The Libraries

One theory of how The Funhouse was created is that it was intended as a sort of interdimensional laboratory that grew a life of its own. There are between one and several realms of near pure knowledge (hard to pin down if they are all aspects of the same place or all slightly different places). As I mentioned in passing elsewhere, they are fundamentally oriented towards the retention, analysis, and preservation of knowledge. Great for studying everything in the universe. What they are not great for however is for gaining new knowledge, seeing as they are far too sterile, and they are especially bad at gaining new information about the ways in which different planes/realms interact with each other, since that is always the complete opposite of sterile. So it is possible that sometime a while ago some cooky scientists might have a started an experiment that spiraled totally out of control and created this mish-mash world that somehow ended up being self-sustainable, and perhaps even self-propagating. Regardless of their relation to the creation of The Funhouse, at least one of these intellectual worlds has some direct interactions with its denizens: The Library. Every bastion of higher learning or store of knowledge in The Funhouse has the potential to link into the Library. Nobody is exactly sure how such links get created, unlike most however they seem to open at the prerogative of the native denizens of The Library. Whatever the exact process might be, once an opening has been created, it will never close, and having such a portal can be incredible powerful. The goal of the denizens of The Library is to collect, retain, and study all knowledge in the multiverse, and The Funhouse is a great way to do the collecting. Any library that has a portal opened to it has the option to create an exchange with The Library, to potentially “check-out” any book, ever, on anything (nonfiction, the fiction version is a lot trickier to open a portal to). There are some caveats however. Firstly, there is no way to know what other books are “available”, one can only request something on a topic, and if the sorter who receives the request deems it too dangerous or unbalanced, they have the discretion to choose another book, or say that no such book is available. In this way civilizations can’t jump too far ahead of each other, although the potential for incredibly fast learning is still great. Second, to begin with when the portal is opened, the library has no right to get any books at all from The Library. For every work they submit however that is deemed to contain enough original information (not already contained in The Library) they get to “check out” one book at a time. A book can be held out indefinitely, however, it will be impossible for anyone to retrieve any other books from that location until the book is returned. If a checked out book is destroyed or lost, a new submission must be tendered which is assessed to be of equal or greater scholarly merit to the lost knowledge. Third, these limits are not made by person or by researcher or by group, but only by geological location. Also, there are no limits on transcribing information from books that have been checked out, which is what all of the smart libraries do. Some possible consequences of these limitations: if a library is burned down, looted, robbed, etc. while it is holding a large number of books out (even 5 can be a lot) it can put that location in an information debt which can take generations to dig out of. Some library locations have had to be abandoned completely because they are simply unusable now because of this occurrence. Even if the city itself is completely abandoned or destroyed by a dragon however, the portal will always be there, waiting for someone to come and start submitting works for consideration, and if a person could overcome the debt in secret, they could unlock a secret of literally unlimited power. Ayn (the city nearish to Ravenhill) will have what used to be a large, well known library that at one point had a working exchange going. However, they lost their rights (probably a fire) and the part of the library with the portal has been forgotten, buried, etc. As happens in ancient libraries. The current rulers of the city don’t care much for the esoteric research that would be required to get their exchange up and running again, or for the knowledge that they could gain from the portal, if they even remember. The researchers working at the library don’t get paid for that kind of work, and don’t have the time to work double-shifts, and all have given up on reopening the portal. Every generation a few young scribes or scholars try and find the portal and get the exchange going again, but if any succeeded they didn’t tell anybody. Rose and Jack are going to succeed in opening the exchange, at least for a little while. This will be how they learn at least some of the history on the Ravens of Raven Hill, and what they are.

Purpose / Function

It's a library. There's books.

Type

Library