Tyler James' 30 Characters Challenge wrapped up this week. Despite having to play catch up a few times and post more than one entry a day, I managed to complete the challenge. I'm going to spend the next couple of posts putting up some of the stuff I liked most.
Stanford Faraday - The Librarian
The Librarian, better known by the name Stanford Faraday, was a professor of English at a fairly well-to-do university. But in his earlier days, when Stanford Faraday was just a lowly graduate assistant spending the majority of his time fetching coffee and hiding in the library, something quite magnificent happened to him. While working on site at the library, shelving books and cataloguing titles, Stanford made his way into the deep, dark recesses of the library, into the bowels of the the beast where the university's most esoteric volumes were stored. Once down there, he was attracted to faint glow that seemed to be coming from one of the farthest corners of the collection. When he reached the glow, he found a cloth covering a fairly plain piece of flat stone that glowed rather brightly, despite having no discernible light source. Upon the stone were etched words in a language so lost to time that Stanford had never before encountered it. Overwhelmed by a desire to experience the tactile sensation of holding the object, Stanford Faraday placed his fingertips on the cold, flat face of that stone and found his life inexorably changed. He didn't remember the next few moments. All Stanford remembered was finding the stone, then finding himself seated at a desk where he'd previously been working. It was as if no time had passed. The stone, an ancient relic of unknown origin, was said to have written upon it all the knowledge of the world, from the beginning, to the end.
Stanford felt different after that day. His mind was clearer, his thoughts crisper. He found that he could predict with some accuracy the weather for the day, could sense moments just before they happened, could find the solution to a problem with more speed than before. Pretty soon, he realized that it was the stone, that something must have happened to him when he touched that stone. For a bit he used this new found brain power for fun and profit, doing things like making bets at the dog track and the like. But Stanford Faraday was a good man and good will out. After the campus was hit with a rash of nighttime assaults on female students, Stanford knew it was time to act. He studied the patterns, found the pieces of the puzzle the police had missed out on, and soon managed to catch the criminal in the act. Of course Stanford Faraday was no fighter, so the act of catching said criminal left something to be desired. He would have to become a better weapon if he were going to continue to do this.
Utilizing the heightened powers of his new intellect, Stanford studied boxing, military tactics, the martial arts, survival skills, amazing himself at how quickly he was able to pick up the intricacies necessary to master these skills. Before long, he found himself possessed of the necessary tools to fight crime, which he did with great aplomb. Until one day something went terribly wrong, and Stanford Faraday, the crimefighter known as The Librarian, hung up his mask for good.
The villainous Dr. Night, the Surgeon of the Shadows, had landed in Stanford's hometown and was painting his bloody scenes across the streets. Never before had Stanford come up against a villain so cunning as Dr. Night, and the ease of his successes as a crimefighter had lulled him into a fall sense of security. Stanford was ill-prepared for the Dr. Dr. Night managed to confound Stanford at every turn. A total of twelve people were killed by the Surgeon of the Shadows before he tired of his dirty business and moved on to warmer climes. Stanford never recovered from this failure. He retired from crimefighting, went back to his studies, and eventually became a professor of English at the university. It was during this time he met his wife, Margaret.
Margaret and Stanford had a very stoic relationship, as the sadness he felt from his failure to save those people from Dr. Night permeated everything he did. As their relationship grew longer, and his years as a professor collected, his abilities faded. The trick to the stone's power was the pursuit of knowledge. Without a thirst for knowledge, no knowledge would come. Sure, as a professor Stanford still sought knowledge, and when he did so he found it easier than most to retain it, but the vast computational power of his brain had waned. He was a sad, complicated man. So when a young student showed an increasing interest in him, he allowed himself a moment of weakness. At 42, he was seventeen years the girl's elder, but her fire and her passion for life, her zest for knowledge, reignited his own. Suddenly the powers of the stone were evident again and all felt right with the world. But with all things of this nature, the truth eventually crept out from the shadows and made itself known. The girl discovered she was pregnant and Stanford came clean to Margaret, who immediately demanded a divorce. The young student, heartbroken by the tragedy of the whole incident, left the school. Before she left she told Stanford where she was going and, despite never again desiring to be with the man, always kept him abreast of her location so that he could money for the children; two twin boys she'd named Jackson and Jonathan.
The loss of her swelled inside him, made him ache. From this loss, he never recovered. His world was a dark place, void of true purpose, until the day she came to him, desperate for help. One of his sons, Jackson, had inherited more than just a thirst for knowledge from his father; he'd inherited the powers of the stone!
