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This text was inspired (with her permission) by the work of u/soft-n-slow of Reddit's r/gonewild.
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Part 2
A few days before.
Emilia woke up yet again more than an hour before she needed to. She stared up at the ceiling of her small one-bedroom apartment, the gray morning light peeking in through the Venetian blinds. It didn't look like going back to sleep was happening any time soon. Nor did she particularly feel like picking up her phone and checking the news, considering how fucking horrible it would all inevitably be.
She supposed she
could
try and get herself off before work.
But it didn't work out. Try as she might, her exhausted brain just couldn't seem to come up with anything that clicked. Not a single fantasy or image that could do the job, despite the mountains of smut she'd read and seen over her twenty-six years of existence. (God, the fanfic alone would fill up entire rooms.) She stubbornly persisted, her fingers working beneath her panties -- but she might as well have been trying to pump a dry well for all the headway she was making. She considered breaking out her vibrator, but she couldn't remember if it was charged or not.
Finally, she just gave up. Grumbling, she swiped her glasses off the nightstand and stomped over to the bathroom. Oh, yeah. Today was just gonna be
awesome.
She could already tell.
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She made it to work with time to spare, not that it mattered. One of the few good things about her job as a reference librarian for a major college is that if she looked busy and managed to project just the right aura of
pissed-off-don't-fuck-with-me-right-now-
ness, it was possible for her to go entire hours with no one bothering her. Which was in everyone's best interest, frankly, given her lack of sleep and the large headache she'd developed just about the same time she set foot on the Lockwood campus.
Of course, there's always that handful of people who just won't get the message. "Ahoy there," an earthy male voice said, far too cheerfully for Emilia's taste.
She looked up bleary-eyed from her computer screen at the balding, gray-haired white man standing on the other side of the desk. Dammit. "Can I help you, sir?" she asked dully.
"Could I just get these titles on order?" The man passed a slip of paper over to her. He had a thuggish kind of face, despite his pleasant smile, and spoke with some kind of rough British accent, landing somewhere between Cockney and Scottish. Ten to one says it's fake and he's really from Iowa or something, Emilia thought.
She glanced over the list and felt a spike of irritation. Every last item looked like it was in the common collection -- meaning that he could've ordered them all easily over the website by himself, which would have taken him significantly
less
time compared to having her do it
for
him.
Is what it is, she told herself. C'mon. Deep breath. Just remember -- life is misery and then you die. "Name?"
"Linton
comma
Edward." She distinctly noticed his eyes flick up and down between her face and her chest. Blech. "I'm a visiting scholar."
She typed it into the computer. No sign of an account for anyone by that name... but that wasn't rare for visiting scholars. Usually thanks to the chairs not bothering to fill out the paperwork on time. "Department?" she asked.
"You know... I'm not really sure." He tilted his head. "It's that one interdisciplinary thing between Anthropology and Life Sciences. Focus on human sexuality?"
Oh, for fuck's sake, she thought in exasperation.
Please
don't let that have been him making a pass at me. "I'll put down Anthropology," she mumbled. "You'll have to present a photo ID when they arrive."
"Sounds like a plan." The man's smartwatch made a soft chime. He glanced at it and picked his bag off the floor. "Sorry, got a meeting across campus in five. Could you just get those in for me? Ta, love." He winked at her -- actually fucking
winked
-- and set off.
Ugh. She shook her head in mild disgust. She'd worked here for too long. Just what the hell was it about college campuses, anyway? Forget the students. Even the professors couldn't seem to keep it in their pants. Well, anyway... the sooner she got his request entered, the sooner she could happily forget she'd ever met the man. With a world-weary sigh, Emilia reluctantly set about doing her job.
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She wound up getting stuck with staying late, of course. Which was okay -- it's not like exhaustion was a thing, right? Still, at least the reference desk didn't get much traffic during the evening hours. Apart from some light reshelving, she was mostly free to just hang around at the desk, keeping an eye out for students lighting things on fire or fucking in the stacks or whatever. The second thing happened so often, she didn't even bother reporting it anymore unless she found them on top of something important or expensive.
All in all, nothing out of the ordinary for her... until she happened to look up at her screen at one point. There was a console window she didn't remember opening sitting off to the side. The text inside it read:
evening.witch: Pssst. Oi.
evening.witch: Anyone still there?
She clicked on the window and tried typing. Sure enough, the text she wrote appeared in the command prompt next to her own login name. Some sort of chat program? She'd never seen it used anywhere in the library before...
"What is this?"
she typed.
"Who are you?"
evening.witch: Why, I'm a hacker, dear
evening.witch: Currently inside of your system
evening.witch: Not to mention most of the others in the building.
Oh, great. So now
this
shit was a thing.
"Why?"
she asked. Followed shortly by:
"Are you a student here?"
evening.witch: Oh, no, dear. I'm a bit too old for that.
evening.witch: As for the why...
evening.witch: Well, why does anyone go to a library?
evening.witch: Knowledge, of course.
evening.witch: An exchange of information.
evening.witch: And in that vein of things...
evening.witch: I have a proposition for you.
Whatever, Emilia thought. Smart money was still on them being a student trying to play a prank or something.
"What kind of proposition?"
evening.witch: I find myself in need of some scans