Chapter 16: 16. Another Birthday

Another birthday coming up, another year of compromises. They really ground you down over the years. Studying everything makes sense the first five or six years, but for how long did they expect you to keep your grades up without the chance to follow your passion, or just some support from home?

Not that Livia had one, not really. That's why she was in business school. Her father actually told her early on that if she found herself in her twenties still one of those people searching, figuring out 'her thing' then go for business. Whatever you end up doing, turn it into a business. Solid advice, she reckoned. If only the courses didn't manage to be drier than kindling. It became evident early on that the people teaching business usually didn't have a thriving one to keep them too busy to teach business. Obvious with hindsight.

Today Livia was sitting in the Scoville library and it was the end of the month. The weekend in fact. So, why am I at the library. The coffeeshop has Wi-fi too. Oh right, I'm broke and was caught using an old mug and sitting down once already.

She hadn’t been here regularly since she was young and first found a book about a boy who met a hat that told him he was a hero, and she got hooked onto fantasy and never looked back.

Well okay, she also spent six months working here back when she just finished up high school and they needed a temp library assistant, but it wasn’t like she came here to hang out. She only got the job because the staff thought the kids would be impressed by someone with a tattoo who still reads a lot. She has a tiny Pegasus on the back of her shoulder. Mighty impressive.

The point being that Livia had tons of stuff to do, usually. She had a side-gig writing body texts, mainly fantasy, for mobile gaming companies usually, and she was the Dungeon Master of three different online DnD groups. She did a lot of running and had even recently picked up boxing with a friend.

But the thing she was actually passionate about, the thing she did as if addicted and was here to do now, was read fantasy. If only that was a job. She treated it like one, which wasn't hard when what you loved to read was the kind of long book series that shot straight past a million words and kept going. In recent years even web-serials and the like. As a life-long reader, and now broke twenty year old, the ability to not wait nor pay for the next instalment of her favourite characters was a sanity preserver in what felt like a world gone mad at times. Most times.

So, why was Livia desperate for Wi-fi?

Because she was out of data, and her internet broke down, and her friends were all busy, all four of them. She was at the library because she couldn’t wait a single hour, because the finale of volume eight in the most epic story, a ten-million-word saga of unprecedented depth, was about to drop and Livia had more than five bets going on about what would go down. No, she would not wait an hour, nay even a minute, before digging in. In fact the pressing of the publish button should be no more than ten minutes off by now.

The staff all knew her of course, and the old building was undergoing some minor renovations.

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“Livia, could you give me a hand please?” Cried Margaret, the senior librarian. Some people instinctively went to shush her, but when they caught who it was they all blanched and quickly looked back down.

Livia coughed to cover a smile, she loved to see it; this was a queen in her domain. She walked up to Margaret rather than shout back. “What do you need?”

“Could you please be a dear and run upstairs to grab the hammer in my office for me?” She asked with effortless charm.

“Of course, I’ll be right back.” Livia had time to spare, and the only people working both had some issues with stairs. There was a small lift, but it took ages.

Wow, this is a big hammer, pretty damn sure I’ve never seen bigger in fact. Livia swung it a few times and had to laugh, this was really overkill for some nails, even if you could still use it with one hand.

When she got back down she had to ask. “Are you sure you’re good to use this?”

But the question just made Margaret laugh. “Of course, my husband gave it to me.” She emphasized the words by twirling the hammer twice. Alright, looks like I might have underestimated Ol’ Margaret.

That was when Livia finally got the notification she’d been waiting for. “Oh cra-, Margaret I really need to read this right now, please excuse me!”

The librarian looked at the running young lady fondly and then went to the back to check on her latest project.

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