Submission (#4125) Approved

Sitting in front of the bookshelf, the little Elnin's tail flicked thoughtfully as he regarded the titles. Well, the ones he could read, that is. Even turning his head the other way, he couldn't figure out what some of them said.

...nope, not even upside down either. Definitely not those.

He'd been thinking about that colorful rain that had happened during the Starfall a lot, and while he had some theories, he'd very quickly realized that he simply didn't know enough about some subjects to even guess usefully. Anyone could just make up whatever wild theories they liked of course, but he wanted to know for sure. So he'd done what any kittom of a scholarly bent might do: found a local library and sniffed out the sections dealing with mana and what was known about the world of Eyre.

There was honestly a lot more here than he'd expected, and some of those books were frighteningly big...

Especially the ones with the titles that he was almost certain were made-up words. Just because he could read the letters didn't mean they meant anything put together like that. Just as well, there was no way he was going to be able to get those down from their shelves. Even when he stretched up on his hindpaws.

Well okay he might be able to get this one down, but he'd rather not accidentally drop a tome of that size on his head.

In the end, he settled for a somewhat bland-sounding "An Introduction to Mana-based Ecosystems", hopping up to the shelf in question (and nobody saw that bit where he slipped and had to scramble, so it never happened) to bat it over the edge to the floor as carefully as he could. Luckily, he got it to land flat instead of tumbling on its spine or edge, so while it made a truly distressing bang upon impact the book itself was fine.

This was half of why he'd waited to come here until the library was mostly empty, truth be told. The rest of course being simple shyness, but that was neither here nor there. And this way nobody was around to watch as he groomed his tail back down to reasonable size from its startled puff.

Landing much less forcefully than his chosen book, Manadh batted the cover open and hunkered down on the spot to see if he could extract anything useful from the thing. Once he finished sneezing from the dust, that is. Didn't people clean back here?

Right, let's see here. Stuff about resonance, harmonics, some of which he was pretty sure he kind of understood. Mostly. Sort of. There were a lot of really big words in here...

Quite a bit later, some of which was spent grumpily loafing on top of the book just in case that somehow made it easier to understand, Manadh batted the cover closed again and shoved it over against the shelf as close as he could get it to its original location. Some of his earlier theories certainly seemed to fit with what he'd gotten from the book, but he'd be the first to say that this was a lot more complicated than he'd anticipated.

But it seemed like there was a theory that mana could build up in waves, like those in the ocean, and as it moved through the world it could push weather along with it. Though he couldn't find anything directly linking it to the colorful rain, at least not in that book, it seemed logical that a buildup of enough mana could actually *form* weather of its own. And if that's what was falling during those storms... well, he wasn't sure what it implied, but it certainly implied something.

He really should find someone to talk to that understood these things better.