//------------------------------// // Prologue // Story: The Library of Discord // by Chinchillax //------------------------------// Accord had run out of books to read. “How does one run out of books?” he thought to himself. There seemed to be a near infinite amount of books but he had read them all, twice. Life becomes really boring when there is an infinite amount of time but a finite amount of books. Such is the problem of being immortal. “When did I cast that immortality spell anyway?” It had to have been somewhere around the time Accord discovered the spell that would keep casting spells for him so he wouldn’t have to. He had made a nice spell that would find a book for him if he hadn’t read it yet. He cast it and a companion spell that would keep searching and searching throughout the universe for books he had not read yet. He loved the influx of new books. New books were new ideas, new experiences, new perspectives. Books were everything. But one day his spell stopped bringing back books. He thought something must surely have gone wrong with his searching spell but he rechecked it and the spell was working fine. The reason his searching spell had stopped was because there were no books left that he had not read. There’s something to be said of the sad feeling one gets upon finishing a good book. The sadness Accord felt upon realizing he had not finished one book, but all of them, was that feeling magnified to a degree he could not stand. He had run out of books to read and that had to be fixed soon. “But how?” Well, a book is simply an assortment of letters on a page. Perhaps there is somewhere where there is every single book that could possibly exist. How many books could that be? Accord pondered this thought for a while and came across a lot of math that he wasn’t prepared for. “If there’s a 410 page book that has 40 lines on each page and 80 characters on each line then that would be… what exactly? 1,312,000 characters in a book. And how many letters are there in the alphabet… 26, and then we need some punctuation… so a period, 2 parentheses, a quotation mark, a comma and an apostrophe. Oh, and exclamation marks and question marks too.” Everything else he could do without. So all in all, 34 characters. So 34 to the 1,312,000th power number of books. How big was that exactly? Too big. Accord had an infinite amount of time to work with, but even that seemed like too much reading. Most of the books would be a jumble of random characters. He would be reading books that consisted mostly of phrases like “qpzns’ka,afou?qpow)nr,ydkl.hgout(had thdao”mkd” for eons. No… there had to be a better way to get all of the books that could be written, and written intelligibly. Accord adjusted his math problem. Let’s say there are 200,000 words in a given language. If there are about 5 characters for each word, for a 410 page book that would be about 262,400 words. So 200,000 raised to the 262,400 power. Hmm… that still seemed like quite a lot. It was every book that could be written so Accord expected it to be a lot. He did have all of eternity to read... so the more books the better, right? Accord got all of the arrangements prepared for the spell. Where would he put all these books anyway? A library seemed like the best fit. A library that could contain 200000^262400 books. Like most things that Accord made, this library would go inside of his head. All the memories of the books he had read had been stored there already, why not the rest of all possible books there could be? Having the library inside of his head would enable him to go back and forth and access the books and the library whenever he needed to. He made some adjustments to the spell, the first letter of each sentence would be capitalized, and sentences would end with a period, question mark or exclamation point. To make the math easier he needed to add 3 more words to his dictionary. Mathematically, one book would be missing, but he’d make it afterwards to complete the library anyway. At last, Accord cast his spell. A spell to create every book ever, every book that could possibly exist.