I was playing Zelda: Minish Cap when I came upon a little side quest involving returning library books to a library. Yeah. Pretty exciting. As someone who does this kind thing for a living, I had some serious-ass problems with this whole section.
So you’re looking for a book, and the librarian lets you know it’s checked out already. But hey, if you want to just go knock on someone’s door, no problem! All you have to do is find a girl with a cat and a library card. Which doesn’t narrow things down a lot. A library user who has a cat? I’ve been under the impressions that you had to show your library card when adopting a cat.
Then you go get the book. And the cat lady is surprisingly cool with it. You’re dedicated. Not a complete creep asshole.
Then you give the librarian the book you recovered. With dedication! And there’s her reaction. She’s not just excited. She can’t begin to describe how excited she is. She is literally surrounded by the written word, the great poets of Hyrule like, I don’t know, Octorok? And even with all that, she can’t BEGIN to tell you about her excitement for carrying a book upstairs and slotting it back in the shelf.
I decided to explore the library a little. On the bulletin board we’ve got two signs. Let’s see. On the left, this week’s top titles. That’s cool.
On the right…also this week’s top titles. Great. We have one fucking bulletin board, and we hang the same poster on it twice. Two times, four inches away from each other. I guess the popularity of this sign warrants a doubling.
I’ll give them one thing. They included a weird old crank conspiracy theorist. No library would be complete without one.
Well, back to work collecting books. This one was checked out by an absentminded scholar. Perfect. So instead of looking for a lady with a cat, now I’m looking for a professor, who could be male OR female, who is kinda stupid. No problem. All in a day’s work of questing in a fantasy world where I can attack people with a sword or use magic powers to shut down dungeons. But no, I should probably be spending my time getting single books back on the library shelves.