Chapter 25

Young Octavia Worblehat lived moving from one foster family to another, then on to another as she moved from one library to another through the scientific magic of L-Space. She lived happily devouring any book she could reach. Her foster mothers and fathers didn’t mind her presence at all. She was a sweet, polite young girl completely dedicated to her first love: library science. To Octavia, books were living things to be loved, protected, and nurtured. She happily returned stacks of books to their shelves for her librarian foster parents, and she learned to repair bindings and dry out wet books. As she learned to move through time, she loved to see how some of her favorite books aged. The majority of the political discourses failed to age more than a year or two, but her favorites were in the Young Readers category, where some remained popular for ages, and some crossed over from universe to universe. (Many publishers are keenly aware of L-Space and realize that they had a pool of reader tested material whose copyright laws didn’t apply in their universe)

“Here’s one you may like,” said Marly, the round world librarian who she recently met for the first time and found a kindred spirit. Twelve-year-old Octavia gave the book a quick glance and saw that it was a discworld story which immediately interested her. Regardless of the advances in newspapers and post offices back home, literacy rates on the discworld were far below 50% and in most places on the disc, the literacy rate was in single digits. Reading for leisure was for the monied classes and there were very few young readers who had time for leisurely reading, so there was little need for books geared toward young readers on the discworld. But outside of the discworld, stories of the discworld were sold as fantasy and did well, garnering millions of readers, legions of followers, and mountains of moolah. On the discworld, those same books are filed under “Biography.”

Her very favorite book was a story of a young boy who lived in abject poverty in some ruins next to a big castle filled with funny wizards. The boy’s only friend was a small talking dog who lived in the ruins with him. The book was a chronical of their adventures in the slums of a big city, turning the boy’s life of loneliness and despair into one of joy and laughter. Sadly, a wicked man who wanted to make money with a talking dog grabbed the boy’s only friend and the boy had to learn to live on his own in the shadow of a big, spooky castle filled with wizards and strange magic. Years passed, but the boy remained near the castle, soaking up magic from the radiation emitted by the castle, but that’s where he and the dog lived before the dog disappeared. The boy spent every day there hoping the dog would return, but he never did and one day the boy met a girl and moved on in life. Later in the book the boy, now a man, and the dog were reunited in a strange far away land filled with strange animals, and they vowed to stay together forever, and they toured discworld and saw all of its mystical sights.