Ex Libris

By Reverend Kinesys

Dedicated to Stacy, a secret master of information.

David lit the flashlight,"come on." he said,"This could take a while."

Raven looked down the stairwell with a bit of trepidation."Couldn't we just find this on the Internet?"

"No."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes."

"Not worth checking?"

"Definitely not." David said with some finality. " Why are you stalling? You have a doctorate in English, it's not like you've never used a library before."

"I'm not stalling."

" Yes...You are."

Raven pushed her glasses up, as she always did when nervous. "...Well, your library..."

"Yes..."

" It scares me....And I don't just mean I'm intimidated by it's size or depth or the amount of personal work you've put into it. I mean I am literally scared by some of the things in it...."

Rabbi David Solomon considered this for a moment." So, My library scares you?"

"Yes."

"Good. Come on."

Libraries and Mages go together like chili and hot-dogs. Long have Mages tried to capture and codify learning of all sorts in order to better understand the world and besides you never know when something is going to come in handy. Here then are a few thoughts about libraries and what they are likely to contain and the perils, frustrations, and agonies attendant to the discovery of a new library or the capture of an enemy's.

What's liable to be in them?

-Esoteric theory.( I.E. study points for sphere Magick.)

-Hedge Magick procedures.(useful for training apprentices.)

-Names and dominions of umbral creatures(Demons,Djinn,Lords,angelics.etc...)

-Maps of umbral places.(may be useless.)

-Magickal History(always useful to keep from repeating the mistakes of the past.)

-Descriptions of Talismans and/or fetishes( oh, the trouble this can cause.)

-Legends of things past.

-Rotes( "So THAT'S how that works!")

-Maps to nodes( again a sure guide to trouble.Rarely tells who owns it now.)

-Cthulhu Mythos Lore (if you are exceptionally cruel....like me.)

-Texts on comparative Magick and comparative religion ( useful for settling inter-cabal differences)

-Stored Intel ( usually gathered by the owner. Includes speculations,theories,notes, blueprints, blackmail material,Novels,Bad poetry, and other suchlike.)

Of course, not every library is composed of just books. even your local public library has many different types of informational storage.

-Books( standard fare of course...)

-Magazines( Like Paradigma magazine or some other equivalent.)

-Tapes(Voice notes on magickal theory,or even magickal books on tape for blind Mages.)

-CD-ROM(Standard among Technomancers now and Virtuals. Considered clunky by etheric Mages)

-Microfiche ( Standard for storing periodicals and newspaper archives Good for other things too.This is the benchmark format for Paradigma archives.)

-Informational Geomids( Like having a living computer working for you.)

-Digital Web storage( anybody whose read Snow Crash can understand how useful and portable this can be. The Librarian could be a Daemon,a spirit,an AI, or a synthesis of all three. This sort of library is probably heavily heavily trapped and/or encrypted.

-Archaic forms( Clay tablets, Cuneiform covered walls, Scrolls, Stamped metal pages of Mathematical symbols like the books of the Great Race. I'd like to see the face of a virtual who breaks into an elder virtuals lab and discovers that he keeps all of his secret books on punch cards.

O.K. Lets say that you've managed to capture another Mages library. and you managed truck all of that stuff home,but it should be remembered that just because you have it,doesn't mean you can make any sense out of it....

-Encryption( utter mastery of this goes to the virtuals,with Iteration X and the Order of Hermes vying for second place. Just remember that there ARE codes and ciphers that cannot be broken. An overview of cryptography would be space consumptive here. Get on the WWW and look around for some Cypherpunk sites. It's worth knowing about. there are even methods for encrypting documents into graphics or sound files.

-Allegories( an equally frustrating way to hide information...in plain sight. Hermetics and alchemists have always used a sort of symbological language that is proof against understanding unless you have sunk your mind into the study of alchemy for years. Verbena use Kennings to obscure their meaning and Dreamspeakers,when they commit anything to paper at all, tend to couch their meanings in the form of fables. Some Akashic Mages do this too. Hell even some orphans,hollow ones and virtuals can get into this act by quoting music or movies that they all understand but others would be clueless unless they had hung out with them for years.

-Braille ( How many sighted Mages can actually read Braille? The same principle might apply to a book written entirely in magnetic media that has no reading device for it. you would need to run your fingers across it and use forces 1 to read it, like the strip on a credit card.)

-Old Languages ( While Ancient Chinese or Tagalog might not slow down the hermetic in the group, Atlantean Senzear and Mi-Go runes might. Hieroglyphs and pictoglpyhs might require a bit of skill and luck to decode and pity the poor Virtual who has to read something written in COBOL or FORTRAN.)

-Reading Devices ( Some mages...extremely sneaky ones...might prepare their libraries in such a way that someone must use a reader device to read anything in it. This device will be stored elsewhere, for security. A variation on this theme might be books that appear mundane or even marginally useful until viewed under the reading device where it true secrets are revealed. Often times, these devices are special lenses or light sources.

While I'm at it I might as well say a few words about paranoia... Mages often will protect their libraries with some sort of ward or trap. There are only 2 reasons for this. In one case, it is because the Mage possesses books and secrets that other people are simply not ready for. The other reason is that some Mages are simply too paranoid and secretive for their own good. This usually has the effect of deciding the lethality of the wards and traps involved. If you're tooling around the master's library and pick up a book and then the next thing you know you are tucked into your bed....odds are fairly good that the master doesn't want you fiddling with that particular tome.

Odds are fairly good that if you open a book and some umbral....THING...tries to rip your face off, that your master is a wee bit paranoid. Different Traditions have different takes on this. Hermetics, as one can imagine, tend to heavily trap,encrypt and ward their works until the fucking books practically glow in the dark. Akashics tend not to ward their books,but often the prospective student must run some sort of gauntlet in order to be worthy of the library's wisdom. Euthanatos might heavily trap their books with serious lethality, but again, if the student is able to circumvent them they are considered worthy. Dreamspeakers might ask a spirit to oversee the library. Chorus Mages don't tend to go in for these reindeer games unless the information contained in a particular volume is dire indeed. Students won't have access to this kind of information at all. Only God can imagine the kind of traps found in a Son of Ether Library. Verbena traps tend to take the form of sickness or curses and Progenitor libraries use similar defenses. Iterator libraries that are independent of the Main computer are very rare but not unheard of. These are often guarded by old and obsolete robots and traps,mainly because Iterators hate to throw anything away. Virtual and Void engineer libraries tend to be stored online in the digital web and perhaps this makes them the most dangerous of all. Imagine opening a datafile and having ANYTHING happen. The viciousness of the wards and traps is only limited by the imagination of it's programmer.