This God's Request is Off the Menu
The increasing roar of small, thundering wheels signalled to me that we’d arrived.
“Youth Section,” I declared, blinking sand out of my eyes.
I sat upright and brushed more sand off my sleeves, automatically reaching for the feel of worn leather by my side. Satchel didn’t so much as shuffle.
“Still not speaking to me?”
Silence.
“Alright then.”
The sandpit we’d woken up in had strayed to a different spot since I’d been here last. So had the squeaky see-saw.
When Todd Sanders approached authors who had writtten for in the world of The Librarian (see also The Librarian Reshelved, and The Librarian Card Catalogue) and asked if we'd be interested in writing fan-fiction or divergent stories of each others' works, I already knew that I wanted write a playthrough for Maria Schrater's solo role-playing game Build Your Own Library: A Solo RPG Journal Adventure which appeared in the Card Catalogue.
I've been playing solo RPGs for a while. Perhaps because I'm an incorrigible plotter, I find writing by the roll of dice (or its equivalent) oddly liberating; I relish being sideswiped by sequences of events that I might not have come up with on my own. However, there's a definite gap between a playthrough one might scribble in a journal versus a story that would make sense on the printed page. (I've had some practice to know this to be true!)
Maria's original game design is admirably elegant: letters from a book title would determine the rooms in your library (e.g. "L" maps to "youth section"), and letters from the author's name would determine the circumstance or complication that you as a role-playing Librarian would find in that room (e.g. "B" maps to "lost child"). For my divergent story, I altered the rules slightly to allow more chance complications. Instead of using letters from the author's name, I mapped each letter to a numeric equivalent, so I can roll a pair of dice and end up with a random circumstance. I also expanded the concept of a library; instead of rooms in a single building, I wanted to give a nod to the wonderful variety of worlds other authors have created in the multiverse that the Librarian and Satchel travel through. All to say, This God's Request is Off the Menu was a labour of love; I had an absolute blast writing this story.
If you're already a fan of the original Librarian books, you'll definitely enjoy these two volumes. It's possibly a rare specimen of authors who love the canon we've collectively created so much, that we'd wholesomely threw ourselves into writing fan fiction of each others' works.
Both volumes of the Inter Librarian Loan were edited by Todd Sanders, with stories by Sarah Allison, Brent Baldwin, E.D.E. Bell, Carina Bissett, Ian Martínez Cassmeyer, Brandon Crilly, E J Delaney, Jane Doring, Lindsey Godfrey Eccles, Indigo Emmerson, Gabriel Ertsgaard, Kat Farrow, Marlena Frank, Reyzl Grace, Isobel Granby, S. M. Hallow, Paula Hammond, Rebecca Hardy, J.D. Harlock, A.P. Hawkins, Henry Herz, Storm Humbert, Larry Ivkovich, Kenzie Lappin, Julia LaFond, Brian Maul, Sean Monaghan, Marshall Moore, Mike Morgan, Waverly X. Night, Tarver Nova, Leo Otherland, Cameron E. Quinn, D.G.P. Rector, Maria Schrater, Elizabeth Snow, A'liya Spinner, NA Sulway, Ana Sun, Michael Teasdale, LB Waltz, and Nathan Waddell.