“Turns out Unch and The Librarian might be one and the same. Keat Owens The Librarian is, underneath it all, what’s called a giant besalisk, a 4 handed version. It’s the involved salamander lineage that doesn’t allow him to be burned, thus the perfect nemesis for firestarter Jerome T. Newton, who we also know now is another version of Wheeler. The ash grey marble hands were a prop.”
“This just gets stranger and stranger,” returns Old Mabel. “The Woods are too peculiar. They could easily drive one mad with their continual twisty-turny ways.”
“Yes,” states Baker, also noticing that Old Mabel didn’t mention anything about moving *away* from said woods. She was engaged for certain.
“I want to know everything about The Diagonal,” she then said.
—–
“Here, let me just clear off some of these beer cans. And: voila.”
“How long did you say you’ve had this?” asked Baker Bloch.
“It came with the place,” clarified Furry Karl the bartender. “Let’s see, that would be 2005. Old Kringles.” He chuckled, thinking of the good demon he bought the bar from while it was still over in Rubi. “Quite the character. Wore a cow bell around his neck at all times.”
“This must be from the original village. But I thought it was destroyed.”
“Nope,” states Karl plainly. “There it is. You can see it with your dead peepers right in front of you.”
“Could be a copy, a duplicate,” speculated Baker.
“Well, could a copy do *this*?” Karl touches the object and produces a shower of shamrocks.
“Maybe,” says Baker.
“No, this is the sign. *The* sign. The one turned over and thrown aside during the ’68 robolution. A turning point in our history and time.”
“You said robolution there, Furry Karl. Did you mean revolution?”
“It was what it was.”
—–
Old Mabel dug deeper into the mystery of the belalisk at the town library. Journal 2 contained some information, but she was determined to find more. A particular pattern in another part of the book also caught her attention this night of playing “stay awake as long as possible to avoid dreaming”. The book just fell open at the page while she was trying to push it away from her to lay her head on the table. A yawn quickly turned into a gasp. “The portal in my dreams?”
But it was too late. Already sound asleep, the monsters arrived quickly.
Sunklands 