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- Casino Night has dissolved into less agreeable chaos.
- The Serpent's Hand agents are attempting to hold back a flood of angry patrons demanding to cash out their chips, while the Undervegas bankers consult a massive tome of arcane contractual caveats to escape their now impossible-to-fulfill obligations. Midnight is by turns screaming and yowling at Ba'al, who is threatening to "double dribble" her; there is a sense of double entendre. Site-666 demonologist Dr. Contessa Thorner (TWO-BALL) is observing altercations between demons and Wanderers from a high gallery, and performing triage exorcisms to prevent fatal escalation. The small, furry patron is driving the auto-rickshaw in circles through the crowd. The corpulent gelatinous form of the demon king Asmodeus is writhing and bellowing wetly as a series of violent ripples pass through his body; he is attempting to smother Agent Calendar, and she is pistoning punches at his underbelly and laughing in unrestrained glee.
- A reporter for the Planasthai Press is interviewing the combatants, occasionally stealing unattended drinks and flinging hexes wherever they seem most likely to generate the best copy for the special edition. A wrath demon piledrives a being of pure electricity into the Undervegas camp's HiHeFiWi router, and it is sucked into the Library's thaumatoelectrical system; below, in the Underlibrary, the sudden power flicker allows Drs. McDoctorate, Moncier and Sokolsky to escape the locked-down door to the Pharos' chamber. Hand thaumaturges and Undervegas witches are attempting to open Ways in the Grand Hall, and close each others', and reinforcements are streaming into the space which is expanding rapidly to accommodate its contents. Docents are banishing violators of the Library's rules against violence, vandalism, profane speech and cannibalism at a rate which does little to reduce the scope of the scrum.
- Dr. Wettle cowers in the centre of this activity, suit in tatters, whimpering.
- [...]
- The Special Librarians file into the Grand Hall and begin cancelling Library cards en masse. Ba'al immediately responds by opening a Tartarean portal, and the combined might of Python's Spirits of Lying and Astaroth's Calumniators — presently hell's top-ranked basketball teams — file out, form a phalanx and begin tackling them.
- [...]
- "The distraction seems a little too distracting," Placeholder notes as the Grand Hall expands rapidly in their direction. It now holds almost the entire active population of the Library, and the automatically-generated tables and research carrels are being repurposed as barricades and makeshift battle-tanks.
- [...]
- Sokolsky turns to Agent S. "Gadget time. Got anything that can get us through there?"
- She giggles. "Rhetorical question much?"
- The team exfiltrates through the centre of the Grand Hall, snatching up Dr. Wettle on the way — "I don't know what's happening," he wails — under the exclusion zone of a gaudy rainbow umbrella Agent S. terms the 'Foulweather Friend'. They are almost through the crowd when Dr. Wettle's pocket explodes in a flash of green light, and they are thrown through the catering tables in a hail of devils' food.
- ***
- SCP-8888
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