

For Leonie, the flight to the Academy has a surreal feeling to it. Ailuros took to riding with them for the assault, and Leonie wonders at the whole situation. Only a few days before Leonie was just a junior apprentice to a Witch running a struggling business trying to make ends meet.

The Witch takes charge of the situation, "Alright, I have a contact back in the Southern District that should have a lab ready for us, and they should be good to go by now given I sent that message back when we first got Ailuros. Ernest, Clement, and I will head to the lab and finish preparations."

As the Witch and company touch down a short way from the Private Eye the Witch calls out to him, "You! You're not just a private eye, you're the Private Eye, the one assigned to me personally."

As the ants stream by in steady number, the shadow on the wall begins to shake. First a hand, followed by the arm, a foot, then the whole leg, and from there an entire three dimensional nondescript human form emerges from the two dimensional wall of the cave.

After a long moment in a fugue state the Witch returns to her senses and approaches Ailuros. The Witch says, "I'm done living in the dark through all this. What is going on?"

It was a beautiful, sunny day when the Fairies showed up in Fort Meade, MD, wearing boots. The Fey entered the nondescript dark glass cube baking in the sun.

In the mountains the Witch and company stumble upon scenes of madness, at least madness to them. Their first brush with it begins when the Witch casts a lighting spell, the orb of light emanating from her hand and floating above their heads near the roof of the cave.

The approach to the mountains of Mold is a sight rarely seen by human eyes. The mold consumes books, the paper contained within providing the nutrients necessary to support the Mold.

The first thing anyone remembers when the Fey showed up was the police disappeared. No murders, no riots or last great stands against some horde, just vanished without a trace in the night. Not even a single body to collect. In their place Fairies began walking the beat.

"I knew it was going to be this way." Says Ernest. The Witch and Company stare at the mountain range in the distance. A hazy mist rises off the slopes, enveloping the mountains and the area below at their base quite a way into the stacks. Leonie asks, "There are mountains in the Library?"

Located down a dark alleyway far from the cleansing light of the day sun and wash of the night moon sits the Private Owner's Clubhouse. In the Clubhouse the Private Owners hold court. Blood stains the floor in the circle in front of the Private Owner's bench. Mold grows in between the walls unseen.

Endless series of books on shelves fill the eyes and mind of the young Bishop. To him he sees an endless feast, nothing but a feast. Food good, bad, and indifferent. Through his own eyes the Bishop can see the glow of Knowledge in the books, a smorgasbord of flavors ready for the tasting.

The Witch and company plus one take stock of their belongings in the stacks well away from the settlement in chaos they left behind, black smoke billowing from the structures in the far distance.

The Private Eye gets tired keeping the lies to the forefront of his mind. He knows the Magic Men scan his mind every so often to make sure he's still buying what their selling, so he keeps the thoughts up for appearances.

The Witch and company plus one shoot over the reeling settlement over the stone walls and touch down just inside the settlement's barrier. There they are met with a collection of twenty-four Rot Zombies headed by representative Clement.

Once outside the church the scene before them is one of destruction. The beam cut through buildings at their base while leaving a good trench through the ground. Some structures crumble into the path the beam took.

The Witch stands up from her seat at the bench, Ernest and Leonie follow her lead, and the Witch gets in close with the young Bishop, "Where is the other Clement? The one who brought us here." Bishop Clement gives a confused look, "What do you need him for?"

"Long ago, back when we understood all things in a more limited manner, we as a people lived in a different world than this." The Bishop brings his arms up and around in a circle, encompassing the air, "This Library was unknown to us. All we knew was a simpler, linear world."

Inside the gated wall the Witch and company are greeted by a well tended and lush garden. A triple-tiered fountain stands as the centerpiece, and sitting by the fountain on a bench is a young man in simple robes no different from all those seen before in the rest of the settlement.

Inside the church, the cavernous place is well lit with thousands of candles, none of the wax burning down, and all the candlesticks burning in suspended animation yet still providing light. What a spell to find and use in such a way, advanced temporal magic for simple lighting, thinks the Witch.

Bold action. The Witch decided to throw caution to the wind and walk openly to the main gate of the Rot Zombie settlement, trailed by Ernest, Leonie, and the Cat. Standing outside the open gate, a lone individual awaits their arrival.

So, Machine Intelligence Fiction The Machine City gets established in a desert, a desert on Mars. A shining city upon a hill, the Machine City glitters in the distant sunlight, sitting in the caldera of Olympus Mons.

The settlement in the distance where the Rot Kings fled, the Witch senses, is filled entirely with Rot Zombies. How many of them are intelligent? How many can talk? What are their magical capabilities?

The Witch, standing on the top of the stack near the corpse of the dead Rot King, plans the next move. Having laid eyes upon the surviving Rot Kings she will be able to track them to whatever ground they go to, but is it wise to blindly pursue?

The Witch steadies her staff in preparation to finish off the two Rot King survivors. No sooner does her gaze fall upon the on to the left of the fallen zombie does that Rot King turn to look back at the Witch. The Rot King on the left says, "Don't!" in English.

Three days. Three days of wandering the stacks and Leonie has yet to run out of stories. Thankfully they've seen fit to talk Ernest's ear off the last couple of hours. Leonie is still talking, ". . . and no sooner did they leave early for the day they got in trouble . . ."

Outside the Western Gate of the 25 Mile Wall, the Library stacks were cleared away a measured distance from the wall to give its defenders good line of sight and force would-be attackers to cross open space on their way to the wall.

The Lead Man steps aside and motions the Private Eye to follow him over to the scrum, "Please follow me, we are briefing the evolution to contain the Witch."

The Private Eye mills around the Great Western Courtyard, the main quad for the Western District's Campus Between the Walls, staring occasionally at the brick buildings thrown up in the Library by the Academy.

While the Witch tries to extract more information from Ailuros by staring daggers at her, Leonie soaks in the somber realization that they are in well over their head.