"Not a bad idea. I'll ask." He tilts his head back and closes his eyes.

He seems simultaneously amused and frustrated for some reason. "I'll take a shower also." And he heads upstairs.

Karen will just, uh, stand here awkwardly and hope that the not-archangels have this sort of under control now and that nobody's going to tell her to go back to school. She will deal with the fact that she's cutting classes later. Probably by ignoring it.

His conversation or whatever it is doesn't take long. "We can't do much until someone who can get them unpossessed arrives. Can I get you two anything?"

BACON BACON BACON wait. No. Must be strong. It's fine, I've eaten.

"I'm good."

"Okay." He goes to a computer and types some things and music starts playing in all the cells, quietly enough that it's not audible outside them. "I'm going to need to go upstairs, that music will keep them asleep but it'll put me to sleep too."

Wishbone yawns. He can barely hear the music, honestly, but he has also been traveling through inhospitable conditions for several weeks.

Karen scoops him up. "We can all go upstairs."

Upstairs is the library floor; it has a fireplace, a warm cozy rug, an elaborate instrument that isn't quite a piano, and books from floor to ceiling on every wall. 

Ooooh books. She might be better at appreciating this opportunity if she weren't currently dealing with Flutie-just-got-eaten feelings, but it'll be a cold day in hell when she doesn't appreciate a new library at all.

What sort of books, exactly, are there useful books that will tell her useful things about weird stuff? Are there ALIEN books? She probably won't be able to read alien books, but she might grab one just to stare at the lettering system, if there are any.

(Wishbone curls up on the rug and sleeps. He also appreciates books! He's just really exhausted right now.)

The books are organized by language, though it might take her a little while to figure that out because the labels on the shelves are in a beautiful curly calligraphy script she can't read; English over here and Spanish and Italian and French and Portuguese and Latin and German and Old English and Middle English and Arabic and Hebrew and Chinese and Japanese and then lots and lots of alphabets she can't even guess at. 

(Man, everyone else in this room is probably like a thousand years older than her and has had a bunch of time to learn stuff like this, and she's going to make it to maybe-thirty-if-Alex-is-right, which is not enough time to learn any of this. It's not faaaaair.)

She copies the labels into a pocket notebook as well as she can, labeling each word with the language it goes with; these words are probably in not-archangel script. When she's done that, she goes through the English section for anything that looks like it might be about Weird Stuff.

Yeah, this is pretty much a library of weird stuff, that and religious books. Guides to vampires, stories of specific notorious vampires, demon ethnographies, copies of the books he gave her earlier, books about magic artifacts and about exorcism and about rituals and spells and the 'gods' and 'goddesses' they call on. A 12-volume series called The Nature Of The Fiend. Eighteen different translations of the Bible and then shelves and shelves of Catholic writers, ancient and modern. Narnia is on there. 

Well, then she has a lot of reading to do before Father Michael suggests that she leave his library. Be easier to do it without the fresh trauma, but hey.

She grabs some vampire case studies, thinks better about reading more extra-grisly things right now, and then settles in to read about magical artifacts.

There's a lot of really random stuff out there somewhere in the world. Some of it gives you superpowers and some of it is binding a demon who will destroy the world if it is damaged or moved and some of it is empowering a demon and must be destroyed to stop them. Many artifacts are needed to perform certain spells. There's one that lets you swap bodies with people and one that makes you able to move through walls and one that allows you to control fire and one that makes vampires indestructible and one that lets you make portals and one that lets you reveal the destination of portals and one that lets you alter the destination of portals and one which demons use to grant wishes and that gets her through the letter 'A'.

Eventually Wishbone wakes up and reads beside her.

She tells him to bark when he wants a page turned. She's actually just going to keep reading until she either gets kicked out or comes up on dinnertime and has to head home for that.

He doesn't kick her out. Alex comes down after a while.

It's getting kinda late.

Yes. I don't want to make them feel like they ought to leave.

Yeah, I just mean, should I order pizza.

Oh. I guess. Yeah.

Karen will still be deeply engrossed in pouring information into her brain when the pizza arrives, at which point she will remember that she skipped lunch today and is actually really hungry.

"So, uh, any idea how long it'll be before the kids are... un-whatever-ified?"