Hector

This page is about the MORITURI TE SALUTANT character, for the 5104 character see Hector Metah Hector is a character in MORITURI TE SALUTANT.

Description:
Various agents of certain mattermancy bureaus have sought out regular visitors of the Harvest Fields Public Library, inquiring as to the name of “that man behind the desk.” Subsequent intelligence reports tend to consist merely of the word “Hector” and a brief summary of the subject’s appearance -- fairly tall and lanky, with long gray hair pulled into a ponytail. He has a fairly thin facial structure, angular but not extensively so, and most of the town’s residents are quick to recall what they remember best about him - sparkling green eyes behind a stereotypical set of librarian’s spectacles and a constant, calming smile. Usually, Hector wears a light brown long-sleeved shirt along with a deep-green argyle sweater vest that has a single pocket stitched into the inside above the heart region, along with a set of dark brown cargo pants.

Though Hector never mentions it to his customers, he absolutely loves fantasy books with heroes and princesses and evil monsters with happy endings for everybody (except the monsters, of course). Secretly, he’s wanted to embark on a grand quest for justice ever since he started reading regularly, and initially thought his newfound powers would allow him to do so, but later realized that heroes tended to be muscular, young, and outgoing, three things he wasn’t. Regardless, in the locked room in the corner of the library’s basement, there is a Papier-mâché dragon and a wooden sword.

Partially due to his occupation, Hector has read a ridiculous number of books and has retained a decent portion of the knowledge contained within, though due to his limited exposure to conversation he tends to assign pronunciation to certain words without actually knowing what they sound like. This has lead in the past, on a few occurrences, to a good deal of confusion.

Items/Abilities:
Due to an unfortunate incident with an especially jumpy grimoire that took itself a tad too seriously (and its residual bookshelf, but more on that later), Hector lost the bottom half of his left leg, but in the process, became the world’s only practitioner of what could be called Bibliomancy.

Hector can summon any number of books or paper-based objects by drawing on the energy of the atmosphere around him, as long as he seeds the process with the primary ingredients of the item beforehand. As such, on his belt -- though not in public -- he carries a bag of wood pulp, a sack of cotton for covers, a small satchel of gold dust (for “that elegant touch”), an Amazonian Tree Squid named Gary, and a silkworm (for thread) aptly named Mr. Wiggles by one of the library’s younger visitors. Hector must also mentally provide the content of whatever he creates, so in most cases there are a few words at the beginning of each book but the rest is blank or nonsensical.

Hector can also rearrange already existent papery matter as much as he pleases, so long as he remains in relative contact with the subject of his mysticism.

In place of his missing leg, Hector wears a simple wooden peg leg. Inside it, there is a small compartment containing a pocketknife and a small amount of each required material -- except wood pulp, which explains the knife and the various nicks along his wooden leg -- for the creation of a single tome.

Biography:
It was another regular evening in the Harvest Fields library. Customers had come and gone, books were taken and returned (some were just taken), and obnoxious children screamed and messed with the shelves. Like children are apt to do.

Just like always, thought the man at the desk near the entrance, and sighed. He adjusted his handmade “Hello! My name is HECTOR” badge for the thirty-second time. There was so much to do, and he was the only one that would do it. The town was too poor to pay for a second librarian, and there were no willing volunteers save the little red-haired girl who was too short to see past the second shelf. Something squeaked.

He tidied up the desk and glanced around the library. Everything was normal, except... that’s odd. The basement door was open, yet he was sure he’d locked it. Some feeling, something very strange, stirred inside him, but he didn’t know what it was. He’d look it up later.

Hector crept down the stairs, took exactly two and a half steps to the left, and pulled the lamp string. He’d done this dozens of times, though not quite in this sort of context -- most of the time he was concerned about someone seeing him go down the stairs, not himself seeing something after going down the stairs. He was sure there was a name for that kind of thing, but something about rhetorical devices made him feel ill.

As the bulb flickered weakly above him, he looked around the basement. Everything seemed normal -- metal racks of cleaning supplies and old books decorated the walls, and a few ornate wooden shelves containing his personal adventure novel collection stood by themselves. Hector exhaled nervously -- and froze. On the end of the second row of Sir Dragonslay epics there was a large, elegant ebony tome that he had never seen before. The weak yellow light from overhead seemed to ooze into it, creating a miniature void of darkness around the visible portion of its spine. Trembling, but filled with wonder, he inched closer and picked it up, opened to the first page, and --

Something happened.

Neighboring residents, upon interrogation, recall hearing something like a scream and a crash that echoed through the night. Those who had been walking by the library at the time, however, remember a piercing howl that somehow seemed to remind them of the most terrible, horrifying book they’d ever read.

The Harvest Fields ER unit had never seen quite a case, and the hospital board elected unanimously to pretend it had never happened. There was one nurse, however, that would live to tell her grandchildren the librarian’s story. He arrived after a little red-haired girl had found him in the library’s basement underneath a bookshelf with a missing leg (which, by the way, was nowhere to be found), but when the doctors examined him they found the wound had already healed.

It looked a lot like paper.