InsaneJournal

Day 10: Library - 1:15pm
Who: OTA
What: Seven point five
When: 1:15pm - 5:00pm
Where: Library
Rating: TBA
Status: Active

The sun was shining high in the sky and a gentle breeze stroked the leaves of the trees, making them, along with the severed stub of rope on the clock face from the day previous sway lazily. It was quiet. Perhaps it was too quiet, for the lack of birds chirping or insects buzzing.

All in all, the day was one of the most pleasant as of yet for the bulk of the involuntary residents of Vas Captio, save, of course, the heat. Maybe it was a bit too hot to be entirely comfortable.

It started small, as most things do. A gentle rumble and shudder of foundation of the library rattled the glass-fronted cabinets containing the most delicate of manuscripts and the leaves of the tree that had grown through the main room floor and out through the ceiling. It might have seemed as though a large truck had driven too close to the building. All fell quiet for a breath.

Then with renewed force the rumbling returned with a roar. The earthquake shook the building from the foundation upward, unshelving books and throwing them into huge piles along the shelves and stacks. Some of the stacks pitched and toppled in a heavy, loud domino effect, bursting through the outer wall in one corner of the main room. The damage of the hole destabilized the balcony, sending it crashing down into the rubble below, pulling itself down all along the room as books flew from the walls and the roof cracked and crumbled violently, raining large pieces of debris down into the room.

In the back rooms and halls, the marble of the floors cracked as the foundation rocked, splitting some portions of the floor open in chasms leading down into the basement like gaping maws. Heavy glass-fronted cabinets fell, shattering glass in sprays.

The roof of the building, also splitting from the force of the foundation cracking and the hole in the main room wall, caved in on itself in much larger pieces, pulling in walls and generally leaving the library imploded down into itself as the ground settled again into silence. No sound remained but the fluttering of old pages floating down to the ground outside.

Vas Captio was still, again, and silent once more.