Elizabeth had been spending so much of her time doing the work in the library that she had delegated to herself that she found she had less and less to worry about. With a few people having come in to work there as well, it was becoming far less a point of stress and now she was just sitting at the front desk, near the head librarian whom she’d decided to call Éponine when she first arrived her, cleaning down the desk as best as she could with a slightly damp rag she’d found.
Occasionally, she would attempt to make conversation with Éponine, trying to get her to talk to her on a personal level without ending up on a seemingly infinite loop of generic replies. She always knew when to stop prodding her, because the woman would seem to get just a little more aggressive with every reply, and at this point in time there was nothing but silence between them.
Another batch of strangers coming into town told her that whatever it was pulling them here wasn’t inclined to stop anytime soon, in spite of the randomness in which it did its thing. Thinking about it too much and too hard usually left her with the beginning of a headache, and after her brief explanation of the theory she had to one of the new strangers-- a boy called Stiles, which was a strange name indeed-- she had decided not to continue torturing herself with it.
Where she had expected Stiles to bring her that book, she wasn’t surprised when she heard the door come flying open. But she was waiting for a younger looking boy, someone close to her age, and instead what arrived at the front desk near her was a man wearing a bowtie and a tweed jacket. And what’s more, he knew her name and called himself ‘The Doctor’.
For a moment, she merely stared at him in surprise. She considered calling for Booker, even if she wasn’t entirely sure if he was even in the library today, while Éponine began her pleasant-sounding generic greetings to ‘The Doctor’. Finally, after the pause and hesitation, Elizabeth stood up from the desk and nodded stiffly.
“I’m Elizabeth,” she said. “What do you want?” He’d mentioned what she said about the anomalies and she wondered why he had been bothering to read all those replies. He must have been one of the new strangers, and if that was the case, she knew she had to be cautious.