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Flamel Parsons     The smugglers had put up a bit of a fight. It was, quite unusually, a very supernatural battle. Their abilities, however minor, were exclusively the psychic brand. Couple pyrokinetics, a handful of illegal psychomarksmen, and one lobbing confusion grenades; it all was fairly by-the-book, not an Elite among them nor backing them. This is small time, and these days, symptomatic of the fact that there's no longer factions of sufficient size to encompass every crook and criminal ring around. This means it wasn't a bad idea for the League and the Paladins to work together a little on this job.

    The warehouse looked like something out of, well, spy fiction again. There were dramatic posters or spray-painted wall art with symbols marked all over them. Skulls with exposed brains, mostly. Illegal psychoscholars are a weird bunch. But Paladin soldiers would have no trouble subduing these troublemakers. In fact, it was easy enough to arrest them with no casualties on either side, if Staren had been inclined to go for stun weaponry today. Those who had been arrested were already being hauled away.

    All that remains now is to dig into their stock of grimoires. So far, most of the books have been low-tier things. Guides on magical and pseudo-magical psychic effects related to, you, guessed it, cursing. Plenty of baleful words that one could speak to lay pain upon their foes, that sort of thing. League interests are in the academic and the useful elements of this, but Paladin interests are in their containment, control, and perhaps the burning for some of them. Nothing hazardous to a trained reader, though, at least not in the first few crates.
Staren     Staren was prepared for... considerably more well-armed and defended enemies than this. After a decade of Elite work, sometimes the small jobs are underwhelming. Staren just feels kind of sad for them... like they're not dangerous enough to justify killing. An old Federation phaser, concussion grenades, and a number of electric shock weapons serve as his nonlethal arsenal.

    Staren's knowledge of how to /perform/ magic is very limited -- He can't even tell a legit magic book from a good fake. Ainsley or Twilight would be better here, although he's sure they'd both find reading books of curses rather distasteful. Still, he can catalogue the purported capabilities of the spells and how difficult the instructions look to execute.

    And of course, his cameras are recording everything, should the Paladins decide to burn any books he looks at later.

    "...If they had anything /really/ dangerous... Wouldn't they have used it on us?" Staren muses, after looking through a few books. "Or do you think it's likely they might not have recognized real power if they saw it?"
Ainsley     It's within Ainsley's best interest to let Staren dig through what's present for anything relevant to research and make notes, but she's adamant that he not take anything out of the warehouse without it first being examined for dangerous traits. Small potatoes curse books don't seem to worry Ainsley overly much, the lizard woman shoveling most of them into a bin. She is a little odd in that she goes through each of them one at a time, flipping through pages and neutralizing the word trap components within them. A lot of curse books have those, and she has to make sure the non-Elites cataloguing them don't get whammied. She puffs an exhausted sigh after a while of this.

    "If any of them were of any real competency in these books, they could have made my next month a living hell," she tells Staren, "Even low-class curses can cause serious issues if used by the right person." Despite her visible distaste with the contents of any given book, she isn't destroying anything. Absolutely everything is getting catalogued as evidence by the looks of things. Until she discovers something at the bottom of a crate, and has to reeeeeach deep into the container to try and pull it out. "What's this...?" Whatever it is, it doesn't look like something that belongs among all these other books.
Flamel Parsons     The book is not a guide to curses. It is also unlike most of the other curse books. Whereas others may be bound in tanned human flesh, bloodied and cut in various rituals, and otherwise mistreated, this one seems to have, at some times or others, once been handled mostly by a government entity. Labels, half torn off, mark its place in historic or classified archives, though who originally possessed it is unknown. The book, well... It is a book, and little else. It seems to have, at one time, been a journal, simply bound in soft grays, whites, and browns. The only label that is on it is one that was first put on it by its original owner, scrawled in fading sharpie that has withstood the test of time badly, but not so badly that the text on it can't be read.

    "LINGUA ADAM"

    It is a book of liguistic scholarly work. Ainsley will most likely be unable to detect the very minor sensation of what is happening. The book's passive effects on the brain and its perception, induced just by proximity, can only be recognized by the very, very slight increase in the 'silent ringing' that each person hears at all times, This is the only indicator there is for the fact that the labels are actually not torn. Staren will find, when he reviews the recordings later, that the book actually was covered in layers of tape, declaring: "PSYCHOHAZARD WARNING", "CLASS 10X COGNITOHAZARD", and "DO NOT PERCEIVE WITHOUT PSYCHOISOLATION". It's marked with the Psychonauts logo for psychohazard: A biohazard icon with a brain square in the center. As the book burns through its last reserves of psychic power, though, everything about it looks like a rather old, but purely scholarly, work, when looked at directly, or even on the recordings. As long as it can keep it up for just a few more minutes...
Ainsley     Ainsley draws the book out of its container, sliding back onto her feet. She squints at the dull pain of the ringing in her ears, but that she can easily attribute to the weapons the criminal elements here were using moments before. Her eyes scan the surface of the book, fingers playing over it. She just doesn't sense anything wrong with looking at it, not at first.
    She cracks open the book, though she makes a face at the resistance in it that she can't make sense of -- later determined to be the tape binding it shut being torn apart, spotted by Staren's recordings which are unaffected by mental illusions -- and she flips through the book while seeking any sort of cursing phrases that might be a problem. Her feathers bristle a little in instinctual unease of an invisible presence and her tongue sticks out some from a strange force gnawing at her, but she discovers absolutely nothing in it but the musings of the author about the structure of language and how it affects the mind, scrawled in hasty handwriting.

    "..."

    And after determining it relatively harmless for now, she puts it in the bin with the others, and rubs the side of her head in apparent confusion. Her head is swimming, but she did get winged in the skull earlier by a lucky criminal, so she still ignores it.

    "Pack this up and bring it to the van," she tells one of the assisting officers.
Staren     Staren nods at Ainsley's assessment that even minor curses could cause a lot of trouble. "What's what?" He comes over to look, as 'Increased incidence of PVP activity in VRMMOs' appears in his HUD newsfeed. Great. What are the odds THAT's being caused by a psychohazard too?

    "Man. It looks like a reference book of some kind." Judging by the look of the cover and binding, he means. "What's it about?"
Ainsley     "Language theory, it looks like," Ainsley answers, "Seems like some professor's thoughts. Weird that it ended up with all of these other books, but people don't tend to look at what they're stealing when they're shoveling books into bins in restricted library wings."
Flamel Parsons     The book, it seems, is a linguistic study. Someone believes they have found the roots, not of all language or something like that, but the language which spurred the development of language itself; it claims to point towards the source of the evolutionary or spiritual impulse to speak words with meaning. They claim that through various extrapolations of psychic background radiation, psychometry of ancient artifacts, and a generous helping of linguistic ability, it is possible to find the Tongue of the linguistic Adam, the first human to connect noises or images with meanings. However, Ainsley only gets as far as the initial studies and data. Eventually, it shifts off towards thought experiments, from which the Tongue may be derived. And then it ceases and turns to blank pages, or so goes the perception of Ainsley when she looks at it.

    She will now find it difficult to stop thinking about the thought experiments and extrapolation involved, now, passively reconstructing it. In fact it is nearly impossible to get the linguistic work off of her mind. It's like that awful joke, 'you are now breathing manually', but it STICKS in her mind when normally it ought to fade, or allow other thoughts to take its place. She can still think, but she'll find herself increasingly distracted.

    By the time the book gets back to the van, its last reserves of imbued psychic energy will completely fade out.
Staren     Staren nods at Ainsley's assessment. "I guess if you're not looking for something specific, it makes sense to grab what you can and sift it for good stuff later... So, is finding out what library these were taken from and getting them back part of your job, or does the League get them, or do we get to make copies first, or..."
Ainsley     "Most of this stuff is going to a lock-up until we can get them back where they belong. Talk to the libraries that own them about holding onto them, I can't really tell you that you can have them," Ainsley says, "I can recommend that you can be trusted with borrowing a few if they trust you with them." She distractedly mumbles to herself after that, a string of lingual phrases that don't make sense on their own, as if she was repeating broken code to herself. Something from the book she read a moment ago.
Flamel Parsons     Paladin enforcers are likely now reporting in to Ainsley. Two of the arrested smugglers are now dead, with a third comatose, all three bleeding from the nose and ears. They appear to have been the ones to handle the book, and may have peeked at materials that came with it, the various papers lodged in the book itself. Cause of death based on initial assessments is thought to be cerebral hemorrhaging caused by neural overload, the equivalent of overclocking the brain until it dies; they started overthinking themselves to death.
Staren     Staren nods to Ainsley. He doesn't /super/ care about the League getting much out of this, but this mission was with their blessing. Oh well, a reccomendation and copies of what he looked at is more than nothing.

    As Paladin Enforcers come up, he looks concerned. "Oh shit. There might be a serious memetic hazard... or psychohazard... in here somewhere. Can psychohazards do that?" He asks Flamel, while running away to check on the bodies.
Flamel Parsons     The neural patterns of the corpses are skewed. The language centers of the brain are enorged and neurologically cancerous, colonizing the entirety of the prefrontal cortex and eventually much of the other brain matter. The brains are unsalvagable, but the gear to attempt salvage is at least giving useful data.
Staren     Getting that's going to take awhile -- Staren will be dragging gear to a prepared location where they can blow everything up if shit starts going down, but eventually he'll get scans, which will probably need to be interpreted by a neurologist.

    It will only raise more questions...