Lyra and Bonbon located the Castle of Two Sisters with relative ease (it was on the map, after all), but struggled a little when it came to finding the secret library entrance. In the end, Bonbon had stumbled on it when she leaned against a shelf to catch her breath, and that was as good a method of discovery as anyone expected of the organization anyway. So that had gotten them inside.
Once they entered, and Lyra had begun to illuminate the mysterious rows with her glowing horn, the pair was still careful to keep an eye out for anypony else there, even though the relative conspicuousness and secrecy of the location meant it was unlikely that a usual guard task-force had been dispatched to investigate. Whether anypony knew besides Princess Luna and her few privileged guards was a mystery. One Lyra and Bonbon intended to solve, eventually.
No guards—but Bonbon swore she spotted a mouse poking out from behind one of the bookcases. Lyra was unconcerned.
Then there was the crime scene. A single fallen, multiply-disturbed patch of missing dust where Princess Twilight had fallen and displaced the years-old collection of grime. Scuff marks from where she'd been dragged, as well as merging sets of hoofprints leading back and out of the library. And there was the desk, a single, closed volume on top, the gilded cover shimmering under the glow of Lyra's horn.
"Why is the floor so sticky?" Lyra raised a hoof from the ground, and it peeled up like the soda-drenched carpet at a movie theater. It seemed to be localized mostly in the area of the reading desk.
When Lyra spotted the book, she reached for it immediately, but Bonbon batted her hoof away like a mother interrupting her foal as they grabbed at a tasty piece of candy. Or a rock, which to some foals might be just as tasty.
"Are you nuts?" Bonbon asked, half-rhetorically. "We're on the scene of the incident and you're going to handle the only out-of-place object in sight? What if it's an anomalous entity?"
"It's just a book." Lyra shrugged, but backed away from the desk. "But I guess you're right. It's not like we haven't seen more boring stuff than that turn out to be weird."
Bonbon nodded. "Exactly. It's only been a few weeks since the toilet-paper-worm."
Lyra shuddered.
"Don't remind me," she said.
Lyra lifted her sunglasses with one hoof to peer at the cover of the questionable text she was now mentally referring to as a 'book-like-object'.
"'Expedient Deliverance Upon Textual Ingestion'? The buck does that mean?"
"Maybe it's a bad translation," Bonbon offered, and got closer to the desk again to check the cover for herself, though she managed to keep her hooves at a distance this time. "Hmmm... I think those runes are Proto-Equestrian, but they might be Terran Cuneiform Script as well..."
"Languages are your thing. If it's all runes inside, and we can't translate them, it's still capable of acting anomalously through the text, correct?"
Bonbon nodded. She peered closer at the book's cover, whipping a magnifying glass out of her suit and holding it over the subtitle first, then the untranslated original above. "Correct. Technically even reading the title could impart memetic influence... though our glasses generally protect from targeted thaumic disruptions. Mine do, anyway."
"Lucky you, getting to try out the new Mark 2's. I've had these since I joined s—I mean, since I joined. They've never let me down once."
"Mark 1's aren't even fully immune to cognitodisruptors at a range of ten yards," Bonbon recited absentmindedly as she scrutinized the corners of the cover, peering at the edges of the material, which seemed neither leather, nor paper, or in fact any material she'd ever seen before at all. "You really should request an upgrade."
"Are you kidding? They're not even broken!" Lyra knocked sharply at the right lens of her glasses, then the left. Though the lenses were thin, they clunked responsively like thick plate-glass, and indeed, seemed no worse for the roughness after Lyra had thumped them a few times.
Bonbon shook her head. "Whatever. I think this should be clear to open. Even with your cheapo specs, we should be okay. I should be, I mean."
Lyra rolled her eyes, but was unfortunately still wearing her sunglasses, meaning the gesture went entirely unnoticed by Bonbon.
"You can go ahead and read it. I'll be here to help if anything goes crazy," Bonbon said.
Lyra nodded. She adjusted her sunglasses in place with one hoof, took in a deep breath, and let it out slowly through her nose. She bit her tongue for a second, then tucked it back into her mouth.
"Okay," she said. "Let's do this."