The scroll archives of the library were stuffy and smelled strongly of the must of aged parchment. The lighting was dim in the vast, high ceilinged room, light sources confined to a few scattered, phosphorescent dimes, giving off a low, red light. The air was also noticeably cold, the temperature kept low to better preserve the precious documents the chamber housed.

Lining one wall of the large, dark room were doors, all of which led to chambers which contained slightly brighter lighting, and instruments for handling the delicate scrolls, many of which were of almost unfathomable age. One of these doors lay open, it's marginally clearer light spilling out in a semi-circle onto the floor. Anyone entering from the small, main entrance of the chamber adjoining the library proper on the adjacent wall would notice the wash of light amid the relative scarlet gloom of the scroll racks.

Nia was walking around the libary slowly looking around carefully. She knew she would get lost! That's why she hated big spaces with many roads. Why didn't she wait for Raven or someone else? At the moment she hated that old geezer for choosing a place like this for the meeting. Now not only she wouldn't help to resque Shinu, but she would have to yell for help or she would never get out of there.

After five minutes of walking in circles she noticed one road behind a bookcase that she didn;t see before, she had to give it a try, maybe she was lucky enough. Not long after she saw Erk, he was alone, she smiled slightly happy that she finally found it and that she wasn't the last one.

Corenian shuffled through the library, being led on by his spiritual familiar which had helped prevent him from walking into many dead ends in the library. Wasting little time, he soon found the open door and slid into the room silently, finding a decent looking corner to lean on, waving Fia to him before muttering silently, "t-this dosen't s-seem to be a-a very clean p-place, why the library anyways." At this point ha had pretty much returned to the way he was before they had scaled the mountain so here he was, back to his normal self, as useful or not it would be.

Raven walked through the library to the meeting place. He was feeling sore all over the place because of his training with his new status magics, he was mainly practicing those that could benefit people instead of harm them. He didn't have that much luck with it but he was getting better at it nonetheless. He was also wearing his gloves that he normally didn't wear unless on missions, but he wanted to covered the bandages that he had around his knuckles from punching some of the training dummies out of rage that he had.

That was worrying him also, because he had never felt such rage before that he was getting lately. He needed to control it soon before he went berserk.

Raven then saw the room that he had to meet Erk with. He was gonna tighten his knuckles but that would probably split open the wounds again, which he didn't need espically since Nia was gonna be there, he didn't want her to worry about him when it wasn't that serious of a problem.

He also noticed that she was there early for once, and not the last one, and he started to wonder if the apocalypse was coming.

Getting to the confined area was easier said than done for Lucien. On the way to the small room, Lucien knocked over four books, and with each thud a slightly whispered cursive word could be heard. By the time Lucien arrived in the room, there were already other people in there.

"Anybody else notice that they designed this library like a maze?" Lucien asked, not intending to get a reply from anyone.

A crash, deafening in the near silence of the archive chambers, drew their attention immediately to the entry of the small cell they found themselves in. In front of the now-closed door stood Erk, hands folded inside the sleeves of his robe, and a small, squirrelly man at his side, arms laden with three sealed scroll-tubes of lacquered wood. Some of the students from the leadership class recognized him as the man who had attempted to begin the class before the battered mystic had appeared. His eyes darted about the room uneasily, clearly anxious about his presence here.

Ignoring his companion's obvious discomfort, Erk strode across the negligeable length of the small room, and stood before them on one side of a table in the center of the cell, with a low, red lamp hanging from the ceiling above it. The table was covered with a thin pane of glass, slightly raised from the surface with small blocks, and hinged at one end The red light thrown by the lamp, the only source of illumination in the tiny room, was positively eerie, creating shadows in the planes of the faces of everyone in it.

Erk regarded them all slowly for several moments, his eyes jumping from person to person until all had been subjected to his scrutiny. He didn't seem encouraged. Gesturing his companion towards the glass-topped table, a panel of instruments and a container of gloves adjoined to it, Erk began to speak.

"Is this all of you? With the fervor that Shinu drew from the students, I'd expected a few more willing to rush to certain doom for him." As he spoke, the squat, nervous man lifted up the glass pane on the table, and began to work free the cap of one of the scroll tubes from its wax seal.

"I'm sure you've all some dim awareness of what it about to happen. In short, we are about to attempt to infiltrate what is quite possibly the most heavily guarded facility on this or any continent, and spirit away a summoner, a prisoner who is likely more important to Galbadia than the entire population of the prison combined. In addition to this, said prisoner may not even be alive at this point, or in any shape to accompany us. In short, what we are about to do is madness and suicide all in one."

As he finished speaking, the assistant had successfully extracted the scroll from its unstopped case, and proceeded to spread it out on the surface before him, hands gloved and carefully unrolling its aged vellum. That done, he replaced the glass pane over the table, encasing the unfurled scroll beneath it. In the dim light of the crimson lamp, the students could make outt what seemed to be blueprints of some sort, or technical schematics. It depicted a structure not unlike a spire, but inverse, each level continuallly shrinking.

Kira walke around the libary, he knew he was late but his reason was needed. He had hoped everyone else had done the same. He figured that the best way to inflitrate a prision would be sometime during the darkest hours, and for that he needed clothes that wouldn't make him stand out. He wore everything in black, the only thing not covered where his blades and his own face. Walking into the room where Raven had told him to go to, he saw only a few of the students he and Crysta had alerted to this rescue op. With him in there now, he counted five students. Half closing the door behind him, he entered the centre of the room and stopped infront of the table, looking down onto the blueprints, noticing the stucture. "It keeps decreasing in size as it goes down?" He thought to himself. Looking back up to see Erk, he knew that Erk must have some idea about this stucture.

Faina was late. AGAIN! She hadn't even known anything was going on, and then when she found out, she had five minutes to get to the meeting place.

She arrived in the library wearing a black tee shirt and black jeans, her hair up and her make up dark. She wandered frantically for a few minutes when she finally saw the door. She hurried over just in time to catch the brunt of the conversation and what Erk had said. She started to shake. Suicide or not, they had to rescue Shinu. It was the only thing she could do, and so help her, she wouldn't be a coward this time.

"Not only does this structure exist, Corenian, it is our destination." Removing a charcoal crayon from the folds of his robe, Erk began to mark some areas of the drill-like building.

"This place is Galbadia's prison. It lies, most frequently, below the sands of the only desert of the continent. As you have no doubt observed, it somewhat resembles a drill, does it not? This is so that it can bury itself beneath the sands of desert, and avoid infiltration, such as what we are planning at the moment. Here," the wizard continued, pointing to a charcoal spot he had made on the glass, "is one of the air vents that open near the top of the structure. If it hasn't been blocked since these schematics were drawn, then it should be entirely appropriate for our endeavor. It is just barely small enough to admit a child, albeight a bit tightly, and shouldn't be guarded. It will open out," moving his finger to another marking, "here, near the furnace room at the heart of the facility, near it's middle level. Assuming, of course, that no major renovation has been done since the construction of the prison, which is entirely likely."