Rodentia Adventures

CHAPTER 11: SWAN SONG

Originally, the single large book stood at the center of the city, even if the space could hardly be considered a city back then. In time, mice gathered about to see it, first few, then many. This place may have been much safer than the open air, but it still wasn't well protected from the elements, however, and even the early settlers understood the delicate nature of paper. As such, a crude structure was built around the tome. This wasn't a simple task, the book tall and set upright, but with a little cooperation and more than a little trial and error, it eventually happened, and from there, if they could build homes for books, well, why not for themselves? They had little need for such things, in truth, their simple underground burrows working well enough, but the novelty appealed to the early mice, with novelty turning into necessity as generations passed, as it so often does. Living in a basic hole in the ground just started to feel uncivilized. It wasn't long before an actual city began to arise, hidden underneath the rusted wreck. 

As for the library itself, it had buzzed with constant attention since then. There were always visitors eager to look at the pictures, but more important were the researchers working tirelessly to interpret the strange runes, and they had made impressive progress in that regard. Along the floor in front of the great text were engravings of each and every letter, number and symbol that had appeared within, set in no particular order. It was along the walls which Dimitri, the head researcher, had been arranging them into set patterns. First came the fairly easy bit, matching the capital and lower case letters. The mice didn't really understand the purpose of the varying shapes depicting the same letters, but the pattern proved relatively easy to recognize and identify. From there, the researcher listed out of all the most common words and how often they had appeared, from there further breaking it down into the most frequent combinations of letters. 

All of this had helped the mice recognize the basic structure of the language, but that was about the sum of it. They understood the most basic tone of the text, based on the collected themes of the images, but without any clear connection between those written words and something more tangible, for instance a picture having the word for what it was depicting, they had very little to work with. Their own methods of communication, especially in the early days, were quite primitive, with few words and even fewer grammatical rules. As a result, It wasn't simply a matter of the text being different from their own language, rather it was completely alien. 

Over the past month, progress had stagnated. The research assistants continued to work without rest, and while they regularly made slight measures of progress, they found themselves nowhere even close to interpreting the simplest of words, let along the body of text as a whole. They were all experts in their field, but without Dimitri, the head researcher, both as a motivator and a scholar of greater knowledge and intuition than all of the other assistants combined, they had found themselves than a little bit lost. 

Still, they would all have to wait for just a little while longer. Dimitri had gone to the movies. 

<3~ <3~ <3~ <3~ 

"No." Aaron said. 

"Huh? What do you mean 'no'?" Jerin exclaimed. "This is what you wanted, ever since we started!" 

"No, it's not. I know you. Sure, you said 'we' the first time, but then you said 'you'. You fully intend to go on. You just plan to do it on your own." 

Mathias looked to her with both a surprised and mildly hurt expression. "Is that... is that true?" he asked. 

"I lied." The girl said in a quiet voice, paws balled into fists at her sides, looking away from the three male mice..