"The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page." -- Saint Augustine

Janelle Graysdottir snarled in irritation; usually, she avoided leaning into the stereotypes about beastkin, even when alone – it wasn't really helpful in a serious academic career, after all – but sometimes it was simply necessary. She was jamming some clothes and basic travel supplies into her somewhat battered-looking suitcase, which concealed a truly expensive spatial enchantment allowing for the transport of a fairly substantial number of books, if all went well.

"I was so close to having this be someone else's problem... If that damn outworlder hadn't kept cranking out new books every couple of days, it would have been too late for me to arrange transport by the time the order came down!" That hadn't been the case, however, and her recollection of yesterday's contact with that uptight Celestial prig, Semyaza, in the central office had her lip curling back from her canines in a distinct sneer. He'd taken transparent satisfaction in ORDERING her to pack up, hire an airship, and head to the Tel Dorinth Sky Island. She could still hear his rather androgynous voice explaining the need to her as though she were a child, or at least a librarian still in her initiate years.

"Now Janelle, I'm sure you saw this coming?", he intoned with a delicately arched eyebrow. "You're no fool, after all," Janelle heard the carefully measured doubt invested in that statement. "We simply cannot – and I mean CANNOT – allow an outworlder to continue producing novel works without coming to some arrangement wherein we secure that knowledge for the archives. And you're not a complete idiot, even if you ARE still on the young and inexperienced side; it's clearly in your assigned territory, so off you go!" He smiled at her with an ever so slightly mocking twitch at the corners of his mouth, showing his perfectly even, brilliantly white teeth – knowing that would set off her instinctive reaction to naked aggression.

Even in hindsight, Janelle was annoyed by his barely hidden racism and ageism; his natural lifespan might be substantially longer than hers, but he personally was barely a decade older than she was and not particularly more accomplished in any way, shape, or form. She wasn't sure if he actually WANTED her to fail, but he clearly wasn't all that concerned about it, either. It would be a setback to her career, and potentially hazardous to her health and well-being, but mostly she was irritated at the disrespect he'd shown her.

He wasn't actually WRONG, though, and she had no particular excuse to enable her to beg off, despite her distaste for both him and the trek ahead. She had, in fact, seen it coming and the preparations were largely in place already; she'd made contact with a local sky pilot and negotiated a mostly reasonable rate for the somewhat risky journey.

The major issue was that she still had no particular way of knowing who it was on the sky island was generating these new works. As far as she was aware, only the dragon was known to reside there, and after nearly three centuries, it seemed unlikely that it was suddenly responsible for a series of new books written in an outworlder language. Something clearly had changed, and there was no obvious person to ask about it. Janelle didn't particularly want to make this trip at all, and she DEEPLY didn't want to approach a dragon, unannounced, in order to politely inquire about books. She didn't know whether Semyaza was aware of that particular issue, but she refused to ask him. The odds-on bet was that he both knew nothing about it and would only find her predicament amusing. Similarly, he'd likely be pleased by her failure, as he wouldn't be the one sent to try again.

Muttering curses under her breath, she kept packing – probably overpacking a bit – and considering her options. "I can just show up blind and hope for the best. I can run another query on the sky island through the main database; they didn't have anything a month ago when I started looking, but maybe something has changed." She tended to doubt that, since the dragon wasn't exactly publishing things, but if someone else was printing books maybe they'd made contact with the outside world. "I can pay a month's salary for a diviner's report – which almost certainly will fail due to the dragon's presence." As a frugal woman on a fairly limited salary, that was an unappealing option. "I could hire a crew of adventurers to search the island." That would be similarly expensive and likely unproductive – possibly catastrophically so, if they annoyed the dragon. "I can pack up my personal gear and run away to join a band of traveling entertainers." That seemed as likely to succeed as her other options, so she sighed to herself and went back to cursing Semyaza's name, lineage, and sexual preferences – unknown though they were.

"I guess it can't hurt to run another search, and assuming that doesn't work, I'm just going to have to offer up more prayers to the goddess and hope for some good luck. Let's see, I've got travel clothes, hygiene and first aid kits, dried rations, several versions of basic publishing contracts and a draft on the bank at Talendra, a linkage tool to the autotranscription service at the central archives of the monastic order, and a few books that seem like they might fit the interests of whoever is writing there. What else? Pretty sure I don't need the adventurer's traditional 10-foot pole and rope..."

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She wasn't really sure if it was the prayers or pure luck, but that final search on the archives HAD, in fact, turned up some critical information. Janelle clutched the two thin sheaves of paper which contained the all-too-brief reports of the dungeon inspectors from Zaipruniel and Daekar. "Well, I'm going to have to assume this is good news, in that I probably won't have to speak with the dragon. She seems to be keeping at least mostly hands off on visitors to the Dungeon." It had been a shock to discover that the most likely individual to be providing these new books was a rapidly expanding, sapient dungeon with an outworlder scholar reincarnated as its core. Janelle was in possession of a telepathy skill, so that was one hurdle overcome, at least.

"But how does one get a dungeon to sign a publishing contract? I can't imagine it really needs money in a distant bank? How would it sign in a legally binding fashion, anyways?"

She was still grappling with those questions. Technically, the dungeon wasn't the author of those works, or at least that seemed like the obvious conclusion, but clearly it had some way of transcribing books from its former existence and could bring over what increasingly sounded like a wide array of books – both useful and possibly not. She had no way to compel sharing of that information; no leverage over publishing houses or distribution networks was likely to help in this case.

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"I'd guess that some combination of gifts and a reciprocal sharing of knowledge is my best approach. But what gifts would a dungeon find useful? The dungeon inspectors' reports are at least moderately helpful in that regard, and a desire to know about the sky island and its history, as well as deities and other dungeons should be reasonably easy to work with. Still, I'd like to provide something it would like beyond just books; if I were to suddenly become a dungeon, what would I want?"

A little thought along those lines and the beastkin librarian had a sudden inspiration. It did require a quick stop by the academy town, but a fast visit to the main university store gave her what she needed in time to make her chartered flight, suitcase in hand and a quick grin on her face.

That grin was not shared by the crew of the small airship, who apparently hadn't been notified by their central office of their destination and its concomitant hazards until about an hour ago. As a result, Janelle was greeted a bit sullenly by the crew, who, at least, had the grace to recognize it wasn't entirely her fault. She did hear mutters of retribution, but they were directed towards their management. They didn't show any signs of actual unwillingness to set sail, and the captain, at least, was pleased when she passed on the knowledge vouchsafed by the recent dungeon inspections. Being able to reassure the crew that a landing point had been established and was apparently tolerated by the dragon calmed most of their nerves and her promise of some additional hazard pay took care of the rest. Further discussion with Janelle revealing the actual time spent on the island wasn't expected to take more than a day or two had the crew almost smiling as they cast off from the University pylon and set sail.

The generally quite poised senior librarian had trouble controlling her nerves, though, as this was rather different from her usual acquisition journey. Not that petty nobles, miserly merchants, and paranoid mages were a pleasure to work with, but a sapient dungeon new to this world and basically free from any controlling force but the deity who had emplaced it represented a whole other level of risk and in unpredictable ways.

Sure, the dungeon SOUNDED eminently reasonable in the dungeon inspectors' reports, and its apparent willingness to host an airmage and her experiments was a good sign. That said, asking it to allow the central archives to copy every book it ever produced wasn't really covered by any dungeon inspector's protocols. If it said no, there was literally nothing Janelle OR the central archives could do to compel it to share. She pondered the likely effect of an alienated dungeon hoarding its knowledge on her career and shuddered. Forget the central archives, that was likely to have the goddess herself expressing her displeasure. And while normally a calm, open-handed deity, she also had access to millennia worth of knowledge concerning ways to punish those who failed her.

She shook herself mostly free from that particular concern. Janelle had no intention of failing, much less doing any less than her best on behalf of the goddess. She had enough faith to expect that her goddess might punish those who worked against her, but that honest failure was its own punishment. Letting down the goddess would surely prevent further advancement, but beyond that she really did hope to please her mistress.

The crew served as a distraction, in and of themselves. The three half-orcs seemed to function largely through a constant low-level bickering, with the captain mostly not enforcing any sort of discipline. That said, the ship ran quite smoothly, and the sailors clearly knew their jobs well; despite the constant swearing and general rough housing, the tasks were all completed with the ease of long practice and familiarity. It wasn't how Janelle was accustomed to operating in the academy, but it clearly worked, and she had enough sense not to try to interfere with people who knew what they were doing better than she.

She watched them carefully, mostly to distract herself, noting the knots being used, the rigging of the sails, and the terminology of navigation. She found herself, eventually, in the prow, ears cocked and nose in the wind, eying the visible geographic landmarks below with a grin on her face and carefully restraining her tail from a constant wagging.

From those landmarks, she could, at least, verify that they were headed in the right direction – moving out of the foothills of the Dragonspires and into the Orclands in a generally southeasterly direction. Fortunately, the political situation was calm for the last several years; there were some raids by the orcs on their neighbors, as there always were, but no organized warfare since the last significant clashes between the Daekaran dwarves and the Orcs of the Ivory Claw almost twenty years past – something about mineral rights along the border, as she distantly recalled.

That meant that the airship could take a least time path that should have them encountering the trajectory of the sky island just a few days before the island left Daekaran space for the Orclands. Having had to leave earlier than she'd wanted, the overall flight time was going to be almost three days in each direction – well, three days to get there and only two and a half to come back, if she stayed for two days.

The captain and crew largely ignored their passenger – not in any particularly pointed way, mind you, but simply because they had little in common with her. She was rather self-contained herself, in a bookish kind of way, and barely noticed the lack of interaction. She'd long since accustomed herself to long stretches of working in silence, gathering information, researching questions posed by academics, and occasionally pointing students in the correct direction (sometimes literally within the archives, usually more figuratively).

She made polite conversation with the captain and his crew over simple meals of stew and rice (apparently a novel experience for the sailors – the polite conversation, that is, not the stew) and threw her bedroll carefully against the bulkhead and out of the way. By the morning of the third day, the sky island was visible and growing steadily before them. That sight, both majestic and ominous, set Janelle's nerves on edge again, and the peace she'd managed to find slipped away from her steadily.

By the time the small skyship had pulled near enough to the island to identify the planned landing spot, she was visibly tense – ears laid back, lips curled away in a nervous snarl, and tension knotting her shoulders. That tension wasn't soothed when a small squadron of red-crested avians wheeled away from the cliff face, patently heading in their direction in an ordered formation.

The flight of four armed warriors drew near enough that the sailors armed themselves out of an abundance of caution. There had been no mention of an avian welcome committee in either dungeon inspector's report, so either they'd missed something, or this was a very new, and potentially lethal, phenomenon. Three of the avians took up what amounted to an escort position, while the fourth – conspicuously shifting his javelin from his hand to a quiver on his back – hailed the ship.

"Permission to come aboard and speak with the Captain? We'd like to verify your intentions, as we've recently relocated to the sky island with permission from the Dragon and the Dungeon – and they're both a little on edge about new visitors."

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