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But only if I had ink.

Fuckers.

Periodically they brought in a pen and had me scribble in a few numbers to pad our accounts. A few dead billionaires suddenly leaving a hefty endowment—that sort of thing. Nothing more.

And my imprisonment wasn’t as oppressive as it could have been. I was allowed to go into the town, shop for food, and order things online. Typing didn’t do shit with my gift unless it was on a typewriter. I could really fuck shit up with a typewriter.

I’d gotten access to one in 1942 and was still being berated for it.

Fuck me for wanting to watch baseball, I guess. With all the men out to war, all it took was a few neatly typed lines and boom, a women’s league.

It wasn’t as interesting as what I’d done in 1945, though.

Have one dictator take a cyanide pill, and suddenly everyone thinks you need an escort wherever you go! Hell, anyone with a theoretical time machine had the same idea.

I just actually did it. All I had was a newspaper at the time, or I would have done it sooner. Such was my limitation, that and the spells placed on my hands. And I learned the hard way how many things it fucked up. Dominoes and all that. But more good than bad.

But that had been forever ago, and since then, I’d practically been living in one book or another, especially current fiction. It kept me evolving, at least. Life had become far more entertaining since those bygone days without air-conditioning, takeout, and internet.

The only thing it really limited was my dating scene. Even if they had lifted my restrictions over the years for being a good boy. I could leave the town with adequate notice, had to check in with local libraries and the like. Still a prisoner, just…different leash.

Grindr was a thing, and I’d futzed about with that a bit, but random hookups at an hourly motel weren’t really my deal.

Normal humans, mundanes, couldn’t enter the environs of the library, or even see it, so bringing a hookup home was a no-go.

But there I was, observing the new guy like some sort of stalker, peeking around stacks to watch him rearrange books. He’d been bitten by an encyclopedia twice and hadn’t noticed. The absolute definition of clueless. It was kinda cute. It was like he was intentionally trying to ignore it all.

I sat in the back room, drumming my fingers on the desk as I glanced at my workload. They had a stack of books there that had been tampered with in some way, and it was my job to dive in for a read and document anything off. Then I’d have to fix it.

There were always rumors floating around online about books with different endings all over, and those were what I tackled. Dean Koontz was notorious for it. I was fairly certain the guy was a carcer of some variety like myself, but we tended to isolate from one another. Book nerds, right?

Which is why I was hiding from the only living human I’d seen in months.

I settled into an odd copy of some new litRPG novel about being sucked into a crab world, and let the magic absorb me, carrying my body and energy into the pages of the alternate world that lived within text.

The story was as the blurb described: sucked into another world. Crabs. Unbalanced leveling system. I ticked off all the tropes as I pushed my mind through pages.

But still, something seemed off.

The world around me trembled, as if my book had been moved.

Not good… Moving a book could disrupt the story.

Since my corporeal form was inside the book, I willed myself to draw my mind back, lifting above the world, transforming scenery to text, to a page, and I was falling.

I slipped free of the book a few feet off the ground, flailing as I came to a crash landing in the middle of a stack with a loud thump and a rather high-pitched scream.

Not my scream.

I blinked and glanced up from my crumpled spot on the floor to make prolonged eye contact with a certain novice archivist. “Uhh… Hey?”

Lex’s bright, wide eyes with blue and green like an ocean met mine and then flicked up, face morphing into absolute horror.

“Oh, hell no. Nope!” Lex shelved a book, stepped back, and turned on his heel, marching away.

“Rude.” I followed where his gaze had been and winced. Crab.

The book I’d been reading, a hardback signed edition of the author’s work, clung to one of the upper shelves, pages folded origami into long spindly legs as it probed the covers of a few other books curiously, like some sort of paginated hermit crab. But that was basically what books were, anyway. Hermit crabs. They crawled from one cover into another, an author’s words. They fit in any space they wanted and eventually got stuck somewhere in your brain.