How to Find your Way in the Incomplete Archives

Thirteen

The Shadow King used a twig to create a circular diagram on the barren spot. He chanted some unfamiliar syllables while squeezing out a few drops of his own blood into the pattern.

A yawning hole appeared in the side of the rock revealing a low entrance to the hidden tunnel.

The green-eyed man iterated his instructions one last time, "You two need to be careful inside. Follow that map exactly and you should reach mid-ground in five hours on the dial. There should be an open space there with three caves on the other side. That's where you might run into the resting Labyrinth of Despair,"

"Anything we could recognise it by?" asked Arlan.

"It appears as a gargantuan serpent with a tall hood covered in many eyes. Avoid its maw but more importantly, don't look it in the eyes. They say it steals souls. Got all that?"

"Yes, thank you for the instructions," Archaea adopted a pseudo-formal stance, "We shall carry out our duties as you will, Your Majesty,"

"Very well, subject. And do watch your head, the tunnel heights were designed with average people in mind," he winked through a playful grin.

Archaea ignored the teasing tone and pulled the de-throned king into an embrace, "Take care, and don't even think of entering after us. We'll deliver your message to Aster and Juvela when we meet them, you can count on us,"

Arlan maintained a respectful silence.

They all knew these promises were mere smoke and mirrors but each kept the desolate thoughts to themselves.

"And, we'll tell you everything that happened once we're back,"

"I'll look forward to it," he managed to hold the smile until the Boglanders disappeared in the darkness of the tunnel, "May luck be with you, heroes,"

****

'Easy enough, and we can both agree this is the optimal solution?' the Librarian prodded their assistant.

'I hate to admit it but it seems like the right decision, all things considered,'

'Good to have you on the same page. So are we clear on what our approach is?'

'We impose a temporary ban on the book or series containing the offending character until the Creators reach out to us with a patch to stop said character's powers from overriding the system. Or until we discover how to stop this character from travelling between the Incomplete Archives and the Valley,'

'Marvellous. So what do we have so far?'

'We know that the booknapper version of Luna cannot be from the main series because the two series are interconnected and she cannot touch them without getting absorbed back,'

'Good, and?'

'We also know she is not an official character caricature created by the Author XXX.'

The hooded figure nodded.

'That leaves us with the option of fan creations or unofficial adaptations. We saw her disappear in the Incomplete Archives, I suspect her story is there, and it is ongoing, or in some state of incompletion,'

'Do we have a book name or an identifier?'

'I have retrieved a list of possible fanfiction candidates that could contain the perpetrator, about three hundred and counting. These are relevant records stored closest to where we saw her disappear,'

'Three hundred? That's quite the number,' the Librarian leaned back in the chair, 'Fanfiction really gets out of hand,'

'That tends to happen when the fanservice is loud. On a side note, there are over seventeen thousand fanfiction shorts, parallel arc stories and illegal adaptations related to the characters of the Seers of Light series.'